Latest / The Expert Method / The Beliefs Running Your Life Without You Knowing
Transcript
- speaker-0: It would say wake up. We get into attitudes, habits, and behaviors that we're unconscious about. And our thinking is largely determined by our belief system. It is, to use the computer metaphor, the operating system that hums away in the background. speaker-1: Today's guest is Robert White. Robert has spent decades building and leading experiential leadership programs that have reached more than 1.4 million people. And today he works directly with executives and business owners. In our conversation, we talk about how beliefs you may not even realize you have shape your thoughts, which create your emotions, and ultimately lead to your actions and behavior in your life. And how becoming aware of those patterns gives you more of a choice in how you respond and what you ultimately create. in your life. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Robert White. Robert, thank you so much for being here. speaker-0: You're very welcome and I'm delighted to be here. speaker-1: Yeah, excited our conversation. So, Robert, in other conversations, and before we started recording here today, you have talked about the environment in which you grew up in, right? You talked about growing up in poverty in an abusive environment with an alcoholic father who died when you were fourteen and having to work, you know, start working at a young age and kind of be pretty self sufficient. And, you know, it's a tough environment to come up in, right? And to grow up in. So when you look back and you think about growing up in that environment. What do you think it taught you? speaker-0: Well, Ian, I know I've spent the the greater part of my life running three companies with a million four hundred thousand graduates of our leadership programs. And you know, in the early days I'm in front of the room and but for most of that time I'm training trainers from the back of the room, which is a very different experience. Even with experiential work, you can notice a lot more from the back of the room. And one of the things I noticed is that many people grew up with situations that were that matched mine or were we worse. And I I've heard a lot of stories. You know, the focus is usually on what we contribute to people through our work, but I've learned so much by sitting in the back of the room listening to people's stories and how they handled that story into their adult years. And what I And I'm going to simplify this a lot, but this kind of works for me and maybe for others. People seem to make one of two choices. They either choose if if they have that kind of background that involves a lot of abuse, is they either retreat from life or they launch themselves into it in an almost kind of weird, strange way. Now, I obviously took that second choice. But you know, that first choice is pretty popular and it leads to a lot of addiction. It leads to passing the abuse along when you have a family, it leads to being the loner in the in your mom's basement. You know, it is a retreat from life that you make assumptions out of that that don't work well in modern day living. On the other side, in my case I got angry. You know, we do a lot of work now with executives who Maybe are really I mean the people I work super smart, super hard working, super driven, you know, just all kinds of great qualities. But something that's sometimes lacking in their life is a clear statement of purpose. Why am I here? What's the meaning for my life? And in doing that work with others, of course I start looking at me. You know, it's I think I I have a lot of bad qualities but I think that's kind of a good quality. I'm willing to self examine. And what I realized is that I did get angry. And I said to myself, my earliest purpose statement is a a negative purpose, but it it drove me for years. I'll never be poor again. That was I'll show them. I'll show them that I'm worth something. After being told for many years, you won't amount to anything, you're too big for your britches. I can give you the whole list of the constant refrain that was in my life. And but I got angry. And that led to actually being in my forties and being, you know, making more money than I ever imagined making, you know, living in a fourteen thousand five hundred square foot home in Aspen, Colorado. With seventy acres surrounding me, my own jet, a month on safari in Africa, you know, all these physical manifestations of success. I I had them all. But I started waking up, and this was this is a conscious awakening, somewhat. I started waking up in that beautiful home and living that beautiful life and beautiful wife and wonderful children. I'd start waking up thinking. God is not finished with me. There's something that I'm supposed to move into here. And then I'd say, no, no, every everything's great, everything's great. That's that self talk. But it wouldn't go away. And and my my friend, the late John Denver, and I traveled together during that period for about six months, and we had a lot of late night conversations. You know, we what we were doing was called higher ground. It was a three and a half hour program about creating a sustainable future. And mostly around the work of the late Buck Buckmaster Fuller, Bucky Fuller. And so we would do that one night and then the next night John would do a concert or vice versa. And when he did a concert, you know, he'd come off and after the backstage stuff at about eleven thirty, wide awake. You know, I'd had a normal day, I want to go to bed. So we had a lot of long talks. And I remember that one time he just became very silent. And then I I questioned him about that. And he said, no, no, no, you know, I I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life. I said, No, tell me. You know, because at the same time I'm having these wake ups, you know, wanting to know what the rest of my life is going to be like. And what he said stays with me. He said, you have a voice and a contribution. You've now had this incredible opportunity for at that time about ten years in Aspen, skiing a lot, traveling a lot, having fun for the first time really in my life. And he said, You have a voice, you have a contribution. Your job is to find out what it is. What's the contribution? And I realized I wasn't coming from contribution, even though I was contributing a lot. I was coming from anger, from being eight, nine, ten years old and being beaten two or three times a week. I was coming from I'll never be poor again. I had certainly satisfied that one. And it woke me up. So I mean I'm grateful to that friendship and to John for many reasons, but that that's the big one. speaker-1: Yeah. And I can see how that anger can really be an effective fuel to drive you and other people that I've seen use that similar energy source, you know, even myself and my own points in my life of anger is an effective fuel to getting things done. But what do you think using anger as a fuel to drive you? you know, misses like what is if you're using anger as that fuel or that scarcity of like that negative purpose that you talked about, I'll never be poor again, which are kind of one and the same of, you know, using anger, using fear as your fuel source of like avoiding something as your purpose. Like what does that miss? If that's what's driving you, what does that miss? speaker-0: The expression that I'm reminded of is that anger is the kind of thing that leads to temporary pleasure and permanent pain. And learning to express it, you know, one of the things, Ian, that's not in my resume and yet has a very big presence in my life every day today, is three years ago I lost a son. I learned that I have a pretty strong belief that I'm I'm supposed to be the first one to go. in the family. But his death has really in some ways shattered me. And I'm I'm often ambushed by anger, by the way, and by sadness. My former wife, his mother, and I have a pact. We have an agreement. And that is that whenever we are ambushed, and that is the term I I've settled on, by something happens where suddenly I'm just overwhelmed with anger and sadness. And getting through that is both of us have agreed that as quickly as possible we will shift to all of the joy that he brought to us in his life. That that's where the focus, not his death, but his life needs to be where we would look, where we would focus. And that's work for me. But that's an example of operating from Not from temporary pleasure and permanent pain, but from responsibly handling our feelings. I know from our work and particularly with executives, most of the people I work with are very, very good at something called compartmentalizing. You know, Bill Clinton, our former president, was famous for being a like a genius at compartmentalizing. You know, he had his vision, his his values in many ways and and his tremendous political ability. I might have disagreed with him quite a few times on policy, but I don't think anybody can doubt that he was either the best or approaching the best politician of my life. He was able to put things about himself that weren't so pleasant aside to do the people's work or to do his work. Wh wh however way you want to identify it. And the clients that I work for are often geniuses at compartmentalizing, at putting things aside so they can get things done. Whatever motivates them. you know, in my case it was, you know, I'll never be poor again. but a lot of different things motivate people, especially when they find the meaning for their life. But they're good at putting it aside. And that that's what I had become. You know, my book, Living an Extraordinary Life, has a subtitle that that says that you're going to do that, including joy and fulfillment. And that's what was missing in my life at around the time of that conversation with John Denver, is that I had everything. I didn't have joy. I didn't have satisfaction, fulfillment. I couldn't celebrate myself. You know, I d I built those companies from behind the scenes, nobody knew who I was. I just ran the company. I mean the trainers knew who I was because I was kind of in their face a lot, you know, on trainer training, but and supervision. Or as one of my friends is prone to say, herding cats. Is that's having 70 trainer full time trainers work for you was like herding cats. I was good at all of that, but the IR our graduates didn't know who I was. And then my staff would pull me out in front of people occasionally. And I was always so uncomfortable. I couldn't acknowledge me. I couldn't experience the joy of that moment. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: so I just started looking at that more carefully and making new choices. So having fun is now a bigger, much bigger part of my life. speaker-1: Hmm. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm sorry to hear about your son. But when you investigated that more carefully, right, your inability to allow yourself to experience joy. And I think anybody listening who is an ambitious, hardworking person who's good at that compartmentalizing, right? Kind of avoiding or just kind of setting your feelings, your emotions aside to get back to you and focus on the work at hand, the task at hand of You know, kind of burying yourself in the work so you never have to feel the things that you feel. I think anybody can recognize that, or many of the listeners, including myself, will be able to recognize that experience. But when you investigated that in yourself, right, this almost inability to allow yourself to experience joy and happiness, what did you find? speaker-0: People ask me about that turning point, about my g you know, losing a lot of money, losing the company, losing getting going back to work. And the heart of that, in terms of the success I've had since then, has been realizing that what we were teaching about purpose, I needed to live it myself. That was really the turning point. My life was either going too fast, or in in a case of of the living in Aspen. Not going too slow, but just focusing on fun, focusing on family, focusing on these experiences that I've always wanted to have. And but that I needed to wake up to the level of purpose that life and God or the stars or the moon or w whoever however you want to credit it had been preparing me for all my life. I needed to step into that. Yeah and two minute lecture that's three days in one of our programs is about purpose and it and what we've identified is levels of purpose. Everybody understands them quickly. The basic level of purpose is survival, you know, food, clothing, shelter. unless you satisfy that, Gandhi said that God appears to the hungry man in the form of a loaf of bread. And so you gotta handle that. The second level of purpose is maintenance that you have figured out how to handle survival in some kind of routine, through your talent, through your hard work, through some good choices, even through some bad choices. But you know, you've handled food, clothing, and shelter, not only for today, but for the foreseeable future. So that's the second level of purpose. The third is a surprise to most of It was a surprise to me and it's a surprise to many of my clients, is leisure. Your third level of purpose is to turn all of your life into play. So it's not about laying on the beach or playing golf every day. It's about having all of the aspects of your life be playful. That you're playing in the game of life. You're noticing what's working, what's not working, and it's it's conscious. It's not just being driven by your internal belief system, especially the unconscious part of that. And the highest level of purpose is contribution. It's time to give back. and doesn't mean, again, that you only work on nonprofit. By the way, I tried that. I was on six nonprofit boards at one time. Almost drove me crazy. But I found out that business is civilized compared to nonprofit boards. But Contribution is are you making a difference? Are you contributing to the person you pass on the street every day and you don't don't ever stop to chat? you know, we talked a little before we formally met today and that on growing up in Wisconsin and people taking care of you. You grow to expect that and and I think as a young person you you don't even know it's happening. You know, you get a little bit older and you go, wow, that was really an important turning point in my life from somebody I'd never met before, didn't know, haven't seen since. Wow, I wish I could connect with them and just say thank you. So people contribute in a lot of different ways and it's something that is being somewhat diminished in today's culture to the detriment of all. But I think that people that I'm privileged to serve People running small and medium sized businesses really that first of all, whatever they're doing usually. If it's not a contribution, they're not in business. So, you know, as a starting point. But look, they're the ones that fund Little League. You know? They're the ones that when you need a silent auction gift, that's who you go see. But they're the ones that you call when when you lose a son. You know, all of those things. People contribute in many, many ways, quite often unconsciously, which speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: by the way robs you of joy and satisfaction. You know, these things are all kind of tied together in a Gordian map. And what's helpful is to have, frankly, a coach, a mentor, a trainer that helps you sort it out. And particularly when you're working with already successful people. speaker-1: Right. Yeah, going back to your idea that having a coach, having a mentor, right, you're able to hear more from the back of the room. That coach and that mentor is kinda in the back of the room looking at your life and kind of how things are playing out, and they can notice things that you would miss because you're there in the moment, kind of living it, right? So having a coach, having a mentor that's able to listen from the back of the room, quote unquote, is super helpful. So I mean that levels of purpose is a new idea for me. But I think you're totally right. Like your purpose, like I think I've mistaken purpose as being this thing that's innate within me, that's ever present, that's like I have one grand purpose for my life. But I think, you know, your point that your purpose evolves based on the kind of the stage of where you're at. Right. So you first need to, you know, be able to handle your own survival, right? The Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you need to get that under wraps. Then it comes down to like consistent maintenance of that survival. Like getting to the point where you really don't have to worry about it anymore. And then that third level is brand new to me of, you know, how can you make life play? Right? How can you really enjoy and leisure and and enjoy life? And that again doesn't mean laying on the beach playing golf every day, but I'd love to explore that a little bit deeper. How do you turn life into play? Like once you have the the survival taken care of, you're in a good steady foundation, you have things taken care of, how can you evolve to that point where you create your purpose around something that helps you like how do you turn life into play? speaker-0: Well it does take three or four days and a skillful training design to really answer that question. But I think what might be helpful is I have a graduate from our our my previous company named Phil Burgess. Now, you know, most of the people listening here won't know him. He's retired. He loves sailing, so when he retired he left Colorado and moved to Annapolis, Maryland, and his sailboat. At the time that I met him. He was a student in our VisionQuest training, a five day executive retreat. And he was the president of I think it was called Rocky Mountain. It was a think tank about the Mountain West. And largely funded, by the way, by the by the old telephone company US West, one of the what is it, seven different franchises that split off from the original ATT. And Phil found out about our training through another graduate and showed up in it and participated fully. I did not lead the training. I w you know, it was on behind the scenes once again. by this time I'm I'm I've left Asia, I'm office in Denver for a couple of years. And I had this wonderful secretary, Alice, and she came into my office one morning with this strange look on her face and said, Mr. I have this per this woman on the phone and I don't know what to do or what to say. And I said, Well, what's going on? And she said, Well, she's Phil Burgess's secretary. And she wants me to tell me tell her what we did to him that caused him to be a human being. And I'll never for you know, you don't forget something like that. So I got on the phone with her and I found out that Phil had he's in the guy is just brilliant. He's got a doctorate and something and ran this big think tank and had a sterling corporate career before that. And I hadn't heard anything from the trainer that was unusual from that training. I didn't I didn't know who Phil Burgess was. But this woman tells me that he came back. She said, and now the team is his team is talking to him and talking to each other and they're treating me better. And she went on and on and on about Phil Burgess. And you know, he's become a friend. he emailed me just recently about some things that he's involved in with charity and wants my support, which he will receive. But my point about it is that what Phil did was he realized in our training, because now I've interviewed him and he's actually gonna be featured in a book I'm now writing about leadership. He found out that he had a belief system that was basically treat people badly because they're always out to get you. So he used that incredible intelligence to berate people, to make fun of them, to shame them in public. And you know, everybody recognized his brilliance and and he had just lots of good qualities. But when he came into the mic workplace, it was mistrust. He operated from mistrust or distrust of no trust. And he believed unconsciously. That people were out to cheat him, out to embarrass him, out to get him. Because that's what his father was like and that's what he was taught. So the answer to your question is if you look at the human operating system, the obvious part is our behavior. The layer below that is a surprise to most people. They think that they think that thinking is the layer below behavior. It's not. Your emotions are the level below behavior. If you think about the the biggest wins you've had and the biggest mistakes you've made, they were rooted in some emotion. And then you behaved out of that and you got a good results or bad results, depending on what that emotion was and how you handled it. But then the level below that is thinking. And our thinking is largely determined by our belief system. It is to use the computer metaphor, The operating system that hums away in the background. But all of the programs, our personality, our habits, all of those live on top of those beliefs. And if you're looking at how do you make the fastest possible progress and really use all of you, it's to do some work on figuring out your conscious and your unconscious beliefs. Because they are what power you and what disempower you. And to the degree that you are unconscious about them, that it is mostly a negative experience. You know, if you wonder why did I make that same mistake again? You're smart, you're accomplished, you're making a lot of money already, maybe. It it's buried in your subconscious. So you can get conscious about that belief, then you have choice. You can choose to keep it. If it if you somehow figure out that it works for you, great, do more of it. But if it's not working for you, then you've got an opportunity to make new choices and instead of repeating the pattern, you know, that you've you've been in before. speaker-1: Yeah. And I think that idea of conscious versus passive has kind of been the underlying theme of our conversation thus far. Like going back to your own story of the environment that you grew up in, right? You can you had a decision, right? You could be passive and just kind of light let life happen to you, right? Just kind of check out, turn off, tune out, be passive, or you can consciously kind of step into your life and take the bull by the horns, as the saying goes, and be conscious about stepping into creating the life that you want. And You know, that sounds very buzzwordy and something that people have heard before, but just felt worth articulating that it seems like this this balance of, you know, conscious versus passive, active versus passive has been an underlying theme of our conversation thus far. But going back to the point that you just made, right? Like a recurring theme of the podcast and a lot of the conversations that we've had recently is really developed this model for me that I've written down in my journal many times, but it's this idea that your thoughts create your emotions, then your emotions drive your actions. So if you want to change your actions, then you really should change your thoughts. But this idea of how do we change our thoughts, you you bring beliefs into this model where your beliefs are what are going to create your thoughts. Your thoughts create the emotions, the emotions create the actions is a new addition to the model. So would love to explore with you how can you change your beliefs? So I guess maybe first, right, you need to become Conscious of the beliefs that exist within you. So once you're then conscious, then you can change them. So I think maybe first it's worth exploring how do you become conscious of those beliefs that you have? Like how do you how do you become aware of those subconscious beliefs that you have that are perpetuating these negative patterns in your life? speaker-0: Well, hopefully you get a skilled outside voice. and yeah, I had a c a telephone conversation with my best friend. You know, I left home at fourteen. My father died, and then my family moved back to West Virginia and I chose not to go with him. I fortunately was kind of adopted by another family, and they had ten children. The joke was ten, eleven, who cares, you know. But I had this incredible gift of a family where they talked to each other, they loved each other, they competed, they argued, they hugged, you know, a really great family. And my dear friend, my classmate that introduced me to his parents and and caused me to be kind of adopted, Michael, is still my best friend. And we happened to end up in Colorado together, which was a An additional bust. But we had a conversation about a struggle that I'm having with my family. And, you know, he knows me so well, he can confront me. And basically what what happens when you have a good coach or a good mentor, you know, somebody that's been there and done that experienced a lot of the things that you're experiencing. Or you get into one of these high impact trainings that, you know, that I primarily do today is is with top teams, not not with individuals so much. But a really good friend who has some wisdom, a coach, a mentor, somebody to interrupt your pattern, your story. You know, successful people have a story and they're good at telling it. And that story attracts the resources and the assets that they need to get done what they're getting done. And the story is great and usually it's they're good storytellers, frankly. you know, even though I hid from the public in building the companies that I've built, I was good internally at telling my story about how those trainings had benefited me and how things had happened in my life and how I was using what I learned today and how maybe you should take a look at this, you know, that kind of storytelling. But stories can also hide reality. Yeah, the Buddhists call it, you know One of the steps that we do in our trainings is to somewhat complete or take any negative energy off of your past, any blame, shame, regret, guilt. But also past success. So that's obviously even senior executives and owners of companies do that. Like Bill Clinton. They compartmentalize beautifully. The second level is to learn to better tell the truth about current reality. And then the third level is if you've done those two things, then you can really choose your future instead of having your future be a product of your past. You know, where you went to school, or how how many years you went to school, how much capital you had, or how much support you have. You know, all of these things that that people do and call a vision. It's really just a continuation of a pattern. So and it might actually be accurate, but it's not felt. but back to that central one. Learning to better tell the truth about your current reality. If you're living in your story, you will ignore the reality. The Buddhists call it developing a selfless regard for reality. You know, seeing patterns that just are not working for you or for your team. And realizing that they are patterns and they can be interrupted, and that there's a route to them. So that you know, the part of your formula, by the way, seems to leave out that if you have a feeling, no matter where it came from, you have to fully feel it. This doesn't mean that when you're angry you go out and shoot someone. This means that when you're angry you have a way of dealing with it. When you are joyful, you have a way of celebrating it. When you are fearful, you have a way of moving through it, or at least recognizing that it was a choice that you made. And you've got a new opportunity to make new choices tomorrow in the next turn. And if you're sad, same. Develop a method to get through it. you know, I've had some lessons in that the last three years. But you know, I have ad two adopted children and both special needs kids. who I've learned so much from, either directly from them or in learning how to parent them. And well, my son Levi, by the way, is he's the crew leader of thirty-two men who do wild land firefighting. It's supposedly the most dangerous job in America today. And so he's fighting fire right now. But one of the things I learned in Levi we adopted at four He had been horribly abused, actually tortured. you know, that it's not a good day when you learn the distinction between abuse and torture. That's not a good day. And but one of the things we learned with him is that because of the abuse that he had suffered in his first four years from his birth mother and her boyfriends, I mean Levi has six cigarette burns on his back in a pattern. But he had shut down his feelings. He had gone beyond compartmentalizing. They were shut down. And one of the things we learned from an an incredible therapist was to ask Levi a question. Are you mad, glad, sad, or afraid? If you think about it, that's pretty much the four big, big ones. Mad, you know, angry. Sad speaks for itself. Vlad, that's that's the joy one, and and then afraid. Mad, sad, glad, and afraid. I found that to be very useful personally. But when I started having a strong feeling, I ask which one of these am I experiencing? And then I remember, you know, when I often in in appearances today I get asked, What's your favorite book? And you know, it's not good for him to say my book is my favorite book. So and and the truth is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Franklin. Is my favorite book, and that's what he talks about. He takes apart that word. I don't know if it's in the book or in a speaking engagement, but I heard this, but is that the key to responsibility is response ability. It's not what you're feeling. It's what your response to it. Can you celebrate joy? Can you move through fear? Can you handle anger? responsibly. Can you find some metaphor that gets you through sadness? In in my former wife's case and mine, we learned to focus on Rob's many gifts. And there and he had many, many gifts and many contributions to us personally and to our family. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: But it's you know, learning to navigate your thro yourself to you know, all of the great teachers and certainly Shakespeare being one of them, know thyself is central to all of the great teachers. speaker-1: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's the I'm learning more and more the how important that is to really know yourself. You know, I think for me, I spent a long time just ignoring the importance of that. It's like, who cares what I'm feeling? Like that doesn't matter. Like I just need to do the things that I know that I need to do to go get the things that I say that I want. speaker-0: This sounds like my story now, Ian. speaker-1: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And but, you know, you're again another buzz kind of cliche thing is that, you know, the only person that you're gonna spend your entire life with is yourself. And the only person that's responsible for creating your life is yourself, right? So and how your feeling, I guess, like the beliefs that you have are the foundation that create the fuel, that create the energy, that create the momentum, that create the patterns, which then go out and create your life. So having that awareness of yourself and how you're feeling, and then the ability to control that. Control might be the the wrong word to use, but be able to navigate through that to find a more productive response, right? The ability to have you choose your response to things, right? That shows up in stoicism, that shows up in Christian theology, that shows up in Buddhism as you brought up, that shows up in Victor Victor Frankel's work, right? It's a thing that rhymes across so many great thinking and great teachings is this ability that you are responsible. You have the ability to control how you respond to any situation, any emotion, any belief, any thought that that arises, right? You have the ability to so building that muscle to be able to choose maybe a more productive response is one of the most important muscles that you can build. Right. I think we all talk about spending time in the gym. I spend time in the gym, but you know, you got to work on the muscle of the ability to One, have the awareness and then two, choose the response that you want to have. So right, becoming aware of your beliefs. We talked about having a strong, like skilled mentor, some skilled person that you can talk to about it, that can recognize it, see it in you, and help you to bring it to your awareness, right? 'Cause it's a hard thing to do on your own because again, you're in there, living it, experiencing it, and that belief is kind of clouding your ability to maybe see it at times. And then the practice of changing that belief. or changing that emotion. You know, it's a very ethereal thing, right? Like it's a whole lot different than, you know, changing your pricing model or, you know, changing your marketing on your on your landing page, right? Changing the belief that you have or changing the emotion that you're feeling. What have you learned about how to how to effectively do that? speaker-0: Well, once again, the we we need the four or five days seminar to answer your question. But look, I'll tell you a different John Denver story from those late night conversations. what's not known about him is that when he was struggling, he had dropped out of Texas Tech and gone to Los Angeles and then he had to make some money. I mean he was playing little gigs and usually in coffee shops and places like that. But he wasn't making enough money to live. So he took a job as a logger. And one of the things that he in that that conversation, I mean he tells jokes about it about he was playing in a bar while he was a logger. He was playing in a bar and and his song, This Old Guitar, he talks about how it has a crack across the face of it. The guitar his grandmother gave him that he learned how to play a guitar on that he that followed him to Los Angeles and to the logging camp and it had a crack because one of the one of the audience members really didn't like Hank Williams and broke his guitar over his head. You know, but the story that stays with me is this one, which is a talk about transformation. One of the things that that happens today still is that the least damaging and most and cheapest way to transport those huge logs is by river. Float them down the river. And then sometimes there's a turn in the river or something happens and one log gets crossways and then they all bang into each other and you have a log jam. A term that's used not just in logging today, but in business and in relationships and lots of ways. Well, I don't know if you've ever thought about it. Well certainly had not. How do you clear a log gen? speaker-1: No. speaker-0: Yeah, I didn't either. Well, there's two main ways. The first one is dynamite. You find out a place to you know those guys walk out onto those log jams and find a place, the right place to blow up whatever is blocking it. So good news is it works. The bad news is first of all the risk to the logger is awesome. But secondly, you're creating a lot of toothpicks. you are splintering a huge amount of the product that you want to sell. The second way you do it is an expert logger goes out into the walks out into the log jam and identifies the key log and then uses leverage and skill and experience to clear the key log that's stopping the whole thing. speaker-1: Mm. speaker-0: No damage, no risk. So if we apply that to any kind of transformation, and by that I mean a s a shift in your perspective, not just a new habit or a new attitude, but a shift in how you see yourself and see the world. That's my definition of a transformational moment. That's what happened for Phil Burgess and a lot of many, many thousands, millions of people in our doing our work. And so what we want to set up is the kind of game, the stimulation, the conversation that leads to a new point of view, a new way to look at yourself, your team, get your team to look at each other and you in a new way, to realize that there is meaning in our work. And our job is to increasingly discover it and add to it and implement it and bring it to people. That's how change takes place. You know, I I worked for someone else for four years and learned the training business. The original training, personal growth training that I went through, it's called Mind Dynamics. And you know, I look back on it with such gratitude. Not the day after the training, but in the years after it, my life changed for the better. And they never talked about business success, they never talked about money. They just talked about me. And One of the things that happened out of that is I started recommending that training to people when I was running sales organizations. So I enrolled over four hundred people into Mindynamics. Not for money, no commission, no nothing. I did not understand the training. I just knew it was good for me and for the family members that I enrolled and my friends. So I got a phone call one day from the founder and chairman of that company. Alexander Everett. I didn't even know his name. I knew nothing about the company. He called me to say thank you. Somebody had told him that I had enrolled a lot of people. So he called to say thank you. And he invited me to California. It was my first first class ticket that he paid for. You always remember that. ten days later I was president of Mindademics for four years. And One of the things I learned from Ale I learned so much from Alexander, he was not a good businessman, but he was a brilliant thought leader. And he selected trainers, he trained trainers, he wrote the material word for word, he practiced it. I mean, incredible example. But I had pretty much free range. But I learned so much from him, particularly about trusting myself and realizing that I had something to contribute there, even and I was a lot younger then. And what I realized years the the ownership of the company changed. It didn't work for me anymore. I ended up working for a probate judge, which was, by the way, not something I recommend to anybody. So I quit and started this company, Lifespring, that went on to be quite successful without me, because I sold it later. But What I remembered from Alexander was a level of trust that I didn't have up until that time. It still wasn't as great as it needed to be, but it was better. And the way that we operated as a team is I'd come up with some idea, particularly around marketing or expansion, and particularly foreign expansion. I would go to him, I'd say, This is what I want to do. It's going to cost us this much. I think it's going to bring us this much. He always answered the same way. Would it be good for our graduates? He didn't ask about the geographic expansion. He didn't ask about our profit. He didn't ask about anything except would it be a contribution? He didn't use that word. He just said, Would it be good for our graduates? speaker-1: Mm. speaker-0: You know, that's a product of transformation. That had never occurred to me. You know, I was self focused around I'll never be poor again, around hard work, around You know, some things that were driving me successfully. I mean, we had huge success with my dynamics. A business I had never been in. And I learned a lot about the trainers and the training business. I also went through the trainer training finally in the third year there. And I actually led two different trainings, one because I fired the trainer in mid training. And I had no one else. So I did it. That was in London. And the other one was in Hong Kong, where we just couldn't justify bringing a trainer and an interpreter and you know and the hotel and the air flight and all that stuff. So I did it and it was actually successful and it led to a lot of success in Asia eventually. But the learning there was trust yourself. But that came because I had a training where somebody noticed the key log that they needed to move in me. He led by example around trust. Yeah. And that building trust first in myself and then in the people around me. And then also I learned a lot about culture without even I don't know if I'd ever use the word at that time in my life. And that that's the heart of what we do with teams today is Build a more effective high performance culture. speaker-1: Yeah. So that key log and it's a beautiful metaphor for kind of how do you effectively change your beliefs or change the emotions that you're feeling is you identify that one key log that's creating the log jam in your progress, right? In your energy, right, in your whatever that is, right? The thing that moves you forward is identifying that one key log that's creating the log jam within you and then working to unlock it or unblock it, right? It's a beautiful example. So it sounds like for you, that key log was centered around trust, both trust in yourself and then also trust in others, right? And you can empathize with where that distrust came from in your story, right? When you look at your story and what how you grew up and the life that you had lived, it's you it would be very natural, right, to just kind of subconsciously pick up this distrust both in yourself based on what the things that you were hearing about yourself from the people around you, and then also Distrust in other people by the way that you were treated by many other people. But then, you know, it's there are, you know, whatever you whatever you're looking for, you can find evidence for anything that you want to tell yourself. Because on the flip side of that, you could have found a lot of trust both in yourself and trust in other peoples around you in the story, right? Both, I survived this, right? I if I'm capable of surviving that, I'm capable of surviving and pursuing and and thriving in any kind of environment. Or if you were looking for examples of how you could trust other people, look at how the family who kind of took you in, you know, treated you like you can find evidence for whatever it is that you believe, whatever yeah, whatever it is that you believe, you can find evidence for it. both about the things that you believe about yourself or the things that you believe about other people, you can find evidence for that. So I think that's a really beautiful story. And then I think the other thing of what you just shared, I think connects back to the levels of purpose again, right? And I think something that we didn't articulate earlier on, but I think it's Incredible. It almost seems like levels one and level two are, you know, passing the game that s society constructs for us of like surviving. Like, okay, you need to survive in this system and this game that we play. And that's levels one and level two. And then once you get to levels three and level four, you're kind of returning back to what it means to really be a human, which is finding play in everything that you do and then contributing to the other people in your life. Right. Contribute like making it less about you, right? Your purpose isn't about you at level four, right? It's about contribution. It's about what can you do to help other people. And it sounds like that's a another beautiful thing that you learned from Alexander when you were at that organization where he was never worried about the decisions that he made. The decision filter that he used for what should we do is how does this impact, how is this going to positively affect the the graduates, right? Our customers, our clients, right? That is the the filter that you picked up from him, which is amazing. But Robert Thank you so much for the time. This was a wonderful conversation. I have one final question for you. It's a recurring question that I ask every guest. But before we get to that, how can people find you? speaker-0: My website's the best way, extraordinarypeople dot com. And if you go to extraordinarypeople dot com, you'll see a little sign up box for my weekly easy. I've been doing it for seventeen years. several thousand people read it every week. And it's an idea that I'm I'm learning, something I read, something I've seen, something I I've experienced, and then my comments on it all designed to be read in one minute or less. So it's called an extraordinary minute. And if you enroll for that, and it's easy to unenroll if it becomes cluttered to your inbox, but if you enroll, you also receive a twenty eight page PDF that is shareable. It's basically what I've learned about success. stor a bit of a story about how I got there. but it a lot of people have told me they use it for brown bagged lunches, they share it with family, they use it as a discussion point with a teenager in a lot of in a lot of ways. And it also includes a little simple quiz around your attitudes, habits, and behaviors that will give you a snapshot of what you're already doing well, but also where perhaps a little improvement would materially change your experience of life. So anyway, that's my free offering. If you want a signed copy of my book, Living an Extraordinary Life, you can get it there. Or you can go on Amazon and get a you know, regular copy. speaker-1: Amazing. So extraordinary people. speaker-0: Yeah. Extraordinarypeople dot com and and Robert at extraordinarypeople dot com I answer my emails, so I'm easy to read. speaker-1: Amazing. Yeah, we'll have the the links to extraordinarypeople dot com or the link to it in the description. So go check that out. if anything that we talked about today resonated with you and I know, you know, we just got into the surface, right? If you go to your website, you'll see a tremendous amount of extraordinary content or you listen to other podcast episodes that you've been on. Yeah, we just kind of hit the surface on a lot of things and your work goes a lot deeper than just what we discussed today. You know, what an hour of time will allow for. So go check out all of Robert's work and The incredible stuff that you and your team are doing over there. But Robert, my final question for you is a recurring question that I ask every guest, and it's if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for ten seconds with one message to the world, what would it say and why? speaker-0: It would say wake up. we get into attitudes, habits and behaviors that we're unconscious about. So wake up to that hint that you're receiving from your significant other. Wake up to what you're noticing with your team in terms of repetitive patterns that they're in. Wake up to the value of some kind of a daily discipline that causes you to be quiet. You know, I mentioned my friend Michael. He swims every day. A lot. And like a lot of lapsed. Mine is to walk in the woods. With other people it's meditation, it's prayer. It's the opportunity or music sometimes for some people, particularly classical music. So find a way to be quiet. So wake up. speaker-1: Wake up. Yeah. And I can experience my own life and throughout our conversation we've talked about the idea that, you know, staying asleep to continue the the metaphor is very seductive in the short term, right? Because waking up requires, you know, looking at what's going on for the truth of what's happening. And that can be difficult and it's easy to avoid or it's very seductive to just kind of stay asleep and just kind of stay and not change. But wake up. Robert, thank you so much for the time. speaker-0: My great pleasure. speaker-1: Thank you for listening. My main takeaway from my conversation with Robert is the idea that a strong drive and an urgency can take you a long way without leading you to a place of happiness or fulfillment. Robert talked from his own experience about how his idea that he had picked up from a young age, about the idea of I'll never be poor again, where gave him a lot of fuel early in life, and it clearly helped him to build and achieve a lot of amazing things. But eventually that drive had done its job. And he realized that that idea, that fuel source, was leaving a lot of gaps in his life. and what stuck with me is the thing that pushed you forward early on in the journey and kind of what got you started and you know, created that hunger can still lead you to a place of want, right? Where where a lot of things, like the important things in life, are missing. And at some point, You'll need to find a different reason to keep going if you want to change it. If you want to get connected with Robert White, you can find his links in the description of this episode. You can also check out his work at extraordinarypeople.com, including his book, Living an Extraordinary Life, and his weekly Extraordinary Minute. If you run a coaching program, course, or mastermind and you want more of your clients to follow through and engage with the ideas that you teach, I put a free resource in the description that will help you build more execution support into your program and get more of your clients better results. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you all in the next one.