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Self-Care Archives - Page 2 of 10 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Aug 18
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1085: How to Find More Fun at Work Every Day with Bree Groff

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Bree Groff shares the simple but effective strategies for finding more fun at work.

You’ll Learn

  1. The mind shift that helps us find more fun at work
  2. The 5-minute team practice that drastically improves engagement
  3. How to find joy during even the roughest work days

About Bree

Bree Groff is a workplace culture expert and author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). She has spent her career guiding executives at companies including Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, Calvin Klein, and Hilton through periods of complex change. She is a Senior Advisor to the global consultancy SYPartners, previously served as the CEO of NOBL Collective, and holds an MS in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University. Bree lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Resources Mentioned

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Jeff DeGraff Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bree, welcome!

Bree Groff
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work. Could you share with us any particularly surprising or extra counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about work and fun while putting this all together?

Bree Groff
I mean, the first, maybe most obvious is when I say work and fun, people are like, “So happy hour?” Like, a lot of times it, like, does not compute, “Wait, work cannot actually be fun. You must be talking about off sites, happy hours.” Or they think, “Oh, you’re going to tell me that fun is a driver of productivity and business performance in the bottom line.” That is true, but also not my point.

My point is that we should be valuing our days at work more highly, simply because they come from our finite bank of days that we get on this planet. And it is not only possible to have fun within the work itself, like when I’m actually creating or making something of value, but to do that is, actually, honors our brief time here, honors our lives in a way that I think we don’t often.

We often wish our way through the week, “Ugh, when can it be Friday?” So, I’m trying to correct that, swing the pendulum back a little bit, such that employee engagement and our own days at the office are seen as valuable just for themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And so, you say it should be fun and we’re trying to correct. Can you give us a sense of what percentage of folks experience regular fun during the course of work versus find this to be a foreign concept when you speak with them or you’ve done the research, like, “Oh, you mean the ping pong table or the happy hour?” Like, “No, I don’t mean those things.”


Bree Groff
Yeah. I mean, the data is staggering on things like burnout, overworking. I’ll try and cite it correctly, but I believe it was 89% of employees have felt a sense of dread within the last month at work, 49% have felt a sense of dread within the last week. And like dread, that is such a big word. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m not having the most fun of my life.” It’s, “I’m actually dreading something.”

So, there’s a lot of headroom for us to go from what’s currently the state of affairs at work, which is something often work is something that we show up to that we get through. We almost show up assuming it’s not going to be fun and that’s not the point of work. So why even try to make it so? But I think it is. I think if we are going to be spending, they say one third of our lives or five sevenths of every week at the office or at the virtual office, well, that’s worthy of us figuring out how to have a better time doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it you could drop even more stats on us, I’m shameless here, because I guess I imagine that both things are true for me in the sense that, “Yeah, you know, I have fun at work and also there are elements that I dread.” And I think that is probably the case for nearly even the most dreamy of dream job havers in their lives. So, I guess I really want to know, like, how many folks experience, you know, near zero fun in the course of doing their work? Do we know that?

Bree Groff
Who experiences near zero fun? I mean, I imagine it’s kind of sizable. Anybody who’s looking for a new job is not maybe near zero, but is sort of approaching that asymptote of there’s very little to get from here anymore. I will say, though, like I’m not of the opinion that every day and all work needs to be fun. That’s just unrealistic, and it holds us to such a high standard.

Chapter one of the book is titled “Most Work, Most Days Should Be Fun.” And if we get most, I think, yeah, you’re killing it. Right? You’re doing a really good job.

Pete Mockaitis
And do we have a sense, very roughly, and maybe even just your gut sense of chatting with folks, if there’s not a perfect survey tool that’s assessed this, like, how many folks find themselves in that boat?

Bree Groff
Of most days most work is fun? My gut sense, and then I’ll try and whip you up some research, my gut sense would be 50% most work, most days is fun. Again, that’s off the cuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, Bree, folks will likely push back on you, in terms of, “Well, you don’t know about my job. This is as dull as it gets.” So, could you perhaps share with us a story of someone who was not having so much fun at work and then made some adjustments and, behold, the very same job they were in became more fun?

Bree Groff
Yeah, I’ll give you a sitcom, “The Office,” right? Like, you’ve seen it, they’re selling paper during the advent of the internet. Like, the business is crashing. It’s probably the dullest possible job you can imagine. I love how the show was framed because it’s not at all saying that work is fun because it’s meaningful or purposeful. It’s to show that work can still be fun even when you have no purpose, no meaning, when your job is to sell reams of paper.

And the reason it was fun, the reason why people love watching it is because the humans in the office, the entry level employees, they made it so. They made their own fun. So, when I think about, like, “How can we as individuals make our days more fun?” there’s so many things that we can do at the local level.

So, for example, when I’m leading consulting teams, it’s me and, on average, maybe seven, eight people on a team for a client, we are our own little ecosystem. So, whoever out there is listening, is, “Oh, my job is terrible,” the question is, “Do you have a few people around you in your local team, or even like one work bestie, where you can make your own fun despite the elements of what’s happening out there?”

So, this could look like anything from, “Hey, we’re going to wear our animal print socks on Fridays.” It’s such a stupid example, but it’s a stupid example because, one, nobody at work probably cares about what socks you’re wearing. And, two, it’s a little bit of an act of mischief and subversion in a way. Like, how can you make your own fun there?

Or, let’s say you have to do expense reports or fill out some sort of soul-sucking spreadsheet. Well, you could do that under your fluorescent lighting hunched over your desk. Or, if you work in an office building where you can take a walk and sit on a bench outside. If you’re working from home, and you can go to a coffee shop and do it there.

There are always ways to get the same work done, but dressed in a little bit more fun. So, at best, we think of work like steak, like it’s juicy, it’s delicious. The work itself is interesting and captivating. But if it’s just not, if your work is broccoli, then your job is to get some cheese and smother it on. And, in the very least, find some camaraderie with the other people who are also suffering alongside you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, I think “The Office” is a fine example because you can see all sorts of good times had in the midst of very boring circumstances. So, could you share some stories of real people who maybe did not have the luxury of a Jim Halpert with all those hilarious pranks and fun-making activities in the mix and how they found some creative ways to upgrade their experience of fun at work?

Bree Groff
So, there was one client that I was working with. The remit was employee experience and sort of like the process of this function. There were about 150 people in the function, and one person in particular, as we’re doing these interviews, was telling me like she was out, she was not having any fun. She was ready to leave.

We proposed many structural changes, process changes, sort of to try and like lighten up the workload and do all these things. But the one thing that made more difference than, and then anything else, for this one woman in particular, we started introducing the concept of a check-in, which is, at the top of a team meeting, you could do it at a standup or, you know, once a week, you simply start the meeting by saying, “How is everybody on a scale of one to five? Put it on your fingers. Three, two, one, everyone puts up their fingers, it’s a four, it’s a two, it’s a one.”

And then you go around the room in 30 seconds, everyone says how they are at work or in life. So, it could sound like, “Oh, I’m a four. We got a new puppy, which is amazing, but the puppy kept me up all night, so I’m kind of tired.” “I’m a two. I’m actually super nervous about this meeting we have later this week. I don’t know if we’re ready for it, so excited to talk about that in the meeting today.” Or, “I’m a five. It’s my birthday tomorrow.” And then everyone says, “Happy birthday.”

It’s a very simple practice. It takes maybe less than five minutes to do within a team. And once we started introducing this practice, so now I’d say most days she was doing this with her team, she was able to share, one, she was a new mom, so she was able to share, like, “Oh, God, this is really hard. I didn’t sleep much last night. And I’m really excited about this event that we’re putting on tomorrow.”

She was able to open her humanity to her team. So, she felt seen in a way that she wasn’t seen before. Nothing actually really changed about the work in that period of time. We were still working on more structural changes, but just the simple fact that she could go into work and she knew that somebody was going to say, “How are you?” and listen, like that was enough.

And so, we will often do, like, a pre-post survey of belonging and engagement and all those things, and the numbers were incredible, just like even when we pulsed on that one intervention. And then, just anecdotally, like her ability to say, like, “Oh, my God, I finally feel like I can be part of this team and not hide my exhaustion.”

Because there’s so much about work that tells us we need to be buttoned up and professional and sort of have like one sort of presentable persona to the business. But just being able to say, “How are you?” and then have someone say that to her made all the difference. So often, when I’m working with clients, it’s the first thing, the first thing I’ll do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Thank you. Yes. I remember when I was working at the Bridgespan Group, we did that practice of check-in, And it was so interesting because, you know, part of me was annoyed at first in terms of like, “Come on. Come on. We’ve a lot to cover, you know. I’m excited to get into it. And really like we’ve got, you know, 50 minutes scheduled for this meeting. How many minutes are we going to do with check-in?”

And it really fluctuated. Like, sometimes it was maybe a good third of the meeting was the check-in. I guess we didn’t have clear rules, but what was interesting is, in a way, that fluidity was kind of helpful. It’s like, “Oh, actually, that’s what was most needed. Go figure. It was not so much what was on the agenda proper, but spending some more time on this stuff.”

And what’s funny to this day, I mean, mercy, this was 16 years ago, but, like, I feel more, like, I don’t know, warmth, affection, interest, friendliness, and remembering of these people than I do like most other team settings. And it was interesting because there wasn’t that much to it. So, I came around to be a fan of the check-in, and it’s interesting.

And people can sort of choose just how vulnerable they are, how much they want to disclose with regard to their check-in. And I don’t think we ever were like derailed, even if it’s like hardcore, you know. I don’t remember what the most dramatic example was, but if someone were to say, “Oh, I’m distraught because my son has a…we thought he kicked his drug problem, but now he’s using cocaine again, and we’re really worried about his safety.”

Like, I’m just trying to imagine like what’s among the most intense things you might say in a check-in. So, one, folks tended not to share that, unless they felt comfortable enough in the team dynamic over time. And, two, when they did share bigger things, it didn’t tend to derail, you know, or take a long, long time. Folks just say, “Oh, that’s so hard. I’m so sorry. Please, let me know if I can support you.”

And it’s a little awkward to transition to the next person, “And I got a puppy.” But, you know, we get over it. In a way, it’s nice because, you know, these things are in the room, even if we’re not saying them, and just not acknowledging them does not make them disappear. Like, we are carrying the emotional whatever of that stuff into it.

And, in a way, it’s actually super helpful because it, like, demystifies stuff. Like, in ambiguous circumstances, I think we humans have a knack for just inventing stories as to what’s going on. Like, “Oh, she thinks my ideas are really dumb.” Like, “No, she’s super stressed about these life circumstances. That explains the low energy, the low mood, the short tip, any number of things.”

And it’s like, “Oh, well, I feel bad for them, but it’s a relief for me.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s just sort of what’s going on there.” And then it opens up opportunities for people to follow up, it’s like, “Oh, you know, hey, we got a new puppy last year, and we found this amazing YouTube channel, which was game-changing in terms of training or whatever.” And then, like, all these new opportunities for connection appear. So, I’m going on and on, Bree.

Bree Groff
I love it, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But just to say, yeah, I think check-ins, at first, I was skeptical, but I became a believer that they do a lot of good, and you’ve got hard numbers on the back end there.

Bree Groff
Yeah, so, totally. And they do feel awkward at first. I won’t lie. Even after doing them for years, I’ll sometimes be like, “Oh, team, wait, can we do a check-in before we jump in?” And I have like a little spike of like, “Oh, is it okay?” And it’s always worth it. Because I remind teams that the goal is not to have an efficient team. The goal is to have an effective team. And in order to trust people, you have to know them. In order to like people, you have to know them.

So, yeah, the research behind this is also really good, in addition to like our own experiences of like, “That felt nice.” But it promotes psychological safety, because if you risk saying something, even 2% vulnerable at the start of a meeting and you’re met with support, now you’re more likely to share whatever you need to share, you know, your business idea, whatever it is, later in the meeting.

It’s great for cognitive offloading. So, there’s research that says if you write or say whatever is running through the back of your mind, you can then focus better on the next task at hand. It’s sort of like shutting down all the tabs on your computer. So, instead of just ruminating on like, “Oh, how’s the puppy? How’s the puppy? So, I got a new puppy. I hope they’re not destroying the apartment right now. Great. I’ve said it.”

Priming contributions. So, once you’ve spoken once in a meeting, now it’s more comfortable to speak again, as opposed to, we’ve all been in those meetings where one person doesn’t speak the whole time, or maybe that’s you, and you’re like, “Oh, God, am I going to jump in now? Is this the one thing I’m going to say the whole meeting?”

And then thwarting any sort of miscommunications, as you said. So, if one person’s camera is off, and you’re like, “What a jerk!” but they’re like, “Oh, I’m a two. I threw my back out. So, I’m going to be camera off this meeting,” now there’s empathy where there used to be resentment. So, so many good reasons to do the check-in, to fight through that initial like awkwardness, and, “Oh, is this going to take a few minutes?”

Because every team that I’ve done this with, which I’ve been doing this now for over a decade, like I know things about their lives and who they are that made me feel, just as you said, like warm and affectionate to them. I’ve had teams, even as they disbanded, continue to check in years later simply because we, like, essentially bore witness to each other’s lives in that time, to the degree the person wanted to share. So big fan is the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s awesome. So, there’s one intervention, simple, powerful. I guess maybe one quick little footnote is like you mentioned the affirming, and maybe it goes without saying, but just to be explicit.

Bree Groff
“Don’t be a jerk.”

Pete Mockaitis 
During the course of a check-in, yeah, you would be affirming as opposed to, “A puppy. Why would you do that to yourself? You’ve already got three young kids. Are you insane?” Like, “Okay, that’s not how to respond to a check-in. Rather, you would…well, you tell me, someone shares a thing and then someone else is about to go, how does that transition or handoff work in practice?

Bree Groff
Yeah, if someone shares a thing, the rule is don’t be a jerk. Although, if you really like each other and know each other, and you know the person would laugh being like, “What the hell were you thinking? You got three kids,” you know, that’s cute. But, in practice, the way that it would functionally work, so I would usually start it off, or like a project manager could start it off, I’ll say, “How’s everybody?” Three, two, one. We put our fingers up in the air.

I’ll nominate someone to start. So, I’ll say, “All right, Pete, kick us off.” You would do your 30 seconds and then you would pass it to someone else. Like, “Okay, Bree, you go,” and then you just go around the room. It just avoids the whole, like, “Who wants to go next?”

And also, if you start at the top of the meeting, you end up getting into the meeting stuff around the same time as if you had just like chit chatted and done the whole, like, “Let’s wait for a few more people to join,” which is my corporate pet peeve.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so then, when someone shares, we mentioned acknowledgement or affirmation previously, they just stop and the next person goes, there’s no like, I don’t know, commenting or responding?

Bree Groff
Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe a little. So, like, “Oh, you got a new puppy. Like, oh, it’s so cute. Love it.” Something like that. If you’re on Zoom or remote, a lot of times people will just put things in chat to respond so that there’s a little bit of reciprocation, but, yeah, I mean, just no terrible back and forth, like, “Oh, I really threw out my back.” Someone would be like, “Oh, I’ll DM you my chiropractor later.” Something like that.

But I’ve had leaders ask me, like, “Well, what do I do with this information? Do I need to follow up if someone’s not doing?” I’m like, “No. The beauty of the practice is, like, this is literally saying, ‘How are you?’ and listening. Like, it’s so fundamentally human. So that’s all you have to do.” But, yeah, like a few, like, “Mm-hmm” kind of thing, that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, the check-in right there is simple, powerful, fun-building. What is another one or two of your top practices you recommend?

Bree Groff
Sure. Another one that falls in that camp is the user manual, which is a document you would keep for your team or maybe your direct reports or a couple of people around you. That’s just a series of questions about who you are and how you work.

So, functionally, each person would have their own page, and the questions would read something like, “Who are the humans and animals who are important to you? How can you be misunderstood? How can someone help if you’re stressed or stuck? What’s important to you on a team? What other responsibilities or joys do you have outside of work? What are you trying to get better at, at work?”

So, it’s just all these sorts of questions called a user manual, is my cheeky way. It’s, like, if you get a blender, you’re like, “What are all these buttons do?” Well, it’s like, “Well, you just go look at the manual. There’s like some quick start guide.” So, this is just the human version of that. Because how often do we work with people? Maybe for years, and then you’re like, “Oh, you have a brother?” It’s like, “Yeah.”

But we just, like, never sort of have the opportunity to, or think to, or maybe we’re nervous to share about those things. Also, like, we learn so much in working together through trial and error, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So, for example, like, if I’m stressed, I want someone to talk it out with me. I’m a very verbal processor.

But other people want to be left alone, like, “Do not go near me when I’m stressed out. Give me a hot second. It’s going to…” But, like, why should we guess who’s who or like try and get it right and then mess it up? So, there’s a question, “How can others help when you’re stressed or stuck?” And you can say, “Oh, just give me an hour or two and I’ll figure it out,” or, “Ask me how you can help.”

So, it’s a really simple document. Actually, I have a template on my website. If people want to go, it’s BreeGroff.com/usermanuals. You can download it and create one for your team. And it’s just another way to sort of like lubricate our social interactions such that we’re having more fun with the people we’re working with and we’re more supportive of them as well. We’re more seen and when we’re seen, we’re also better liked.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. I also want to hear your comments. In your book, you mentioned a couple of the super tiny little things we can do to, like, give many treats to ourself or to enhance a very basic experience of drinking coffee or tea. Can you speak to these concepts?

Bree Groff
Sure. Yeah, so there’s something that I call thin-slicing your joy. If you are looking ahead at your calendar for the day, and you’re like, “Oh, God, this is going to be painful. Back-to-back meetings, I have to get this thing out, and my inbox is a mess.” Well, if you look at the whole day, sure, it might look hard and dreadful, but we don’t have to look at a whole day.

So, then thin-slicing looks like, “Well, is there one hour, is there one meeting where I know I’m going to have fun? That’s maybe a brainstorm meeting or there’s some people in there that I like.” Or maybe you’re like, “Nope, Bree, every hour looks rough.” And I say, “Okay, great. Thin-slice even further. Are there a few minutes throughout your day where you can squeeze a little extra joy from what you’re already doing?” So, things that take no time.

Smelling is a great one. So, if you’re going to go get yourself a cup of coffee, maybe you stash some cinnamon in the office or in your kitchen and put a little bit on your coffee or your latte, and then just take three seconds and, like, breathe it in. Sensation kind of things are really good for getting us out of our heads, out of sort of like ruminations and anxieties and your head spinning about work.

Another small thing, sometimes the best way to have more fun at work is to help someone else have more fun at work. So, you can send something I call a love bubble, which is just like a two-line text. It could be a text, a DM, an email to a colleague, to say like, “Hey, you totally rocked it in that meeting. I don’t know how you got everybody on the same page. It was so cool.” It’s just like a little note of “You’re awesome. Appreciation. Thank you. So cool that you did that.”

The trick is, like, don’t overthink it, don’t like craft the email. This is not like formal feedback. This is like, “I have a nice thought. I share a nice thought.” Because so often, I think we do have nice thoughts about our colleagues, like, “Oh, they’re so good at that,” we just keep them to ourselves. So, if you can spend 30 seconds shooting off a little love bubble, now you’ve made that person’s day and you sort of kickstarted this positive feedback loop. Now maybe they’ll think of doing the same.

Other, like, little silly things, like micro acts of mischief I really like because they get your adrenaline going a little bit almost office style. Once in a while, you could put Comic Sans in your presentation and see, like, who you can make twitch because it’s like such a terrible typeface. You could rearrange the office furniture. Maybe you play yourself some music. I will say, though, all of these things are, they’re like realistic hacks.

Like, “I’m not having a great time at work. I can’t quit my job and/or maybe I’m just having a bad day. Like, how do I find more joy?” And that’s fine. Like, sometimes we just need to get through things. But I will also say it’s also important to acknowledge, like, “Oh, am I just hacking it through my day every day?” In which case, then it’s a bigger conversation with yourself about, like, “Is there a different role that’s better for me out there?”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I’m thinking about the TV series “Severance” right now with their really lame, like sort of parties are fun acknowledgments, “And you get to select a style of music and an instrument. We’re having a melon party, and this melon party is not going to start itself.” And what’s funny is, I think that that’s kind of the joke, it’s like, “Oh, these are kind of lame incentives, but these people are like, in some ways almost like children, and so, they can appreciate them.”

But yet, I think there’s also great wisdom in there in terms of like, “We are kind of like children in terms of little things really can be quite delightful.” And I think, often, my sense is, sometimes the more that they violate norms or are weird, in some ways, the more delightful. I mean, I’m sure there’s exceptions, but like the silly socks, for example.

Like, I have, for instance, when I had to get through some stuff, and it was all kind of lame, I would say, “I’m going to celebrate aggressively even though I have very limited resources.” Like, it’s just me. I am in sort of a small office space here but, “I’m going to get a shot glass full of cold water and pour it over my head and pretend it’s like the Gatorade being dumped on the coach, you know, after the victory.”

It’s like, “Well, I had a victory,” and cold water just makes you go, “Ooh,” a little bit. So, I mean, it is so little and so silly, and yet, I guess our inner children, if you will, can find some delight and some fun in it such that it meaningfully transforms the experience of that day.

Bree Groff
Yeah, I mean, the trick here is just amuse yourself. Like, because it’ll look different for everybody. Like, some people are sitting and will be like, “I like my socks just the way I like my…” It’s like, “Great. Don’t do the sock thing.” That’s a very low-bar example. But I guess what I most hope is that people feel the confidence in the value of their days.

And when you feel like you deserve to have a good day, you’re in a position then to try and make that true, to amuse yourself. Because I think so many people will show up to work thinking, “This day is not even mine. I’ve sold it to some employer. I’m not expecting to have fun. I’m here to provide the shareholder value and get my paycheck.” And I get that that sometimes feels like a more honest assessment of work. And yet, I feel like, in that situation, we’ve given up too fast. We’ve settled.

Instead, I think it’s worthy to hold the belief that, like, “Today, whatever day it is, April 12th, this year, I get one shot at this day. This day is not coming back again. This is a day of my life, not just a day that I’ve sold to an employer. So then how do I want to take ownership of enjoying it?” And then it’s just a question of like, “What do you like? I don’t know. What amuses you? What do you find fun?” I think the Gatorade, like the little shot glass of Gatorade is hilarious.

It’s so good because it’s playful. I think there is something in that sort of childish sentiment. Because children realize that there’s value in play just because there’s value in play, not the corporate version of that, that there’s value in play because it drives innovation. No, it’s just simply fun. And now you’ve had that moment of joy and you’ve banked it and it’s yours in life.

I also think it’s important to amuse ourselves because it creates a culture where we give permission to other people to also amuse themselves. And so, sometimes this is sort of like accoutrement around the work, you know, like the socks or the Gatorade example, but also, I think it’s important to amuse ourselves in the work. So, even like when I’m doing client projects and we’re scoping work, I’ll often ask myself the question, like, “How do I want to shape the work or define the work that’s most fun?”

Because I could deliver like an 80-page client deck or like a PowerPoint deck to the client. I would probably do the job. Or, we could design this like two-day immersive offsite experience that’s way more fun to build and way more impactful. So, I think it even goes just beyond the day to day, but, like, “What’s the fun work we want to do and do we have enough belief in the fact that we deserve to be having good days to like risk looking a little silly or childish?” And I think it’s worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Bree, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Bree Groff
I said a lot of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, we’ll do it. That’s fine. Can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bree Groff
Yeah, I mean, on this topic, I love the Annie Dillard quote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

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

Bree Groff
Yeah, I’ve always loved the Marty Seligman, he’s a UPenn researcher in positive psychology, the learned helplessness studies. He did this study probably decades ago now, where he would put dogs in this room, would shock their feet, I guess, low shocks that dogs were okay.

In one setup, the dogs weren’t able to escape the shocks. In another setup, they were, they were able to walk off the place where they were getting the shocks. They took those two sets of dogs and put them in yet another trial with shocks. But now, both sets of dogs were able to escape. The dogs that could escape the first time were like, “Yeah, I’m getting out of here,” and they did.

The dogs that could not escape the first time just sat down and whimpered, even though they could escape. They just decided, they had learned, essentially, had learned helplessness, “There’s nothing I can do here. I’ve just got to take it.”

And I loved that study for what it teaches us also about, like, happiness and joy in the workplace. Because I think a lot of us over time, I know I have, at times, have learned, “There’s no fun to be had here. There’s nothing I can do to change it. I’m just going to lay down and whimper and collect my paycheck.” When, in fact, there is so much that we can do.

And in fact, what sort of broke the trance for those dogs who had learned, “I can’t escape this,” was the researchers picking them up and walking their paws off of the shock area to actually teach them, like, “Oh, no, you don’t have to accept this.” So, in some ways I’m hoping to do that for the corporate world as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. And a favorite book?

Bree Groff
Yeah. So, basically, all of Agatha Christie’s novels because they’re my version of being totally unproductive. In a world that teaches me that I need to be optimizing all the time, reading for pleasure feels delightful and subversive. And so, my favorite reading for pleasure is cozy mysteries, and I love all of hers.

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

Bree Groff
Yeah, I really love Trello.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Bree Groff
Yeah. So, I love – would you call this a habit? – I love making a Moka pot in the morning. I really love the few minutes that takes me to make it. The minute I stare, I say, I’m just like staring at it, waiting for it to boil. It’s a good sort of sorbet palette cleanser for the start of my day and makes delicious coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a Bree original quote that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Bree Groff
“When you overwork, you underlive.”

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

Bree Groff
Yeah, come hang out at my website. So, it’s BreeGroff.com, B-R-E-E-G-R-O-F-F.com. And from there, you can order the book, you can subscribe to my Substack, you can find me on social media, but it’s a good first place to come say, “Hey.”

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

Bree Groff
My goal for you for today is to send a love bubble. Find one colleague or contact. You’re going to shoot them a two line note that says something like, “Oh, that design you did was so good. The plan you wrote up was awesome. Like, thank you so much for doing this thing. It really helped me.” And then make somebody else’s day. We’ll create a pay-it-forward kind of vibe for each other.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bree, thank you.

Bree Groff
Thank you. That was fun.

May 08
0

1056: Winning the Mental Game of Leadership with Sébastien Page

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Sébastien Page explores how great leaders navigate failure, conflict, pressure, and purpose.

You’ll Learn

  1. How agreeableness holds you back
  2. How to know whether a goal is still worth pursuing
  3. How to make stress work for you

About Sébastien

Sébastien Page is Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He has more than two decades of leadership experience and has done extensive research on positive, sports, and personality psychology. He currently oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in Assets Under Management.

Page has written two finance books: Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know, and the co-authored Factor Investing and Asset Allocation, and he has won six annual research-paper awards: two from The Financial Analysts Journal and four from The Journal of Portfolio Management. He appears regularly on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and in 2022 was named a Top Voice in Finance by LinkedIn. He has been quoted extensively in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Barron’s. His latest book, The Psychology of Leadership, is on sale now from Harriman House. Page lives in Maryland with his wife and kids.

Resources Mentioned

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Sébastien Page Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sébastien, welcome!

Sébastien Page
Thank you. I’m very excited to do a podcast. I don’t get to do that many, and it’s a lot more relaxed than what we usually do on live national TV when we talk about markets.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Well, it’s funny, you talk about markets a lot, but you got a book about The Psychology of Leadership. What’s that about, Sébastien?

Sébastien Page
You know, I get that question a lot, “Why would a finance guy write a book about self-improvement and high-performing leadership?” I’ve been a leader myself for about 25 years in business. And, to me, I started working on this because, myself, I felt very stressed at work, and I was beating myself up for being stressed. So, I was stressing about stressing.

And, Pete, I talked to a sports psychologist who introduced me to a lot of fascinating research, and that was the beginning. The first time I met him, he had this story because the sports psychologists, it turns out, is a pro-athlete as well, 40 national titles in the sport of handball. And so, that’s the sport that looks like squash but you smack the ball with your hands. Forty, four-zero, national titles, and he’s a sports psychologist. His name is Dr. Daniels Simmons.

This is the origin story of the book, “Why would a finance guy end up writing a book on self-improvement and leadership?” He tells me the story of his best match ever, and it’s a match that occurred 10 years ago but he remembers everything about it. He remembers every point, where he was at every point, where the ball was. He has a tear in his eye. At some point, he’s on his knees, he makes an extreme impossible shot.

And then, Pete, it’s an absolute letdown because he goes, “And then I lost the next two points.” And I go, “What? You lost the game?” And that’s the mindset of a sports psychologist, where you have 40 national titles, and your best match ever is one that you happen to lose, but that’s not really relevant. To him, that day he realized he could play at a higher level because he was playing a stronger opponent.

So, I became fascinated with this mindset of sports psychology. So, that’s how the book started. And then I just dug into the research.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it was it his best game ever in terms of his own performance or his delight in it because he realized that he had achieved at a higher level?

Sébastien Page
It was mainly the latter. It was the realization that he could play at a higher level. And, to me, it was the realization of a mindset, which, by the way, relates to money management as well. You can’t get everything right in money management. Sometimes you lose. It was an illustration of that mindset and how you handle it.

But, for him, it was, “Look, I’m now a stronger player. It doesn’t matter that I won or lost.” It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about winning. It’s just a different way to approach uncertainty and failure.

Pete Mockaitis
No, it’s a good one. One of our guests, Michael Bungay-Stanier, who wrote The Coaching Habit and others, said his favorite quote is, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by ever-greater things,” or some of that notion of ever-greater things.

Sébastien Page
I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And that you can feel good about that, in terms of “Okay, hey, I still lost but, wow, my golly, look at what it took to take me out. I’m really getting better. That’s awesome!”

Sébastien Page
I like that a lot. And I often think back on Roger Federer’s commencement address that went viral about six months ago. He was speaking to students. And Roger Federer is one of the top tennis players of all time, and he goes, “I’ve played 1500 matches in my career. I’ve won 80% of them.” But then he asked the students, “What percentage of points do you think I won?”

What do you think, Pete, is that percentage, percentage of points that Federer won in his career? Not to put you on the spot.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I don’t know how tennis scoring works. I was going to wildly guess, 61, Sébastien.

Sébastien Page
So, you’re not far. It’s 54%. So, Roger Federer, top tennis player only won 54% of the points. And then he looked at the students, and he said, “Whatever game you play in life, you’re going to lose.” Effortless winning is a myth and it’s your mindset when you lose. You actually learn more in sports psychology, from losing than from winning.

In fact, I write this in The Psychology of Leadership, sports psychology is not about winning at all. It’s about losing and what you do with that loss. And I really liked what you said earlier about losing to ever-greater things or ever-greater opponents. That’s exactly the conversation that sparked my interest in sports psychology and how it can apply to leadership, to business management, and to money management as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I was thinking about money things as well. It might’ve been Mark Cuban, who said, “You only have to be right once,” in terms of, like, your entrepreneurial career. Yeah, you can fill many things but your one big win, and, whoo, you’re doing awesome.

Sébastien Page
Yeah, that’s an analogy in venture capital, and it’s the same idea. You have to accept the fact that a lot of your bets are not going to work. As long as there’s one that goes 10X, you’re going to be a successful venture capitalist.

But in terms of self-improvement, we don’t like losing, and we have to kind of get over that. As leaders, when you look at business environments, accepting that you’re going to have setbacks, and just focusing on what you do with those and how you move forward. That’s where the mindset shifts.

And, look, I think, Pete, in general, sports psychology is greatly underrated. I wrote the book also because the positive side of psychology is kind of still on unexplored in business. If you go on Google Scholar, and you searched for articles in clinical psychology, you’ll probably get about the same number of articles as in positive psychology. To me, that’s fascinating. The business world has only scratched the surface here of the positive side of psychology.

Let me give you an example. Does the name Felix Baumgartner ring a bell?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, he got the red ball really high up stunt.

Sébastien Page
Yes. Here’s the stunt. He goes on a helium balloon, up 24 miles to the edge of space, he steps out of his capsule, and he skydives for 10 minutes, four minutes in freefall. The first human being to break the sound barrier. I mean, it’s amazing what he did. But what most people don’t know is Felix Baumgartner was coached every step of the way in preparation and through the day of that skydiving from space stunt by a sports psychologist.

So, I used this sometimes as an introduction to, yeah, psychology is super important to treat clinical anxiety and depression, but it’s also really important for ultra-high performance. And that’s where the business world hasn’t really come around to this much yet. And it just brings so much tools to deal with setbacks and the stress that comes with high performance, because it’s stressful to deliver high performance in any area of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, you’ve got a number of really cool principles that you put out in your book, and I want to jump into speaking about these bits, about mindset. You said we should identify and manage our core beliefs. Tell us, why and how is that done?

Sébastien Page
So, a core belief is the way you interpret the world. Think of it as rules of thumb. They might not be entirely conscious but it’s how you interpret events, and how you tend to make decisions. In the research in psychology, it’s often about a traumatic event that changed your core belief.

So, imagine someone who was betrayed in a major way in their life. They might’ve developed a core belief that everybody is out to get them, and that’s how they’re going to interpret situations and go through life with that core belief.

Now, in business, we have core beliefs. “The consumer is always right,” is a popular one. In money management, we have core beliefs, “The trend is your friend,” or, “Buy low and sell high.” And the thing about core beliefs in business, in leadership, for yourself, is that they’re, oftentimes, unexamined.

Do you know, Pete, what your core beliefs are, how you tend to react under pressure, how you tend to interpret the world? Not necessarily. You might have core beliefs that you haven’t realized you’re using to make important decisions.

So, in that principle, I encourage people, for themselves, for their teams, for their company, to write them down, examine them, discuss them, “What do we believe in? How do we interpret the world?” And here’s the key. Some of them, you’re going to want to get rid of. Other ones, you’re going to want to foster within your team or within your organization. And that’s where you start managing core beliefs, and it’s incredibly powerful in setting the right culture for high performance.

I had a core belief earlier in my career, my boss used to say that I heard high frequencies, and this was about corporate politics. What he meant was, you know how dogs hear certain noises that humans don’t hear?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I’m thinking about the Superman movie with Gene Hackman, and that dog with high pitch thing. But Superman and the dogs could hear it.

Sébastien Page
Yes. So, he would say, “You hear high frequencies, like you’re hearing political noise, or you’re worried about things that are really just high frequencies.” And he would remind me of this every time I get worried. And my response was usually, “Well, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.” That’s kind of a famous quote that people use sometimes, “It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.”

But that was a bad core belief. It was a bad core belief to think that, to not assume good intentions. And I kind of managed and replaced that core belief with, “Start by assuming good intentions.” It’s just a good starting point, even if you’re wrong. It’s a better way to start when you’re managing team dynamics and corporate politics.

So, that’s an example of examining core beliefs, changing it for a better one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you walk us through the practice in terms of how you identify a hidden core belief, and then if you see it, you say, “Ah, actually, I don’t like that. That’s not so helpful”? How do you jettison it? Because I imagine that’s perhaps easier said than done.

Sébastien Page
So, people in clinical psychology, when they might have really unhealthy core beliefs, they just go to therapy, and that’s a way, through discussion and through the therapeutic to identify your core beliefs but I think you don’t need to go to therapy to identify your core beliefs.

I think, as a team setting, say in a business environment, what you want to do is observe how people behave, think, make decisions, interpret events during moments of high pressure, during moments when it’s tough decision, and there’s emotion in the room. That’s usually where we default to some core beliefs.

And then what you do is you discuss these. Let’s take money management. Markets are crashing, “Are we prone to just sell and panic or buy more or sit tight?” And there’s probably a core belief behind that. And so, you identify those moments of pressure, and then you see how they come out, they surface, during those moments.

It’s also often written down in a company’s founding or there’s a lot of companies that will write, “We believe…” statements. And those are usually a bit cheesy and motherhood and apple pie, and they sit on a PowerPoint somewhere, and they’re cliché, and we don’t really read them or believe them. But you know what? These things really matter day to day.

Not necessarily the curated PowerPoint, but, “What do we believe as a team?” whether it’s a sports team, whether it’s a family. You’re a leader in your family. You don’t have to manage people in a business to be a leader. So, in The Psychology of Leadership, I give some examples of company core beliefs or team core beliefs, and just writing them down is very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s hear a real belief, written down, that’s powerful and has a galvanizing real impact on a team.

Sébastien Page
So, for us in business, if we’re disagreeing on something, the best way to win the argument, say it’s a product development or an investment decision, is to make the case on behalf of our clients. So, there is a core belief that everything we do, everyday we go to work, is to make money for our clients so they can get better retirements, pay their bills, put their kids through college.

That’s the mission of a money manager. You go to work and you want to make money for your clients. So, that’s a core belief. We write it down often, we talk about it, and we resolve disagreements with them, is that we’re acting as fiduciaries for our clients.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And then you also have a principle about “Be disagreeable sometimes.”

Sébastien Page
So, in personality psychology, we all know whether we’re introverts or extroverts, and that’s actually popular in the business world nowadays to talk about introversion, but there are these other traits, and agreeableness is one of the traits that I talk about in The Psychology of Leadership.

Agreeableness is a great trait to have. It just means that you like to get along, you’re a good listener, you tend to not confront people head on, but like any personality trait, it has downsides. If you’re too high in agreeableness, you’re a people-pleaser and you’ll put other people’s needs before yours, and that might not be productive for your own career and even for the benefit of the team.

So, some people score high in agreeableness, some people score low. In The Psychology of Leadership, I actually publish my own scores. I’m tempted to put you on the spot, Pete, to see if you would score yourself high or low in agreeableness.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m too agreeable, it’s a problem. I need to, sometimes, not give a “Good God, gosh, golly” about other people’s perspectives in order to do what’s optimal, yeah.

Sébastien Page
You hit the nail on the head. If you want to be a good leader, an effective leader, you can’t spend your days just trying to build consensus and making everybody happy. You’re going to have to make some decisions where you’re going to have to be disagreeable.

And I say 10% of the time in The Psychology of Leadership, this is a book that’s full of research. All the principles are research-backed but the 10% is my intuitive recommendation, know when to be disagreeable at the right moment, when you need to put your foot down. Only then you’ll be an effective leader.

You can’t just go through your day-to-day as a leader just constantly trying to make everybody happy. It’s a desirable thing, though. That’s why I say 10%, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Wel, it’s true. And as I think about, if you hear the stories of great leaders through history, there are often those moments in which all or many of the advisors around them are pushing them in one direction, and they say, “No, absolutely not. That could result in nuclear annihilation. So, we’re not doing that. We’re doing the opposite,” and they firmly, with backbone, go ahead and do the thing. And we’re still alive today, so thanks to good leadership backbone.

So, I guess the hard part, Sébastien, is how do we know, “When is that 10%?” How do you know, “You know what? I am, indeed, putting my foot down, and the perspectives I’m getting are incomplete or just plain wrong. And so, we’re going my way this time”?

Sébastien Page
Well, let me give you two cases. One is you, as the leader, have information because you’re connected to the board of directors or the clients. You might have information that you can’t share for one reason or the other.

But there’s an information asymmetry and you know what the right decision is, or maybe you have a unique talent, and only you. But be careful with that because that can turn into arrogance. But you have an edge in making the decision. Like, in your example. You’re going to be disagreeable.

The other part of it, number two, is that the job of the leader, often, is to resolve conflicts. And you’ll have people come at you with recommendations that disagree. So, one person wants the organization to go left, the other person wants the organization to go right, “Leader, what are we going to do?” It can be absolutely exhausting and counterproductive to just try to create some kind of consensus or keep everybody happy. If the organization needs to move fast, you have to use your 10% right there.

So, you use your 10% when there’s an information asymmetry or really convince you have the right decision and others don’t, and then you use it when, and maybe a bit more often, when you need to help resolve disagreements. Because if you don’t, over time, it builds, and it builds, and it builds, and it becomes your full time just dealing with the disagreements because they fester, they just keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, by taking a stand and resolving it, we sort of nip it in the bud.

Sébastien Page
Yes. And remember also, I talk about goal-induced blindness in the book. And with goal-induced blindness, people lose sight of what’s not related to their goals. They just focus narrowly on the goal, and they might sacrifice their health, their family, or their sense of ethics. So, they’re, famously, companies, business leaders, or sports leaders and athletes, that cheat because they have goal-induced blindness.

And so, when you as a leader, you really have to put your foot down, and say, “Okay, you need to go home and rest. This is perhaps a disagreeable way. I know you want to stay here and keep going,” or, “This is an ethical grey area and we don’t go nowhere near that. And, therefore, I’m putting my foot down.”

So, exercising leadership is a lot about inspiring people, is a lot about building consensus, is a lot about being agreeable, but 10% of the time, and that’s my own rule, 10% of the time it’s not, and that’s a crucial part of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Goal-induced blindness is a fun turn of a phrase. And I’m curious if there are any early-warning signals you look for to see, “Uh-oh, it looks like we are starting to tip-toe into blind territory.”

Sébastien Page
You’re going to start seeing it through people getting exhausted, through morale, through customer feedback, but let’s just define goal-induced blindness clearly. It’s well-researched in psychology, and let me give you an example, Pete.

I was in front of about a thousand students, giving a talk, about two months ago. And I asked the students the following question. I’m going to ask you, too, although I think I know what you’re going to answer. Imagine I give you a bowl of a hundred gummy bears. Four of them are poisoned and they’re going to kill you. So, you have a 4% chance of dying.

And my challenge to you, Pete, is would you eat one gummy bear for $100,000?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d have to run all the numbers but I’m guessing no because it would take vast sums for me to think it’s worth trading my life, and our numbers aren’t good enough here, Sébastien.

Sébastien Page
So, look, I offered the students, hypothetically, a million. That was my opening. And I saw 15-20% of the room raised their hands. And in surveys, when you ask Millennials, for example, there are good surveys on them, 81% of them say that their life goal is to become rich, which, by the way, is not a bad goal. Go for it. Like, measurable goals, traditional goals are motivating, go for it.

But the caveat about goal-induced blindness is that, I mean, what? Eating one of those gummies is complete goal-induced blindness. Like, no amount of money is worth doing this. And here’s why I used four gummies that are poisoned out of a hundred.

The literature in psychology refers to Mt. Everest deaths. If you want to summit Everest, you have a 4% chance of dying in the process. And when you read about psychology and goal-induced blindness, there are lots of examples of people who die on Everest because they have the summit in their sight, and they lose sight of everything else, the risk they’re taking.

So, at the end of one of my principles, I go, “If you’re going to take any advice from this entire book, take the following. If ever you feel like climbing Everest because it’s there or some other reason, my advice to you is ‘Don’t.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny because Everest, we think about money, I suppose my frame of reference for even entertaining the gummy bears is that if I think about my life as a gift or contribution to family, nonprofit, others, like, “What is the impact I would like to give? What’s the impact I would like to create by putting my life in service of folks? And then what might be the comparable impact of a vast sum of funds going to, you know, starving or whatever, folks in need?”

So, I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it. Because we might say, “Would you eat a gummy bear if it meant you’d save many lives in the neighboring room?” And so, I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it. Whereas, Everest, yeah, I mean, one, I’m not that into mountain climbing, even though it’s kind of fun.

You’re right, I think that’s excellent to think about goal-induced blindness, is you just want it really bad, and you’re excited about it, and to heck with the risks.

Sébastien Page
Look, you found the perfect counterargument to what I was saying, which is you might have altruistic goals that you are behaving in a way that looks like goal-induced blindness but it’s a completely different framework, it’s to do something good. And there, we get philosophical. And there’s the theory of utility, and “How do you achieve the greater good for the greater number of people?”

Psychology is not much about philosophy. My son is 17, happens to be really interested in philosophy, so we talk about these things. But, Pete, you gave a really good counterargument there. My general recommendation is to pursue goals, go for it. Like, measurable goals work. They work. They motivate. We take people to the moon. We want to go to the moon. That’s the goal. And it works. And it’s okay to want to make money.

And I think, even better, if you want to make money for altruistic ends because, in that case, also research in psychology, in positive psychology, shows that that is much more likely to make you happy, Pete, to help others than making more money per se. And there’s a lot of research about “Does happiness increase with money?”

If you’re in poverty, it definitely does, but then it does not much after a certain level. That’s also well-published research. But the problem with goal-induced blindness is that it happens. So, I’m arguing for having goals, for being aggressive in pursuing them, but for being mindful of “Are you still taking care of yourself? Like, are you healthy? Are you sleeping? Are you eating okay? Are you exercising? And don’t cheat, ever. It’s not worth it. Yeah, you’re playing a long-term game.”

And recognize when you’re slipping into goal-induced blindness. That’s a risk for high performers, not for low performers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s good to note that, sometimes, as you pursue a goal, we realize the costs are much greater than originally anticipated. And it may be wise to pause, and say, “Hmm, new information has come to light. Perhaps this goal is no longer worth pursuing,” although that is a bummer, and make sure you don’t let your ego get into it, like, “I’m not a quitter.” It’s like, “Okay.”

Well, I think about that with Everest, in terms of folks, they get in that position where they pretty close to the summit, and they realize, “Uh-oh, we’re entering a high-danger situation,” and some folks will wisely turn back even though they were so close to the peak, and those who are like, “Doggone it, I’m so close, I can’t give up. I’m just going to go for it. I’m going for it.”

Sébastien Page
Look, quitting might be the most underrated skill in business. We think of leaders as those that never give up and stick to the goal, but there are plenty of occasions in business when the facts change and the future profits from your project have changed, and you have to quit even though you’ve invested a lot in that project.

Annie Duke has a fantastic book that she titled Quit, and it’s about how quitting is an underrated skill in business. And I refer to her research in The Psychology of Leadership as well. So, I’m glad you bring this up. Pete, the other example I like to use when talking about goals is my friend, Phil. So, that’s the story of my friend, Phil. Phil made a billion dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Shout out, Phil.

Sébastien Page
Yeah, with his cryptocurrency company, and he decided to give everything away to charity. And the next morning, he was eating his cereal in his kitchen, and an angel appeared to him. So, this is usually where I disclose that it’s not a true story, but it’s illustrative.

Pete Mockaitis
“What an interesting life Phil has had. He earned a billion dollars. Sees angels.”

Sébastien Page
You might’ve been wondering where this interview was going.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I bet, I’m an angel, Sébastien, so, okay, fiction with you.

Sébastien Page
It’s a made-up story but I use it to frame goals. So, the angel said, “Oh, you’re such a good person. I’m going to give you one of the following three gifts. I can give you infinite power, I can give you infinite wealth, or I can give you infinite wisdom.”

So, I don’t know, let’s encourage our audience to think about which one they would choose. Pete, which one would you choose – power, wealth, or wisdom?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m tempted to say, to paint how we define the terms, infinite wisdom may lead you to, if you so desire, infinite wealth and power in addition. So, it’s like a three-for-one deal with the wisdom.

Sébastien Page
Or it may lead you to not desire those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Sébastien Page
Who knows? But that was the interesting part about that story, is that Phil chose wisdom. And so, for the first time in human history, someone had infinite wisdom. There was a giant press conference, cameras in his face, lightbulbs flashing. What would the person with infinite wisdom say? We’ve never heard from anyone with infinite wisdom.

And the story goes, Phil said, “I should’ve taken the money.” And this is the frame that I use to talk about goals and long-term goals, and how we think about, “Which goals will make us happy?” And this is where positive psychology comes in.

And Andre Agassi, for example, had the clear goal of being one of the best, or the best tennis player. He was miserable his entire career. His autobiography is one of the best books I’ve ever read, Open by Andre Agassi. He was absolutely miserable. He hated playing tennis. And when he left tennis, I think he became much happier.

So, we set these goals and we don’t take the time to think about “What long-term goal will truly make me happy?” So, positive psychology says, when they followed people for their entire lifetime over 80 years, eight decades, this is a study out of Harvard, and they go, “What makes people thrive over their lifetime? What makes them happy? Let’s ask them, on a regular basis, how they’re doing.” A bunch of questions, “How are you doing? How are you feeling? How’s your life going?”

And then there’s generations of researchers, as you can imagine. There’s no study like this. It’s fascinating. Eighty years running, it’s still running. Robert Waldinger out of Harvard, he’s fantastic, and he’s still running that study.

But what they found was people, during their lifetime, who climbed the social ladder, who were healthy, who made money, were not necessarily statistically happier than those who lost their job, who got sick, who went to prison.

It’s just so fascinating that all these traditional goals did not make people happy. And there was one dimension, though, that showed to be very powerful in people’s ability to thrive in the long run and feel happy with their lives.

I don’t know if you’d talked about it in your podcast with Robert, but it is those that had the most positive relationships in their lives self-reported the higher levels of happiness over their lifetime. So, relationships are important.

Now, we’re getting into notions of happiness and positive psychology, and here I am, a business guy, talking about these very abstract concepts. What does it mean in business? It means a ton. If you have a bad day at work, it’s probably because of a relationship issue. I would say, nine out of ten times, you’d come home and you just had a bad day at work, it’s probably relationship-related.

If you want to run a high-performing organization, a high-performing soccer team, a high-performing orchestra, a large proportion of the success of the team is going to be the quality of their relationships. And it’s not about being nice and feeling good every time, but it’s trust, it is mutual respect, it’s how you give feedback to each other. Those things are absolutely necessary for strong leadership and strong team performance.

So, we go from this theoretical, positive, nice-sounding positive psychology stuff to really practical business practices in terms of how you give feedback, how you receive feedback, how you talk about culture, why culture matters, how people interact within a team, why trust is so important.

And I say set goals that are longer term, that will generate organizational happiness, set goals for yourself that are positive in nature, and here’s how you go about executing against those goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we talked about agreeableness a little bit. I also want to talk about neuroticism. You’ve got a bit about learning to love to worry. Tell us why and how do we do that?

Sébastien Page
We talked about why I wrote this book, initially, why I got interested, particularly in sports psychology. I felt stressed. And I was beating myself, well, for feeling stressed, I thought, “I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’ve had more stressful jobs. Why do I feel stressed at work?” And there, sports psychology is incredibly helpful because you learn to embrace a certain amount of stress.

I explain in The Psychology of Leadership that optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero. In other words, stress can increase performance up to a point of optimal performance, after which, performance decreases, mental health gets impacted, you choke, it impacts your physical health as well.

But this idea of going through life trying to operate at zero stress, first of all, is absolutely impossible. And the top athletes, I guarantee you, speaking to a sports psychologist who trains them mentally, they get absolutely stressed. Now, sports psychologists like to reframe stress as activation or arousal. In the literature, there are different ways to define this.

I’m using the term stress loosely here. But this idea that there’s a curve, that stress to a certain amount, with activation, will improve, not decrease, your performance is super fascinating. And, by the way, those curves, they’ve been studied for almost a hundred years, and they are different for different people. So, your stress curve might be different from my stress curves, and they’re also different for different tasks.

For some tasks, you’ll perform really well when you’re really stressed, when you have the adrenaline pumping. If you’re going to run a 5K, you’re probably going to get your best time with a very high level of activation and some adrenaline coursing and some, yes, some stress before the race. You’re going to perform better.

If you’re going to do archery or something complex or solve math problems, you’re going to need some activation but your optimal performance is going to be at a lower-stress level.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense. As I think about when I’m really fired up, my hands are kind of shaky. So, precision archery isn’t the best. Well, you got me thinking about biathlon athletes which is the fun-nest sport. The funniest idea for a sport, “Let’s go cross-country skiing, and then pause and shoot, and then do it again and again.” And so, there you have it, they’re playing both games at the same time.

Sébastien Page
I love that example because, to ski, I mean, the technique is pretty straightforward. They got to be pretty activated. And then they need to bring it down really quick for the shooting. So, it combines two stress curves, and the ability to toggle between the two is part of that sport. That’s a great example, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to hear your piece about thinking about death.

Sébastien Page
So, does that sound positive or negative to you if I just say that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, there’s some ancient stoic philosophy about the benefits of remembering, thinking about your death. So, yeah, on the surface, it feels a little spooky and unpleasant, yet there could be rich goodness under the surface.

Sébastien Page
Look, Stephen Covey has one of the best-selling self-improvement books of all time, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. One of the habits is “Begin with the end in mind.” And he does talk about thinking about what you want to reflect on at the end of your life.

And then Covey argues once you figure that out, it guides your values, and you bring that back to today and it’ll help you make better decisions that are more aligned with your long-term goals and long-term values. So, I love that.

In fact, one of the early titles of the book, instead of The Psychology of Leadership, was “The End in Mind.” I actually wanted to give a nod to Covey.

But so, you’d think about death, it helps you think about positive psychology. There’s a model in positive psychology that spells P-E-R-M-A, PERMA. It was developed by Marty Seligman, father of Positive Psychology. I hate acronyms because we use way too many of them in business, but I love that one. So, P stands for positive emotion, and then ERMA, E stands for engagement, R for relationships, quality relationships, M for meaning, and A for long-term accomplishment.

When you think about your death or when you think about what you want on your tombstone, what you’re going to reflect on has a lot more to do with ERMA – engagement, relationships, meaning, and long-term accomplishments – than what day-to-day you and I and everybody in our audience, we’re all seeking, which is basic positive emotions, a good glass of wine, a laugh, a like on social media. We’re all addicted to the positive emotions.

But if you put this in the context of thinking very long term, think about death, stoicism, the end in mind, however you want to frame that thinking, you introduce notions of positive psychology that are incredibly powerful. We don’t really talk about this in business, but there are lots of ways to think about applications of this in business.

For example, engagement. More than half of employees in surveys in our country are not engaged at work. So, how do you use research in psychology to improve engagement? And you introduce the notion of flow, how you set the goals, how you set the milestones to put people in flow, and so on. Meaning is incredibly important in business, and some are underrated sometimes.

So, I could go on but this whole idea of starting from the end point is a big part of The Psychology of Leadership, of goal-setting, and of executing against goals.

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

Sébastien Page
I would say, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. You know, I mentioned, in my day job as a money manager, I have to go and talk about financial markets in the space of two to ten minutes, and it is high pressure and it’s live national TV. I’m super happy that you got me on here, to have more of a conversation. It was a lot of fun. I hope our audience liked it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote.

Sébastien Page
Okay. Marcus Aurelius, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”

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

Sébastien Page
There’s some research that shows that social comparison is a more powerful motivator than positive encouragement.

So, here you go, Pete. If someone else has a podcast that you feel you’re competing with, and they’re getting more views, better ratings, it should be, theoretically, based on that research, more motivating to you than if I just called you, and say, “Hey, Pete, you’re doing a great job. Keep going.”

And so, it’s counterintuitive. We look down on social comparison but it’s actually very powerful. And if you can gamify it and enjoy competition, it could be a super powerful tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Sébastien Page
I got to go with David Goggins, either of his books, Can’t Hurt Me or the follow-up. And I read so many books but there’s no author like David Goggins that is going to motivate you to do something about your physical health and exercise.

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

Sébastien Page
Favorite tool in my day-to-day life, very underrated, I feel, is a calorie counter. I think it’s really hard to eat a decent diet. I don’t think we should all, like, try to be perfect. But counting your calories is pretty much, at least in my life, the only way that I could get a decent diet going, is to actually look at it and count it. So, those are, like, really helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Sébastien Page
This is going to sound unusual, I suppose. It’s important to me to have a streak for exercise, and I’ve basically exercised every day for more than 12 years, for at least 30 minutes. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I just go on a slow jog.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key Sébastien-original soundbite that you’re known for, or people quote back to you often?

Sébastien Page
The most critical lesson in leadership that I’ve learned over the last few years, and I’ve been a leader for 25 years, is summarized in four words, “Talk less. Listen more.” We think leaders have to be outstanding communicators, and that is part of the job, but listening is what is going to really push your leadership skills upwards.

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

Sébastien Page
PsychologyofLeadership.net or LinkedIn.

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

Sébastien Page
Set big goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sébastien, thank you. This is fun.

Sébastien Page
Thank you. Likewise.

May 05
0

1055: The One-Minute Trick to Defeating Procrastination with Dave Crenshaw

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dave Crenshaw discusses how to find the energy to tackle your goals–when you really don’t feel like it.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to overcome procrastination in one minute
  2. The five costs of multitasking
  3. Why to pick a terrible stopping point 

About Dave

Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of millions around the world.

Resources Mentioned

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Dave Crenshaw Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Dave, welcome back!

Dave Crenshaw
Pete, it’s great to be here. I always enjoy talking with you. We always have a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe too good of a time. You’ve introduced me to “Slay the Spire,” which has cost me hours of fun.

Dave Crenshaw
It didn’t cost you. You gained all that, right?

Pete Mockaitis
It cost me. There was gain and cost. And my son, Johnny, likes it now too. So that’s cool. Thank you for that.

Dave Crenshaw
Oh, that’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re talking about procrastination and taking action despite, you know, internal emotional resistance and reluctance. And as a backdrop for this, I’d love it if you could kick us off with, you have a deeply vulnerable and powerful annual practice. And I bumped into a seven-minute video from you on LinkedIn. I wasn’t expecting, but was like, “Wow, this is this is powerful stuff.”

And the comments, likewise, were resonating and finding actionable wisdom for some of their own difficulties, but in terms of mental health or taking care of business when they don’t feel like it. So, could you share a little bit of that context?

Dave Crenshaw
So I’ve dealt with a variety of mental health challenges throughout my life. And a big element of that has been depression. And the way that I heard someone describe it is– and part of what I’ve dealt with, in conjunction with that, is pretty recurrent suicidal thoughts. But, in particular, one year, it was just bad. My body chemistry was completely compromised. And so, I had to work with a psychologist, to work with a psychiatrist, get medical help to solve the issue. And as I was coming out of that, Pete, there was a moment where I had one foot in and one foot out. Meaning I saw what I was like and I saw where I was going and the things were getting better.

And in that moment, I realized I had an opportunity to help people because I was in both worlds and I could see what it was like to not deal with that, but also the pathway that I was taking to get out. And so, I recorded one video, and then later on condensed it, and started to share the strategy that I used to get out of that with the goal that this is going to help someone.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful, powerful. Thank you for sharing that. And, yes, I, too, have dealt with suicidal thoughts from time to time, and it is tough and unpleasant.

Dave Crenshaw
I’m sorry that you had to go through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Dave Crenshaw
It’s a terrible feeling. 

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And I think, like, this provides maybe perhaps the most intense or dramatically possible backdrop for thinking about procrastination or emotional reluctance, resistance to doing stuff. Because I’ve had, you know, more often than suicidal thoughts, like sort of just like a malaise in terms of, “Oh, I don’t feel like it and these things seem so hard.” And it’s like I’m thinking and moving slower.

And yet, even when th is happens, I have found it is possible, and often not fun, but sometimes surprisingly fun, to go ahead and take care of some business.

And you have a transformational tactic that you’ve shared, and folks are really vibed with. Can you tell us about it?

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah, and I’ll give a little bit of a context for this. As a time management guy, because that’s what I do, one day, I was coaching a client, this is where this thought came from. And he was talking about vacations, and about how he would take a vacation and he’d rush to get everything ready. At the end of the vacation, and then he would have to catch up and do all this other stuff at the other side of it.

And he said the phrase, “If it weren’t for the last minute, I wouldn’t get anything done.” And that is a very common thing for people who experience ADHD and a variety of different psychological challenges. And I think it’s just human as well. And I thought about that and I thought, “What if it was the other way around? What if it was, ‘If it weren’t for the first minute, I wouldn’t get anything done’?”

And that was something that I immediately made a part of my time management training. And the idea is simply this. When we look at a project, we look at a task, we feel overwhelmed, we say, “This is going to be difficult for me to do.” I was coaching someone who was in sales, and this was back in the day, I’m dating myself. He would actually open up the phone book and call people, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, cold call is not dead, Dave.”

Dave Crenshaw
I’ve got a mentor who still does it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Blunt’s in my ear right now.

Dave Crenshaw
So, he would say, “It’s really hard for me to start making cold calls.” And I would say, “Well, what’s the first minute? What’s the first action that you need to take?” And he’d say, “Well, I need to identify who I’m going to call.” I said, “No, no, no. You’re thinking five, 10 minutes in. What’s the first minute? What’s the first action?”

And he said, “I just need to open up the phone book.” And I said, “Okay. In your calendar, schedule that. Block out how much time you think you’re going to have to take, whether that’s an hour or two hours or whatever. Block it out. But in your calendar, write the phrase, ‘Open up the phone book.’” And the moment he did that, he was like, “Oh, I can do that. That’s easy.” And then he immediately was able to flow right into starting to make the calls.

And so, a big part of my training, and my processing, in my course, “Time Management Fundamentals” and elsewhere, I tell people to schedule the first action, the first minute of activity. And that’s a way to just jump over all that emotional baggage that we have and just trick yourself into starting to be productive.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, literally, on the calendar, we see, “Open up the phone book,” or whatever it is. Or, “Sit at desk,” in terms of, like, the first minute, the first action. And I think that’s great, even if you have not scheduled it or you’re in the midst of a thing, and it’s like, “Oh, I should do this task, but, oh, I don’t want to. It’s so complicated. There are all these different stakeholders, and then I don’t want to step on any toes, that I’m probably going to offend someone. And who needs to be included?”

So, you got all the stuff that pops up showing why this is difficult or unpleasant. And then I think it really helps, for me, if I think about the first minute, or like the tiniest step, it’s, I’m like coaxing myself like a child.

It’s like, “Okay, Pete, you know what? We don’t have to finish all those things. No, no, no. All we’re doing, we’re going to read that email. We’re just going to read every word of that email. And then we’ll just pause there. That’s all that’s happening.” And then if that feels too hard, it’s like, “I’m going to open that email. We’re just going to open it,” and then it’ll be on the screen, and then you can do what you want from there.”

And so, I am like coaxing and coaching myself into the tiniest step. If one minute’s too hard, maybe the first four seconds.

Dave Crenshaw
And there’s an interesting thing about emotion. Procrastination is driven largely by the emotion that we feel. Let’s say that there’s a big goal that you want to accomplish. Let’s run through the different time periods and the emotion that you feel, the emotion you feel about it.

So, let’s say that I’m going to create this goal that I’m going to get promoted. When I think about the goal, what’s the emotion that I feel? I feel good. It feels great. When I start doing the work, what’s the emotion that I feel? Usually, I feel pretty good once I’m in the motion of doing it. And then when I accomplish the goal, how do I feel? I feel really good when I did that.

So, emotion is good when you think about it. Emotion is good when you do it. Emotion is good when you complete it. Where is emotion not good? Where does the emotion feel the worst? Just before we start the work, right? So, we have to trick our brain to jump over that emotion, to just ignore it and start the process.

And that’s what the first minute does. It just helps us remove emotion from the equation so the brain can’t bog us down. And then once we start working, we start feeling good again.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, Dave, I’m seeing in my mind’s eye sort of a graph or infographic or picture. Maybe you’ve made one and I’ve seen it in one of your books or courses, I’m not sure.

Dave Crenshaw
I haven’t, but I should. That sounds good. I’ll make a note of that.

Pete Mockaitis
On the X axis, it’s like we’ve got time, and the Y axis we’ve got feel good. And then we can sort of see, like, at the start, or stop watching Netflix and begin doing the thing is our lowest, most unpleasant time. But then there are several maybe milestones of feel good in terms of, it’s like, “Okay, I’m in the groove,” “Okay, I’m making some progress,” “Okay, I’ve got an insight,” or, “Okay, I’m looking back and feeling kind of proud about what I’ve accomplished over this period of time.”

So, it’s like there are numerous phases or eras over the course of this thing. And yet, our brains can vary adeptly, zero in on a short sliver of a minute or two or three that is most unpleasant. And that’s kind of a distortion in and of itself. That is not an accurate representation of the overall emotional pleasant or unpleasantness of the whole arc of the thing.

Dave Crenshaw
And let’s tie just a little bit of science into this. Our brains are hardwired to resist change. That’s an evolutionary advantage. That’s a good thing because it allows us to take things that normally would take a lot of work and make them easy. For example, brushing your teeth. I don’t have to think, anymore, about how I’m going to brush my teeth, and that’s because the brain has created a pattern that says, “This is how it’s done.”

And so, because my brain doesn’t like change, it also makes it easy to continually do the things that it should do. The problem is whenever we try to do something new, our brains go, “What are you doing? You’re messing up the system. I didn’t exercise at 6:00 a.m. in the past. Why are you making me do it now?”

And so, that first minute of activity can play an element in forming new positive habits.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. So, by thoughtfully, conscientiously designing, selecting, choosing what we’re doing with that first minute is very powerful in terms of trajectory. It sends us down and the habits and patterns and grooves that get formed.

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah. And we can trick ourselves into creating new habits, new patterns, just by doing that first minute over and over. And you do that repeatedly for a month, and pretty soon what used to be something your brain resists is now something that your brain embraces and just pushes the momentum to it.

So, you can use that that gift both directions. You can use it to prevent yourself from doing what should be done or you can use it to create a new habit, and then your brain locks in and it becomes easier in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really solid. And thinking, linking it back to the suicidal thoughts, I deliberately chose a replacement in terms of, if I was feeling super tired, stressed, overwhelmed, just, “Aargh,” I might have the thought like, “Ugh, I want to die.” And so, it was like, I’ve said, “Well, no, no, no. More accurately, what I want is rest.”

So, that’s the new thought. The “I want to die” thought, I am choosing to replace with, “I want rest.” And it is more true and accurate. And it creates a much better internal vibe for me, you know? It’s like, “Okay, well, let’s make a plan to figure out how to get some rest in the near future.”

Dave Crenshaw
It’s interesting. I hadn’t planned on bringing this up, Pete, but I think there’s another principle that I teach that relates here. I have a book called “The Power of Having Fun.”

And there’s a principle that I teach in that called head-heart-mouth. And head-heart-mouth is designed to program your brain. Because a lot of people now, if you say, “What do you like to do for fun?” and, first, they’re going to have a hard time with it, but maybe they do something that’s a break, that’s relaxing, but they don’t feel it. They don’t take it in. And, boy, I can relate to that as dealing with depression, right? I’m doing something that’s supposed to be fun and I’m feeling miserable.

So, head-heart- mouth says, “Do something and then…” head, “…think intellectually, ‘This is a good thing.’” “It was good for me to do that work.” Intellectually, I say in my head. You don’t have to feel it, right? You just say it.

Heart means, “Why was this good?” You ask an emotional question, “Why should I feel good about this? Why would this feel like a good thing?” Well, it’s good to make progress. It’s good to move forward. And I feel like I’m a productive person or I feel like I am adding value to the world. There a lot of reasons why.

Mouth is expressing it in some way. So, you might say, “Hey, I did some work today, it was really hard and I did it anyway.” Or, you might write down in a journal, “I did this thing and it was rewarding to do that.” So, you just get it out of your head. And the more you practice head-heart-mouth with the things that are difficult, the more you start to retrain your brain to feel the positive emotions that are occurring. And then you start to recognize them.

So, whether it’s doing work, you start to feel that work is more rewarding. If it’s having fun, you start to feel that “Slay the Spire” is more gratifying and it’s giving you positive impacts in your life. Whatever it is, spending time with family, you can use that head-heart-mouth to reinforce the power of that first action that you took in the first minute.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And this reminds me of the practice of savoring, which is so powerful and yet so easy to not do. So, the head-heart-mouth approach, I like it just makes it explicit in terms of “What are we doing here?” with regard to the savoring as opposed to, “I guess this is cool.”

Dave Crenshaw
It systemizes it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so easy to just skate right past it, and yet when you systematically have these three pre-planned moves, it just locks it in.

Dave Crenshaw
It’s easy to skate over these things when we are constantly doing multiple things at the same time, when we are media multitasking, when we are not paying attention to the people around us, we start to just create this surface-level skimming of every experience in our life, and I’ve tried to make an effort to not media-multitask anymore, where I’m using my phone and I’m watching a show at the same time.

And I’ve been like, “Okay, I’m not going to do this.” And it’s interesting, like, all of a sudden, these shows that I was watching to take a break started to become more rewarding. And I started to feel happier just simply by not playing “Gems of War” while I’m watching “Severance.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, it’s so funny, Dave, when you said “Severance,” because I love this show so much. I was, like, “Sacrilege! Media-multitasking during ‘Severance.’” Part of me is like, I guess my philosophy or current practice is, “I mean, if the show is, you know, whatever, you know, some 10-year-old sitcom that just has some laughs here and there, you know, no big deal. But if it’s a work of high art, oh, it must be savored.” And you’re saying, “No, don’t media-multitask on anything.”

Dave Crenshaw
Yet, that’s not just about shows, it’s about everything that’s happening around us, the people around us. Even the work that we’re doing, the meetings that we attend, everything starts to become just a little more meaningful and we start to feel more connected when we choose not to multitask.

Where we’re trying to do two attention-requiring tasks at the same time, things take longer, we make more mistakes, we increase our stress, and we damage relationships.

And, you know, I’ve always talked about in terms of those four things, but having this conversation, Pete, I think there’s a fifth cost. And the fifth cost is the impact on our mental health. We damage our mental health and we train our brains to skim through life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so let’s zoom right back into the moment of, “All right. I got to do a thing and I don’t want to.” Any other pro tips for us in that moment?

Dave Crenshaw
I think the other thing that you want to consider, we’ve talked about the negative emotions that stop us from doing things, but there’s also a positive emotion or a positive mindset that keeps us from doing it, and that’s imagination. So, a lot of people who listen to your show, Pete, they’re highly intelligent, they’re imaginative, they’ve learned how to set goals probably for many of the guests that you have.

And so, we set these goals, we create these resolutions, right, every year, and we say, “I’m going to do it.” And again, the emotion is fantastic because we see this big picture of how my life’s going to get better. The problem is, along with that imagination, we’re also seeing all of the work that needs to be done to get that.

So, I think what I would weave into this is what I teach about goal-setting and achievement, which is just keep splitting the thing in half until it gets as small as possible. So, if I say, you know, I could use any example, let’s say, “I’m going to write a book in a year.” So, then the question is, “Where do I need to be six months from now? Well, six months, I should probably complete my first draft.”

“Where do I need to be three months from now? Well, maybe I should have completed the first chapter. Where do I need to be one and a half months from now? Well, maybe I have a table of contents,” and I just keep splitting it down and down and down and down, until I’m down to “What do I need to do today? What do I need to do in this next minute, in this next second?”

And we take these big goals that we want to accomplish and we break it down into just turning on the computer and looking at the first page.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s super. And so, then when you’re feeling the overwhelm, that’s a great thought, “Well, how could I cut that in half?” And until it’s halved enough times that it’s easy.

Dave Crenshaw
Eventually, you’re going to get to a place where it’s just so darn easy, that’s “Why won’t you do it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Dave Crenshaw
And we can do it for the next day, “What do I need to do tomorrow? What do I need to do by the end of the week? And then what’s the one minute that’s going to move me closer to that thing this week?” You know, it’s interesting, this is kind of related to the concept. I did a podcast, I’ve wrapped it up now, and I also have a course on LinkedIn Learning called “Success Stories with Dave Crenshaw.” And I interviewed a really, really interesting character.

Are you familiar with the name Ed Greenwood?

Pete Mockaitis
I think so.

Dave Crenshaw
Many people aren’t but they probably have seen his work. Ed is the creator of “The Forgotten Realms” for “Dungeons and Dragons.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Dave Crenshaw
So, all of the characters that you see, the world that you see, all of that was created by Ed. And he was talking about his writing process. And I know that most people here aren’t writers, but you can apply this principle to what you do. He said that he would not finish at the end of a chapter. He would finish with, like, the first paragraph of the next chapter.

So, what happened was, when he would sit down to write the next day, he already had some words on the pages. And I think that’s a great thing to do is sometimes we look for those natural break points, which we should, but then at the end of it say, “What do we need to do to just push this 1% further, just a little bit more so that tomorrow when I pick it up, I can look at it and go, ‘Oh, this is exactly, I know where I’m supposed to be’?”

I thought that was a great principle that I had never heard before, but I think we can do that in a variety of different ways with our work and the projects that we’re approaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I like that it’s almost like when you have an open loop in your brain, like unfinished business, then there’s a push to want to close it, to get that kind of wrapped up and into a good stopping point. But to intentionally flip that on its head, it’s like, “Let me go to a terrible stopping point because that is an outstanding starting point.”

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah, it’s going to make that first minute a lot easier. It’s just sort of an extra little tool in the belt to make that simpler the next time you come.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And you can apply that to all sorts of things in terms of if there’s a project, I am going to open up all of the windows associated with doing that task. And so, that’s just there waiting for me when I return to the office the next day. Or, I would lay out all of the physical items necessary to complete a thing. And then, if like the phone book is open, and a sticky note with an arrow is affixed to the name, or the CRM, as the case may be in 2025.

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah. And the other thing that’s really interesting, too, is I’ve started using AI that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Go on.

Dave Crenshaw
So, maybe I have to work on a project and I’ve got all of these random thoughts in my head. What I can do is just dump them into ChatGPT. That’s what I use, and we have like a team thing. And the great thing about that is when you own a corporate plan, it protects it, right, that keeps it from going out there. So, we can put everything in there.

And I’ll have all these ideas, these random ideas, and they’re just not quite cohesive. And I just dump it in, and I say, “Can you put this into a logical order,” right? I’m not asking it to do the work for me. I’m asking it to order my thoughts for me and give me a starting point. And then I see the order and I go, “That is exactly what I was trying to do with all that chaos that was in my head.”

And now I can take that outline, or whatever it is, and I can start to order. It can’t replace my creativity, but, boy, it can make it really, really easy to give me that starting point so that I can get to work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And we’ve had Jeremy Utley on the show talking about AI stuff. And I think that what you’re doing is dead on in terms of thinking about it as a collaborator that’s a cool way to collaborate there.

Dave Crenshaw

And it’s a cool way to beat procrastination, which is the topic, right?

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

Dave Crenshaw
“Every time you devote time to practice, you haven’t lost. You’re always a winner.” And that is from Bob Ross.

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

Dave Crenshaw
Well, certainly, lots of work by David Strayer of the University of Utah about multitasking. I cite that a lot in my books, and the importance of focusing on one thing at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Dave Crenshaw
I like “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide” by John Cleese. It’s a great little book that teaches you how to come up with new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Dave Crenshaw
Everybody asks me, “Dave, what’s the best app to use?” And the best app to use for productivity is your calendar. I just love the calendar. It’s so simple and it’s probably underused by most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us, what’s something people are not doing with their calendar that they ought to?

Dave Crenshaw
Two things. One, they’re not scheduling all the things that are happening in their life. And so, that’s like spending time on a credit card. You don’t really know if you have the ability to do the things that you’re committing to. So, when you use your calendar for everything, it shows it. But that also has to be accompanied with one that seems contradictory, but it’s important, which is scheduling buffer time. Scheduling lots of time for nothing so that you have room to breathe for all of the interruptions in between.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dave Crenshaw
I used to not do very well with exercise. I started to exercise very simply, just a little bit more each time, which kind of goes back to the thing. I just started shooting baskets, and then I started to shoot jump shot baskets, and then I started to use the treadmill, and I just added a little bit more and more over time, and now it’s pretty consistent. And I’m probably in the best shape of my life and it makes a big impact on everything.

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

Dave Crenshaw
And this could be a quote as well from one of my mentors, David Winford, “Do what you said you would do by the time you said you would do it.” That is the most important rule of success, and most people, if they just did that one thing, they’d be more successful than 90% of the people around them.

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

Dave Crenshaw
I love connecting with people on LinkedIn, Dave Crenshaw, connect with me there. I put out updates all the time, and that’ll also, I share videos from all of my LinkedIn Learning courses as well.

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

Dave Crenshaw
Just put into practice what we talked about. Think about something that’s difficult for you to do, something that’s daunting, maybe something that you’ve been putting off, and just say, “What’s that first minute?” and immediately put this into practice. That way you move from just hearing this conversation to making it a part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dave, thank you.

Dave Crenshaw
Thank you, Pete.

Nov 14
0

1011: How to Defeat Overwhelm and Get SO MUCH Done in 15 Minutes with Sam Bennett

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Sam Bennett shows you how to transform the way you work through the magic of the 15 minute method.

You’ll Learn

  1. The impressive amount you can get done in 15 minutes
  2. How to deal with the overwhelm 
  3. Why it’s worth “doing it grumpy”

About Sam 

Sam Bennett is the author of Get It Done, Start Right Where You Are, and most recently, The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. A writer, speaker, actor, and creativity/productivity specialist, she is the founder of TheRealSamBennett.com, a company committed to helping overwhelmed creatives and frustrated overachievers get unstuck.

Sam is also a popular course instructor on LinkedIn Learning with over a million class participants worldwide. She lives in Connecticut, and you will find her online at www.TheRealSamBennett.com and 15MinuteMethod.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Sam Bennett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sam, welcome.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. Hi, everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting. We’re talking about The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. And could you tell us a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made while researching this stuff? You’ve been in the game for a while and you’ve settled in on 15 minutes.

Sam Bennett
I have. I have, yes. So, let’s talk about how you can change your life in 15 minutes a day. Because, here’s the thing, people are always going to be like, “Sam, is it really possible to change your life in 15 minutes a day?” I’m like, “You already are. You’re already living your life in 15-minute increments. You may not be describing it that way, but, you know, that’s how time works, as far as we know.”

And the thing that I’ve noticed, over and over again, is how much a person can get done in 15 minutes. Everyone is always shocked, “Oh, my God, I got so much done.” And how much you can get done in 15 minutes every day, for a week, for a month, for a year, for six years, for 60 years, and it sort of makes logical sense, like, “Oh, yes, if I practiced my ukulele every day for 15 minutes, you know, in not very long of a time, I would be a better ukulele player.” Or, “If I did my prayer and meditation practice every day for 15 minutes.”

Every medical and health professional in the world will tell you, if you move your body in any way, shape, or form every day for 15 minutes, you’re good, you know. And even things that people think like, “Oh, you know, I want to write a book. I can’t do that in 15 minutes.” Well, if you sit down and write every day for 15 minutes, you can get out about 250 words. And so, in about 200 days, that’s 50,000 words, that’s a book. So where were you 200 days ago, and would you like a book right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, understood. Could you share with us any particularly inspiring tales of folks who have taken this particular prescription and just really ran with it and seen cool things?

Sam Bennett
So many. I got an email from a guy who was, funny, he said he got the book on Audible, and he said he’s from Philadelphia so he’s a natural-born hater, and he got a certain amount of ways through the book and decided, “Oh, no, this isn’t for me. This isn’t for me,” and he turned it off. But then something kind of kept tapping him on the shoulder and so he went back to it and he started to listen again.

And by the time he wrote me, he said he had listened three full times all the way through, and he had started doing some 15-minute tasks that were sort of changing things for him. But the biggest change is that he was able to quit his job that he has been trying to quit for nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. So, what are the tasks that enable one to quit a job much more rapidly than, I guess, his default approach? And how do you put those into 15-minute increments? That’s intriguing.

Sam Bennett
I think a lot of it has to do with keeping your promises to yourself. We build esteem and respect with other people by keeping our promises to them. We build self-esteem and self-respect by keeping our promises to ourselves, but sometimes we get caught in the loop of not keeping our promises, “Oh, I’m definitely going to go to the gym today. I’m definitely going to give them my two weeks’ notice. I’m definitely going to tell my spouse this isn’t working,” and then we don’t, because it’s scary or it’s hard or it’s not the right time or whatever.

I don’t have any judgment here about how fast things are or are not supposed to happen. I think we’re not always in charge of that. But I think, for him, there was something about spending every single day, 15 minutes a day, on something that mattered to him, right? So, this is one way to approach the 15-minute method, is pick something that lights you up, that brings you joy, that you’ve always been naturally interested in, that you’ve always good at, maybe something you’d love to do as a kid or you used to do, you know, before the kids, and reincorporate that into your life.

Because even though, yeah, you may not join the Bolshoi Ballet anytime soon, 15 minutes of ballet can make you feel like a ballerina again, and that can carry over into your life, right? So, I think that was a lot of it, and learning that he could trust himself to be an entrepreneur, to take the reins of his own life. Because, okay, here’s the thing, it was a family business. So, the person he was trying to quit was his dad, which, you know, makes it a little loaded.

And he said, yeah, he said he had felt just so much calmer and clearer about his life because he was making the steady incremental progress. And they were negotiating their summer vacations, and the guy said, “Yeah, oh, and after August 15th, I won’t be back.” And his dad said, “Okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right then.

Sam Bennett
Like, total non-deal. It was so exciting. I was really pleased for him. But sometimes it’s a lot more, a lot less dramatic. I had a client who had moved to North Carolina to take care of her ailing mother. Her mother eventually died, and now she’s living in this house with all of her mother’s stuff. Again, giant, overwhelming, like, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this in 15 minutes a day.” It’s like, “Well, but you got to start somewhere.”

So, she starts with her mother’s office, and she starts sorting her mom’s papers for 15 minutes a day. Okay, great. Making some progress there. And then she figures out that her mother’s record player is in there and all her old albums, and music was something they really shared a love for. So, she started putting on albums and playing an album. So, that’s like 22 minutes is like half a side of an album. Children, albums are how we used to listen to music.

And then she found a box of her mom’s old stationery, you know, that beautiful, heavy cotton linen stationery that they just don’t even make anymore. So, she started writing notes to people because she’d moved away to North Carolina. And then she had all these notes, and so then she had to walk to the mailbox every day, and she started to get to know the neighbors and the dogs and the mail carriers.

And, like, all of a sudden, this little 15-minute task of “I need to clear out my mom’s office” starts turning into “Oh, I’m rekindling my love of music. Oh, and I’m reconnecting with my friends. Oh, and I’m connecting for the first time with this new neighborhood.” Like, you start to follow the sparkly breadcrumbs and it’s amazing where it leads.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, I’m curious, why 15 minutes?

Sam Bennett
Because that’s about as much time as anybody’s got. I mean, you read the article, it’s like, “You should spend five hours a week in the gym.” I’m like, “Really? What five hours would that be? Could you please point that out to me, those five hours, because I don’t see it?” But 15 minutes, pretty much everybody’s got 15 minutes. I don’t care how busy or overcooked you are. You’ve got 15 minutes. And that whole feeling of like, “Oh, no, my work needs me, my kids need me.” Not for 15 minutes, they don’t, and, in fact, it’s kind of a good exercise for all of you to have to let people leave you alone for 15 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose if I were to get all nerdy and optimize-y about it, I might say, “Well, why 15 and not 12 or 18?”

Sam Bennett
Well, and that’s the whole thing, right? Make your own adventure, right? If 15 minutes doesn’t work for you, but 12 does, fantastic! Do 12. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but 7 does, great! Do 7. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but an hour and a half does, terrific! I don’t care. I’m not your mom. But the idea is to start doing something, to be taking baby steps every day.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay, so there’s no precise super neuroscience magic behind the 15 number. But I would, if I may, give you a little more of an extra credit on it. I think that 15 is, approximately 15, has some magic to it, in that it’s big enough to actually achieve a thing and go, “Okay, cool. I bought a thing. I found a thing that solves this problem I’ve been dealing with for years by clicking around Amazon, reading their reviews, looking at four options, and now I bought the thing, and so, okay, done.”

Sam Bennett
Done. Off the list.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s long enough to do something meaningful, but it’s short enough to not spark resistance, like, “An hour? Oh, I already don’t want to do that. This is going to be miserable.”

Sam Bennett
Exactly. Exactly. And so, I offer a thing for sale on my website called The Daily Practicum, and every weekday for 15 minutes at 12 noon Eastern, we hop on the Zoom, wave hello, start the timer for 15 minutes, 15 minutes later, it goes off. And everybody looks back up at me, they turn their cameras back on, with, I swear, this post-orgasmic glow about them. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh! I did it! I did it! I made that phone call! I’ve been putting off that phone call for six weeks and I made that phone call!” Amazing.

“Oh my gosh! I sent an email to my friend. She just lost her husband and I didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to say something, so I just did it. I just wrote it, and I sent it, and now it’s done.” Or, “I sat out in the garden with the sun on my face for 15 minutes.” Everybody’s always astonished at how much they can accomplish, how great it feels to accomplish something, something tangible, something that’s meaningful to you, to be taking those baby steps toward a bigger project.

And the little secret with The Daily Practicum, especially for our neuro-spicy friends and our extrovert friends, being in a group, knowing that there’s other people also working at that same time, we call it parallel play or body doubling, is really helpful. It’s sort of a form of positive peer pressure. It works. It just works.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Well, we had Taylor Jacobson, who founded Focusmate, on the show, and that is a tool that likewise helps you say, “Okay, now I’m meeting a person and we’re doing a thing even though you’re remote.” That accountability magic is powerful. Well, how many people show up at noon for this thing?

Sam Bennett
You know, it depends. There were some people who were there every single day. There were some people who were sometimes there and sometimes not. There were some people who are never there, but they keep the subscription going because it’s worth it to have it on their calendar every day because just they can’t do it at that time, but the fact that it’s on their calendar makes them remember to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And it sounds like one theme there is something that we’ve, historically, avoided, resisted, put off, ignored, deferred. There seems to be some magic there in particular. Like, there are some extra goodies that you receive in terms of reward or benefit internally, psychologically, when that’s the case.

Sam Bennett
Definitely. Definitely. And I really, again, in the same way that I’m not particularly attached to 15 minutes, specifically, I’m not at all attached to what you spend it doing. And some people come to me and say, like, “I have no idea, Sam. I don’t even know where I would start. I don’t even know what I would spend my 15 minutes on.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, great. Maybe you spend your first 15 minutes making a list of 15-minutes-es, what might interest you, what’s sort of tapping on your shoulder, what seems kind of fun.”

You could also spend 15 minutes staring at a blank piece of paper, because 15 minutes of enforced boredom never hurt a person. And when was the last time you looked at a piece of paper for 15 minutes without reaching for your phone?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, you’re giving a lot of cool ideas here. In fact, in your book, you got a chapter with 52 suggestions. I’m curious, are there a couple within that listing that a lot of people have grabbed, and said, “Wow, this is so transformational, Sam. Thank you”?

Sam Bennett
I think the things that I see the biggest “wow” on is taking a walk every day for 15 minutes, even just, you know, once around the building. Connecting with people, taking 15 minutes to look up an old colleague or an old school friend or somebody you haven’t talked to in a while, and just pinging them in whatever way you like to ping people. I mean like, “Hey, you know, I just thought about you and how great you are and I’d love to catch up.”

Because, you know, Pete, relationships are everything. The quality of your relationships is the quality of your life. And those little just catching-up phone calls can lead to amazing things. So, I think those are probably the two biggest wows. But I also like, yeah, anything that you just feel like is too big, that you’ve just been putting off because it’s too overwhelming. The minute you start thinking about it, you get completely overcooked.

And this happens with highly creative people, right? We get an idea and, all of a sudden, we see it in full color, sequels, theme parks, international grassroots movement, you know, it’s all there, and then we immediately go, “Oh, my gosh, how could I even…where do I even start with that idea?” So, I’ve been giving the example of if you have to clean out your garage, which obviously everybody’s going to go like, “Sam, I can’t do that in 15 minutes, I need like two weekends.”

Okay, first of all, again, where are those two weekends? And if you did have two weekends, I seriously doubt you’d want to spend them cleaning out the garage. But let’s say the garage has really been weighing on you. It’s upsetting. It’s causing some stress family, like, “Let’s take care of the garage.” So, I would say, for the first 15 minutes, just make yourself a mug of something.

I’ve got my little Art Before Housework mug here, and just go out and, like, contemplate the garage. Be with the garage. See what the garage has to say to you. Don’t do anything. Just take it in. And it may be that around minute 11, you go, “Wait a minute, those seven boxes belong to my brother Jeffrey. Jeffrey, come get your boxes!” And now you’ve cleaned out a whole corner of the garage and you don’t have to do anything.

And maybe the next day, you go out again with a mug of something and look in one of those Rubbermaid tubs, and you go, “Oh, that’s got holiday stuff in it.” You make a little sign with your Sharpie that says “Holiday” and put it towards the back because you only need that stuff once a year. And maybe the third day, you take that broken bicycle and you roll it out to the sidewalk with a sign that says “Free broken bicycle.” And in this way and fashion, a person could, in fact, clean out their entire garage in 15 minutes a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it. And it’s funny, as I visualize it, I’m thinking, “Uh, Sam, you forgot the step dust out the cobwebs so it doesn’t feel gross walking around there.”

Sam Bennett
That would be another excellent 15-minute task, but cobwebs are hard to get rid of. You could get pretty far with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, totally, you could. I got to fix cobweb duster, too. It feels good.

Sam Bennett
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s actually more effective than just, whatever, a paper towel. So, yeah, there’s little extra bonus tips sprinkled throughout it here, Sam.

Sam Bennett
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And, contemplate, I love it. That’s a valid, useful thing to do because it’ll spark all sorts of ideas and potential strategy, and maybe saves you from getting in too deep in a silly way when you can just call someone else and have them do part of it for you.

Sam Bennett
Also a valid strategy. That’s another great way to spend 15 minutes. Call the nice people who will come and do it for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so I’d love it if you could zoom out a little bit in terms of, psychologically, what’s going on here. You’ve got some interesting insights in terms of, you say overwhelm is an inside problem and not an outside problem. Not so much like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s too much stuff!” but something inside of us. Explain.

Sam Bennett
Yeah, it’s an inside job. We feel like it’s happening because, “Oh, my gosh, everything’s coming at me with such an equal level of intensity, and I don’t know where to start and I don’t know where to begin, and I just feel overcooked.” But that’s not actually true because, when we look at people who work in chronically overwhelming circumstances, the person who is working the front desk at the emergency room, first responders.

I did a television interview on a news channel with a woman who said, “Oh, like when we’re covering breaking news, or when something tragic has happened and we’re reporting right in the moment.” I’m like, “Right. Those are circumstances that many people would find overwhelming, but you are not overwhelmed. You are doing your job, right?” The reporter is not overwhelmed. The person at the ER is not overwhelmed. The first responder is not overwhelmed. They’re running into a burning building, but they are not overwhelmed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, Sam, that’s actually eye-opening right there. Like, is that really true? Have we talked to the people? I’ve got a buddy who’s firefighter. I should ask him.

Sam Bennett
You should ask him. I’m sure there are sometimes things that are freaking, but it’s their job. They’re trained for it. I spent most of my adult life working as an actor, and especially as an improviser. I was with the Second City in Chicago and played with a lot of those alumni out in LA. And even just getting up on stage with no script and no agenda and four chairs would, to many people, be overwhelming. We’re going to improvise for two hours off of one suggestion or make a play up as we go along. But that wasn’t overwhelming to me, that was my job. It was fun. It’s fun for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s funny, now that you mention it, as I’m reflecting on times that I or loved ones have been in the emergency room, the folks around me seemed so chill and calm and, like, they’re taking their time, it almost annoyed me, like, “Can’t you see this is very serious and urgent?”

Sam Bennett
That’s right. I also think about the people who work in hospitality or the people at the airlines. Every single time I go to an airport, you’re in line for the security check, and there’s always people who are like, “I mean, we’ve got to catch a plane.” I’m like, “Kitten, everyone in this building has to catch a plane. That’s why we’re here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so noted. So, then, indeed, there are folks who are in a situation we might find overwhelming who, yet, don’t feel overwhelmed. What is their secret? Or how can we get some of that inside of us?

Sam Bennett
So, I think some of it is just that, like I said, they’re doing the thing. They’re dealing with what’s right in front of them, they’re trained, they’re prepared. Also, I think they’re engaged. They’re engaged in what they’re doing. When you’re overwhelmed, you’re sort of outside of things and thinking about things as a whole.

And sometimes, I think, we say we’re overwhelmed when we’re actually underwhelmed. Like, I’ve done that where I’ve written out a to-do list, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m exhausted before I even start. Like, I don’t want to do any of this.” That’s not overwhelm, that’s underwhelm. That’s, like, “This is a lot of stuff that really should be delegated out to somebody else. Or, does it even need to be done at all, really?”

And so, this is part of the reason why I want people spending 15 minutes a day on the stuff that lights them up, that engages them. And I know I can hear the people, I can hear you all out there, saying like, “Yes, but, Sam, that would be selfish. That would be selfish of me to spend 15 minutes on my own thing.” And I want to say, again, you’ve got it backwards because what’s actually selfish, what’s actually an imposition on us, is when you are walking around exhausted and stressed out and with no sense of humor, and the rest of us have to deal with you like that. That is selfish.

You show up rested, prayed, meditated, walked, creatively fulfilled, whatever it is, we love that version of you. You’re calmer. You’re less reactive. You’re a better listener. Like, please, please claim that 15 minutes for yourself, and do the thing that you know keeps you a little bit lit up inside. And, Pete, I have a revolution I want to start.

All right. Stay with me, everybody. I have had every job in the world. I’ve delivered flowers, I was a barista, I was a whitewater river guide, I produced radio shows. Like, you name it, I did it. But I’ve never had a job in corporate America. So, I always have this feeling of like, “What are they doing in there? I don’t understand.”

But I keep reading the statistic that 77% of employees are disengaged. Seventy-seven percent? That’s a lot. I mean, if somebody took away 77% of your money, you would notice. If you lost 77% of your friends, you would be bummed, right? And it seems to me that this must be a very expensive problem for businesses to have three-quarters of their people walking around not giving a flying hooey about what’s going on.

So, here’s my thought, here’s my revolution. I want businesses to start saying, “Okay, everybody, we recognize that you are human beings, and we want to give you 15 minutes a day just for you. So, every day between 9:00 and 9:15, or between 4:15 and 4:30, that’s your time. You don’t check your email. Don’t make your dentist appointments. You spend that time on something that matters to you. If it has to do with work, fine, but it doesn’t have to. Please do you.”

And, certainly, businesses have tried this kind of thing before. But here’s what I think will work. So, now, we go into our meeting, we have this habit of 15 minutes a day where everybody does their little thing, and I can sort of imagine the water cooler talk of like, “What did you do?” “Oh, I wrote crappy poetry.” “I love crappy poetry. I was writing crappy poetry last month. It’s cool.”

But we go into the meeting and, I say, “Oh, hi, I’m Sam from Events. And today, I spent my 15 minutes working on a needlepoint project for my godchild that I started when she was born, and now she’s about to graduate from high school, so I’m really excited to get it done.” Now, there are studies that show that if you let people say something about themselves as people at the beginning of a meeting, they will be more innovative and more productive in the meeting because you have reminded them of the fullness of themselves.

They’re not just Sam from Events and Pete from Sales. They’re like, “Oh, I’m Sam from Events and I do needlepoint, and that was taught to me by my grandmother and, and, and.” So, now I’m bringing more of me to the table. And then, down the table, there’s Debbie, “I’ve never liked Debbie. We don’t get along.” But then Debbie says, “Oh, yeah, I’m Debbie from Accounts, and I spent my 15 minutes today doing cross-stitch.” “Doing what? Well, now, we’re needlework buddies. We can talk embroidery floss. And no wonder she gets on my nerves because she’s a counted cross-stitch person. No wonder she’s in accounts, like that’s detail work.”

And do you know what we call that? Engagement. People being engaged with each other personally, and people will do way more for each other than they’re going to do for any job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That sounds lovely. I mean, if you say some organizations have done this, can you share some of these cases?

Sam Bennett
Google, quite famously, had a thing where you could devote, I think, a fifth of your time. I think one day a week you could spend on a project sort of your choosing. I think the idea was that it was sort of help humanity or help Google or help, you know, it wasn’t so much on enriching yourself as it is enriching the world. There’s been a couple of other places that have tried.

But I think just treating people like grown-ups and just acknowledging, like, “We get it, you’re people with a life, and we want you to have a full and rich life, and we’re going to just give you 15 minutes a day to do something about that,” it seems to me to be very inexpensive way to say we care about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it a lot. I like to imagine that in terms of, “Yes, folks are talking about it and you…” especially if it’s sort of the same time across the whole organization for everybody, then we all know. Because some organizations, for example, they will have the week between Christmas and New Year’s is just off for absolutely everybody, or right around the 4th of July.

And people just rave about this because it’s like, “It’s not just my vacation. I know everybody’s gone. Nobody’s expecting anything from anyone and/or sending anything to anyone. If they do, they know they’re the ones who are not to expect anything.” So, I think that’s pretty cool. So, likewise, if you had that daily 15 minutes, that’s just kind of fun to imagine.

Sam Bennett
Well, exactly. Maybe if some people wanted to get together and do like 15 minutes of chair yoga every morning, or they wanted to take a little walk around the building or something, you could do things in groups. I mean, there’s all kinds of, people come up with amazing things that they can do. Get together a little rock and roll band, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you say this 15-minute approach defeats perfectionism. How does that work in practice?

Sam Bennett
So, perfectionism is a big word that sort of covers a multitude of destructive behaviors. So, I think one of the things with perfectionism is sort of breaking it apart a little bit, because it is made up of a lot of little parts, and to say, “Okay, which of these is really functional for me?” because there are some just faulty beliefs in there.

And sometimes I’ll hear from people, like, “Well, I just feel like if it can’t be perfect, why would I even bother to do it at all?” I’m like, “Okay, that’s an interesting perspective. Where did you learn that perspective? And is that really what you want to be teaching your children, if it can’t be perfect the first try, you shouldn’t do it at all? I doubt that’s what you want to model for your children. I think you probably want to teach your children to, like, “No, try it. Stick with it. See where it goes.” Right?

So, be a good parent to yourself now, and let that voice that says, “You better live up to this standard, young lady, or nothing good is going to happen for you.” There’s also just the overthinking. Some of us get a little addicted to planning out every last little thing inside of our minds but then never actually taking action.

I had a friend who, when he was a kid, he used to buy all the science books and he would study all the experiments until he really understood all of them but he never actually did any of them. He just worked it out inside of his head, and he was like, “Okay, good, I’m done.” So, that’s a worthwhile intellectual exercise, but would you like to bring something into the world? Like, would you like to try it?

I think it also works for kind of what you were saying before, “It’s only 15 minutes, and you’re going to do it again tomorrow anyway, and the next day. So, how perfect is it going to be in 15 minutes? And you’re going to have plenty of time to perfect it later, so it just sort of hopscotches right over all that pressure.”

And I think it also gives ideas a chance to flourish. I think a lot of times people psych themselves out initially by going, “Well, I have an idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I’m still thinking about whether or not it’s a good idea.” And I work with all kinds of people. Academy award winners, Emmy award winners, award-winning writers, famous people, not famous people, and I’m here to tell you, there’s no such thing as a good idea. There’s only ideas, and some of the ones that you think are terrible turn out to be fantastic. And some of the ones you think are fantastic turn out to be completely dull.

Like, you don’t know until you bring it to life, or start to take the steps to bring it to life. So, to get out of that pondering mode, and out of that inner judgment mode, of like, “Oh, it’s got to be good. It’s got to be a good idea.” No, it just has to be an idea. Like, just start, and then see where it takes you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now you have a number of fun phrases, and what you’ve just described reminds me of one of them. Can you unpack a couple of them for us? One is the alchemy of effort, and the second is grumpy magic.

Sam Bennett
So, the alchemy of effort is something I noticed as an artist, but I see it in real life, too. Not that art isn’t real life. But there’s a magical thing that happens when you have a little idea and you take some steps towards it, and then maybe you share it with the world. It sort of changes the minute it hits the air. And then you work on it and it changes, and then maybe someone sees it and it’s changed again because they’ve seen it and they’ve had a reaction to it. And now they are changed and it is changed and then you are changed by that feedback.

And we get this little sort of Mobius strip, this little infinity loop of you putting out energy and effort and ideas and other people responding to that, and that shaping and gaining momentum and influencing you and influencing the world. Like, it’s really exciting and fun, and it’s the joy of the creative process, it’s that communion, that sense of like, “Ooh, I did something and people got it. They heard me. They felt seen. They enjoyed it. They laughed. They sang along,” whatever it is.

Or they loved the equation. They loved the app. I mean, creativity is not just art. Everyone is creative. And I just think that that little cycle is so magical. And every time you stop yourself from sharing your gifts with the world, you’re stopping that alchemical magic from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the grumpy magic?

Sam Bennett
Grumpy magic is a little process that I put into the book. It’s a little thing that I teach but, really, what it is, is just a reminder to everyone that, you know, I work in personal development now, and no shade to my personal development brothers and sisters, but there can be a certain amount of oppressive optimism, and what we might refer to as “toxic positivity.”

And I just want to say, you can create magic in your life being very grumpy, and very tired, and very pessimistic, and not that interested. I notice that grumpy people have happy marriages. I notice that pessimistic people often make lots of money. It is not a prerequisite for you to be 100% spiritually aligned in order to get what you want. So, don’t wait to feel good. Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels like there’s some merch there, Sam, if you don’t already have it.

Sam Bennett
Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think that’s really good, and it’s nice and short, too, because “Do it grumpy,” it’s kind of hard for me to think about remember big, long things or complicated things. It’s like, “Ah, there’s this thing, but I don’t feel like doing it.” And so, I sort was able to have that conversation with myself, it’s like, “Okay. Well, in 15 minutes later, or 30 minutes later, you might still not feel like doing it, but then it’ll be behind you and that’s kind of cool. You’ll feel better having it behind you than you will stewing in the fact that you don’t want to do it for this period of time, even if you try to distract yourself with other more fun things.”

Sam Bennett
One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And don’t underestimate the positive effects of smugness. Like, when you do something hard or something you don’t want to do, but then you do it anyway, it’s a little bit like when you go to the gym in the morning and you just spend all day being like, “That’s right. Hair toss. Hair toss. I’m awesome. How are you?” You know?

Like, that feeling of a little bit of inner pride of like, “Yeah! I did that. I told myself I was going to do it, and I did it. I didn’t feel like it, but I did it.” Like, that’s good. That spills over into your life and has a really positive ripple effect. So, all that like, “Don’t be too proud of yourself. Don’t be too big for your britches.” No! Buy bigger britches, for sure. Be proud.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Sam, any other top do’s, don’ts, things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Sam Bennett
I just want everyone to remember that y’all are doing great. You’re doing great. People love you. You’re making a difference at work and in your community and in your family, and it’s okay to take the pressure off the gas pedal, maybe. And some of you are driving with your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time, sort of not really letting yourself succeed as much as you might want to, and I just want to say you’re doing amazing. And maybe just 15 minutes a day can help tweak you up to the next adventure.

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

Sam Bennett
My favorite quote is, “The cure for anything is salt water, sweat, tears, or the sea.” It’s from the Danish author Isak Dinesen.

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

Sam Bennett
I remember cutting out an article from a piece of paper, probably from a newspaper, probably 30 years ago, that was done by a wealth management company. And they found that, across the board, at all levels of wealth, two-thirds of the people felt like they would be better off if they just had twice as much. So, even the millionaires were like, “Uh, I’m not sure. I think if, really, if I had twice what I have right now, then I would be okay.”

And that little bit of information made me realize, “Oh, it’s not about the number. Feeling okay, feeling secure in your life, feeling like you have a good nest egg is not about what that actual dollar amount is. It’s a decision to feel okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And a favorite book?

Sam Bennett
You know, what’s bubbling up for me is the Little House on the Prairie books. I must have read those a thousand times as a girl, and I still think about them a remarkable amount. I think there’s something about that homesteader spirit that I kind of like.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Sam Bennett
Levenger Legal Pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the little discs?

Sam Bennett
Oh, no, I don’t do the disc ones. I do these here, I’ll show you one of them. They’re nice heavy pieces of paper and they’ve got room at the top to put a date and a subject title, and then there’s a little space along the side so you can make annotated notes. I can put little action items on the side. I do everything. I’m an analog girl, Pete. I like legal pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, doesn’t Levenger have a little magic to make it easy to take an individual sheet from that and to put it in elsewhere and organize and stuff?

Sam Bennett
They do. They have a system called Circa that is like that, those little things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Sam Bennett
My favorite habit is probably my 15 minutes a day. I do mine before I even roll over in bed. I do a little sort of breathing prayer meditation practice thing that I sort of have made up over the years. And, like I said, I do it before my eyes are even open. I think that liminal time right there between waking and sleeping is a really valuable time, a very fertile time, especially for highly sensitive people, highly creative people, busy people.

So, to stretch out that moment for myself and connect with my feeling of the divine, and my own body, and my own breath, it really makes a difference for me in my day. And when I don’t do it, I really notice it. And if I don’t do it for a couple days or a couple weeks, things really go off the rails. So, I don’t know how many more times I need to prove that to myself before I just do it every day. I’m pretty consistent, but even so, it’s not every day. But that’s the beauty of 15 minutes a day. Like, you didn’t do it today, you’ll do it tomorrow. It’s okay.

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

Sam Bennett
Yeah, one that I hear a lot is “Get a C.” Stop trying to get an A+ in everything. Just get a C. C is the grade that you get for showing up and doing the work. Not doing the work better than everybody else, not being in the front row with your hand raised, just show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work.

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

Sam Bennett
You can find me at TheRealSamBennett.com, and you can hop onto my email list there, which is where I kind of do everything is via email, but I am also on the socials. I am also on all the socials as The Real Sam Bennett. 

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

Sam Bennett
Yes. Start doing your 15 minutes, and then write me and tell me all about it, and we’ll be pen pals and best friends because I want to hear about your projects.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sam, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many delightful 15-minute increments.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. What a treat.

Oct 24
0

1005: How to Feel Energized Every Day with Dr. Michael Breus

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Michael Breus cuts through the noise and discusses the three most important wellness habits: sleeping, drinking, and breathing.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top habit that leads to better sleep 
  2. Just how much water your body needs 
  3. What many get wrong about breathing 

About Michael

Michael J. Breus, Ph.D.,is a double board-certified Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Sleep Specialist. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have taken and passed the Sleep Medicine Boards without going to Medical School. He is also the founder of sleepdoctor.com.

Dr. Breus is the author of four books with the newest book (2021) Energize! Go from dragging Ass to kicking it in 30 days, adds the concepts of Movement (not exercise), and Intermittent Fasting to his already famous Sleep Chronotypes. And it was recently named one of the top books of 2021 by The Today Show. In his 3rd book (2017) The Power of When, which is a groundbreaking biohacking book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your biological chronotype (early bird or night owl). Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise and much more based on over 200 research studies.

He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 400 interviews per year (Oprah, Dr. Oz, The Doctors, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and more). Dr. Breus has been in private practice for 23 years and recently relocated to and was named the Top Sleep Doctor of Los Angeles by Reader’s Digest.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Michael Breus Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

Michael Breus
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here eight years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. It’s been a while. You were one of the first and one of the longest episodes because I had so much I wanted to talk to you about sleep. So, thank you for bringing it.

Michael Breus
Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear, any really fascinating new discoveries that you’ve made in the world of wellness, energy, sleep, drinking, and breathing that you’re excited about to share right off the top?

Michael Breus
Well, you know, I’ve got a new book coming out and I’m pretty excited about it. I mean, let me tell you why I wrote the book because I think that’s really the most important part, is I just think wellness is too fricking complicated. Like, I was at the gym the other day and this woman, she kind of finished an exercise and then she was just, like, sitting there, like, you could tell she was visibly confused at what was the next thing she was supposed to do. And I feel like all of wellness has sort of started to turn into that.

Everybody’s asking me, “Should I buy a sauna? What green drink should I have?” And they’re not even looking at, “Are they getting enough sleep? Do you have enough water in your body? Do you know how to breathe correctly?” So, I started thinking about it after I read a book my friend Joe Polish wrote called Life Gives to the Giver, and he was talking about these skills that you gain over time, and that one skill, sometimes a particular skill will, once you have it, will kind of topple over and then maybe make some other skills a little bit easier.

They called them dominoes, so I was like, “Well, I wonder what the dominoes of wellness are?” What are the fundamentals? Like, what is the DNA of wellness? What are the two or three things that you just got to get right for everything else to make sense? And sleeping, hydrating, and breathing kind of made sense to me.

If you look at the world’s records, the longest a person has ever gone without sleep is about 11 and a half days. Started hallucinating. It was pretty, pretty messed up. It wasn’t pretty. Pretty much kind of in a corner, sort of shaking to the side. But you look at how somebody can last without water, which, by the way, I do not recommend to anyone, three days is about as far as you’re really going to get. And then when you look at breathing, how long are you going to last without breathing? Without assistance, I think that the record is something like 11 and a half minutes, 12 minutes underwater, something like that.

But I started to think about, like, “What are the fundamental things that our body can only live without for a very short period of time?” Believe it or not, we can go without food for, like, 30 days. We can go without exercise for a lifetime, I think. I think a lot of people have proven that one. You can go a long time without doing a lot of stuff.

And so, then I said to myself, “Okay, these three feel like it. Let’s dive into the literature and see what there is to see.” Obviously, I know the sleep literature pretty well, but this book is not a repeat of that. What I really decided to do more of was look at, “Okay, well, what are the five big mistakes? Like, what are the five things that people are just screwing up with their sleep?” If they just fixed one or two of them, I swear to you, life would be so much easier.

Then I started to really dive into hydration. And, to be fair, I was never a hydration guy until I started to become a runner and live in Arizona at the same time. So, I really had to know and understand that from a runner’s perspective, but also started to really wanted to learn about hydration from an overall perspective.

I’m 56 years old now, and a lot of my contemporaries are finding that hydration is a bit of a challenge, and so really understanding what are my hydration needs, and then breathing, and then you start to think about breathing, like, “All right, come on, Michael, like, how bad could I be breathing? I mean, I’m alive, right? Like, this really shouldn’t be that difficult.”

If you start to look at the Indian and the Ayurvedic culture and history, you start to learn that some of the yogis and some of the people way back in the day, they’ve been doing some pretty interesting breathing techniques for a very long period of time, and they get incredible results. There’s breathing that slows you down, makes you sleep, turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. There’s breathing that hypes you up and turns on your sympathetic nervous system, and we use these techniques today.

If you go from standstill to running across a field, trust me, you’re using some breathing techniques, hopefully, fairly efficiently and fairly quickly. So, I started to say, “All right, can I make it easy? Can I make it straightforward?” So, what I did was I said, “Look, I’m going to set my alarm five times a day,” and I did this for myself just to kind of test it out, and I chose the times based on my chronotype.

And then during each one of those little five-minute periods of time, I have water, I do a breathing test. I’m focusing on something for my sleep, and, honestly, it’s now become ingrained as a habit, and it’s wonderful. Most of my patients tell me this is a great starting line for wellness, and I think that’s really what’s great about it, is you don’t have to worry about, “Do I have an exercise routine? How much protein should I have? Do I need creatine?” You know, it’s more like, “Hey, dude, just breathe and sleep and hydrate, and guess what, you’re like 50% there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fascinating stuff. And I’m curious, you mentioned your patients, do you have a tale of transformation in terms of a professional who’s like, “Yeah, okay, okay, okay, sure, sure, sure, sleeping, hydrating, breathing, got it,” and then they did it? And what kinds of results can unfold for people who think they’re doing it fine, but then put some attention on it and to do it masterfully?

Michael Breus
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I think the devil is in the details, for sure, when it comes to people and how they follow it and how they adapt it. I found some really cool adaptations for people. As we get older, we start to lose touch with some of our thirst signals, we don’t realize that we’re thirsty. And so, I had one woman who really, you know, she just forgot to drink all the time. And so, what we did was we paired television – she liked to watch her shows at night – with tea, and so not caffeinated tea, obviously, because that would be bad for her sleep, but we used to call it tea and TV.

And so, we would actually just put on her phone a reminder, “Tea and TV.” And it was something that was that simple for her that allowed her to become hydrated. And then, to be honest with you, she started to become more motivated for her weight loss goals. Now I’m not saying that this is some miraculous recovery, and I’m not saying that she lost 50 pounds because she started doing tea and TV. But what I am saying is that something as simple as hydration can kickstart other behaviors that you’re just not motivated to do.

It’s very, very, very hard to be motivated when you’re tired, when you’re dehydrated, and when you’re out of breath, it just doesn’t work well. Now, as far as, like, looking at some pretty drastic people, I belong to a men’s group, and on every Sunday, we go for a hike, which is awesome. We have a great time, and it’s beautiful here in California, there’s a million places to go hiking. And we have a varied age range in our men’s group. We have guys that are probably in their late twenties, all the way on up till their eighties.

And so, for the older guys, we always make sure that we’ve got people in the front of the line, people in the back of the line, a little extra water, things like that, just to be thoughtful. And this one guy comes on the trip and he is a fairly robust guy, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m a camel. I don’t need to drink water.” And we’re like, “Bro, you need water,” and we kept trying to give him water, trying to give him water. Three-quarters of the way up the trail, he totally bonks. We have to call EMS. It’s a mess. So, those are the situations that you obviously want to avoid.

Now, the good news was, for that particular individual, he came back to do hikes a few weeks later, and we had absolutely no problems with him because he was able to stay hydrated. So, I think there are some pretty cool stories out there about people who are definitely finding something new about themselves from this, but I think it’s one of those things that you didn’t think about. So, I have had a couple of patients turn to me and say things like, “I’m not as grouchy all of a sudden,” which is kind of fascinating. Again, not something that you would have expected.

I had one spouse tell me that they were much more interested in being intimate with their partner because the partner just seemed like a different person. Their mood had changed, their ability to communicate was better, all of these different things. Now, I’d like to blame it on the Sleep, Drink, Breathe program that it was going to be fixing all of your marital woes, but I’m not convinced it will. I will tell you though, if you do it with your partner, it’s a fun thing to do together and it’s something that a couple can do to get healthy together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very pleasurable. Thank you, good doctor. Well, so let’s talk about these in sequence. When it comes to sleep, I’m curious, how big a deal is it if we get okay sleep, you know, maybe six and a quarter-ish hours a night versus great sleep, seven and a half plus hours a night? Is that fine or is that pretty consequential a difference?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I’ll tell you, is it only matters when it matters. So, as an example, if you’re getting six and a quarter hours, and then, all of a sudden, you get five, you are screwed. But if you’re getting seven and then you get five, you can snap back from that very easily and be pretty good that day as well as the next. So, it really has to do with compliance and consistency, I think, is the two biggest things with sleep.

Because if you can just build a steady, solid base of good quality sleep, and it doesn’t have to be…I mean, again, we’re talking about minutes here. I’m talking about quality, right? So, I don’t care if you have six hours of sleep, as long as it’s super high quality, if that’s what works for you. But remember, the deal here is it’s not to get the least amount of the good stuff, right? Like, people seem to think it’s this kind of game.

Remember, sleep is recovery. This is what your body needs to do in order for you to get to your next step. So, by ripping it off, by limiting it, whether it’s through time or caffeine, is kind of foolish when you start to think about it because you’re going to need that body to repeat that activity again and again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say “screwed,” what exactly does that mean in practice?

Michael Breus
Well, I mean, so for example, it really can depend. I mean, I have some people who, as an example, let’s say you’re normally getting seven hours of sleep and something terrible happens and your flight is delayed and you’re sleeping on the floor of the airport and you get five hours and then you have to go on television the next day, you’re probably going to be just fine, right? Because, yeah, you’re not feeling so great, but you’ve been getting seven hours of sleep.

If you’ve been getting six hours of sleep and that’s really not what your body needs, your body needs seven, your anxiety is going to increase significantly with this new added stress of not having slept well, on top of now being in a stressful situation. My guess is that, usually at that point in time, a lot of people reach for stimulants in order to kind of counteract that level of sleepiness.

And so, once you start to go down that path, you end up overstimulating because your body is, unfortunately, dehydrated because it hasn’t slept, and now you are kind of in this little bit of a death spiral where you’re amping up your anxiety while you’re amping up your caffeine. Usually, the performance is probably a B, B-minus, of what you would want it to have been had you been sleeping probably seven hours, where it could have easily been a B-plus or an A-minus, again, just from a rebound.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I found is the consequence can be even greater in so far as when I’m well rested, and tell me if there’s some cool science on this so it’s not just my anecdote, when I’m well rested, I’m ready to take on the important but not urgent and not pleasant task that have tremendous strategic value.

Michael Breus
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m kind of sleep-deprived, it’s like, “Nah, I don’t feel like it. I’ll maybe do that later.” And so, in a way, if good sleep makes the difference between doing those things and not, over the course of a career, it could have a multimillion-dollar impact.

Michael Breus
Absolutely. And I think we see that with hydration and with breathing as well. So, I mean, I 100% agree that if you can have your body kind of in a flow state, in a mindset where… it might not be perfect, it might not be all, I’m getting my best ideas every single second, but it might be, “Hey, I’m going to do the blocking and tackling that needs to be done of trimming this email list, or creating better copy, or doing more editing,” or whatever it is, absolutely, I think, sleep, hydration, and breathing, all of which, again, if you can put it on kind of a schedule, it makes it so much easier.

It’s interesting, when you look at entrepreneurs in particular, and you look at people who are like, “Grow, grow, grow. I got to get my business going,” some of them have some of the worst wellness habits you’ve ever seen. They’re all coffee junkies or energy drink, I mean, I shouldn’t say all, there’s a lot. And that ends up playing a big role when, in fact, if you slept well and you were hydrated, you’d be shocked at how much energy you have. So, I think there are some things in there that I think could be super-duper valuable at any stage of business.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, you know, Michael, I don’t know how many podcasters you chat with who have, in fact, read dozens of full-text studies, randomized controlled trials of different sleep interventions, but I have because I’m a fiend for this sort of thing. And what I find interesting or sad, I don’t know, is that often sleep hygiene education is used as the control and sees almost no result as compared to the active intervention. So, how do you, in the position of educating, help make an impact here? Like, what do we need to do if sleep hygiene education is so lame it’s the control?

Michael Breus
So, number one, I love the fact that you brought this up, and it’s important that you’re thinking about it this way as well. So, number one, let’s be super-duper clear for your audience members, sleep hygiene just by itself, in and of itself, it barely does shit, like, let’s be fair. Now, if you do the opposite of sleep hygiene, like if you have a drum set in your bedroom, of course it’s not going to go well, super-hot room, lights all on, I get it, okay? That seems like it’s kind of like the no-duh of sleep is sleep hygiene to me.

But I think there’s something in between, like a sleep disorder, and I guess what you’d call disordered sleep, which is just sort of, like, “I wish I had some guidelines. I wish I had some evidence. I wish I had a few things that would really work that I could follow that were straightforward and simple to be able to allow me to get better sleep.”

So, one of them is, no matter what your chronotype is, if everybody out there just wakes up at the same time, seven days a week, not five days a week, seven days a week, biologically speaking, you set a process in motion so that your melatonin production becomes consistent at a very specific time every single night. It is exactly 14, roughly 14 hours, I shouldn’t say exactly, roughly 14 hours after you wake up.

So, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m., 14 hours later is 8:00 p.m. and that’s when your melatonin is going to go on board and start to work. That’s why people start to feel sleepy around 9:30, 10:00 o’clock. However, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m. during the week and 9:00 o’clock on the weekends three hours later, melatonin production is three hours later, which means your brain doesn’t even going to think about going to bed until 1:00 o’clock in the morning.

So, by keeping just this one habit, like this would be a better habit than listening to almost all of the sleep hygiene, again, don’t sleep with a drum set in your room with lights on in a very hot room, but if all you did was keep your wakeup time consistent, notice I didn’t say bedtime, but wake up time consistent, you could actually make a biological process in your body consistent that helps you fall asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. Number one, that’s your top.

Michael Breus
That’s my top. And it doesn’t matter what your chronotype is. Now, I’ve mentioned the word a couple of times, and I know, Pete, you know what chronotype is, but for your audience members, I created a system called chronotyping, where you can take a quiz, you go to chronoquiz.com, and it’ll teach you what type of sleeper that you are.

So, there are four different types. Early birds are now called lions, night owls are now called wolves, and we figured this out. Now, what’s even better is waking up at the right time based on your chronotype. So, chronotype turns out to be genetic and it’s something that I can show you. It’s a quiz. It’s like 30 questions online. Like, it’s not very long and it’s fairly accurate. We’ve had over 4 million people take the quiz now, and so we’ve really been able to kind of dive deep and get some interesting data out there.

And it’s quite fascinating to learn about these different chronotypes because it tells you a lot about the person’s personality and things like that. So, not only waking up at the same time, but if you wake up based on your chronotypical wakeup time, it’s even better. In truth, you end up needing less sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s beautiful. And what’s interesting is, between the last time we spoke and now, I spent a night in the Vanderbilt Sleep Laboratory hooked up to a lot of things.

Michael Breus
Oh, nice. Tell me. Tell me.

Pete Mockaitis
They informed me, much to my surprise, and being a regular weight, a normal weight, that I had a mild case of obstructive sleep apnea.

Michael Breus
Oh, what were your numbers? Do you remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you for asking. My apnea hypopnea index was 9.1.

Michael Breus
That’s not very much.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it is. So, it’s mild, but I was experiencing sleepiness in the day, and so I’ve been doing some things and that has helped.

Michael Breus
So, what did you do about it?

Pete Mockaitis
But as I’ve learned, this sleep apnea business is apparently pretty widespread.

Michael Breus
Oh, it’s amazing how many people have sleep apnea that is undiagnosed. Now, here’s the thing, is you have to really understand sleep apnea and its consequences to really gain an appreciation for it. So, first of all, mild sleep apnea in somebody who’s fairly lean, like you are, is something that, in most cases, we may or may not decide to treat. But, as an example, for somebody who may have been a bit bigger, then we might’ve said to ourselves, “Hmm, they’re already putting a load on their heart because they’re a little bit bigger, so, cardiovascularly, that could, in the future, be problematic.”

We want to make sure, even with mild sleep apnea, that that isn’t putting an extra load on the heart. So, therefore, even somebody with the exact same numbers as you, let’s say nine, but let’s say had an additional 60 pounds on them, we would probably consider treating it at that point. Also, to be fair, their symptomatology would probably be much worse than yours. You just said anything that you reported was kind of mild, whereas somebody with 60 pounds on them at your height would probably have significant different symptomatology, I would gather, probably more severe. So, it’s interesting when you start to look at it.

For folks out there who want to know a little bit more about what we’re talking about, an apnea hypopnea index means the number of times that you stop breathing or almost stop breathing divided by the amount of time that you spend in bed per hour. So, Pete stopped breathing in his sleep or almost stopped, according to the numbers he reports, as roughly nine times an hour. Now, you might say to yourself, “Holy crap, nine times an hour, that’s once every six minutes. That seems like a lot, Michael.” So, let me give you the scale.

So, it’s 5 to 15 is mild, 15 to 30 is moderate, 30 and above is severe. Also, one thing that we don’t know about Pete as of yet is how low did his oxygen desaturate while having these events. That can also be a severity criteria as well. If I have somebody who stops breathing in their sleep nine times an hour but their oxygen dumps into the 80s, I’m treating that immediately because I’m concerned that they may have other things that could be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for asking. About 92-ish.

Michael Breus
So, that’s fantastic. So, we never want to see it going below 92, if at all possible. 90 is kind of like that lower rung where it’s like, “Okay, let’s just make sure it’s above 90 and then you’re okay.” But 92 is actually a better number to have. And on room air during the daytime, you’re probably 96-98.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, all that’s to say, so we’re getting into it, but I think it’s important, so if folks have no idea that they might have sleep apnea…

Michael Breus
Most don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
…what would be some telltale signs? And I’m going to say it, Oura Ring let me down on this one. Other people may love their Oura Rings and I think it’s great for other purposes, but it left me at the door.

Michael Breus
Well, it’s not diagnostic. Yeah, it’s not diagnostic for sleep apnea, number one. So, first of all, if we’re thinking trackers, everybody probably knows that Apple Watch just came out and is now actually tracking for sleep apnea. So, they actually will tell you, supposedly, if you’ve got sleep apnea. I don’t have the app as of yet, so I haven’t tried it out.

So, if you’re looking for trackers, that’s one that might be possibly helpful to do so. But to be fair, usually your bed partner will tell you. The person sitting next to you is going to tell you if you’re snoring, they’re going to tell you if you stop breathing in your sleep. You may actually experience it as well. You could wake up and be like, “Ahh,” and gasping or choking from air and trying to do that. So that could be a telltale sign.

If you wake up in the morning with a headache, that is absolutely a sign. It usually is due to oxygen deprivation causing that kind of swelling in the brain, which is not good. Also, depression, anxiety, moodiness, things of that nature, that up-and-down nature of that, of it all, that can certainly be a symptom or a sign of sleep apnea, and then of course daytime sleepiness, so just being tired, falling asleep at work, not performing, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if folks are thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like me,” I’ll say one of the easiest things I’ve discovered to assess this is just like the SnoreLab app, you get an audio of yourself, like, “Hey, there’s me stopping breathing. Whoa! Okay.” And, two, you could just get, like, sleeplay.com has an overnight test.

Michael Breus
Yeah, we sell them actually from Sleep Doctor as well. We have a full line of tests. It’s literally, you push on a button, and we do a full telecommunication with one of our doctors, so you actually meet with one of our doctors, talk about your symptomatology, they decide if it’s appropriate, send a test to your house. Believe it or not, the tests now are disposable.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought that was weird. I thought that was weird. But I’ll tell you my results from the test were almost identical to my results from the Vanderbilt Sleep Lab, and, oh, so much cheaper.

Michael Breus
Right. And easier, right? And in a better environment, I would argue, an environment more tailored to what your natural sleep would look like, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Very good. Okay. So, there you have it. You might have sleep apnea, you don’t know it, take a look at that and the dividends could be huge. Waking up at the same time. What else would be maybe your number two hottest tip for improved sleep?

Michael Breus
I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s kind of the not tip. It’s the, “Don’t think that it’s just going to go away on its own because it’s not.” Everybody thinks that, “Oh, you know, I’m just stressed out and I’m supposed to sleep like crap right now,” or, like, “I’ve got three kids, I’m supposed to sleep like crap.” That’s actually not the case. So, it’s not going to go away on its own.

If you are not happy with either the quality or the quantity of your sleep, and, by the way, don’t confuse the two. Don’t think that just because you sleep more, it’s going to be better, because it might not. So, understand how things like caffeine, alcohol, affect your sleep. Possibly follow my 3-2-1 rule, which is: three hours before bed, stop alcohol; two hours before bed, stop food; one hour before bed, stop fluids. That will save you some trips to the bathroom and, hopefully, make you have some better sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now let’s talk hydration.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Good Doctor, you said that we can lose touch with our thirst signals as we age, but if we’re in the prime of our careers, can’t we just drink when we’re thirsty and call it good?

Michael Breus
I wish it worked. Unfortunately, as I take a sip, it doesn’t. So, what happens in a lot of cases is if we are sleep-deprived, and I think we’ve pretty much established that we are a sleep-deprived society, the signals don’t come as often as they should. So, believe it or not, our thirst meter, if you will, is off if you’re sleep-deprived. So that’s number one.

But let’s say you’re well-slept and your thirst meter should be on the mark, part of the problem is that we don’t have a solid understanding of what that amount should be. I started diving into the literature because, honestly, it was really kind of foreboding. And I’ve seen everywhere from 50 ounces a day to 130 ounces a day recommended. So, like, the problem is that nobody knows what they’re shooting for.

So, I actually developed a formula based on your weight and what’s called your uptick, so your ability to absorb water and then how much you would actually need in order to do that based on your weight, so, it’s quite simple. So, you just take your weight, you multiply it by 0.6, and that’s the number of ounces that you should drink.

Pete Mockaitis
My weight in pounds and not kilograms?

Michael Breus
That is correct. Pounds. And so, if you’re a 100-pound person, you should have 60 ounces of water. If you’re a 200-pound person, you should have 120 ounces of water. Now, you want to add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise. That’s it. That’s the whole formula. Weight times 0.6 and then take that number and add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise, and that will get you pretty much right as rain. The key here is to sip not chug it, and you want to get at least 30, I’m sorry, 40 ounces before noon because otherwise it’s tough to get all that water down without having to pee all night long.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s very clear and direct. Thank you. All right.

Michael Breus
I like to prescribe water. I think it’s the best supplement out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, water, is it always water? Other beverages are just as fine or not as good? Or what’s your take?

Michael Breus
Well, you know what? That’s a great question. So, number one, there’s a lot of types of water, believe it or not. There are water enhancers, by the way. We can talk about that. But I think you can throw a couple of cups of coffee in there. I don’t have a problem with that. I would prefer if you could stay away from the sugary stuff.

So, if you like sparkling water, that’s great. If you like carbonated water, I don’t have a problem with it. I’d stay away from soda, if you possibly can. But I’m also here to tell you that if you’re not going to drink and the only thing that’s going to get you to drink is a Diet Coke, fine. Drink your Diet Coke. I’d rather you get the fluid than not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s talk about these enhancers, these electrolytes, the powders, etc. Are they handy? And under what context?

Michael Breus
Yep, so that’s exactly how you should think of them, as handy and only under certain contexts. So, I did a little comparison in the book, looking at things like liquid IV and LMNT and a few others, and here’s what I can tell you. First of all, there’s a lot of sodium in these, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but here’s the thing. What they’re trying to do is create a barrier with the water-salt balance in your body. Because when you get too salty, your body wants more water. When you have too much water, your body wants more salt. So, that’s basically kind of how the whole thing works.

These packets of electrolytes are mostly salt, so you want to be careful, especially if you have high blood pressure, about dumping these things into your water bottle every day. Why I said I like the word “handy” is because you should have a packet with you, but you should use them sparingly. So, I would say, as an example, if you’re a runner and you run five miles every day, and you do a long run on the weekends, then I would use it for the long run on the weekends.

So, times where you’re going to be extra exposed or have a significant more energy expenditure, I think it makes a lot of sense because that helps keep that hydration going. But I want to be also clear about something, is using one of these products does not preclude you from drinking more water.

So, what a lot of people will do is they’ll pour this thing in, and they’ll think, “Oh, I don’t need to have my however many ounces because I’ve put my hydration multiplier in.” No, no, no, no, no. You still need the same amount of water. You just need to really think about these times and when to use it, and I would argue you probably already know when those are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking if I am consuming this much fluid, for some that could be quite the uptick. Am I going to have to go to the bathroom all the time? Or are there some strategies for this? What do I do?

Michael Breus
Yeah, so it turns out that you don’t have to go to the bathroom all the time. So, it’s kind of interesting. There’s a section in my book that looks at bladder control, actually, and here’s what’s fascinating is, as you learn to drink more water, your bladder and your body absorbs it quite nicely and can control it. So, you won’t see a huge uptick in bathroom breaks. You will for the first two weeks, but by the third week it levels itself out quite nicely and it’s not really any more than usually what you’re used to. Here’s an interesting little factoid, is that no living mammal can pee for longer than 21 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to try it. I don’t think I’ve ever timed it before.

Michael Breus
Well, you will never not time it now. Everyone who is listening, I can assure you, is now, the next time you pee, you’re going to think about it. But if you pee for 21 seconds, you have truly emptied your bladder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Breus
Challenge out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the stopwatches coming out. That seems kind of short, intuitively, but, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Michael Breus
Wait till the next time you pee, and it’s like, it’s not a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It’s a 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, you know, that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then is there a certain amount of fluid that I can only…? You said don’t gulp or guzzle. Like, is it 16 fluid ounces an hour? Or is there a guideline for, like, what’s going to be just more than what your body can deal with?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I tell people, is you want to think of your body like a sponge. So, you know when you walk out in the morning to the sink and there’s this kind of shriveled block and it’s pretty hard you could probably hammer something with it, that’s your sponge, right? That’s your body when you first have water. And if you pull the spout and you put water on it, if you put a lot of water on it, it just rolls off. It doesn’t really get absorbed.

But if you have a slow stream, it slowly gets absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, and then the whole thing grows, and then finally, when it gets too much water, it basically overruns. That’s exactly how you should think about drinking. You’re the sponge. You don’t want to throw 20 ounces down your gullet because it’s not going to get absorbed. But if you sip it, you’ll be surprised.

So, my favorite technique for doing this is, every morning, one of my morning routines is, I call it the three 15s, where I sit on the edge of the bed and I take 15 deep breaths, then I get 15 minutes of sunshine, and I drink 15 ounces of water. So, while I’m getting my 15 minutes of sunshine, every minute I just take a gulp, and I’m outside, I get the sunlight, I get the vitamin D, it turns off my melatonin, and I’m breathing. Like, I don’t know how many that is. It’s past a quadruple.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, all at once. All right. Well, any other do’s and don’ts when it comes to hydration?

Michael Breus
Well, one thing for people to know, and this is kind of weird, but it’s actually a truism, you can actually drink too much water, and this can happen. It’s happened actually at a fraternity hazing and things of that nature. You can actually make somebody toxic by putting too much water into them or into your body. As a matter of fact, was it Brooke Shields, actually had this happen? She was overhydrating and she overhydrated so much that she actually went unconscious and passed out. So, you can go to the other side of water. So, again, balance is sort of key here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about breathing.

Michael Breus
Yeah, let’s talk about it. It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to breathe, it’s actually quite remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what are we doing wrong, exactly?

Michael Breus
Well, that’s the right question. It’s like, “Well, Michael, are we doing something wrong? I mean, we’re alive, right? So how wrong could it be?” I would say some of the biggest things that we see people that are doing that are actually just not helping with their breathing, number one is their breathing is too shallow. Number one, that puts much bigger load on the heart. Number two, you actually get about half as much air. Taking a long, deep belly breath, and then kind of letting it go through your diaphragm, actually extends the lungs and allows your heart to slow down, which is much more healthy, generally speaking.

So, one of the things that we do is we breathe in a too shallow of a way so it’s just very light repetitive breaths. The other biggie that we do is we’re too mouthy. Too many people are mouth breathers. That can be due to congestion. That can be due to people just not really thinking about it, but in a majority of cases when people are mouth-breathing, it’s basically like putting leaded gas into the engine because you get every bacteria, virus, particulate, everything is coming right through the mouth, straight into the lungs, and kind of gumming up the works.

And then I think the other big one, and there’s actually six breathing problems, but I think these are the big three. People forget to breathe. Do you ever do this, Pete? I have this happen to me every once in a while. Like, if I’m concentrating, like if I’m playing a video game or I’m watching something, I’m just there and then, all of a sudden, I realize, I’m like, “I forgot to breathe.” I start to breathe again. Do you ever do that?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure.

Michael Breus
So, that’s something that people do as well. And, again, getting people more thoughtful about breathing, in general, turns out to be a great idea. And the yogis and the Ayurvedics and that culture has done such an amazing job of teaching us so many different kinds of breathing. I utilize several of these different types of breath work in the book, and it’s fun. It’s fun to actually try some different things out.

I’ve tried the hyperventilation breathing called Kundalini breathing. That was quite an experience for me. I’ve also tried the 4-7-8 breathing. This is a technique that I utilize actually in the middle of the night for many of my patients. So, people who wake up in the middle of the night can’t return back to sleep. My favorite technique then is 4-7-8 breathing.

So, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Slowly breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, you breathe out for a count of eight. This was a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil for the Navy SEALs to help them lower their heart rate so they could shoot in between heart rates for long range snipers. So, this is a great technique you can utilize.

I utilize it before I go on stage. I utilize it in the middle of the night. It’s one of those great things that will just dump your heart rate super-duper quick and allow you to breathe better. So, I think there’s a lot out there. There’s more out there than you might imagine on breathing, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re breathing through the mouth, we have some negative impact associated with just sucking in the microbes, pathogens, etc.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m curious, like what’s really at stake when we breathe optimally, versus we breathe with just kind of without any thought to it?

Michael Breus
So, oxygen transport, and so it all has to do with energy. So, for folks out there who want more energy, shallow breathing is never going to get you there unless it’s super-duper forceful. So, I would argue that all of your energy, remember, oxygen is the fuel that lights the sugar fire that is your energy. So, when we eat something, it all gets broken down into glucose and then stored as either fat or glucose, and so we need something to light that on fire to create energy. That something is oxygen.

And so, by taking small, shallow breaths and unfiltered breaths, what ends up happening is we get bad quality air, and we don’t get enough air, which means we don’t have enough fuel for the fire and we don’t have enough energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And then, you’ve got a few changes you recommend, so we’ve already covered the using your nose and bring it into the diaphragm. Any other top things we’re getting wrong?

Michael Breus
Well, I think just being thoughtful about breathing and thinking about it is probably one of the biggest things that I want you to do. And let’s be fair, you don’t have to do something crazy, okay? Like, a lot of people turn to me, like, “Oh, Michael, you learned all these crazy breathing techniques. I’m not a meditator. I’m not a yoga person. I don’t know how to do those things.” Wrong. This is just breathing we’re talking about.

One of the techniques is you breathe. You hold one nostril closed, and you breathe in through one nostril, and then you breathe out through another nostril. That’s the technique. This isn’t hard stuff, but what it does is it allows you to be purposeful in your breath work. It allows your heart rate to go up and down in ways, shapes, and forms that causes other things to happen in your body, like melatonin to be produced, or cortisol to be produced, or things like that. So, it’s really quite powerful. Honestly, I was kind of surprised, because when I went into this, I’m like, “What am I going to learn about breathing?” I was shocked.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one of your suggestions is to strengthen your diaphragm, and I’d love to get your hot take on, I guess they call it respiratory muscular training, RMT, with tools like The Breather, but do you think that’s worth doing?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I think. I don’t think it’s worth spending a ton of money on a bunch of fancy gadgets and gizmos. There are actually some things that you can buy on Amazon for 20 bucks that can actually help strengthen your breathing quite nicely. But the big thing to do is, again, in the Sleep, Drink, Breathe programmatic book, where we have these five separate times throughout the day where we have you do different things, you’re breathing at all five of those times, you will naturally begin to strengthen just by doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing, even if that’s the only technique that you do.

So, the good news here is, I think if you if all you did was buy the book and follow the program, your diaphragm is going to get stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Michael, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Michael Breus
Well, here’s the deal, is I feel like the book is a little bit like a ticket. So, if you buy the book, you actually send me a copy of the receipt and I then send you all this cool stuff. So, I actually have got several lectures that I’m doing live that you’ll be invited to join. You get the plan immediately for free right there, so even before the book comes out. There’s a couple of different things in there that I think you’ll like.

Also, you are entered into a drawing for a free mattress. So, we’re going to have several mattresses that we’re going to give away for people who are doing that. So, it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re definitely looking forward to it. So, if you get a chance, go to SleepDoctor.com/book, and check it out.

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

Michael Breus
So, I heard Nelson Mandela once say, “I never lose. I only win or learn.” 

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

Michael Breus
I think, for me, the most interesting research that came out was when they started studying narcolepsy to help insomniacs. So, they started to learn, genetically speaking, what was going on with narcoleptics and make them feel so sleepy to try to understand how we could help people with insomnia. I thought that was a really cool application of the science.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. Now, I have to know, is there a one weird trick from narcoleptics that helps them snap into sleep immediately?

Michael Breus
Well, so it opened up a whole line of genetic work and possible new drug therapy, actually. So, there are actually several companies now that are looking at the on switch for narcolepsy as a potential on switch for people with insomnia, but not at that level, of course. And so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Breus
Well, my all-time favorite book is Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. But I just read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and that was just powerful.

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

Michael Breus
Probably my pillow because I’m a sleep doctor. I love my pillow. I actually have several pillows that I utilize. One is from a company called InfiniteMoon. I have no affiliate anything with these companies. InfiniteMoon, they make a cool, really good pillow called The Curve and then something called Sleep Crown. Now, this is weird. This is a pillow that I actually put over my head and it actually helps. I don’t know why. It’s just so damn comfortable and I really enjoy it.

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

Michael Breus
Sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up.

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

Michael Breus
Head on over to SleepDoctor.com and check out my book. You’re welcome to ping me on Facebook, TikTok, all of those. And I have a YouTube channel where I’m now doing some really fun, interesting videos. So, if you get a chance, check it out there, throw me some comments.

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

Michael Breus
Here’s my final call to action, is do yourself a favor and just consider your sleep, your hydration, and your breathing, in what it could do for your overall performance, whether that’s your work performance, your relationship performance, or your personal performance, and see if it’s something that might be interesting for you. You might be surprised.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, it’s been fun once again. Good luck and good sleep.

Michael Breus
Thank you. I appreciate it. Wishing you some sweet dreams, Pete.