The Communication Mistake Almost Everyone Makes (And How to Fix It) | Greg McKeown - EP 778

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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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For ten years, I have been asking the question, what
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is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless
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ideas in practice in the world of relationships, teams, organizations,
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what's the primary bottleneck? And the answer, to my surprise,
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it isn't talent, it's not strategy, it's not execution. The
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primary bottleneck is like confident misunderstanding. We are wrong, we
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think we're right, and we act upon that, and that's it.
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That's it.
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Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This
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is the show where we explore the art of human
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flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
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Each week I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists,
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and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover
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the tools that help us lead with meaning. He'll win,
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it hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're
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capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as
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a leader, we're seeking deeper alignment in your life. This
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show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act
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with intention, Because the secret to a life of deep purpose,
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connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hello, friends,
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and welcome back to Passion Struck Episode seven hundred and
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seventy eight. Lately, we've been exploring the profound sense of
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isolation that creeps in when the spaces we live in
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and the institutions we trust slowly lose their humanity. Today,
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we're taking a massive step forward in our ongoing series
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looking at the connection crisis, shifting our focus to why
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your personal sense of mattering and belonging is the absolute
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foundation for your ability to thrive. Today, we're looking at
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something that affects every relationship we have, the gap between
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what we think and communicated and what another person actually heard.
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Have you ever been absolutely certain someone understood what you meant,
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only to discover later that they heard something completely different.
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It happens in marriages, It happens between parents and children.
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It happens constantly in friendships, workplaces, and leadership teams. Most
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of us assume communication breaks down because people simply aren't listening,
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or because we didn't speak clearly enough.
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We live in a.
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World where everyone is talking, hosting, commenting, and reacting, Yet
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somehow understanding feels harder than ever. We leave conversations convinced
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we were clear.
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We assume we know what.
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Someone meant, and often we're wrong. There is a term
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for this called confident misunderstanding, the belief that we understand
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one another when we actually don't. It may be one
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of the biggest hidden obstacles in our relationships. When we
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feel the exhaustion of this gap settle in, our natural
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instinct is usually to retreat into our own heads, overanalyze
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our lives, or try to endlessly hack our daily habits.
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But the data shows that heavy overthinking only fuels our anxiety.
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Some of the most important breakthroughs in our lives don't
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happen in isolation. They happen through honest conversation. And that's
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exactly why I wanted to bring our guest Greg McEwan
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onto the show today. Greg is the host of the
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acclaimed podcast What's Essential and the globally renowned author of
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the blockbuster bestsellers Essentialism and Effortless. He is currently conducting
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groundbreaking doctoral research at the University of Cambridge studying the
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deep impact of this understanding gap on human behavior. In
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this conversation, we explore a surprisingly simple idea. Clarity isn't
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just about what we say, it's about how much noise
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we bring into the conversation. You'll hear why even a
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small reduction and emotional noise can completely change the quality
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of understanding between people. We'll also dive into incredible stories
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from the corporate cultural turnaround at Microsoft to the intense
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interrogation breakthroughs that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein,
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to show you exactly how erasing the noise in your
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mind allows you to truly see another person's world. Before
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we dive in, If this show helps you feel a
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little less alone, please share it with one person who's
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navigating their own messy transition. You can find us on
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YouTube and taking just a minute to leave a rating
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a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts makes a massive difference.
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If you want the accompanying workbook to help map these
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insights directly into your life, you can grab it at
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the ignitedlife dot net. Now let's dive in with Greg McEwan.
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Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to
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be your host and guide on your journey to creating
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an intentional life that matters. Now let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely honored and thrilled today to welcome Greg
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McEwan to Passion Struck.
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Greg spent a long time coming. Welcome to the show.
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John, It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
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You are a very well known author. But I'm actually
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going to start with your podcast today because I'm a
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huge fan of it and I wanted to give it
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some airplay. You've recently had on one guest who I've
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always wanted to have on, Matthew McConaughey, who I know personally,
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and I know him personally from Church of all places,
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and then you recently interviewed a friend of mine, jim Ill's.
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Zaki, about kindness. What was that episode like?
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Because I know jim Ill and I talk a lot
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about what he studies, which is a little bit different
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than the Kindness Gap.
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I'll tell you the thing that stands out to me
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about my conversation with Jimil was a conversation that I
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don't remember if it was on or off AB but
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I am in the middle of new research at the
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University of Cambridge, a mid career doctorate, which is just
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a terrible idea and writing a book on the same ideas,
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and he shared something that I thought was just such
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a brilliant insight and gave me a lot of permission
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and direction of what I was doing. And it was
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this that for about one hundred years, psychology departments and
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then practitioners, so psychotherapists parted ways and psychology departments moved
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into the quantitative realm, and as a stereotype of the point,
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you can imagine doing endless surveys. Individuals fill out surveys
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about their experiences on any number of phenomena. Of course
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that's not the only kind of research that's been done
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in psychology departments, but overstating the point in order to
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make it. Whereas on the other side, you've got these
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practitioners who are at least in conversation with one of
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the person in therapy sessions, so it's an ongoing conversation,
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and so they're developing expertise in that area. But the
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overlap has been minor. And one of the reasons it's
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minor is one of my advisors has pointed out to me,
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doing the complex into play between people is so challenging
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to study it in is so immense, So much is happening.
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You can see why people have moved to the other
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side of the Aisle. But recently he made the point
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that perhaps no more than ten years ago that a
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few researchers have emerged who have been using the new
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technologies that we have the deep data, and very much
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more recently ai to be able to bridge the gap.
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It's called naturalistic methodologies, and that's what I've been doing
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in my research. It was such a valuable, useful way
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of naming and framing the problem, and it's affected directly
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the way that I tried to approach what it is
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I've been study. So that's just one insight that I
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had from speaking with Jamil.
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I always find he gives me the best tidbits offscreen
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as well. When I was starting to try to frame
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my book that's coming out in October, it's called the
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Mattering Effect, and I went to two people to help
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me think about it. One was Dan Heath and the
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other was and they both provided really good context in
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different ways on how to approach it.
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So I agree with you that he's.
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Really brilliant and what is the mattering effect?
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There have been a lot of books, starting with Robert
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Putnam's Bowling Alone, that have really explored how our life
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has shifted, and for me, that shift is really personal.
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I reached a point where I just felt numb and exhausted.
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And when I reached that point, I started to really
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search for answers for why did that happen to me?
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And I started to see the loneliness and people disengaged,
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burned out, all these different things. And what struck me
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was they all can't be separate things. They have to
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be symptomatic of something larger. And I think that something
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larger is a feeling of insignificance or invisibility. And so
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there have been some recent books that have explored what
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mattering is. This book builds on that foundation of what
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Jenny Wallace and Rebecca Goldstein and others have done, but
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it gives a systematic framework of if we're losing that
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sense of significance, how do you build it back, first
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within kind of our own human operating system, and then
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once you do that, then how do you scale it
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beyond yourself into work, your families, your relationships, society at large.
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So that's what the book does.
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It's abuseful wood mattering, isn't it. It is easy for
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me to relate to. So there's a kind of a
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meeting of the mind's moment, because the first lesson every
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human learns is that if they're not heard, they will die.
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And that's physiologically true, because of course, if your crier
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is not heard and you're not fed, you will die,
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but it also turns out to be psychologically true where
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we have these case studies in Romania, for example, and
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also in England when children were first I can't remember
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the name that I'm looking for, but when they're put
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into these hospitals, but that's what's the word I'm looking for,
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orphanages they go, Yes, these cases of perfectly physiologically healthy children.
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In both cases we have these well documented rolling over
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and dying, so their physiological needs are being met, but
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not their psychological needs, and that still has a physiological impact.
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One of the things that I've been studying through these
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last sort of four or five years is the depth
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of that need. And you're calling it mattering that we
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could say in other words, too, we could say to
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be seen, heard, known, understood, And that isn't a nice
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to have. It's a need as deep as but I
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think it's as deep as anything minus physical survival. And
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it's the latest that we understand on this. It is
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a cradle to grave need. And so it's not just
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as attachment theory once suggested, you're just these these key
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years of one to three, although clearly that really does
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matter and is disproportionately important. It stays with us, and
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I may have interesting thoughts as to how to develop
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that within ourselves, counterintuitive insights into how to do that.
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But anyway, this is a meeting of the mind's moment.
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I think it's a fair in conversation.
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And what you were describing very well is actually what's
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termed the mattering instinct. That instinct right when we come
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out of the womb is to do just that. We
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are looking to be felt, to be seen by another,
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and we carry that instinct throughout our lives, and you
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are also correct psychologically, it's as important to us as
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safety or love. And what I think people don't understand
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is when we think of top x like meaning, and
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there have been some great books on that recently, with
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A Berks's book and Bill Burnette and Dave Evans. Meaning
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is built on top of connection, which is built on
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top of the foundation that we stand upon, which to
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me is mattering.
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And I put out a book about.
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Six weeks ago aimed at this for children called You
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Matter Luma, which is really focused on how do you
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restore mattering in what I call the wet cement years
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of childhood when they're four to eight years old. I
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think they're two intervention points. You have that age, and
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then you have another age at from ten to thirteen,
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where that cement is starting to take hold and kids
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are starting to now be of the age that they
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can ask the questions and understand what this really means.
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And if those two reinforcement points four to eight, ten
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to thirteen aren't met, that's where you now go from
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being able to instill it to now having to self
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correct it, which is exactly what happened to me in
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my life. So I have now spent probably close to
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eighteen nineteen years now studying it. This book is really
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a compilation of over two hundred interviews that I've done
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on this topic.
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Well, and beyond the two hundred interviews, what you describe
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being I think is in that self correction process is
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the deep wook of life. To be able to it's
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almost like a the sci Fi idea of going where
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nobody's gone before, and to do that a deep work
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is I think what it takes is courage, and courage
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feels terrible. We want as little of it as possible
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as the general practical rule, right, We don't want to
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It sounds good in books, but in practice it's a
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terrible feeling to feel courage and the need for courage.
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But that sounds like what you've done is to go?
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Is that twenty year journey almost twenty years is really
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about that, the unraveling of how you got here in
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service of rebuilding something different, something better. What did I
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get wrong? No?
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I mean it's absolutely the case. I think we're best
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position to serve the person we once were. And when
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I saw the impact that this had our men, how
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it impact impacted all el of my life, I started
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to see it everywhere I looked. And so that's why
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this book became so important to me, because it's not
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just about fixing myself. So many people out there are
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completely lost, and this is going to be one of
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the first questions I was going to ask you. One
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of the reasons they're lost is I heard you say
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this is because they've lost the narrative of their lives.
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And that's what's plaguing I think so much to society today,
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and when you lose that narrative of your life, it's
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a very uncomfortable position to be in, because it's like
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being lost at sea and you're in the middle of
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the ocean and you don't know how to get yourself
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to safety. That's kind of how I felt when this
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was happening to me.
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You said a couple of different things that let's just
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building this idea of people having lost the narrative of
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their lives. So when I wrote Essentialism I tenish years ago,
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we were firmly in the middle of the information age,
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whose primary characteristic or challenge was distraction. And it's not
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like that has gone away. But as we've moved into
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the AI age, I don't think it's distraction only it's disorientation.
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And that's not a trivial shift as far as I'm concerned,
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because information overload is one thing, but emotion overload is
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a different thing, and it's this emotional noise that leaves
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us feeling well, the word noise fittingly comes from the
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Latin nausea, and so that this state we're in is
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a state of nausea, and it leaves us feeling very reactive.
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Of course, disconnected, and I suppose to question that. One
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of the questions that I've been wrestling with is, well,
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what do you do about it? And one of the
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answers that's been most counterintuitive to me is that you
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don't primarily figure it out. I'm not now saying there
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isn't a role for self reflection, of course there is.
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But what I think is that the deepest insights we
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get into ourselves happen in interpersonal dialogue of a certain kind,
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and it's so rare. It was rare even before the
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information Age, it's rareer even now in the AI age,
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and without it, we really are adrift. Back to the
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point that we started on today, this one hundred year
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separation between psychology and psychologists, let's say, is that when
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you're studying meaning in psychology and connection and understanding from
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the point of view of the individual mind, yes you're
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going to learn things. But the problem is that mind
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was not formulated in separation from others. We've already identified
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if there's no connection between you and others, you can physiologically,
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you can physically die from that lack of connection. So
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the mind that's been studied for one hundred years is
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an incomplete model, very incomplete to think of it this way.
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And this is Italia. Wheatley is one of the leading
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researchers in the world on this, and it's called naturalistic methodologies.
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And it's like, this is a paradigm shift. It's so
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intuitive when you hear it, you think, well, how can
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it be a paradigm shift? But I've tried to already
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put that into context. It's as we learn to understand
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others and be understood by others, that is the most
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important metabolism of our lives. I write a journal every day.
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I believe in this. I'm not arguing that self reflection
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has no place. Nevertheless, I think that what must happen
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in order to address the loneliness, what I would call
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the understanding gap, to give a different name to it,
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is must happen between people. And it's in that process
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that we will learn who we are. And in some
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ways there is not any reasonable alternative to that because
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everywhere we go, there we are. Everywhere we go, our
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thoughts are with us, we are observing us. This is
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not a great feedback loop. In fact, we know that's
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true because rumination and thinking of self literally loads on
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the same axis as misery. So we know that just
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thinking obsessively more and more, why do I think that?
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How am I built? What's going on? In an attempt to
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understand ourselves? An attempt to hack ourselves is actually not
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hacking but attacking ourselves, and it's really not at all optimal.
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So learning how to understand and be understood this is
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where I believe the big breakthroughs in healing the mattering crisis,
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or the understanding gat lies.
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Before we continue.
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Thank you for supporting Passion Struck and for sharing these
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00:20:27.119 --> 00:20:30.359
conversations with others. One of the biggest themes you're hearing
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00:20:30.400 --> 00:20:33.640
in today's conversation with Greg McEwan is that your mind
319
00:20:33.720 --> 00:20:37.559
cannot be fully understood in isolation. We simply cannot live
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00:20:37.759 --> 00:20:42.759
a truly essential life without upgrading our ability to communicate
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00:20:42.799 --> 00:20:45.720
about the things that matter most, the people who matter most.
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00:20:46.279 --> 00:20:49.640
If you've ever felt invisible despite working hard, contributing, and
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00:20:49.680 --> 00:20:52.839
doing everything you thought you were supposed to do, that's
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00:20:52.960 --> 00:20:56.039
exactly the question I'm exploring in my upcoming book, The
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Mattering Effect.
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The book examines.
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Why so many people feel un scene despite doing everything
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00:21:02.319 --> 00:21:05.960
they were taught should make them feel successful and what
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00:21:06.119 --> 00:21:10.000
changes when we rebuild a genuine sense of significance. We
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create companion workbooks and weekly reflections for every single episode
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00:21:13.960 --> 00:21:16.519
to help you apply these conversations more intentionally. You can
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00:21:16.599 --> 00:21:20.000
explore all of it completely free at the Ignited life
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00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:22.599
dot Net. Now quick break for our sponsors. Thank you
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00:21:22.640 --> 00:21:32.720
for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to
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00:21:32.720 --> 00:21:35.440
Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now
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00:21:35.519 --> 00:21:40.839
let's get back to the conversation with Greg McEwan. You're
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absolutely correct, and that's exactly what the book tries to
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tackle and why it took me so long to try
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to come up with a framework on how to go
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after it, which is why I sought out Dan Heath
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because when I think of frameworks, he and his brother
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are some of the best at it. Because I was
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just knocking my head against a wall for about eighteen
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months trying to think of, like, how do you even
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approach this? But something you said I want to highlight.
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I put out a substack post about two months ago.
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My sister passed away from pancreatic cancer about eighteen months ago,
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and so sorry, it's just one of those diseases that
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is one of the worst that's out there, and I
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happened to be fortunate enough to take one of the
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last walks with her, And as we were doing that walk,
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we were talking about Henry David Thurrow and talking about
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quiet desperation. And when I think about his concept of
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quiet desperation, he was thinking about a world that had
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walls because we didn't have the digital world. And so
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in this article that I wrote, I adopted it and
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I said that we have gone from this quietness that
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he talked about is quiet desperation, to now quiet disorientation.
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So when you said the word disorientation, I couldn't agree
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with you more because we've taken that whole quiet desperation
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and now we've moved it to a world with no walls.
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And I think that is what's happening to so many
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of us, is we've gone to this paradigm shift, as
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you described it, where now we are expected to feel
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all the issues that are going on. It goes back
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to Dunbar's number, like we've gone from a tribe of
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one hundred and fifty to now we're expected to be
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a tribe of seven billion. And your body was just
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never meant to have that type of association.
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Yet that's what we.
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Force on ourselves. So no wonder we're disoriented. So I
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love that you're thinking about the same thing because it's
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a profound shift.
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I mean, just wrote down quiet desperation versus possibly noisy disorientation,
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depending how you think about it. But I like both
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ways that we're thinking about that. Yeah. I was thinking,
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as we've been discussing this, about a story that I
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haven't published anywhere to my recollection. But it happened when
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I was a young man. I was on a church
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mission and I was paired up with someone who was,
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as you would expect, really different to me, and that's
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totally fine. We were getting on to just fine, and
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then somebody had this idea. They said, so we were
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in like a zone of let's say, fifteen twenty of us,
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and someone said, oh, we should go in early in
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the morning go on a creation. And we were in
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Toronto at the time, and so let's go to Lake
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Ontario on a creation. And it wasn't my design, and
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I don't know, for whatever reason, I wasn't like, super, yeah,
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this is what we should do, but I wanted to
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support the efforts. So we went and so really it's
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very beautiful and peaceful. You can see Toronto in the
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gray morning light. Behind us, you could see Lake Ontarios.
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And then right in the midst of this, while someone
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is just barely finished reading literally the creation story, the
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person I was paired with my companion, he starts throwing
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not pebbles, but like big rocks at the seagulls, and
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then he hits one of them, and so this seagull
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is just it's not like just hitting flew off, like
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he has damaged to this seagull and must be too graphic,
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but he has just paralyzed this seagull and it's absolutely
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horrific as far as I was concerned. And the scene
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of it too, like it's a peaceful scene and the
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whole point was creation and honoring that. And I just
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couldn't even speak to him. I couldn't even look at him.
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I just was like, what were you thinking? And so
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we were on public transport all the way home and
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the same I couldn't look at him, couldn't speak to him.
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I was just in shock. And I suppose that I
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was moving into that mode. So this was not long
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after I had been introduced to the power of Rigerian
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type listening and understanding, and so I had already seen
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firsthand within months of this experience. So this was very
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close to having just discovered it in a formal sense,
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that there was structure to this and that it was repeatable,
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and that you could connect with people in minutes not months,
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and to have them say things like I've never told
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anyone this, but suddenly they would be doing it, and
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it was so amazing to me, almost almost magic. And
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so I'm wrestling with this, and then this experience happens,
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and in a way I think, I thought, well, what's
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it all for if I can't apply it here? Certainly
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this is a testing moment, right can it apply into
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a thing that I think is so unthinkable or wrong
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or foolish or whatever the words would be. So, after
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it was a bit more regulated, I asked him, Okay,
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so what were you thinking? Right? But from a genuine okay,
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I want to see where you're coming from. I've still
429
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got my own strangeness about it, but I can put
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that aside from a moment Where's it coming from? And
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he just explained, Look, I grew up on a farm
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where it would rural seagulls. We had huge seagull problems.
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We killed thousands of segels all the time, that they're
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just pests the rodents to us, and we're a threat
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to us too. So he didn't say these words, but
436
00:27:11.880 --> 00:27:13.799
the spirit of it was, this is as much of
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a moral moment as killing a fly, maybe stepping on
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a watch. That isn't what it means to him. And
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it's in that observation that I suddenly discovered something about myself.
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And that's this point, this broader point I'm trying to
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make that we can only understand ourselves as we're talking
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and listening and understanding to other people. And it was
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in that moment I realized, well, I grew up having
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Jonathan living to the seagull. The book read to me,
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I read it myself. This was multiple times. This was
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meaningful to me personally, it was meaningful in our family.
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And I realized, oh, what he did. In my mind,
448
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he killed Jonathan, And I thought, right, okay, so I
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can still hold onto the idea this is not a wise,
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kind thing to have done. That wasn't the thing. Even
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now I think, yeah, that's not the thing to have done.
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But nor did I have to be imprisoned on a
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moral continuum that was so different in kind to where
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he was coming from and his own experience with it,
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and so from that we were able to work through
456
00:28:24.400 --> 00:28:27.559
it and came I would say, better friends. Afterwards. I
457
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remember buying him a poster of Michael Jordany was a
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big basketball player, and it was the wings one way
459
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You've got where you've got Jordan with wings spread out.
460
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It's cold wings and it's quite impressive looking picture. And
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just wrote to him, to the seagull Killer, and that
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was just the moment of laughter between us because we
463
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had found shared meaning and understanding. And Yeah, I think
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in that simple, in some ways trivial story of my
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just barely out of youth that I think a lot
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can be made of how much we start to understand
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ourselves and only can understand ourselves through understanding other people
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and being understood by them.
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00:29:14.119 --> 00:29:18.640
It's a very troubling story. And unfortunately I've seen this
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under extreme situations where I was in combat earlier in
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my career, and part of the trauma recovery process for
472
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me was observing what you saw with the seagull with people,
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and that is one of the hardest things for me
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to understand is how in extreme situations we stop seeing
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the value of another human being and its most extreme
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form when we're pushed into those situations like that. But
477
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the scary thing is for me is that in much
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of society that viewpoint of the other is becoming more
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extreme and just ordinary situations, which is where this gets
480
00:30:06.920 --> 00:30:11.279
really scary. And this interview is going in many different
481
00:30:11.279 --> 00:30:14.119
directions than I thought it would, but they are important topics.
482
00:30:14.839 --> 00:30:16.960
Well, I think there is a golden thread running through
483
00:30:16.960 --> 00:30:18.680
it as it is, even if it's different to the
484
00:30:18.680 --> 00:30:21.599
one it's imagined. And I think you're right in a sense,
485
00:30:22.640 --> 00:30:26.920
however awful. What I'm about to say is it's not
486
00:30:27.119 --> 00:30:35.359
hard to understand how humans in a military setting come
487
00:30:35.440 --> 00:30:40.359
to think of the of the enemy as less than human.
488
00:30:41.480 --> 00:30:44.799
First of all, you're being told that. Secondly, it helps
489
00:30:44.839 --> 00:30:48.400
to to it helps to resolve the cognitive dissonance that
490
00:30:48.519 --> 00:30:53.279
fighting and killing each other inherently produces, has to produce.
491
00:30:54.000 --> 00:30:57.240
This is a way to resolve it. But even simpler
492
00:30:57.240 --> 00:30:59.160
way of saying it is as soon as you see
493
00:30:59.200 --> 00:31:04.960
somebody else as threat, then your own psychology reduces into
494
00:31:04.960 --> 00:31:08.440
that lizard brain, into the term I like the most
495
00:31:08.599 --> 00:31:12.799
is primal panic, And that's what happens when people feel
496
00:31:12.799 --> 00:31:17.319
themselves misunderstood. Well, what else can it be? When you
497
00:31:17.359 --> 00:31:21.200
feel someone if they see you, will kill you. Then
498
00:31:21.240 --> 00:31:27.119
the most extreme form of being misunderstood, the valued, unseen, unimportant,
499
00:31:27.519 --> 00:31:30.920
the humanized. What else could that be? That? Of course
500
00:31:30.960 --> 00:31:34.519
that's what people are experienced. Of course people experience primal panic,
501
00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:38.960
and so in that state, it's very easy to stop
502
00:31:38.960 --> 00:31:42.960
seeing other people. Just biologically, we're gonna we move into
503
00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:49.720
a into that different mode. Now, your broader point is
504
00:31:50.240 --> 00:31:57.480
I think exactly spot on, which is what happens when
505
00:31:56.960 --> 00:32:01.599
it's when what I would describe as an artificial process
506
00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:07.680
generates the sense that we need to see each other
507
00:32:09.480 --> 00:32:14.440
as threat because the same functionality takes place the same
508
00:32:14.440 --> 00:32:20.680
primal panic, the same exaggeration of positions. And we haven't
509
00:32:20.759 --> 00:32:23.200
used the word so far, but I do think that
510
00:32:23.680 --> 00:32:26.400
I think that the polarization, what we would mean, what
511
00:32:27.880 --> 00:32:32.480
could be covered by that word is in its richest sense,
512
00:32:33.160 --> 00:32:36.519
is the is the single It is the primary threat
513
00:32:36.599 --> 00:32:39.799
that we face. I believe that, I believe it's more
514
00:32:39.799 --> 00:32:45.079
important than any other political difference. So, however, disagree, however
515
00:32:45.160 --> 00:32:48.799
much I might disagree with somebody about some policy, some issue,
516
00:32:48.920 --> 00:32:53.960
however important that is, it is not as important as
517
00:32:54.079 --> 00:33:01.160
this as the growing level of distorting content that is
518
00:33:01.319 --> 00:33:08.319
infecting us. And because, in the simplest sense, what happened
519
00:33:08.400 --> 00:33:13.519
is happening is that we're approaching a noise threshold and
520
00:33:14.480 --> 00:33:19.400
the difference between noise being loud and then you pass
521
00:33:19.440 --> 00:33:22.759
a point where the decibel level, a very small incremental
522
00:33:23.160 --> 00:33:30.480
increase of noise makes it impossible to understand the meaning.
523
00:33:30.599 --> 00:33:32.839
Anyone who's experienced that with the radio ever in their
524
00:33:32.839 --> 00:33:36.519
life one degree more on the dial. You can still
525
00:33:36.559 --> 00:33:39.519
hear words, but you don't know what's being said, and
526
00:33:39.599 --> 00:33:42.960
so it's very subtle difference, and I think that we
527
00:33:43.000 --> 00:33:46.519
are approaching that point. The data is alarming. I think
528
00:33:46.599 --> 00:33:50.880
the most alarming statistic for me has been how many
529
00:33:50.960 --> 00:33:53.559
people have stopped speaking to a family member or a
530
00:33:53.559 --> 00:33:58.440
friend because of polarization. When I started my research, it
531
00:33:58.519 --> 00:34:01.200
was one in six. When I was writing it up,
532
00:34:01.240 --> 00:34:04.640
it was one in five when I most recently searched
533
00:34:04.640 --> 00:34:06.440
for it. As I was writing it up, it was
534
00:34:06.480 --> 00:34:10.440
already described as more than one in five. It's not
535
00:34:10.599 --> 00:34:13.159
obvious to me that it is obvious to me that
536
00:34:13.199 --> 00:34:17.039
the forces in play right now will continue and we
537
00:34:17.079 --> 00:34:18.679
can be at one in four and one in three,
538
00:34:18.880 --> 00:34:22.400
and one and two. If you get to one in two, okay,
539
00:34:22.519 --> 00:34:27.480
now you can't do anything. If you can't understand each other,
540
00:34:28.599 --> 00:34:32.760
you can't do anything else. There isn't an anything else.
541
00:34:33.480 --> 00:34:39.239
Everything else that you could possibly want to do grows
542
00:34:39.360 --> 00:34:42.840
out of the foundation of being able to understand each other,
543
00:34:42.960 --> 00:34:45.360
be able to figure out what they mean, figure out
544
00:34:45.400 --> 00:34:47.199
what you mean, and you have to have a certain
545
00:34:47.280 --> 00:34:49.480
level of safety to be able to do that, and
546
00:34:49.639 --> 00:34:53.320
being constantly on this high alert with each other. Primarily,
547
00:34:53.320 --> 00:34:57.559
I would say because of social media, polarization, profiteering. I
548
00:34:57.559 --> 00:35:00.920
would say it is the primary cause, although there's many others. Yeah,
549
00:35:01.039 --> 00:35:03.719
I don't think it can be overstated the level of
550
00:35:03.800 --> 00:35:05.599
risk we're in now.
551
00:35:05.599 --> 00:35:08.880
And one of my favorite researchers who unfortunately passed away
552
00:35:09.159 --> 00:35:13.400
from cancer was Emil Burneu who really studied this at Wharton,
553
00:35:13.679 --> 00:35:16.960
and I loved him for the fact that he would
554
00:35:16.960 --> 00:35:24.159
thrust himself into conflict of the largest size and he
555
00:35:24.199 --> 00:35:26.400
would go and help the other side see each other.
556
00:35:27.039 --> 00:35:31.199
Because I think, especially here in the United States and
557
00:35:31.239 --> 00:35:35.159
in much of the Western world, we're so fixated on
558
00:35:35.360 --> 00:35:39.920
either or thinking that it just drives us to one
559
00:35:39.960 --> 00:35:43.840
extreme or the other. And I wish people would adopt
560
00:35:43.880 --> 00:35:50.000
more both and because it would help us profoundly see
561
00:35:50.199 --> 00:35:54.280
the perspective of others and get us off of these
562
00:35:54.519 --> 00:35:58.679
cliffs that we find ourselves on that have become so divisive.
563
00:35:59.239 --> 00:36:02.760
Here's what I think think can be done about it. Actually,
564
00:36:02.840 --> 00:36:04.719
let me tell you a story that I think is
565
00:36:05.559 --> 00:36:10.320
an important illustration of what I think is the solution.
566
00:36:11.039 --> 00:36:16.960
It's a business example. You go, so about ten years ago,
567
00:36:18.840 --> 00:36:23.559
Microsoft's just had a decade, lost decade, and they bring
568
00:36:23.599 --> 00:36:27.519
in the new CEO, Saturnadella. He comes in. What's he
569
00:36:27.599 --> 00:36:30.039
going to do? He's got no end of things he
570
00:36:30.079 --> 00:36:33.440
could do, because there's all sorts of innovation cycle problems.
571
00:36:33.480 --> 00:36:37.000
They've just canceled Zoom, which itself when it came into
572
00:36:37.079 --> 00:36:40.760
existence was two years behind the equivalent product at Apple,
573
00:36:41.320 --> 00:36:43.599
and eventually they just fail at it. Right, So that's
574
00:36:43.599 --> 00:36:45.880
just one of many illustrations. So what does he do?
575
00:36:46.239 --> 00:36:49.559
Very first meeting, I interviewed the president of Microsoft, as
576
00:36:49.679 --> 00:36:51.920
he told me the story is that he came in
577
00:36:51.960 --> 00:36:56.840
and he gave everyone a copy of nonviolent Communication. And
578
00:36:57.199 --> 00:37:01.760
that's not normal for that culture. That was a hugely
579
00:37:01.840 --> 00:37:06.360
symbolic thing. But also it wasn't just symbolic. It was
580
00:37:06.400 --> 00:37:10.199
symbolic about the very what he believed was either the
581
00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:14.719
central issue or a central issue. And you can map
582
00:37:14.760 --> 00:37:20.480
from there a little like the butterfly effect, that symbolic action,
583
00:37:21.320 --> 00:37:25.239
and how it reverberated outwards. I don't mean that alone,
584
00:37:25.400 --> 00:37:28.760
but how that helped to create a tonal change and
585
00:37:29.000 --> 00:37:32.440
actual skill development. And he was modeling it constantly, so
586
00:37:32.519 --> 00:37:36.119
it wasn't it was genuinely how he was going to lead,
587
00:37:36.159 --> 00:37:38.760
and he considers it the most important thing he did
588
00:37:39.199 --> 00:37:42.800
over the next six months next year was a serious
589
00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:47.280
kind of change of communication with people. And in doing that,
590
00:37:47.280 --> 00:37:49.320
so he would call people up, brand new employees of
591
00:37:49.320 --> 00:37:51.079
the company and just ask them questions and listen to
592
00:37:51.159 --> 00:37:54.119
them and really try and gather insight from them. And
593
00:37:54.159 --> 00:37:57.639
so the logic of this is not the benefits of
594
00:37:58.000 --> 00:38:04.239
being understanding, It is the benefits of actually understanding. That
595
00:38:04.400 --> 00:38:07.639
is not the same thing at all, because what people
596
00:38:07.719 --> 00:38:11.760
say is not of equal value. There's something that people
597
00:38:11.880 --> 00:38:17.320
know that is disproportionately valuable. Anyone he's speaking to is
598
00:38:17.320 --> 00:38:21.159
the CEO. They have something that's really a signal in
599
00:38:21.239 --> 00:38:25.039
the noise. They have insight, but the problem about meaningful
600
00:38:25.480 --> 00:38:29.840
things is that they feel disproportionately vulnerable to share them.
601
00:38:30.119 --> 00:38:33.480
So if you try and scream at people to get
602
00:38:33.519 --> 00:38:39.239
them to say what they really feel, well, yeah, that's
603
00:38:39.280 --> 00:38:42.039
not really likely to happen. You have to create enough
604
00:38:42.480 --> 00:38:46.719
safety and enough genuine curiosity that people go, Okay, well
605
00:38:46.800 --> 00:38:48.760
let me share, I will share. I'll try and make
606
00:38:48.880 --> 00:38:51.920
sense of this myself with you. He said that all
607
00:38:51.960 --> 00:38:54.559
those insights, all those signals, is what helped him to
608
00:38:54.599 --> 00:38:57.920
be able to define the vision and the strategy for
609
00:38:57.960 --> 00:39:00.840
the company. Over the ten year years he's been there,
610
00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:04.320
he's gone from three hundred and fifty billion to three
611
00:39:04.400 --> 00:39:06.920
point five trillion depending on the day, one of the
612
00:39:06.920 --> 00:39:09.000
few companies ever to be a four trillion dollar company.
613
00:39:09.360 --> 00:39:11.400
And this is at the heart of it, because it
614
00:39:11.480 --> 00:39:15.039
affected Those signals are what then help you to make
615
00:39:15.079 --> 00:39:18.360
better decisions or less stupid ones, be less wrong at least,
616
00:39:18.400 --> 00:39:21.280
which let you to be more innovative, which means you
617
00:39:21.280 --> 00:39:24.679
can do things faster than your competitors because they are
618
00:39:24.719 --> 00:39:27.280
still dealing with noise while you're dealing with signal and
619
00:39:27.320 --> 00:39:29.679
so on. And so he's a signalist that would be
620
00:39:29.719 --> 00:39:31.880
my new language for that right, that's what that he
621
00:39:31.960 --> 00:39:37.480
leads as a signalist. I love that story in terms
622
00:39:37.519 --> 00:39:40.079
of what can we do about the polarization. That doesn't
623
00:39:40.079 --> 00:39:43.039
sound like a polarized story in one sense it isn't.
624
00:39:43.719 --> 00:39:46.199
But what I love about it is that if you
625
00:39:46.280 --> 00:39:49.800
can improve through the throop of understanding, if you can
626
00:39:49.880 --> 00:39:54.840
increase the throop of meaning sharing even a tiny amount,
627
00:39:55.239 --> 00:39:58.480
then you disproportionately improve everything because it's the actual bottleneck.
628
00:39:59.039 --> 00:40:01.960
It's what the resistance is made of. If I were
629
00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:03.760
to say it in simpler terms, I would say it
630
00:40:03.800 --> 00:40:06.639
like this. I know that when my wife and I,
631
00:40:06.639 --> 00:40:09.199
if we're in an argument, sometimes we'll laugh, maybe it
632
00:40:09.239 --> 00:40:11.719
will laugh afterwards, occasionally in between it and we're like,
633
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:14.000
we don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. The
634
00:40:14.159 --> 00:40:17.400
meaning has been lost. And it just goes to show
635
00:40:17.440 --> 00:40:19.960
that threshold moment. If you can reduce noise even a
636
00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:25.159
little bit, suddenly everything makes more sense, everything works, and
637
00:40:25.239 --> 00:40:30.079
vice versa is also true. That's really what happened. It
638
00:40:30.199 --> 00:40:33.679
might at Microsoft under sat you in Adela, and I
639
00:40:33.679 --> 00:40:39.480
think it's a good, an optimistic, but a helpful case
640
00:40:39.519 --> 00:40:43.119
study for what we're going through our culture is also sick.
641
00:40:43.199 --> 00:40:47.079
It is sick for exactly the same reasons. The patterns
642
00:40:47.119 --> 00:40:50.920
are the same. The disagreements weren't there over politics, but
643
00:40:51.039 --> 00:40:54.480
they were over directions of products and how to communicate meetings.
644
00:40:54.480 --> 00:40:58.239
But the dynamics are the same because the symptoms, there's
645
00:40:58.239 --> 00:41:01.519
a hundred symptoms, but the cause is still the same
646
00:41:02.239 --> 00:41:03.840
understanding gap between people.
647
00:41:04.719 --> 00:41:05.039
Correct.
648
00:41:05.119 --> 00:41:06.880
I'm going to just share a story with you, and
649
00:41:06.880 --> 00:41:08.599
I'll try to keep it as short as I can.
650
00:41:08.880 --> 00:41:11.760
So I first met Steve Baumber in two thousand and five.
651
00:41:12.039 --> 00:41:14.639
I was a senior.
652
00:41:14.280 --> 00:41:17.960
Executive at Low's, reporting directly to our CIO, and at
653
00:41:17.960 --> 00:41:21.679
that point in time, Low's was one of the only
654
00:41:21.760 --> 00:41:26.039
big box retailers that wasn't running Microsoft operating systems and
655
00:41:26.119 --> 00:41:30.239
our store because it was so costly, and not only that,
656
00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:33.199
it opened you up to security vulnerabilities and all kinds
657
00:41:33.199 --> 00:41:37.800
of patching and overhead. So we ran a very Unix
658
00:41:37.880 --> 00:41:43.280
based ecosystem, and because of that, all our registers were
659
00:41:43.320 --> 00:41:48.239
really dumb terminals and we were just running this simple
660
00:41:48.480 --> 00:41:52.320
os on them. But it was extremely powerful because our
661
00:41:52.400 --> 00:41:57.280
systems rarely went down because each store could function independently
662
00:41:57.639 --> 00:41:59.840
in the way that it had built, and I remember
663
00:42:00.559 --> 00:42:04.599
Bomber coming in and having this meeting. It was myself, Steve,
664
00:42:04.639 --> 00:42:08.119
our cio, and one of my peers, and he was
665
00:42:08.159 --> 00:42:12.159
like just pounding his fist on the table, how dare
666
00:42:12.239 --> 00:42:14.119
you not use Microsoft products?
667
00:42:14.440 --> 00:42:14.599
You know?
668
00:42:14.800 --> 00:42:18.400
And it was just if you knew Steve Bomber, you
669
00:42:18.400 --> 00:42:18.880
know what I'm.
670
00:42:18.800 --> 00:42:23.079
Of course, for those that don't know him, you just
671
00:42:23.119 --> 00:42:25.159
look up is famous. You can do. It's one of
672
00:42:25.199 --> 00:42:28.079
the first viral memes of the Internet. Is him screaming
673
00:42:28.559 --> 00:42:31.199
is the developer's speech And you just can search up
674
00:42:31.239 --> 00:42:35.760
Steve Bombers developers speech and you'll see a certain glimpse
675
00:42:36.440 --> 00:42:39.360
of a way of operating. Carry on with your story, please.
676
00:42:40.360 --> 00:42:45.119
So I fast forward six years from that and now
677
00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:48.800
I'm a CIO at Dell and one of the presidents
678
00:42:48.840 --> 00:42:51.039
I'm working with is this guy Ron Gerritts, who's in
679
00:42:51.159 --> 00:42:55.320
charge of our smartphone strategy. And we had two devices
680
00:42:55.320 --> 00:42:57.599
we were going to launch on the Android, which is
681
00:42:57.639 --> 00:43:00.400
what we wanted to launch the Streak on, and then
682
00:43:00.480 --> 00:43:03.519
this Microsoft platform, and we.
683
00:43:03.440 --> 00:43:05.679
Had made the decision we were going to go to Android.
684
00:43:05.920 --> 00:43:09.639
So Bomber flies out, has this meeting with us, and
685
00:43:09.679 --> 00:43:12.519
it's the exact same meeting he had with me at Low's.
686
00:43:12.639 --> 00:43:20.199
He's vehemently just caustic, screaming at us, etc. And we stood,
687
00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:23.599
like we did at Low's, we're not changing, We're going
688
00:43:23.639 --> 00:43:27.159
with Android. And then he unfortunately met with the CEO
689
00:43:27.239 --> 00:43:31.000
of Dell who came out of that meeting and told us, so,
690
00:43:31.039 --> 00:43:35.039
we're launching the product on the Microsoft OS. And I
691
00:43:35.079 --> 00:43:39.480
remember Eric said he had like a team meeting of
692
00:43:39.519 --> 00:43:42.000
his director reports and he said, we're dead on arrival,
693
00:43:42.280 --> 00:43:45.440
and that's exactly what happened. So then I fast forward
694
00:43:45.480 --> 00:43:48.800
to three years from that point and Bomber asked me
695
00:43:48.920 --> 00:43:52.840
to come and become the CIO at Microsoft. And I'm
696
00:43:52.840 --> 00:43:57.119
on my round of interviews, going around and just meeting
697
00:43:57.800 --> 00:44:01.679
one executive after another who is just miserable. The whole
698
00:44:01.800 --> 00:44:05.679
environment there is just for infighting and more infighting. And
699
00:44:05.719 --> 00:44:09.599
the last interview I have was with Satya, who begged
700
00:44:09.599 --> 00:44:12.559
me to take the job and just give it two
701
00:44:12.679 --> 00:44:15.360
or three years because he thought there would be change
702
00:44:15.880 --> 00:44:17.920
in the works. And he was explaining to me what
703
00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:21.559
his vision was, which is exactly what he implemented. But
704
00:44:21.719 --> 00:44:23.880
I personally didn't think I could last that long in
705
00:44:23.920 --> 00:44:26.000
the environment so that's my Microsoft.
706
00:44:26.360 --> 00:44:30.079
That's fascinating story, right, And it's not really a story
707
00:44:30.079 --> 00:44:33.400
about whether you should have made a different decision or not.
708
00:44:33.480 --> 00:44:36.280
That isn't even the point about the story. In a way,
709
00:44:36.360 --> 00:44:39.199
the story. One way to think about it is how
710
00:44:39.320 --> 00:44:45.400
much all of us are conditioned in certain ways. Your
711
00:44:45.440 --> 00:44:49.000
experiences was Stevebama right, like, not the only conditioning experiences,
712
00:44:49.000 --> 00:44:51.760
but those experiences previously. When you then see it again
713
00:44:51.760 --> 00:44:54.400
at Microsoft, you go, look, I can't sign up for
714
00:44:54.480 --> 00:45:00.280
that kind of feeling all the time. And yes, you're
715
00:45:00.320 --> 00:45:03.559
a different thing, but we don't know will you be successful?
716
00:45:03.679 --> 00:45:06.119
Is one person? Is it going to turn it around?
717
00:45:06.199 --> 00:45:08.159
Is there going to be something different coming from it?
718
00:45:09.400 --> 00:45:11.840
And fortunately, I would say in a lot of ways
719
00:45:11.840 --> 00:45:15.000
he has been successful. But I love the story, I
720
00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:20.079
love the background, I love the support of this observation. Yeah,
721
00:45:20.280 --> 00:45:22.159
they were famous for it, right, that's the dumbest thing
722
00:45:22.159 --> 00:45:24.840
I've ever heard, screaming that in meetings. Then you go
723
00:45:24.920 --> 00:45:28.800
from that to non violent communication is a big culture
724
00:45:29.360 --> 00:45:35.039
shift that's being attempted. But building on it though, it's
725
00:45:35.239 --> 00:45:37.559
the reason I even shared the stature story that we
726
00:45:37.599 --> 00:45:40.960
went down this sort of Microsoft riffing. Here is a
727
00:45:41.000 --> 00:45:46.199
solution that is an antidote, and it was first described
728
00:45:46.519 --> 00:45:50.280
in nineteen fifty two by Carl Rodgers. And I'm not
729
00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:52.360
going to suggest that he's the only person who's ever
730
00:45:52.400 --> 00:45:56.119
written about this, but it was a very important breakthrough.
731
00:45:56.599 --> 00:45:59.760
Certainly he thought that you know, of course, Karl Rodgers,
732
00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:03.480
so many people don't now, but Courages was arguably the
733
00:46:03.480 --> 00:46:08.360
most important influenced psychotherapist of the twentieth century. Certainly within
734
00:46:08.440 --> 00:46:15.960
therapeutic circles, he's considered the most important. He gives a
735
00:46:15.960 --> 00:46:21.599
talk it's called Communication on its blocking and facilitation. It's
736
00:46:21.679 --> 00:46:25.840
one speech. He published it later in books verbatim as
737
00:46:25.880 --> 00:46:29.639
the same speech, but he describes in there what he
738
00:46:29.800 --> 00:46:34.000
felt was a test tube solution, that is a micro
739
00:46:34.119 --> 00:46:37.280
solution to what he thought was the big macro problem
740
00:46:37.280 --> 00:46:40.880
of problems of the time. And he said, if you
741
00:46:41.039 --> 00:46:48.239
follow this simple procedure, then you can take put people
742
00:46:48.239 --> 00:46:52.800
in rooms in totally polarized positions and help them to
743
00:46:53.400 --> 00:46:56.719
make enormous progress in rapid periods of time if they'll
744
00:46:56.760 --> 00:47:00.199
obey a single rule. Are you familiar with the am
745
00:47:00.199 --> 00:47:02.239
I already showing somebody you already know? Or is this
746
00:47:02.440 --> 00:47:04.079
on the edge of that note knowledge.
747
00:47:04.199 --> 00:47:06.239
It's on the edge of that now I'm so very
748
00:47:06.320 --> 00:47:06.800
familiar with.
749
00:47:07.559 --> 00:47:10.320
Of course, so much has been written and validated about
750
00:47:10.360 --> 00:47:14.880
Roger's general views, but this particular article, in this particular finding,
751
00:47:15.159 --> 00:47:18.719
has been much, much less studied, perhaps for some of
752
00:47:18.760 --> 00:47:22.480
the reasons we've already discussing, but that this is the rule.
753
00:47:22.960 --> 00:47:26.280
The rule is you only get to make your point
754
00:47:27.199 --> 00:47:31.840
after you've made the other person's point to that person's satisfaction.
755
00:47:32.719 --> 00:47:36.400
That's it, right, So now that's the change in the
756
00:47:36.440 --> 00:47:42.360
normal communication shape. And he said when that when you
757
00:47:42.440 --> 00:47:44.800
do this, he says, especially if, he says, if you
758
00:47:44.800 --> 00:47:47.599
bring a third person in right, like a neutral he
759
00:47:47.679 --> 00:47:51.360
called them an understanding catalyst. So someone is a neutral
760
00:47:51.360 --> 00:47:55.880
third party who is just there to help people do
761
00:47:56.239 --> 00:48:00.239
that because it sounds so simple, but my goodness, in
762
00:48:00.360 --> 00:48:05.519
practice people can struggle with this so deeply. It can
763
00:48:05.519 --> 00:48:08.159
be one of the hardest things they've ever tried to do.
764
00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:12.880
And then at the end he throws down this gauntlet
765
00:48:12.920 --> 00:48:14.679
in a way, he says, what we need to do
766
00:48:14.800 --> 00:48:18.559
is take this test tube solution. We need to replicate it,
767
00:48:18.679 --> 00:48:23.119
we need to codify it, refine it, scale it. So
768
00:48:23.159 --> 00:48:29.599
seventy two years later, I can't find any academic publication
769
00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:32.440
that has done this. Now there might be it could
770
00:48:32.480 --> 00:48:34.719
be under different names and so on. I don't know,
771
00:48:34.760 --> 00:48:37.480
but I've looked pretty deeply and can't find anything. And
772
00:48:37.480 --> 00:48:40.400
that's what I've been doing is to try to do that.
773
00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:43.719
And so one of the things in the process, so
774
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:46.679
we've been literally built a listening lab. We bring two
775
00:48:46.719 --> 00:48:49.480
people in at a time and help facilitate this rule.
776
00:48:49.800 --> 00:48:52.360
And so all sorts of people we've had it head teacher,
777
00:48:52.639 --> 00:48:55.360
principal and one of their teachers at a police chief
778
00:48:55.440 --> 00:48:58.039
or one of his direct reports. We have husbands and wives.
779
00:48:58.079 --> 00:49:01.559
We've had parents and children, also lots of dynamics, business
780
00:49:01.559 --> 00:49:05.119
and non business business partners, all sorts and have been
781
00:49:05.159 --> 00:49:07.800
studying the interchange and what to do and so on.
782
00:49:08.679 --> 00:49:16.119
You can simplify this process into force word loop, and
783
00:49:16.159 --> 00:49:24.920
it's this right, it's listen, reflect, speak, confirm. That's it right,
784
00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:26.320
that's the entry point.
785
00:49:27.079 --> 00:49:28.119
Yeah, it's pretty simple.
786
00:49:28.440 --> 00:49:31.880
It's a loop that it really matters. And there's a
787
00:49:31.960 --> 00:49:36.800
balancing within these steps because listens, okay, that's me making
788
00:49:36.840 --> 00:49:40.199
it safe. Let's say for you to say what you mean,
789
00:49:41.079 --> 00:49:44.599
and the reflect is then me trying to find words
790
00:49:45.719 --> 00:49:49.679
to name what it is that you haven't yet said
791
00:49:49.679 --> 00:49:53.360
out loud. But you really do mean better than you can.
792
00:49:53.440 --> 00:49:56.719
So I'm saying what you mean. Well, then there's having
793
00:49:56.760 --> 00:49:59.840
got to that clarity and that might take a few iterations,
794
00:49:59.840 --> 00:50:02.239
but and it's my turn, right, I need to be
795
00:50:02.280 --> 00:50:04.639
able to know how to say what I mean, which
796
00:50:04.679 --> 00:50:07.840
is itself a new skill. My experience is almost nobody
797
00:50:07.880 --> 00:50:11.119
says what they mean for lots of reasons, including they
798
00:50:11.119 --> 00:50:14.000
haven't figured out what they mean yet. This is not nothing.
799
00:50:14.840 --> 00:50:17.800
And then the final step, and that's in the loop,
800
00:50:17.920 --> 00:50:21.599
is confirm that is, I don't take it for granted
801
00:50:21.599 --> 00:50:24.360
that just because I've said what I mean, even if
802
00:50:24.360 --> 00:50:26.840
I've said it clearly, even if I'm practiced at it,
803
00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:30.000
I don't assume there's been understanding. They have to say
804
00:50:30.039 --> 00:50:33.760
what I mean. And so there's this kind of very
805
00:50:33.800 --> 00:50:40.000
simple but clean equilibrium there in that pattern. And you
806
00:50:40.039 --> 00:50:42.480
can look at it graphically, and you can break down
807
00:50:42.599 --> 00:50:45.599
specific skills and phrases that people can use in each
808
00:50:45.639 --> 00:50:49.719
of them to try to reduce the noise and increase
809
00:50:49.760 --> 00:50:53.440
the signal flow between people. And it's been really quite
810
00:50:54.280 --> 00:50:59.000
shocking to see how this has played out in these sessions.
811
00:51:00.320 --> 00:51:02.360
Greg, I know you're a big fan of Gandhi's work.
812
00:51:02.639 --> 00:51:06.440
So if you just took what you suggested with that loop,
813
00:51:06.719 --> 00:51:09.079
what would happen if you combine that with Gandhi's idea
814
00:51:09.119 --> 00:51:15.119
of reduce anyone's self to zero? Because as I see this,
815
00:51:15.480 --> 00:51:17.239
if in a lot of what you're talking about here
816
00:51:17.320 --> 00:51:21.920
is ego and removing oneself of ego, so to me,
817
00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:24.039
it would have a compounding effect the way I think
818
00:51:24.079 --> 00:51:26.119
about it. But I'm interested in your thoughts.
819
00:51:26.639 --> 00:51:29.280
I want to connect directly with the Gandhi question, but
820
00:51:29.320 --> 00:51:31.079
I want to do it this way. And you'll see why.
821
00:51:32.079 --> 00:51:35.480
There's a In the early nineteen hundreds, you've got the
822
00:51:35.519 --> 00:51:41.719
first telegram and radio operators, so there's new cutting edge technology,
823
00:51:42.599 --> 00:51:46.800
and the people that were trying to utilize those technologies
824
00:51:46.960 --> 00:51:50.280
started using a metaphor for what they're doing. Signal and noise.
825
00:51:50.320 --> 00:51:52.519
We've been using that as a metaphor throughout the conversation.
826
00:51:53.599 --> 00:51:57.719
Signal was the message you're trying to send, and noises
827
00:51:57.920 --> 00:52:03.079
everything in the atmosphere, right like the true physical noise
828
00:52:03.280 --> 00:52:07.199
interference that exists. And they knew from very early on
829
00:52:07.400 --> 00:52:09.639
that there was a relationship between the two and they
830
00:52:09.719 --> 00:52:13.719
knew the relationship was approximately more signal power will help,
831
00:52:13.840 --> 00:52:17.320
and if you could reduce noise power, then that will
832
00:52:17.320 --> 00:52:23.079
also help. But it took fifty years until there was
833
00:52:23.519 --> 00:52:28.840
a researcher put was able to articulate the mathematical relationship.
834
00:52:29.280 --> 00:52:35.960
So the law of information communication. And if I were
835
00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:39.320
to summarize that law in its simplest possible form, it
836
00:52:39.360 --> 00:52:47.239
would be this is clarity equals signal divided by noise. Now,
837
00:52:47.400 --> 00:52:52.360
that is really important, and unless somebody is particularly mathematically inclined,
838
00:52:52.559 --> 00:52:54.800
it won't be obvious even when you first hear it
839
00:52:54.880 --> 00:52:58.239
what the importance of that is. But what it means
840
00:52:58.280 --> 00:53:02.559
is that noise is the determining factor. A tiny reduction
841
00:53:02.639 --> 00:53:06.639
in noise will have a greater impact on clarity than
842
00:53:07.400 --> 00:53:10.519
increasing signal. That's the point. And in fact, if you
843
00:53:10.599 --> 00:53:12.960
just want to stay mathematical for a moment, if you
844
00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:15.960
can reduce noise to zero, then what happens to clarity
845
00:53:16.079 --> 00:53:19.440
is it reaches almost to infinity. That is the law,
846
00:53:19.519 --> 00:53:21.880
and that isn't just like a nice idea. That law
847
00:53:21.960 --> 00:53:25.360
has been utilized by almost all technologies that are trying
848
00:53:25.400 --> 00:53:28.079
to send out messages or receive them. Ever since and
849
00:53:28.119 --> 00:53:30.440
so that is a great deal of our modern life
850
00:53:30.480 --> 00:53:35.199
is shaped by that. It's a very profound insight. All right.
851
00:53:35.320 --> 00:53:40.199
So if you can reduce the noise, clarity increases, that's
852
00:53:40.280 --> 00:53:44.239
the import. Now you use the phrase, I know the phrase.
853
00:53:44.320 --> 00:53:47.119
Of course, used that phrase myself. That Gandhi. One of
854
00:53:47.119 --> 00:53:50.199
his key input insights for being able to have this
855
00:53:50.280 --> 00:53:55.360
disproportionate impact in India was to reduce himself to zero.
856
00:53:55.920 --> 00:53:59.119
If I can cut out that noise, then that will help.
857
00:54:00.119 --> 00:54:04.480
He was clearly true, clearly correct. We're going to tie
858
00:54:04.480 --> 00:54:10.400
all these together. It's also almost the Batian language that
859
00:54:10.599 --> 00:54:14.880
I got from Eric Maddox. Okay, so we're going to
860
00:54:14.920 --> 00:54:18.039
take this take the signal to noise ratio equation. Okay,
861
00:54:18.079 --> 00:54:21.159
we're putting that aside. Gandhi you've mentioned, we touched upon it.
862
00:54:21.400 --> 00:54:23.119
Now I want to talk about Eric Maddox and this
863
00:54:23.159 --> 00:54:28.280
will all thread together. Eric Maddox was he worked in
864
00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:35.840
an intelligence agency and he was a Mandarin translator. But
865
00:54:35.920 --> 00:54:40.480
he also took an eight week course in interrogation techniques.
866
00:54:40.599 --> 00:54:45.440
So that's just minimum standard basic certification for being able
867
00:54:45.480 --> 00:54:49.000
to do interrogation. He does it. He almost fails the class.
868
00:54:49.039 --> 00:54:51.199
He doesn't like it. He doesn't like what he's learning
869
00:54:51.199 --> 00:54:54.360
in there, and he just goes, Okay, put it aside,
870
00:54:54.920 --> 00:54:58.039
go back to what I was doing. Until the Iraq
871
00:54:58.119 --> 00:55:04.440
War erupts, and as they're trying to gather together personnel,
872
00:55:05.079 --> 00:55:08.400
they're just literally looking through, Okay, who has these two
873
00:55:08.480 --> 00:55:14.960
things checked on in their employee file and he matches
874
00:55:15.440 --> 00:55:19.159
the combination. What it means in practical terms is he
875
00:55:19.239 --> 00:55:21.960
is sent immediately out of the blue to the front
876
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:29.079
lines in to crete in Iraq with no He's never
877
00:55:29.719 --> 00:55:34.159
interrogated a prisoner ever, and now he is required to
878
00:55:34.239 --> 00:55:38.559
do that ten twelve hours every single day. So the
879
00:55:38.559 --> 00:55:41.000
military would go and collect people that they thought might
880
00:55:41.039 --> 00:55:43.960
have information of interest, and he would follow a procedure,
881
00:55:44.440 --> 00:55:48.039
a protocol, and the protocol was exactly as I'm about
882
00:55:48.079 --> 00:55:53.360
to describe it. Well, I already know you're guilty, and
883
00:55:53.679 --> 00:55:57.840
I've got your all the information here in this vanilla envelope. Here,
884
00:55:57.920 --> 00:56:00.599
I already know you're going to gwant Animo for the
885
00:56:00.639 --> 00:56:04.239
rest of your life. The only way that you can
886
00:56:04.280 --> 00:56:06.320
get less than gwentanamo for the rest of your life
887
00:56:06.400 --> 00:56:09.440
is to cooperate with me. And if he could have
888
00:56:09.639 --> 00:56:12.639
somebody successfully go from a state of non cooperation to cooperation.
889
00:56:12.760 --> 00:56:16.400
That's called breaking them. And he states the number that
890
00:56:17.079 --> 00:56:19.760
in this industry, if he industry is the right word
891
00:56:19.800 --> 00:56:22.800
for it, but in this discipline globally, the rates are
892
00:56:22.840 --> 00:56:27.320
about four percent success rates, so very low success rates
893
00:56:27.360 --> 00:56:29.840
using this approach, and he does this for days. He
894
00:56:29.920 --> 00:56:31.920
hates doing it. He thinks the whole thing is stupid,
895
00:56:31.920 --> 00:56:34.280
as he did in his interrogation class, but he doesn't
896
00:56:34.320 --> 00:56:36.239
either have the courage to do anything different, or doesn't
897
00:56:36.920 --> 00:56:38.920
perhaps even though there's a different way, just doesn't think
898
00:56:38.960 --> 00:56:41.360
this is a very good way. Until one of the
899
00:56:41.400 --> 00:56:44.800
prisoners turns to him and says straight to him, just
900
00:56:44.880 --> 00:56:48.679
eyeball to eyebel. He says, you don't get me, and
901
00:56:48.800 --> 00:56:53.599
you don't want to get me, and that pierces him
902
00:56:54.039 --> 00:56:58.079
because he knows that's true. He knows that's built in,
903
00:56:58.280 --> 00:57:02.400
baked into the protocol he's using, and it's yeah, well
904
00:57:02.519 --> 00:57:06.559
that's it, you've named it. We feel naked. What on earth?
905
00:57:06.920 --> 00:57:09.800
What are we doing here? I don't even want to
906
00:57:09.880 --> 00:57:13.480
understand the other person. I'm assuming the whole story is
907
00:57:13.519 --> 00:57:16.320
what I already have defined. I'm just trying to coerce
908
00:57:16.400 --> 00:57:19.719
them using that existing story. So out of fear they're
909
00:57:19.719 --> 00:57:23.880
going to break. Well, from then on, he's okay, I'm
910
00:57:23.920 --> 00:57:27.239
not doing this anymore. And so instead what he does
911
00:57:27.679 --> 00:57:31.119
is he moves into I don't even I would just
912
00:57:31.440 --> 00:57:33.880
a signalist, right, I don't have better language than this.
913
00:57:34.119 --> 00:57:37.960
He just goes in there listen to really lose himself
914
00:57:38.000 --> 00:57:40.599
in the other person's story. Okay, tell me all about it,
915
00:57:40.639 --> 00:57:44.320
tell me everything. Just keep them talking. That was the goal.
916
00:57:44.519 --> 00:57:47.280
Just keep them talking so I can keep hearing an understanding,
917
00:57:47.639 --> 00:57:51.239
he said. When he did this, he said every person
918
00:57:51.280 --> 00:57:54.760
we spoke to, He says he now believes it with
919
00:57:54.840 --> 00:57:58.920
everyone in life, a dropping breadcrumbs for us. And they're
920
00:57:59.000 --> 00:58:04.559
testing to see whether there is real interest. What level
921
00:58:04.599 --> 00:58:06.920
of safety am I at? How much do they want
922
00:58:06.920 --> 00:58:09.559
to understand, and if they don't, if they're just here
923
00:58:09.599 --> 00:58:12.239
to judge, or if they've already judged. I'm not interested.
924
00:58:12.440 --> 00:58:15.119
I know from the testing, and he said he found
925
00:58:15.159 --> 00:58:17.320
that they were all sharing it, and when he listened
926
00:58:17.320 --> 00:58:20.000
and understood, they just keep going and keep telling. He said,
927
00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:22.880
by the end of an interrogation, he knew already very
928
00:58:23.039 --> 00:58:27.079
clearly didn't take expertise. He felt five places they've lied
929
00:58:27.239 --> 00:58:29.320
it wouldn't get stopped them all away, just keep letting
930
00:58:29.360 --> 00:58:31.679
him talk and talk, but he could feel those shifts,
931
00:58:31.719 --> 00:58:36.480
those let's say, micro body glitches. I say, just go
932
00:58:36.519 --> 00:58:38.239
back to them. Okay, listen, I've heard your whole story,
933
00:58:38.239 --> 00:58:40.039
but there are these five motes that you've talked about this.
934
00:58:40.119 --> 00:58:42.719
Let's go back and talk about each of these and
935
00:58:42.719 --> 00:58:49.239
what's really going on. So Eric Maddox starts doing this
936
00:58:50.039 --> 00:58:55.880
and within nine months has the most complete picture of
937
00:58:56.679 --> 00:59:00.719
Saddam Hussein's network of anyone in the military in the world.
938
00:59:01.760 --> 00:59:06.599
Nine months. Compare that eleven years with finding Osama bin Laden.
939
00:59:06.840 --> 00:59:10.199
Nine months. Some of the prisoners were helping him. Now
940
00:59:10.360 --> 00:59:14.599
they were fully part of his leadership team in being
941
00:59:14.599 --> 00:59:17.599
able to put this network together, and he's able to
942
00:59:17.639 --> 00:59:21.079
identify exactly where Saddam Hussein on the last day that
943
00:59:21.159 --> 00:59:26.159
he is in duty. Is where they identify exactly where
944
00:59:26.159 --> 00:59:28.559
he is, and that there was the night before the
945
00:59:28.599 --> 00:59:32.159
moment we all remember where Sadam Hussein is found coming
946
00:59:32.199 --> 00:59:35.199
out to what's called the spider cave or whatever, a
947
00:59:35.280 --> 00:59:40.440
spider hole. And this is Eric maddos. Okay, Eric Maddox,
948
00:59:40.480 --> 00:59:42.719
what's the connection back to your original question with Gandhi
949
00:59:42.960 --> 00:59:46.119
reduced myself to zero. He said the key to doing
950
00:59:46.199 --> 00:59:50.440
this was what he called I'm going to erase my mind.
951
00:59:51.360 --> 00:59:54.119
I begin by erasing my mind so that I can
952
00:59:54.199 --> 00:59:59.239
even begin to visualize their world, their story, their narrative,
953
01:00:00.039 --> 01:00:02.039
and so that I think is a is a similar
954
01:00:02.079 --> 01:00:05.840
point the noise. And he doesn't use this way, but
955
01:00:06.079 --> 01:00:09.360
Carl Rogers, he doesn't use the word noise, but the
956
01:00:09.760 --> 01:00:13.320
enemy that what he calls the blocker is our tendency
957
01:00:13.400 --> 01:00:18.559
to evaluate other people before we've understood them. And he
958
01:00:18.599 --> 01:00:22.400
said that this is the idea, that's the noise in
959
01:00:22.440 --> 01:00:27.599
the equation. So reading, putting that aside, pausing and trying
960
01:00:27.639 --> 01:00:29.360
to lose ourself. Where do they come from, how are
961
01:00:29.360 --> 01:00:31.440
they sing it? What do they understand? What does this
962
01:00:31.519 --> 01:00:35.239
mean to them? And staying with it is that is
963
01:00:35.360 --> 01:00:37.639
just the key to getting signals to be revealed and
964
01:00:37.679 --> 01:00:41.599
connecting those signals, whether it's Gandhi and India, whether it's
965
01:00:41.639 --> 01:00:46.519
Sachinidela at Microsoft, whether it's Eric Matics in the middle
966
01:00:46.519 --> 01:00:50.440
of a one of the noisiest environments you can even imagine.
967
01:00:51.639 --> 01:00:54.440
In those kinds of environments, there is such a way
968
01:00:54.519 --> 01:00:58.960
to break through, and it's So this intent to understand
969
01:00:58.960 --> 01:01:02.800
and be understood and know other intent is it represents
970
01:01:02.960 --> 01:01:07.519
a significant paradigm shift from what we are doing now
971
01:01:07.599 --> 01:01:10.960
and what we have even experienced in our lives. And
972
01:01:11.000 --> 01:01:15.840
once we discover it, the world opens up to us. Greg.
973
01:01:16.119 --> 01:01:18.719
What you're going to find is so uncanny here about
974
01:01:18.719 --> 01:01:21.880
this whole discussion is the mattering effect is all about
975
01:01:22.119 --> 01:01:26.599
the mattering signal and how it gets a race, which
976
01:01:26.679 --> 01:01:29.719
I called through the slow Fade, and then how we
977
01:01:29.760 --> 01:01:33.519
rebuild it. And so the whole book is the architecture
978
01:01:33.519 --> 01:01:34.679
of rebuilding the signal.
979
01:01:35.639 --> 01:01:36.440
It's beautiful.
980
01:01:37.280 --> 01:01:41.159
So I had no idea we would have this type
981
01:01:41.159 --> 01:01:44.519
of conversation, but I really appreciate it. We didn't even
982
01:01:44.559 --> 01:01:48.719
get to talk about your two phenomenal books, so I'm
983
01:01:48.760 --> 01:01:53.039
going to just bring them up because if I'm sure
984
01:01:53.079 --> 01:01:54.400
that's readers.
985
01:01:56.119 --> 01:01:58.719
Came in to hear about, let me connect the dots.
986
01:01:58.960 --> 01:02:00.719
If you want, you put this at the beginning. But
987
01:02:01.519 --> 01:02:04.000
for ten years I have been asking the question, what
988
01:02:04.280 --> 01:02:08.000
is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless
989
01:02:08.840 --> 01:02:13.280
ideas in practice in the world of relationships, teams, organizations.
990
01:02:13.360 --> 01:02:17.119
What's the primary bottleneck? The answer, to my surprise is
991
01:02:17.440 --> 01:02:21.440
that it isn't talent, it's not strategy, it's not execution.
992
01:02:21.760 --> 01:02:29.760
The primary bottleneck is like confident misunderstanding. We are wrong,
993
01:02:30.760 --> 01:02:34.679
we think we're right, and we act upon that, and
994
01:02:34.719 --> 01:02:40.440
that's it. That's it. There's a tap a game that
995
01:02:40.559 --> 01:02:43.840
was invented. You may be familiar with it, given that
996
01:02:43.880 --> 01:02:47.320
you know the Heath's work, but it's a nineteen ninety
997
01:02:48.079 --> 01:02:52.159
dissertation written by PhD student at Stanford University. And it
998
01:02:52.199 --> 01:02:54.360
wasn't the main thing even that she wrote about. But
999
01:02:54.559 --> 01:02:57.480
the first experiment that she ran there was a game
1000
01:02:58.199 --> 01:03:02.320
where two people to diad. So she had forty in total,
1001
01:03:02.400 --> 01:03:04.840
forty people and they had the experiment three times, and
1002
01:03:04.880 --> 01:03:09.559
the experiment was person one would tap a song to
1003
01:03:09.679 --> 01:03:13.559
person two and person two had to guess the song
1004
01:03:13.679 --> 01:03:17.719
with no words, no music, no humming, no singing, just tapping.
1005
01:03:18.719 --> 01:03:21.079
But before she did that, she asked the question, well,
1006
01:03:21.960 --> 01:03:26.599
what's your confidence level as a tapper? For confidence? How
1007
01:03:26.639 --> 01:03:29.880
confident are you the listener will get it? And on
1008
01:03:29.960 --> 01:03:32.559
average they said fifty percent Across the one hundred and
1009
01:03:32.599 --> 01:03:38.440
twenty experiments. In practice they were successful three times out
1010
01:03:38.480 --> 01:03:42.079
of one hundred and twenty, so two and a half percent. Now,
1011
01:03:42.119 --> 01:03:44.440
she didn't ask the listeners their confidence level. So I've
1012
01:03:44.480 --> 01:03:48.320
replicated this study more than once and found that listeners
1013
01:03:48.400 --> 01:03:56.199
are as confident or more. So. You have this perception problem,
1014
01:03:57.199 --> 01:04:01.199
and it's not about some peripheric for all issue. It
1015
01:04:01.280 --> 01:04:06.880
is about the primary mechanism of life. Because nothing gets
1016
01:04:06.920 --> 01:04:11.360
done without correct understanding between people. So it's not nothing,
1017
01:04:11.400 --> 01:04:16.760
it's not trivial. And if people are massively overconfident in
1018
01:04:16.800 --> 01:04:20.000
their ability to understand and be understood, then they just
1019
01:04:20.039 --> 01:04:27.199
go through life ignorantly wrong. It's the psychological, the interpersonal
1020
01:04:27.239 --> 01:04:31.199
equivalent of everyone thinking they're above average drivers. Right, That
1021
01:04:31.400 --> 01:04:37.760
incompetence makes their incompetence invisible. And that's what's happening with understanding,
1022
01:04:37.800 --> 01:04:40.840
is that we learn communications the most important skill in life.
1023
01:04:40.920 --> 01:04:43.840
Understanding is the most important skill within that. We learn
1024
01:04:43.920 --> 01:04:46.119
what skills we do have for how to do that
1025
01:04:46.239 --> 01:04:49.920
from our family of origin primarily, and that's where it's invisible.
1026
01:04:50.119 --> 01:04:53.760
No one announced to us this is really limited communication
1027
01:04:53.840 --> 01:04:56.599
by the way that you're observing here. This is really
1028
01:04:56.679 --> 01:04:58.960
dysfunctional in fact, and you'll have to learn some new
1029
01:04:59.079 --> 01:05:01.960
No one ever says that. So you're just going through
1030
01:05:02.000 --> 01:05:04.880
life and visible taking those skills with you, taking them
1031
01:05:04.920 --> 01:05:07.320
with you become the CEO of Microsoft. That doesn't mean
1032
01:05:07.320 --> 01:05:10.719
you've learned better skills. It just means that you are
1033
01:05:10.760 --> 01:05:15.599
in a position to utilize your same skills and cause
1034
01:05:15.880 --> 01:05:19.280
unintended damage all along the way. This is the primary
1035
01:05:19.280 --> 01:05:24.440
bottomneck to living out essentialism. Why essential things are so
1036
01:05:24.519 --> 01:05:27.159
much more vulnerable. Trivial things are safe and easy, like
1037
01:05:27.199 --> 01:05:31.719
an importance iceberg. The top is easy, obvious and safe. Underneath,
1038
01:05:31.760 --> 01:05:35.679
it's way down below enormously valuable. Those are the essential
1039
01:05:35.719 --> 01:05:38.599
subjects with the essential people in our lives. Well, you
1040
01:05:38.719 --> 01:05:42.960
just can't live out essentialism without learning how without upgrading
1041
01:05:42.960 --> 01:05:46.719
your ability to communicate with people who matter most about
1042
01:05:46.760 --> 01:05:50.280
the things that matter most. And so that's the bridge
1043
01:05:51.079 --> 01:05:54.400
from essentialism to the subjects that we've been talking about today.
1044
01:05:54.519 --> 01:05:59.800
This is the unlock. This is how to unlock people, relationships, teams, organizations.
1045
01:06:00.719 --> 01:06:02.719
This is the core, This is the heart of the matter.
1046
01:06:04.079 --> 01:06:08.400
And well, Greg, I love the discussion today. Where can
1047
01:06:08.559 --> 01:06:10.719
the listeners find out the most about you?
1048
01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:14.039
Well, look, one thing people can do is they can
1049
01:06:14.119 --> 01:06:17.280
just go to Greg mceuwan dot com. There's a sing
1050
01:06:17.320 --> 01:06:19.880
they can sign up for a free course. It's called
1051
01:06:19.920 --> 01:06:22.679
Less but Better. It's a thirty day email course. It
1052
01:06:22.679 --> 01:06:25.519
comes with principles. It's a high quality course you'd normally
1053
01:06:25.519 --> 01:06:27.840
pay money for. It's for free. They can sign up
1054
01:06:27.880 --> 01:06:30.239
there in about ten seconds. If they do that, then
1055
01:06:30.239 --> 01:06:34.360
they'll become part of the ongoing conversation and the great Heaven.
1056
01:06:35.679 --> 01:06:39.679
And please check out his books Essentialism, which sold millions
1057
01:06:39.679 --> 01:06:43.360
of copies, and Effortless, of which I always thought it
1058
01:06:43.400 --> 01:06:47.400
was funny when I read Essentialism, because Effortless is actually
1059
01:06:47.440 --> 01:06:51.280
in the book very much, sir, but it's but I
1060
01:06:51.280 --> 01:06:53.639
don't think a lot of people got it. So I
1061
01:06:53.679 --> 01:06:55.760
was glad you wrote the second book.
1062
01:06:55.920 --> 01:06:58.119
Yeah it's not, and I was, yeah, I agree. They
1063
01:06:58.159 --> 01:07:01.360
missed the second paradigm shift. And I think that's to
1064
01:07:01.400 --> 01:07:04.400
some extent because books can contain one big paradigm shift.
1065
01:07:04.440 --> 01:07:06.880
That's one of the lessons. And so I really wanted
1066
01:07:06.920 --> 01:07:09.639
to go there because there's so many people who are
1067
01:07:09.679 --> 01:07:14.320
just buried in the noise we've been describing overworked but underutilized,
1068
01:07:15.119 --> 01:07:18.639
and particularly insecure overachievers. That's where I wrote the book
1069
01:07:18.800 --> 01:07:24.079
for Effortless, for they're just so burdened by mental models
1070
01:07:24.119 --> 01:07:27.960
they don't even know are they're like one of my
1071
01:07:28.039 --> 01:07:33.559
favorites is that people believe that easy equals lazy and
1072
01:07:34.079 --> 01:07:38.440
insecure over achievers do anyway, and they don't be thouse
1073
01:07:38.440 --> 01:07:41.519
aren't the same things. And so once you can unlock that,
1074
01:07:42.239 --> 01:07:45.639
you can open a very different kind of way of living. Well,
1075
01:07:45.760 --> 01:07:47.559
just I'll maybe say it this way. You don't write
1076
01:07:47.559 --> 01:07:50.719
a book called Effortless because you think life is easy,
1077
01:07:50.880 --> 01:07:52.920
or even that it should be. You write it because
1078
01:07:52.960 --> 01:07:57.440
life is a catastrophe, and it is for almost everybody,
1079
01:07:57.440 --> 01:08:00.119
almost all of the time. That's what I've lear and
1080
01:08:00.199 --> 01:08:04.159
listening to people, Oh my goodness that I don't think
1081
01:08:04.199 --> 01:08:07.559
I've ever spoken true words than that. So Effortless is
1082
01:08:07.599 --> 01:08:10.639
an attempt at saying, look, if you can't work harder,
1083
01:08:11.000 --> 01:08:13.599
if you already did that, if you're already doing that,
1084
01:08:14.920 --> 01:08:20.800
then what if there is a gentler, wiser, smarter, better,
1085
01:08:21.600 --> 01:08:26.079
even easier way to take off some of that edge,
1086
01:08:26.760 --> 01:08:30.319
make life that a little more livable, a little more doable,
1087
01:08:30.479 --> 01:08:34.239
a little less exhausting, a little less harsh on you
1088
01:08:34.319 --> 01:08:37.319
and everyone around you. And so it's I wrote that
1089
01:08:37.439 --> 01:08:41.520
is a kind of it's like an insecure overachiever's guide
1090
01:08:41.520 --> 01:08:47.840
to healthy productivity and I really have enjoyed being able
1091
01:08:47.920 --> 01:08:51.199
to see people find that at the right time.
1092
01:08:52.920 --> 01:08:53.159
Greg.
1093
01:08:53.199 --> 01:08:55.720
I know you don't do many podcast interviews. I am
1094
01:08:55.760 --> 01:08:58.439
so grateful and so honored that you gave me the
1095
01:08:58.479 --> 01:09:00.800
opportunity to come on Passions because I know it's going
1096
01:09:00.840 --> 01:09:02.199
to be profound for our listeners.
1097
01:09:02.479 --> 01:09:03.800
Thank you again so much for.
1098
01:09:03.760 --> 01:09:06.359
Coming, John, It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
1099
01:09:07.000 --> 01:09:09.079
That brings us to the end of today's conversation with
1100
01:09:09.119 --> 01:09:09.840
Greg McEwan.
1101
01:09:10.319 --> 01:09:11.520
One of the profound.
1102
01:09:11.079 --> 01:09:13.319
Concepts that I hope stays with you as you walk
1103
01:09:13.359 --> 01:09:16.239
away from this episode is the core rule of communication.
1104
01:09:16.880 --> 01:09:21.399
Clarity equals your signal divided by the noise. When things
1105
01:09:21.399 --> 01:09:24.159
get tense at home or at work, our default reaction
1106
01:09:24.399 --> 01:09:27.600
is usually to turn up our signal power. We speak louder,
1107
01:09:27.640 --> 01:09:30.640
we argue harder, or we over explain our side of
1108
01:09:30.640 --> 01:09:33.439
the story. But the math reveals that cutting out the
1109
01:09:33.479 --> 01:09:37.159
noise is what actually changes the equation. A small drop
1110
01:09:37.159 --> 01:09:40.279
and emotional noise yields a massive increase in true understanding.
1111
01:09:40.680 --> 01:09:43.760
When you drop your defensive judgments and practice that simple
1112
01:09:43.800 --> 01:09:47.880
loop of listening, reflecting, speaking, and confirming, you create the
1113
01:09:47.920 --> 01:09:52.039
conditions for real understanding to emerge. In our next conversation,
1114
01:09:52.159 --> 01:09:56.079
we're tracing this exact arc to its ultimate destination. I'll
1115
01:09:56.079 --> 01:09:59.319
be joined by global researcher and best selling author Marcus
1116
01:09:59.359 --> 01:10:02.399
Buckingham to explore a question that makes a lot of
1117
01:10:02.479 --> 01:10:05.680
leaders uncomfortable. What if the force that drives the highest
1118
01:10:05.760 --> 01:10:09.960
levels of performance isn't pressure, accountability, or incentives, but love.
1119
01:10:10.600 --> 01:10:13.479
Marcus has studied millions of data points in human behavior,
1120
01:10:13.479 --> 01:10:16.920
and he's discovered that extraordinary work doesn't come from force
1121
01:10:16.960 --> 01:10:21.000
and compliance. It comes from environments where people feel truly seen, valued,
1122
01:10:21.039 --> 01:10:23.880
and safe enough bring more of themselves to what they do.
1123
01:10:24.359 --> 01:10:26.720
We're going to look at why certain experiences stay with
1124
01:10:26.800 --> 01:10:29.560
us while others disappear, and map out exactly how you
1125
01:10:29.560 --> 01:10:33.920
can stop your daily interactions from drifting into cold, invisible spaces.
1126
01:10:34.319 --> 01:10:39.000
But when we humans try to vocalize the extreme positive
1127
01:10:39.039 --> 01:10:40.960
experiences we have in life, the way we use is love,
1128
01:10:41.039 --> 01:10:45.680
and I kept changing it, frankly, over the years. I
1129
01:10:45.760 --> 01:10:48.159
kept changing it to something more palatable to the business world,
1130
01:10:48.199 --> 01:10:51.720
like passion or joy, or or engagement or satisfaction.
1131
01:10:51.760 --> 01:10:52.560
And those are really.
1132
01:10:52.439 --> 01:10:56.880
Good words, but the actual words people use, they don't
1133
01:10:56.960 --> 01:10:59.920
use delight, They'll use the Wood The US is love,
1134
01:11:00.880 --> 01:11:02.840
so really for me, it was a wake up call
1135
01:11:02.920 --> 01:11:06.000
to go listen. As a researcher, if people are spontaneously
1136
01:11:06.079 --> 01:11:08.720
using a word or a set of words, you don't
1137
01:11:08.720 --> 01:11:10.520
dismiss it or try to change it for them as
1138
01:11:10.520 --> 01:11:13.079
though they were wrong. You interrogate the word, what do
1139
01:11:13.119 --> 01:11:13.520
they mean?
1140
01:11:14.319 --> 01:11:15.039
Until next time?
1141
01:11:15.239 --> 01:11:18.199
Remember that flourishing is rarely found by adding more to
1142
01:11:18.279 --> 01:11:21.800
our lives. Often it begins by reconnecting.
1143
01:11:21.600 --> 01:11:23.319
With what has been there all along.
1144
01:11:23.760 --> 01:11:25.640
I'm John Miles, and you've been passion struck