so rather than me and then you are the problem it is I'm pulling you to my side of the table and it's us together versus this problem that's Dr Julie gerner and she spent her career helping CEOs and leaders unlock Peak Success Through a unique blend of psychology and emotional understanding she's aptly compared to Wendy Rhodes a billions in part two of
this conversation you'll learn how to detach your worth as a human from your results at work if it's too close to you it's going to change how you operate it's not going to give you the greatest objectivity strategies for finding and removing blind spots to success I think that you have to go outside of yourself sometimes and be open different ways to
approach tough conversations and how I position things in language are always going to be from a place of strength how to end toxic friendships able to be candid about some of those things is really important and usually people are pretty okay taking that hint and more it's time to listen and learn [Music] one pattern that I I've seen in outliers
or Highly Successful People is that they tend to have higher standards than other people but their their standards for how they spend their time standards for the work that they accept or expect out of themselves and others for relationships sort of for everything it's like the bar is raised and and this can cause problems when they expect
it from other people too because I think they tend to expect it from themselves and then because they expect it from themselves they expected from other people I mean what's your take on the standards and bars that people set for excellence I think that it is a primary pain point for a lot of the people that I work with that they are frustrated
endlessly that people do not in their companies hold the same standards that they do they put it as a point of culture they have you know kpis and other types of things that should be measuring it but there's always this kind of deep Brewing frustration that they're not as engaged as obsessed as any of those things as they are and the
truth of it is they're not going to be most of the time but can they hit a bar that is eighty percent of what your expectation might be and is not going to be enough and I think for some people they're just still going to carry that frustration and for other people they're going to recognize that hey if people can give to the certain extent it takes it off my
plate it takes it still pushes the business forward and it will it is productive because most people won't even meet that bar right the standards you hold for yourself is high and it is why you are sitting in your seat and other people if they held that exact same standard would not be in their seat they would be somewhere else so you have
to think about you know the people that you're hiring the mission that you're on where other people are at and be able to consider that I do think it's really important to hold that high bar however and I think it's important not to um not to lower your standards you know a lot of people say you know if you want to be happy don't have expectations and I
think that's a really good way to be unhappy for the rest of your life because people if you don't have expectations there you will just put up with everything right I mean you don't expect anything for yourself with high expectations with kind of enforceability around that you're not going to put up with a bad relationship
a bad work environment a bad employee a bad you know all of these types of things and you hold that bar and I think that's really beneficial for you your company for example uh for modeling to others for kids um I think that having a high bar is important how that's translated can sometimes be important too like especially if you're a parent uh and if
you're a CEO like how you bring people to the standard that you expect is incredibly important you don't want to do it through like kind of fear and intimidation you want to do it through a way where people feel inspired to rise and to hit their own potential because you are there the person that they believe sees something in them that they
do not see and that can pull people to operate at higher levels too they want to please you they want to perform for you and you know they want to be on a winning team so you know to use a sports analogy you know Tom Brady tends to elevate the people around him because they get to play with Tom Brady even if there's a lot of people out there who
hate Tom Brady but nonetheless he does tend to do that and people step up their game because they want to perform they want to be his receiver they want to score a touchdown with Tom Brady you know like if you're great you have the ability to elevate people around you too and to not just see it as like I hold this bar and you're not meeting it and
you know in a very punitive way you can actually kind of bring people with you and just have this winning team that you just happen to be leading I think everybody has high standards when they care enough agreed agreed that's a great insight because when we care about something no matter if it's the restaurant we're picking the work that we're doing and we
really care about it like deeply care about it then we we hold ourselves naturally we're not thinking about a high standard we just naturally hold ourselves to a higher standard of you know the people scrolling Instagram looking at photos of food before they pick a restaurant rather than just looking at the reviews right like
there's a higher threshold for because they care about food and they care about uh that thing so I find it interesting and then I guess the follow-on to that would be it's also an unintentional signal you're sending at work if your your standards are not above average let's say then you're signaling to people sort of unconsciously that this is a job for you and not a career
and therefore I would expect and I don't know if this is true or not you get treated more transactionally at work because if you're going to take it as a job and I care a lot and I'm fully invested and I'm all in and this is a job to you and you're sending this unconscious signal to me that this is a job to you well then I'm going to treat
it as a job to you but if you're in the boat and you're rowing with me and you're all in then I'm going to treat you differently and you're going to get different opportunities than if it's a job to you yeah absolutely I think that that's a hundred percent true and I think it should be true right I mean if you are looking for a partner to build
with you're going to look for different traits and qualities than somebody who just kind of like clocks in and clocks out and somebody there's nothing wrong with people who clock in and clock out if they're able to like perform their task and do what they need to do but they are only going to reach a certain level with that type of mentality and um
and that's okay as long as they're okay being at that level so one of the byproducts of this that I want to get into and you have a great sort of analogy for those in terms of the driver not the car is when you care deeply you can also become attached to things and take things personally so how do we get out of that I think that it's very
useful to see business or things that you care deeply about are the things that you do not who you are and I think it actually gives you an increased level of competence when you're able to do that because you're able to when you're emotionally too attached to things it skews your decision making it skews how you invest in it um and I and your Investments you make
with it right like you're you're more tender in some ways with things that are precious to you and not that you don't want it to be precious but it close to you it's going to change how you operate it's not going to give you the greatest objectivity that you're going to need to make the best decisions so I see it as you know that Detachment
is actually very essential to making Optimum decisions around that element otherwise you know you start you do start getting too precious about you know the business and people how people talk about the business if there's like maybe there's genuine criticisms of your business that are pretty valid and it can Shield you from seeing some of those
things you could be taking it personally and when it's really about an operational issue with the company that you run um you could be missing problems because you refuse to see it things in a certain way so there are I think that there are secondary impacts that people don't see when they make themselves the business that the business itself and put
it at risk talk to me a little bit about those blind spots like how do we learn to see our blind spots how do we learn to see reality better uh given the backdrop of sort of like being obsessed with what you're doing and all in and then the tendency to associate yourself with the business or instead of you as a person yeah I think
that you have to go outside of yourself sometimes and be open so sometimes I'll do things like 360s for people where you know they'll trust me to speak with eight to ten of their employees usually I'll I'll do mostly direct reports some skip levels some people who have never worked with them at all so that I I hear what people kind of the whisper network
is and what their reputation is sometimes board members so I want to know people who are above them below them uh various people in their ecosystem and I guarantee them anonymity right like no one's going to get this feedback I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about this person how they communicate how they lead with where their areas are
and the amount of information you get with anonymity is it's amazing right like I mean the reports are like 13 pages long it's it's a it's incredible because you know for the first time they feel like they're free to give absolutely um and you know and I ask the person to make sure you set the stage where you want honest feedback and all that stuff um
but you know for the first time they're really able to say well this is where I see that like we could be so much better or this is where I see that like oh we're really missing the boat because you know we change course too often like you know the CEO really has shiny object syndrome like people talk about crypto they're doing something crypto they talk
about AI they're doing something there like we got to focus right like so there are there's some brilliant feedback that comes from people around you and then to have to sit with someone and say hey this is what other people have seen right like the good the bad the ugly and you know sometimes people initially will dismiss things out of hand and it
comes back around that you know sometimes this is not always the thing that they should have been dismissing but I love when people give some pushback around that because you know if you have someone who comes to you and say you know I'm going to talk about everything but product we could talk about everything but product
that's to me as a signal like we need to talk about product right like that's the the flag so a lot of times when I get these out of hand dismissals like oh we don't talk about that that's that's not important I'm like oh that's interesting right like that's very important and so we'll Circle back around but you do with blind spots oftentimes you have to get
outside of your own uh your own vision and consider it if you're a leader you don't have 20 20 Vision on your own performance but other people likely can add to your framework to get you there you just have to be able to be open ask questions receive feedback and when you're giving other people feedback on their performance on you know
performance review perhaps there are ways in which you should be having others reviewing your performance as well um people say that and they do it and sometimes they do it in very limited ways like you know answer this like you know one through five in my effective Communicator well you don't really get any information there like you know so
like these are things that you have to make sure that you want real feedback around and creates systems where you're getting real feedback around it so that you can can genuinely improve and increase your scope of vision and then you take this information and then you have tough I would imagine somewhat tough conversations with some of these
people and you talk about caring deeply and challenging directly and what does that mean and how does it relate to hard conversations yeah in the basis of radical Candor a book that's often taken pretty out of context because they're like you know I'm being candid I'm being radically candid um but that you really do have to the
basis of it is you have to care deeply to be able to challenge directly and that somebody has to know that you care deeply about who they are in their role that you care about their performance that this is coming from a place that's meant to make them better right and if it's not coming from that place and it's coming from a place of punishing or shaming or you
know humiliating or dominating it's not a really effective thing to do it's a counterproductive thing to do that will work against you but people can take hard feedback from people that they know are in their corner and so you know it's kind of like and it's this really silly analogy but I'll use it anyway but it's like if you went to go try on jeans you don't want
the friend who tells you you look great in every pair of jeans you want the person who's like wow you should definitely should not buy those right like and you trust them and you don't get angry at them because you know that they're actually looking out for the fact that you should look they want you to look good and the same is true for feedback in
Executives or anyone else like I'm going to give you some really hard feedback and it's going to hurt one of the questions that I always ask CEOs and others like hey you know what's a question that you'd want me to ask and one one guy said and I thought it was a really nice question he goes I want them to to say what does he think he's great
at that he's not I want them to tell me like what I really think I'm good at but I'm not he got some really hard feedback on that and I think that it can hurt you know you go out there you're very confident you're very excited especially in things you think you're good at and then people tell you like this is a you're really not that good at this
um it stings and I think you have to be able to sit with people and understand that like no matter what levels people reach their people and like some of these things are going to hurt and so being able to present things in ways that are hard but getting through Sometimes some of the the other characteristics that prevent feedback like this
um you got to push a little bit and sometimes the conversations are pretty they can be somewhat contentious right like I can say hey this is just what I found and you get a lot of like pushback or defensiveness and that's okay you know I can take that it's it's not a big deal but I think that also you have to have a great relationship for someone to
feel comfortable being able to be kind of not their best self with you right to be able to give you some hard responses to be able to be a little Brusque with you um and I can take that and it to me that's a signal of trust right you can talk to me a certain way if you want to but we're still going to have this conversation it's not going to impact
our relationship and we're going to continue moving forward um but obviously it's still in a respectful framework It's just sometimes people respond in ways that aren't optimal and there's no facade I'm expecting from them I wonder if your feedback is more receptive going back to what we said earlier about working a job
versus being all in you're all in with the people you're working with yeah and so giving feedback is a very different place from somebody who's all in versus somebody who's working a job so that would create a little bit of contention at work too where you know if I perceive you as working a job and you're giving me feedback then I'm going to take that
very differently than your friend who's telling you hey I got your best interest at heart here those genes don't work for you yeah uh and it's interesting how we receive that information I think also you know they're hiring me to give them feedback that they're not getting elsewhere and they're hiring me because they want to be operating at their best
and deep down they know this is a problem that needs to be solved so if you want to get to a lot of times people will bring me a board because you know if you have an issue with you know engineering not functioning optimally you bring in an engineer and I guess you know I my background is in Psychology and I'm the person they're going to bring in to figure out them so that
they're able to move to the next level and whatever that means I think that at the end of the day they're ambitious enough they're engaged enough that they want that to work and so you know they're bringing in someone who can get them to that place and I think they understand that and I try to set the table you know before meeting I always
say look this is going to be tough and some of our moments are going to be challenging but everything I do is because I want you to win I want you to be better I want you to get to where you want to go I have them set goals prior to our engagement like what are the two or three things you want to see out of us working together and so everything I'm
doing is really around those goals because I measure myself to those you know like I don't like to lose so I want to see these things move and I'm invested in them not in them not remaining the same so I mean there's a we are both tied into making sure these goals happen and I'm incredibly invested every person walking around I see is my
calling card so and my piece of work in some ways so I don't I want to have a great product out there too do you rehearse these conversations in your head before you have them what's your process like leading into a conversation that you know is going to be contentious or difficult not only for you but ensuring that you get the right messages
across so that's a really good question I do always think with intention about how I'm going to present certain information uh because I know the capacity it has to either like I don't want to I don't want to kick someone around where they're going to be harmed by it I don't want to impact them in any negative way if I can help it I want them to see it as an
opportunity or a challenge and so how I position things is always very intentional and the language I use is always very intentional so I don't want you'll I guess I was gonna say you'll notice in my notes but you don't receive my notes so if you were to ever read my notes I always take notes during the meeting so people can fully engage
but if you were to ever read the notes that I send to clients uh you know after we meet I always send them notes afterward for them to review because there are always things that they're working on and how I position things in language are always going to be from a place of strength they're never going to be like you know um the words that I
choose are going to be very deliberate and the reason why is because I think that like if you're if peppered throughout your feedback is you know weak falling down ineffective uh this that and the other you're kind of setting them in a framework that is not only feels very disempowering but also for a lot of these folks it's
not going to feel engaging so I try to frame things always as you know opportunities challenges um ways in which people can um you know level up or improve in some fashion the next kind of level of operation rather than you know you're operating below par there is a next level of operation right so there's there's different ways that I think
about framing it but I don't want to my job is always to have them seeing things as look this is the a way of skipping levels getting better being better and it's going to be hard to get there but hard is something that most of these folks take on willingly and even if they don't like it at first they'll consider it and they'll come back to it and we'll
work together and I've seen that more often than you know you can imagine that people will take there's some really hard feedback and they're not going to like it and then the next time we meet they're like you know I really reviewed our notes and I thought about it and like I'm in let's do this like let's let's make this happen let's Master this
right like let's engage with this and I think that that is an incredibly good position rather than talking to someone in a way that is just kind of a puts them in a weak position I'm not going to do that to people even when it is incredibly hard feedback it's the difference between victim and Survivor right like you want people who
are always in Survivor mindset not in victim mindset and even I think about that all the time aside from being intentional and maybe um but the words you're using and the place you're coming from right the place of pulling people forward and being better what are the other tips that you could give people for preparing for hard conversations in advance to put
themselves in a position to have the most effective conversation possible sure I think that one of the best Frameworks people can use and I think people um don't use don't have hard conversations because they see them as being a conflict right it's going to be me versus you and it's going to be a conflict so what I try to do is to say rather than let's just say
Ted is his uh the marketing department is missing its numbers I don't want to say when Ted comes in Ted you're missing your numbers right like what's going on um I want us to instead of being me versus you I want to pull him to my side and be like hey this is US versus a problem you can do this at home you can do it at work you could do it anywhere
and to be able to say hey Ted I noticed that you know our numbers are we're kind of missing here in the marketing department can we like let's do some problem solving around how we can really pull these up so it's a we you know you're intentionally pulling someone to your side you're forming a collaboration against the problem so rather than me and then you are the
problem it is I'm pulling you to my side of the table and it's us together versus this problem that we're going to talk about and it is um it's incredibly effective because it reduces defensiveness it creates openness it makes you more approachable and you can have really hard conversations in that way and I can do that with people in
leadership positions as well it's how I help them to have conversations earlier because a lot of times we avoid that stuff because we anticipate conflict and while there still may be some challenges in those conversations within us versus the problem versus me versus you you're going to really take the the kind of temperature down quite a bit by
approaching it that way I like the idea of collaboration against the problem I think that's very powerful then it doesn't become about you or your behaviors it becomes about what can we do together to solve this problem we all we all have off days right like we're bad you know like things aren't going right we're angry we're upset we
have negative emotions how do we learn to overcome those negative emotions so that we can be productive in the day could you be more clarifying on that like if you're you you're driving in traffic right you mentioned earlier you get to work you're really upset you're late uh not your fault you're still upset because you're 30 minutes late
you're behind you've missed and then you have to sort of like have the ability to reset yeah and go in how do we learn how to do that that there's a few things one is that you know you have to make a decision whether like is was this a bad 10 minutes or was it a bad hour or is it going to be a bad day right like I think that having a bad
we all have bad moments bad minutes bad hours but we don't have to have bad days and it's how do we you know you make a decision at some point that things are going to bleed into the rest of your day and I think you have to make again it's with intentionality you have to make a decision of like all right I'm really ticked off about X
and you know I'm here to do X Y you kind of you reset in a very intentional way and I I think that for me it's about how am I thinking about coming into this day this meeting I try to um help people think about their intention going into things how do I want people to feel do I want them to feel my frustration or do I want them to feel like you know they're engaged in a
company moving forward do I want them to be influenced by my bad you know fight with somebody or car problems or do I want to make sure that they feel like excited and motivated to take on the things ahead so you have to be intentional about how you want other people to feel and kind of what the outcomes are that you want and be really
honest about whether you're creating those or you're really blocking them because oftentimes if you're bringing your bad mood to the table you're blocking the very outcomes that you want so if you're able to tell yourself like how do I want to make people feel when I come in here well if I want them to feel frustrated afraid to approach me and all of these
other things I'm probably just going to be the bad mood that I'm walking in here with but at some point as a leader and this is a I think it's kind of controversial to say but like you step into a role right they call it a role for a reason you you are stepping into a part you are expected to play to be effective in this organization and if
you can't do that you're not being very good at what you do right you're you're kind of drawing away from the effectiveness that you could have and sometimes stepping into that role means that you leave a lot of other things on the side it means that you don't bring your full self to work nobody cares nobody wants that and like you bring your best work self to work
and you lead from the front and you do what you have to do so I think about it like that too like your expectation for yourself needs to be that you step into the role and you do what you need to do to be have the best results you're going to get I want to switch gears a little bit um I think we're both big Believers in curating your circle the people you're
getting around with uh I get questions all the time about how to end uh I'm gonna say toxic but sort of like friendships that no longer work for you anymore or relationships that aren't aren't productive or serving you and that are pulling you pulling you down how do we go about ending those relationships yeah I mean that's tough
It's like a friendship breakup of sorts right I think that you end up most people if they end up phasing these people out of their lives by just not engaging and eventually people stop asking you know like they get the hint um or there comes that moment excuse me ghosting them right I mean like or they respond and think oh you know I'm too
busy or I'm doing X or I'm doing why um and so I'm a I guess that I'm a fan of of being somewhat upfront like you know I'm really busy focusing on X right now and so I'm really not going to have the time to be doing you know X Y and Z or I'm at a place right now where I'm really busy with my business and so I'm really not able to you know kind of go
out on Fridays um you might want to like unsubscribe me from that chain because I'm never going to be able to go out on Friday nights I'm just I know I sound boring I'm just gonna need to lock in here and do what I need to do and eventually those people will kind of go on their merry way but it's being direct with them about you know what you're able to do what
you're not you know if someone's calling you or texting you all the time being like hey I'm sorry I'm not responding to all your texts but I really don't have the bandwidth from being honest to be able to respond all the time and so I'll get back to like being able to be candid about some of those things is really important and
usually people are pretty okay taking that hint and they you know fade away a bit and then eventually this thing kind of falls off if you want to have a more direct break because people are actively toxic that's another thing and obviously requires like kind of a conversation um but you know most people avoid those kinds of hard conversations when they
can sadly I I think it's sort of easy to see uh the extremes right when somebody is uh in your life and you know EX it shouldn't be there but what are the sort of like the red flags to look for as a lead up before it gets to that point that you see in relationships be it with friends or or family or even uh you know a partner or spouse
I think people who violate the boundaries that you set are a big one right like hey I really need to work on this project tonight and you tell that to your friends or you tell that to others and they're like hey do you want to go out do you want to do this oh can you wait Can the project be pushed back can they do this or that um you know that to me is a flag people
who don't respect what you set up to begin with um people who are not actively who are not supportive are sometimes a flag you know it's one thing to ask smart questions it's another thing to kind of reduce you in any way but I think one of the biggest ways that I think about it is how do you feel after your interactions with them do you feel
energized do you feel engaged do you feel motivated or do you feel beaten down do you feel uncertain do you feel insecure do you feel like any of those negative things so I think they're and I think your energy is probably the best flag and it isn't always about something specific so if you leave those interactions and you know you find
yourself not feeling great um to me that's always the first flag and then do you notice there's a pattern that like every time you talk to this person you have that same like sap of energy and it's like a vampire of sorts and you know you don't feel like energized and positive and optimistic and whatever I mean everyone goes through a hard time so maybe your
friend's going through a divorce and you you want to be there for them yeah but if it's a persistent pattern where like you're walking away feeling negative or you know kind of not engaged or not energized and they're kind of taking from you um I think that's a really big sign one of the things that we talked about earlier uh that I said we'd come back to
was fighting up front what does it mean to fight up front and how do we do it so when I first was in grad school my area of specialization was adult Psychopathology and forensics so I worked a long time in forensics whether it was a bit in forensics I should say whether it was in like you know maximum security setting or evaluating people
for like you know mental state at the time of the offense to set up the insanity defense or mental time mental state at the time of the crime setting up for the insanity defense so one of the things in forensics that they tell you you know just a good rule of thumb is that hey if you're ever walking along and you know somebody tries to kidnap
you pull you into a van or a truck or a car or whatever your best chance is if you fight up front right like this is the chance you have because once you go into that vehicle wherever you are taken uh wherever that secondary location is you don't know what's going to happen and it will be worse right you it will be worse you can't predict it you don't
know it it's it's just it's a bad thing so you want to do everything you can to not get in that vehicle and if it ends up your if it ends your life if it has a tragic outcome so be it but it is going to be more pleasant and better for you than ever getting in that car and I really thought about that a lot because having the conversations early
having the collaborations rather than conflict early addressing problems early in your business in your life in your relationships whatever saves you so much on the back end that you can never predict if you're able to address an issue with an employee that like all of a sudden you have this gut feel man this guy's not going to work
out this woman's not going to work out and a lot of times okay I'm going to monitor them right you want to give them benefit of the doubt so you monitor things aren't going well you put it off now they're on a pip or some kind of plan put it off and before you know it you have this person on your team and it could be a very high level employee like maybe it's
a CMO or somebody who's like really could influence your bottom line and now you have six months your metrics suck your brand is doing worse your profits are down and it's because you didn't you couldn't have that hard conversation earlier that would have saved you all of these detrimental places that this person has taken you
and in relationships it's often honestly it's probably worse right like you're dating someone you kind of have a red flag but you're like oh I don't want to be too judgmental and you let it go and now we're six months down the road and it's terrible and you're trying to find a way out desperately and it's going to be a real challenge
um as your lives are further mingled together so you know the notion of fighting up front is if you do it right it shouldn't be a fight right it should be something that you address early as quickly as possible in a way that can help to resolve whatever it is that you see as the threat um and so you just you know intervene early
it's just kind of the basic I guess uh point of that because it's true like once you kind of agree to go on that ride that secondary location is unknown and it it will be worse the longer we wait the bigger the price tag to sort of like fighting absolutely absolutely so you don't want to go there and it's a it's a place you want to
avoid at all costs let's talk about the notion of cognitive ruts people sort of get ingrained into thinking and responding and seeing the world a certain way it's often shaped and reinforced by years of patterns and this can hold them back how do we recognize that we're thinking this way and we're in a rut and overcome that sure I think that people will start bumping up
against themselves because they are the greatest like if you are the greatest driver of where you end up you're the greatest kind of engine to your business in your world and in your relationships um then you also are also you are also the greatest limiter right so if you start whether it's with these imaginary rules or with how you think about things
or how you think about yourself you know people get into you know years and years of thinking about things in the same way they'll think about you know what they're capable of what they can do uh whether they're able to have these hard conversations um they'll just over and over and over again they tell themselves the same message and so I think about it almost
like a rut because they can't see any other way like they literally can't see any other way of operating and so they're just they're in this tunnel they're in this rut and they're just going to think about things the same way and at a high level people do this too right like at a very high level of operation people don't see any other way of
operating but how the style that they use today and so you know the goal really is if you feel yourself bumping against yourself and you say hey like I don't understand like why X person is doing something and I'm not or why they're taking risks and I'm not or why this is happening and I'm not look at how you think because you're probably in
a tunnel somewhere and so what you want to start to do is to expand yourself into places where you're going to get some movement there right like you don't get out of the tunnel right away you kind of go up on the wall a little bit and then you go back into it you get up on the wall and you see a little hope maybe sometimes
outside of it and you get back into it and then eventually you're going to kind of pop out of that but the way in which people start kind of getting on the wall at least get out of that rut a little bit is start to think about how you operate because what I've noticed and if you look for it and I know people have built Industries on this right like
let's say you're a marketer and okay you're a marketer on Twitter and you're a marketer you have marketing friends you go to marketing conferences you go to marketing forums you read marketing books and you wonder why you're not an exceptional marketer and it's because like you're in a rut you know you all you see is this certain content in the
certain tunnel and what you'll notice is that people who are exceptional are pulling in like you know Steve Jobs used fonts from a calligraphy course right that he took like that like people who are great will find ways of pulling in exceptional things from outside of their fields outside of their way of thinking outside of tradition outside of you know what is
common and some ways we have to do that for ourselves right but we also have to do that for our professions our businesses how we think about our life and begin to look at non-traditional ways of doing it and sometimes those non-traditional ways end up blowing up uh like for example the fire movement right like the financial Financial
independent retire early group yeah you know had a different way of looking at finances but you know some people like them some people don't but I think that what's so cool about it is it's a different way of looking about retirement how cool is that and then you have people who think about uh you know other elements of pulling in art into
what they do and we see things with like you know web3 and we see things with you know some other areas where they pull in even with crypto pulls in some elements of traditional Finance to make its itself bigger and more powerful so it's these collaborations that and using things in unique ways that make us really exceptional and can really push
us past our boundaries whether that's us as a person and thinking about new things uh you know Tim Ferriss in his four hour work week made people think a lot differently about work and and how they allocate time and Outsourcing um so we can all find different ways and different you know hacking ways to be able to think we're all great hackers if we are forced into it
um that's one thing that was really great about having some insight into prisons is how great people can be when they I mean it's it's kind of a bad situation right but like it forces creativity it absolutely forces creativity so you if you want something you figure out a way and you know in our comfortable lives there's nothing that
forces us to figure it out so we're really comfortable we have some Mastery in like you know marketing and we feel very confident very capable and we go to All Those comp conferences but really great marketers are stealing from artists they're stealing from like affiliate marketers they're stealing from all of these other places and they're pulling
things in and making them exceptional and so these cognitive ruts we get in sometimes we have to really think like are we reinforcing our own rut and how can we begin to expand outside of it and you know what I try to do personally is that I try to make sure that like everything I'm reading isn't just about like performance or psychology you
know I'll read like autobiographies and biographies about people and how they thought about things but also I I definitely follow and read artists and I definitely follow and read people who are in other fields and philosophy and and other things because I need I need to see and be challenged all the time in what I'm pulling in so that I can think
of something new and novel or put things together in new and novel ways so that I'm I can be great at what I do and I hope that people are always challenging themselves because it seems like you know not to criticize LinkedIn but the content of it can be really rote and boring and it you can see how these ruts happen right when we criticize
these big corporations sometimes we can see how it happens because you look at the maybe conferences are upcoming or things that are happening and you look at the list and you're like oh my God this could have happened like five years ago and been exactly the same um what's challenging things what's pushing people out of that rut uh what is kind of challenging them personally
professionally and how can they think about this more effectively I want to ask in all of your work what have you learned from people that you've applied in your life that's made a difference to the quality of your life uh of the clients I think that they challenge me always to think bigger than I do I think that there's always a different level
that I'm unaware exists and so it it opens I mean it certainly opens my range and how I think about things when every single day you know I don't have I have two or three clients I'll meet with every day and I don't have like corporations and do some corporate contracts but you know when you work with people who are operating at a certain level you
know some of my clients are working you know a couple hundred thousand dollars you know they're making Summer Running billion dollar companies and some have built you know companies that are worth quite a bit and you see kind of like you know how they live their lives and how they think about their work and how they think about their business and how they
think about risk and it certainly makes me think like you know I need to continue to expand and challenge myself um so that I'm you know bigger able to reach more able to do more um and continuing to you know expand and grow and challenge myself it's exciting I'd love to hear kind of how they think about some of these elements
while I'm helping them on other specific other elements um because it's um you know it I think our exposure is important one of the common themes that has come up over and over again through our conversation but we've never actually hit on the right word as perspective right so when you talk about cognitive routes it's you're gaining a different
perspective from other sort of areas of wisdom that you can apply to a certain area when you talk about being challenged or seeing a Next Level you're shifting your perspective from what you see it's really hard to understand a system that you're a part of when all you see is that system and so it's really interesting blind spots again right how do we get rid of blind spots
we change our perspective we change our lens into the situation now all of a sudden we can see things that we couldn't see before I think that's a really uh interesting sort of way to wind that up and we always sort of end um where I try to end each Episode by asking the same question which is and I'm super curious for you which is what
is success for you success is having enough to never think about to never think about needing it right like and to be able to like monetarily anyway and to be able to have the optionality that I wish for across various areas of life and you know the thing for me is that money provides some optionality um but success means that you have
optionality in a range of things time uh they have optionality in your future and what you choose where you live where you uh how you help others the kinds of help you can offer to others the scale at which you can offer help to others and so I guess I would look at it as being assured that I there is nothing that I would need to have the kind of
optionality that I would want and that would I guess be my measure of success it's a good question thank you very much and thank you so much for a wonderful conversation today thank you so much for having me you know we've circled around each other quite a few times and um and you're a really thoughtful wonderful man so thank you for engaging with me today