Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain,
Speaker 1: behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest
Speaker 1: who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater
Speaker 1: understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.
Speaker 1: Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse in a human possibility.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. So today I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to have Brendan Burchard on the podcast. Brendan
Speaker 1: is one of the most watched, quoted, and followed personal
Speaker 1: development trainers in the world and possibly in the history
Speaker 1: of the world. Larry King named him one of the
Speaker 1: top motivation and marketing trainers in the world, and he
Speaker 1: is also a number one New yeark Times author in
Speaker 1: which his books include The Motivation Manifesto, The Chart, The
Speaker 1: Millionaire Messenger, Life School and Ticket, and most recently, High
Speaker 1: Performance Habits, which we'll be talking a lot about today.
Speaker 1: He's the star and executive producer of the number one
Speaker 1: self help show on YouTube, and his podcast The Charge
Speaker 1: Life debut at number one on iTunes. Success magazine named
Speaker 1: Brendan is one of the top twenty five most influential
Speaker 1: leaders in personal growth and achievement, along with Oprah, doctor Oz,
Speaker 1: and Cheryl Sandberg. Brendan's so excited to chat with you today. Man,
Speaker 1: I'm thrilled to be here. I'm a huge fan of
Speaker 1: your work and your podcast, so thanks for having me. Likewise,
Speaker 1: thank you, and congratulations on being on the cover of
Speaker 1: Success Magazine. I mean that's like the ideal thing to
Speaker 1: show your mom, right, Like, like, someday, someday I want
Speaker 1: to be in the cover of Success Magazine so I
Speaker 1: can really show my mom I made it. You know.
Speaker 1: The funny thing is when they sent me that cover. Yeah, literally,
Speaker 1: that's probably the first person outside of my wife that
Speaker 1: I texted it too. I said, Mom, check this out.
Speaker 1: And of course she you know, she's always been a
Speaker 1: huge champion and cheerleader for me anyway, and she's like,
Speaker 1: that's great. How do you're so excited? But she would
Speaker 1: say that if you know, it doesn't matter what's happening, like, hey,
Speaker 1: mom doing a podcast today, that's great. Howey, I'm so excited.
Speaker 1: You know that's what mom's doing. Well. It sounds like
Speaker 1: kind of like your personality too, like when you're just
Speaker 1: imitating her, you sound like yourself. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you realize that. I actually read,
Speaker 1: of course, the Success article and they quoted your mom
Speaker 1: and I loved how they saw it her out And
Speaker 1: you know, she said, when you were a kid, you
Speaker 1: were this big, energetic ball of sunshine sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And you know that clearly comes through and a lot
Speaker 1: of the work you do. But that doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: haven't had a hard life. Now, when I've been reading
Speaker 1: some of your work, it's just so it says here
Speaker 1: you've been involved in car accidents, You've had to deal
Speaker 1: with brain injuries, You've had lots of other failures. Could
Speaker 1: you talk to me about some of that, Brendan, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole reason that I got into psychology
Speaker 1: in the first place was because I was dissatisfied with
Speaker 1: my own life. Yeah, and that all perpetuated my entire career.
Speaker 1: If that perpetuated, because when I was a nineteen year
Speaker 1: old kid, I had a breakup with the first woman
Speaker 1: I ever loved, and she was, you know, my sweetheart
Speaker 1: and my everything. We were like that annoying high school couple,
Speaker 1: you know, like so deeply and passionately in love. We shared,
Speaker 1: like you know, a U haul to the college we
Speaker 1: signed up for it. I only went to that college
Speaker 1: because she went there. You know, all our friends were there.
Speaker 1: We lived in the same dorm, we signed up for
Speaker 1: the same classes. I mean, we were just locked at
Speaker 1: the hip. And then about halfway through that first year
Speaker 1: of college, she cheated on me, and I just fell apart.
Speaker 1: You know, I like to say and tell people, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, when all of your identity is tied up
Speaker 1: in a relationship and the relationship falls apart, so to you,
Speaker 1: That's what happened to me. So by the end of
Speaker 1: that first year of college, I became depressed and then suicidal,
Speaker 1: just a turn of events that fortunately gave me some
Speaker 1: reverence for life and some perspective. Right when I was
Speaker 1: in the deepest part of that depression and planning my suicide,
Speaker 1: not just thinking about it, I saw a full page
Speaker 1: ad in a school newspaper. I was still, you know,
Speaker 1: reading a lot, and reading has always been the same
Speaker 1: grace of my life. And I was reading the school
Speaker 1: newspaper and there was a big ad, this big, beautiful ad,
Speaker 1: and it was an ad for a summertime job in
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic. They needed students down there to be
Speaker 1: like two of guides, and long story short, I got
Speaker 1: the job. I went down there with a friend and
Speaker 1: in our first couple of nights there was in a
Speaker 1: car accident, and I had these series of moments sort
Speaker 1: of lots of people in heaven in car accidents, and
Speaker 1: they know this slow motion thing happens, and if you're
Speaker 1: conscious anyway, and the slow motion thing happened, and it
Speaker 1: made me ask and think about my life. Now. I
Speaker 1: don't know if in the moments I was so you know,
Speaker 1: cognitive and thinking, oh wow, you know I'm facing that
Speaker 1: in my life. Let me think through these main questions.
Speaker 1: But later, as I was healing, after I survived it,
Speaker 1: I realized the experience that I went through forced me
Speaker 1: in those moments later on to wonder if I'd really
Speaker 1: lived my life and I hadn't. You know, my question
Speaker 1: did I live? I hadn't been living. I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about taking my life. You know. Did I love? No?
Speaker 1: My heart was so broken, and honestly, even in the relationship,
Speaker 1: I hadn't really been authentic in my love and caring
Speaker 1: because I was young and dumb, and did I matter?
Speaker 1: Was a question I asked, And you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: really have a lot of direction. I certainly didn't know
Speaker 1: about these things we talked about so casually today, like
Speaker 1: servant leadership and volunteering and making a difference. And so
Speaker 1: the questions that I faced at the end of my life,
Speaker 1: did I live, did I love? Did I matter? I
Speaker 1: was deeply unsatisfied with the answers. So I, like a
Speaker 1: lot of people, I go well. After I recovered from
Speaker 1: the injuries and was back in college, I wanted to
Speaker 1: live a better quality of life. I started asking, well,
Speaker 1: how do you live a good quality of life? How
Speaker 1: do I change? And the irony is it began with me.
Speaker 1: I got a hold of Success magazine at some point
Speaker 1: talk about coming full's circle. I saw Tony Robbins on
Speaker 1: an infomercial. I picked up a book from Brian Tracy
Speaker 1: and aug Mandino and Paul o'cuelo, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I started just a deep dive in the world of
Speaker 1: success in psychology and personal development. It was my first
Speaker 1: time reading Carl Rogers and that totally changed my life.
Speaker 1: And then it was Alfred Adler, and it went on
Speaker 1: and on and on. I just went deep into those things,
Speaker 1: and I was trying to search out how do I
Speaker 1: change my life. There was never any intention of like,
Speaker 1: I want to be a teacher on that someday. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to write my life. Then after I did,
Speaker 1: people said, hey, man, I remember last semester you were
Speaker 1: this depressed, sad kid, you know, and now you're happy.
Speaker 1: How did that happen? And I would just tell them
Speaker 1: the things I was discovering about, you know, beliefs, and
Speaker 1: about identifying my values and what's important to me and
Speaker 1: having a vision for my future and understanding the importance
Speaker 1: of optimism and all the basic things we always talk
Speaker 1: about psychology and personal development. I tell them, and I
Speaker 1: tell my car accident story in a much longer, longer
Speaker 1: fashion than I just did. And then they'd say, that's inspiring.
Speaker 1: You should tell other people about it. And that kind
Speaker 1: of began my real deep dive into the work and
Speaker 1: then ultimately in teaching it. Yeah, and am I right
Speaker 1: that the first book proposal you put forward to the
Speaker 1: publishers was rejected? Yeah? I would love to say it
Speaker 1: was rejected the way you pronounced it kind of like
Speaker 1: a singular event. Oh, I see, the book was life's
Speaker 1: golden ticket, and it was a story about a person
Speaker 1: going through second chances, because I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: the psychology of change, but not be like, here's my
Speaker 1: story as Brendan Burchard. So my school and ticket has
Speaker 1: written a little bit like The Alchemist. It's a parable
Speaker 1: and it's a story of a man undergoing dramatic change.
Speaker 1: I'd never hearden any fiction before. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: I was doing, and so fifteen publishers turned the book down.
Speaker 1: Later on, literally after a book party from a book
Speaker 1: I had called The Millionaire Messenger that hit number one
Speaker 1: on New York Times, my agent pulled me over and
Speaker 1: we were talking and he told me it actually had
Speaker 1: been turned down nineteen times, but he didn't have the
Speaker 1: heart to tell me about the four extra ones. Enough
Speaker 1: is enough, and then he's like, Okay, the kid gets it.
Speaker 1: It's not going to work. And then Harper Collins called,
Speaker 1: and it was Harper one at the time they had
Speaker 1: published Pauloquelo, and it was Paulo o'quelo's editor who saw
Speaker 1: the magic in it, and he said, actually, I think
Speaker 1: this has got a chance. And they believe in this young,
Speaker 1: dumb author who knew had no idea what he was doing,
Speaker 1: and law school and ticket sort of came out and
Speaker 1: began my career. Wow, it's amazing. You know. Something tells me, though,
Speaker 1: you have such resiliency that even if that one didn't
Speaker 1: work out, you'd still somehow find a way to this pathway,
Speaker 1: you'd find other other things to persevere. Man, I'd hope
Speaker 1: to think that, especially by that age. You know, I
Speaker 1: was twenty seven or eight by the time I wrote
Speaker 1: Lafe School, maybe twenty eight. And the truth is I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been if I hadn't read so much work
Speaker 1: in psychology in personal development, because those those things taught
Speaker 1: me that resilience wasn't Yeah, because I think, honestly, if
Speaker 1: I hadn't read you know, every personal development guy in
Speaker 1: the history said persevere. You know, that's like the oldest
Speaker 1: conversation in all of self help is perseverance. And if
Speaker 1: I hadn't read it, I honestly I think I think
Speaker 1: before my car accident, I was a little bit of
Speaker 1: a quitter. And you know, I don't mean that as
Speaker 1: if I'm I don't understand any any like I feel
Speaker 1: bad about my identity. But you know, I remember reading
Speaker 1: Albert Bandura and all his work on self efficacy, and
Speaker 1: that was a huge shift in me. I mean most
Speaker 1: of that stuff came out in the eighties, and you know,
Speaker 1: I was kind of coming into my own as a
Speaker 1: man after two thousand, but reading Bandura that was huge.
Speaker 1: The power of self efficacy and believing in our ability
Speaker 1: to make things happen, and our confidence in our ability
Speaker 1: to achieve things, and how we have to change our
Speaker 1: approach to achieving it but still belie we can do it,
Speaker 1: and a lot of expectancy theory and these things. I
Speaker 1: got so wrapped up in it. I was like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: that's what I want my life to be like, even
Speaker 1: though it wasn't like that. That's why I love psychology
Speaker 1: because it says, hey, maybe maybe you don't think like
Speaker 1: this yet, but maybe you can start these thoughts because
Speaker 1: you'll feel better or you'll be better. And that's what
Speaker 1: really drew me to the work and ultimately teaching it.
Speaker 1: That's wonderful, and it also speaks to the power of
Speaker 1: these writings. You know, we write these books, we do
Speaker 1: this stuff, and we were like, man, are we going
Speaker 1: to have any impact? You kind of sold it on
Speaker 1: the other side. First, that yes, the stuff can have
Speaker 1: an impact. I mean it impacted you to have more
Speaker 1: efficacy to keep trying. So that's really interesting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I told you I didn't come out, you know, being
Speaker 1: a self help teacher, you know, right. I didn't start
Speaker 1: that until, you know, as a full time career, until
Speaker 1: I was like thirty two years old, which even that
Speaker 1: sounds young to me now, but you know it was
Speaker 1: because when I finished school in grad school, I finished
Speaker 1: grad school University Montana with a degree in organizational communication,
Speaker 1: I went to accenture and they just happened to be
Speaker 1: you know, I was telling these partners and these people
Speaker 1: at these fortune five Hnter companies about my car accident
Speaker 1: and the meaning that I took from that as a gift,
Speaker 1: as a second chance, and how I decided to craft
Speaker 1: my life differently after that. And they were the ones,
Speaker 1: you know, when I'm quoting to them, you know Earl
Speaker 1: Nightingale or you know Richard Carlson, or you know zig Ziggler,
Speaker 1: or I'm talking to them, you know about Alfred Ahler
Speaker 1: or Eric Frohm, They're like, you really like this stuff,
Speaker 1: You're really passionate about this, and your story could be
Speaker 1: inspiring like, go write a blog about it, you know,
Speaker 1: go do a video about it, go do a speech
Speaker 1: about it. And I had no I was like, how
Speaker 1: do you do that? But so many people said that
Speaker 1: could inspire people that I got hooked on, and I
Speaker 1: believed them. I don't know that I'd be here if
Speaker 1: people hadn't cheered me on. And also, I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like there was a great amount of post traumatic
Speaker 1: growth that happened for you. And that's as you know,
Speaker 1: of a field of positive psychology, there are a few
Speaker 1: people who are able to kind of turn these traumatic
Speaker 1: experiences into a great source of meaning and put it
Speaker 1: into their creative work. So I feel like you keep channeling,
Speaker 1: Like you keep doing it over and over and over,
Speaker 1: and book after book, day after day, to YouTube video
Speaker 1: after YouTube video. I see you channeling all your energies. Actually,
Speaker 1: before I dive in, I want to talk about you,
Speaker 1: do I live? Did I love matter? Could you unpack
Speaker 1: for me what it means to you to live? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I get the others. I totally get the others, but
Speaker 1: the first one could be a little ambiguous. I'd love
Speaker 1: for you to unpack it a little bit. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I've been working on that for so long couting for myself,
Speaker 1: and I kind of came out with this little framework
Speaker 1: that helps me think through it. Which I know this
Speaker 1: sounds very academic to say. It's like, well I've got
Speaker 1: a framework about living, but yeah, but you know I
Speaker 1: love that shit. Yeah you're talking my language. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we all can. There's like three types of life,
Speaker 1: you know. I think there's the caged life, which is
Speaker 1: where I had lived when I was depressed. You know,
Speaker 1: when you're trapped in your own negative thinking, you're trapped
Speaker 1: in your own circumstances, where you're own trapped in your
Speaker 1: own boundaries of belief or your own behaviors and they're
Speaker 1: not working. You know, it's like literally being in a cage.
Speaker 1: You feel like you're shaking the bars and you feel frustrated.
Speaker 1: And we've all been there at different parts of our
Speaker 1: life and in different areas of our life, but we
Speaker 1: know what that means when we feel trapped or caged.
Speaker 1: And then I think a better quality of life, certainly
Speaker 1: is the comfortable life where you've got more options and
Speaker 1: more opportunity, more choice, and things are going good. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you got the job or the car or the house,
Speaker 1: and things are going pretty good, and I was there.
Speaker 1: That's what it was like. When I had a corporate
Speaker 1: job after grad school. I was like, this is good.
Speaker 1: I was comfortable. I had a paycheck for the you know,
Speaker 1: like a good one. You know. I was living an
Speaker 1: independent and free life. I mean, things were good and
Speaker 1: I was comfortable. But you know, sometimes with the comfortable life,
Speaker 1: there's this tell that happens where you're out with friends
Speaker 1: and everyone's like, hey, how's it going, and you're like,
Speaker 1: you know it, it's fine, and fine becomes this like
Speaker 1: four letter word. You know. It's like that you know
Speaker 1: that there's something more aching inside. And to me, that's
Speaker 1: the charged life calling you and the charge life. It's
Speaker 1: just a higher level of enthusiasm, and it's a higher
Speaker 1: level of engagement, and it's ultimately a higher level of
Speaker 1: empowerment with you and other people. And so I think
Speaker 1: when I think of when you say did I live,
Speaker 1: the way I evaluate it is did I live my
Speaker 1: life fully and completely and honestly and vibrantly? And I
Speaker 1: measure that through my enthusiasm, Like today, am I enthusiastic
Speaker 1: for this day and the opportunities I have? And I
Speaker 1: measure it through my engagement, like, am I really deeply
Speaker 1: not just passionate about what I'm doing? Am I a
Speaker 1: little obsessed? Because my philosophy in this book, a little
Speaker 1: bit from the study that we did on high performers worldwide,
Speaker 1: is they go a little beyond passion. And because you know,
Speaker 1: passion is actually pretty safe. You know, people want you
Speaker 1: to be passionate. Passion for pizza. Yeah, you know, live
Speaker 1: with passion, be passionate, follow your passions. All that's good,
Speaker 1: that's safe. But when you're passionate, people cheer you on.
Speaker 1: When you're obsessed, they caution you. You know, they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know you're geting a little too much time for
Speaker 1: that here? Or why are you so weird? Or why
Speaker 1: do you care about that so much? And I thought
Speaker 1: high performers they allow obsession into their life. They don't
Speaker 1: fear it as much as other people do because they
Speaker 1: figure out that healthy versus unhealthy obsession stuff. So for me,
Speaker 1: if I'm living life, really the engagement isn't just like
Speaker 1: I'm present in the moment. That's everything too, But I
Speaker 1: also want to be obsessed with what I'm working on.
Speaker 1: Am I obsessed with the mastery and the excellence? Of
Speaker 1: it where I feel like that engagement level isn't just
Speaker 1: passion that comes and goes, but it's like it's obsessions
Speaker 1: like excitement, enthusiasm, and deep engagement. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if that answers it completely, but that's how I feel
Speaker 1: as I'm talking it out with you. Oh, sure does
Speaker 1: make a lot of sense. And you're bringing in some
Speaker 1: of those ideas about harmonious for subsessive passion, but you're
Speaker 1: saying they're not scared of the obsessive passion. That's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I really like that kind of framing. They kind of
Speaker 1: embrace and accept their totality of being in a way
Speaker 1: that's right. Oh my gosh, you nailed it. Because one
Speaker 1: of the habits, and we'll talk about the research behind that,
Speaker 1: I know, but one of the habits we found of
Speaker 1: high performers worldwide was their ability to raise performance necessity.
Speaker 1: And that just means they mentally sort of psyche themselves
Speaker 1: up to be excellent what they were doing, because it's
Speaker 1: not a preference to do well here, it's a necessity.
Speaker 1: It's necessary that I do well here, and let me
Speaker 1: tell my brain why. And one of the components of
Speaker 1: that bouncing up what you said. In the way that
Speaker 1: they raise necessity is they literally attach their identity with
Speaker 1: doing well in that activity. And just like obsession, they
Speaker 1: got the guts to do that. It's scary, Like you're
Speaker 1: not right before we started talking here praising you for
Speaker 1: your guts and saying, hey, I'm a writer and I
Speaker 1: had done that too. It's guts to say to attach
Speaker 1: identity to our craft, because what if it doesn't go well?
Speaker 1: I mean, what does that say about us? If my
Speaker 1: book gets you know, declined from editors or it doesn't sell,
Speaker 1: or what if someone says, you know, I'm going to
Speaker 1: be world class, you know in this area or this topic,
Speaker 1: or I'm going to really put my passion behind this
Speaker 1: new small business and I am this person and it fails.
Speaker 1: That is a horrible thing on the identity. Just like
Speaker 1: when I said my identity was wrapped up in that
Speaker 1: relationship with that girl I loved. Well, that's scary, except
Speaker 1: I found every high performer that it is structured interview with,
Speaker 1: which was over three hundred, they felt that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was very clear that their identity was wrapped up
Speaker 1: in what they were high performing in and whether they
Speaker 1: were a high performing mom, or they were high performing
Speaker 1: CEO at a fortune fifty company, or they were both,
Speaker 1: because that exists, you know. Even my favorite story is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite stories from the book is I
Speaker 1: was working with this gold medalist sprinter and we were
Speaker 1: at the blocks out on the track field and we
Speaker 1: were talking about his psychology right before the gun goes
Speaker 1: off to start the race, and he was talking about
Speaker 1: the importance of winning for him and I said, well,
Speaker 1: how do you know if you're going to win? And
Speaker 1: he said, what do you mean? I said, well, like
Speaker 1: when you think of the competitors, all these folks in
Speaker 1: the lanes next to you, and you know this race
Speaker 1: is going to be won by you know, one hundredth
Speaker 1: of a second or a tenth of a second. Let's say,
Speaker 1: how do you know who's going to win? Who do
Speaker 1: you bet on? And he said, well, I do We
Speaker 1: bet on the person who is down the blox looks
Speaker 1: up towards the end of the finish line and says,
Speaker 1: I'm going to win this one today for my mom.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, I was like, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: that's necessity I have to do. Necessity is my identity
Speaker 1: is attached to it. I'm okay, being obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: I'm doing it for a social d or a purpose
Speaker 1: or a mission or even yes, an obligation beyond me.
Speaker 1: And there's a deadline. And if we get those things together,
Speaker 1: those four little things identity, obsession, social duty and deadline
Speaker 1: all together in your mind with the right thought patterns,
Speaker 1: you will feel that is more necessary to perform with
Speaker 1: excellence than usual. And you will that's really interesting. It's
Speaker 1: actually I'm going to try to play that tip next
Speaker 1: time I'm running on my Olympic track. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like ask to yourself these questions like why is
Speaker 1: this important to who I am to do well? Why
Speaker 1: do I love this thing so much even when it's hard?
Speaker 1: Who needs me right now on my a game to
Speaker 1: perform well? Who needs me to do well at this?
Speaker 1: And why is it important that I do well at
Speaker 1: this now? Simple questions like that, you know, aims are
Speaker 1: mental focus, Aims are ability to perform better, And is
Speaker 1: simple as those things are. It just turns out that
Speaker 1: high performers have that kind of mental pregame that allows
Speaker 1: them to perform better than the average person, even if
Speaker 1: the average person has a similar skill set, Because it's
Speaker 1: not always about expertise development. Sometimes it's about mental preparation. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: this question, why do I love this? And it's tie
Speaker 1: into self esteem is really really important And you know,
Speaker 1: I really like this distinction between optimal self esteem and
Speaker 1: unstable self esteem, which is tends to be associated with
Speaker 1: some forms of narcissism. Yes, it's you know, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: and I love that because you know, we've also in
Speaker 1: so much of great self esteem literature, we're cautioned against
Speaker 1: tying identity towards doing a good job. And that makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, for me, one of the big
Speaker 1: books of my early life in psychology and when maybe
Speaker 1: the first psychologist besides like Maslow or Rogers that I
Speaker 1: really fell in love with was Inthaniel Brandon and you
Speaker 1: know we just lost him, was that two years ago?
Speaker 1: Self Esteem? Yeah? Six Pillars Self Esteem was monster book
Speaker 1: for me. And but even in that way, it does
Speaker 1: it does warn just you know, and most psychologists would say,
Speaker 1: just be careful of too much identity tied too, because
Speaker 1: then if the external thing that you want it doesn't
Speaker 1: turn out and you internally punish yourself, that's a good
Speaker 1: recipe for unhappiness, which they're true, but I'll tell you
Speaker 1: high performers are willing to take that risk a little bit,
Speaker 1: just like you were with your blog saying, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: a writer, this is what I do. I'm sorry if
Speaker 1: you don't like it or I'm not going to respond
Speaker 1: as fast, but I'm going to pull myself away and
Speaker 1: put myself into scraft. Well, yeah, it sounds to me
Speaker 1: like what you're saying is, you know, contingent self esteem
Speaker 1: is not good, but choose your contingency carefully. So it's,
Speaker 1: you know, overall, like you don't really want to be
Speaker 1: contingent too much on external validation. You know, you want
Speaker 1: to have you want to be driven by intrinsic motivation.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like in certain instances, you know, there
Speaker 1: can be very healthy contingencies. So you're just basically saying,
Speaker 1: choose your conitgency carefully. That's absolutely right, and don't fear
Speaker 1: when a part of you, you know, feels like doing
Speaker 1: that thing. It's like, you know, Oprah knew that what
Speaker 1: she was doing was right for her, and she speaks
Speaker 1: so eloquently about it, that she was doing who she
Speaker 1: is and what she felt called to do, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people back away from that higher sense of
Speaker 1: calling and identity because you know, who am I? Or
Speaker 1: what will they say? Or how will I be judged?
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you it's a lot easier to back
Speaker 1: away from that than to embrace it. You know, I
Speaker 1: shared that not just from my own personal respective, but
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the stories of this book
Speaker 1: they struggled with that. You know, they really do and
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't have the right answer, But the
Speaker 1: observation was pretty clear to me that they were willing
Speaker 1: to step over that line and say this is who
Speaker 1: I am, because they would often say when I interviewed them,
Speaker 1: you know, they would often say things like, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine myself doing anything else, right, this is who I am.
Speaker 1: And man, when someone says that to me, I just
Speaker 1: want to double high five I'm and hug them because
Speaker 1: whatever it took to step into that took some guts.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it takes a lot of bravery to be yourself.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, no, for sure. So let's talk about the study.
Speaker 1: Something that I am very pleased to see is that
Speaker 1: this was put to some rigorous testing. You had a
Speaker 1: whole team of researchers. I'm just going to call out
Speaker 1: some names, some first names, Alyssa, Mike, and Danny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those names Ringabella. Oh yeah, they were absolutely huge. And
Speaker 1: and I'll just clarify a little bit because you know,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people when they see a book,
Speaker 1: they think of a you know, they think of a
Speaker 1: research or a study as a singular thing. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people say, well, you did this study.
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, we did studies, you know, because this
Speaker 1: book honestly is a culmination of the last ten years
Speaker 1: of me studying everything I could about the high performance
Speaker 1: that we worked with, both from the you know, the
Speaker 1: qualitative side of things as a high performance coach. I said,
Speaker 1: this is my career two more quantitative, based on taking
Speaker 1: surveys and based on sort of creating and validating you
Speaker 1: now called the high Performance Indicator. At least three of
Speaker 1: this thing, which we validated other we validated this performance
Speaker 1: scale against other validated scales to assess our predictive utility.
Speaker 1: You know, fancy way for everybody you know who's listening,
Speaker 1: fan of all this stuff. We kind of geeked out
Speaker 1: on science of it. Oh yeah, my audience will love
Speaker 1: what you just said. Yeah right. It was like you know,
Speaker 1: three years ago, I didn't understand even what convergent validity meant.
Speaker 1: I had to conceptionally understood, but I certainly had never
Speaker 1: executed it. And so doing that work and then trying
Speaker 1: to do the factor analysis and the component analysis and
Speaker 1: blah blah blah to make sure that what we were
Speaker 1: seeing in this book wasn't just from my perspective of coaching,
Speaker 1: wasn't just you know, my opinion, because I've been training
Speaker 1: on high performance also for a decade, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: just from my own literature views, which you know, I've
Speaker 1: been doing for basically twenty years reading everything I can
Speaker 1: in this topic. Was Hey, I want to be able
Speaker 1: to create a scale or what now call the HIGHERFORMANCEY indicator.
Speaker 1: I want to be able to create something that if
Speaker 1: I go into an organization like we just recently did.
Speaker 1: We went to a large organization and we said, give
Speaker 1: us your top leaders and give us your average performers,
Speaker 1: and I wanted them to take this scale. Inevitably, the
Speaker 1: top leaders who have objective measures of success, their score
Speaker 1: should be higher in these areas that we are saying
Speaker 1: correlate with long term performance, specifically long term success. And
Speaker 1: those who are an average, well, their members should reflect that.
Speaker 1: And in area after area that we have tested this with,
Speaker 1: that comes to be true that these six habits do
Speaker 1: correlate with long term success. And you know, we've gone
Speaker 1: through multiple versions of it, just like any good science,
Speaker 1: and we keep meeting it up and we'll do it
Speaker 1: better and better and better. And when the book publishers
Speaker 1: were publishing our latest methodology report on the entire thing
Speaker 1: as well, and I could not have done that if
Speaker 1: it was not for Danny Southwick jumping in especially him
Speaker 1: to help me make sure I was thinking through it right.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a master's degree, but I'm by
Speaker 1: no way a psychology PhD. Or a psychologist or a
Speaker 1: psychiatrist or a neurologist or anything with an ist. At
Speaker 1: the end of ALYSSA MARASAAC, Mike Shannon Thompson jumped in
Speaker 1: there and I had, you know, I've been blessed to
Speaker 1: train over four hundred psychologists in a high performance who
Speaker 1: attended a performance academy and I beat this up against them,
Speaker 1: and I said, hey, am I doing sorry? Am I
Speaker 1: thinking about right? Would you take the assessment? What other
Speaker 1: things should we run it against? And really long story short,
Speaker 1: we came down to after measuring over one hundred different
Speaker 1: performance variables throughout my last decade, came down to about
Speaker 1: eleven to fifteen. That seemed to be pretty strongly correlated
Speaker 1: with long term success. Then we beat it up even
Speaker 1: more by asking, well, are these habits malleable? Are they trainable?
Speaker 1: Are they observable? Are they conscious? Are they things that
Speaker 1: high performers would say they are aware that they are
Speaker 1: doing and try to do better at I think what
Speaker 1: makes this book unique is I wasn't going after, you know,
Speaker 1: the same things a lot of habit writers have done
Speaker 1: in the past. They're trying to tell you how to
Speaker 1: set up a habit so it's easy and unconscious and
Speaker 1: you never have to think about it again, you know,
Speaker 1: like tying your shoes, But high performers don't. That's not
Speaker 1: what they're after, you know. They want to know what
Speaker 1: are the deliberate habits that I can do consciously and
Speaker 1: consistently to keep getting better, because otherwise it's an unconscious
Speaker 1: competence and that's not going to take it to the top.
Speaker 1: So that's what this book is. It's a six deliberate
Speaker 1: habits that we have both codified, figured out how to
Speaker 1: measure objectively bounced against you know, other things to get
Speaker 1: the predictive utility value, and then proven out in the
Speaker 1: field with GPA, with sales revenue numbers, with rank in
Speaker 1: position and hierarchy, and in multiple external measures of success
Speaker 1: just to see, you know, to test our stuff. And
Speaker 1: so these six kind of made the great. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: add some outcomes here that I see you measure that
Speaker 1: I care more about, like happiness and interpersonal relationship quality
Speaker 1: of interpersonal relationships. You also predicted those two things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, high performance is a incredibly high predictor and
Speaker 1: correll it of happiness, of well being measured as multiple
Speaker 1: different types of scales of well being, as purpose in life,
Speaker 1: as wiliness, as achievements, driving diligence, industriousness. I mean we
Speaker 1: were able to balance against a lot of other things.
Speaker 1: But for me, I'm similar to you mine where it's
Speaker 1: super highly strongly correlated with happiness, positive relationships, and what's
Speaker 1: important to me influence. Because my number one struggle in
Speaker 1: and forced me to kind of want to write this
Speaker 1: book honestly, was there's so much done in psychology, but
Speaker 1: sometimes you just want, you know, psychology to walk across
Speaker 1: the hall to sociology a little bit, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you know, my thoughts on grit or deliberate practice
Speaker 1: is usually to say both of both. By the way,
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of both Angela and Andrew's huge, huge,
Speaker 1: and I know, you know, them really personal for me.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I say yes, but long term success without you know,
Speaker 1: you can say passionate perseverance, but if you don't have
Speaker 1: people skills in there. I know a lot of very
Speaker 1: passionate persevering people because they're not good with people, skill
Speaker 1: that they never broke through. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people who deliberately practice and do you know a version
Speaker 1: of it, let's say, and yet because they're bad with people,
Speaker 1: they piss off the coach and now they can't climb
Speaker 1: up on the team. They piss off the investors. Now
Speaker 1: the investors won't you know, who funded them in the
Speaker 1: first round won't fund them the second round. It's like,
Speaker 1: our influence and our social circle is so much more
Speaker 1: important than you know, grid or deliberate practice or even
Speaker 1: high performance alone. So I wanted to create a concept
Speaker 1: that measured that as well. And my theory was, or
Speaker 1: my hypothesis was, Hey, I bet this is really important,
Speaker 1: so let's include it in there. And I think, especially
Speaker 1: in the corporate market, they're really going to like a
Speaker 1: book like this because it's it's saying how important leadership
Speaker 1: really is. You know, Tom Brady can't be Tom Brady
Speaker 1: without leading that team. I don't care how good he
Speaker 1: throws that ball. I don't care what his grid is.
Speaker 1: If he doesn't lead that team, well he ain't Tom Brady.
Speaker 1: And so I think we nailed that, and that to
Speaker 1: me rose up out of the study. I didn't even
Speaker 1: know how important that one would be. So in terms
Speaker 1: of outcomes, it's correlation with influence, happiness, life, satisfaction, all
Speaker 1: those those getting really fired up you can tell yeah,
Speaker 1: I can, you know, let's push talk. I'm sorry. And health.
Speaker 1: That's the last thing, like, oh yeah, health outcomes, which
Speaker 1: is huge. You know, high performers are somewhere of forty
Speaker 1: percent more likely to work out three to five times
Speaker 1: for a week than you know, the average person. That's
Speaker 1: pretty extraordinary forty percent. You know, it's the health outcomes,
Speaker 1: positive health outcomes being associated with this too. I think
Speaker 1: that's important because I think the world's really struggling that
Speaker 1: at least here in North America. Oh yeah, mental and
Speaker 1: physical health for sure. Can we talk about each of
Speaker 1: the five and I'll read like one item from each
Speaker 1: of it because I imagine you wouldn't want me to
Speaker 1: read the whole scale, right, that's proprietary information, Is that right? Oh? No? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: one item sounds great, and we can talk about each habit. Great.
Speaker 1: So let's start with clarity. I know what I want.
Speaker 1: I'm clear about my goals and passions. Tell me why
Speaker 1: that's important. It's important because we found that high performers
Speaker 1: one of the first practices each chapter is a habit,
Speaker 1: and then we break it down into three practices that
Speaker 1: we saw led to the development or the improvement of
Speaker 1: that habit. And one of their habits is to envision
Speaker 1: what we call the future for and that is high
Speaker 1: performers tend to enter situations thinking through these four things themselves,
Speaker 1: like who do I want to be in the situation?
Speaker 1: Their social context, as in, how do I want to
Speaker 1: interact with people here, the skills or the strengths that
Speaker 1: they want to demonstrate in that situation or develop, and
Speaker 1: the service or the contributions they want to make there.
Speaker 1: So we call it self social skills and service, and
Speaker 1: critical to that is the one you just read about
Speaker 1: is they're continually seeking clarity on who they are and
Speaker 1: what's important to them. And that's why they're able to
Speaker 1: adjust course or even stay resilient because they know what's
Speaker 1: important to them, which sounds so seemingly obvious, except that
Speaker 1: we're often told that we're supposed to get clarity, but
Speaker 1: high performers happen to be seekers. They seek clarity there.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're not the ones who evaluate their performance
Speaker 1: on New Year's Eve only you know, they're not New
Speaker 1: Year's goal set. They're very consistently and seeking is this
Speaker 1: right for me? Should I be doing this? Do I
Speaker 1: really care about this? Is this something that's going to
Speaker 1: you know, lead to you know, fulfillment for myself? So
Speaker 1: you know, I know what I want. I'm clear about
Speaker 1: my goals and passions. But it's you know, I know
Speaker 1: what will make me successful. I know how to achieve
Speaker 1: what's important to me. I have clarity about what I
Speaker 1: really want to accomplish in my life, or in this context,
Speaker 1: it's really sitting and ruminating about that. Am I clear
Speaker 1: about what's important to hear? And coming back to Oprah again.
Speaker 1: And the only reason I keep mentioned to her is
Speaker 1: because you know, I'm blessed to work with her, and
Speaker 1: we have a course coming out soon. It's my second
Speaker 1: Oprah dot com course, and so it's on my mind.
Speaker 1: Every time you do a meeting with Oprah. She has
Speaker 1: this thing. She says, what's the intention for this meeting?
Speaker 1: And she asked at the beginning of every meeting. She
Speaker 1: always wants to know what's the intention of this meeting?
Speaker 1: And that is a great example of seeking clear before
Speaker 1: they enter situations. High performers are asking that type of question.
Speaker 1: They're trying to get more clarity as they are about
Speaker 1: to begin something. Yeah, So that habit seems to I.
Speaker 1: I was wondering where you bring in the purpose or
Speaker 1: the mattering part, and I see that as part of
Speaker 1: habit one. Yeah, that how do I matter in this situation?
Speaker 1: The third practices define what's meaningful, because you know, I
Speaker 1: like to say not everything that's achievable is important. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: for sure, brother, for sure. There's a story in there
Speaker 1: in that. Probably one of the most successful people I
Speaker 1: ever coached myself personally, you know, as a woman in
Speaker 1: fortune five hundred and had ten thousand employees under her
Speaker 1: direct report, and we were talking about something and she
Speaker 1: kind of gave me that language in her own dialogue.
Speaker 1: She was realizing that she'd climbed a lot of mountains,
Speaker 1: but many of them are the wrong mountains. And so
Speaker 1: I tell people all the time, it's not always achievement.
Speaker 1: That you think that you're after more achievement, but and
Speaker 1: we all really do believe that in some ways. But
Speaker 1: a lot of people are good at checklists and to
Speaker 1: do lists, and they got the great planners, and they
Speaker 1: really are good at knocking off the task and the
Speaker 1: activities on a workplan. But for many people, achievement is
Speaker 1: not the problem. Alignment is. Yeah, And that brings to
Speaker 1: me lots of ideas of authenticity. So I think that
Speaker 1: one I would put authenticity as part of that. It
Speaker 1: sounds good, and I may in fact do that when
Speaker 1: I write for your site. Yeah, you know, we asked too.
Speaker 1: You know. Part of that is we give a lot
Speaker 1: of questions and here to ask to kind of aim
Speaker 1: yourself in. One of the sking clarity questions is how
Speaker 1: can I make this effort personally meaningful to me? And
Speaker 1: I think that's important. I recently had a team member
Speaker 1: who in one of my companies who we let go.
Speaker 1: And in the sort of the debrief process of letting
Speaker 1: this person go, we had this conversation and they, you know,
Speaker 1: they said, well, I just, you know, I was doing
Speaker 1: a lot of things and sometimes it just wasn't meaningful.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, we're changing people's lives. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: You know. But it's like that person like, look, I
Speaker 1: do email too, you know, I do so yeah too.
Speaker 1: I've got to do a lot of menial tasks, but
Speaker 1: I make them meaningful to me by seeking clarity on
Speaker 1: what that meaning could be. And that's why I'm able
Speaker 1: to stay in the game longer than a lot of
Speaker 1: people would quit by getting bored. Yeah that's great. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's move on to habit too, which is energy.
Speaker 1: So one item would be like, I feel highly energized
Speaker 1: every day. Now, I imagine you don't treat these six
Speaker 1: as completely independent of each other, right, but as kind
Speaker 1: of feeding off each other, right, Like the more quality
Speaker 1: you have, the more energy you have for the task, right,
Speaker 1: or the more energy you're right. So these kinds, would
Speaker 1: you agree they feed off each other? They do? And
Speaker 1: in our very first methodology report, we found that it
Speaker 1: was cool that each of these habits correlated strongly with
Speaker 1: long term success, but they each actually correlated with in
Speaker 1: one another too. They were distinct enough, you know, to
Speaker 1: pass the test of distinction and differentiation. But yeah, the
Speaker 1: more clarity you have, the odds are, the more energy
Speaker 1: you have because you won't be wiped out doing things
Speaker 1: you hate, you know. And that combined all six also
Speaker 1: added up to a total higher score in high performance,
Speaker 1: which is kind of how we started drilling down on
Speaker 1: which ones mattered most. But yeah, generating energy is everything
Speaker 1: because I think, especially today, this is going to be
Speaker 1: a popular habit in chapter because a lot of people
Speaker 1: they feel like the energy that they're experiencing your life
Speaker 1: is just energy they have or do not have, you know,
Speaker 1: similar to people who might think, well, I'm happy or
Speaker 1: I'm not happy, and as if you know, there's no
Speaker 1: will component there, you know, or no ability to raise
Speaker 1: those numbers or those feelings or those sensations consciously. And
Speaker 1: our energy that we are experiencing mentally, emotionally and physically
Speaker 1: is under a great degree of our command. And when
Speaker 1: we discover how much that is now we really want
Speaker 1: to optimize our health now we want to bring more
Speaker 1: intention and joy to experiences. Now we want to learn.
Speaker 1: And this is my favorite phrase from that chapter is
Speaker 1: release tension, set intension, and that is you dig on this.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people are going to cover this.
Speaker 1: When I studied how high performers, why is it they
Speaker 1: didn't burn out? It was weird. They're more successful, but
Speaker 1: they perceive that they have less stress than their peers.
Speaker 1: And I thought, was it just because they, you know,
Speaker 1: are more confident in handling stress they've done it before,
Speaker 1: or they seem like maybe their peers were running around crazy.
Speaker 1: I'm like, why is it that they report less stress?
Speaker 1: And others like, what was it? And so when I
Speaker 1: started to get in the structured interviews and in conversations,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that they were using less energy throughout the day,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't that they had less tasks that demanded
Speaker 1: all of them or could be stressful. It was they
Speaker 1: had this practice of renewal in their transitions. They had
Speaker 1: what we now call master They mastered transitions. So I'll
Speaker 1: give you a great example. It's very tactical. You and
Speaker 1: I do it every day. Probably you know there's a
Speaker 1: transition moment between answering emails and opening up keynote to
Speaker 1: make a presentation. What most people do is they're bleeding
Speaker 1: energy mental focus, energy, if you will, and also physical
Speaker 1: energy in their kind of sort of tractoring through their
Speaker 1: transitions without releasing the mental focus from one to enter
Speaker 1: the next one. And what I found, for example, a
Speaker 1: high performer, instead of just you know, doing email immediately
Speaker 1: opening the presentation, work on the presentation, they would finish
Speaker 1: email and they would do something casual that they didn't
Speaker 1: know they were doing at the time. They'd get up,
Speaker 1: they'd walk around the office, say hi to some people,
Speaker 1: get some water, maybe stretch a little bit, ah, sit
Speaker 1: back down and start the next activity. And they had
Speaker 1: all these little renewal practices between activities. Not like they
Speaker 1: took a walk at lunch, but with a lot of
Speaker 1: them did stuff like that. It was between the activities
Speaker 1: of the day where they refreshed themselves mentally, emotional or
Speaker 1: physically before entering the next activity. It's the person before
Speaker 1: walking into the meeting or their fifth meeting, I should say,
Speaker 1: they go to the bathroom, you know, spash a little
Speaker 1: water on their face, do a couple jumping jacks, then
Speaker 1: walk into the next one, or it's the person who
Speaker 1: they pull up to their house from a long day
Speaker 1: of work and before going in to say hi to
Speaker 1: their honey, they just close their eyes and release tension
Speaker 1: with maybe a you know, a sixty second or five
Speaker 1: minute meditation, then go in intentionally on what kind of
Speaker 1: mom or dad they want to be. I like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to describe it other than they
Speaker 1: mastered these transitions, and they're like little transitions and not
Speaker 1: these big ones at the beginning or the end of
Speaker 1: the day necessarily. They're like throughout the day. They're doing
Speaker 1: these little renewal peros that all culminate to their ability
Speaker 1: to recharge throughout the day, not just that one time
Speaker 1: in a meditation or at the very end, you know,
Speaker 1: or during that one time at lunch. It's lots of
Speaker 1: little renewals that keep them recharged. And we talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of those in the book, and that was
Speaker 1: for me. I learned a lot in that and just
Speaker 1: observing I was like, wow, I got to start doing
Speaker 1: a better job at that. So now between the major
Speaker 1: activities I go and my routine is I'll go and
Speaker 1: drink glass of water, all bounce in place and take
Speaker 1: ten deep breaths while bouncing in place, not like jumping,
Speaker 1: but just like sort of chea gong bounce, like a
Speaker 1: Tai cheek bounce, just loosening the shoulders, letting my body
Speaker 1: bounce up and down, breathing ten times in and out,
Speaker 1: and then I'll go down the next activity and I've
Speaker 1: entered way more present, way more focused, and I feel
Speaker 1: like my performance went up too. So this, you know,
Speaker 1: makes me think of Andre Eriksson's work showing that the
Speaker 1: highest performers in his sample didn't necessarily have the more
Speaker 1: quantity about it, but they're more efficient and they also
Speaker 1: rested the most as well. So this seems to dovetail
Speaker 1: nicely with that kind of finding. It does. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: like that, so there's an efficiency here. The efficiency of
Speaker 1: your time seems to be somehow related to this energy managing.
Speaker 1: It's like managing your energy, your ability to manage your energy,
Speaker 1: not necessarily as a treat like I either have a
Speaker 1: lot of energy or not, because you find extroverts have
Speaker 1: on average more energy than introverts, and I would hate
Speaker 1: for this these habits to be all about extroverts. Y,
Speaker 1: that's right, So that's what we're happy with and the
Speaker 1: habits didn't correlate with a traditional perspective, I should say,
Speaker 1: in personality. And there's a study in here that we
Speaker 1: cided as well, for you know, some nine hundred CEOs.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a huge difference in extroverts versus introverts in
Speaker 1: terms of their performance over the long term. I know
Speaker 1: there's a lot of debate about that, certainly in academic circles.
Speaker 1: There's very little debate about that, by the way, in
Speaker 1: high performance circles in terms of like corporate practitioners, because
Speaker 1: you know, anyone's who's done a lot of work has
Speaker 1: seen lots of introverts crush it and lots of extra
Speaker 1: rits crushing, you know. And it's really about the mindset
Speaker 1: and the routines and the habits that are happening to
Speaker 1: support that person. And I think that's what you said
Speaker 1: is a really important distinction because the reason I said
Speaker 1: when we label to have it to generate energy is
Speaker 1: because they are consciously doing that. It doesn't say, you know,
Speaker 1: have energy by trade or birth. You know, it says
Speaker 1: there are these activities that they are doing that just
Speaker 1: they're doing it more consciously and consistently in other people,
Speaker 1: and that's giving them the edge absolutely. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about the next one, because I know that you have
Speaker 1: a life too, so you don't want to spend the
Speaker 1: rest of the day. Oh man, you know I dark
Speaker 1: out about this with you. Brother, I could say, you
Speaker 1: keep me on time because I'll go on and on.
Speaker 1: So I will. So the next one is, let's say
Speaker 1: about necessity. That's an interesting phrasing. That's kind of a
Speaker 1: unique phrasing. Right when I look at these items, they
Speaker 1: seem to have a lot to do with grits and
Speaker 1: working hard and having the motivation, the ability to self
Speaker 1: generate motivation in a way. But tell me why you
Speaker 1: called it necessity. It's very interesting. The first time I
Speaker 1: ever had a real touch of real sort of academic
Speaker 1: approach to organizational communication. A lot of the work we
Speaker 1: were doing there was more ethnographic, and I was very
Speaker 1: interested to see how do high performers actually talk about
Speaker 1: it and what are the things that they say that
Speaker 1: gives them the edge? And a lot of them if
Speaker 1: you go in and you ask a bunch of high
Speaker 1: performers like hey, why are you so good at what
Speaker 1: you do? They almost laugh and a lot of them
Speaker 1: say things like I don't have any other choice. Man.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's not like what we want it to be.
Speaker 1: For a nice you know, for a great ted talk
Speaker 1: like purpose and meaning and amazing. A lot of some
Speaker 1: that's there, no question, But a lot of times it's
Speaker 1: just like I have to get myself primed to do
Speaker 1: a good job here, or the competitors are to eat
Speaker 1: my lunch, or that new young hire is going to
Speaker 1: outpace me, or you know, my family is going to
Speaker 1: be left struggling. And for them it wasn't just like
Speaker 1: at first we wanted to call that's like, is this
Speaker 1: this is like emotional commitment, right, and so we want
Speaker 1: to call it emotional commitment. But looking through the transcripts
Speaker 1: and in the different ways we had to figure out
Speaker 1: how to do the first measurement of the first HPI,
Speaker 1: it was like, no, this is it is They feel
Speaker 1: it's necessary for them to do well. And it's not
Speaker 1: always just the internal standards of my identity or my
Speaker 1: beliefs or my purpose. It's sometimes those external ones, the
Speaker 1: social obligation or deadline. Like I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but dude, a deadline makes it necessary for me to
Speaker 1: get that book done. As soon as you give me
Speaker 1: a deadline, my output per hour kicks up. That's so interesting.
Speaker 1: So there's individual differences in that. Do you think there's
Speaker 1: some people where a deadline really crushes their spirit? I
Speaker 1: think it ends up being down to in the book,
Speaker 1: we call it real deadlines versus false deadline. You know
Speaker 1: what's that difference? That's interesting? Yeah, Well, and I were
Speaker 1: kind of joking about this in the beginning, like we
Speaker 1: get a lot of requests and we're blessed to have that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I get a lot of requests, Brandon, I need
Speaker 1: this by Thursday, by Friday d D. And I have
Speaker 1: this reply that I said almost anybody who sends me
Speaker 1: request because they are usually asking me for it by
Speaker 1: a certain time, and I say, hey, thanks for this.
Speaker 1: Could you write me an email back and explain when
Speaker 1: is the absolute drop dead date and time you need that,
Speaker 1: in which if you don't get it by that date,
Speaker 1: the world explodes or career crumbles, my reputation is ruined
Speaker 1: forever and a series of negative consequences upon which there
Speaker 1: is no hopeful return. Ac curbs. Please let me know
Speaker 1: that date, because every day before that is called a preference,
Speaker 1: and honestly, before you wrote me, I got hundreds of
Speaker 1: preferences in front of you. So the only way I
Speaker 1: can possibly sort Yeah, that's good is by knowing the men. Right,
Speaker 1: you're good, You're a good brand. I'll send you the email, Brendan,
Speaker 1: you're good. That's influence. That's an influence ability. I would
Speaker 1: put that under that habit. That's very good. That's very good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I changed my contact forte to just due to the
Speaker 1: high volume the commitments I receive. I'm not just I'm
Speaker 1: just simply not taking on any more commitments till next
Speaker 1: year because I need in order to help people maximally,
Speaker 1: I need to focus on what I'm currently doing, as
Speaker 1: opposed to spread myself too thin. That's what I wrote.
Speaker 1: But I feel like I guess they're just different approaches
Speaker 1: to this. You know, it's easy to get overwhelmed, and
Speaker 1: that's a that's an incredibly gracious way to respond, Brendan,
Speaker 1: incredibly gracious, well, because you know it ends this way
Speaker 1: and it basically ends with you know, can you please
Speaker 1: let me know that drop dad date and why it
Speaker 1: specifically occurs. Then for you, what if you honestly like
Speaker 1: read the request and you just don't want to do
Speaker 1: it though, Like I'm saying, like, what's your rejection for that?
Speaker 1: You can't do everything in life? No? Yeah, very similar
Speaker 1: to what you would. What you just described that you
Speaker 1: wrote is that I'm very focused on this particular project
Speaker 1: right now. If it's not an emergency or a real deadline,
Speaker 1: please you know, take this action or you know, defer it.
Speaker 1: But I have that type of thing as well. Our
Speaker 1: no is very gracious, and I talk about this in
Speaker 1: the book in the productivity habit is that the ability
Speaker 1: to say no first after you've achieved a certain level
Speaker 1: of success is important. And to convince yourself about why
Speaker 1: you would say yes, I like that becomes now the game.
Speaker 1: You know that makes no sense? Yeah, yes gets you
Speaker 1: in the game, and then no keeps you at the
Speaker 1: top levels of the game. So when you're you know,
Speaker 1: when you're in your twenties, you say yes to everything
Speaker 1: because you're just trying to get influence and experience, find
Speaker 1: out what your thing is, you know, help people. And
Speaker 1: then then at some point, if you're responsible for the
Speaker 1: powers that you have developed, however you define that, then
Speaker 1: you have to now start prioritizing and the way to
Speaker 1: do that is to immediately start with no and then
Speaker 1: justify to yourself why that should be prioritized up for
Speaker 1: you to even take it on. My friend Brian Holiday
Speaker 1: actually wrote a really good article about why he says
Speaker 1: no to everything, very similar to what you just said.
Speaker 1: I really like that. It's one of those things, though,
Speaker 1: when you say that too much, that people think you're
Speaker 1: kind of a jerk, because, especially people who don't know
Speaker 1: what it's like to receive a million requests, you can
Speaker 1: come across as kind of thinking you're better than others,
Speaker 1: when that's not what it's about at all. You know. No,
Speaker 1: here's the good news. I've got the you know, sort
Speaker 1: of scientific answer for that a little bit, and that
Speaker 1: is so our next habit and the fourthabit is to
Speaker 1: increase productivity. And here's how high performers did it. You
Speaker 1: can't possibly write an action based, sort of business oriented
Speaker 1: book without having stupid acronyms. But well, my colleague Martin
Speaker 1: Sellingman is the master at that end. All right, it's true.
Speaker 1: So this one or just you know, some alliteration or
Speaker 1: some type of you know, this one is just like
Speaker 1: here's what we found. The fancy phrases you will get
Speaker 1: the idea and why high performance became that way. The
Speaker 1: first thing they did is they identified that what we
Speaker 1: call their PFI, their primary field of interest, and that
Speaker 1: was a big thing. And they all talked about the
Speaker 1: day when you discover the primary field of interest, it's
Speaker 1: real for you versus the busy work, right because there's
Speaker 1: a difference between busy work and your life's work. And
Speaker 1: when people hone in on what the real primary field
Speaker 1: of interest is for them, things really shift. But then
Speaker 1: they went to another level deeper and they identified their PQO,
Speaker 1: which is the sort of abbreviation for prolific quality output,
Speaker 1: and they identified in that primary field of interest in
Speaker 1: which they wanted to be recognized, received rewarded, or dedicate
Speaker 1: their life to because they're calling. They identified the primary
Speaker 1: and the quality outputs they would have to create in
Speaker 1: which they would have to be prolific. And when they
Speaker 1: made the shift, and this is an obvious and very
Speaker 1: clear shift that a very high performer I talked with
Speaker 1: when I talked about because I ask questions like, tell
Speaker 1: me about a time when you shifted into the highest
Speaker 1: gear of performance in your life. What changed then? So
Speaker 1: many of them, you know, when they finally dug down
Speaker 1: and we really got to the question. We essdenced the
Speaker 1: question they would discover, Oh why realized that my craft
Speaker 1: was this and I was really going to aim that,
Speaker 1: Just do that or you know, it's a story in
Speaker 1: the world of a steam job is coming back to
Speaker 1: an Apple when it's floundering and saying, hey, you guys
Speaker 1: have too many product lines here. We're only going to
Speaker 1: do these things primary field of interests, and we're be
Speaker 1: prolific in creating this type of output the highest level
Speaker 1: of quality in this way, and be more prolific in
Speaker 1: creating more than anybody else ever. And it's like high
Speaker 1: iPod iPhone, and it's just over and over and over.
Speaker 1: You know, whether it's you know, some sports people identifying
Speaker 1: that specific sport and the wins that they need to
Speaker 1: climb the national rankings on or the worldwide rankings on,
Speaker 1: or it's you know, a musician whoever it is, those
Speaker 1: two things. When those align, you figure out that primary
Speaker 1: field of interest, and then you figure out the prolific
Speaker 1: quality output. And then you identify and this is the
Speaker 1: hardest part that we're really talking about, You identify the
Speaker 1: rest as distractions towards your ability to do PQ. Oh,
Speaker 1: so it sounds like a lot of like deep focus,
Speaker 1: deep focus added with deep courage and the ability to
Speaker 1: say no to things that are great. So I see
Speaker 1: lots of things that are boundary setting, the importance of
Speaker 1: boundary setting, importance, prioritization, time management, all that stuff is
Speaker 1: kind of folded under productivity. Is that right? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: you know what I think the distinction is is that
Speaker 1: you and I say things like that. You know too,
Speaker 1: especially when you know, speaking around the world, people their
Speaker 1: eyes can glaze over when you say boundary setting or
Speaker 1: time management or increasing productivity. But then you bring it
Speaker 1: back to that sense of self satisfaction and meaning that
Speaker 1: comes from having a sense of personal power and focusing
Speaker 1: your life on things that matter to you and the
Speaker 1: guts to do that, the guts to say no to
Speaker 1: the things that don't matter to you is the defining
Speaker 1: hallmark of high performers. But I also say, just you know,
Speaker 1: the good life. I mean, there's so many things that
Speaker 1: you and I get requests to that would be so
Speaker 1: amazing to go and do. By the way, I recognize
Speaker 1: it's difficult to make a distinction of saying yes and
Speaker 1: no between good and two bad things is easy. It's
Speaker 1: when you have a lot of good opportunities that it
Speaker 1: gets harder. And I don't pretend to be the guru
Speaker 1: on that. I would recommend everybody reading Rushworth Kidter's work.
Speaker 1: He's pretty much the pre eminent ethics trainer worldwide. Most
Speaker 1: of the fortune one hundred Good or Bad took his
Speaker 1: ethics training and he wrote a book called How Good
Speaker 1: People Make Tough Decisions. And all listeners should listen. If
Speaker 1: you're going to read hyper Worm's Happen, that's awesome, compliment
Speaker 1: it with that book because it will help you make
Speaker 1: those right choices for you and the others that you
Speaker 1: lead and serve. That's great. Thank you for that recommendation.
Speaker 1: We'll try to put that in the show notes. Oh cool.
Speaker 1: In the instance of time management, we talked about influence already,
Speaker 1: we touched upon that. One of the items is I'm
Speaker 1: good at persuading people to do things. I'll be honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm a little critical of this one because these kind
Speaker 1: of items are actually very correlated with grandiose narcissism. These
Speaker 1: things could rate out of the MPI as well. I
Speaker 1: have strong leadership skills. People describe me as highly influential.
Speaker 1: But the other two, how do you distinguish this from,
Speaker 1: you know, manipulative exploitation. Sure, well, first, the one you're
Speaker 1: counting on is our most recent methodology report for the
Speaker 1: that's right, Yeah, for the academic version versus the one
Speaker 1: that informed a lot of the book. Oh okay, that's
Speaker 1: good information. Actually cool. Yeah, yeah, this one was to
Speaker 1: the one you're reading, is the methodology report to kind
Speaker 1: of run this against other validity other scales have been validated.
Speaker 1: So your point that one does have that theme and
Speaker 1: style of that work before it, because we wanted to
Speaker 1: assess where that's true or not. The actual HPI, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, five times longer than when you're reading there,
Speaker 1: the professional assessment version is much more. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more under the influence related to empathy. Oh that's good,
Speaker 1: that's very good. Yeah, I'll send you the full one.
Speaker 1: It's pleasy. Do please do the ability to for example,
Speaker 1: one you don't see in there because it was, again,
Speaker 1: this was a validity report. The actual assessment has, for example,
Speaker 1: the ability to garner trust, to create camaraderie less oriented
Speaker 1: towards those ones. Unfortunately, just the traditionally most of the items.
Speaker 1: In order to sort of assess the predictabilidity of this,
Speaker 1: we had to bounce it against things that had been
Speaker 1: correlated with success specifically, and that one I agree with
Speaker 1: you. You You know, I'm good at persuading people to go
Speaker 1: do things. I haven't met a high performer who wasn't
Speaker 1: good at persuasion, but they weren't also using it just
Speaker 1: to you know, right right, that really has a very
Speaker 1: instrumental feel to it, right. It's not consistent with your
Speaker 1: love thing. So that's why that's why Hyperworn's have it.
Speaker 1: Number five is called develop influence, and the three practices
Speaker 1: that we found that develop it is. Number one teach
Speaker 1: people how to think, and that is you have to
Speaker 1: consistently say what do you think about this? Or hey, guys,
Speaker 1: let's think about it this way. When you want to
Speaker 1: influence people, you're helping shape their thoughts and you're also
Speaker 1: asking for it. How would you think about it? How
Speaker 1: would we go about it? Number two is they challenge
Speaker 1: people to grow, and so influencers I like that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They challenge people's character, they challenge people's connections or relationships,
Speaker 1: they challenge people's contributions, and it's in challenging that they
Speaker 1: gain influence. You know, Challenging can be like persuading. It
Speaker 1: can sound very instrumental, you know, but it's the way
Speaker 1: that you use it. And you know, precision can be
Speaker 1: a positive tool or a negative tool, and a frankly
Speaker 1: socan leadership, and so can productivity. Right, all these things.
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, grit can be a terrible thing as well,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh yeah, no, it's true, No, it's very true. Actually,
Speaker 1: I modify what I said. A lot of these items.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily grandiose narson, but the assertiveness aspect of extraversion.
Speaker 1: You would find lots of these kinds of items, you know,
Speaker 1: like I'm really good at persuading people and having them
Speaker 1: do what I want, and I'm very effective at telling
Speaker 1: stories and et cetera, et cetera. So you see a
Speaker 1: very strong link between extremely high levels of assertiveness and
Speaker 1: grandiose narcissism, which I find really interesting. Oh dude, And
Speaker 1: you know what the coolest thing is, man, You're good.
Speaker 1: Assertiveness did not strongly correlate with high performance overall scores
Speaker 1: you're talking about with a larger test battery or with
Speaker 1: this one, because with this one I mean the idea
Speaker 1: it has to These items are straight out of the
Speaker 1: assertiveness rule book. That's right, these ones in your scale, yeah,
Speaker 1: any one? Yeah. The ones that I'm taught talking about
Speaker 1: is when we asked the survey to high performers, Okay,
Speaker 1: good like empathy, ability to garner trust, that kind of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll give you the actual item is the actual item
Speaker 1: was I am more assertive than my peers. High performers
Speaker 1: didn't strongly. They don't feel like they're more assertive than
Speaker 1: the average person, even if and for me, I think
Speaker 1: persuasion or leadership, and even the ability to describe myself
Speaker 1: as highly influential as an example, I think in real
Speaker 1: life language. And I think this is where obviously methodology
Speaker 1: comes to play in academics and science is where the
Speaker 1: meaning is important. Like you know, our next, our last,
Speaker 1: habits demonstrate courage. It was so hard to find a
Speaker 1: lot of strong agreement on what courage was in the
Speaker 1: academic science. You know, it's difficult. There's not a lot
Speaker 1: of people who agree on exactly what courage really means
Speaker 1: if we're going to measure it. I feel the same
Speaker 1: way in the popular culture. If you say asservativeness to somebody.
Speaker 1: A psychologist thinks of that in very different way than
Speaker 1: a fortune and fifty executive. How's a fortune and fifty?
Speaker 1: How do they think of it? They would associate even
Speaker 1: more with what I would lead towards demonstrating courage, in
Speaker 1: the sense of, oh, I stand up for myself, I
Speaker 1: speak up for myself. I am willing to push my
Speaker 1: ideas even when other people are pushing back. I think
Speaker 1: that's all a psychologists because sectualized as well. But we're
Speaker 1: talking about the extreme high ends. You get dominance that
Speaker 1: can easily turn into dominance if it's too high. A
Speaker 1: good point, absolutely, so maybe you know, for some of
Speaker 1: these things, maybe there's a golden mean. I think so.
Speaker 1: I think that's a good point. My sense about the
Speaker 1: matter is that language really matters in self assessments, and
Speaker 1: I think people would you know, if I'm filling out something,
Speaker 1: and then this is just always going to be a
Speaker 1: part of self assessment when individuals filling it out for themselves.
Speaker 1: You know, when they say, if I read I'm good
Speaker 1: at persuading people to do things, you know, I might yeah,
Speaker 1: if I read I'm more assertive than others. I mean
Speaker 1: I don't want to be like you know, I don't
Speaker 1: want to Yeah, you know what I mean is yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's how they might be identifying in that
Speaker 1: particular item. My reference with the assertiveness so cool partics
Speaker 1: was just figuring out the right words. Sounds good. I
Speaker 1: don't want to harp on that. Well, man, this is
Speaker 1: actually I love this stuff. Let's go to the last one.
Speaker 1: Of course, you talked a little about courage. To me,
Speaker 1: a lot of these items have to do the resiliency,
Speaker 1: the ability to fall back, to get back from setbacks.
Speaker 1: This one is assertiveness, though I speak of for myself,
Speaker 1: even when it's hard. That's assertiveness. That's pure assertiveness. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I anticipate the new situation. Oh sorry, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't want to read the metloud. This
Speaker 1: is proprietary. Yeah, so that's cool. So tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit more about courage and would you link that
Speaker 1: a little bit to post traumatic growth as well? You know,
Speaker 1: I haven't studied that link. I would guess it'd be true.
Speaker 1: I mean, my God would say yes, I haven't studied
Speaker 1: enough about post traumatic growth to know all of the
Speaker 1: levers there. I guess would be yeah, but I think
Speaker 1: what we found here that was really important was the
Speaker 1: ability to respond quickly made the difference for high performers
Speaker 1: that you know, it's easy to avoid for something for
Speaker 1: so long that performance declines. And we found this with people,
Speaker 1: for example, who ran organizations who know they would talk
Speaker 1: about a period of years they knew there was a problem,
Speaker 1: but they kept waiting, you know, well, when we get
Speaker 1: some new hires, we'll fix that. Or we found entrepreneurs, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I knew the process didn't work, but you know, I
Speaker 1: thought the customers weren't that bothered by it, and they
Speaker 1: waited too long to face a challenge or an emergency,
Speaker 1: and that really hurt their performance. And yet we also
Speaker 1: found that there was that part of that assertiveness that says, hey,
Speaker 1: despite that, I'm going to face it. What we did
Speaker 1: find a lot of agreement in the academical literature about
Speaker 1: courage is that they were to take action, usually for
Speaker 1: a moral or what they senses a higher reason, in
Speaker 1: the face of fear, uncertainty, judgment, rejection, threat Taking that
Speaker 1: action despite those things is what qualified his courage in
Speaker 1: both the eye of the beholder and those who viewed them.
Speaker 1: And we found that debate be true. And one of
Speaker 1: the other elements that was so powerful about their ability
Speaker 1: to demonstrate courage was that they spoke up not just
Speaker 1: for themselves, but they also spoke up for other people.
Speaker 1: When they saw a wrong or when someone smashed down
Speaker 1: someone's ideas, that they would say, well, hold on, that
Speaker 1: was a good contribution. That's scary. I mean, we always
Speaker 1: everyone's listening has had had that point in their life
Speaker 1: when they were in a meeting and they wanted to
Speaker 1: speak up for somebody, but they didn't and they regretted it,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and we know the hyprowormers would on
Speaker 1: average more likely to step into that and say something.
Speaker 1: I like that one a lot. So look, Brendan, I
Speaker 1: want to thank you for really making contact with the
Speaker 1: research community and really caring about getting the science right
Speaker 1: and validating the ideas. You're a very rare, rare breed
Speaker 1: in your field, and I mean that I think we
Speaker 1: could scientific prove that's true. Like I'm not just like
Speaker 1: that's not just my opinion. Like you look at the
Speaker 1: one hundreds of thousands of books on the self development
Speaker 1: bookshelf in the bookstore, and I want to roll my
Speaker 1: eyes at a lot of them because they're just armchair theorizing.
Speaker 1: So thank you for really taking that care. I think
Speaker 1: that I'm not sure if even your audience as fully
Speaker 1: aware of that fact. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it was helpful to have the audience because, you know,
Speaker 1: when I started been teaching High Performance Academy four D,
Speaker 1: a seminar on some of this stuff, what seven, no, gosh,
Speaker 1: nine years ago, something like that, and it was great
Speaker 1: because maybe it was my second one, and it was
Speaker 1: a little armchair theorizing from what I'd been through or
Speaker 1: how I'd coached people, but I didn't have, you know,
Speaker 1: the literature view or any empirical work behind it yet.
Speaker 1: And a person came out to me to say, you
Speaker 1: said this on stage, Brendan, how do you know it
Speaker 1: to be true? And I wasn't even satisfied with my
Speaker 1: own answer. That's a good question. Yeah, I thought, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'd better dig into this even more and
Speaker 1: hopefully one day, you know, if I read and study enough,
Speaker 1: I can learn how to do these types of things
Speaker 1: and find the right partners and friends to contribute it
Speaker 1: and write and also acknowledge you know, everything I said here.
Speaker 1: You know what one part that I do think makes
Speaker 1: me unique is you know a lot of people who
Speaker 1: want to be the grou and have the one hundred
Speaker 1: percent certainty. I mean, I opened this book, you know,
Speaker 1: after talking about sort of the method we went about
Speaker 1: it with probably what I don't know, seven eight paragraphs
Speaker 1: of saying, hey, we've also tested to see if this
Speaker 1: isn't true. And I'm sure we're at the tip of
Speaker 1: the iceberg because there's so much we don't know about
Speaker 1: high performers yet, because I feel like this is relatively
Speaker 1: an emerging field still, at least in the way we
Speaker 1: think about it in my genre. So I feel like
Speaker 1: we're learning so much. And so I'm also hoping that
Speaker 1: a lot of the academic or even the more professional community,
Speaker 1: these who are the practitioners in that performance specifically contribute ideas, blogs,
Speaker 1: articles to us, because one of my goals of my
Speaker 1: performance institute is to learn. I mean, that's one reason
Speaker 1: you and I got to connect, because I'm going to
Speaker 1: learn so much from you. And I don't think any
Speaker 1: science has ever done, you know, And I think it's
Speaker 1: always just learning the finer ways of replicating or breaking
Speaker 1: it down or expressing it to find out what's more
Speaker 1: and more true or likely. But I think we're all
Speaker 1: going to be a student in this game for a
Speaker 1: long time. Well, I think that what you just did
Speaker 1: suggest you should add one more habit of humility. What's
Speaker 1: wrong with you? Know? You see a lot in the
Speaker 1: High Performance to me, and it's just so much about
Speaker 1: overconfidence and crushing it. And with what you just said
Speaker 1: was a great example of humility, and I just hope
Speaker 1: that you incorporate that somewhat in your models of high performance.
Speaker 1: Matter of fact, it's in the what we call the
Speaker 1: High Performance Traps. It's in the last one of the
Speaker 1: last chapters of the book. We talk about the three
Speaker 1: things that ruin that's right over the long term, and
Speaker 1: number one, the number one thing was superiority. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that. Yeah. And then then
Speaker 1: I go on a whole tirade in there about humility. Right,
Speaker 1: I questioned myself, I'm like, if I take on superiority,
Speaker 1: does it make me sound superior? Here's a trick as
Speaker 1: a writer to make sure I wasn't doing that. So
Speaker 1: I do you mean if you're like say that, you're
Speaker 1: like the most at humility is that you're saying or
Speaker 1: just saying people who are superior are wrong. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you know, but it was one of
Speaker 1: the huge, huge lessons because I really believe that when
Speaker 1: we interviewed performers and asking when they had a period
Speaker 1: of we asked them, say three to five years, she
Speaker 1: were on a roll and suddenly that role or the
Speaker 1: hot hand ended like what led to that that was
Speaker 1: in your direct control and was part of either of
Speaker 1: your psychology or relationships. And the three traps that we
Speaker 1: talk about are beware superiority, beware dissatisfaction, and beware neglect.
Speaker 1: And that second one is so important to dissatisfaction because
Speaker 1: to your point, so much of the overconfidence or hustle
Speaker 1: and grind stuff is you know, you're supposed to you know,
Speaker 1: in the old phrase of you know, grin and bear it.
Speaker 1: And just we found the strivers and or high performers
Speaker 1: they're not striving dissatisfy that they actually do have a
Speaker 1: level of satisfaction consistently throughout the journey. And it is
Speaker 1: that satisfaction that enables them to access things like you know,
Speaker 1: presence or gratitude or flow or being in the zone.
Speaker 1: And it's not just grin and bear horrible, you know,
Speaker 1: work yourself to the grind nonsense. You know, it's actually
Speaker 1: high performers. The reason they're high performing is because they're
Speaker 1: enjoying the process and they're honoring the struggles that come
Speaker 1: up versus fighting them. And it's that enjoyment of the
Speaker 1: process that I was in access to higher performance. So important,
Speaker 1: so such an important point because you know, we find
Speaker 1: our own research that perfectionism is like one of the
Speaker 1: strongest correlates of grandiose narcissism, which is, you know, what
Speaker 1: you would call superiority. So they're linked, they're very much linked.
Speaker 1: Like those with a superiority complex are really really hard
Speaker 1: and perfectionistic on others as well as themselves, and they
Speaker 1: don't know that if they kind of relax those external
Speaker 1: standards a bit, they would actually get better performance. So
Speaker 1: I'm really glad that you include that as a trap. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being so gracious with your time,
Speaker 1: and I wish you all the well with your book
Speaker 1: and with this model. Thank you, my friend. I loved
Speaker 1: it so much just chalking with you, and I normally
Speaker 1: learn so much from you and continue to listening to
Speaker 1: the podcasts. So thanks for having me on. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast
Speaker 1: with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this
Speaker 1: episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something
Speaker 1: you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.