Self-Awareness Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Owen, welcome!

Owen Fitzpatrick
Thank you so much, Pete. Delighted to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Inner Propaganda. And, wow, I got to hand it to you for writing a heck of an introduction to this book. Introduction: “How to write a suicide note.” Can you take us into that story and share why you chose to open that way?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Sure. So when I was writing this book, this book is I think number 10 in terms of the books I’ve written so far, and it’s the most important one I’ve ever worked on because it’s all driven by an experience I had when I was 14.

So when I was 14, I was very depressed. I was suicidal. I didn’t have many friends. I struggled a lot with my mental health overall. And I had a moment where I was ready to end my life.

And so I started writing a suicide note. And the suicide note was to my parents just to apologize and to say, “I’m so sorry for doing this. I just can’t deal with it. I feel so alone, broken, etc.” And then as I was writing it down, I wrote a line to my parents saying, “I’m so, so sorry. I love you so, so much.”

And I can’t really put my finger on where it came from, but it’s almost like I found myself writing a question which is, “Is this how much you love them?” It was like a sort of sarcastic, edgy type of question back.

And it stopped me on my tracks at that moment. And then I started having a sort of internal war, but it kept coming back to that question. And every time I came across that question, something shifted in me. And by the end of that, I suppose, letter, I had stopped entirely the thought that that was what I was going to do.

And from that moment on, I never wrote another suicide note. I never considered suicide. Not that my life measurably improved the next day. I still struggled with the same situation outside and inside, but I knew that that was off the table. So my belief transformed in one moment.

And so I became, I suppose the cliche is, you know, you learn from your experiences as you get attracted to psychology. So as I started studying psychology, I was just everything I could about why we believe what we believe.

So I wanted to know about cults. I wanted to know about propaganda. I wanted to know about how did Nazi Germany influence so many people back then? How is it so powerful, this experience that I had? How come that changed everything for me? How do beliefs actually change? And why is it so difficult to change minds?

And then as I started working in corporations, working with thousands of people there, once more, the same things came about. Being right is not enough. You walk into a room, you’re trying to persuade your boss of something. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got all the data, it doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re still going to struggle to change that person’s mind if they’ve already cemented themselves in terms of certain belief.

So that’s kind of what drew me there. And the reason I started the book was that was the origin of the experience. And I want this book to arrest people and interrupt the pattern of thinking that they have and get them to go, “The stakes are higher than you might think. This isn’t just about influence. This is about something that can transform our lives.”

And so I felt that the gravity of the situation I went through is something that I needed to share. And, you know, pretending that everything is perfect, I think, sometimes is just an easy way out. I think we need to talk about real things, and that’s why I decided to start with that story.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yes, and it is powerful. And thank God you’re here. We’re so glad that you’re with us, and that it is a powerful, powerful story that sets some things up. You say it’s not just influence. We had Bob Cialdini on the show. He’s an endorser of your book. Love him. He talks influence. You’re saying this is something kind of different. What do you mean?

Owen Fitzpatrick
So whenever we talk about influence, and again, Robert Cialdini is one of the most important mentors to me and whatnot, you’re talking about the ability you have to influence what another person believes or thinks or feels. And this is, I suppose, this book is also definitely about influence, but it’s also about mainly the influence that we have over ourselves.

So when I say inner propaganda, I’m talking about the fact that we convince ourselves of things all the time, and most persuasion happens within ourselves. So it’s not that other people automatically will persuade us if they use this tactic or this trick. It’s that they are creating the right conditions, whereby we convince ourselves.

And that matters because I think we walk around with this idea that we are seeing the world as it is. And if someone else doesn’t agree with us, well, that’s because they don’t get it, you know, like, “I see things correctly, Pete,” Well, you know what I mean. “He’s influenced by propaganda.” Like, there’s ways I can go inside my mind and convince myself. This is called naive realism where we see the world as we think we have it right and everyone else hasn’t.

And that matters not just from an influence standpoint, it matters from a decision-making standpoint in the corporate world, but it also matters from a polarization perspective, is in finding commonalities. If you’ve got to work on a team with someone that has a very different way of looking at the world, you have to try hard to be able to figure out, “How can I look at the world from their perspective such that we can understand each other better, such that we can work better and more effectively together?”

And so to me, while the book is largely about influence, it’s not the influence we kind of think of in terms of, you know, “Do this and this immediately will change for them.” That’s part of it, but a big part is, “How do we need to influence ourselves so that our mental health’s better, so we’re making smarter decisions?”

And then if we are going to influence someone, “What are the things that actually work as opposed to the myriad of things that we could do, the tried and tested tactics that we’ve applied before, but yet always seem to to fail to reach the mark?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man, there’s about ten directions I want to go with this, Owen. Oh, so good. Well, for one, naive realism. Great term. I should have known that earlier, because I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately. And, great, there’s a name for it.

I would dare to guess, Owen, that just about all of us have this. We believe the way we see things is as they are and correct, and the way others see things is limited, incomplete, incorrect. I don’t know if you have any stats or research on this, but I think almost all of us have this in most contexts of our life.

Owen Fitzpatrick
I think one hundred percent agree with you. I think when it comes down to it, I mean, I think it’s common sense to know that. The problem is, is that, oftentimes, and there’s all sorts of different sort of quotes in time, the certainty is the poison of an intelligent mind, because whenever we are convinced about a particular perspective or point of view, that automatically means, unfortunately, sometimes the smartest people can have the dumbest takes.

Because just because you’re intelligent doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always seeing the world the way it is. And the smarter you are, often, the better you are at debating, the better you are at arguing. And so I can convince people who aren’t as sure as I am of what is true, even though necessarily it’s not.”

So the problem is that, oftentimes, we act as if we’ve got, what I call, the objective truth as opposed to, what I refer to, I think there’s five types of truth. I talk about desired truth, which is when we believe something is true because we want to; emotional truth, we believe something is true because we feel it is; past truth, we believe something is true because we remember it that way; or shared truth, we believe it’s true because me and Pete agree that it’s true.

And the reason I call those truths is because that’s how people describe it. It’s not like, you know, when we talk about all of these different forms, it’s not like, “Oh, I’m wishful thinking right now.” I’m saying it as if it’s an objective truth.

Everything is masquerading under this label objective truth. But objective truth is you’re there, you are able to test something and with prediction using, let’s say, in science or engineering, if you’re building a skyscraper or a plane, you need objective truth because if it doesn’t work, people die.

But in most other cases, in politics, in education, in business, there’s an awful lot of subjectivity to the truth or enough room for us to be able to get around it. And even if, for example, you have facts, there’s a difference between the facts and the truth, the facts are what data you have in front of you. The truth is the story you tell about what that data means.

And I think we need to start to get to grips with these ideas because, otherwise, we’re sabotaging ourselves, we’re sabotaging the decisions, and we’re failing to impact the very folks that we’re working with on an everyday basis.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s heavy and it sounds true. Say it again, certainty is the poison of…?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Of intelligence. The speed to your anger is the depth of your programming. In other words, the quicker you get angry whenever your beliefs are challenged, the more than likely you’re programmed in that, like there is zero movement on that.

And we’re all that way. I’m not turning around pretending that I’ve got zero beliefs and I look at everything objectively. I definitely don’t, right? I have a very different, a very extreme sort of bias towards the things that I love and care about and who I am as a person. So I’m definitely not saying that, but I am saying I’m recognizing that more and more.

And I think the first step in any of the work we need to do on ourselves, well, just like self-awareness is a business skill, is something that will help us to be more awesome at a job, we need to recognize we also need to understand we’re not always right. And getting to grips with that means letting go of this need for certainty, which we often have. And there’s other reasons for that from a brain science point of view.

But letting go of this need to be certain about everything all the time, to jump to hot takes to go, “Oh, this is the way it is.” We love to do that because it gives us a feeling of comfort. It’s like a warm blanket of certainty. It’s like, “Ah, I understand how things are.” And the world is far too complicated. It’s not that simple. And I think recognizing that is crucial, especially in an age where there’s so much chaos going on.

There’s a concept called the need for cognitive closure. And a lot of people have this tendency where they really need to get closure on particular ideas. They love when, especially when they’re in a state of uncertainty, they love to get to a place where they go, “Oh, this is it.” They don’t like living in any form of ambiguity.

And so we tend to create these things. Nassim Nicholas Taleb called it the narrative fallacy where we come up with stories to explain the world. And if we just understand the world like this, then everything is okay because, “It fits into my narrative.” But the problem is they’re not accurate. And as a result of that, they can often create more problems than they can solve.

Pete Mockaitis
Owen, this is powerful, beautiful stuff. That quote, “Certainty is the poison of intelligence,” I’ve got a variant of my own, and it’s a joke in one that goes, “Obviously, overconfidence is the most destructive force in the history of the universe.”

Owen Fitzpatrick
Love it. Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, I kind of believe it, and it’s kind of a joke at the same time. It’s like, you know, layers to it. But I’m right with you there. So the beliefs we have do make a tremendous impact for, I think about mental health and, boy, the placebo effect and the nocebo effect, and just the impact of visualization.

And Alia Crum with the milkshakes, and what your ghrelin is doing, if you believe it’s a caloric-rich milkshake versus like a low-cal milkshake, your body is changing. You just think about standing up. Your body is preparing itself with blood pressure and whatnot. And so it’s wild how the beliefs we hold have tremendous impact.

And I would love to hear, in terms of, fundamentally, how is it we come to believe things or not believe things?

Owen Fitzpatrick
So I would, first of all, say if I was to give that answer, we really could be on this for the rest of the year and longer because there are so many different factors, but I don’t want to give sort of just a “it depends” type answer.

So just to give you, I suppose, what my work and research showed is that in order for a belief to, let’s say, change, which is similar to a belief forming, it needs to, number one, feel right. Number two, it needs to fit in with our identity and who we are, and only then will we make it make sense.

The problem with most people, and this is not just in the business world, this is in everyday conversations you have with your partner, with your kids, with your friends, it’s that when you try to change minds, you go to the making sense piece first.

So you go, “Logically, this makes sense to me. Let me explain to you the logic, and then you’ll believe the same thing I do.” Now that will work if you feel open to it, if you’re really like me searching for what’s actually true.

But if you already have a point of view or perspective on something, let’s say, for example, we take AI, right? And we say, you’re trying to convince someone that you work with that AI is a good thing. And they believe that AI is the work of the devil, right?

If you turn around and you think, “Well, let me give you logical reasoning,” what Adam Grant would call logic bullying, “Let me give you all the logical reasons as to why AI is brilliant and why you’re wrong, that it’s dangerous and blah, blah, blah.”

Well, that’s going to fall flat in its face because, and typically the explanation there is, “Well, they’re going to kick in with some biases. They’re going to have confirmation bias where they’re going to look for evidence to prove that they’re right, and they’re going to dismiss evidence that contradicts them, etc.”

But to me, it all starts before that. It starts with, “How did they feel about this particular topic, about this argument?” There’s a concept in neuroscience called affective realism, which is that the way we see the world is filtered through our feelings.

So if, Pete, you’ve ever felt hangry, that’s angry when you’re hungry, or tangry, that’s angry because you haven’t got enough sleep, or tanxious, you’re spiraling a bit more than usual because you haven’t really gotten enough sleep or whatever.

If you’ve been in those states, you know what it’s like to physically feel a way that influences the way you perceive the world. And the problem is it doesn’t just start at the physical.

You could be, you know, doom-scrolling on your phone, you see a picture of your best friend in Greece and they’re swimming in the sea, and part of you is happy for them, but another part of you is really jealous. You’re going, “Oh, my goodness, that would be so nice there. Things are so heavy on me at the moment, work is so tough, my boss is annoyed with me,” and then you see your friend swimming and, therefore, you feel bad.

And then that feeling sticks in you a while. You put your phone down. And then whatever is going on in your life, you’re going to filter it through that feeling. So our feelings will influence how we interpret a situation.

Now, belief is a story that we not tell ourselves, but it’s a story we sell to ourselves. And so the stories we sell to ourselves become the beliefs we buy into. So how do we sell it to ourselves? Well, why do we buy anything, Pete? We buy it because, “I know if I buy this, this will make me feel good because it allows me to do what it is that I need to do.”

So you get a new gadget, for example, and you decide, “Right, if I only had that gadget, I would be able to use it in this situation, in that situation, the other situation.” And so it’s not just a logical purchase for most of the things we buy. It’s an emotional purchase.

The same is true of a belief. We feel a certain feeling as a direct result of whatever idea we have in there. And then that drives the decisions we make. And then the second piece is then it has to fit in with who we are. We tend to invest in things, but we also tend to invest in beliefs that align with either who we think we are or who we want to be.

And that’s why often groups can have an undue necessary influence. That’s why groupthink happens in organizations, why Siemens had a terrible experience with groupthink. You know, NASA, of course, in the experience of the Challenger space shuttle, the mistakes made because people didn’t want to be the person to be able to challenge back.

And I think that these are all examples of what it’s like to believe in something and almost the belief in something. It’s like the membership fee you pay to be part of the group, and that’s a problem. And so what I like to do is try to unpack, especially from my own limiting beliefs, “What are the feelings that are dictating what I’m believing right now, both the things I want to feel as well as the feelings that are associated with this idea?”

And then second of all, “What about my identity? How is this preserving my identity? What am I trying to protect here? And what’s going on?” And when I start to unpack that, that’s where change can happen.

Pete Mockaitis
So we talk about ‘fits in,’ that really connects strongly. I think about this documentary “Behind the Curve,” which is talking about Flat Earth folks. And at one point, he said, these hardcore Flat Earthers is like, “Boy, I’m so deep in flat earth now, I don’t know if I could leave it even if I didn’t believe it.” So I was like, “Whoa, like that’s very honest and it’s potent.”

And so the belief needs to kind of check these three boxes: feels right, fits in, makes sense. Could you maybe expand a little bit with some examples on how a belief could pass or fail, like how that might unfold as our brains are kind of trying something on or evaluating something?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Sure. So if we take the example I just started with, which is AI, so you’re trying to talk to your friend about AI and they’re, you know, they believe that it’s the work of the devil. When they talk about AI, the amount of data you put in front of them is not going to influence their decision one bit because it’s not a logical choice. It isn’t that they evaluated all the evidence and they’ve come to the conclusion.

The reason they don’t believe AI is a good thing is because it doesn’t feel like a good thing to them, first and foremost. And that might be because they’re terrified. They’re scared that AI is going to take their job. They’re scared that AI might take over the world. They’ve watched “Terminator 2” on repeat and they are genuinely looking at the future going, “We are in big trouble here.”

And so from that perspective, their feelings are the problem there. They are feeling this way about AI and, therefore, all the information or logic we give them is not going to change their feelings. Second of all, they have more than likely seen themselves as one of the defenders of humanity.

And I’m using a bit of hyperbole there. Obviously, it’s not exactly articulated like that by them, but they will see themselves as, “Look, I’m a human, I value human things, and we cannot let this artificial intelligence to overcome and take us and kick us out of our jobs. This is wrong. This is fueled by the billionaire class or whatever the narrative they are.”

And, by the way, I’m not saying that any of this is wrong. I’m just saying this is more than likely what a lot of people may well be thinking in terms of their identity. And so, as a result of that, all the information you give them, you’re already fighting a losing battle. You’re not actually arguing about the same thing. Because they have one reality in their world and they have their naive realism. You’ve a different reality in the world. You’ve your own naive realism.

And so what that means is that nothing that you say is going to penetrate their belief because anything you say feels wrong and doesn’t fit in with who they are. And so if you’re to have a shot at talking to them, the first step is to try to understand, “How do they feel about it?” and to be able to go, “I understand why AI is terrifying because of this, right, because of this.” And you let them know that, “I connect with exactly what you’re feeling right now.”

The second thing we do is, once we’ve demonstrated, “I get you, I understand the feeling,” is you go, “Here’s what I’m feeling as well.” And then you give stories, which are obviously one of the best ways to be able to… like the Trojan horse of messages. You use the stories to create the emotion of the kinds of reasons why you’re excited about some of the elements of AI. But, again, you keep bringing it back to, “But, of course, we have to be careful, we have to be mindful, we have to figure this out.”

And then when you talk about it from the identity perspective, you paint a picture, whereby, the way you see it is, “Yeah, I know that AI could take over my job.” Let’s say I’m a coder, right, “I went to university, I’m a master coder, I’m brilliant at doing this, and all of a sudden now you’re telling me that AI can code better than I can. What does that make me? I’ve lost my identity.”

And so if I’m trying to convince my friend that feels this way, I can share my vulnerability about my thoughts about it, but then I, again, tell them a different story. And the story that I would use for that would be, “Who could I be if I was able to be masterful at using AI?”

In other words, “If I adjusted so that I saw AI as an incredible tool that allows me to do the things that I can do to the best of my ability. And also because of my skills in coding, I have an an edge that nobody else has, or very few other people have, in terms of how I can use AI better than anyone else out there.”

And when I start to paint a picture of a desired potential identity for them to have, it, at least, gives me a shot at helping them to change their mind in that context. Because, again, they’re not making up their mind based on evidence. People don’t do that.

Instead, what they’re doing in that context is they’re holding on to their identity. So our goal is to be able to expand their identity so they’ve got more choices available to them. Just on this particular point, I’ll give you one sort of side example if that’s okay.

Years ago, I worked with a coach and it was at a coaching seminar. I was helping people to change habits. And this lady came up and she was a smoker. And she said, “Look, Owen, I know all the techniques. I know how to stop, but I will never stop.” And I said, “Why?” And she goes, “Because I’m just a smoker.”

And so I said to her, “How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?” She said, “About 20.” I said, “How long does it take you?” She said, “About three or four minutes.” I said, “So you spend about 80 minutes of your day smoking.” She said, “Yes.” I said, “How much time then do you spend not smoking?” She said, “About,” whatever, “22 hours and 40 minutes.” I said, “If you had two jobs, one of them you did for 22 hours and 40 minutes, and the other you did for 80 minutes a day, which one would you describe yourself of?”

And she said, “Well, the one I did 22 hours and 40 minutes.” I said, “So that would make you a non-smoker who smokes for 80 minutes a day.” And at that moment she sat back and she goes, “I never thought about it like that before.” But that opened up everything.

I saw her six years later at another conference. She came up to me and she said, since that day, she hadn’t touched a cigarette. And again, she had all the tools. But what made the difference for her in that context was opening her identity and realizing it doesn’t have to be this way.

We limit ourselves so much what’s possible at your job. One of the most important things, for example, this podcast does for so many people is it isn’t just about the skills that you give them, about presence or communication or relationship or productivity. It’s also the fact that they know, by listening to it, they hear the stories, the examples.

It opens up the possibilities and they go, “You know what? I think I could be more awesome at my job. I think I could communicate better.” You know, it’s the idea of this growth mindset that, “I think it is possible for me to be better.” And having your identity expanded like that gives you a real shot to be able to actually improve.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And it makes sense. It’s just about like the logical stuff. which you know there’s a lot of and, in a way, it’s almost straightforward in terms of like facts, data, supporting evidence, you know. there’s that.

Owen Fitzpatrick
It’s table stakes. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s that. Okay. So, you also make the point that certainty can be manufactured. How does that happen? And what have we got to be on the lookout for?

Owen Fitzpatrick
So I’ll answer the question by, first of all, saying, “Why does it happen?” and then, “How does it happen?” So why does it happen is because we want to feel certain. We have a desire. So our brains are basically prediction machines. And our brains look around the world, it’s trying to make the best possible predictions to keep us alive.

So our brains are optimized for safety more than anything. They want to keep us safe. And that’s why we have a negativity bias, why we’ll be more likely to overthink on the negative things than the positives as a natural tendency.

But we also have a desire for stability. Our brains like things simple and stable. They like to use as little energy as possible. Our brain, typically, uses 20% to 25% of the calories we take in, even though it only represents 2% of our body mass. So it’s constantly using shortcuts.

Now, with those shortcuts comes not just biases or whatever, you know, cognitive biases that are occurring, like confirmation bias, but also comes this desire to make everything certain and clear, “I love to jump to conclusions because once I have a conclusion, I can rest. I know the way it is.” And the problem is we don’t like the level of uncertainty.

In a world of uncertainty, which is this world is constantly becoming more and more, I suppose challenging our levels of certainty, more unclear, more uncertain. In a world like this, our brains need certainty more than ever. Therefore, people are jumping to conclusions more than they ever have.

So that’s why, in terms of how we manufacture certainty, by, first of all, demonstrating the certainty we want. So whenever you demonstrate a sense of certainty in something, people are craving that. And that’s why, oftentimes, in uncertain times, they will crave a strong leader with a definite point of view and a sense of certainty. It doesn’t make it right, it just means that that tends to be what people gravitate towards whenever there’s a lot of chaos moving around.

We love clear instructions. But also, once you have the person with the level of certainty, you want a clear, simple message. You want to make it as easy as possible for the person to buy into. And then you want to make sure that they’re on the right side of it.

So the reason conspiracy theories work, for example, is largely because the conspiracy theory makes me feel smarter than everybody else and it fulfills that for me. I know, like, “Pete, you know, he doesn’t realize this is actually the way the world works. The world is flat, it’s a conspiracy. And they don’t, all these smart people don’t know it.”

So it makes me feel smart. It makes me feel like the hero of the story. And the people in the story, they’re the victims. All these being villainized by the powers that be that are convincing you that the world is round.

And I think once we understand the mechanisms of this, we have to start to make it, especially in the business world, we have to start to make a better effort at being better specifically with the way in which we take on information.

And so there’s a number of techniques you can use to ensure that you’re not jumping to conclusions as quickly and you’re not falling for this sort of temptation of certainty that, again, the powers that be know only too well will give you exactly what it is that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
The temptation of certainty. Owen, you got a way with words. Yeah, we do want it. And I think it’s funny, sometimes, we’ll pay a lot of money to get it when, honestly, many things are just unknowable.

And so I think that’s a dangerous risk factor, and I think I found that on both sides of the coin as a client and as in a client service business. We help launch people’s podcasts and produce their episodes. They’re like, “So what’s the answer to get a huge audience?” It’s like, “Well, I mean, you can make something great that people love and value and it’s distinctive from other things.”

It’s like, “Okay, so then how long should the episode be?” It’s like, “I mean, as long as it needs to be, about two, four…” and it’s very unsatisfying in terms of the desire for certainty, it’s like, “You’re supposed to have all the answers.”

It’s like, “We have many answers but other things are unknowable. And, hey, man, Disney and Netflix don’t know how to crank out hit shows. They do their best and have plenty of flubs and foibles and cancellations after one season, so that’s just sort of how it is.”

The future is unknowable and yet we crave it. So give us some pro tips on how we can be wise and inoculated against the temptation of certainty to our peril.

Owen Fitzpatrick
I think the first step is to recognize when someone is trying to influence or manipulate us in terms of, let’s say, the way they communicate. There’s a fascinating study that was done by an ecologist, Marten Scheffer, and his colleagues. They did this in 2021.

And what they did was they analyzed millions of pages or millions of books, actually, that were written between 1850, and some newspapers as well, between 1850 and 2019. And they looked at rational language and emotional language.

And they found between 1850 and 1980, words like judgment, conclusion, and rational type of words was on the increase and was continuously increasing until the 1980s. Around about the 1980s or so, it changed and emotional language started to take over and more and more emotional language was used up to 2007 when it just went even more, like it accelerated even faster than ever, right?

Now, when you look at that data and you look at the study that was done, and I presented this on one of my Instagram reels a few weeks ago and it did very well. But the response in the comments, there’s thousands of comments, and the comments were all about, “This is why. Let me tell you why. It’s because of this, it’s because of that, it’s because of this, these people.”

And they were demonstrating the very phenomenon because all of the descriptions they were using were full of all of this emotional language. And so when we’re in a situation where we’re reading or consuming information, and this isn’t just in the news, this is also in the business world.

If you’ve got a colleague that uses a lot of hyperbole, uses a lot of emotional jargon, recognize it and understand it. And it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, it just means using that particular term is influencing you in a particular way.

And the flip side is if you want to be more impactful in communication, what are the choice of words that you can use that would influence people in a more impactful way? How do you generate more emotion or more feeling through the words or through the language that you use and recognizing the power of emotion as an influence tool?

And then the other important technique I would have would be around our own thinking is that instead of looking at beliefs as being, “I believe this,” or, “I don’t,” start to see it on a sort of a continuum. There’s a great book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke about behavioral economics. It’s a wonderful book.

She talks about, if you are betting on your belief, how much money would you put that that belief is true? And as soon as people put money down, all of a sudden, they’re not quite as sure as they were beforehand.

And so I like the idea of asking the question, you know, “On a scale of zero to a hundred, how sure are you of this particular belief?” And there’s going to be certain things like, you know, “I believe I love my family.” Okay, that’s 100%. Great. But you’re not going to be challenging that anyway.

But for all of the other beliefs, especially in the business world, you start to evaluate and you go, “Okay, I’m 90.” And then you look at the evidence and you ask, “Whatever is going on, does that increase my percentage? Does it decrease?”

But the mere fact that you have it as a percentage, “I am 80% certain,” and we start to use that in the vocabulary, “I’m 80% certain that this is true. Or from my available evidence, I believe this with 80% certainty.”

The more we start to talk like this and think like this, the more we build flexibility into our beliefs, which means we’re less likely to fall into a trap where we have to defend with this level of certainty. Because as soon as you start to see it as, “My certainty can move,” now, all of a sudden, it’s not a case of a binary, “I believe,” versus “I don’t.” Now it’s, “Well, I have certain evidence that suggests this.”

And this is also based on something, I think, 300 years old, a guy called Thomas Bayes had what we call Bayesian reasoning, which is you walk in there with a prior, like a belief I have currently today. And then if information comes along or evidence comes along that challenges it, “Well, now I’m going to adjust it.”

And I think there’s a beautiful freedom we have when we stop playing the game of certainty versus, you know, chaos. We don’t always have to walk around certain about everything. We can focus on what we can control in the moment, but we can accept, “Look, this is how I’m feeling right now.” But a belief is an idea we feel certain about.

And so because the word feel is there, changing that feeling means not seeing it as this thing that’s stuck or this belief that it’s constructed or created by facts or logic, which often logic is the one that arrives last and takes all the credit, right? It’s just what our brains are good at using in order to be able to justify whatever it is that we believe.

And that’s also why it makes sense comes at the end, because you can find logic. I mean, there’s Flat Earthers believing in the flat earth. There’s people that believe all sorts of stuff. And when you listen to them talk, they sound convincing when they start to use all of their logical reasoning skills, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, when I watched the Flat Earth documentary, and maybe I’m just so suggestible, but I was like, “You know, they’re making some pretty good points.” And then I was like, “How do I really, really know the Earth is round?” But then some of the very claims they made about flights never going in a certain direction, I was like…

Owen Fitzpatrick
Debunk it, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, “No, I see the flights going in that direction you say they never go right now. What? Okay.”

Owen Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And, again, these things are, it’s easy for us to see, but again, to your point, they can sound so compelling and convincing. And that’s why I say, you know, there’s an arrogance, oftentimes, we’ll have where we think, “Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe they fall for this.” We’re falling for stuff all the time. We’ve all got our inner propaganda going on.

And again, this work didn’t come out of me going, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve figured out the way people are and lucky I don’t have that.” I have to challenge my inner propaganda every single day. I’ve got beliefs that change regularly because I’m constantly aware that just because I feel it’s true doesn’t necessarily make it true.

And, again, I’m not trying to lull us into a sense of epistemological uncertainty or subjectivity where it’s like, “Well, it depends on what you mean, and it’s everything’s up for interpretation.” It’s not. But we need to stop this, I suppose, again, the temptation that we have to be able to succumb to an easy explanation because it’s easy. Sometimes things need nuance, and to me nuance is needed more now than it ever has been in terms of human history.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, tell us about that inner game, the inner struggle there. If we identify some beliefs that we’d prefer to not be there, or we want to adopt a belief that seems true-ish and would sure be beneficial if we claimed it and owned it and had it installed into our operating system, how do we shape, build up, adopt, positive internal beliefs, or usurp, break down negative internal beliefs?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Sure. So, first of all, we have to cultivate what I call a belief growth mindset. So, obviously, Carol Dweck talked about the growth mindset. We have the ability to improve our ability or intelligence if we put in the effort, if we take feedback, if we challenge ourselves, right?

The belief growth mindset is simply an adaptation of that where my main message is we need to be more comfortable with changing our minds. We need to be more comfortable with changing our beliefs because currently we’re not.

Because if I change my mind, if I don’t buy in fully to this thing, people can catch me out. And I think we need to start to see the fact that I have changed my mind on something as a positive, as a benefit. It shows strength of character to be able to do that.

And the belief growth mindset is comfortably recognizing that you can update your priors as Bayesian theorists would say, you can update your beliefs, you can change your mind. Once we acknowledge that, once we sort of recognize that, then the next step is to be able to do what I call a belief audit.

And the belief audit has four steps. The first one is to identify what belief we have. Now, this is trickier than it sounds because, often, we will say, “Well, that’s not a belief, that’s a truth.” And so the reality is we don’t often distinguish between the two.

But the way in which you know it’s a belief is pretty much everything is a belief, and it’s only true if you’ve objectively witnessed it time and time again, and you can make accurate predictions 100% of the time. So we know gravity, for example, exists. That’s an example of an objective truth or a fact. Most other things are beliefs. And that doesn’t make them wrong. It just means they’re beliefs.

If it’s a belief that’s holding you back or causing you problems, that’s the one that we’re selecting. So if I believe that I’m useless at talking on camera or I’m no good in an interview and I have an interview coming up with Pete, that belief is not going to serve me well.

Now, what most people do then is they will go into the whole challenging for evidence, they’ll go, “How do you know you’re useless? Have you ever tried this before? What if you’re not useless? Are you useless every single time?” So these are all great questions that we would use in terms of a therapeutic setting to work on building and challenging the beliefs.

I go in a different direction because I think the big problem we have is that we’re looking at the belief as if it’s a truth that the person will change their mind based on evidence. And if it feels right to them or if they’re open to it or their identity is moving or changing as a result of a therapeutic endeavor, then that will help. But in most cases, that’s not the situation.

So in the moment, it’s not about whether it’s true, it’s about whether it’s useful, right? I can find evidence to prove I’m useless in lots of areas, but I can also find evidence of the opposite.

And so when I can find any evidence I like and I can make it fit like a Flat Earther, I can make it fit my argument. Then in this context, what I need to do is stop for a second and go, “Since I can pretty much prove anything, the question isn’t, ‘Is it true?’ The question, ‘Is it useful?’”

And so the first question is, “What is the belief that I’m holding?” And then let’s say I believe, “I’m not good enough as a speaker,” or let’s say, in terms of presentations, “I’m just not good with people, and that’s why I’ll never succeed in my job.” And then you go to the second question, which is, “What are you trying to achieve by believing this? Like, what is your goal in believing this?”

And, automatically, it’s like, “Well, I suppose it gives me a sense of certainty that this is who I am and it protects me from rejection and it protects me from trying and it protects me from putting myself out there.” Then you go, “How is that working for you? Like, is it successful?” “Well, it’s doing that, but it’s sabotaging my career and I’m not getting anywhere as a result of it. Like, it’s destroying my chances to be able to thrive in my career. And it means I’m missing out on so many opportunities.”

“Okay, so what’s a better belief that would help you, that would still protect you, but would help you to be able to get better and to do better?” “Well, I suppose if I believe that I could become really good at this, and even when I make mistakes or I don’t do a great job, that doesn’t mean I’m no good with people. It just means that I haven’t yet learned the skills and every negative experience I have could serve to be feedback to help me to become better and better and better, so I do become great eventually.”

Taleb talks about the concept of anti-fragility, things that gain from disorder. I like the idea of an anti-fragile identity, which is, instead of seeing yourself as how you want to be, you see yourself as the kind of person that, whatever happens to you also happens for you.

Whatever challenges you go through, whatever adversity, whatever uncertainty, whatever complexity, whatever mistakes you make, all of that can be transfused into lessons, learnings, feedback that helps you to get better next time.

And so, therefore, my belief about myself is, “I’m constantly updating my beliefs. I’m constantly getting better. And every time I make a mistake, it can just teach me a valuable lesson. But because I have that belief, nothing can get me down because whatever happens to me, again, can happen for me.”

And the more we start to see that as a potential new belief, that becomes a lot more useful than the old-school belief, which is, “You know, I’m useless with people,” which is just a narrative we’ve been spinning for years, just because we had two or three examples of it and it also is convenient. It means we don’t have to try. It means we can hide away from the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s a nice process there. It’s like, “Hey, let’s shift the focus dot from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Is it useful?’ And then we kind of think through the implications of the different beliefs and where they go.”

I’m curious with regard to the ‘feels right’ and ‘fits in’ perspectives of that, I suppose, at the stage of what would be a more useful belief, there’s many to choose from. And so, perhaps, those that’ll be the most resonant will be the ones that best feel right and fit in. Can you speak to that?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Yeah, so if we take the same example, and we look at the ‘feels right’ and ‘fits in.’ If I go, “I’m great with people and everybody loves me,” well, that’s a nice belief, but, ultimately, when it comes face to face with reality, you’re probably going to notice it gets knocked down.

Because if you haven’t been great with people or if you haven’t spent much time with people, you probably haven’t cultivated the skills yet. So just believing in something positive is not necessarily going to hold mustard in that context. It’s not going to keep you safe because you’re going to get rejected and you’re going to have negative experiences.

And that’s the thing about just blind positive thinking is you always have to deal with reality eventually. And so my way of thinking is something that’s useful is something that is great whenever things are going well. But even when things aren’t going well, it’s all part of the story.

And that’s why I look to make, because in order for something to feel right, the person has to go, “Yes, I can get behind this. This feels right.” And whenever they have a negative experience, it fits nicely into that story because, again, the belief is a story.

So if something goes wrong, “Well, I knew that this might happen, and all it means is this. I knew that this might occur, and all it means is this.” So it maintains this feeling of rightness. So people are more open to it because it’s something more plausible, but also, when it’s tested, it works.

And then in terms of identity, again, if you see yourself as the kind of person that constantly improves and gets better, well, it doesn’t really matter what happens because it’s not like, again, the problem or the mistake we might make is we go, “I’m an amazing communicator and people always listen to me, and that’s who I am as an identity.”

But the challenge is that when people don’t listen to you, then that again creates a cognitive dissonance, a tension in your mind, because now, all of a sudden, “I believe that I’m this person, but yet reality is saying I’m not. Maybe I’m wrong.”

And what I believe is much more useful is to go create a version of yourself where whatever happens, it serves to make you better.

And that’s something I think all of our identities can get behind because, “I’m not pretending something’s true when it’s not.” I’m simply saying when you start to look at the negatives as the potential lessons or learnings that can help you to thrive in the future, that’s way easier to get behind and your brain is a lot less likely to push back on that because, well, what’s it pushing back on, right? There’s no real way to prove it wrong.

And I think that’s the problem. The flip side is when people say, “I’m not good enough,” there’s no real way to prove it wrong because you’re not even telling me what you’re not good enough to do. Some people go, “I’m not good enough.” “Good enough at what?” “Well, at work.” “In what way?” “Well, in terms of my performance.” “What do you mean by your performance?” “Well, well…”

Like, the more we start to knuckle down, good enough is just one of those empty statements that’s very hard to disprove because it just feels bad, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And as a result of that, every time you’re in a bad state, it feels right to you, it goes, “Yeah, you know why this is? It’s because I’m useless, because I’m not good enough, right?” and that becomes part of your identity. And, therefore, you filter the world through it.

When you see yourself as constantly a work in progress, it changes the game because I think the reason people think of it in terms of, “I’m not good enough” is because they see this static identity. It’s like, “Do I have what it takes?” Well, you won’t know until you give what it takes. But that could be a long process.

But this speed that we have to get a sense of certainty as to whether or not I am this person, this isn’t the X factor. Life isn’t like that. You aren’t like, “I’m going to get the buzzer or I’m not.” This is real life. And real life means complexity and confusion and getting rejected when you should have been accepted, and getting accepted when you should have been rejected, and people not as good as you and doing better than you.

Like, this is life and we have to navigate this uncertain world the best we can. And to me, that means taking charge of the stories that we sell to ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very handy in terms of there are many beliefs that are useful or unuseful to make sense of the reality in front of us and our experience of it and we really do get to choose what we’re going to grab and they’re going to be way stickier if it feels right, fits in, and makes sense.

Owen Fitzpatrick
Exactly. And I think we have to recognize we do have the ability to do that but, first, we have to acknowledge just because we believe it, it’s not necessarily true. And I think that’s the most important of all.

And the reason I call it the inner propaganda, and I talk about what I call the inner dictator, and I know there’s lots of terms, there’s like inner critic and there’s the different saboteurs, and I think all of that is great.

The reason I call it the inner dictator is because whenever I was depressed and whenever I struggle with my mental health, it didn’t feel like it was a negative thought. It wasn’t like a voice telling me negative and then I would push back with positive and we’d have a nice little debate. It felt like the truth. It felt like the reality. And so the dictator was organizing my attention and convincing me, “This is the way it is. There is no other reality. This is a fact,” and it’s me experiencing that.

And when I went to North Korea and I walked around there and learned what it was like to be inside a regime, completely blatant propaganda everywhere, I recognized what was going on inside my head because I was like, “The same thing that I’m doing inside my head is what’s happening out here. I’m being convinced by this voice that everything is wrong.” My inner state media showing me, only what maintains this negative feeling I feel.

And recognizing that and understanding this is propaganda, that was the saving piece. Because now I knew, whenever I was in this dark mode and I believed that this is what needed to happen, I’ve now learned that whenever I’m in that mode now, I’m recognizing I’m going, “I’m not in a good place to deal with this.”

Like, a few weeks ago, I had a big sort of setback. And immediately, my brain was like, “Why did you do this? This is the worse.” Like, it was just telling me all these things. But because of the work that I’ve done, I knew, “Okay, this is propaganda.” And it didn’t mean that it didn’t still hurt, but it meant I knew I was not in a place then and there to make any decisions, right?

Whatever I would decide there was going to be dictated to by this absolute convincing vibe that I had inside my head that was like, “Owen, you are wrong or you are bad or the future is hopeless.” Knowing that, as soon as you spot the propaganda, and you recognize you’re experiencing it, that’s the freedom.

When I realized that, it stopped me from making stupid decisions in those states, but also gave me a distinction that I needed, which is just because you believe it doesn’t make it so. And in order for me to be able to make smarter decisions, to be able to perform better, to be able to be happier, I need to recognize when the propaganda is trying to sabotage myself and my life.

It’s like a double agent. It pretends it’s always working for you and it does amazing things. But it also sells you a reality that you don’t always have to buy.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued. So Kim Jong Un, North Korea, so we know what he’s trying to achieve via the propaganda. What’s our brain up to when it gives us this nonsense propaganda?

Owen Fitzpatrick
It’s up to those two things. It’s up to feeling safe and it’s up to feeling certain, right? It wants to keep things stable and it wants to make sure it has nice, easy ways of seeing the world. And whenever we feel bad, we don’t always attribute that bad feeling to what it belongs.

So you could have a problem or crisis in one area of your life and then you take it out in another area. So you’re struggling with your job and you take it out on your partner, and then you start to create problems in your relationship, or vice versa. You have problem in your relationships, you start to take it out in terms of your job.

So we aren’t always aware as to why something feels wrong in the moment. But our feelings aren’t categorized like that. We don’t just switch into different human beings in different parts of our life. And that also happens through time as well.

So as we grow up, we develop certain habits or certain patterns, and they affect us later on in our relationships. So you’re cheated on by one person. That doesn’t just affect you with that person or create a negative feeling. It changes the way you think about that type of person, right, a partner. And, therefore, the next partner you meet, the same feelings are dictating what your attention is putting on. So it’s harder for you to trust that person in that situation or scenario.

In the business world as well, you’ve had a boss that’s treated you really badly. The next boss that you have, almost anything that they say, you might look into or overanalyze or worry more about because your brain is focusing on what could go wrong as well as going, “Okay, what’s the story here? I need a sense of certainty. I need to know why this boss is treating me this way.”

And so we will grab onto any story that fits. And that’s the problem. We make up our minds too quickly. I believe we need to doubt ourselves more in order to believe in ourselves more.

Pete Mockaitis
So much good stuff. Owen, let’s hear in rapid fire about a few of your favorite things. Can we hear a favorite quote?

Owen Fitzpatrick
Sure. Favorite quote is actually by Rainer Maria Rilke, which is, “The purpose in life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” And to me, it’s kind of like the epitome of this anti-fragile sort of identity. It’s like whatever hell hits me, it’s just going to help me get even better as a result.

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

Owen Fitzpatrick
My favorite research, I mentioned earlier, Martin Schaefer, and that study. I absolutely love it. I found it fascinating. There’s also some really cool AI studies that have been coming out in the last couple of years about the impact of, I think, they had 900 people arguing against ChatGPT 4.0. And ChatGPT 4.0 was like 60% more persuasive, but it was more persuasive for two main reasons.

Number one, it knew how to pick the right kind of ethos so it knew what character to pretend itself to be. So it gave itself the right qualities to make it as persuasive as possible. And, number two, it was able to analyze the actual profiles of the person they were arguing against in real time. And they were able to use their moral framing and use their language against them.

So when that was taken away from them and they’re just using logic, there was no discernible differences between the humans and the AI. So I found that was really fascinating, stuff like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Owen Fitzpatrick
There’s obviously Influence with Cialdini, there’s Think Again, which is Adam Grant. But my favorite over the last few years has been a fictional book called Address Unknown, and it’s set in the 1930s. I think it’s Kathrine, I think it’s Kessler, I think. But it’s just a fascinating book. It’s a short enough book, but it blew my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Owen Fitzpatrick
It’s going to seem nerdy, but whenever I have a new thing I want to learn about, what I’ll do is I’ll do deep research on Claude and ChatGPT. I’ll put the two deep researches together, then I’ll have an argument with, you know, both, get all of that, and then I’ll put it into Notebook LM and have a podcast created for it, and then I’ll listen to it on my runs.

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

Owen Fitzpatrick
It’s the stories that we sell to ourselves become the beliefs we buy into is the thing I hear the most.

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

Owen Fitzpatrick
OwenFitzpatrick.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, Instagram and whatnot. And InnerPropaganda.com is its own website, but OwenFitzpatrick.com is the best place to learn more.

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

Owen Fitzpatrick
Think about the beliefs that you hold and evaluate the level of the percentage of certainty, like we said, and start trying to be more flexible with your beliefs because the more flexibility you build into it, the better your thinking, the better your decision-making, the better your relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Owen, thank you.

Owen Fitzpatrick
Thank you very much, Pete. A pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Henry, welcome!

Henry Cloud
Good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. I loved your book Boundaries, and we’re talking about your latest, Your Desired Future. Could you kick us off by sharing, perhaps, one of your most intriguing, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this tricky gap between intention and achievement?

Henry Cloud
Well, it’s something that we all experience and something that we notice in others who, whenever we’re at one place, it may be in your career and it may be in your life and it may be even in a relationship, “Well, here’s where we are,” and we want to be in a desired future or a different place, right?

And we got to work on it, and it doesn’t happen. And what was kind of the sort of you call it the awakening, was that I noticed that, when people would put hard work in things and they weren’t getting there, they started asking the question, “Well, what’s missing? And is there a universal path that just has to be included in getting anything from here to there?”

And that’s what started the study on it many, many years ago. And that’s where this model came from. And, basically, it’s because we go about things as we are wired. And we create teams and companies and projects in our own image.

And the problem is we don’t have all of the strengths that it requires, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make sure all of those elements are there. And that was the big awakening, just to give a map for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the major reason we don’t achieve that which we intend is that we’re kind of going about it just you doing you.

Henry Cloud
It’s a great phrase.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And some things, I guess we’re wired to achieve, you know, fairly naturally and other things are kind of a stretch.

Henry Cloud
Yeah, and what’s really important, you can look at people that accomplish stuff in different areas and even very different styles. You take a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs, they started out the same time, kind of doing the same thing, very, very different styles. But if you break it down, what was it that moved them from here to there? Those elements are the same. They do it differently.

And sometimes, like you’re saying, we do those things naturally in some particular area, but we fail in other areas because they’re not present.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was running into some trouble and then made some changes in alignment with these principles you’re unpacking here and what happened for them?

Henry Cloud
This is one you see all the time. It’s very common for an entrepreneur or a founder to be really good at vision and really good at engaging the talent and sometimes even good at strategy. And what happens is, when it gets a little further down the line where you start to have to really get a little bit what feels like to them in the weeds, then that’s where it kind of unravels.

And I think you’ve seen a lot of stories like this where somebody starts something, where you see it a lot is in the public companies. It goes public, and then the board says, “We got to bring in a seasoned operator.” Well, that’s because of these other components in the chain.

If you want a story, I can tell you about my own.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Henry Cloud
Many years ago, I wanted to start a psychiatric hospital that was friendly to people of faith. Because a lot of times people of faith would check into a hospital for treatment and their faith would be seen as part of the problem, not part of the answer. And I just wanted a place where that was friendly.

And so I thought, “Well, the best way to do this is to buy a hospital.” I was in my 20s. I didn’t even know that was hard. So I went out and raised the money to buy a hospital and started down that path, and ended up changing the model a little bit.

Long story short, started the company, right, and was doing one hospital, and it was doing well. But I was doing it in my own image. I wasn’t in the healthcare industry. I was a clinician, and so I set up this whole hospital company almost in a private practice model.

And what happened was, just by happenstance, I met somebody that had come from that industry, and he looked at it and said, “You have no clue what you have here.” And he started asking questions, like, “Where is your call center?” And I go, “What’s a call center? I mean, we just took calls and put people in treatment.”

And then he started asking all of these questions. And just by having somebody that could bring the other elements in of engaging the right talent and having a strategy to scale, and knowing what to measure and what to hold accountable, be held accountable to and all that, we ended up in 45 markets in the western United States.

And I would have been kind of stalled at a very limited vision if that hadn’t happened. But it took somebody else to point out to me what was missing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so these things about having a call center, how would you categorize the domain of stuff that was just sort of you were blind to?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, let me put it in then. The book is about a very simple model. I found a long time ago, if people have little models as almost like a GPS to look at, “Am I doing everything that needs to be done?” That’s where this came from.

And I had a big awakening one day, because there’s all this leadership and performance literature out there. But if you put it all together, what’s it really talking about? And I decided, “Why can’t we factor and analyze all that and get, what are the categories? What are the elements that it falls in?”

And I ended up asking a question. If you look at the human body, the most efficient, most complex, most complicated, greatest achievement machine it’s ever been designed, how does it get from here to there?

And it was incredible because if you break it down and went to neuroscience and neuroanatomy and all this stuff to ask, “How does a human body get from here to there?” Well, it starts with, what you read in the literature, your brain has something no other species has, which is the capacity to imagine a future that doesn’t exist today. We call that a vision.

Now, what was a real awakening was everybody knows about vision. But when you start to look at the brain and what it does with a vision, it has certain components to it that then creates a linear path and does all the stuff. But your head can’t go anywhere by itself.

So what it does is, number two, is it starts to engage the talent it’s going to need to help it get there. Because the brain is not going anywhere by itself. So it says, “Well, I’m going to need a couple legs and a couple eyes,” and it starts recruiting people with the talent and the skills that are gonna help them move from here to there.

Now we got it all together, you got the, “I don’t need my little finger, but I need a leg and I got eyes. And then we got to figure out, well, how are we going to get there? Well, I think I’ll call an Uber. Well, that’s not a good way to get there. How about a scooter?”

“Now if I’m going to get over the other side of the room, what’s my strategy going to be? How am I going to get there? I’m going to walk.” And now we have a strategy that begins to define the specific activities that are going to make that strategy come to fruition.

Now that becomes a big deal. And what your brain does at that point is it creates a plan with specific activities that move the needle on that strategy. And then, number four, it has already designed a measurement and accountability system.

You start walking, you start to wander off, it goes, “Wait a minute,” and it corrects you because it knows what you’ve got to be held accountable to that’s going to get you there. And, number five, if you do veer off, it quickly fixes you before that problem becomes a pattern.

So what do we have? We’ve got a very clear vision that’s got to be compelling enough to awaken a lot of systems in you and desire and other things. Number two, who do you need to help you get there? It might be talent, it might be a team member, it might be a friend, it might be a supporter, whoever. But we’d never go anywhere by ourselves.

And you got to specifically name, like Jim Collins said, “What are the seats on the bus that you need? And who are the people that are going to be in those seats?” And then you got to have a strategy. Otherwise, we start doing all sorts of random stuff, hoping we get there.

That strategy has a plan. And, number four, are you measuring the right things along the way? Because a lot of people just measure against the goal. They’re not measuring against the specific activities that are going to move the needle.

And then when you find something that’s off, you’ve got to fix it fast. Because if you don’t fix it fast, you don’t have a problem anymore. You’ve got a pattern. And patterns change the direction of where we’re headed.

So the human body knows what it’s doing. We should just kind of do what it does. And when you look at great achievements, you’re always going to find those five things. Clearly knowing where they were going, getting the right talent on board, having the right strategy, measuring the right things with accountability, and quickly fixing what you find. That’s the way we get from here to there.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say your body knows what it’s doing, you’ve got chapter 2 entitled, “Your Body Knows Best,” what do you mean specifically by that?

Henry Cloud
Well, what I mean is that it comes with all the systems that do all the right things to get you there. Let’s just take the measurement and accountability system. When you start walking across the room or you start driving a car, your brain has already figured out what it needs to hold you accountable to. You automatically steer. Well, that’s because those systems are wired in there.

What we’ve got to do, if you’re going to increase sales or increase the culture of a team, you got to start with knowing where you want to go and then knowing who’s going to play what role in getting you there, and then knowing what to do.

So our bodies just do this naturally until you start to break it down on what they are doing. The neuroscience of how your body achieves things is exactly applicable to everything we do in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that you have laid out some core foundational fundamental principles, and it seems like you’ve done a nice job of categorizing, cataloging.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it seems simple and elegant and, but, of course, with the way you lay it out this way. How do we run into trouble?

Henry Cloud
Yes. Here’s how we run into trouble. Two ways. One is everybody knows those topics. There’s nobody in business that hasn’t heard of those five things. We run into trouble because we’re not doing them in the way that they work, A. But, B, we really run into trouble because our own personal issues get in the way.

For example, take holding people accountable or holding the team accountable. Well, what if you’re conflict avoidant? What if it’s hard to have difficult conversations, what if you have fear around that?

Or back to vision. What if you come up with a, “Gosh, we could do this,” and then you got a bunch of negative voices in your head that say, “Well, what makes you think you can pull it off? You don’t have the money for that. No, that’s too hard”?

And just our simple thinking patterns and the limits we have in our own head can stifle a vision. So all of these components, the growth gaps that we need to do in getting better, those really come into play. And that’s what a lot of coaching is about, too.

You know, I work with CEOs in huge, I mean, public, multibillion dollar, they run huge things. And most of the time, it’s not that they don’t have the business acumen. It’s some kind of personal growth step that’s getting in the way. And that’s how a lot of times we get stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of a personal growth step and how that gets things back on track?

Henry Cloud
Well, I’ll give you one of a big company everybody knows. If I ask the question, “Where did Google come from?” We all think back, and if you’re old enough, “Ah, well, tech was ramping up, and the internet was ramping up, and somebody put a bunch of money up, or whatever.”

I would answer that this way. Where Google came from was a graduate student named Larry Page who went to a personal development, personal leadership development retreat, a camp, and they taught him a mantra. And the mantra was, “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

And he kept saying that over and over and over. And he was trying to get rid of the natural tendency to think in some sort of limited fashion and question any idea or discount it or have objections. And he just started doing that over and over and over.

Well, one morning, he woke up and he had a thought. And that thought was, “What if we downloaded every URL on the entire internet and saved them?” Now that’s insane, I mean. Most of us would go, “Well, we don’t have enough RAM for that? I mean, where would you, you know?” All of a sudden, all these reasons why it can’t happen.

But he took a personal growth step to get some crap out of his head and then we ended up with a search engine, and then we ended up with all this other stuff. So it’s a lot of looking at oneself, looking at my patterns and how I typically go about stuff.

And are there any of these elements that are difficult for me that I should take a growth step in or I should get help with or bring somebody to the party who knows how to do this? You know, if you go back to my hospital company that I built, I was much more on the vision side of that. I engaged the talent. I brought the investors. I brought all the doctors, so 200 doctors ended up working for us and a bunch of other stuff.

But I didn’t have the strategic operational skills or even thought about that, that would ever get that to the place it went. And I probably never would have gotten there if I hadn’t brought in new talent. And that didn’t have to be somebody you hire. It could be your uncle who’s done what you’re doing.

We always need to find the right wisdom and the right help, whether it’s paid or unpaid, that can help us get to the next step.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you identify or zero in on which of these components is our shortcoming, our gap, our personal development need?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the ways, first of all, just look at the results. We have a lot of ways of explaining things away, “Well, the market’s bad, this or that.” Let reality talk to you. And sometimes that’s in the actual results of what you’re getting and whatever you’re trying to work on.

And you’ve got to get honest about this, “Is this thing working? Is it moving forward? Is there anything I can look at that says, yes, we’re going in the right direction?”

If there’s not, then what I would do is I would just go through the categories and start to ask, “What’s missing here? Or what have I really not focused on?” You know, a lot of times, a big one is the engaging the right talent piece. I mentioned that a few times because it’s huge.

We don’t know what we don’t know a lot of times. And what we’ve done is we’ve kind of just listened to people that are right there. And sometimes we got to get out of our own bubble or our own neighborhood or whatever.

And there’s somebody that’s done this before. There’s somebody that can look at it and know what I’m missing. And we need other eyeballs. And the best people, they get out of their closed system. They look at the way other companies, other teams, other individuals, other people are doing this that kind of expand this and can help them.

And the biggest, highest performers I’ve ever worked with, when I first went into coaching, I kind of expecting the ones that were crashing and burning to reach out to me the most because, “I need help. They’re calling me all the time,” this or that. It turned out to be the exact opposite.

The highest performers are the ones that use input from the outside the most. It is the highest performers that I hear from most often.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I have found that is rather transformational when I reach the conclusion, “I really don’t know what I’m doing here. Someone else does. I’m going to talk to them.” And so I just recently, I emailed someone who’s like, “Hey, I saw your LinkedIn. You’re a strategic advisor. I could use some strategic advice. What’s your hourly rate? Let’s do it.”

And she said, “It’s 500 bucks an hour.” I was like, “You got it.” And it was a pretty worthwhile $500 hour in terms of, “Yes, this is what I am missing and what I need. Thank you very much.”

Henry Cloud
Because what’s the value that you got from that? You know, a lot of times people look at the rates they’re going to have to pay and they go, “Well, that’s a lot for an hour,” this and that. Well, if that ended up making you, when you utilize it, multiple seven figures, it’s the cheapest hour you ever got in your life.

It’s just you have to look at the value you’re getting, always. And sometimes that value is free. Again, it might be a relative, it might be a friend. What’s important is, “What value does that talent bring to what I’m trying to do?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Henry Cloud
Because advice is cheap.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Henry Cloud
Anybody will tell you what they think you ought to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, in my experience with this, it seems like you can get an answer very quickly by asking a buddy, asking Google, asking the AI models, but it’s not what you really need. Well, I mean, it might be if it’s really quick and easy, straightforward answer, it’s like, “Okay, yep, that’s it. Got it.”

But when it’s nuanced and complicated and specialized, I find that we…what’s the expression? Is it Mark Twain or someone? “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the answer. Okay, I’m just going to go do that.” It’s like, “Oops, no, no, that actually is not the move,” but, unfortunately, you’ve sort of spent a lot of time and effort, maybe money, on a path that might make some conventional sense or feels good, but it is not actually rooted in reality, best practices, etc.

Henry Cloud
I think you’ve hit a couple things on the head there. One of them is when you said it’s nuanced and everybody’s got an answer or whatever. I’m very leery, I should say, of people that have a template that they just come and apply to every situation. And there’s value to that.

I mean, there are consultants and they have a model and they go in and take that model and put it there. The people that I want to talk to are the people that have the experience base that they don’t come in and say, you know, “Look, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

So they look at every problem, “Here’s the answer,” right, because that’s what they know. It’s like you’re saying, they know that and they’re going to apply it. There’s a proverb that I love that says, “He who gives an answer before he understands is a fool.”

And I want to talk to somebody who’s got great diagnostic abilities to look at my situation and, inductively, pull out from their experience base the nuances, like you’re saying of, “This is the path. This is what I think is wrong. This is what I would suggest.” And they’re doing good diagnostic work.

And sometimes people, they already know the answer before they’ve met you, then I would I’d be a little leery of that. I want somebody that’s got enough experience and knowledge to whatever I’m struggling with. The answer is somewhere within them and they’re gonna pull it out of the box.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your pro tips in terms of are there any super high-leverage moves, like we talked about finding a great person for insight, advice, diagnostic skill to help you out? Within the other domains of a vision, strategy and plan, measurement, accountability, adaptation, problem solving, are there other high-leverage, best practice moves, tips, tricks, tactics that really do a lot of good work for us when we implement them?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, there’s one big one. Look in the mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Henry Cloud
It’s, we gotta look at ourselves first. I mean, it’s so easy to explain things away, “You know, this person is not good,” or, “The market is this,” or, “You know, we got bad customers,” or, “My boss,” or something. And that’s not what great performers do.

The big power move is to first look at ourselves in that context, and ask, “What am I contributing to these results? What am I contributing to this problem? What am I contributing to keeping it from being resolved?” And to own it.

Then we can go to, “What do I need to take control of to change?” But it is a tough shift for a lot of people to make to stop externalizing what’s holding them back. Now there are external factors that we have to work with, but if we don’t look at ourselves and how we’re responding to those external factors, it’s just going to continue to stay stuck.

And it all starts with some pretty good self-awareness. And here’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Self-awareness is a fruit of other awareness. We become aware of ourselves by letting really good eyeballs take a look, and other people on the other side of us talk about their experience with me and what they see, and we got to assimilate and accommodate that data.

And so, here’s a good question. If you’re on a team and y’all suck and you’re leading a team, go to each one of your team members and ask a simple question, “So what’s it like to be on the other side of me as your leader in two areas? Relationally, how am I doing? How do I make you feel? How do I help you? How do I support you? All that.”

“And on the other side, the actual work, the tasks. How am I performing? How am I delivering for what you need from me?” That’s a great conversation to have. And ask it above you, ask it to your peers, and ask it for people that report to you. And you’re going to probably get some pretty good direction from that.

Now, you don’t listen to everybody. There’s nutcases out there, too. They have their own biases. They have their own agendas. But if you choose carefully, you’re going to probably see a few patterns emerge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. So we look in the mirror and we get self-aware by getting other aware, talking to folks, asking those questions. Any other power moves that make a big impact?

Henry Cloud
What’s hardest for you to do next? We tend to move away from change that’s going to activate our fear systems, really. When we got to make a change that’s not, and these are the most valuable changes, by the way, because if they were easy, we’d already be doing them, but they’re necessary and we’re not doing them.

So that’s usually the growth step we need to take is going to feel very uncomfortable to you. And big growth steps happen from stepping into the area of your discomfort, because that’s where new skills and abilities are not only needed, but that’s where they’re going to be built.

We don’t grow without discomfort. Your hippocampus has got to be aroused in order to keep the log and the memory patterns of new whatever you’re doing to turn them into automatic. And arousal comes from getting nervous.

It’s like the Olympic swimmer who’s waiting for the gun to go off. They are aroused because it’s a big challenge, but that pulls them to greater achievement as well. Most of the big records are set in the final event. They’ve had that same swim 100 times before they got there. So step into the areas where you’re not comfortable, and that’s really where you’re going to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anything else?

Henry Cloud
Well, I open the book with a story about my dog Finley. Finley is a Doberman. I’ve always loved big working breeds. And Finley is awesome. I mean, she does her job, but she does it like she’s wired. Somebody comes to the door, she runs to the front door, she barks, scares the heck out of them until I come up and say it’s okay. And it is intimidating and she does it great and I love her.

But I’ve never heard her run to the front door and bark, and then stop and say, “I wonder if that was helpful?” In fact, a bigger question, “I wonder if barking like that is going to get me closer to where I want to be on Thursday?”

That ability to get above what we’re doing, above how we’re wired, and begin to ask the question, “Am I doing what needs to be done to get me where I want to be on Thursday?” that is something that all of the greats do. They don’t just work, they work on how they’re working and they get above it.

And that capacity for self-observation, with some kind of a path, and that’s what the book is about, you could just get above and say, “How clear have I been about the vision and communicating it to the people that have got to go with me? How much have I really worked on making sure I got the right talent around me?”

“How clear is the strategy for all of us? Have I just assumed that? Do people know every day when they wake up what they got to do that day that really moves the needle? And then are we really keeping tabs on are we doing what we said we were going to do and is it working? And then when problems come up, are we fixing them?” And if we get above that path and start asking those questions, all sorts of light bulbs come on.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, we had a guest, Richard Medcalf, with a book called Making TIME for Strategy, and he was sort of talking about just this. And often there’s a project that no one’s asking for, but it requires asking these kinds of questions to really get those tremendous improvements.

I’d love your hot take in terms of, is there a ritual, a habit, a practice by which folks you’ve seen incorporate this into a recurring rhythm and see good things on the other side?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the important words here is rhythm. We tend to observe ourselves, but not frequently enough sometimes. The cadence of it is not enough. If you take, for example, you take a pilot and they’re going from LA to New York, well, they’ve got a strategy, they’re going to fly this plane, but they’ve got a plan and the plan, the strategic anchors are 40,000 feet, 540 knots, certain heading. So they take off.

Well, what they’re also doing is getting back to the cadence of measurement. If they drive down at 38,000 feet for more than just a blip, their accountability system is going to say, “Flight plan shows 40,000. You’re at 38,000,” instantly, they go, “Crap! I’m burning too much fuel. It’s slowing me down. I got to adjust.”

But if they wait too long for that to happen, they’re going to end up three states away or getting there an hour late. And when we’re looking at what we’re doing, some cadences, they’re too short. I mean, people don’t even have time to work before somebody is in their face again, you know, they micromanaging them all over their case.

You got to give enough space to what you’ve observed to begin to implement it. But if you go too long without self observation for you and the people that are involved, you can be 500 miles off track and now you’re down the wrong road.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is it daily, weekly? In some ways, it’s possible, I think, to overdo it. Like, we’re kind of getting into a bit of a navel-gazing or a, what is it, a state-dependent vibe, which is suboptimal, per the research and literature. So, what do you think?

Henry Cloud
Well, again, it depends on, “What are you doing?” Some things that you’re working on, and sometimes in crisis or things have gone south, that cadence can be daily for some things. I mean, it depends on what you’re doing.

Other times, a quarterly checkup. It all depends on what you’re doing and how long it takes for the change to take effect and how long it takes for it to unravel things if it’s not addressed. Those are the two factors I’ve looked at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Henry Cloud
One of the favorite quotes that I put in the book was one time Peter Drucker said, “There’s nothing worse than executing perfectly the wrong things.”

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

Henry Cloud
I think it was 2004, we had about 400 fatalities in the commercial airline industry in the US, 400 and some people died. The FAA came together, and what they did was they brought into one group the equipment manufacturers, like Boeing and Airbus and those people who make the planes, the pilots unions, the mechanics unions, the air traffic controllers, and kind of whoever touches this thing called flight.

And they formed a covenant of their group together. And the covenant was this, “When we find a mistake that we did, we’re going to bring it to the group, and we’re going to – lack of a better word – be transparent, confess it.”

And what they said was, “Nobody is going to get fired, nobody is going to jail, unless you try to blow up a plane or something. Nobody is going to get in trouble. We just want to bring the problems to the group.”

Here’s what happened, just take an example. A pilot comes in and says, “We had a near miss and it was really close and it was really bad.” And the group starts going, “Tell us about it. How did it happen?” They said, “Well, I was trying to adjust the switch down here and lost visuals and wasn’t looking at the radar or the screen or whatever, and there it was.”

The manufacturer says, “Oh, well, we can move that switch.” A million things like that where they’re coming together without fear.

Now here’s what happened. That was in ‘04. I think it was 12 years later. You can look up this story. I want to say, like, they went, it’s like, in 12 years, 20 billion departures, something like that, in that time period, zero fatalities for 12 years.

Now, what does that tell us about the kind of teams we need to create, the kind of relationships we need to create with bosses, with direct reports, with our peers, where we can come to the table and talk about what we’re struggling with and where we need help and where something is not working and where I screwed up? That’s one of my favorite studies.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Henry Cloud
One of them is not a business book. It’s a book called No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton. You know, I don’t even know what year this was, but Peter Drucker wrote a classic called Management. It has so many foundational principles in it. You can go through it and just over and over and over again. That’s one of my favorites.

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

Henry Cloud
OneNote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Henry Cloud
One of my favorite ones that anchors me is I try to, somewhere pretty early, 9:00 o’clock-wise, but soon in the day, whenever I get up, I need about an hour of quiet time, and try to do that every day if possible. And it’s a spiritual time for me, it’s a reflection time, and that’s a really important one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that’s been quoted back to you many times, a Henry Cloud nugget that you’re famous for?

Henry Cloud
Probably the one I hear the most is it’s more a phrase, it’s from my book, Necessary Endings, and they will say, “Knowing about the wise, fool, and the evil changed my life.” That’s what people tell me. And it’s a little, again, a model. You don’t deal with everybody the same way, that we have three kinds of people in our lives at any point.

A wise person is a person that, when they receive feedback, they say, “Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry. I won’t do that again,” and you have a conversation, things get better. And so we can talk about problems with them.

A fool is someone that, when the truth appears to them or when they’re given truth, they don’t adjust themselves. They try to adjust the truth.

So they’re going to minimize, get defensive, blame you, the problem is never in the room. It’s out there somewhere or they’ll attack you and get angry. And it does no good to talk to them about problems. You have to talk to them about a different problem.

And the problem is, “When I talk to you about problems, it doesn’t help. So I’m not going to talk to you about problems anymore. We’re going to move to some consequences if this doesn’t change.” And the third category are people that do evil things. And those are the people that are intentionally out to hurt you. We need to always protect ourselves from that group.

So you talk to the first group. You have some limits and boundaries with the second group, and sometimes that can get to a good outcome. But the third group, it’s lawyer, guns, and money, like Warren Zevon said. You got to go into protection mode.

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

Henry Cloud
Probably just go to DrCloud.com. A lot of what I do is right there.

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

Henry Cloud
I would do what Finley doesn’t do. Don’t just keep barking. Stop barking and ask yourself, “Is the way I’m barking going to get me to where I want to be on Thursday?” Get above your ways and look at the patterns. And the book will give you a good template to look at that with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Henry, thank you.

Henry Cloud
It’s good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Nir, welcome back.

Nir Eyal
Thanks, Pete. Great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Nineteen minutes.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty minutes.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Sixty minutes.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Sixty hours straight?

Nir Eyal
Sixty hours straight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that I have.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Happen.

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

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

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

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

Nir Eyal
Sandwiches, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it comes up semi often.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
“I have ample time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nir, thank you.

Nir Eyal
My pleasure. Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, absolutely.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I think so, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I can look it up right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, my wife is that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
It does, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Lencioni
You worked at Bain also?

Pete Mockaitis
I did, yes.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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