you have to learn to quit being right all the time and quit being smart all the time and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are and realize that i'm here to make a positive difference in the world and me being smart and me being right is probably no longer the way to do that [Music]
marshall welcome to the show oh thank you so much for inviting me i want to start with something simple and then we can build up from there so let's start with what is leadership leadership number one i never like to get into semantic debates so when i give you a definition just look at it as my definition not the right definition paul hersey my
old mentor taught me that he said there are many definitions of words so don't get into semantic arguments just to find what you mean and just leave it at that so for me i like his definition leadership is working with and through others to achieve objectives and the key word and the definition is others as opposed to doing it by yourself can
anyone be a leader oh yeah anyone can be a leader assuming they have basic qualities to get along in life yeah yeah i mean i'm often asked a question are leaders made or born a common question and i can answer one thing definitively are you ready 100 of every leader i've ever met and i've met many have been born they've all been born
so the only question is can leaders become more effective and the answer to that is a definite yes i have research from thousands of people that leaders can definitely increase their effectiveness do we hold any sort of self-sabotaging beliefs about leadership yeah i think we have a lot of self-limiting beliefs and um the self-limiting beliefs a lot
of these come from inside us basically i can't do this i can't do that uh this is just the way i am one of the most common problems is this is just the way i am as if we have some real quote real fixed identity that lives throughout time and i have to really work on people to change that even smart people say things
like this you know i can't listen i can't listen i've never been able to listen i can't listen well look in their ears why not you got something stuck in there why can't you listen do you have an incurable genetic defect that is prohibiting you from listening well you know yeah as long as we tell ourselves that's the way i am two things happen both bad one
we inhibit the odds on ever getting better two even if we do change our behavior we don't seem authentic to ourselves we feel like a phony because if the real me can't listen and you say i'm a good listener you know what i'm thinking well that's not the real me i'm just pretending to be a good listener because the real me is no good
at that so a lot of our beliefs are very self-limiting and by the way this is not limited to people at the bottom of the food form people i coach are at the top of the food chain and they still do this that's just the way i am stuff so when it comes to changing our behavior then and i want to speak more about this a little later as well
are we changing our beliefs about ourselves or are we changing our habits both i mean you can definitely see if you don't change your beliefs about yourself it can be hard to change your behavior or as i said even if you do change your behavior you don't feel real or authentic so that's why i think it's really important to to look at both
uh the way you do look at yourself that you identify your self-concept your identity whatever that might be and also your behavior talk to me a little bit about how you go through that process with someone do you start with the belief do you start with the behavior how do you get that earned confidence to sort of say that i can do this even
though you haven't done it or you don't believe that about yourself well what i do is i give everyone confidential feedback so every leader i work with gets confidential feedback from their colleagues the average person i coach gets feedback from 18 people so you know this is and these reports are very um they're hard to hear sometimes because
they're not used to getting honest feedback and so they get feedback from a lot of people these might be board members there might be direct reports peers and then they get this feedback and they say okay i feel good about x i want to get better or why i said fine then they need to talk to if they're not the ceo they talk to the ceo
if they are the ceo they talk to the board say all right is this are these the right behaviors and the right people and they say yes and then the next thing is i teach people how to respond to feedback they go back and talk to everybody and say for example you know thank you so much for participating in this process
the first thing i want to say is you know how grateful i am i don't know who said what many people said many things to try to help me i have nothing to lose and much to gain second much of my feedback is positive ethical dedicated hard-working i care about the company and our customers and creative and getting results and these are important things to me i hope
my score high and did i do not know who said what i know a lot of people took the time to help me i just want to see how grateful i am then they don't say but they say and there's something i'd like to improve for example i'd like to be a better listener if i haven't listened to you or the other people in the past i'm sorry
please accept my apologies there's no excuse i'm not going to ask you for more feedback about the past i'm going to ask you for ideas for the future if you had have ideas help me be a positive and open-minded listener in the future what might they be whatever the person says sit there shut up listen take notes say thank you don't
judge and don't critique and then they listen to the ideas and they say thank you i cannot promise to change everything everyone says i can promise so to listen to everyone to think of these ideas and do what i can i cannot change the past i can change the future you know i can't get better at everything i get better at this
and i'm going to involve you and ask you if you don't mind to help me get better so that's responding and then the next thing is they focus on changing i had been in business 12 years before anyone asked me the great existential question what was it does anybody ever really change well i have a background in mathematics i said i have no research to prove it so
i guess i don't know well for 45 years i've been answering the question now i do know i know who changes who doesn't change why people change why people don't change and the key to making change last is and by the way i've done a research study called leadership as a context board if anyone would like to see a copy of the
research send me an email marshallmarshallgoldsmith.com i'll send you a copy of it and it's 86 000 people from all around the world and the key to making everything work is you have to follow up and stick with it what's that sound like you know mr colleague two months ago i said i wanted to be a more positive and open-minded
listener it's been two months based on the last two months give me ideas for the next two months four months ago i said i wanted to be a positive and open-minded listener based on last two months give me ideas for the next two months six months eight months 10 months 12 months well what happens when you do this is this is research study from 86 000
people leaders that don't follow up and don't talk to people guess what don't get better improvement looks like random chance leaders that do talk to people and follow up to the degree they make it a systematic process huge improvement and what i've learned is people don't get better because of me they get better because of themselves and the people
around them i'm a facilitator more than i'm an expert one of the things that that strikes me about that approach that's really interesting is that if i um have a colleague and the colleague doesn't think i'm a good listener and i go to them and i say okay i'm going to change my behavior and do you have any ideas for what i can do and
they still are going to see the world through this eye i could be a great listener for six months and then that one time that i don't listen they're gonna they're gonna key in on this well this is a very very critical point this is why follow-up is important take scenario a and scenario b scenario a you get feedback i'm going to
pick a simple example making destructive comments i picked that because you couldn't get simpler so i get the feedback i make too many destructive comments okay quit doing it just quit doing it i go seven months and never make a destructive comment about anyone now back to your good point seven months later i say idiots in finance
stupid bean counters how to get anything done is stupid company that's run by accountants you hear me your reaction is has never changed here's what happens though when you do follow up i come back immediately and have this conversation you don't believe i'm going to change you don't believe i'm going to change you think well they went to this course
temporary religious experience this will never last it happens so two months later when i come back and say it's been two months i want to do a great job of not making destructive comments be a good team player give me ideas now you think about it you think wait you've done a good job four months good job six months good job
seven months idiots in finance you know what you would say then you know you've really worked hard you went seven months without doing that you shouldn't have said that i said you're right i'm going to apologize situation a did behavior change yes did perception change no situation b did behavior change yes did perception change yes and you're making
an excellent point in leadership it doesn't matter what we say it only matters what they hear if they don't hear it it doesn't matter if we said it or not one of the other points you made about leadership was working through others and i think that's really interesting because often we transition into leadership i mean formal leadership in
terms of running a team or an organization or a department and we're going from a job where we're a high achiever but that achievement is often individual so how do we transition from being an achiever to a leader oh it's very what you've i just said is one of the biggest challenges of all of going into leadership because we're used to doing it ourselves
now you have to learn to quit being right all the time and quit being smart all the time and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are and realize that i'm here to make a positive difference in the world and me being smart and me being right is probably no longer the way to do that
you see when you're in school you take test after test after test after test you have to prove you're smart over and over thousands of times to prove you're smart it's very difficult to stop we're we're programmed to prove we're smart and it's hard to stop so i was interviewed in the harvard business review and asked a
question related to your question what's the number one problem of all the successful people you've coached over the years my answer winning too much what does that mean it's important we want to win it's meaningful we want to win if it's critical we want to win if it's trivial we want to win if it's not worth it we want to win anyway winners love
winning it's very hard for winners not to constantly win i'm going to give you a case study of winning too much that almost all of my clients fail you will probably fail and almost all the listeners will fail case study number one you want to go to dinner at restaurant x your wife husband friend or partner wants to go to dinner at restaurant why
you have a heated argument you go to a restaurant why it was not your choice the food tastes awful and the service is terrible option a you could critique the food point out our partner was wrong this mistake could have been avoided if only you listen to me me me me me option b shut up eat the stupid food try to enjoy it and
have a nice night what would i do what should i do almost all my clients what would i do critique the food what should i do shut up case study two even worse you have a hard day at work a hard day you go home your husband wife friend or partner is there the other person says i had such a hard day today i had such a tough day and we reply
you had a hard day you had a hard day do you have any idea what i had to put up with today do you think you had a hard day we're so competitive we have to prove we're more miserable than the people we live with i gave this example to my class at the dartmouth tech school young guy raised his hand he said i did that last week
i asked him what happened he said my wife looked at me she said honey you just think you've had a hard day it is not over yeah it's not over well it's hard not to win all the time and and the other thing is it's very hard for technical people not to add value constantly so what does that mean i'm young smart enthusiastic and you're my boss i come
to you with an idea you think it's a great idea rather than just saying great idea our tendency is to say well that's a nice idea why don't you add this to it well the quality of the idea may go up five percent my commitment to execute this idea just went down fifty percent it's no longer my idea boss now it's your idea incredibly difficult for smart
successful people not to constantly add value one of my good coaching clients was jp garnier he was the ceo of a very large drug company called glaxosmithkline i said what did you learn about leadership as the ceo of this huge company he said i've learned a very hard lesson and every time your listeners get promoted in life this lesson becomes
more real he said my suggestions become orders now he said if they're smart they're orders if they're stupid they're orders if i want them to be orders they are orders and if i do not want them to be orders they are orders anyway my suggestions become orders for nine years i trained the animals in the united states navy was the first thing i
teach the new admirals you get that star your suggestions become orders apples don't make suggestions that one makes a suggestion what's the response iii that suggestion is an order so i said jp what'd you learn from me when i was your coach that helped you the most he said you told me one lesson help me be a better leader and have a happier life i
said what was it he said before i speak breathe breathe and ask one question is it worth it is it worth it he said as the ceo of this company 50 of the time have had the discipline to stop and to breathe and say is it worth it what did i decide am i right maybe is it worth it no oh uh there's two follow-ups i have to
this the first is sort of reprogramming the stop adding too much value is is definitely something that i've had to catch myself doing uh when i use deleted team people and it is what is the when you catch yourself in that moment and you know you can make this idea better and you you swallow it you don't say anything
it's sometimes good to add value i can't tell you when it is or isn't good now jp didn't say he never added value what did he say half the time he didn't add value right in the old days he always added value see if you just stop and think you're probably going to come up with a pretty good answer the in real world we don't stop and think we just talk
by the way if you have to ask at work i'll give you a technique breathe is my comment going to improve this other person's commitment if the answer is yes fine if the answer is no breathe again is it worth saying sometimes it is sometimes it's not at home breathe breathe is my comment going to improve my relationship with the person i love
if the answer is no should i say it well at work about half the time if you have to ask it's not worth it at home it's almost never worth it if you have to ask [Laughter] there's a good bet don't even think about it you know if you have to ask is this going to be a good idea it probably won't be what i like about the breathing exercise
is that it acts sort of as a clutch and it takes us from responding and into reasoning and when we respond without reasoning we're truly animals if you will and all of our sort of instincts come out and we can add this clutch by taking a breath and then that allows us to sort of switch into a reasoning and not responding
how do you help someone gain the confidence to take on leadership responsibility or believe in their ability or their potential as a leader you know i answer is i'm not an expert the people i coach um people i coach are ceos or could be ceos of huge corporations and they don't really need to go to the assertive training program so i i
there are other people i can answer that question far better than i could there's an enormous amount of research and overwhelming amount of advice for leaders out there on how to motivate other people what do you want leaders to know about motivation well let me give you advice for coaching now i'm not going to speak about all leadership because
i'm going to speak just about coaching okay you ready in my coaching for years i didn't get paid if my clients didn't get better better is not judged by me or them and shoves everyone around them now there's a great way to test if someone believes what they're saying ask them a question you want to bet on it do you want to bet on it now they say i
believe it but i wouldn't bet on it you know what you just learned they don't believe it they don't believe it if they believe it they bet on it here's the money i bet on it well when you get paid for results you learn humility the client i coach that i spent the most amount of time with did not improve at all and he did not get paid
the client i coach i spent the least amount of time with improved more than anyone i've ever coached 200 people got better and i did get paid a very humbling lesson i made a chart on one dimension it was called time spent with executive coach marshall will smith the other major called improvement there was a clear negative correlation
between spending time with me and getting better well i thought this is troubling so i go talk to my client who improved the most who i spent the least amount of time with by the way i've spent hours with him he's a great friend of mine over 30 years but actually coaching very little time he improved the most and he was great to start with his name alan malawi
allen went on to be the ceo ford the stock went from one dollar and one cent to 18 and 40 cents 1 837 appreciation and stock value he also had a 97 approval rating from every employee union company ceo of the air in the united states and ranked number three greatest leader in the entire world amazing man so i talked to alan my good friend
i said alan of all the people i've coached i spent the most amount of time with you i spent the least amount of time with you coaching you and you improved the most and you were great to start with now said alan i made a chart on one dimension it's called time spent with the executive coach marshall goldsmith the other one's called
improvement and there seemed to be a negative relationship here now alan i said the way this chart looks had you never met me you would really be good so i said what should i learn about coaching from you well he taught me a lesson to change my life he said your biggest challenge as a coach is one thing customer selection you pick the
right customer your coaching process always works you pick the wrong customer your coaching process will never work and he said never make the coaching process about yourself and your own ego and how smart you think you are make it about those great people you work with and how proud you are of them then he said is the ceo ford my job
isn't that different i don't design the cars i don't build the cars i don't sell cars i gotta have great people and every day i drive to work i tell myself leadership's not about me it's about them well if you ask me a lesson you know i get ranked number one coach in the world for years nobody knows i'm a good coach i can't sit there and say i'm a better
coach than everybody how do i even know that i don't one thing i have got though i got the best clients how do you go about client selection well number one i talk to my clients i say if i work with you you will do the following you will get feedback you will talk to people you will follow up you will work hard you
will will will will and then i say guess what if there's any that you don't want to do it's okay i just won't work with you i just won't work with you now one thing i'm real proud of in my new book the earned life is the first six pages first six pages of my clients and the one thing i did in this book that i love is it says in my 50-year career as an
executive educator and coach i've been blessed to work with many of the greatest leaders in america in theory i'm supposed to help them in practice i've learned far more from them they've learned from me and then i go on and talk about how great they are well they talk about how great i am i talk about how great they are you know what
have great items because of them anybody would look like a good coach if you coach the people i coach [Laughter] somebody's jim kim president of the world bank saved 22 million lives when he's had a partner in health my friend alan malali i mentioned ceo of the year in the united states uber jolie ceo best buy spectacular leader turned the company around
albert burles ceo pfizer did a few important things last year when francis helselbein won the presidential medal of freedom peter drucker said it's the greatest leader has ever met oh you know uh ashish chadvani just got nominated for nobel peace prize james downing head of st children's hospital etc etc etc well you know what
key to being a great coach work with them it's like saying that the key to being a good coach in hockey is like coaching the all-star team oh yeah exactly i'm coaching the all-stars by the way the coach that coaches the greatest players he's probably going to win yeah it's probably going to win and the other thing is if people don't care
don't waste your time have you ever attempted to change the behavior of a husband and wife or partner had no interest in changing how's that working out for you and i was teaching my class you ever try to change mommy and daddy that had no interest in changing how'd that go one woman raised her hand i said are you
trying to change mommy or daddy she said daddy i said what's daddy's problem she said he doesn't have a healthy lifestyle i asked her how old is daddy she said 94 years old leave the old boy alone you want to smoke a cigar old man smoke too who cares he's 94. well you know people don't care don't waste your time put your time as a coach in with people
that do care you're the only ones are gonna get better anyway so on that note you've worked with some of the best people in the world and thousands of them at that i'm curious as to what you've learned about what really matters in life from them this is a different question than corporate success if you look at life my new book i talk a
lot about that and i talk about three things what's it take to have a great life all right and to me great life's not measured by how much money you have or how much status you have what does it take to have a great life first what i talk about three things i don't discuss in my book and then three things i do the ones i don't discuss are number one
is health you need to have good health but i'm not writing a book on health two you need at least a little kind of middle class level of income and i'm not writing a book about that and you need to have great relationships with people you love and this book is only partially about that assuming you've got that you need three things one
your aspirations you have to have something why am i doing this some reason for existence that's beyond just getting things done you need a why two your ambitions those are the achievements that you have and then number three is your day-to-day activities that's the life you're living every day and to the degree these three things are
aligned you're probably going to have a great life which not as always as easy as it sounds and what happens is if you look at the history of the world most people in the history of the world were kind of stuck in the action phase that day-to-day activity we didn't have a lot of control in our history we kind of much did what we were told were born
where we were supposed to be played our role in life and we just lived from day to day not a bad thing just that's the way it was some people are lost in the aspiration phase they have lofty ideas and dreams they don't achieve much but they think a lot about big things the people i coach and most people on this podcast
if they're not careful they overweight ambition and achievement they're lost in achievement and the one thing i really focus on in my new book is this never make your value as a human being conditioned on the results of what you're trying to achieve never do that it's a fool's game it is a fool's game for two reasons one you don't control the outcomes
there are million variables impacting anything we're trying to do in life today you don't control that and number two what happens if you do achieve stuff how much satisfaction does that give you in life anyway a week a month a year not much as soon as you achieve something if that's all that matters guess what you're gonna have to do achieve more and
more and more and more and you never get there so it's really this is counter to western philosophy we have been hammered that achievement is good about 98 of all self-help books tell you achieve more delay gratification here's how you can achieve more on the assumption that once i achieve more everything will be okay
the great western disease is it's all going to be defined when followed by when i get the money status bmw condominium everything's going to be okay after that there's no win that's all nonsense it's all going to be a great win when is an old person waiting to die that's when you know there's no win there and one one type of book always ends with and
they lived happily ever after that type of book is called a fairy tale that's a fair that's not the real world that's not that's a fairy tale in life we're constantly reinventing ourselves and the first thing i talk about is never place your value as a human being on the results of what you're trying to achieve i mentioned albert berla who endorsed
the book from pfizer i called albert how'd you do last year pretty good you know came up with his vaccine saved a billion or so lives that's pretty good and stock's an all-time high and ceo of the year and oh book and oh bubba on and on a pretty good year so what's your problem in life he said i have a huge problem
next year next year if his value as a human being is he has to do better than last year pack it in he will never do better than last year what happens to the super bowl champions disaster michael phelps won 25 gold medals more than anyone in history what do you think about doing everyone is less metal killing himself killing himself if that's it
you're not going to win you're not going to win so what i talk about in the book is it's great to try to achieve things but don't become fixated on the outcomes one of the most brilliant people i've ever met is called his name sophie bacall safi who's a small business guy started up 10 or 12 companies made tens of millions of dollars has a phd in physics
from stanford has an iq probably equal to mine and yours combined he um you know just a brilliant guy wrote a book called loon shots he's consulted the president's on and on and on so safi is one of the people i spent time with over covid during zoom calls every weekend and he said he finally realized something he's a scientist he said he finally
realized that that he i always thought happiness was a dependent variable based upon achievement that i will be happy after i achieve and he said i finally realized happiness and achievement are independent variables you can achieve a lot and be happy you give a lot to be miserable you achieve nothing and be happy you
achieve nothing and be miserable through independent variables and if you know when i talked to safi i told him how much you have to achieve we need two phds from stanford what another 100 million bucks start up some more companies consult a couple more presidents what does it matter you're on achievement you're a 99.99 now
you think it's going to matter you get to a 99.9999 it's not going to matter you're just going to find something else to do and it was a great breakthrough for him because he realized you can be happy without dependency upon the next achievement can we teach people this or does it have to be learned yeah and and the way you do it is you
love the process of what you're doing you do your best it's connected to a higher purpose and you achieve what you achieve yeah and this comes back to focusing on the process and instead of the outcome exactly i tell a story the golfer in the beer can so there's a golfer going to his little country club he's playing for the club
championship right last hope noisy people in front of him drinking beer very annoying but he concentrates he hits a drive almost perfect somehow the ball goes over into it into the rough a terrible lie what happened he walks up to the ball a beer can the idiots in front of him left a beer can on the fairway he is so angry what does a golfer need to do
forget about the drive forget about the beer can forget about the idiots come up with a strategy breathe focus on the process hit the shot in front of you hit the shot in front of you that's it let all that other stuff go it's just a distraction don't think about winning the tournament that's a distraction don't think about
the results hit the shot and the other thing is forgive the other people for being who they are and forgive yourself for wishing they were somebody else let it go don't make yourself miserable because people in front of you are idiots how important is it to the to have people around you to have good company around you while you're doing this
well you know i think it can be very important let me give you the background of what i did over covet which led to my last book that is this we ended up with 50 or 60 amazing people and i can mention their names they're all in the book one of them was pal gasol who's a great basketball star curtis martin nfl all-star telly lung
broadway star we had the head of the olympic committee the head of russell investments they had ancestry.com we had all these ceos president of the world bank just an amazing amazing group of people and every weekend they talked about their lives and every week they would say here's what i feel good about in my life and here's what i've done wrong
and please give me help i just helped me and they try to help each other over and over and over and over again well they loved it why there's an old saying it's lonely at the top it used to be lonely at the top today it is lonely er at the top people are lonely out there people are lonely and just having a group of people to talk to
where nobody's going to put you on social media make a fool of you where you can just be a human one person said i get to be human one hour a week is a big deal so i think having a support group is more important today than ever having people that help you they try to you know you know kind of support you they're not trying to put you down
and also very few of us live in the community that we were brought up in most of us don't we we don't have this community anymore and we're lonely so i think it's you know a support group really important and and over covet i spent 400 hours doing this i think two of the things that you hit on there that are that are really
important are a sense of community a sense of purpose and also feeling like your partner you're part of something larger than yourself yes and i think that that's missing from so many of our lives right then not only the connection to our community but also feeling part of something meaningful that's larger than us and if you're not what's the point
so why exactly am i working 80 hours a week why well if there's no larger purpose why am i doing this and you know i think a lot of us have some illusion that if i get more money i'll be happier life will be meaningful or something right and that doesn't exactly work i mean look at me i'm 73 years old now i don't have to be in this podcast you
know what i could be doing right now i had the opportunity i could be playing crappy golf with old men at the country club while eating chicken salad sandwiches and discussing gallbladder surgery yes i could be doing this i don't want to do that i'd rather talk to you it's more meaningful to me it's a lot more meaningful than playing
bad golf and talking about you know gallbladder surgery if you ever want to make your golf game worse i'll come out with you how do we de-program ourselves then from the the sort of focus on results and you know getting to the next step and then the next step and the next step being better and better and better and
how do we get out of that to the point where we can take pride in the process and focus on the next shot trying to make the next shot better or the next practice better or well i'm going to share a technique i talk about in the book and this is called the every breath paradigm so i'm a buddhist i'm not a religious buddhist i'm a philosophical buddhist i
probably read 400 books about buddhism so i know more about buddhism than i know about get what i got a phd in buddhist belief is every time i take a breath it's a new me so you breathe new me knew me knew me everything that happened before this second in time was done by an infinite set of people they were called the previous me's
so the first thing is you breathe and you think about all the previous shoes think of all the gifts they've given you that's listening to me right now think about how hard they tried how many people they helped if anybody did that many nice things what you just say to those good people thank you thank you thank you now did they make some
mistakes in life of course they did let it go let it go so one thing is don't live in the past and beat yourself up over the head for things the previous versions of you did there's a great story in the book a guy's riding in a car with his wife and they had a great time with the kids over the weekend they're so happy and she starts in on well you know 10 years
ago you were never around and you didn't do this and that and the other and he said something he said you know that was a different person he said i'm i'm not the person i was 10 years ago hopefully i'm a better person i've tried and the person 10 years ago made some mistakes i'm not that person and you know what you said you're right
you aren't that person that's not fair well you know we all change we're not the same person you were 10 years ago and the first thing is just let go of that let go of that and just realize you know i could be the person i need to be now i mean i went to ucla and you know i had a pretty great basketball coach called john wooden when
i was here and john wood never focused on results at all you know what he said all i focus on is the process and do your best if you do your best you know what be proud if you lose be proud you win be proud if you don't do your best you have nothing to be proud of and he said he never focused on the outcomes the coach of duke same thing
coach k what does he say you have a terrible play you feel bad you know he says next play next play next play you have a great play you're going like this next play you don't jump up and down and live in the past you don't put yourself down about the past it's over it's over and one of the things i talk about is vicarious living
one of the huge problems in our society today is vicarious living living our lives through others not living our own lives um the average american kid that's flunking out of school spends 55 hours a week on non-academic media video games movie tv non-academic media they're living someone else's life i was talking to my son about this about
wasting your time playing video games is how you think video games are bad is nothing he said people spend over a billion hours watching somebody else play video games i mean how how vicarious is that you know pewdiepie is but pewdiepie is his internet star people have probably spent a billion hours watching him play video games some
sarcastic swedish guy over a billion hours have been spent watching the kardashians for what they don't care about you you're living someone else's life and one of the key points is live your own life and by the way when you live in the past you're living someone else's life too the guy sitting at the bar talking about super bowl three
he wasn't in super bowl three a kid was in super bowl three a young version of him 50 years ago was in super bowl three not him well that's just another form of vicarious living he's living with what he used to be so i've done nine programs in my house with retiring ceos and first thing i tell them is you can live in the past
you can't you can't sit there and say i used to be the ceo of something you got to be where you are you got to find meaning now and what you did was greg you did it that was nice the previous versions of you did that you know good for them that's not you what are you doing now how do you coach people to turn the page i have an idea that you know i've
written about recently called the 24 hour rule which is no matter what happens in your day you get that day to celebrate or cry or the next day you have a new page and it's a blank page and you have to move on you can't hang on to yesterday's wins or yesterday's losses you just need to go forward that's it and you just breathe and you
say all right it's a new day forgive yourself for whatever happened make peace move on and like coach k next play move on and don't live in the past and again there's this assumption that whenever when i get this stuff everything's going to be okay what is the great western art form we've been hammered millions of times you get
hammered with the same message the great western art form sounds like this there is a person the person is sad oh very sad they spend money they buy a product and they become happy this is called a commercial have you ever seen one of those before how many times have you seen that message there was a person who was sad they spent money and became happy
millions of times has hammered into your brain no wonder people get fixated on this stuff they're giving the illusion that somehow this is going to make them happy i want to come back to leadership a little bit because uh it's not often i get to talk to one of the world's leadership coaches best leadership coaches in the world and
so i have some more questions around that and i think that yeah so as we sort of look to lead more inclusively these days how do you coach leaders to think about privileged bias and blind spots well being more inclusive i think is very important i am not an expert on unconscious bias but let me tell you what i do teach people
my the book is dedicated my new book is dedicated to roosevelt thomas who is the world's expert on diversity and he taught me a lot i'm not an expert on topic but he did teach me a few things and the first thing is realize different people have something called different referent groups they have different heroes they look up to different people
and it doesn't mean they're good or bad but if you understand that you're much less likely to hate people or discriminate against people the other thing he said is you always differentiate between what he called a preference and a requirement of the job and he used example my apologies he uses the example of um he uses the example of phil jackson
coaching the chicago bulls and dennis rodman and dennis rodman you know had yellow hair or purple hair that phil jackson didn't care he led the league in rebounds and maybe phil jackson did or did not love his multi-colored hair the point roosevelt made is so what he didn't care that's his choice whether i like his hair or not is irrelevant
this is not a fashion contest it's a basketball game and really sorting that out is another helpful way the other thing is though ask people for input about yourself and you focus on you getting better more than just judging everybody else so peter drucker i was on the advisory board of the peter drucker foundation for 10 years
now peter drucker again ranked number one leadership thinker in the world my intellect compared to peter drucker is out of a 10 year old i can tell you this guy was smart he was playing with a different deck than i was and he taught me many things that he said you know in the past the leader of the past knew how to tell leader future's going to ask like you
said they're going to be inclusive they're going to ask why in the past it was a different world in the past the leader knew more about what they were doing than the followers in the future the followers no more than a leader if i'm if i got a ceo who knows more about marketing than the marketing person and more about finance than a
finance person more about hr and hr person they do not have a leadership problem they have a selection problem they have the wrong staff you want them to know more about what they're doing than you well if i manage you and you know more about what you're doing than i do i can't tell you what to do and how to do it i have to be inclusive i have to
listen i have to involve you why because i don't know enough to tell you what to do and back to the other example i'll probably do more harm than good i'll probably do more harm than good so shut up why is leadership so scarce in major institutions and what would need to change for more leaders and leadership behaviors to emerge
very interesting question now i just wrote an article in chief executive magazine about this very question and what did i say feedback on leaders is worse and worse and worse than it's ever been behavior of leaders is better and better and better it's ever been leaders today are more effective than any time in history i mean people say are leaders
bullies today compared to the past hello did you ever read a history book wake up we used to have things like slaves and we used to have people building pyramids and we used to have kings who would chop your head off for no reason that was the world we were brought up in were leaders worse than of course they were were they bullies in they there was
no question about being a bully how about negative feedback did you give them negative feedback what happened they chopped your head off you gave negative feedback leaders today are much better here's the problem the standards are much different as leaders behavior has actually improved the expectations of leaders has
actually gone up far faster than their behavior change so today companies can't tolerate bad leaders because employees won't put up with them in the old days nobody liked being managed by a bully nobody liked a bad leader nobody likes being talked down to treated like an idiot but they had to put up with it
name a choice today people have a choice and you know what they'll say goodbye especially after covet goodbye they're not going to put up with that it doesn't mean leaders are worse than they used to be it just means the expectations are higher than they used to be and employees have a lot more power than they used to have one of the things that
sort of seems to have changed during the pandemic is how we we give praise or sort of recognize people for their contributions in the sense of it used to be you've run into somebody at the coffee machine or the water cooler and you can say hey you did a great job on this and now it's more scheduled meetings and back to back
and not everybody's in the office how do you think about that well i'm going to make a couple of reflections on this because you really brought a couple of different issues i'm going to give you all your listeners one suggestion on giving recognition and it works just as well in a virtual environment as it does an in-person environment and i've never seen it fail
one of my clients taught me this he went from a six percentile and provided recognition to a 94 percentile in one year six to 94. so what'd you do it's not too complicated he made a list of everyone that was important in his life friends family direct reports colleagues twice a week once on wednesday once on friday look at the page
did anyone on this page do anything i should recognize if they did email voicemail say thank you little note nothing too fancy if they did if no one did anything he didn't say anything he didn't want to be a phony one year six to a 94 that's all he did to me you don't have to have fancy programs to recognize people you need to
have the discipline to ask yourself should i be recognizing people that's one thing a second technique is start asking people a question tell me what are you proud of so when you ask people what are they proud of they often tell you great things you didn't even know and it's another great way you can recognize people so i i think you know a
couple of things on giving recognition the other thing you talked about though is this ongoing zoom call after zoom call after zoom call thing one of the great leaders our group was margot giorgiotis margot was the ceo of ancestry.com before that ceo of mattel she turned ancestry around she sold to blackstone for 4.75 billion dollars an amazing woman
she said you know this may be the least important zoom call of the week for me it may be the most important one for them and what you need to do as a leader is you need to stop and breathe before every different interaction breathe stop if you don't they all start to blur together you need to breathe you need to swear am i
what's important now who's here breathing breathing breathing slow down start over slow down start over slow down start over if you don't everything just becomes a blur is is the nature of how we communicate with people i mean that the tools that we're using has changed but where do leaders go wrong with communication in person and over zoom
and what are the ways that we can correct that well i think the best way to improve our communication with people is not to ask me for suggestions but ask them so let's say you want to do a better job of communicating with mary you know the best person in the world to help you that might be it might actually be merry ask them you know
i can give you generic answers but that may or may not fit your issues ask the real people that you work with now one thing i talk about in the new book is empathy and it's related to this concept empathy is an interesting thing up until a couple years ago i just saw empathy is a good thing sounds good fuzzy warm he has lots of empathy i thought well
that sounds good and i started studying empathy i realized it's sometimes good but too much empathy can be a disaster so i talk about four types of empathy and it's good to look at all four and it's back to your question about others and connected to them the first type of empathy is called the empathy of understanding
now empathy simply means putting yourself in the other person's frame of mind and understanding the world from their perspective well or feeling the world the way they feel it or all that the first empathy is empathy of understanding understand you understand why you feel the way you do that's good you think very positive could be good could be bad
it could be used to help you it could easily be used to manipulate you let me give an example a budweiser beer they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads with a little dog and a horse now why do they do that how many men actually go into the bar and say you know i want a budweiser beer why i love that little doggie and a horse so cute i love them
zero how many buy beer because of the dog and a horse lots they're not spending that money for no reason they know the trigger they know that that little story is going to have you buy beer or they wouldn't be spending the hundreds of millions of books so understanding where other people are coming from could be good could be used to help them
could be manipulative could be used to trick them or manipulate them the second type of empathy is the empathy of feeling you know i feel your joy i feel your pain could be good it makes you understand people better connect with them could be a disaster i'm the coach of the head of the st children's hospital you can see kids die of cancer every day
he gets to see their parents he can't carry that home he can't live with that pain if he does he can't do his job so it could be good it could be bad the next is the same thing the empathy of caring you think caring is good well caring can be very positive i care about you i try to help you can be very negative
i have a very fun example in the book about the empathy of caring with of all people a hedge fund manager now you think the last person to worry about caring about people too much would be a hedge fund manager you know the stereotype of a hedge manager anybody doesn't care about people they would be at the top of the charts this is one of the most famous hedge
fund managers in the world and he's been interviewed by another hedge fund manager i'm just sitting there because i was a previous speaker before him i'm just sitting there god was just curious to listen and he asked the guy why don't you have a fund anymore and the the big guy said i'm not as good as i used to be the other guy
why not he said well you know i've made obviously tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars for people but i've also lost tens or hundreds of billions i've probably made 51 or 52 and lost 48 or 49. that's pretty good and obviously i have a few billion left over for me that's pretty good he said i never cared
i would just make investments and you know analyst and if i didn't play a game and i was good at it and they said one day i started caring i started thinking you know well this is a this is somebody's retirement account and their health care and they need this money and i started caring you said it became much less effective afraid to take risks
he said i don't invest other people's money anymore i just invest my own if i lose i lose i win i win it's not that big of a deal i don't invest money because i'm not as good medical doctors you can't operate on your family why care too much care too much sometimes you got to let go of that caring and then the final is empathy the vital part of empathy is
doing i not only maybe know what you're coming from or care or feel your pain i'm doing something to help you could be good but one of the people in our group she said i'm a fixer i fix everybody else's problems i create dependency they become like children and they don't take responsibility because i'm always taking care of them
so if we look at empathy the key and this goes back to recognizing people how and when is and then i talk about the term in the book called singular empathy and what does that mean i'm going to be who i need to be for the person i'm with now i'm going to be who i need to be now i'm not carrying around the past
i'm not sitting there trying to prove how heroic i am i'm going to be who i need to be now and one of the guys in our group telly young i don't know if you ever saw the play aladdin but anyway he played aladdin on broadway for three years literally a thousand performances he did aladdin so i asked telly how'd you do it night after night after night
he said i had to become the rope now he said i'm gay but i had to fall in love with that princess you know every night and the way i motivated myself is he said when i was a little boy i was eight years old and i went to a play and it was so touching and singing and music and lights and i just loved it and he said every night i get it there
on stage you know what i think that eight-year-old kid this is for you this is for you kid and maybe i've done the play a thousand times but the kid has not seen it a thousand times wonderful story so i have him work with people at the children's hospital to help him and let me give you an irony i'm working in a children's hospital in san diego
with him as volunteers and he's teaching a class we're teaching the class about empathy and i said well i'm sure you must have had you medical doctors have had you know lots of training about this topic you know what the answer was zero never been trained at all on this topic and they're around dying kids so you know you really need to think
what does empathy mean when is it useful when is it not useful and they were so appreciative to even have somebody try to teach them about this to your point about the first part of empathy there we can understand without agreeing with somebody else too and i think there's a nuance there we can see the world through somebody else's eyes we
can smell what they smell and feel and think what they think but we don't actually have to agree with them that's right that's right that's right and you can be in touch with someone but you don't have to agree with them and also you can't live there see the people i coach they may play like nine roles or ten roles in a day
i mean they wake up they have to do a performance appraisal they have to make a board presentation they have to go to a funeral they have to have an award ceremony you know all day they're in these different roles and they just can't carry it with them they can't they have to let go of that previous role they got to be i got to be where i am now
i i'm not i'm in an award ceremony okay somebody died that's not now it's not fair to that person who's getting the award that i'm still at the funeral i'm not at the funeral anymore i'm here i'm here where do i need to be here when now and it's very hard to do this it takes a lot of discipline to do this but it's really a sign of someone who's a great
leader that has the discipline to do that that goes to what you said earlier but the the woman i forget her name sorry who was on the zoom call and said you know this is the most important call for me but it might be for somebody else right yeah and frequently a lot of people don't understand this for the people i coach you think their
jobs are glamorous a lot of their jobs are boring they're listening to presentation after presentation after presentation everything that's been sanitized they've already seen everything 20 times they probably know what the person's going to say yet they need to be upbeat and positive and appear interested that's not easy to
do one of my favorite lessons from you is uh you've said in the past that there's three words that kill conversations no but and however and i'd love to talk about what impact these words have and how do we learn to stop using them this is a great tool to help you be a better listener and be more open-minded just never start a sentence
with three words no but or however if you talk to me and i say no first word no was it shot you're wrong but what does butt mean disregard everything you said just erases whatever you said a terrible habit so one of my clients is stubborn and opinionated and by the way my clients if they do this i find them 20 so he says but and the money goes to
charity so he says you know and now you think twenty dollars where they care about twenty dollars they're rich people yeah you're right a lot of them are men yeah yeah i'm gonna help you somebody said rich old men would ritual men like to lose small amounts of money no rich old men don't like to lose any money i can tell you
they hate losing money so it's amazing how well this works and the money goes to a charity they choose like one guy going you know 20 40 60 80 100. he said this is expensive i said you made 35 million bucks last year this 20 dollars going to a little homeless child shut up shut up just pay the money it's embarrassing and
one of the guys i'm coaching is mr gm ralph then mr jim rowell is a billionaire just a great guy who lives in indy he donated bill gates flies to india with warren buffer to talk rich people into giving money to the poor nice idea right so my friend mr jim rao donates 340 million dollars to poor people in indy out of his pocket very generous man well
what happens is i'm coaching him the money goes the same charity 20 40 60 nobody said this is expensive i said excuse me timeout you just donated 340 million dollars to this charity two days ago and now you're telling me 20 is expensive what is wrong with you he goes oh i i forgot i forgot i forgot sure you forget how you forget
donated 340 million bollocks let me tell you the difference my friend standing up in front of bill gates and warren buffett and every newspaper in india writing a personal check for 340 million dollars and giving it to poor people you know what that's called in life winning winning twenty dollars losing he didn't care about twenty dollars
he didn't care about 340 million dollars what does he care about though winning it's it's hard for winners not to win so i've raised thousands and thousands of dollars doing this with my clients and it just works great the new york post wrote a story about my book and what got you here won't get you there when i was young and this
interviewer had a real chip on his shoulder and business people are jerks and they have to hire some clown like me to help him and you know they're all losers and idiots so after about five minutes i said you think they're bad you're terrible oh yeah every sentence you start as no but however all you do is argue and prove you're right he said well that's
wrong i said well starting now anytime you do this i would say 20 bucks i said well bud 20 40 60 80. finally goes no i said well you said no he said well i did not say no yes you did so i didn't oh you did that's why i did not i said oh you're sure i'm positive you said that little uh box there that's a tape recorder tape recorder it has a rewind button
why don't we just hit the rewind button and hear you say yeah let's do this so he has to revive him in years of views oh no then his story gets better then he goes home and he listens to the tape and he goes what an ass right and then he talks it gets worse then he says his wife i don't do this to you do i he wrote the nicest story though
because he wrote the story he said this story i was going to talk about what a bunch of jerks they were well maybe i should look in the mirror how do we learn to be disagreeable then without uh or how do we learn to disagree without being disagreeable like this is a hardware default where we're saying this and we're having a thought
we're thinking in real time we're not taking a breath now breathing breathing breathing what did you just say this is hard wired as if somehow this is a genetic unchangeable variable don't think that way it's not hard wired this can change anybody can change as long as you say it's hard wired by even bother if it's genetic there's nothing you're
going to do about it if it's hardwired you can't change it we can all change so don't think hardwired or in the dna or any of those phrases we can all change now i'm going to teach you something that peter drucker taught me and you can share this but i'm sure with everyone who's listening if you learn nothing from me but this one little thing
you're going to have a happier life you're going to deal with differences better and you're going to be better at influencing the world are you ready for this great learning point from peter drucker are we ready number one our mission in life is to make a positive difference not to prove we're smart and not to prove we're right
we are not here on earth to prove how smart we are we are not here on earth to prove how right we are we are here to make a positive difference in life if we do not make a positive difference it is absolutely irrelevant how smart or right we are number two every decision in life is made by the person has the power to make the
decision make peace with that not the smartest person the best person a fair person a logical person a wonderful person a rational person or even a sane person every decision is made by the person has the power to make the decision make peace with that if i need to influence you and you have the power to make the decision and i
need to influence you to make a positive difference there is one word to describe you that word is called customer there's one word to describe me that word is called sales person customers do not have to buy sales people have to sell you sell what you can sell you change what you can change if you can sell it you sell it
if you can't if you can change it you change it if you cannot sell it and you cannot change it ah let it go let it go and if you don't like it leave but as long as you're cashing that check at the end of the month you sell what you can sell you change what you can change and you make peace by the way i have repeated this thousands of times
to people with mbas from harvard ceos of multi-billion dollar companies i had just repeated this lesson over and over so few of us ever get this deeply one guy i'm gonna see him tonight in fact my buddy fred is here in nashville tonight he's visiting his friend's a great success story so fred's an old friend of mine fred was ceo of a
company he was owned by a company called kkr private equity you know kkr is he went kkr yeah new york people would you say squishy people are a little bit bottom line oriented you know a little focused on yeah a little of numbers there i like those numbers private equity guys right so fred is the ceo he's he's 41 at the time so he's the ceo of this kkr company
you know what fred says about kkr 41 year old young fred ceo he said oh they can't tell me what to do fred 41 year old fred oh no can't tell me i'm ceo they cannot tell me what to do i'm the ceo you see you know henry kravitz who's worth billions of dollars can't tell fred what to do sorry fred let's grow up son so anyway
they figure out how much it costs to get rid of fred a couple million bucks they don't even care about the couple million bucks it's a pain in the butt now they got to hire somebody new start over oh they're in a foul mood so they they had me talk to fred so i told fred this whole peter drucker thing about the decisions and power and all
that stuff so fred says well they can't tell me what to do i said fred i'm gonna help you buddy it's their money you no i said fred i said fred not only can they tell you what to do you know what fred i'm going to tell you exactly what to do and fred if you do exactly what i tell you i may save your sorry butt if you do not do exactly what i tell you
i got to go back to daddy and mommy in new york and say i can't help little freddie and then fred i said he needs a better coach fred there isn't a better coach is there they're just screwed aren't you fred so what's it gonna be friend fred you know what he did he he salutes the flag he said thank you that was 12 years he was the ceo of that company
did a great job never had a problem got along with corporate very well he just had a little bit ego issue and he would tell you that conversation changed his life and by the way i don't know exactly but i got paid approximately 150 000 for that two-hour conversation well you know what they didn't care saved them a whole lot more than 150 000
bucks that's a really good investment on that prayer and ironically fred and i are going out tonight i'm in nashville now and fred's kids playing a rock band so i'm going to see fred after i talk to you and we're going to go out and see his kids in a rock band tonight you brought up decision making a little while ago and that's a key component of
sort of leadership and i'm curious as to what you've learned about making better decisions that most people miss i want making better decisions well the first thing i've learned is the decision maker makes the decision let's talk about when you are the decision maker if you are the decision maker this peter drucker thing still applies
now i'm the decision maker and you come to me and let's say we disagree all right what do i do i breathe and i think okay we disagree i can either do it my way or his way um if it's close my advice is probably do it your way you're more committed you believe in what you're doing and fine assuming it's pretty close but let's
assume i think this is really serious and we disagree and i don't want to do it your way that's fine that's fine you know what i said i'd say you know mr x in this case i want to do decision y for the following reasons which we've discussed you want to do decision x for the following reasons which we've also discussed and you're a very smart man
and you've got some good rationale behind what you're talking about in this case i've made a decision i still want to do y you say i disagree i say well in this case we do disagree and i respect you and i still won't do y you say well i think you're wrong you know what i say maybe i am and by the way if i'm not wrong this
time i'm gonna be wrong sometime i respect you i value your opinion i've thought about it and i've made the decision and here it is and i want you to execute it in the best way you can if you have any problems tell me what they are and we'll discuss it yet are we going to do this has been decided as opposed to let me point out why i'm
right and you're wrong which is a complete waste of time and that's most people's default sort of reaction to that right is to prove that you're smart prove that you're adding value prove that you're right for what and by the way here's the point let's give me in this case study the leader of the benefit of the doubt let's say there's an 80
chance my decision is a better chance better decision there's still a 20 chance your decision is better now my decision is in theory the right decision on the other hand there's a 20 chance i'm wrong and your decision is a better decision that's life it's not like engineering school we're just guessing here we're all just guessing
and sometimes i'm going to make a good guess and sometimes a bad guess and sometimes i make the right decision and it didn't work because of other variables i can't control i made the best decision at the time and it still didn't work that's why life is way life happens let's switch subjects a little bit and talk about environment which affects our
unconscious mind and creates sort of invisible defaults in a way if we don't create or control it it controls us how do you think about people's environment when creating the best position for success well i wrote a book about this one called triggers triggers now by the way i this book i'm just doing now the earned life is number 49
and i've done six bestsellers three new york times bestsellers one mega big bestseller and i have also though i have published 42 books that were purchased only by my mother my father and my relatives so hopefully this one will get purchased by a few people so i've sold about two and a half million books so somebody bought a lot of them but a lot
most of them nobody bought but this book triggers i talk about that as we go through life there's an argument i control it or it controls me that's a great existential debate of life two schools of thought when we look at two dimensions one dimension is the environment controls me i am controlled by triggers in my environment what is a
trigger any stimulus might impact our behavior could be a sign of sound a person a thought any stimulus impacts my behavior is called a trigger so one school of thought is we are controlled by our environment bf skinner the brilliant harvard psychologist thought that the other school of thought is we control it so let's talk about
four dimensions dimension one is low on low uncontrolled by others low in control by self chaos theory and you know some smart people believe life is basically random chaos number two is i control it now there's a ridiculous book called the secret do you ever read that book the secret no it's it's a ridiculous book it's sold seven million copies or more
and the essence of the book is the secret is if i envision it it will happen see that's it that's the secret i'll tell you what the secret is if i sold seven million copies if i envision it it will happen and they have all this studies they've done well like jimmy wanted to win the basketball team basketball game their championship and
he envisioned and happened and mary wanted to be a movie star and she envisioned it what happened and harry had cancer and he envisioned it and went away and it did by the way every story in the book is true here's the problem they didn't interview the dead people they didn't interview the thousand waitresses in hollywood who envisioned
being movie stars and they didn't interview the basketball team that lost from a mathematical perspective this is called the survivor bias well you know they did this they are successful yeah you did this too and you're a complete failure so you know if you envision it it will happen well if you envision things you
probably increase the odds are going to happen but there's certainly no guarantee it's going to happen because you envision it i mean that's to me childish the opposite is you have no control and b.f skinner the famous harvard psychologist wrote a book beyond freedom and dignity years ago a very famous book he said we're just strictly creatures
that are a function of our environment we're like a stimulus response machine what i believe is we control it and it controls us to a degree we are controlled by the world and to a degree we do make a difference ourselves so i i think the purpose of the book is just to make move the scale a little bit so you're a little bit more in control
and the world's a little bit less in control and the first thing you do is you realize when am i being controlled by the environment when and then you start becoming aware of it and say what can i do so that these unwanted triggers change my life because what happens is we all wake up with this dream of what we're going to do every day yet things happen
and these triggers usually don't push us toward becoming the person we want to become they usually push us away from that person for example you're going to go in the diet you smell the bacon you see the cake you know you're going to work out well you see the tv show you know you get distracted things happen and so it takes a lot of discipline to
go through life and just be aware of when am i controlling it and what is it controlling me and by the way a lot of it is unconscious the beer example you know you're not aware of the fact that budweiser is sitting there in your brain making you want to buy beer they are you're just not aware of it and the more we're open to the fact that
we can be manipulated by the environment the less likely we are to be controlled by the environment the more we deny the fact that we can be controlled by the environment the easier it is to be controlled are there specific examples or changes that you've seen people make to their their operating environment so to speak that
have a big impact on their ability to lead or be the person that they they want to be i'm going to share a tool with you are you ready i am now going to teach you and your listeners something that takes three minutes a day it costs absolutely nothing and will help anyone listening get better at almost anything some people are skeptical now three
minutes a day costs nothing help me get better at almost anything this sounds ridiculous too good to be true half the people that start doing this quit within two weeks and they do not quit because it does not work they quit because it does work what i'm going to teach you next is incredibly easy to understand it is
incredibly difficult to do i've had a person call me on the phone almost every day for 25 years to make sure i do this why somebody asked me why do you have someone call you on the phone every day don't you know the theory about how to change behavior i wrote the theory about how to change behavior that's why i have a person called me on
the phone every day what i'm going to teach you next my name is marshall goldsmith i'll get ranked number one leadership thinker and coach in the whole world i have someone call me on the phone every day to make sure i do this stuff why i am too cowardly to do any of the things i teach by myself i'm too undisciplined to do any things i
teach by myself i need help and it's okay who are we kidding here we all need help get over that ego stuff you know willpower yeah willpower grossly overrated yeah willpower good luck on that one we all need help who are we kidding i need help you need help how many of the top 10 tennis players in the world have a coach 10 they need help
now how does this work get out a spreadsheet on one column you write down a series of questions that represent what is most important in your life could be friends family health whatever it is for you work you write it down every question must be answered with a yes a no or a number yes is recorded as a one knows a zero or some number and
then you have seven boxes across one for every day of the week so every day you fill out the little form at the end of the week you get a report card i will warn you in advance the report card at the end of the week will not be as beautiful as the corporate values plaque you see stuck up on the wall so i've been doing this for 25 years you
do this every day you know what you quickly learn you learn that life is incredibly easy to talk and life is incredibly difficult to live you do this every day you're not looking at those talk values those are beautiful the talk values you look at those liv values not so pretty let me give you a couple examples of questions for me
for example one of mine is how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it wasn't worth it i don't see too many zeros on my scorecard kind of hard for that old professor not to be right all the time how about you have you ever tried to be right just a little too much once or twice yeah how many
another one how many angry or destructive comments did you make about people yesterday well we don't we don't want other people stabbing us in the back why are we stabbing them in the back how many steps did you take how many push-ups how many sit-ups how much do you weigh did you say or something nice for your wife your son your daughter
your grandchildren how many minutes did you write those books don't write themselves just questions about life every day this is hard it's very hard to do anybody says this is easy you've never done this you tell me it's easy you've never done it it's not easy it's hard i work with some of the most successful people in the world i was just coaching
one of the most successful people in the world last week he was supposed to do this every day for two weeks he made it seven days out of fourteen now he has a simultaneous md and phd with honors from harvard in anthropology and normal in five years a normal human gets a phd in anthropology in harvard in eight years he owned five years got md
at the same time you know what he couldn't get it up for three minutes every day to do this after he committed to do it why it's hard it's embarrassing it's humbling and we did this thing over kovid i'm going to share six basic questions that everybody had to talk about they talked about in every meeting they would stand up and share their scores
it's like alcoholics anonymous for successful people they would stand up and share those scores right and they're often not pretty i'm gonna give you the six questions i recommend for everyone are you ready you just do these six questions every day you're gonna have a better life question number one every day evaluate
yourself on one to ten scale and every question starts with did i do my best to there's a reason for that it doesn't even say you succeeded you just said did you even try you see if i said did you do and your answer is no you blame the environment it's their fault but when i said did you do your best to guess what uh oh you gotta look in the
mirror me me me not so pretty the first one is did i do my best every day to set clear goals well you think that sounds pretty simple all these big deal people i'm used to dealing with they must get a perfect score on that every day no no they wake up in the morning email phone call one guy said how did i do about setting
clear goals on a one to ten scale and zero unless my goal was respond to crap all day which i guess that's i did a good job of that that was it all i did was respond to crap all day question two did i do my best to make progress toward achieving my goals well every day we set up for these pla when we do bother to make the plans we
have these grandiose plans about the day we don't plan on anything going wrong or any distractions we make these plans as if we live in some dreamland where everything today for once in the world is going to work out it never does and people get lost and confused and they forget what the plans were and it's not so easy number three did i do
my best to find meaning every day rather than wait for the world to give me meaning did i do my best to make my life meaningful every day not in some abstraction or theory in terms of the real humans i'm dealing with number four did i do my best to be happy did i do my best to be happy no that's amazing most people often never think to be happy
they're just too busy doing prep so three medical doctors in my book triggers an interview all individually by themselves they all have iqs of a zillion i said how'd you do an average day and did i do my best to be happy they'll have the same answer never dwelled on me to try to be happy they're medical doctors i said did it dull on you you're
gonna die did they cover that in medical school that death thing did they bring that one up oh yeah they covered that death thing i said you think this is a silly or trivial question and said no it's an important question i just was too busy achieving things to think of it well average person did i do my best to be happy today on one to ten scale 5.5 out
of 10. if they were in school these people got a 55 out of 100 they would be ashamed you know i tell them the test i gave you is about a thousand times more important than a bozo test you took in school raised the score the next one is did i do my best to build positive relationships that is actually harder at work than it
is at home a lot of times you have a hard day at work you go home you're tired you just lose it forget about the people around you just lose it and then the final one is did i do my best to be fully engaged and present every day did i do my best one of my personal questions is what percent of the day was i present engaged
average day i give myself about a 30. probably lying to give myself a 30. probably don't even deserve that most of time we're not engaged we're not present [Music] just wandering around stumbling around through life you know trying to you know i mean it's one of those days you you say you you wake up in the morning you come home with sick what'd you do today
i don't know you didn't know what you did or or my favorite sort of uh recollection of this is sort of you you interrupt somebody watching tv on a commercial and you say what are you watching and they're like i don't know yeah they're staring at it they don't even know what they're watching yeah one one of the guys that was in my
little group is a great basketball star this is a great story so one of his things was he wants to be fully engaged with his wife because his wife says you're checked out too much now you're physically here but you know mentally you're not here he's going to do better so one day his wife you know he's terrible terrible terrible so i talked to him and said what was the
problem so i was tired very tired i've been working out all day i was tired you see i said that's very interesting i went to the national basketball championship finals there and i watched you play that game i paid a thousand bucks for a seat and so did my son we watched you and you're running up and down that court like a banshee
now i said were you tired i was exhausted i said did you go to the coach and say hey coach i'm tired take me out nope nope he said i never told the coach i was tired my entire life i said you think your wife was impressed with i'm tired [Laughter] not so much not so much well sometimes it's harder it's harder to do this stuff at home
sometimes because at home we just check out and lose it you mentioned something earlier about tennis and it sort of triggered something in my mind about we talked earlier about taking a breath before you respond and thinking and then as you mentioned tennis i was like tennis players have a ritual between points basketball players have a ritual at the
free throw line what they're really doing is that's their version of this breath and that ritual counters our human nature or instinctive sort of tiger woods same ritual before he puts same thing a little what does that rich will do calm down calm down i'm putting remember what am i doing you know forget about the score
forget about the past forget about the previous shot forget about the club championship no hit the shot i want to end with um one final question here careful thank you now you can ask me one question do i get one final reflection though myself yeah totally okay good you give me your question then i'll finish with my final reflection
okay how do you define success i define success is as you go through life you have alignment between one your higher aspirations in life two what you're trying to achieve and three your enjoyment of the process of life itself regardless of the outcomes so as i journey through life i've got a higher purpose i'm doing my best to achieve
stuff that's connected to that and i enjoy the process of what i'm doing i won beautiful that's it now let me finish now with my best advice for everybody are you ready i want everybody listening take a deep breath ah imagine that you're 95 years old and you're just getting ready to die you're on that death bed here comes your last breath
right before you take the last breath you're given a beautiful gift the ability to go back in time and talk to the person who is listening to me right now the ability to help that person be a better leader much more important the ability to help the person have a better life what advice would the wise 95 year old you who knows what mattered in life and what
didn't and what was important and what wasn't what advice would that wise old person have for the you that's listening to me right now whatever you're thinking now do that in terms of a performance appraisal that's the only one's going to matter that old person says you did the right thing you did the right thing
that old person says you made a mistake you made a mistake you do not have to impress anybody but that whole person some friends of mine interviewed old folks who were dying and got to ask him this question what advice would you have on the personal side three themes theme number one three words be happy now not next week not next month not next
year not i'll be happy when i achieve this stuff or when i get this money be happy now we we all have the same win that 95 year old person that person looked at death that is when we all got exactly the same win here learning point from old people i got so busy chasing what i didn't have i couldn't see what i did have and i had everything
well many people listening to a scholar of your health and you have families and people love you and some money and probably almost everybody listening compared to me you have youth you got youth don't get so busy chasing what you don't have you can't see that learning point number two is friends and family never get so busy climbing that
corporate ladder you forget the people you love that happens way too much and when you're 95 years old and you look around your deathbed none of your co-workers waving goodbye you realize these people are kind of important they're the only ones here today and number three if you have a dream go for it because you don't go for it when
you're 30 you may not when you're 40 or 80 doesn't have to be a big one maybe a small one go to new zealand speak spanish play the guitar other people think your dream is goofy who cares not their dream it's not their life it's your life i had an embarrassing experience a few years ago i was teaching my class and i said go to new zealand speak spanish
guy raised his hand he says we're in spain you idiot we all speak spanish business advice is much different number one life is short have fun number two do whatever you can do to help people the main reason to help people has nothing to do with money or status or getting ahead the main reason to help people is much deeper the 95 year old you will be proud
of you because you did and disappointed if you do not and if you do not believe this is true interview any ceo who has retired and i've interviewed very many and asked him a question please tell me what are you proud of none ever told me how big their office was how much money they made all they ever talked about the people
they helped find advice also the same go for it your world's changing your answer changing do what you think is right may not win at least you tried old people we seldom regret the risk we take and fail we usually regret the risk we fail to take and finally as i've grown older i guess my expectations in a way have gone down and
down but impact's going up and up why quit worrying about what i'm not going to change let me give you my goal lauren a little time together here pretty simple let's imagine a few people have a little better life listening to our conversation that's good enough for me i'm declaring victory here me too thank you thank you so much