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the grass is not always greener · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: You guys aren't in a band.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was right on.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_03: It sounded right on to me, too.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm on a delay.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and also I was if I was in a band, I wouldn't be the drummer, so there's that.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: What have you learned about why people quit?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, it's an interesting one because I think we mentioned this possibly in a in a previous podcast, but we've done quite a lot in the way of looking into those motivations.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: And specifically, we've spent quite a bit of time interviewing people that have moved from uh from one job role to another job role inside their organization, but then also people who have uh quit their companies entirely and uh moved either outside the workforce temporarily or moved from uh from one job to another.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the number one reason why people quit, as far as we can figure out, is because they can.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so what we mean by that, and I again I think we spoke about this a little bit previously, is that it's sort of related to a general malaise.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: There is this feeling like work isn't working for you, and as a result of that feeling, you change one of the things you can change.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things you can change is changing jobs.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so when you when you think about what that actually means from an underlying perspective, is that it kind of means you haven't got a very good reason.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um you certainly haven't got a very well thought out reason for uh for shifting from one role to the other.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now the second thing we find, which is rather interesting, is that in many cases, before people are taking that decision to change their job and and move into a different role, um they're kind of quitting in place.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, they are moving from a position where they're fully engaged in their job to a position where they're not engaged in their job, that they're checked out while they're still collecting the paycheck.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: And that, of course, is that's not great from an organizational perspective.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're not gonna get a lot out of those employees.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's not great from a team perspective because teams are gonna uh not be able to rely on those employees to do their fair share of what's uh of what's needed.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: But it's actually not good for the individual either.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um what we found is that once people actually get into that mode of kind of checking out in place, which you can almost equ uh make equivalent to a low-level form of burnout, once they've gone into that mode, it can be very difficult to get out of it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so even then at that point, shifting into a new role, once the honeymoon period's gone in the new role, you're probably not, you're probably gonna find yourself back in that in that same spot again.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh lots of lots of research shows that the re the reason people leave is because of their manager, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what if your manager is the burnout one who's already quit in place?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what used to be a good management situation now just cascades and gets worse.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: You have to count on everybody trying to be their best uh to keep that working.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really, it's really interesting.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and from that standpoint, I mean so what does it mean organizations should be doing to prevent it?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I I think the first is being able to spot it.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, and it's not easy.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um people have gotten really good at uh quitting in place or checking out in place, and so it's not terribly easy to spot at the individual level, but it is at the individual level that it needs to be sorted.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um now you can look at teams, for example, and how they behave.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are some telltale signs uh to a dysfunctional team.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, when you start to see some teams that might be ostensibly producing great results or achieving great outcomes.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but when you look at what's happening really within that team, you can observe that about 80% of the work is done by about 20% of the individuals in the team.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so the challenge with that is that um what's gonna end up happening is those 20% that are that are carrying the weight, um, they're gonna end up getting burned out.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so you have burned out individuals that even though they don't really mean any harm to anybody else, it's the very fact that they are um quitting in place is having a profound impact on their teammates, and then by extension, those teammates uh get on their journey to burnout as well, which is which is unfortunate.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um and you can see this uh come up in in a few different other areas too, in terms of um uh of looking at meetings, for example, um in in some cultures where you see a ton of meetings happening, um, and you get there's this um what are we meeting for?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, everybody gets on the call and they're like, all right, whose call is this anyways?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and you have like 17 of those every day.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, it's interesting that we've that started to happen more over the past couple years.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And the the data does seem to suggest that that is the result of this quitting in place.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, scheduling a meeting and appearing busy, right, or appearing to do work, the only place that that can appear is likely a calendar that people can see, you know.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So by loading that up, like, oh I uh they're doing they must be doing a ton of work, and that ton of work must be associated to an outcome.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Going back to your question, I mean, what should organizations be doing?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they should be really inspecting these things and and and looking at looking at this in in more detail.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can't just look at a team and say, oh, this team is performing well, so that must mean that every single individual in that team is doing great, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: That goes back to that dysfunctional team example that I provided before.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and you can really start to look at the calendar, just having a whole bunch of meetings scheduled all the time could be an indication that there's many people that are burned out, and that is effectively a symptom of that.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: That is their way of being present at work even though they're truly not there.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um so looking for those signs and being much more uh um much more detailed in terms of of looking at the signals.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: So, Matt, you said that you know the old adage is that people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses or they quit their managers.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: And and absolutely that is that remains um at least partially true.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the more nuanced answer to that is that people don't quit their jobs.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: What they quit is the experience that they're having.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that day-to-day experience of work, as we've discussed in previous podcasts, has changed, you know, fairly, fairly dramatically.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it can well be that in many cases, the day-to-day experience that you're having in the workplace that includes interpersonal relationships that you have with others but is not limited to them, you're just not digging that anymore, right?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result of not digging that anymore, you then look to take a uh you know, to take action associated with it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you or your team wants to discover how Billion Minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to Billionminds.com slash learnmore today.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's billionminds.com slash L E A R N M O R E.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you made a great point because like you're not uh some people are, but you're not normally drastically changing your skill set or what you bring to the job.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're just doing it in a different place where maybe you feel more appreciated or they just whatever it makes you it's a different setting for the same skill set a lot of times.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's really interesting if you're trading one manager for another.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't fix the root problem of how and why you're doing your work, you risk eventually hitting that same wall everywhere you go.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's the most common refrain that we hear from people that have shifted from one role to another.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: So they go to the new role, they have the honeymoon period where things seem a little bit different, and then three months later, four months later, the day-to-day experience they're having is as bad or worse than the previous day-to-day experience that they had.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: And nothing really changed because there was no change in the way in which they approached work.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: And that's been exacerbated still further.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: We've obviously done our sessions on the good, the bad, and the ugly of um of working from home versus you know working in the workplace.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: But it is true to say that it can be exacerbated even further if you're not even going to a different place to do the work, right?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: You're getting up about the same time, you're walking into the same home office that you walked into before, and you know, only the names have changed, but everything else that you're doing in terms of weight, the way you approach work, the role that it plays in the rest of your life, none of that has changed.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so, frankly, nothing, uh, nothing much is happening to improve your mood.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's a fix that didn't really work.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's what that's what we're finding for the for the majority of people that are shifting for a non-specific reason, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't really do anything to fix it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you also trade in your reputational capital and your political knowledge of how the organization you're in works, navigating the organization, who to ask what.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You come in, yeah, you're fresh and you're bringing new perspectives or whatever, but you're also the new person that doesn't know who to ask anything, and any of the reputation you had built up previous is kind of gone, you know.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're you're so maybe those are new pressures that we've added that we didn't count on in just getting that relief of switching jobs.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, it's really interesting.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So what else have you found would lead people to be become disengaged or or uh or on the other side, engaged?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: What what engages them?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like what have you been finding there?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what we've found uh is rather interesting, which it relates back to something that has been discussed for many years now.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, ever since Dan Pink wrote his book Drive, um, he talked in uh in that book about autonomy, mastery, and purpose, with autonomy being um the freedom to do your work in the way that you want it to do it, uh mastery being the uh the skill set to do it well, and then purpose being um the reason why you do your work and that purpose uh often being related to something of a of a higher purpose, something that is beyond yourself.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so the book uh goes into some detail as to why uh if you if you bring all of these things together, if you have a high degree of autonomy, a high degree of mastery, and a high degree of purpose, then that translates into motivation, aka being uh being engaged.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: Now that's a um the findings that were in that have seemed to hold up pretty well over the years.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_03: But one thing that we've realized is that the mastery part of that um is actually something that is that that is a little bit more complex.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: So in in general, people have thought about the the mastery side of this autonomy, mastery, and purpose triad as being centered around are you qualified to do your job well?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: So what we've seen is that people who are disengaged, they've often consistently failed to be able to do that kind of stuff well, and that leads to their uh to levels of disengagement.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: And conversely, people that are engaged have really taken the time to build the skills necessary to do all of those things really well.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I guess then where does the responsibility lie in generating those skills in terms of is it the employer that needs to make sure that their employees can get there?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the employees' own responsibility to skill up in that, or is it some you know, combination?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is it really about the employees taking responsibility for that?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do they even know this is something they're missing?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a domain that we're we're steeped in at you know, with billion mines, but you know, where does that land for employers and employees in the general population?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it definitely is somewhere in the middle.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's no no single ownership over this.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I mean, obviously when you hire a professional, you expect that professional to um continue to grow and have a desire to continue to grow um and find a way to self-motivate and things like that.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Those are just kind of standard table stakes when you hire a quote unquote good employee.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: But but effectively for the organization, everything that Paul just said, the organization has to, at a minimum, have an understanding, acceptance, and appreciation for this lack of skills.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, is it their problem to solve for 7.5 billion people?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, but billions of people are experiencing the problem associated with the lack of these daily skills, these daily effectiveness skills.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so just starting with being in recognition of that as an organization, um, and then and understanding that there's um you can't just look at the you can't just continue to deploy the same mechanisms as you had in the past.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, so you could the employee could read productivity books, they could you could rule out some mindset training and things like that, you could bring in motivational speakers, you could do offsites, uh, you can uh you can increase people's salaries to just kind of try to help offset some of this, but really none of that gets to root cause.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: When you accept the fact that root cause is that lack of daily skills, as Paul described, then if you want to retain your employees and you want them to have a positive work experience, then you have to try to help enable them to develop that set of skills.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you said it really well, Matt, is that I'd say most people uh don't even really understand that that's the root cause, right?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that haven't done all the research and and figured that out for themselves.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and how could they?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: Who's got the time these days?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, it to do all that, it's almost you know, like I now you're asking me to do something else to help solve this problem.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: So organizations can by design have more resources, more capabilities to be able to help people.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so prioritizing those things uh is quite important.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: What I mean specifically is um arming people with that set of skills, prioritize investing in that, um, being more understanding about the fact that people need to practice skills.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they might be practicing their skills during a what was it, traditional workday, but they may be practicing on a personal use case or in a personal setting.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: So put that great flexibility that we have now to work for us in terms of building those skills across your life, not just purely in a work setting.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And like I said, organizations understanding, accepting, supporting, and promoting that.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, you would expect if you're hiring a high functioning employee that they're pretty good at this.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe we're wrong at guessing that too, right?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe companies overestimate it, underestimate it, or aren't thinking about it even.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's really powerful.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think one of the most interesting aspects of what you just brought up there, Matt, is that there is an assumption that these you know high performing employees should just kind of have this nail.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a there's a couple of things that that make that assumption sort of semi-ludicrous.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: That this world of work, the way in which this world of work has changed, whereby we've gone from you know, doing a bunch of stuff in a fixed period of time and how much stuff we did was basically the primary measure of how successful we were, to a world where um like a work day never has a formal start and a formal end, and um we are being measured on outcomes that might take weeks or months to accomplish.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, when some of those outcomes are actually beyond our own control as to whether they occur or not, right?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: When you're when you're being measured in that way, and when success in that environment is so ambiguous and uncertain, the only reason that we that we do it, that we can do it, is because we can, as humans, we're so flexible and adaptable that we can sort of do that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: You try to have a computer do that, it would be impossible, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: So it it is it is uniquely human that we can even sort of do it, but that doesn't imply in any way, shape, or form that we can do it well.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so, and that the average employee who's uh you know in the average organization uh can excel at it without any concrete training or any concrete skills development that somehow they'll figure it out because they're human and they're great and human beings are awesome.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in any other domain, when we think about the idea of developing a skill and what it means to develop a skill, there is a concept of being having a low level of skill or a high level of skill, and developing a high level of skill typically takes, you know, a period of time, and it takes certain things that you need to do in order to be able to develop that skill.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: So before we get into the specifics of it, we have to really start thinking about what it even means to develop skills, and particularly to develop these kinds of skills.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like an off-site is not gonna give you a skill, right?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: An off-site might make you aware of a skill that you need to work on or to develop, but it's not going to give you a skill.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: Even a book in general is not gonna give you a skill.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: So the analogy that we often use is one of driving a car.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I don't know anybody who is able to read a book about what it was like to drive a car and then immediately jump into their car and get out on the freeway and not crash.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason for that, of course, is that driving is you can think of driving as one skill.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: In reality, driving is a whole set of complementary skills that you need to build in order to be uh and have them all work together and work with your brain and your human body uh sitting in this specific car.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: And then once you've got that core set of skills, you can easily transfer that set of skills to the next car you drive or the next car you drive.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: Now, in the case of driving a car, it doesn't take that long to be able to uh to be able to determine that skill, but everybody remembers that point when they were bad at driving a car and then they became okay at driving a car and they became good at driving a car, and that was the development of the skill that was going on.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: So these things are much the same thing.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of the interesting things that we find, particularly with billion minds, is that when you first start talking to people about it, they actually think that this is very simple, right?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's very, it's just like, well, hang on, you're just describing work.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's what work is these days.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody can do that.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: And what they learn over time is that there is a big difference between doing things and doing things well.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and so it's kind of like to borrow another analogy, we often use the analogy of running, right?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Which is we can all move if we if we're able-bodied, we can move in a way that approximates running.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: But there is a big difference between that and running like an Olympic athlete runs.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a strong skill element to run like an Olympic athlete runs, and that's based on practice, it's based on consistency.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Continuous development and devotion.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's based on a really, really deep connection between the way their mind works and the way their body works in order to be able to get the most out of them.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: These skills often fit into a similar bucket, right?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: They're things that are appear simple on the surface, but in reality, in order to do them really well, they take a bunch of practice.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: And to get into specifics of them, really fit into three buckets.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the first bucket is organizational structure.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: The second bucket is a repeatable method or routine, right?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: Having a repeatable routine.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: And then the third is a consistent approach to wellness.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: And the most affected people understand what those things are, they devote time and attention to practicing the right skills to uh that they need to develop.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: And then they uh continuously hone them.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: Now, once you start to think about it like that, and once you start to think about the fact that you've got to develop this set of skills, uh, and if you do, then you're gonna be really, really effective.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: You start to see why there are like one or two percent of the population that are super effective because they've spent months or potentially even years honing those sets of skills in order to be able to in order to be able to be really, really effective on a day-to-day basis.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: And that translates into capabilities that are prized by their organizations, things like adaptability and resiliency, capabilities like that.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: So they've invested in themselves, they've invested heavily in themselves, but the payback is the ability to be consistently effective on a day-to-day basis.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Are you looking to hone the skills you need to thrive as work and the rest of our lives merge?
• 23:52
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• 23:54
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• 24:02
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• 24:07
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• 24:10
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• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: What can you practically do?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: What can you how how can you help your your teams, your people?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I think it probably starts with what not to do.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and I I talked about some of the things earlier, and I think Paul reinforced that as well.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um once again, once you accept that uh the challenge is a challenge of skills, you have to also, by extension, accept that it's gonna take some time and it's gonna take those elements that Paul just described, aka it's gonna take investment, and I don't mean dollars investment, I really mean time investment, energy investment, support investment, sponsorship investment.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um those are the those are the pillars of of real change management.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so uh, you know, in invest in um invest in people building these skills instead of investing in them just attending an offsite or doing a team building, anything that's ephemeral.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the that's the the flag.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Let's call it a yellow flag.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um things that last an hour or last a day, you know, or or something like that.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that's that should be at least a yellow flag, unless you're being really purposeful about it.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you had a motivational speaker at the front end of a nine-month you know change management process that is extremely well scripted with a tremendous amount of sponsorship, well, that's another story.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're looking for a result from putting a smart, well-spoken person in front of a group of employees, then you know, you're probably gonna get little more than awareness and maybe an inkling of desire, which are important ingredients, but they're just part, they're just part of the ingredients.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, I I was thinking about this uh even just throughout throughout this uh this podcast is um what does the future job description look like?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Think about that.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um it might be a place to start if as a as an organization.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, we often would talk about the job description as being really interesting because things change um over time, people change, organizations change, job functions change, um, but now things are changing like at lightning speed, uh, you know, and and we write these job descriptions and hire people based on a set of skills um to do a particular job function.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: But how many how many uh job descriptions or or or resumes have you know we seen that talk about someone being really good at at managing uh the competing demands of of work and home, like work-life integration, people who are really good at shutting the door to work at the end of the day, you know, um uh people are really good at prioritizing across their personal commitments and their work commitments, people that are really, really good at writing outcomes for themselves and executing against those and able to keep commitments to themselves.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, how often have you seen that?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever seen that?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, you it's like we need a mindset section on the re on the CV, you know.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it is it well, so I'm glad you said that though, too, because it's I think I have seen, Matt, I have seen mindset buzzwords.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: I have seen that.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, but I but that's not enough, right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not just that you've got we we love open mindsets, we you know, we we love these things, we love people that have a growth mindset.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: Those are things that you actually will probably find.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: But have you turned those mindsets, have you used those mindsets to to develop a set of skills, right?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um have you have you really mastered your your craft, mastered your skill of of daily effectiveness or not?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah that's different than mindset.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's something that's really practiced, rehearsed, refined over time.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then it belongs to you, it's part of you, it's part of your identity.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Everything else can be learned, right?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we like to say that like a growth mindset, for example, is a necessary but not sufficient condition here.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, yeah, what the growth mindset does um is it allows you to be open-minded enough to understand your the areas that you can grow, right?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: To understand that not everything is perfect right now, and that there is an opportunity to uh to improve in various in various different ways, including how you go about uh optimizing your day.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um but these these sort of learned traits that in terms of how our mind uh works and how to optimize um this amazing mind, this set of amazing minds that we have, is part of the overall picture.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: But another part of it is also being open-minded enough to know, to be aware of the fact that this brain in our heads is not perfect, and that sometimes the reason the thing that it's not perfect at, sometimes the best solution to that is to get stuff out of your head and get stuff in a different spot, or do stuff in ways that relies less on the natural characteristics of your brain.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: So understanding what the what capacity you have to grow it is very important, but understanding what natural weaknesses it has and then compensating for those weaknesses by doing things in a different way is can be super powerful.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: So that can be a system that you build, or it can be a system that you use, like you could use us, for example.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um or um it could be that there are certain things in a team setting whereby you do less of that thing because you're uh you're naturally less gifted at it and you've done all the development that you that you need on it.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that somebody else is taking is taking that position.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, again to jump back to sports as we often do on this thing, you know, if this was a basketball team, for example, right, you have different people in the basketball team that play different roles in that basketball team because they have affinities at doing certain things certain ways.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: You don't want everybody to have that uh that exact same set of skills.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_03: You create a set of complementary skills for people that work well together.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: So if we can help people develop their own personal approach to being as effective as they can be, and then combining that with the natural talents that they have, and then as we form teams, combining teams of complementary talents, then at that point you have uh a group of people that are highly motivated as individuals, that can work really effectively as individuals, and then combine really effectively as high performance teams.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's really really sharp.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the idea that just quitting isn't the answer, but actually doing this work to make yourself good even where you are might actually be great if you came at it from a different uh perspective.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um not just shifting the uh the computer that you sign into and your email address, but actually yourself and and so Well thanks guys, this has been a great one.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Matt.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: It was fun.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Matt.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.