Latest / Humanity Working / GuestCast - Paul Joins Cultivating Potential with Karen Zeigler

Transcript

GuestCast - Paul Joins Cultivating Potential with Karen Zeigler · Humanity Working

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, Paul here.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: A few months back, I was lucky enough to be featured on a podcast that is not the Way Too Busy podcast.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Cultivating Potential, and it specifically looks at helping companies grow the innovative potential within their four walls, whether those four walls are physical or virtual.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Karen and I had a really interesting and wide-ranging discussion where we were looking at, if you like, the relationship between humans and technology and how transformation on the technology side is changing the way that human beings are working.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed the discussion, but it occurred to me that we've never actually featured it on this feed, so we're putting that right right now.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Hope you enjoy it.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome friends to the Cultivating Potential podcast with Karen Ziegler.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: In this podcast, Karen serves relevant and adaptable content that will help leaders like you cultivate the potential of your employees.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: She believes that cultivating potential is the greatest opportunity for leaders to make an impact today and leave a legacy for tomorrow.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: Today's episode is sponsored by the Alchemist Creative Company.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_04: They are a one-stop shop for all your video and podcasting production needs.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, they are the magic behind the Cultivating Potential Podcast.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_04: Be sure and check them out at alchemistcreative.co and let their team transform your next digital project into gold.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to the Cultivating Potential Podcast, where our aim is to bring enterprise leaders the wisdom and the resources they need to cultivate the creative and innovative potential of their employees.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: It is our belief that cultivating the potential of employees is the greatest opportunity leaders have to make an impact today and leave a legacy for the future.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_04: Today I'm excited to welcome Paul Slater.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: Paul is the co-founder and CEO of Billion Minds, an organization with the mission to help a billion people thrive at unstructured, ambiguous work through practice skill development.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: Paul has spent over 25 years working in a variety of technology strategy roles, writing and delivering courseware and books for organizations, including Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and Shell.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_04: He formed his own training and consulting organization before shifting to building a large-scale architecture inside enterprises and managing the organizational change associated with adopting new technologies.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: At Microsoft, Paul designed architectures of portfolio management and cloud computing and consulted startups and large enterprises, including TELUS and GoDaddy, building their businesses on the Microsoft Cloud, ultimately shifted into the healthcare technology space and became the CTO for Life Sciences.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: Over these years, Paul has become increasingly obsessed, and I share obsessions with him, about what makes people effective by combining secondary research into productivity practices with primary research into the habits of the most effective among us.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_04: So who doesn't want to learn from Paul?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm so excited he's here today.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_04: In 2020, he took the leap of faith and left Microsoft to form Billion Minds so he could help others start every day with motivation and end it with accomplishment, which don't we all want that?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome, Paul.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, Karen.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be with you today.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it is so good to have you.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I can't wait to dig in to this conversation about billion minds and how it works and how it helps us, you know, get a handle on this uh unstructured and ambiguous work that we've all been thrown into over the last few years.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_04: And and not that maybe we couldn't have seen it coming, but it certainly has hit many of us hard.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_04: And and I know even myself, who I thought I was a pretty productive person, has uh wobbled a bit.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_04: But you know, let's start with uh the story and the inspiration behind Billion Minds.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I think that there's probably a bit uh looking back, there's probably a bit of a personal story there, and then there's the uh and then there's the story of the company itself.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So um, I mean, my own story began being deeply immersed in tech from from when I was a kid.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but even as a as a young child, I witnessed my my dad kind of coming to terms with what technology meant um inside his organization.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: He was a um he was an organic chemist, and um he kind of saw that there was a need to start bringing technology into the lab in which he works.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: So he volunteered to get involved and engaged in that, kind of taught himself to program a little bit, um, and uh had his Apple II Plus, I think it was, inside inside the lab.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and then we as a family, uh, he was very convinced that it was gonna be a very important part of our lives.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: So we got uh we got a VIC 20 and then a Commodore 64, if anybody's old enough to remember those uh uh those things, started coding a little bit ourselves.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so from a young age, um, it was really kind of embedded in me that technology was going to be uh an extremely important uh part of our future and it was gonna disrupt our lives.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so coming out of college, my first jobs were in tech, and I was training, uh, I was actually doing a lot of IT training.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that uh was really when it kind of hit home to me what is what was happening to the way in which people were working.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because um, my very first things that I was uh was doing was teaching people on things like the Microsoft Office productivity suite um and actually alternatives to it, things like WordPerfect, for example, um Lotus One Two Three.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for an audience below a certain age, they're gonna be what is WordPerfect?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: What is Lotus One, two, three?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: But people above a certain age will know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and so what was really interesting is in teaching those people, for many of those people, just like my dad, um, just a few years uh previously, for many of those people, they'd never even seen a computer, let alone uh understood how it was going to disrupt their lives or or what it was gonna do to them uh as individuals.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, what we saw even back then was a massive transition in terms of how work was being done.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, we had um uh people who were very used to having secretaries or executive assistants or whatever it happened to be.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of job role started to disappear as people got computers on their own desks and they started scheduling their own stuff and they started managing their own day and et cetera, et cetera.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I kind of saw that firsthand with my with the very first job that I that I had in tech, training this group of people to do stuff that was completely unfamiliar with them and in itself was going to disrupt their day.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: So throughout my entire career, actually, as I've done all those varied things that you talked about in that introduction, I've always maintained a really strong interest in the relationship between humans and technology, but then specifically what happens to humans in the workplace, what happens to people in the workplace and in their lives as it is disrupted by technology.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're now at a point where where there is no really, there's no human in the Western world, probably no human in the world whose life is not in some way disrupted by technology and whose life is in not some way different than it used to be because of technology.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Some of those changes are very positive.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Some of those changes require um a lot of transition from uh from the human being.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So all fast forward a long time.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm in uh I'm in Microsoft uh working actually in an internal startup inside Microsoft alongside uh um alongside my co-founder there, a person called Ryan.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so we were working on uh this internal startup whose mission was to basically, if you like, uh make clinical research much more efficient, efficient and effective, um, using the Microsoft Cloud as an underlying um technology stack underneath it.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we are now using technology in every way we possibly can in order to make our uh in order to make our work more efficient, more effective, et cetera.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: But our lives inside that role and our working life had become incredibly unstructured and incredibly ambiguous.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got my background that is fascinated with how this is happening into society as a whole and how it's have and the impact that it's having on people as individuals.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan's got his background in organizational change management and trying to understand what this means at an organizational level when uh people are disrupted at a personal level.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And even though our day job had nothing to do with it, every conversation that we would have after work was about this exact topic.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: What is happening to the world of work?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: What is happening to us, and what is the impact on people as a result of it?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we got to a point where, as we were thinking about this, we were thinking that all the positive things are great, but all of the challenges that people have with working in this in this new world are not great and they're fixable.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So why don't we try to fix them?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's why we formed billion minds, really, with this goal to be able to take the the the part of the equation that is so often neglected, namely the human part of the equation and give the humans the human skills actually that they need to navigate this this new world.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because that journey that I just described, yeah, um, from when I started teaching people in IT to now, just for me personally, that's only a 23, 24 year journey.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the world is so different, so different over that uh over that period of time.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there's just kind of this assumption that all of us innately have the skills to be able to thrive in this new world, even though this new world is so radically different to what the old world used to be.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we wanted to go after, and that's why we formed the company.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_04: You know, everyone says, Oh, technology makes your life so much better, it makes it so much easier, so much faster, but there are unintended consequences to all that.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_04: And um I'm I'm interested to dig deeper.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_04: Now, you mentioned your journey, the people's journey, the effect on yourself, the effect on your people.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, also, we talk to leaders in this podcast, obviously.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_04: So even beyond the effect on all the in all the people, it's also affecting the company because the company is nothing more than a collection of all the people.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_04: So it just gets magnified even more.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: So what a what an interesting um problem that you set out to solve.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I can't wait to learn more about how you solved it.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_04: So what are when we talk about billion minds, and first of all, let me let let's uncover for our listener why you chose billion minds, because I thought that was a little interesting tidbit of a story, and then we'll dig into uh what you learned.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the group of people that are really having to deal with this challenge of doing this unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when we say unstructured, ambiguous, we really just mean if your day today looks different than your calendar today looks different than it did yesterday, and your calendar tomorrow looks different than it does today, right?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you are, rather than being measured on the number of individual tasks that you're checking off each day, if you're being measured on broader outcomes that you're driving that might, you know, be weeks long or months long or years long, if you're doing that kind of work, then that that group of people commonly referred to as knowledge workers, there's a there's a just over a billion of those today.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what's really interesting is that over the next six to seven years or so, it's expected that that billion will be uh doubled, actually, over the uh over the next uh six, seven years, as I say.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now that you could argue, you could argue that that first billion, they kind of self-selected into this thing.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: So even though they're uh even though they may be struggling on a day-to-day basis, even though they may face challenges, um, they're they're at the tip of this, tip of the spear, right?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're the ones that are are like, yeah, I understand this is difficult, but it kind of aligns to the way I like to work, it aligns to the skills that I kind of underlying have I have on an underlying basis.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: That ain't gonna be the case for that second billion.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: That second billion that comes through, those people are have not self-selected men, and they're gonna they're gonna need real help in terms of developing the right skills in order to be able to thrive in the world that exists today, and of course, all the changes that happen over the next six to seven years.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we call it billion minds because it is a it's a challenge for our minds.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's how we use our minds.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just how we upskill our brains, it's how we surround our brains with the systems that can support them and all that kind of stuff.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: All of that work needs to happen for these billion people that are going to be added to the knowledge worker workforce.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and for the benefit of their companies they're working for as well.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: So let's dive in then.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_04: What are some of the main things you've learned about how people work differently in the knowledge worker segment than say before or historically?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so there's obviously there's some things about this that seem obvious on the surface, but when you kind of delve a little deeper, there are there's actually a lot more to them.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the first thing that I would point out, which again on the surface is obvious, is just what has happened to our day, what's happened to the uh to the day, that every day and how every day looks.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, excuse me, the old version of the of this world, um, which really isn't that long ago, as I mentioned, it's probably you know 20, 25 years ago.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the majority of us, even if we were working with technology or something like that, the majority of us had something along the lines of a nine to five job.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, maybe we work flex time or whatever, but we we had some working hours, we physically went to a location where we did it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then critically, the people that we were working with, they were physically co-located alongside us.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: So things like collaboration and so on were super simple, and everybody was kind of working the same hours.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it was really easy.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone spoke the same language, everyone spoke the same language, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: All of those things, right, were uh basically meant that you go to work, you do work, you take breaks during the day, right?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Often structured breaks as well, like 10:30.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody steps up from their desk and they go spend some social time together, and then they go back to work, and then lunchtime, same thing.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's there was this clear separation between work periods and non-work periods, right?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Works and break.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the benefit that accrues associated with that is that when you close the door physically at work at five o'clock in uh at the uh in the afternoon, probably no cell phone, no, the only way your boss is going to contact you is by calling your house if you happen to be at your house, right?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so what it means, what that constitutes is basically 16 hours of rest every day.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uninterrupted.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And 60 uninterrupted and 64 hours of rest every weekend.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I I think obviously you can just look at the data and know that, but I think what people have not necessarily internalized for themselves as to what that actually means, what that means for themselves as an individual.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we found that it means for ourselves as an individual is number one, um, that lack of uh breaks, right?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: That lack of kind of enforced break that you get at the at the end of each day means that people basically never get to recharge.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They never are able to start work with motivation because they never really finished it the day before.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was never that period of time, that conscious time that you stay where you step away from what you do.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing is that even during the period, as work is kind of bleeding into the rest of our lives and the rest of our lives is bleeding into work, gives us a ton of flexibility.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it also means that we are making dozens, hundreds of decisions every single day about what to do, when to do it, when to stop doing it, when to do something else, how to prioritize against the thing that we're doing versus the other thing that we could be doing.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so our brain ends up getting loaded with all of these decisions that we make during the course of the day when we're deciding what it is that we're gonna do.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the consequence of that, as well as a bunch of inefficiency due to context switching and so on, is a load.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a load that we put on our brains as we try our best to optimize the period, the the you know, the waking hours that we have.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we're trying to optimize most of that or a good proportion of that in our heads.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got uh basically a lack of breaks that is happening combined with this constant set of decisions that you're making as an individual as you try to as you try to be effective.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then on top of that, as all of this has been enabled, we're now in a position where companies have got a thing that they want, which is really flexible workers, which is great because it allows them to change direction quickly and adapt quickly and all of that kind of stuff.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they've so they've got that.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what they've as they've developed it, it's almost like you you wonder what you what you wish for, right?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because as they as they've got that, the types of outcomes and objectives that they set for those workers tend to not be easy to know if you're accomplishing as an individual.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: So in the old world, the old world I was talking about, the structured one, by and large, our success was measured by the as the day was fixed, it was measured by how much stuff we got in that day, and how much stuff we got done in that day.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: But now the f now the day is not fixed.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what's typically replaced it is what outcomes you're driving over the course of weeks and over the course of months.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And again, for the individual, that puts a toll on the individual because it means that you don't really know.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of knowledge workers report to us that they don't really know in the day as to whether they're being successful.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the time, we we ask set sets of simple questions like at the end of the day, do you uh are you generally successful?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Did you have a good day?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a bad day, or do you not know?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the most common answer was I didn't know.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: So people actually go through a full day, they do all of the stuff they're supposed to do, they finish at some point, and they don't know whether they were effective or not.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's a very um disempowering feeling to not know that you've had any success.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I all you move the needle in any way.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I was just reading today um about energy levels and how that's unfinished, which if you haven't accomplished if you don't know that you've accomplished anything, then there's a lot of stuff that's unfinished, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_04: The feeling of having all these unfinished things and also that continual decision-making thing going on you mentioned in the brain, that when we don't decide, which is often the case, we'll put off decisions later, or we wait for more information, make decisions, those two things are one of the biggest energy drains we can have.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_04: So it's no wonder that our workers are exhausted just from that little bit.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: And that's probably still just on the surface level of what your research is telling us.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, totally.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the and the interesting point about this is that when you think about what that means for the individual, for the team, for the organization, it's all basically suboptimal.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: You've got an individual, you've got an individual who has sort of traded structure for freedom in a sense, right?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: But in that trade, what they've got is probably a low level of anxiety.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: What they've got is um lack of clarity as to whether they're being successful or not.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what they've uh and what they've got is that feeling of never ever being rested.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then at a team level, you've got individuals who are all going through their own personal journey.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And because they're not co-located and because they're not sitting together doing the same work at the same time, that journey is individual and it's rarely being shared.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody's having their own challenges, which means that as a result, you often get teams that are less functional, and you get the classic 80% of the work being done by 20% of the people, which ironically then burns out those 20%.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got at an organizational level basically a bunch of effort happening, but that effort not really translating into impact inside inside the organization.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: So if because I think in to a certain extent, because the impact of tech has been so great, and because it's helped in all All productivity measures over the last you know 30, 40, 50 years.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that the people in the mix are becoming more disillusioned, having more mental health challenges, um, and struggling more has almost been, and are also, by the way, less productive in many, many good measures.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's almost been hidden by the fact that the technology is kind of like held um, you know, sort of um advanced faster than the challenges that the humans in the mix are facing.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the results are really damaging.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not just increased absences, but you know, 120,000 people die every year from ailments related to workplace-related stress.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a real, it's a societal problem.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's a US figure alone, by the way.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a societal problem that is being caused by this.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_04: Well, as you were talking, you know, I was thinking about the dislocated work worker.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I mean, obviously that creates feelings of isolation.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_04: That feelings of isolation lead to depression, which I'm sure leads to that number you just mentioned.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_04: Those feelings alone are also energy drainers.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it reminds me, interestingly, I was reading about, no, actually it was a YouTube video I watched.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, Jordan Peterson, he's a psychologist, and he was talking about uh the treatment of humans, and and he referred to how in Auschwitz um they would require the prisoners to carry a 50-pound bag of salt, you know, like 100 yards, I forget how long, take it there and take it back.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_04: There was no purpose in it, it was just for them to avoid punishment as you know, refugees or uh prisoners.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_04: And our if our workers are feeling like I'm doing all this work, I'm not accomplishing anything, or I don't know what it is I'm accomplishing on it.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's almost like they're carrying that 50-pound bag of salt every day just to avoid the punishment of you know doing something wrong, but they really aren't having the impact, like you mentioned.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and absolutely related to that is the fact that people feel that they're um that they're not doing their work well.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: And also in many cases, that they haven't nailed life well.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we did about 300 interviews when we first started the company, and we're up to over a thousand now, um, to really try and ascertain and understand um how people managed their work, how people thrived at this unstructured, ambiguous work when they did, um, and how people struggled and why they did.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the real uh issues that people came up with in terms of how they struggled was that a lot of people felt like they could they could be okay at the work thing and bad at the rest of their life, or okay at the life thing and bad at their work, but they could never have both.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, a lot of people uh got irritated with you know discussions about things like work life balance and so on, because they're like, oh yeah, well, it doesn't exist.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: I hear about this theory of work-life balance, but in reality, that's not my life, and it's not been my life for you know, ever since my company kept coming back to me and say telling me to do more with less.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a little bit of this of this disillusionment in terms of what um of what companies are actually looking for when they talk about work-life balance and at the same time talk about, okay, it's the new fiscal year, we're all going to do twice as much with half the resources or whatever it happens to be.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Those two things, there is there is a breaking point to that, right?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: There is there are fixed elements here, right?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are fit there's there's a fixed number of days um or fixed number of hours in the day that you can work, right?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: There is a certainly a fixed number of hours in the day, period, 24.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you're so you you reach a point where you where you literally cannot do any more.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: You can obviously find more efficiencies, um, but even that uh reaches a limit.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we see in terms of what of the toll it takes upon individuals and organizations, there's that 120,000 figure that I gave you before, but there's a a lot of stuff that comes way, way, way before that.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that comes way before it is obviously the idea of people um resigning, of which we're we're seeing more and more and more as people struggle with it.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: But then uh probably as big a problem or bigger problem than that, which we see all the time, is what we refer to as sort of checking out in place.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you're at a point now where you're doing this unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even know what success looks like.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So your manager probably doesn't really know what success looks like, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You're not being, hopefully, you're not in a position where you're being micromanaged to the point where they're looking at everything you do.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so it becomes quite easy, as it were, to check out in place and basically live with a level of low-level burnout and still collect the paycheck.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's happening all the time in companies across companies all across the world.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the real challenge with it is that once you have individuals that have slipped into that state, as it were, where they're not motivated to start work with a purpose and end it with accomplishment, it is really costly to bring them out of it.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really difficult to bring them out of it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in some cases, you can you you cannot bring them out of it.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so that's bad for the individual because it means that they're not going to find joy in their work, really, no matter where they go or what they do.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's bad for the company because obviously you're paying somebody and they're not engaged in the work that they're doing for you.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_04: That's crazy.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I it goes back to when things were split when there was work or home.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: Generally, you know, if you were really good at work, but you didn't have it together at home, you could bury yourself in your work and pretend you were success.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_04: Or if if you didn't like your work and weren't successful, you could at least escape it at in your home life and be good at that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: So, but I forget who it says when you when you do one thing well, you do how you do one thing is how you do everything.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that becomes more prevalent as everything is kind of flows together.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our version of that is for work to work, your life has to work.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so these two things are so interconnected.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, is is a difficult area for a lot of organizations.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the things we work with organizations on quite a lot, is okay, what's the what's the right way in which to it to approach that with your employees?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because you know, you don't want to be seen as invasive in uh in your employees' lives.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that you've already invaded it, right?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: You've already invaded the the moment I'm holding up, uh I'm holding up my phone to the screen here now.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, the moment that that we had people using their their personal phones to access their work stuff, um, and the moment that they were getting pinged all hours of the day from their boss, you have invaded the rest of their lives.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so if they're going to be effective, their lives have to work.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: The company has to have some, if it wants to get the best out of its employees, it has to have some role in helping people optimize their lives more effectively.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_04: So let's dig into that because how do you, as an organization, billion minds, separate or bring together, say, for instance, um, you have an individual that's found you and they're using your tools and they're becoming more effective, but their level of accomplishment really has to do with a clear direction and guidance from their organization.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: So until you get their organization involved in the process, how do how do they really step up and become, you know, motivated to get out of bed, feeling accomplished when they end the day when there's an underlying structure issue or clarity and communication issue on the company side of things, maybe?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we approach that from two angles actually.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, first off, we work with both individuals and companies.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: So um let's just explain how um the two angles of that equation work.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: So from an in from an individual perspective, the underlying challenge that individuals have in the workplace today is the way we in which we work has shifted ever so dramatically.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we as a workforce as a whole have not developed the skills in order to be able to thrive in that in that new environment.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the skills that I'm talking about are related to the challenge that we were talking about before, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: The skills that I'm talking about are being able to switch off from work effectively at the end of the day, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: The skill would be to ensure that you're able to get enough rest so that you can recuperate and do work well the next day.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's things like prioritization.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: So prioritizing of all the things you could be doing, what should you be doing?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's things like being able to um to be able to basically compartmentalize your life into the various pieces that you need to get stuff accomplished in and have success across all of them, because for work to work, your life has to work.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: So those are all skills that we can uh that we can work with individuals on to build.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the skills that I haven't mentioned yet, but many of us are very, very bad at is setting expectations in others.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if for so, as an example, if you as an individual decide that you're gonna work with billion minds and you go through our free foundations program, and then you go super deep with us, and you decide that you want to uh develop a personalized system for you that is gonna work with your strengths and your weaknesses.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Part of what we do when we work with those people and we insist on it, is that those people get super good at setting expectations with those around them in their personal life and setting expectations with those around them in their work life.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: The reason that we insist on it so much is the data really shows that if you're trying to instigate any change in what you do or how you work, then the single biggest indicator of success is how many other people have you told about it.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to lose you can play to anything, by the way.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to you want to lose weight, you want to lose 20 pounds, yeah, go tell the 20 people most important around you that you're trying to lose 20 pounds and then you're gonna do this differently and you're gonna do that differently, and you'd like them to hold you accountable for it.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: That that will make more of a difference than whether you uh than weight cost of diet you follow or whether you've joined a, you know, whatever, right?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: This this this thing about setting expectations is so closely linked to accountability.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing that we work with people on is the fact that setting expectations is centered around not just what you say, but it's centered around what you do.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take it to this personal effectiveness example.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: So if as part of this, I decide that I'm gonna adopt, even though my work doesn't set it, I'm gonna adopt a more traditional work day kind of thing where I'm gonna switch off from work, let's say at 6 p.m.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: at night, right?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: So then I need to have the courage, as it were, to be able to tell my colleagues that I'm gonna stop doing this at six o'clock.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: I need to explain to them what the benefits are that they're gonna see out of this.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I need to explain to them what that means for the work that I'm gonna be able to do with them.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, people often, often say, I can't do that.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: People will think so much differently of me, right?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're so used to me being the person that always said yes.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And now I'm telling that I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be there at 6:30 at night or something along those lines.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, it depends on how you go about doing that.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it depends on how you link it to the business benefits to the people that to the people that you're working with.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: But when we work with individuals, those individuals that do take that step and do start communicating with their manager, with their colleagues as to what they're doing and why they're doing it, they wind up being way, way, way more successful than those that kind of like do it in a vacuum.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first part of it, which is that you can work with the individual, but the individual has to take on the responsibility of communicating externally what it is they're doing.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that said, um, when we work at a team level, for example, inside organizations, that becomes much easier because now everybody is kind of with the program, everybody's speaking the same language, right?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, and motivation at work, all of that kind of stuff.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_04: And so when we work with pressure, when they're setting those expectations.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we work when we work with organizations, though, we also allow that also also allows us to kind of set what that how to communicate that down, right?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: How to explain to people that we're everybody's approach is going to be different, but we're all collectively working on the idea of of creating a better environment to do our best work in create in creating an environment that allows us to be able to perform this unstructured and ambiguous stuff really well.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can then get into things like what are the shared outcomes?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: How do we communicate with each other about outcomes?
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: How does a manager and their employee uh get set on what exactly an outcome is?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: How do you deal with it?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: How does that translate to how meetings happen?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: How does that translate to how people manage their calendar?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: How does that translate to people saying saying no or saying yes?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: All of these things are things that we sort of know that we should do, but it never works because you have a manager, for example, saying, hey, it's okay for people to say no.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then the moment somebody does, then they behave in the wrong way, right?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: So so it it's good, but it's it's not it's not um necessary, but it is good to have a group of people go through these things sorts of things together.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I I can imagine that it would be helpful.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_04: And thinking about just your example with the weight loss, you tell 20 friends that you're gonna lose 20 pounds or whatever.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, it seems like along with the expectations comes the setting of a lot of boundaries.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that and that expectation setting, as we say, it's it is in part um here's what to expect and here's why.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's also about setting those boundaries on yourself.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the we talk about the interesting findings when we've delved deep into why people don't set expectations in others.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: In part, it's because they're afraid of of how others will respond.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: That we had we have one person we worked with, uh, I'll change her name, but let's say her name was June.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, um, well, I've basically done everything for everybody else, no matter what they asked for.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they would always say, I would say, they would say jump and I would say how high.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've done that for 15 years.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: If I now say no, or if I now say things are going to be different, everybody's opinion of me is going to go down.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so for her, when we worked deeply with her on it, what we realized that this was actually a kind of deeper thing about sensing approval from others.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And she was worried about the uh the approval that the the way in which other people felt about her being diminished.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: And for her, she fully admitted afterwards that it was at the time she got beyond that and she actually did set those expectations.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, the fear of that was going to overwhelm anything else, even if it was self-sabotaging for her.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it was actually only when she had some health problems that she started to make the shift that she needed to make.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: And now she's actually doing more work in less time, and everybody around her knows why and how.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I love that.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_04: You know, fear is a funny thing.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I think one of the best lessons I learned in my life was early on when I had a sales career and they took and you had to sell, and you were so fearful of getting a no, you know.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_04: And instead of making it about the sales, it was about getting the first 100 no's so that you can get over the fear.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_04: And I think it's like that with any boundary you set, it's always fearful in the beginning.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_04: But the more you stick to it and the more you, you know, implement it with everyone, the easier it gets.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but that does bring up an a thought here.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, we're talking more than just about the physical work that we do.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: The these fears they get into the mental and maybe even some of the spiritual beliefs that a person has about themselves.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_04: Does um billion minds dig into that?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: We do.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and for some of the people that we work with, that actually can be can be kind of uncomfortable.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the way in which we break down um the what it is to be effective in this world is really down into three uh three components.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is based, by the way, on those initial interviews that we did and the research that we did.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: We found like 95% of people were just struggling with all this stuff, and one to two percent of people have really got it nailed.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: And those people that have really got it nailed really focused on three areas, building a personalized approach across three areas.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the first was organizational structure.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you go about organizing uh the work that you do on a day-to-day basis?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: The second was about um routine.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, how do you create in a world where the routine is not created for you?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right, how do you go about creating your routine?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Theoretically, it should be better, right?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've not got a routine imposed on you, you've got a routine that you can build that works for you specifically.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're still that's the autonomy everybody's wanted for so long.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that probably worked pretty well when we did flex time, but now it's just got so randomized, it's very difficult for people.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then the third piece, um, which is the area I think that you're really touching on, is what we we call it ability to execute.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we use that term quite deliberately because we we want people to just think about it almost like an athlete would, right?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, what an athlete would think is okay, they'd have those first things.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: They'd have some organization, right?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: They'd uh in terms of they'd organize their training, they'd know whether, you know, where the things were that they needed to do in order to be able to train.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um they'd have a routine, right?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: As in, they'd go train at five o'clock in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon or what it happened to be.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would make sure that they were able to execute.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do they make sure they're able to execute?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: They get enough rest, right?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: They combine hard workouts with routine, they have great nutrition, for example.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so we break down that third element, which is analogous to wellness, into eight different dimensions.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those dimensions is uh is spiritual.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now we don't necessarily doesn't necessarily mean religious, uh, it just means really kind of an uh of an understanding of what your purpose is, what your higher purpose is, what you what what you do and why you do it um in a very personal sense.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so those those dimensions, those eight dimensions actually in total, are actually extremely important for people to have a baseline level of capability.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't have a baseline level of capability, it affects their ability to execute and they're never going to get those other things done.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we're so out of whack in corporate America in terms of how we go about dealing with these things.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we we still, despite the fact that we've got examples of from athletes, for example, of people, you know, people like Tom Brady, whether you like him or not, he's had a you know 20-year career or whatever it is.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like think how long it is, right?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: These athletes that are now having incredibly long careers.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because they've taken what the best of sports science tells you, which is you prioritize nutrition, you prioritize rest, you prioritize um repeatable routine, you pick up you pick a program that works for you, you just don't just pick one off the shelf.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: They figured all of that out, and then they use it, and the results are exceptional.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then the rest of us in corporate America, we go, yeah, yeah, that's for them.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, we'll like like what we'll do is we'll just uh work 16 hour days or 18 hour days and we'll keep doing it until we have a heart attack and die, right?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's our that's our approach.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of those approaches works really well and it's proven to.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: The other one works really badly and is proven to, and yet we still do it, or at least even if we if we even if we don't do that, what we do is we just dress say we do window dressing.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: The window dressing being, hey, go on a go on a uh motivational speaking course or or Read a book or use your PTM.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Or take a nap or have your PT.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or have your personal time off or take a mental health break, right?
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's too late, right?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not let's not make people sick and then give them a break.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's work well in the first place.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_04: Wouldn't that be that's a novel idea?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh well, Paul, what kind of results are you seeing at uh of the people that are going through the Billion Minds program?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think one of the most interesting things for us, and it wasn't actually something that we expected, um, is around um people finding satisfaction in the work that they're in.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so, you know, we launched this through the pandemic.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: So when people were obviously working from uh um working from home and having to deal with the challenges of that if they're not if they're not used to it.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and of course, we are continuing to operate during the great resignation.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that we have realized, again, this came up in our research because we did a bunch of interviews with people after they left their job and they've gone into another one, like three months after.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Why did you leave?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: What's caused you to uh what's caused you to do it?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the uh the most interesting result of that, by the way, when you ask people why did they leave, you know what the most important or what the main answer was?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't know.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't which is really interesting as well.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was the most common answer in retrospect.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: So at the time, people would have like a like a oh well, I didn't really like my boss, or you know, whatever it happened to be.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: But once they got there, once they got into the second role and the dust had settled, and the honeymoon had uh gone through gone through, then they were like, I don't know.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I said I didn't really like my boss, but my new ones know better, you know, those those kind of things.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we realized um through the work that we've done and through the one-to-one interactions that we have with people that are on the program is that one of the main reasons people quit their job is because they can.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, it's something that they can change, right?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: When they're and so the thing that they're trying to change is this underlying overall sense of disquiet or anxiety around their workslash life experience.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're trying to change something related to that, there's not many things you can change.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, changing jobs, that seems like a pretty good option.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like the average salary goes up by what, 2% a year or 3% a year, something like that.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: You change jobs, your salary goes up on average by about 10 to 20 percent.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it feels like a good, it feels like a good thing, a smart reward of some sort.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's a reward associated with it, and you're changing something just because you can.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, given the fact that everything that we do is really centered around people developing skills to be able to thrive in the work in which they do, yeah.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what we've seen is that a lot of the people that are working with us have gone from, I'm gonna quit because it's the only thing I'm gonna do, to actually, I kind of like my job a lot more than I did.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm staying where I'm staying put.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that um, it's that relationship between what we're doing and basically people's efficacy and more inclination to stay where they are that was a little bit surprising for us.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: We thought we were just gonna help people be happier in their job, which is great, but we hadn't really connected that to the idea that they would then stay.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose we should have thought about that, but it does seem to be happening.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_04: You know, um, as you're telling your story there, I was listening to a motivational speaker that not long ago, and she had gone through sobriety, so she had gone to AA meetings.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: And the story she was telling was I guess in AA they have something called, oh, they're doing a geographic.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_04: And basically, what you're saying here, what is happening with the great resignation, rather than facing their stuff and changing themselves, they were just going to change your location, go to a different city or do so a different job.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_04: So it's like people in the great resignation are they're doing a geographic, like they're doing a geographic instance.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's yeah, it's change something you can rather than look internally.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's true, it's absolutely true.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was just our first customer.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: We had um, we had 20 we started very small with a company of 28 people.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: We had, you know, several that that shared with us that now that this had given them a new outlook on the work that they did, um, that they were uh that they were staying rather versus moving on to something else.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: That can be valuable as a business result for a uh for a lot of companies, but also it's super valuable for the uh for the individual.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've got to get out of this world where people are just grinding through the day.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of this work is actually exciting in its own right if you can do it well.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you if you struggle every single day to be able to switch off from your day and look at the end of the day and tell your loved ones what you did and why you did it, yeah, then it's not gonna feel fun.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_04: No, and that and that struggle, I think, is why we see suicides going up, health care issues going up, alcoholism going up.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_04: So many problems.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a every uh it's really unfortunate to say, but every almost every single one of those is in quotes a solution of some sort, right?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: As in alcohol dims it, suicide ends it, you know.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: They these are all these are all really, really damaging, unfortunate solutions that people choose, yeah.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that are way, way worse for everybody, for themselves, their families, for society, for their employers, than what they could be doing, which is finding uh developing the skills to be able to get through their day better.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_04: Well, in my coaching days, it was always uh trading the disempowering choice to an empowering choice.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_04: And it sounds like for organizations, billion minds is the empowering choice for them to really uh make those changes that are necessary, but do it in a way that's empowering to the individual and the organization.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_04: So, well, uh I hate that our time is coming to a close because there's so many good things that we could continue to dive into, but we always like to leave the leaders that are listening um with one tip that you would have for them that would that they could go back to their offices or to their next Zoom meeting and and use to cultivate the potential of their employees.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_04: So, what would your advice be?
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: Gosh, one tip.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_04: That's a the one tip is that like most of my guests, they they steal about two or three, but they still about two or three.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well we'll we'll try to get it down to get it down to one, but it might be a broadish one.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so um one thing I would say is that there is a ton of hidden potential among all of your employees.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what I would suggest is rethink and reframe why that potential is not being extracted.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we keep going back to our research, but one of the things that was most interesting, I think, for us about it was that many of the people that we spoke to had experience of things like let's say mindset training, or experience of programs designed to cultivate their leadership potential, experience of programs uh that were designed to try to help them figure out what they wanted to be when they grow up, like to look at the uh what was going to happen in their future.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: And these were all great, but the organizations didn't see quite the results that they were expecting to get from those uh from those types of programs.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: What we've seen is that no matter where people are inside organizations, whether they are, you know, 21 years old coming out of college or a senior executive inside an organization, there's one thing that was holding all of them back, which was that they really absolutely had not nailed the 16 hours that they were awake from.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, they lacked a set of consistently applied basic skills that were gonna make sure that they thrived in the present.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, my point about all of that is that a lot of the attention that we place inside organizations is around uh like facilitating people's future, which is great, but until you have nailed people's present, you can't actually get there.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so focus like a laser on making that 18 hours that people are awake the best it can possibly be.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then once you do, instead of that acting as like a sponge or quicksand that holds people back, right?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't got time to, you know, I've got all these dreams, but I haven't got time to fulfill them, that kind of thing.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, instead of it acting like that, if you get that right, it acts like a spring or a trampoline, it pushes people forwards.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so invest two months, three months, four months in really nailing those uh those foundations, and then use that as a springboard to achieve all the other things that you're looking to achieve.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I guess that's one.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: That was that's one.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_04: And just to add a benefit to that, when when you help someone nail that, um that creates we all have within us what's called homostasis, this comfort zone.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I think what's been so disheartening for the pandemic and everything that's happened in the workforce is because it's taken us out of our homostasis.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_04: So anxiety levels have gone way through the roof, not to mention media's help.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_04: But by nailing that 16 hours, they are are bringing it back to kind of a comfort zone for themselves.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's going to look different every day, maybe different for every individual, but the anxiety levels can begin to come down, which also will improve the productivity and on and on.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just totally agree.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's like a pebble in the water and just keeps going.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_04: So wonderful, wonderful.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much, Paul.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, thank you.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, thank you for joining me today and for the wisdom and experience you shared with our listeners.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's been an empowering program for leaders seeking to cultivate their employees' potential.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_04: If you've enjoyed this interview with Paul Slater, CEO of Billion Minds, be sure and connect with him on LinkedIn and also on Twitter at Slater in Seattle.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_04: And also don't uh miss the opportunity to go to billionminds.com and sign up for the free trial of their personal effectiveness program.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you for joining this episode of Cultivating Potential Podcasts.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_04: We're honored to be able to serve leaders like yourself as you learn and grow.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks so much, Paul.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Karen.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy Podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our Way Too Busy Lives.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: If you're enjoying the Way Too Busy podcast, please consider leaving us a rating and review on iTunes so that others can find us as well.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks.