Elevate Yourself & Reach Your Potential | Robert Glazer | Modern Wisdom Podcast 236

Robert Glazer is a CEO and an author. Closing the gap between where we are and where we could be is one of the most important pursuits in life. Today, expect to learn Robert's best advice for elevating your spiritual, physical, intellectual and emotional capacities, why looking for a cerebral answer to every problem can be a poor strategy, the most powerful changes you can make to impact your growth and much more... Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Buy Friday Forward - https://amzn.to/2FOFam7 Follow Robert on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robert_glazer Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #growth #selfdevelopment #chriswilliamson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You and I get into a car accident, you know, this morning. You are enlightened and so you're like, oh, I've got insurance. That could have been worse. You walk away, you go, you go do three podcast interviews. You have a great day. You meet a bunch of friends, all this stuff. You know, I'm like swearing all day, freaking Chris and one more thing in the world. What could go wrong this year? And I, I get in a fight with my brother. I don't do the goal thing that I said I want to do. Like, we both experienced the same thing, right? How we chose to respond and react to that? We tell ourselves different truth. We tell ourselves the truth that my day got ruined by a car accident. Well, that's not, that's not really the whole truth. The truth is you had a car accident and that wasn't your fault, but you control what comes after that.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  What does the word elevate mean to you?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, to me, elevate just means taking it to another level. And I think the important part of that and, and the way I look at it differently than, than maybe some others. I think when you talk about success versus achievement. But to me, it's like really like to your potential, not other people's definition, not what other people think you should be doing. But how, how do you, within you, you know, raise your game to another level from, from the potential that lies within?

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  And you've looked at a framework to go around that. Obviously you're a business owner, multi, multinational, international business for multiple years now. Into the, uh, into the twilight of running a business, I think, as, as many people would, Yeah. would have said by this time, not many people have survived.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Or at least the teenage adolescent years. So, yeah, I, I sort of fell into this framework by accident. So I had actually started a note to my team about five years ago, every Friday. It came out of actually a personal leadership event that I went to for a week that was hugely impactful. Very focused on improving your morning, things you could do in the morning, kind of think, reflect, read something positive, write. The reading positive stuff that I wrote was just way too rainbow and unicorn-y for me. Like it didn't, it didn't do it for me. Like, so I, I had some stories and some quotes and some stuff that I saved and I just started.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Writing this note to my team every Friday of forty and it was something about we were all remote and it was about getting better or improvement and it sort of fell into a formula and I wasn't sure if people were reading it, but I liked writing it. It was a good habit. And eventually I heard from back from people that they were they were reading it. They were sharing outside the company. I told some other people around it. Eventually I opened it up so people outside the company could join it and there were a couple hundred thousand people within a few years signed up for it. So what happened was that when I went to write a book, our company had really grown. We had sort of tripled during that time period. I was meeting a lot of interesting high achievers from all around the world and I just did this pattern analysis sort of came up, which was

• 2:52Speaker 00

  I tried to write a compilation book called Friday Forward, ironically, which is the book I just released, but no one would buy it. And they said, look, you're not, no one knows you and you can't write a compilation and these stories are online. But the agent challenged me to like, what's the story behind the story? And so, so when I actually started looking at how would I fundamentally change my life in the last three years? What how would we grown as a company? We always said we invested in people holistically. Why were these little notes having an impact on strangers I had never met? And what was common about all these high achievers that I would run into? Like these four things, just, I mean, I had lists and crime and it just, you know, you know, punted squares and it just always came back to these four principles of, of, and this notion of

• 3:33Speaker 00

  the people build capacity faster than others and it was spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional. I just saw that pattern and actually from our company's standpoint, that's how how we had been training our employees, not, not, I mean, yes, there's direct training to what they're related to, but we had tried, we were training them to become better overall. And we were getting the business benefit of that and they were getting the benefit outside of work.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  It's odd to hear someone in the business sphere use the word spiritual. I don't.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I, and I, look, I, I struggled with that word. I am not very religious. I, I tried to find a hundred different words that might work for it because so spiritual capacity is not religious in my definition. It is, it is who you are and what you want most. For most people, I think it is being able to identify their personal core values, because I think that ties to their success everywhere. It ties to their success with their selves, with their family, with their business. And, and like, we work with leaders in our organization to identify their personal core values, so, so that they can understand themselves as a, as a leader. I think most people that is just the missing like rudder in their life in terms of getting the boat going in the right. They might have a really nice boat, might be going really fast and look pretty, but it is like going to Antarctica and

• 4:47Speaker 00

  they want to be in Hawaii. And it's not until they get to Antarctica that they realize that really doesn't make them happy.

• 4:54Chris Williamson?

  Shit, I didn't mean to be here. I've got two, two threads open in my mind. First one was Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism. On this show, he told us a story about an executive he worked with who'd got to the top of a particular industry, a very well-known industry. Twenty-five years he'd been working there and found that when he made it, he was VC of something international corp, multi, multi-limited.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  I think I know the story, yeah.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and he found out that he didn't have a, he couldn't talk to his son. Him and his son had a very strange relationship. His son was eighteen or twenty or something, and his son wouldn't speak to him. Literally, the, the relationship had just devolved into nothingness. And he got to this peak that he thought he was going to, this destination, this Antarctica, and then in Greg's words, he realized that he'd won the wrong game. And that avoidance of going incredibly fast in precisely the opposite direction, and that is the other part, which is a mental model called direction over speed, that if you're going in precisely the right direction, even very, very slowly, every day you're making progress. Conversely, you can go incredibly fast.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Degrees and you're going, this is what we learned with the parallel lines and yeah. There's a slide I showed in one of my presentations on capacity building and it has this beautiful house on a lake, right? It's a similar thing. And I say to people, you gotta be, if this house is your goal, you gotta be very honest with yourself about the why. Is the house to show yourself in the world you made it, right? Because then that might have one level of satisfaction. But if you say that it's this house that you have to have on a lake for your families and generations, and in getting the house, you lose your kids and get divorced, you are not likely to reach your goals. I just don't think a lot of us, if it was really about family, if family was the why, then

• 6:39Speaker 00

  you should not sacrifice family in the pursuit of that house. You should actually vacation with a family and pick the land together and work on the drawings together. You should not go isolate from yourself, from your family and make money. So I think that's, I came to understand at some point that that long term, the connection between spiritual and intellectual capacity. So intellectual capacity is like your operating system. How do you learn, plan, goal set, execute with discipline in service of what you want? Your long term goals need to fulfill one or more core values in order for it to work, right? You have to be working towards something that actually fulfills a core purpose, or else I feel like you get to that hollow, that hollow ending.

• 7:22Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. How do people find their why then? Is that where we start? Is that the beginning of the MOT that we're going through, the service that we're going through?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, look, a lot of people now, this is a great time to think about it. The why is a whole more complicated process. I, I consider the why similar to the sort of core purpose. I think it's the topic sentence. I think that's deep and requires a lot of work. If you figure out your core values first, to me, those are the pillars. Like if you can identify, these are my, these are the core principles I am, I've always been, I've impacted by. Sometimes the why starts to become clearer because it is literally like the roof of the topic sentence that sits across these pillars of values. I always say for a company, the why is easier because it's always usually why they started, right? Like we started to eradicate blindness and then they figure out the values as they get team. For a person, I think you More want to be clear on the values.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  And then the why is is hard work and it ties to Friday Ford I wrote this week, I mean, I will say ninety, not ninety, seventy percent of the time, I think people's why is connected to a deep point of pain or something early from their childhood or an experience they had for which in a in a in a positive way becomes the driving force for why they do what they do. I think it's very obvious for some people. I think for other people, it's sitting right there, but it's amazing how they haven't made the like a couple of times, because I've spent a lot of time paying attention to this. I've asked people a question or pointed it together and, you know, and and they look like suddenly very shocked and vulnerable versus some people are aware. I was at one of these dinners a while back and there was one of these, you know, sketch artists who, you know, does the whole thing in real time.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  And, uh, you know, because I'm around this a lot, I was like, this is an amazing skill. Like, how did you learn this? And she said, my purpose is to help people see and be heard. That was her answer. And I was like, you know, I'm like, you hear that out of one percent of point one percent of a lot of people. I said, can I ask you a question? Uh, and you don't have to answer it. I always predict that you don't want to. Does that come from a very personal place for you? I I just love to know. And she looked at me, she's like, I had a significant stutter until I was fifteen years old. So to me, that was just like, that is, that's a case study. And I think for that type of person, it's clear for a lot of us, there's this mental firewall in between the experience and and and and and that. And, you know, I think some people don't want to be as a victim. To me, it's just your story. It's your truth.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  You know, the example I think I used in the book is like, let's say you had a single parent who did their best for you and worked three jobs and got you into college and made you successful. But you were alone a lot after school because of that. You might go on to form this award winning after school education program. Like, it's not, it it it's just your truth. Your parent, you're not upset about your parent, they did the best, but there was something in that that that, you know, you wanted to fix for other people. And in fact, I actually think that severe drive come is what is what's created from that experience.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting what our childhood experiences and the predispositions and the presumptions that we have about the world and ourselves and how we connect with others. It's, it carries through and then it keeps on rearing its head. You know, like when you see dolphins jumping out of the ocean, you're like, it's flat. And then every so often it just jumps out and you're like, oh, there's that thing again. Stephen Pressfield was on the show a couple of weeks ago and he talks about shadow careers. Have you heard him talk about this?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it sounds like it might tie into what you're talking about there, that a shadow career, a lot of the time is analogous to what someone feels their true calling is, but it's far enough away that it protects them from failing at the thing they love.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Super interesting.

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  So the examples that he gave were people who always wanted to be actors that go and become entertainment lawyers. So they are close to the actor.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  I thought you were gonna say they become like play coaches or something like that, but yeah.

• 11:17Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, I guess, maybe the, maybe the director as well, perhaps, that they get to, they get to do it, but they don't, yeah, and they, they get to look after, they do to sort the deals. It's analogous, they're kind of there, but it's a shadow career. It's just a, it's the lesser version of what they genuinely wanted to be. Someone wanted to be a singer on stage and then became a teacher, teaching music. And you're like, well, you, you're almost there, but without the pressure. And I think that's kind of relates back to what you said.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And I think what we'll see coming out of COVID, I mean, how many people, you know, like people get comfortable and, you know, in that comfort, they are not willing to leave okay for better, right? So I think, you know, they get laid off and that shadow career becomes the primary career. It's oftentimes it takes that. I think COVID-19 will be a huge career transition for a lot of people. Say, look, you finally took away from me what I wasn't willing to kill, the sort of comfortable. And, and now I'm gonna, you know, in the midst of this without good options, I'm gonna lean into that, right? And it's interesting how that, how that happens.

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that we're going to see the? Reversal of the polarity of this stuff, because I was talking to Daniel Sloss, Netflix special comedian this week, and he said he thinks we've lost a whole generation of creatives and artists in all forms, live musicians that have realized they can't perform live, comedians that haven't been able to keep their comedy going, artists that can't go and sell their work to anyone because no one's going to art exhibitions, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder whether the people who had embraced their proper calling, their full calling, perhaps may have had it muted.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  They'll go the other way.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  And go into shadow career and the people for whom they were looking for this opportunity. I wonder whether you're going to have the entire bar stool get turned upside down.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, there are always some seismic impermanent changes in these things, but then I think there's always an overestimation of things that will never be the same, which, you know, isn't true. I just think you see, you see a ton of innovation, right? I think you see, I remember watching this video of an exercise person doing it in front of an apartment building and everyone was out on their roof.

• 13:21Chris Williamson?

  It was in Italy, I think.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I, I, I, look, I think the art, I think everyone will innovate. I think it will be over, you know, at some point, people are actually, you know, really desperate for music and creative and there'll be a ton of demand. But, but it's almost like there will be some rotation, right? Some of those people might give up and get into something else and then have a fear of going back. But I think then you have those other people we just talked about who might actually dive into that because there's no risk now. So I, I continue to see any business requires innovation. I think you'll see new types of art or digital art or outdoor art or concerts and some of that stuff will stick and people may, you know, you may just be more outdoor. I'm surprised still someone hasn't figured

• 14:06Speaker 00

  out how to do a massive socially distanced concert, you know, on a.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  So we had one, we had one. I shit you not, 10 minutes behind me.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:18Chris Williamson?

  There was a thousand person music festival going on. I know we're not talking like Creamfields or Coachella kind of size, but it was individual pens, people came in in zones. You had like a fenced bit around you, you and a group of six in a bubble and there was service going past, but live band, live music, stage show.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  And I'm sure people wanted, I'm sure they were so happy to have that, right?

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  It was a big.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  I could charge an arm and a leg for that.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  For sure. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So core values in that case, if core values are going to inform purpose. Where do we start finding our core values? Be some people listening perhaps for whom they are really questioning their current life direction at the moment. They think, come on, Robert, give me the, give me the red pill on core values.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's not that easy to do. I'm actually just finishing up a course on it because the thing I get asked about the most, I, I put a couple of resources in Elevate on this and questions you could ask. But it's a process that you go through and it, it takes six to 12 months, but you start it. And I think you start with some questions and there's some examples on there on, you know, thinking about the types of scenarios where you've been really, I, I'm going to paraphrase a complicated process into simplicity, sort of how it's done. Cause I've done this with now a bunch of different leaders and it works. But you ask a bunch of different questions that, and you answer them for yourselves that produce responses, like they're kind of best and worst.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  And, and you, you ask them a bunch of different ways, you create a bunch of different lists and then you start looking across the list for the themes because where was I successful? Where was I not? What are the characteristics of people I struggle with? Where do I not? You know, one of the, one of the, and you start thinking about those questions, you will start to notice patterns that will illuminate your core values. You know, one of the questions that I always say that that's the 101, the sort of 303, I don't know if you guys use that numbering in college classes, university classes.

• 16:10Chris Williamson?

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Sorry. Yeah. So 101 is what we call entry level university courses here. So the, the advanced version is if you wanted to sit down right now, write what, what someone you would want someone to say at your funeral for your eulogy about you and the impact that you had on their life. I did that exercise long before I did the actual core value work and a lot of the terminology was in there because when you get that raw about what, how do you want to be remembered? What do you want people to think of you? It gets to your values and the impact that you want to make. But, you know, I always say like it. The analogy that I give with core values, I think we know our core value when it's crossed, right? And that's a lot of us. So picture you're driving a really nice car through a tunnel.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  The lights are off. You hit the right side wall. It goes, you know, all this stuff. So you pull the car off the wall and you get in the lane and then you hit the other wall, right? This is kind of how we make decisions when we don't know what our, it's like, once we feel that it's crossed, we move away from it. But if that's a nice car, you'd really want the lights to be on and the things to be painted and saying, I shouldn't get near that wall. And that wall is that job, that person, that relationship, because, because these are opposite values to myself. I talk about the big three. I think when you think about, you know, where you choose to live, who you choose to partner, your vocation or work, if you make those decisions not aligned with your core values, it's very unlikely to work.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  You can marry someone or partner with someone who's different, different hobbies, interests, whatever. But when you get to the hard stuff, if your values aren't aligned, I think that's the, I don't think you're, it's not a clone. It's clearly the opposites attract. My wife and I are very different in respect. But when we get to the really hard, difficult stuff, we are philosophically aligned on it. So that's the, that, that, that, that's the basics. I think you can have decisions in front of you and you should say, I should do that. I should not do that.

• 18:04Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say that physical fitness, physical wellbeing is one of your core values. What are the rest of them?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so it's, it's, I'll just run through them quickly. The, oh, one of my core values.

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yours? What are yours?

• 18:17Speaker 00

  My, my, my, so my core values are health and vitality. So that includes physical fitness. So find a better way and share it, which explains a lot of what I do. Self reliance, one that I came up with that really is fitting, but it took me a while to get the right word, which is respectful authenticity. And then the last is long-term orientation. So if I pick some activity that is aligned to all of those, or if I pick a parental activity, like I am so happy and I'm doing well. If I do something that is crosses a lot of those, then not so well. So when you think about those first two, like find a better way at health and vitality, right? Every year I pick a fitness challenge or something new for me to do because I haven't done it. It's better way. And then it forces me to train

• 19:00Speaker 00

  and, you know, be healthy and that's important. And so we talked to our-

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  What was this year's?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  This year's is a half marathon, which I'm is I'm gonna have to do

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Social distance.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Yes, but I'm working up towards that distance. I've biked from London to Paris two years ago with a group. I've done Olympic triathlon. I've just a bunch of different stuff, but it's interesting. Like when we talk to our kids around, you know, we have family core values too. And when we talk to them around like not having a third cookie, you know, it is under the value of because we talk about being healthy and that's not healthy. It's not a rule. It's a it aligns to a value.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Ben Bergeron from the CrossFit world? You would really, really enjoy his work.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe I, yeah.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  He's an ex coach of Matt Fraser, Fittest Man on the Planet. He has a podcast called Chasing Excellence, which is named after his book. And I would highly you and him sing very much from the same hymn sheet, especially with regards to the family values thing. Everything that he does is driven from his values. I think that's great. I spent a lot of time this year working on my core values and it's really informed a lot of my direction. It's helped me to lean into discomfort in projects because I know that it is truly aligned with the things that I do as opposed to previously, especially if you suffer with imposter syndrome, which we all do.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Which all successful people do. You know, people who've gotten there for the wrong reasons don't seem to have it.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we also, we realize.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  People who are lucky never have imposter syndrome. It's interesting. People who work hard.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  I'll, I'll take that as a compliment in that case. Yeah, so it's really, really helped. So everyone that's listening, if you haven't gone away and done that, get yourself a copy of Elevate. Otherwise, Chris Sparks, he has an experiment without limits. There's some great worksheets in that. Taylor Pearson also has some great worksheets, some good ways to do it. So we've, we've spoken about the spiritual. Should we go into the intellectual next? Do those two kind of follow on from each other?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, they actually go in a particular order for me. So let me just, let me set the framework and then we can dive in each one just to make a recast. Spiritual is your core values, kind of, you know, who you are and what you won't want. Intellectual capacity, as I always say, it's about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, execute with discipline. So this is kind of growth mindset, being proactive, long-term goals, short-term goals, routine habits, accountability. It's kind of, once you know what you want, how do you get it? Your operating system, how do you make your operating system better? Then physical capacity, kind of what it sounds, you know, health, well-being, physical performance, resilience, kind of embracing competition, really, now I know, now I know what I want, I know I want to get it, and now motivated to, you know, keep myself in good shape to get there.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  And then emotional is the last one. It's interesting, the hardest one for a lot of people. This is the world around you. So it's how do you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset and the quality of your relationships? So my analogy is that if spiritual capacity was designing the race car, you know, intellectual capacity was building it, physical was sort of testing it on test track. Emotional is like, how do you do in that car when it's out on the road with the rain and sun and lots of other cars, right? Some cars will do better than their spec and some will do a lot worse. So emotional capacity is really interaction with, with the world around us and the things that we don't control.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  Based on your time coaching and also working within your business, which of those four areas do you find people falling short or tripping over the most?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  I most, so it's interesting, like for me, I, I fall in and out of them, you know, physical and physical can be a real gateway. If you get tired and cranky, think about it. You, you lose sight of your goals, you don't interplay well with other people, you know, you, you kind of give up your learning and your thinking, a lot of that stuff. For most people, I think they haven't even touched the spiritual capacity part. And, and, and so the most important thing that they can do is start the work there. That's the one for me that once you get it 90% right, you're pretty good. It doesn't require daily maintenance as much because the other ones align you to it, right? You say, oh, I know my values, so I need, this is what I need to go and learn and do.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  But I, so I, I would say that I think that that's the one that people haven't touched. I think a lot of people struggle the most with emotional capacity, particularly right now, in terms of when they know what they want, they're still haven't moved away from people who aren't aligned to that. Or they really mix things that they control and that they don't control, right? So, perfect example, you and I get into a car accident, you know, this morning. You know, you are enlightened and so you're like, oh, I've got insurance, that could have been worse. You walk away, you go, you go do three podcast interviews, you have a great day, you meet a bunch of friends, all this stuff. You know, I'm like swearing all day, freaking Chris and one more thing in the world, what could go wrong this year?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  And I, I get in a fight with my brother, I don't do the goal thing that I said I want to do. Like, we both experienced the same thing, right? How we chose to respond and react to that, we tell ourselves different truth. We tell ourselves the truth that my day got ruined by a car accident. Well, that's not, that's not really the whole truth. The truth is you had a car accident and that wasn't your fault, but you control what comes after that.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you haven't mentioned there, or at least I said, what some of the hurdles people overcome. You mentioned that a lot of the time we vacillate between many of them. But intellectual wasn't one of the ones, at least that came to the forefront of your mind. I think I've got a potential hypothesis about why that might be the case. I think that increasingly, solutions to problems in a postmodern enlightenment, non-religious world are very cerebral. We have this huge proliferation of personal development, self-development, and rightly so. You know, I'm contributing to it now. We put three, four, five hours of personal development content out every single week.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of the time that causes people to, to look for a very cerebral, very cognitive, very transactional solution. Okay, I have a problem with my this thing. Like, which page in Atomic Habits is it that I need to turn to to like find the particular habit that I'm doing to do the whatever thing? Or like, you know, I mean, that's how I think that a lot of people are looking to get the solution. Whereas what you've identified there is it's all of that ancillary stuff that actually feeds in to our ability to get that engine to be bigger, to get the fuel efficiency to be faster, to get the steering to be tighter.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Right, and it's an interesting point you made because I think that a lot of people in that realm, again, they're looking for that hack or that quick fix. That's not what it's meant to mean. It meant to mean, once I know what my most important contribution is, I'm going to do everything I can to learn and focus and be disciplined about going in that direction. It is the glue that sort of holds you to that. It's not the quick fix, right? I'm not, I think there's a misunderstood line between the 80/20 rule and hacks. You know, I think that, I think there's always an 80/20 rule. There was just some study I saw yesterday, someone sent me because they know I love

• 26:14Speaker 00

  the 80/20 rule, that like 20% of super spreaders, or 19.8% of super spreaders in Singapore had created 80% of the cases. Like, it was just really, it was really interesting.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you want me to give you another one to add to your collection?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  So, the bottom 80% of men on Tinder are competing for the bottom 20% of women, and the top 80% of women on Tinder are competing for the top 20% of men.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Sounds about right.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  That's from Datanomics. So, there you go. Facts don't care about your feelings, Karen. I'm very sorry about that. Intellectual. Are we talking about expanding our intellectual capacity? What are some of the key areas that you find coming up during your work to do with that?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a lot of it's goal setting, and I think understanding, I was not, I didn't understand this. You know, I would set a lot of one-year goals, and I would meet them, and I'd feel great, but they weren't connected. So, to me, it's now a reverse engineering process. What are the long-term goals? Do the long-term goals fulfill the values? And therefore, short-term goals are actually down payments on the long-term goals, or else we go for the short stuff, versus like, I need to make deposits. When you have two things, and one of them is put the envelope in the mail, or the other is climb the mountain, like, we just put the envelope in the mail, we put the envelope in the mail, and the mountain stays pretty far, rather than take a step, take a step, take a step. So, I think it's, I think, I'll answer this, I'm giving you examples at both ends of the spectrum.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  So, really setting what we want, why we want it, and then committing to the pieces to get there. Again, back to that house. Like, I want this house, and, well, I need to save the money for it, my family and I need to go to towns, find out where we want it to be, we need to pick a, develop, like, those are all things I could do over time, rather than just, you know, deciding, get there. And then the other, fully through the whole spectrum, on the other side of routine and all that stuff, I think is just accountability, right? A great People and leaders, they want accountability. Other people do not. You know, I was hearing someone reinforce that, like world, Todd Herman, world-class performance coach. And he was saying like, Michael Jordan, they love accountability. They love being yelled at, told they're not doing something. You know, average people do not want accountability. They wanna excuse their way out of it.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  So there's multiple levels of that. You know, there's self-accountability, which is, can be journal writing. It's really annoying to write you're gonna do something for five days in a row and read it, you know, and then do it. There's, there's peer accountability, where even me sending you what I said I was gonna do that week every Friday at 10 a.m., you know, upset up. And that's where a lot of mastermind groups come in. And then there's public accountability, where people just put their thing out at the beginning of the year. Dear world, this is how much I'm gonna weigh at the end of the year. This is what I'm gonna do. Anyone who does all three is, is probably in a unique, rarefied feel.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Where else in intellectual do people have holes that can quite easily be filled?

• 29:00Speaker 00

  I, yeah, I, I think there is confusion between an intellectual capacity is not doing more, right? It is actually, think about upgrading the processor. When you upgrade the processor, it should crunch more data with less energy, right? So I think a lot of times, like, let's say, I, a lot of people, this crosses into emotional. I struggle with difficult conversations at work. Like, I really struggle with them, performance conversation. So the night before, I sweat, I don't sleep, I get all, whatever. Or I just sit down for a day and I read three books, you know, I, I listen to Patty McCord's podcast, who's, or Kim Scott, who are like the world leaders on difficult conversations. And I now have upgraded my operating system with the tools and tactics.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  We're actually doing this now is less work and less energy. That, to me, is a huge mistake. I am not advocating anyone run the hamster wheel faster. I am saying, upgrade the processor so the task requires less work and less energy.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I think action is the antidote to anxiety comes in quite well there.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  Much of the time when we have anxiety about anything which is approaching us in the future, it's because of a fear of a lack of capacity in order to be able to deal with it. Yeah. And then that's where procrastination comes. You think, oh, I'm really going to struggle with that thing, that project, that conversation I'm going to have. And then the deadline arrives, I'll put it off, I'll find an excuse, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll delegate to someone else, whatever it might be. Whereas, as you've identified there, if you're moving towards that, that goal, you're, you're in control.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  People have solved these problems. I mean, I interviewed Patty McCord from Netflix, who's, you know, really kind of thought leader on the great culture, but direct with people. And when she, we talked about like letting people go and something they really struggled with, you know, she, she would coach her mentees when they had to have one of these conversations, they haven't done it. She's like, call your voicemail, have the conversation with your voicemail five times before you do it and listen to it, right? There was not a secret, it wasn't a hack, it was actually practicing it, doing it, like knowing the framework, how to do it. And it was very pragmatic advice on like, yeah, of course you're not going to be good at this, you've never had this conversation. That's why you need to practice having this conversation.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  I wonder again, whether this links back to the cerebral overly cognitive argument that I made a little bit earlier, that we presume because we see wonderful leaders that we guess are just bestowed with this magnetism and they just flow in a room and everyone loves them. It almost makes us forget that it's a skill, the same as anything else.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  It's a great lie. We tell ourselves a lot of the stories in Friday Forward, do you miss that? If you've ever listened to How I Built This podcast, you know, my favorite part is all these super successful company and people, their worst dark moment where like they were almost out of business and they go on for a long time, you know, for a lot of people. We love to be like, oh, that company was an overnight success, right? Because that ascribes it to timing or luck. Or I don't think professional athletes get enough credit, you know, in cases where you say, oh, it's just so gifted, like practices 10 hours a day. Like, if you want to be a professional speaker and you practice speaking 10 hours a day, you'd probably be a good speaker. I mean, most of these athletes, look, it's what they love to do, but they, the amount of work that they put in to practice

• 32:17Speaker 00

  things before they do them far exceeds anyone in the business world.

• 32:21Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent. I've been hugely on this flex recently that so few people. Even if you're fully aligned, your goals, your dreams, what you know you need to do, you've broken it down into the individual steps and you're committing yourself fully, being as present as you can. But think about how far from an athlete's level of preparation everybody else is, except for the total freaks within their industry, the Elon Musks of this world, probably a couple of guys at Google and Facebook, you know? You think an athlete's optimizing his food, his rest, he's thinking about-

• 32:54Speaker 00

  He has three coaches and he's the best in the world, right?

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  And he's surrounded by a team of people who are all on the same journey as him. He's sleeping, thinking about what he's going to do tomorrow. He's waking up in the morning at the time that's prescribed, all of that stuff. So thinking like an athlete, no matter what your industry is, I've taken a lot of inspiration from that this year, trying to turn pro.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Right. And who are the athletes that always disappoint, that people are, you know, regret signing?

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  They're the ones who don't do that work, who looked like-

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Right, but they had a lot of talent, right?

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  Or they looked from the outside coming in, the best signing of the year, and then you get him into the training pitch and he's leaving halfway through the day.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  They, when I think about all that bust in National Football League, which is the biggest draft, it's, it was the really talent, they were drooling at a talent, but not passion and wasn't willing to do the work, right?

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  What's next? Physical?

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Physical, yeah.

• 33:51Chris Williamson?

  Physical. How do we expand our physical capacity?

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting, you know, physical, taking physical as an analogy to the other capacities, we understand it more. We tend to think that we have these things or we don't have these things, right? Versus you wouldn't say, oh, I can lift a found, found weight five times or I can't. You'd say, if I did it for 90 days each day, then it would be, it would be easier. So, you know, it's the health, wellbeing, physical performance. I think we've moved past the, Greg McKeon talks about this a lot, but I think we've actually fortunately moved past celebrating leaders and executives who get no sleep. And, and I think actually people are now, yeah, they're now- Going the other way, saying I sleep nine hours a night. We're not, we're not celebrating

• 34:35Speaker 00

  that anymore. I think there's managing stress and, and this is again where, where, where we build resilience. I think sometimes I'm actually, I believe, I think resilience is this emotional and physical flywheel. So I think we, we do something, and I, and I had a couple of conversations with performance experts around this because I was like, what's the chicken and what's the egg? And, and the consensus, not by a 80/20, but by a 60/40 was that I, I think you do something hard that you don't think that you can do. Upon doing that, you gain emotional confidence that lets you be willing to set a next benchmark. But it's actually that effort. I don't think you can will yourself to resilience. Like

• 35:18Speaker 00

  you actually have to get through that race, take that extra step, do it. And then you're like, oh, what other lies have I been telling myself? [laughing] I can't do. And, and you know, the, the thing that people are pointing out is that there's a mentor of mine, he's a great speaker. He always offers in a speech $10,000 to anyone who goes back and brings a can of stress into the meeting. He goes, go, go, go find me a can of stress and, and I will pay you. And his point is that stress is not an external thing. It is actually an internal response that we do to ourselves. And you could be stressed about, you know, the deal you're about to close for signing your company for a billion dollars. You can be stressed about, you know, not having enough food this day, your job. It actually has the same physical response on your body. We are using a very

• 36:03Speaker 00

  outdated flight or fight or flight mechanism, like all the time, which was meant to save our life. And it does biological stuff to our body that's like pretty unhealthy. So if, if, if we sit in that state, we, we are releasing tons of cortisol, like if we don't, but it, but it is with, we are the only ones that can get us out of that state, right? I mean, it is, the world does things that, that cause stress to us. But as we said before, that is a different threshold point for everyone. It's a different subject matter for everyone, but it, it shows up physiologically the same.

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  So you've got, something's occurred. You've had a phone call. Something really stressful is about to happen. The partnership that you thought was about to go through tomorrow, the merger is on the rocks. What would you prescribe to someone who has had that call to get themselves out of that stress response and to allow them to have that clarity of thought again?

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, the basic thing is probably to get outside, you know, you're actually have built up that cortisol, which was some, I was talking to someone about this who understands the science of it more. So you've actually built up the fight or flight thing. And so you need to fight or flight. Right? So if you

• 37:14Chris Williamson?

  Like a let off, steam let off.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you got into a big fight, you would probably let it off.

• 37:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Okay. So go punch someone in the street.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Probably go for a run or an interval training or something to actually like, I am very cognizant. I don't like running, but I love how I feel after I run. So I listen to podcasts or I do whatever I can because I know that it just puts me physically in a state that, that I need to be in. But yeah, you actually need to go blow off that steam. I think literally or figuratively.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Breathing as well, I'm going to guess, focusing on deeper breathing, activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, if you, look, there's a whole range of things. I think if, if, if, if, if you do, you know, meditation, if you do these things and you're comfortable and you're not, these are all things that you could do. It just, I guess it goes to the level of where the person is. It's a good time to turn on your calm or headspace app. I actually think some people though, in that immediate thing, aren't able to transition right into that. Like, in fact, I'd say like, let's say this was at 10 a.m. You probably want to blow off some steam, literally. But, you know, I, what I found on those days is actually the meditation or something else would be really important in the afternoon to make sure that my night's sleep was good later on, right? That I'm not, it's not replaying, but it is, it is hard to move.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  It takes probably, you know, a Dalai Lama type person to move from severe stress straight to meditation unless they have deep practice in that.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Anyone who's tried to do that, all that you do is sit in the same lovely meditation pose. Yeah. And then you just ruminate about the thing that you're worried about and you're like, this is

• 38:54Speaker 00

  And then you get mad at yourself that you can't

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Wasting your time.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So again, I'm not a scientist by anything, but I, but I, I do think you need some sort of, you know, walking, breathing, relief valve from that. But look, if you have it out with the person, you might, you might've actually already had that. I think it's more if you go away stewing that, yeah.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  I get it. Where else in physical, we've said sleep and stress, two key areas. What else?

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, I think, I think, you know, exercise, eating, I am, I am not a, a dietitian. I am not, you know, so I, but I've, I've read, what I try to do is read from everyone that's smarter and, and take all the intersecting things and what do I think is the, is the principle? So one thing is that I think there's a lot of science now that, that there's a lot of brain and body connection, right? Between what we eat and that it crosses the gut level and that affects how we feel or otherwise. I think the also dangerous thing out there is that there's a lot of people saying that whatever their diet is, whether it's gluten or paleo or this, is the thing that everyone should do. And the really smart people who know this will tell you that's completely the opposite.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  You know, one, one man's poison is another man's, uh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm blowing the analogy. Uh, yeah, we'll go with the British, a tonic. So, um, I think, you know, there are definitely different things that, that affect each of our health and make us feel, and I think you need to figure out what works for you. But in general, you know, less sugar, less processed food, less alcohol, less caffeine. Like, I think those are probably all general principles. Many of us are on a, you know, upper in the morning, downer on the, in the evening plan. What I, what I understand from, again, the people who understand this, I'm, I'm very honest that this is secondhand, is that you're, you know, you're not allowing your body to

• 40:47Speaker 00

  go through those processes organically if you're always creating them artificially, right? So if you, to the example before, if you're only can calm down by having a drink, you've now trained, and you can only get yourself awake by having a coffee, you are now training your body to, to do that.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  It's weakening, very much so. The buttress, the scaffolding that your body's laid upon, you know, like one of those, is it the Dalí painting where all of the clocks are melting and they're all really sort of flaccid, all the clocks are melting on the side of a, of a cupboard? And it's like propped up by loads of different individual prongs, like, you know, when you put your hands in pizza dough and it's all falling all over, it's like, these are the little prongs. However, if you take them away and you allow yourself to cultivate those capacities naturally, innately. If you choose to have a drink, a coffee, then you get to expand your domain of competence on top of something which is already sufficient as opposed to, um,

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Ideally, you'd have the drink after the run and the coffee after the workout, right? Where, where you've, you've combined in the organic response.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get it. So emotional, final one.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, this tricky one. So I, you know, a big, there's two big things of emotional. There's a bunch of different things, but the buckets. How you react to the things that you don't control. So that's the first one. And then relationships, both the quality of your relationships and who you choose to spend time with. In the first one, I think it's interesting. Like I, I, I have some family members that spend a lot of time on weather apps. And it always frustrates me. I'm like, to me, the weather, the weather is the perfect emotional capacity. Like, the weather is going to be the weather, right? You are not going to change it. But if you're constantly, oh, it's gonna rain tomorrow, or do you look and it's gonna rain tomorrow? And like, oh, I'm gonna go to the movies and get an umbrella. Or do you actually like, get stressed about what the weather is, or get frustrated that it's not lining up to what you wanted, right?

• 42:38Speaker 00

  That is a kind of a microcosm of emotional capacity. You don't control it. How do you react to it? And the second is relationships. I think, you know, we spend a lot of time with people who I would use the term called energy vampires. Like where you actually feel worse after spending time with them. Probably not as much time, like you and I might not, might see each other once a year, but we have this awesome uplifting conversation. It's forward moving, whatever. But then I'm spending a lot of that time with a friend that I just don't have the, you know, courage to, that I literally feel worse every time. You know, I spend with them. And I, I actually think we need to reallocate, you know, Jim Rome said you are the average of the people you spend the,

• 43:17Speaker 00

  the five people you spend the most time with. I, I think we need to even make a list of who, who do we need and want to spend more time with? And how without breaking up or blowing up with those people, do we remove energy from those relationships? And an example someone gave me is like, don't say stuff you don't mean. Like, we should have lunch again next week. Like after you just got like, you don't, you just got through lunch and you're terrible and this person complained about the thing already. Like, we should do that again soon. You don't have to say that. You don't, you don't have to call someone and have the same conversation, you know, with that relative every four days. You could call them every six days. So this thing about energy vampires, really like if, if you, people you feel worse with after spending time with, you need to figure out a way to spend less time with those people.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  They are not moving you towards your spiritual and intellectual capacity in any way.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  The British equivalent of an energy vampire is a mood hoover.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you guys are so passive aggressive.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's so.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  You'll have a hard time. You'll be like, no, let's definitely get lunch next week. And then afterwards, like, oh, my God, that person is the worst.

• 44:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think there's certain things that both Americans and British could take from each other. And you are correct, the

• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  the passive aggressiveness, the quiet behind to the back sulking, very sulky, very sulky nation.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  I was at a conference with someone in our industry with a bunch of competitors and they walked up and hugged all of them and you know, walked away. I was like, that is so nice. We wouldn't do that in the US. You guys all get along like we all hate each other.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  I thought it was so, it was so stereotypical.

• 44:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've looked at the relationship side of emotional. What's left?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's the things that we control. So, so circumstances and then, and then, and then people. And I think there is also a piece that again to resilience, there is that emotional side of resilience. Like, how do I, you know, how do I plan for the next thing I'm going to do that I didn't think that I could physically do? Because what I think keeps people moving forward in that is, is being vulnerable, is getting out of their comfort zone. You know, I think that greatly increases their emotional capacity. People want to share. People want to be vulnerable. They're just scared to. And when they do, the depth of their relationship, you know, two people have been having this superficial conversation for five years, aren't talking about the real thing that they want to talk about that would actually create

• 45:43Speaker 00

  the bond that they're seeking.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Massively, a huge problem amongst young guys, I think, especially ones that are professionals, type A's, trying to be overachievers. They, and I did for a very long time, I presumed that strength and confidence and bravado and courage and all of these things went along with not showing vulnerability. Whereas quite the opposite is true, that the people with whom I have the deepest relationships are the ones that I've been the most vulnerable with, and it becomes self fulfilling. When you tell someone something which in the wrong hands could be quite catastrophic to you.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:20Chris Williamson?

  That's really where you make a connection. And I think.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  There's a book that's up on the big shelf up there, The Lonely Century by Norina Hertz, talking about this loneliness epidemic that we've got at the moment. And I wonder how many people are combating loneliness by trying to be overly confident, by thinking I am going to be the sort of friend that other people would want to be friends with. And the truth is that being more vulnerable and showing that side of you that is precisely the opposite of what you think other people want, might be the quickest way to make a connection.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  I think there's, look, there's a lot of culture in this. There's a lot of gender history in this, particularly with boys, you know, feelings. I mean, I've heard this story, you know, closer to home for you. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a story from a coach or a speaker, an Irish boy, you know, and his father who just wanted to have a real discussion and give him a hug. And I mean, my friend Philip McKernan, you know, just talks about, you know, he wasn't, it wasn't until he was 45 that he and his dad said they loved each other. They were, you know, it was this thing you didn't do. And they danced around it. And it was like, as a, as a son, it's all he wanted, you know, and I just, I feel like I've heard. So there is a lot of, there are cultural implications in, in a lot of this stuff. But I do think generationally, it's, it's changing a bit, which is nice.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  I really like the analogy that you drew between using the weather app. So we've had a lot of Stoics on recently, including Ryan Holiday. And the weather's a good example. Using the weather as, look, controllables versus uncontrollables, the dichotomy of control, all this sort of stuff. But thinking about the fact that I was laughing at how your friends who like to look at the weather app, because I'm like, how ridiculous. Why would you do that? But really, everything on your phone is the weather app, apart from individual messages, looking at

• 48:08Speaker 00

  The news is the weather app?

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. You're watching, watching the presidential debate. Do you think that what you say is going to change what Donald Trump or Joe Biden says the next time?

• 48:18Speaker 00

  But it affects, it affects you. And hopefully my mom won't listen to this, but my mom was in a tizzy the other night. And I was talking to her and, you know, upset, more normal about what's going on. I was like, and she just had surgery. So she's, I know she's had, sit down. I'm like, how long have you watched the news today? It was the first thing I said. I was like, well, I'm just, I'm like, turn it off. Just turn it off.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  You've overdosed on news today, Mum.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  I can tell, the two things I've been able to tell in Covid when people are in bad places are, and usually it's probably both, one, they've been consuming too much news, you know, and, and two, they have not gotten enough sleep. Those seem to be very clear markers of sort of just low ability to deal.

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  That's a one-way ticket to feeling pretty miserable in 2020, I think. News, too much news, not enough sleep.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  And that's why I believe in these buffers, like, I leave my phone downstairs, I don't really, this guy texting me, you know, this morning, asking me something about podcasts this afternoon, did you get, I'm like, I'm sorry, I don't look at my phone for the first hour in the day, and I leave it downstairs, because nothing good happened overnight, you know, other than some guy emailing me that there's some guy, you know, 11 million pounds state and I'm the, you know, beneficiary, you know, what I could do, I just send him a cheque. Like, nothing great happens overnight. And, and I'm not a doctor, so it's not an emergency, but if I, as soon as I look at that, I'm going to be pulled into that world.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent. I've, I mentioned before we started, I'm a club promoter and I have a, a little quip that I always use.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Really, nothing good happens overnight.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  Dude, after 1am, nothing, nothing interesting has ever happened. Ever, ever, ever, ever.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Only get bad email, yeah.

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Self-limiting beliefs was something that I wanted to talk about with you. A lot of people, we mentioned imposter syndrome earlier on. How can people overcome those self-limiting beliefs?

• 50:09Speaker 00

  I, I, I think you need to look at the source of them. I, I think a lot of times, I think you can think back to childhood, there are a lot of things placed on people and think about where that came from. Also, there's stories that we tell ourselves because we don't want to do something and we don't want to fail at it. Like, I always think it's interesting when someone says, you know, there's a framework that, that a coach I worked with once used, more business coach, but says, I can't do that. I could never write a book. Okay, well, why? Give me the five whys why you can't write a book. So his thing is he takes the five reasons why you can't do it and then asks you how you could solve each of those five things. Well, I don't have the time. Well, how could you solve that? Well, I could, you know, I spend thirty minutes every morning writing it. Well, I don't have the experience. Well, how could you solve that? Well, I could hire one of these companies that does, you

• 50:53Speaker 00

  know, ghostwriting. Well, I don't have a topic. Well, how could you solve that? Well, I could spend a few of those days and thirty minutes like picking topics and ask my friends. So like it basically like rhetorically puts it back on themselves because I, I, I sometimes, again, we were told we couldn't do something and the most damaging ones come from third parties, but a lot of time I think it is a protection mechanism. Look, there's some reality, like I could not be a professional football player. Like I don't have the talent. I could work as hard as I want, but I don't have the talent. But, but I just, I, I, I always squirm when someone tells me they can't do something that I intuitively know that they can do because I think they're just trying to protect themselves. Whereas the alternative of saying I don't want to do that doesn't sound as good.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  I agree about internalizing the, the bad third party rhetoric.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  Every bad inner voice that we have was once a bad outer voice, I think.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Someone told you you were stupid your whole life. Like, that's a very hard thing to overcome and believe you're smart, right? Or someone said that to you or they, those things are pretty, pretty damaging.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  It can also, going back to what we said at the very beginning, talking about the spiritual, a lot of the time, people I think can internalize that and use that as the, the main thrust of their career. So there's another Greg McKeown example about a guy that was a CFO, I think, or a COO or something, but still believed that he was terrible at maths. Because his, like some grade school, primary school teacher had said, you suck at maths at eight years old. And he'd carried that with him and then made it his career and still. COO or CFO of this huge company still believed that he couldn't do maths.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  And look, I'm very believing, remember my respectful authenticity value. I believe in telling people the truth, but I think as a manager, a leader, you can do decades of damage, right? So if you worked here and I was like, Chris, you're just not, take some right out of the office. You're just not management material, right? Like, that could sit with you for a long time. You could be really like, have some, you know, confidence issues from that. But if I sat down and said, Chris, you know, I've looked at you, I've bought you managing, you seem to love being an individual contributor, you know, you, you want to sell your own thing. You want to be responsible. Like, that's very different than leading a team. I think you could actually do really well in this, but, but this requires leading a team. And I don't really think that's actually what you want to do or whatever.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Like, those are very different ways where one might actually help you realize that, oh, people, I just thought I had to lead a team to get ahead. That's actually not what I like and I've been doing it. Versus me crushing your soul by attacking you, you know, personally. And I've heard from a lot of people that how a comment from my boss has, has had five or 10 years of damage, you know, on their, on their confidence in their career.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  It's dangerous, man. As you rise up through the ranks of any business and you start to get subordinates below you, or if you're a business owner and you have the entire company below you, the words that you say have a disproportionate impact on people long after you've left them or they've left you. I do think there's a big, a lot of responsibility in that. I don't often hear it talked about actually either in, in the business.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  No, and the truth is the truth, right? So to say, Chris, you are not doing well as a manager. That is the truth, right? But then the other truth is, and I think it's because you actually don't want to be one, if you thought about it. And you want to be, you don't want to manage salespeople. You want your $2 million book of business. You want the credit. That's great, but you actually just need a role that, that reinforces that, right? There are two different ways to have that, have that conversation.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Final thing, you talk a lot about how we can use and relate to our competition. Think in 21st century, always on social media comparisons, how much do you earn? The new house, the new car. How can we use and relate to our competition?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, to me, like, healthy competition is, is, I actually think we need to lose to, we need, we need to learn to win well and lose well. And, look, all monopolies happen because there's no competition. So I, I, I actually believe that competition is just about raising our own standards and understanding that whatever I'm doing today, if I'm doing the same thing in 10 years, it's probably not a winning strategy, right? I like to say, if you were the best horse and buggy repair person in the entire world, you probably don't have a lot of work right now. So, um, I, to me, it's, it's raising the bar on yourself, embracing it. I'm not, I, I'm not, I'm pro-competition in that way. I'm not all saying it's all about winning. I actually, I don't believe in that at all. But I think when you elevate

• 55:29Speaker 00

  the playing field, you, you do it for everyone. Like, I don't want to be the 10,000th best place to work. Like, I want to be the, you know, top 10 best places to work. I, I don't think you'd have a lot of people who'd say, like, oh, I want, you know, the person I want to fill this role is the person that no one wanted, right? I, you know, there's usually someone that everyone's trying to do. So I might, my, my, and my, my favorite example is, the most enlightened yoga teacher in the world will compete for a single job at the biggest, you know, most prestigious yoga studio. Like, it just is, is reality. And there's times when we need to win well, and there's times that we need to lose well, but at least we're trying to up our game.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Robert, man, I really enjoyed today. Where can people go if they want to sign up to your newsletter? Where else do you want to send them?

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, so everything's really integrated now at robertglazer.com, G L A Z E R dot com. Uh, the books there, books are there, Elevate Podcast is there, and they can sign up for the Friday Forward newsletter as well.

• 56:28Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, man. Thank you so much for today.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  All right.