The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver
My Guest:
Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child.
Key Learnings:
Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort.
Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today.
Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us.
The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no.  
The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating.
Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow.
Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom would ask, "Why do you have to use us as the example? Why do you have to share about our family?" Nicole would explain: " This is the only experience I can speak from, and our family's experience is so common. To see her dad, who came from a family largely shut down emotionally, crying in understanding and pride, was overwhelming and validating for why she does this work.
At 13, Nicole was getting straight A's but unraveling on the inside. She was socially shy, struggled to order food at restaurants, and had very few friends. Then she discovered alcohol and pot made her feel comfortable. That anxiety she lived with suddenly felt freer. She would stumble through the living room at night, her parents already in bed, then wake up at 6:00 AM the next day, pitch a softball tournament, win it, and seemingly be fine.
Her parents had no idea. She was very good at suppressing her emotions and coping. By contrast, on the surface, it seemed like she was doing well. They were a family who didn't really talk about emotions, so they had no indication.
The drive itself isn't the problem. It's the energy that inspires action. Nicole's dad worked into the night to support the family. Her mom would say, "why not 100?" when Nicole brought home a 96. That translated into drive and ambition. That's not a problem. For a lot of us, it's the energy that inspires action and translates into impact. It can become a problem when we have no limits to our working, where we exhaust ourselves and burn out, where we don't feel worthy in moments of inaction or rest.
The marker of a healthy relationship with drive is flexibility. When you're forced to stop because you're sick, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or someone else needs you, can you be flexible enough to do that without feeling terrible about yourself? The ability to choose to say, "Okay, contextually speaking, I need to pause," and still feel okay about yourself, that's the marker.  
Hold space for both: acknowledging harm and taking agency. Other people have contributed to our discomfort. Maybe parents didn't meet our needs. If we don't acknowledge that, we suppress. But we also can't stay stuck in anger and resentment.
A true boundary isn't demanding that someone else be different. That's still giving away your agency. A true boundary is saying: you've hurt me, and I'm gonna take responsibility that I'm allowing it. I'm gonna show up differently now to limit the impact of what you're doing.
Talking about trauma can keep it alive in your body. Trauma doesn't live in logic and understanding. It lives in your body. It lives in habits and reactions. Your mind is so powerful that you can think something and feel as if you're living it in that moment. If you're going week after week talking about all the things that are hurting you, you're continuing to keep that alive in your body.
Holistic psychology bridges the gap between mind and body. Traditional psychology focused solely on the mind. The CBT model says if we think differently, we produce different feelings, then different actions. But Nicole was missing the body. Our nervous system, our earliest environments, neurobiologically created patterns wired into us. Science now shows we maintain the ability to change throughout our lives.
Drop into your body. Where is your attention right now?
Are you feeling your muscles, your heels impacting the earth, where you're sitting?
Or are you so lost in thought you're disconnected?
Jaw clenched? Fists clenched? Shoulders up to your ears?
Holding your breath? Breathing short and quick from your chest?
These are markers that your body is under stress right now.
Once you have that information, make small shifts. Slow and deepen your breath. Elongate your exhale just a little longer than your inhale. If your movements are quick, slow them down. If you're holding tension, release it. Now you're regulating your body so you can show up differently.
Meditation is just awareness. It's not sitting cross-legged trying to make your mind quiet. Life can be a meditative experience. Thoughts are helpful. They're where we create things, have insights. The goal isn't a blank, quiet mind. The goal is awareness.
Nicole calls it her spaceship. Her protective habit for so long has been to dissociate, to disconnect. She pursued clinical psychology where she can live in her mind. When what she's feeling in her body is too uncomfortable, the quickest path out is to distract herself with someone else, with the next achievement.
This work has made Nicole's relationships more real. More authentic. More grounded in vulnerability, messiness, emotion as opposed to curated versions of who she thinks she needs to be. What she's most familiar with is dealing with all her feelings alone.
The Harvard study found one thing leads to a happy life: love. Ryan referenced the longitudinal Harvard study that has gone on for 90 years studying what leads to a happy life. At the end of the day, it's love. The ones who live the happiest, longest, most fruitful lives are surrounded by people they love and who love them. 
What a gift it is to be loved for all of yourself, not just the perfect parts. When you can show someone all of yourself, your messiness, the things you hid and kept secret, and still be loved. The overachiever gets to show more parts of herself, and people don't abandon her. They stay. That's the love most of us are striving for.
We are all a bunch of messy humans trying to figure it out as we go.
Nicole's champagne moment a year from now: presence and beingness. Whatever is happening or not happening in her life, she's celebrating the celebration of that moment. Being alive. Feeling the gratitude, the joy. Not focusing on what was produced to give her the opportunity to celebrate, but being present to the life around her. The taste of the champagne, the humans surrounding her in that moment. 
Reflection Questions
Which childhood adaptations are still driving your behavior today? Are you choosing them, or are they choosing you?
When was the last time you actually dropped into your body and checked: am I tense? Am I holding my breath? Am I stressed?
Who in your life sees all of you, not just the polished version, and loves you anyway?
More Learning
#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What People Think of You
#140: Dr. Carol Dweck - The Power of a Growth Mindset
#229: Dr. Henry Cloud - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Book Announcement 
01:08 Show Intro and Guest Setup 
02:36 Good at Everything: The Hidden Cost 
06:47 When Therapy Stopped Working 
09:32 How The Holistic Psychologist Started on Instagram 
11:20 Purpose, Fame, and Setting Boundaries 
15:06 How Her Family Reacted to the Spotlight 
19:21 At 13: Straight A's and Self-Medicating 
22:12 What Her Parents Missed 
23:48 Drive vs. Worthiness: Where It Becomes a Problem 
29:20 Why Flexibility Beats Rigidity 
31:03 Agency vs. Blame in Therapy 
31:57 When Therapy Becomes an Excuse 
33:47 What a Real Boundary Actually Is 
35:44 The "Bad Therapy" Debate 
38:50 What Holistic Psychology Actually Means 
41:35 Daily Body Practices, Not Retreats 
44:06 How to Drop Into Your Body 
46:38 Meditation Is Just Awareness 
49:36 Why Vulnerability Makes Relationships Real 
52:07 The Harvard Study: Love Is Everything 
55:36 The Champagne Question: Being Present 
57:33 EOPC

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
Notes
 
Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866
Key Learnings
The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction. 
There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible.

"The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living."  This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it.
Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day.
Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance.
The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something.
What David's workday looks like now: 
Batching work: people at work check their email on average 77 times a day. The way people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. When you do that, it lowers your productivity and massively increases your stress.
David doesn't start his day with his inbox. He'll check it at the end of the workday because emails can take him away from the most important work at the beginning of the day. 
Stress + Rest = Growth. The workday ends when David's son gets home. When writing, you have to program in rest, just like you would if you were an athlete in training. 
Daniel Kahneman said writing "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the worst few years of his life. David had lunch with Kahneman and praised the book. Kahneman said, "Never again." He said it was so isolating. He was used to working with a partner or multiple partners and colleagues. He felt so isolated that he said he'd never write a book again, or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's what he did. And David could empathize with that. 
David made a one-page architectural outline for how "Inside the Box" would look. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book. He wrote as small as possible to try to defeat his own system. The book's 20% shorter than his other two. He thinks it's much tighter writing. He was so much more efficient that he doesn't feel nearly as burned out.
After a mega hit book, two things matter: (1) A lot is out of your control, and (2) Identify as a craftsman. David's colleague at Sports Illustrated told him, "If a book about genetics and vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was right. But David very strongly identifies as a writer now, as a craftsman. He's taken fiction writing courses just to learn about craft. With Inside the Box, he did a structural experiment that he found so engaging because he was focused on the craft itself, not just the commercial outcome.
"Docendo discimus" - by teaching, we learn. This is a quote from Seneca. If people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind. They start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. Teaching it is even better, but just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn in a much more coherent way.
Narrative values: the recurring themes that give coherence to a life. David went back and looked at his life and identified: curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, and resilience. Now that he's started telling his story in that way, it shows up everywhere. But going forward, he also wanted some things in his story that he didn't have. So he identified forgiveness in particular because that has not been a strong suit for him.
Ben Helfgott: the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. Almost everybody in his family was killed in the Holocaust. He just preached forgiveness all the time. When David saw what Ben did, these petty grudges he's holding are nothing. You're just poisoning yourself when you hold these grudges. So David decided he wanted forgiveness to become one of his narrative values. 
Herbert Simon won the highest award in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. His quote serves as the epigraph of the book: "It is a myth, widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they're most free."
Simon coined the term "satisficing." It's a combination of satisfy and suffice. It means having good enough decision rules. He contrasted that with maximizing. From a mountain of psychological research, it is almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time.
Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said you need three sets of clothing: one on your back, one in the wash, and the next one ready to wear. He simplified all the decisions in his life so he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. He famously said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Choose when to choose. Choose when to save and when to use your cognitive bandwidth. 
Good enough doesn't mean you have low standards. It means you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things.
"How you do anything is how you do everything" is completely wrong. This is one of David's least favorite quotes. It's wrong. Herbert Simon did the same mundane thing, the same breakfast every day, the same socks, so he could crush it in his work. He wasn't doing everything the way he was doing his work.
The Fredkins Paradox: We spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar.

General Magic: They invented the smartphone in 1990. The iPhone would not exist without them. They had infinite degrees of freedom. They could do anything. When the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. It had a 200-page manual. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months.
Meanwhile, people inside General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success. One low-level engineer started Auction Web. His bosses said no, too small. He left and changed the name to eBay. Another created Graffiti. He said "I'm going to solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want contacts and calendars on the go." He did just a calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. That was the Palm Pilot. By doing way less. By doing something, not everything.
Tony Fadell (the "podfather"): "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints." 
Bill Gurley said, "We have a saying in venture: more startups die of indigestion than starvation." When Tony co-founded Nest, he made his team work inside a literal box. He made them prototype the box before they had the product. If it didn't fit in that box, it was not a priority.
Reflection Questions
What area of your life has too much freedom right now? Where could you add a constraint (a deadline, a ritual, a boundary) that would actually make you more productive or creative?
If you had to pick three narrative values that run through your life story, what would they be? Are they the ones you want, or do you need to add an aspirational value like David did with forgiveness?
What's one decision you're maximizing (trying to find the perfect choice) when you should be satisficing (good enough and move on)? How much time and energy would you free up if you applied Herbert Simon's approach?
More Learning
#310 - David Epstein: Why Generalists Will Rule the World
#582 - Cal Newport: Obsess Over Quality
#660 - James Clear: The 4 Laws to Behavioral Change
Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Price of Becoming - Ryan's New Book
01:15 Meet David Epstein
02:39 The Fact Checker: What Great Leaders Do
04:27 Dedication Easter Eggs
05:50 The Problem With Too Much Autonomy
10:47 Why You Actually Need Constraints
12:29 Batching Work: The 77 Email Checks Problem
17:20 Lunch with Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow Was Miserable 
22:18 What To Do After A Viral Book
27:07 Docendo Discimus: By Teaching, We Learn 
29:13 Why Leaders Should Regularly Teach
31:09 Desirable Difficulties
31:56 Narrative Values: The Themes That Define Your Life
34:31 Adding Forgiveness As an Aspirational Value
36:13 Chips on Shoulders vs. Proving People Right
39:10 Herbert Simon: The Man Who Won Everything
40:20 Satisficing Over Maximizing
42:40 Choosing When To Choose
44:29 Good Enough Doesn't Mean Low Standards
46:13 Why "How You Do Anything" is Completely Wrong
47:25 General Magic: Do Something, Not Everything
52:49 One Year From Now: What Are You Celebrating?
54:54 EOPC

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.
Key Learnings
When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work. 
Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency. 
"Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting."  (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it.
Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it.
Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it.
Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love. 
But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees.
The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences.
If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes. 
The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down.
Culture is just a series of experiences. 
Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior.
"If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation.  The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life.
The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team.
A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable.
The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time. 
A question for all leaders:  What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team?
The five sequential feelings of love:
Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? "
Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling."
Significance: "Do you know my story?"
Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?"
Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?"
If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go. 
Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years.
Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map.
We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.
Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience.
The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story.
The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held.
If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth.
The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them: 
How'd you feel about last week? 
What are you working on this week? 
How can I help? 
Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance.
Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it.
Reflection Questions
What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?"
Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human?
Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it?
Time stamps
00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro
02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company 
05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love? 
07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame 
12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love" 
15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior 
17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes 
21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings 
25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action 
29:50 How Do You Prove ROI? 
31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything 
32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences 
33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs 
35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing 
38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint 
39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?) 
40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?) 
43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences 
47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth 
53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins 
57:37 EOPC

More Learning
#467: Marcus Buckingham - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked
#305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall - A Leader's Guide to the Real World
#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)

Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My Guest: Nir Eyal is a Stanford lecturer, behavioral designer, and bestselling author who has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. He's one of the most rigorous thinkers alive on why people do what they do, and what it actually takes to change.
Notes
Julie introduced Nir to the Turnaround technique. Nir and Julie met the first week of college in 1997 and have been married since 2001. A big part of the genesis of Beyond Belief came from Julie introducing Nir to this technique called The Turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie, that she used with her mother to repair the relationship she had with her mom.
A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. It does that by creating short-term relief from discomfort. "I hate public speaking, I'm no good at public speaking, so I'm going to avoid public speaking." You reduce your motivation to go on stage, providing yourself temporary relief, but long-term suffering.
The Turnaround helps you collect a portfolio of perspectives. The problem is that our minds hate changing beliefs. We use these beliefs to justify passivity. A turnaround helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs, and then you can choose the ones that serve you versus the ones that hurt you.
Your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second. Your brain is processing 11 million bits of information (the sound of a voice, light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room). Your conscious mind is not aware of all this. Your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.00045% of the information that's coming in.
The brain sees reality through a tiny pinhole of attention. It's the difference between reading a simple sentence or War and Peace twice every second. In order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality you're actually consciously aware of.
The brain makes predictions based on our beliefs. How does the brain make sense of all this information? It has to make predictions, and those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predictive processing. Everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief.
The three powers of belief:
The power of attention changes what you see
The power of anticipation changes how you feel
The power of agency changes what you do
Limiting beliefs hide themselves. A limiting belief, by definition, is hidden because we think that what we see is accurate. We all think that what we experience is a fact. "I saw it for myself. I'm stating my truth. This is the way things are." But that's not true at all. The way the brain processes information is woefully inadequate to put that burden of truth on it.
The Turnaround uses four questions to challenge limiting beliefs. 
Is it true?
Is it 100% absolutely true?
Who am I when I hold onto this belief?
Who would I be without this belief?
Nir's story: "My mother is too judgmental and hard to please." Nir sent his mom flowers for her 74th birthday. She said, "Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead. Don't order from that florist again." Nir instantly became his 13-year-old self and blurted out, "Well, that's the last time I order you flowers again."
Venting is terrible. It does nothing but reinforce your beliefs about people because not only do we not see reality clearly, we certainly don't see other people clearly. We see our beliefs about people. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.
The Turnaround opened up new possibilities for Nir. In 30 seconds, he determined: (1) that belief may not be true, (2) it doesn't really serve him, and (3) there might be a better way to be. He could actually be happier without that belief.
The brain hates changing its mind. The turnaround asks you to look at the diametric opposite of your belief. We have a psychological immune system. Just like if you get a splinter in your finger, your body will mount an immune defense. The same happens in our minds. The more you feel "that's crazy, I don't wanna think that way, that can't be true," the more you need to explore it.
Nir found four beliefs instead of one:
My mother is too judgmental and hard to please
My mother is NOT too judgmental and hard to please (maybe she was just conveying information)
I am too judgmental and hard to please (I had rehearsed a script of effusive praise I wanted)
I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself (I felt incompetent that the flowers didn't work out)
"Beliefs are tools, not truths." This is the most important thing Nir can convey. Which one of those four beliefs is true? All of them. None of them. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths.
Facts, faith, and beliefs are three different things. 
A fact is an objective truth about reality. It is so whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That is an objective fact. 
Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. 
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.
Most problems come from thinking faith is a fact. Too many people think that their faith is a fact, and the things they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs, which are changeable. That's where most of our problems come from: interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems.
The original belief left Nir powerless. "My mom is too judgmental and hard to please" only has one way out: she has to change so I could be happy. Good luck. The other three beliefs, Nir could do something about. They were in his control. That enabled him. It freed him. It was liberating.
Misattribution of emotion: hurt people hurt people. When we feel bad inside, if you've ever been bullied or been a bully yourself, this is always what happens. When you feel crappy on the inside, the first person you can find, you're going to punch him in the face, either physically or verbally, because you feel crappy. That's what Nir did to his mom because he felt bad. So now she should feel bad.
How to handle narcissists: acknowledge they're operating with the best tools they have. That person is a narcissist? Awesome, because you don't have to be around them. But narcissists are operating from the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life, but how do you stop suffering because of them? Acknowledge they are, and reduce your suffering around them.
Nir called his mom and apologized. He said, "I'm so sorry for my behavior. I realize that you were trying to help me. You were conveying information about the flowers, so I wouldn't order from that florist. Thank you for that." That call completely changed their relationship.
We expect people to change, but we can't even change ourselves. We can't do the simplest habits like eating better, exercising more, and managing our time. Why are we expecting other people to change?
"Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt." When Nir's daughter was born, and he held her for the first time, he felt overwhelming adoration. Five minutes ago, she didn't exist, and now he loved her more than anything. He gave her complete, total benefit of the doubt. Why? She didn't do anything. She never sent him flowers. Babies poop, they need food all the time, they cry. But he never said, "she's crying to annoy me." We give babies the ultimate benefit of the doubt.
Why don't we give adults the benefit of the doubt? When those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, those are the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to be with them or include them in your life. The requirement is: how do you figure out how to stop suffering, to be at peace?
We're constantly judging everything. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. Judging, judging, judging all day long. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Expecting things to be different than they are. These are all limiting beliefs, and all they do is make us suffer.
"We don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems." The problem is your belief that something should be different from what it is. It's like asking Nir's daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. What am I expecting? She doesn't have that ability. Why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations?
Nir and Julie now collaborate instead of argue. Since they started using the Turnaround technique, they used to have disagreements. Now they collaborate. If there's a very smart person, much smarter than Nir, who has an opinion, who he respects deeply and loves and admires, why would he fight with that person? He would collaborate with that person.
Different perspectives are an asset to collect. If Nir sees things one way and Julie sees them differently, that's amazing. A new perspective. It's like collecting Pokémon cards. You've gotta get 'em all. Now with more perspectives, he can pick the best one.
Writing sessions with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson. Nir would work on his own and get distracted. But when he had other authors around him, they would sit down, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break. They'd do that for three hours every morning. Not only is it inspiring, it keeps you on track.
Find a focus friend. Somebody you can go to a coffee shop with and say, "I really need to focus. Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other." Just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on keeps you accountable.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Sometimes it can be tricky to be in a room with people who are super successful. Nir was the least successful author there at the time. You have to put it in perspective and know it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. The best thing you can do is do the work.
Time boxing is better than to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity because there's no constraint. You can always add more things to a to-do list. You come home from work every day and say, "I still have all these things I haven't done on my to-do list." 
A time box calendar is the most well-researched time management technique. What's much more effective than a to-do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention. The goal now becomes not to finish anything. The goal is to work on that task for as long as you said you would without distraction.
Make time to do the work, to turn your values into time. That's the secret to avoiding comparison. You put in the time to do the work. When you have it on your calendar, the goal is doing the work, not finishing the work.
Lucky people literally see reality differently. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took on average two and a half minutes. The lucky people took 11 seconds. Why? On page two, one of the images said in big, bold text, "There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize." The unlucky people never saw it. Their brains took in the information, but it never became part of their conscious awareness.
Entrepreneurs see $100 bills on the ground when everybody's walking over them. That is driven by beliefs. You believe you can will things to change. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, talked about his reality distortion field. That's exactly what this is. Entrepreneurs tend to be way more optimistic. They believe that lucky things happen to them, and so they see opportunities.
"With our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful, sunny day." So many people say "with my luck" and follow it with something bad or negative. This belief and mindset of saying "with our luck" followed by something extremely positive is contagious and enjoyable.
"Everything good happens to us." Nir's family says this whenever something good happens. There's no line at the TSA. "Everything good happens to us." The food was good. "Everything good happens to us." Little things, big things. Do more good things happen to them than bad things? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. When you believe those things, you notice them more. Your life actually does seem magical, blessed, like you're always lucky.
60% of opportunities are provoked luck. They studied super successful entrepreneurs and VCs and found that 60% of their opportunities provoked luck. They provoked the lucky thing that happened. How? Something as simple as sending a note of gratitude. Never hold back on a compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them.
Thank you notes create provoked luck. Tina Seelig writes thank you notes compulsively. She wrote a thank you note to somebody. The thank-you note landed on someone's desk. You're sitting at your desk with things to do, and here's a thank you note, and to the right is your laptop with an email about a new opportunity. Who is going to get the call about that opportunity? You're top of mind. "Ryan's such a nice guy. He sent me that note. I'm going to call Ryan about that opportunity."
Changing Nir's relationship with his mom changed his relationship with his daughter. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. When Nir started giving his daughter the benefit of the doubt, it pushed him to figure it out with his mom because he needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as he would want his daughter to give him the same. He's doing his best. He's not perfect. He makes mistakes. Those are the tools he's got. 
You go from loving your kid to liking them. Nir and his daughter went skiing together for his birthday. The entire three hour car ride up, the entire three-hour car ride back, they were chatting. They wrote an article together in the car. You always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born, you love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer.
Reflection Questions
What limiting belief are you holding onto where someone else has to change? What are three other ways to look at that same situation that would put the control back in your hands?
Are you treating your beliefs like facts or like tools? Which beliefs are you holding because they're true, and which ones are you holding because they serve you?
Who in your life are you not giving the benefit of the doubt? What would change if you gave them some grace?
More Learning:
#554 - Tim Urban: Become a High Rung Thinker
#342 - Shane Snow: The #1 Leadership Skill is Intellectual Humility
#596 - Arthur Brooks: The Art & Science of Happiness 
Podcast Chapters
02:19 Julie Introduced Nir to The Turnaround 
04:28 Limiting Beliefs: How They Sap Motivation 
07:51 Your Brain Filters 99.99% of Reality 
10:17 The Flower Story: When Nir Became His 13-Year-Old Self 
12:41 The Four Questions That Change Everything 
15:25 Finding Four Beliefs Instead of One 
19:08 Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths 
22:52 Narcissists Are Using Their Best Tools 
27:53 Focus Friends: Writing with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson 
31:09 Comparison Is the Thief of Joy 
32:04 Time Boxing Beats To-Do Lists 
35:04 We Don't Have Relationship Problems, We Have Belief Problems 
35:59 Why Nir and Julie Don't Fight Anymore 
38:25 Explaining Worlds vs Changing People 
42:03 You Can't Write Clearly If You Can't Think Clearly 
43:23 Lucky People See $100 Bills on the Ground 
46:29 "With Our Luck, It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Day" 
49:38 Thank You Notes Create Provoked Luck 
52:42 From Loving Your Kid to Liking Them 
56:16 EOPC

My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear.
Notes:
Key Learnings
"Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life.
What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something."  He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about.
When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is.
Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into.
"Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments.
Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment. 
Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment."
Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad alongside a community, but then after a measure of time, that's when you say, okay, now how do we grow from this? How do we use this to compel us forward?
Be thankful for the tough moments. Will can look back at every tough moment with gratitude. The girl who broke his heart two years before he met his now wife, he's so grateful that she did. Breaking up with his business partner and selling his restaurant company felt like the worst thing ever, but he wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened.
"Who is a restaurateur without restaurants?" COVID forced Will to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next. When he sold the company, two days later, he had a full-blown identity crisis. COVID gave him the gift of forcing him to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing he'd always done.
Team first. "The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team." This is what Will learned from Danny Meyer.
The power of language to define a culture. How beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your values through language. Danny spoke in "isms." Every time he gave them an ism, it was clear that thing mattered to him, so it needed to matter to the team as well.
Cult is short for culture. Will's friends from college joked that he worked for a cult, but cult is short for culture. The funny thing is, they worked for companies that lacked a culture. Every great team feels a little cultish, and that's because of the leader.
Hospitality is the advantage. The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. Every company is trying to identify its competitive advantage: what is the thing about the business that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking away its customers? Those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. Here's the thing: it does not just matter how good the product is, and it does not just matter how strong the brand is, because eventually someone's going to come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand.
Relationships matter. Hospitality comes through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you will earn takes a very long time to erode.
McDonald's vs. Chick-fil-A. The hospitality difference. McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. Their product is consistent, and there was probably a season for a very long time where they were the best burger chain out there. Compare that to Chick-fil-A: if you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, a lot of people would say other people make better chicken sandwiches than Chick-fil-A. But people are still loyal to Chick-fil-A, not because of the brand, not because of the product, but because of the way that they make people feel.
Little gestures go a long way. Chick-fil-A does things like "my pleasure" and refilling your drinks in the dining room. These little gestures go a long way because we are much less likely to leave one company and go to another, even if the other company is better priced and the product is a little bit better.
Food is just a conduit through which to express hospitality. As many stories as you hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, you don't hear those stories about McDonald's. And that's not an accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not. If you're in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in an endless way.
Find the smallest touchpoints. Every experience you're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints. The problem is so many companies focus on only the most obvious touchpoints without realizing that there is impact to be made with each one of them. 
Hospitality is a craft, a muscle that you can strengthen. Will created the Welcome Conference because he wanted someone who was a server at a restaurant who had dreams to own their own restaurant to have a place where they could learn about the craft of hospitality.
What you can't afford to do with money, you can afford to do with time. Will can't afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on stage at his conference deserve, so he came up with a more creative way to show appreciation: a dinner the night before. It's about community, because the people who take that stage have the responsibility to create the conditions through which attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form a community for others until you first feel a sense of community amongst yourselves.
There needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. Will created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and he was always the only dining room person speaking at them. He wanted a place for the dining room people to have community.
Gift bags are a terrible idea. People think the more they put in the bag, the more hospitable they are. It's usually junk.
"I look at something, design the version of that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then welcome others into my imagination." 
What makes a great conference is meeting the people at those events. The best events are about the people in between the meetings. That time matters.
Energy in a room is so important. Will is one of the most extroverted people in the world, but if he walks into a cocktail party and he doesn't know anyone, he seizes up. He doesn't like it. He likes to be around people he knows.
Be a connector. A month before Will's event, he realized many people were coming alone, which he wasn't expecting. They sent an email to all of them and said, "We saw that you're coming alone. We have an idea. If you'd like to meet some people, let us know." They set up dinner reservations at Will's favorite restaurants in Nashville and did some matchmaking. Those 40 people ended up coming into the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big, awesome community.
Make the "yes" as easy as possible.  Will gets Emmy screeners, and some people send DVDs (which he doesn't have a player for), while others send QR codes, which make it very easy to watch. The lesson: make it easy for people to say yes to what you're offering.
Shop your own business. Stay in your own hotel. Until you've actually been on the receiving end of whatever you're serving, you have an inability to see all the things you're doing wrong or the opportunities you have to do more things right.
"Never let a gracious impulse pass." There's the devil and angel on your shoulder. The devil will tell you how hard it will be. Don't listen to that. If you are going to shop your own business, when an idea pops up, do something about it. Get out of the sea of mediocrity.
The Unreasonable Hospitality Guide is the "how." There are exercises on how to build a team, how to build a culture of hospitality, how to work with your team to create magic, daily huddles to move the needle, the dreamweaver concept, etc.
"I've never once regretted caring more. I have regretted not caring enough." People can't always notice things, but they can feel it.
Reflection Questions
What are you obsessed with? If you had to retire tomorrow, what hobby would you fall into? If you don't have one, what can you start becoming obsessed with now?
What adversity are you currently facing? Have you allowed yourself and your team to fully feel the weight of that disappointment before shifting into problem-solving mode?
Map out every single touchpoint in your customer experience. Which ones is nobody else thinking about? How can you make those more awesome?
More Learning
#545 - Will Guidara: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
#372 - Will Guidara: The Nobility of Service
Podcast Chapters
01:00 The Price of Becoming
02:16 The Correlation of Obsession and Excellence
08:06 Adversity Is Fuel
11:38 COVID Identity Reset
15:19 Lessons From Danny Meyer
20:36 The Hospitality Advantage
26:01 Touchpoint Experience Audit
28:55 Welcome Conference Preview
30:44 Creating Community Over Dinner
32:02 Creating A Magical Event 
33:35 Why Events Must Exist
35:30 Designing Hospitable Touchpoints
40:42 Make It Easy To Say Yes
45:58 Never Let a Gracious Impulse Pass
47:29 Unreasonable Hospitality Field Guide: The How To
51:20 Obsession, Care, And Excellence
55:53 EOPC