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States Into Traits · Fierce Encouragement

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, this is Mark.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is Fierce Encouragement.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you for being here.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: If this is one of your first times here, well, I created this podcast many moons ago.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And really, because I struggle with confidence and self-talk, negative self-talk.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in this podcast, I simply share tools and resources and ideas that you can practice at home, at work, and ultimately kind of being your own best friend, your own best advocate.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's the basic idea here.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to thank you for sharing your time with us.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you get something out of this, and I'm glad you're here.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome all my longtime listeners.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here, too.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Today on the Bot uh podcast, I wanted to talk about this book I've read a few years ago.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was just going through some of my notes.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing book.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's written by Dr.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Richard Davidson and Daniel Goldman.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Daniel Goldman wrote the classic uh emotional intelligence.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: But Dr.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Richie Davison is from here in my hometown at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he's done a ton of study with the Dalai Lama and in mind states and meditation and kind of like mind training methods and to see how they produced effects in the lab.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So their book called Altered Traits, Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body, was a really powerful book when I read it many years ago.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of one of those, I guess it has a lot of scientific um study in it.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It gets a little dry or kind of uh long at some points.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the main thing that I took from it was this idea of altered traits.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we can get into states of being for periods of time.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we can have that state of patience or that state of being loving and kind or uh whatever else, right?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what they argue in this book through meditation and mind training and even the cutting edge and really powerful research that they've done, that we do have control over changing our mind.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's that idea of neuroplasticity.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we want to kind of sweep away the, I guess, the distortions we have around meditation and mindfulness, and to really be practical and scientific and like outcome-based with it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the best books that kind of leans into the science in the study.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the biggest takeaway for me is creating those states of being, not just lasting for a little bit, but turning them into traits, turning them into somebody you are more often.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the research says more and more, and through this book and through so many other papers and research, that it is possible to change our brains and the way we think.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And with that, we can change how we show up in the world.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a great book.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um to get into some of the notes, I kind of scribbled down here, piece of paper here.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really into the science of behavior change and habit building, but this totally overlays with that.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what do I mean?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a thing from BJ Fogg called the A B C's of Habit Building.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is to anchor, the second one, and the B is to do the behavior, and the C is to celebrate.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think like this parallels what I found in the book.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: When we want to turn a state into a trait for ourselves, we need to get really good at grounding our habit or anchoring our habit, our new habit, installing that habit, and then affixing it or connecting it to celebration and being happy that we're doing it.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then and only then, when we do these in small chunks consistently, we can kind of get into that autopilot or even that algorithmic mode.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I make my coffee, I wait for my coffee to brew and I go sit down and do some meditation.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's my algorithm.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's your algorithm to bring more of that mental grounding and breath work and train your neuroplasticity towards higher virtues and values and strengths?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: How can you use your meditation to fiercely encourage yourself and see it as a really great, powerful practice that you're building up?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of comes down to this other idea I wrote down is about mindset.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: What is one new social or high-value virtue or strength that you have that you could work on installing and putting in your life more?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: My teacher talked about it kind of like this.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: What is the most painful thing for yourself during the day?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: What's the most difficult thing for you to perform?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's getting home from work and having that kind of wobbly emotional time.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's right away in the morning when you feel tired right after getting up.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: But thinking of those habits you can install, thinking of a mindfulness and a mental exercise habit, a mind training habit, how much of a difference would it make in your life if you just turn that state into a trait?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what if those pleasant mental states produced real payoffs in your life, a lasting personality trait that could bring you just new results in your relationships, in those moments during the day when you get frustrated, and even enjoying the bigger, uh, more uh savoring moments that we get a chance to have in our life.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And really, what would your life look like in three or five years if you had that uh trait developed in a deep, deep way?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So making your states into a trait.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Check out that book.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a link in it in the show notes.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But Altered Traits by Daniel Goldman and Richie Davison, if you want to go a little deeper kind of on the science and prove out to yourself that this does make a difference, or you could start your own experiment today.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Start it with five minutes and do that every day over the next week or two.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing I had written down here, and this has come up again and again this week in my coaching conversations, in recording here, obviously, in my journaling, and even in my sessions with my coaches.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it's this it's this idea of seeking failure.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if you're in the corporate world, but sometimes they talk about this idea of fail forward, you know, embrace failure.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the company embraces failure.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We want you to fail.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but when I heard that and then went back to my desk in my corporate life, the talking about it and theorizing about it, and then actually going to your desk and doing those things, there was a big chasm between embracing failure in theory and embracing failure when it actually happens on the uh the factory room floor.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to give it lip service, and it's really hard to do it when somebody screws up, something got missed, or or there was a big decision that didn't get made that costed us money.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's this great book called You Squared or You to the Second Power that I got years ago.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Really short, great, wonderful book.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a link to that also in the show notes.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: But he there's a chapter in there that Price Pritchard reads or writes about, and it is the idea of seeking failure.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he has a quote in there.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: I took a quote and a highlighter, I just loved it and been reading it this past week.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: But he mentions that everything looks like failure in the middle.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Surgery looks like there's been a murder in the room, baking a cake, the kitchen's really messy.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And even when we fly to the moon on a rocket, that rocket is off course over 90% of the time.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in a sense, we fail our way to the moon.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: We fail our way through surgery and business problems.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he says that failure is a sign of success.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sign of progress.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: That feels like some mental judo, but what if we change our mindset around failure?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: But what if we live it, not just talk about it in companies or in meetings, but actually go back to the desk and celebrate our failures in a sense?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: What if problems are a good thing?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: What if they mean and mean that we're aiming high?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we aimed low, well, there'd be no problems.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: There'd be no issues.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's just an for me, it was an aha-aha moment, even trying to work with this through the years, but imagining everything that's going wrong or the problems or the failures I have in my business or in my life, and being encouraged by them, seeing them as a sign of progress and seeking failure truly, whether it be with your team, your organization, your family, or even in your own creative projects.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: How can I embrace and romance and love that uncomfortable place of seeking failure?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what does it mean in my life?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: The last thing I wanted to bring up and that I sketched out and was thinking about a lot this week was the idea of 5% experiments.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this connects with the idea of failure.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we can fail bigly and feel really horrible about it and maybe lose weeks because we're just, you know, whatever, fall into that numbing behavior or the avoidance.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: But what if we put our hard hat on, got back to work, and just tried to get 5% better or be willing to fail, like 2 or 3%?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Can we slow down and not have that all or nothing thinking and invite ourselves to play in this kind of zone of genius, in a sense?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do today to get 3% better?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do today to push myself 5% more?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Think how you could get your system for your event or your project and let that be 5% better.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, the question or the prompt you could sit with is what would it look like to have a trait rate dialed in 5% more this next year?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, what would it feel like in a year to have a unique trait that you want to develop like a muscle and have that dialed in 5% every week?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what if you could learn to play with failure and see failure as success just 5% more?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: What if you could bring that attitude and that ethos to your team and encourage failure and embrace it, see it as an investment.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many teams that I connect with where there's a lot of fear in leadership and ownership, the inability to look directly at the product, at the customer experience, and be honest.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So many people are performing and trying to be that thing at work and at home.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: When what would it look like to experiment with an authentic failure attitude, one of learning and growing?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And how or what, or who would you be if you got 5% better over the next few months?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: What does that look like when we think of our workouts and our relationships and, of course, our creative projects and our job?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I had today.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: That idea of developing those states into permanent traits.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Check out altered traits, that great book.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And also, how can we use failure, seeking failure as Price Pritchard shares in U Squared?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Using everything to get better, and remembering that every great leader, every product, everybody that's come before you, that it's always messy and bloody and screwed up in the middle.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's maybe right where you need to be.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, just bring that 5% mentality online.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's the one thing you're working on?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And how can you get 5% better at it today?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Make a commitment to that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: I really want to thank you for being here.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate all the listeners that take the time and more importantly, take the time to plug these into their day-to-day, slowing down to write some things down, maybe even writing notes to yourself or doing some journaling practice.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: No matter what it is, make that commitment to yourself.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's great that you're here listening, but it's even more powerful for change when you connect and train yourself with yourself and coach yourself.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're ever interested in having a conversation with me, I love to connect with people that are either going through it or want to step into that best version of themselves.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: So apply in the show notes.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have an application in there.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to connect with you and you share your answers to my questions.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we can take a look and see if we we can connect on a call.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it'd be great to hear from you.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you're having a great day, a great evening, wherever you're at.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this has been Fierce Encouragement, and this has been Mark.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Have a good one.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Bye bye.