Perry Maughmer

Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. And I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're going to talk about the most important battle we'll ever fight. And that is the one within. I truly believe the most important thing we'll ever do is figure out how we win that battle. And I don't know that now that I've said win, I don't know that it's win. But how do we continually. Challenge ourselves. How do we understand how we are the ones holding us back? Now, it's it's hard because we often think we're acting in our own best interests. But I don't think we realize the challenges involved in effectively managing our behavior and making sure that we're doing things that align with putting ourselves in the best position to achieve our goals. And here's why. Because as a human. The number one thing. The one number one thing that drives our behavior is we act in a way that's going to relieve discomfort. Right. And by the way, aspirational goals create tremendous discomfort because it's making us think about behaving in a different way. And the reason for that is if we were behaving in a way that would enable us to reach our goals, we would already have the stuff we're thinking about. We would already be the person that we're thinking about, and we're not. None of us are. We're always a work in progress. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And we shouldn't we shouldn't judge ourselves.

Perry Maughmer

There's going to be and I have an opinion about this because as you can imagine, I, I truly believe that the more we want, if we want to, if we want to love, if we want to learn and we want to lead, we can't judge. Because judging prevents all of those things. I can't judge and learn at the same time. And I attribute that because I you know, I work with a bunch of different folks and organizations that are that run organizations, their senior managers, whatever you want to call them. And we read books sometimes as a group. And so it's very interesting to sit and listen to them, give me feedback about what they took away from a book. And most of the time, and it works the same way with speakers as well. Most of the time what I hear is all the things they didn't agree with in the book. And so what it tells me is, is they're spending most of the time judging what they're reading immediately. Now, I think we all do this all day, every day. We do it when we're talking to people. We do it when we're watching a show. We do it when we're reading something. We do it all day long. We judge almost instantaneously because we're trying to figure out what to do with something. So is it good? Is it bad? Is it right? Is it wrong? Right.

Perry Maughmer

We're judging. We have to be able to turn that off. For our own best interest. Now, if we accept. If we accept there's a variance in who we are and who we wish to be. And then we have to learn to live with that discomfort that that dissonance is going to create. And that's a challenge because it takes energy. It takes energy from us to be okay with that. And tonight, to not go to a place to ease the discomfort. Now, what I'll tell you is changing this behavior, doing the fighting, this battle from within is really about getting out of a rut. And it's it's interesting because, you know, I came from a rural area. And if you think about this, there's no better example of how this impacts us than and how it how hard it is than to this. If you ever have ever driven a vehicle in a rut. Then you don't. If the ruts deep enough, you don't have to steer. You can take your hands off the wheel and it's going to go wherever the rut goes. But if I really want to get out of that rut, I have to do two things. I have to exert energy to get the wheels out of the rut, and then I have to hold them out of the rut. Those are two separate activities that require two different types of energy.

Perry Maughmer

Because getting out of the rut could be easy holding it because that's a one time thing, right? So I've done that. Now I have to exert constant tension to keep myself out of the rut. It's the exact same thing that happens with our behavior. We're not, by the way, we're not fixed as from a personality standpoint, we're not We tend to think this thing about being authentic, which I think is a cop out. Right? There is no authentic you. The authentic you is the one you create. And you create that on your own. If you don't, all of us as adults, we got to a point where we've developed certain mechanisms, certain traits, certain behaviors that are easy for us to exhibit with. No. Energy. That's it. And so that's what we're really fighting and struggling against, is that perception that there is somehow an authentic self and there isn't. There's only the self we've created. Now the challenge is, is that when we didn't really create that because it was formed right around the time we were in our mid to late teens, we kind of got to that point. And so not many of us had a not many of us chose at that point. You know, we it's based on how we were raised. It can be based on a multitude of things early work, education, family, religion, take your pick all the things that that impacted you from a growth standpoint.

Perry Maughmer

And at some point in your middle to late teens, you were fully baked. Right. And then we just settled in and that's who we were, you know, And many of us can look back and, you know, when your when you were growing up, you know, that was you were that person. You were that person. And even through college or through early parts of your work, you were you were told you were a certain type of person. That's not true. It is true that that's how you behave. But it's not true that that's who you were destined to be. It's who. It's how you were acted upon by outside forces and then an equal amount of how, you know, nurture versus nature. But it isn't hardwired. You're not hardwired to be a certain way. And the question becomes, are you willing to fight that battle? Like, do you want to fight that battle? And if you do, that's awesome. Again, I don't judge. If you don't, that's fine too. I just want people to own the opportunity. I want you to own the opportunity to change if you want to. And changing from our past self, you know, is linear and incremental. We're changing into our future. Self is transformational. If we allow if we think about the future self, then that can become transformational. Because here's the here's what's interesting is if we look at our past and judge and project that into the future, it's always going to be incremental because of the amount of effort we envision it's going to take to do it.

Perry Maughmer

The funny thing is, most of us, if I ask you. To think about. It's really hard to do. But if I ask you to think about ten years ago. And if you would have thought you would be doing what you're doing now ten years ago. Would you have forecasted it accurately? Would you have thought you could ever have achieved the things you've achieved in the last ten years? If I asked you ten years ago, in most of us, if we did, it honestly would say no. We would never have thought we could have achieved in the last ten years we would have ever done the things we have done over ten years if we would have thought about it back then. And so think about it. Think about the same thing going forward. Right. We have to stop letting our past define our future. We have to let our future define our present. Now, here's another piece of this is we cannot change the events in our past, but we can change what they mean. To us and we should actively. Because what they mean to us isn't fixed. The event happened. There's no way around changing certain events that happen. But we can change what they mean to us and how we take that into the future.

Perry Maughmer

Again, this is all the context around the most important battle we're ever going to fight is the one we fight within ourselves. We can lay the groundwork. We define the rules. We define the rules of engagement, as it were. Everything is completely. Let's say. Up for interpretation. There are no objective events. There's only how we think of them. It isn't the load that breaks you. It's how you carry it. And so if we view things differently, we change what they mean to us, which changes our capacity in the future. And that's what's really empowering about all this. We can't change what happened. We can't even change what we did. We can't change what it meant to us. Which essentially changes what we can do in the future. And we never there's there's something a guy named Rick Snyder came up with something called hope theory. And there's and so hopeful thinkers are people who are able to establish clear goals. Imagine workable pathways and persevere even when obstacles get in the way. And there are three main things that make up hopeful thinking. One is goals. We think about what we want to be in the future. We think about making the world a better place in some way, shape or form. And then that leads to pathways, which is, you know, cognitive dissonance. Because when we start thinking about things in the future, our brain starts figuring out ways to make it happen.

Perry Maughmer

It finding its pathway thinking, which is finding different ways to achieve our goals. And then finally, agency. An agency from a psychological standpoint, is just believing in your own capacity to to instigate change and achieve your goals. It's it's believing you're capable of doing something. And that's really important. It's there's a term called self efficacy, and that's agency. And you'll see, I'm sure you know, people and maybe even you've been this person at some point in your life where you just didn't believe in your capacity to do it. You didn't believe you were capable. And so what does that mean? We do. If we if we don't know if we're capable, then we probably don't try. Because again, going back to we're going to avoid discomfort and having that conversation with ourselves in our head is uncomfortable. Right. It is uncomfortable too, to challenge yourself. It is uncomfortable to believe or to own up to the accountability that I'm sure you've heard the old saying. If it's to be, it's up to me. But to really internalize that and say, I'm capable of doing this, I'm capable of doing different. If I truly want this thing that's within my reach. And again, if you're five two and want to play in the NBA, that's something different. But if you want something different for yourself or those you care about, most of the time, it's well within your capacity to do.

Perry Maughmer

If you're willing to fight the battle. If you're willing to challenge that person in your head who wants to be comfortable, who doesn't want discomfort. Because no growth is comfortable. Growing, especially as an adult. Now, this is the really the killer thing is that as a kid, as a younger adult and as a kid, we loved learning new stuff. We would try I mean, just all you got to do is watch a kid that's three, 4 or 5 years old. They'll try something over and over and over again. Even even if they fall down, even if they skinned their knee and it doesn't matter, they're all over it. Like the world is completely new to them. So they have no no worry about failure. It doesn't register. It's like we go. It's like going from crawling to walking. It's transformational if you just never learn to walk and you just crawled faster, that's not going to work. You go from crawling to walking to running, and those are transformational changes. That nobody had to tell you how to do. By the way, those same transformational changes can happen as we get older. It just takes we have to get rid of our head trash. We have to get rid of the I can't in our head or there's a saying we shouldn't shit on ourselves. You know, I should do this.

Perry Maughmer

I should do that. No, you should. You shouldn't do any of those things. You have to talk to yourself in a way like you would talk to somebody else who you're trying to help. Now. I've always been I go back to hopeful thinking or hopeful the hope theory, because I've always one of my favorite sayings is hope is not a strategy. And I still believe that, but I believe it can lead to a strategy. Hope isn't a strategy, but it can lead to a strategy. Because if I'm hopeful. About the future, then I can I'll take steps to create the strategy to make that happen. If I'm not hopeful, if I have a dimmer view of the future, if I don't believe that it's possible, then what am I going to do? I'm going to stop. And then I'm going to get retrospective and think about the past only because that's all I have. I don't have the future now. The future is nothing that I want to think about. And so hope is not a strategy, but it can lead to a strategy if we allow it. But we have to have that foundation of hope because that's what drives that's what motivates us to do the difficult things we're going to need to do. Now, we also need three other things. In my opinion. We need cognitive flexibility. We need psychological flexibility, and we need emotional regulation.

Perry Maughmer

All right. Cognitive flexibility is a readiness. To selectively switch between mental processes to generate appropriate behavioral responses. We have to be able to change our way of thinking. It is an easier way to say it. So cognitive flexibility, you have to change the way we think. We have to be willing to switch between mental processes because the way we thought to get us here is not the same thinking that's going to get us there. We have to fundamentally think differently. And then psychological flexibility is also they refer to it also as emotional agility. So psychological flexibility and emotional agility is the ability to stay in contact with the present moment regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings and body sensations, while choosing one's behavior based on the situation and personal values. Again, I can I can stay in contact with the present moment regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings and body sensations. So. So if I get upset or angry or any of those things or unpleasant thoughts hit my head, I can stay in contact with the present moment. I can stay focused even if it doesn't feel good. I can stay focused. And that's a that's something we can work on, most of us. It's a challenge because once we start, if we have unpleasant thoughts or feelings or bodily sensations, we lose our contact with the present moment. And then finally, emotional regulation. And what that means is we have a way to think about our emotions in a way that's positive.

Perry Maughmer

And so there's there's basically two categories. One is reappraisal, the other suppression. Suppression doesn't really suppression usually linked to negative outcomes. So I'm going to ignore my emotions. That's never a good thing. Reappraisal is changing how you think about it. Think about the thing that prompted the emotion in order to change your response. Right. So I feel something and I think about, well, what happened that prompted that emotion and that I can change my response that way. And the way I look at this is you go one layer down. Emotional regulation is. I feel angry. I don't react to the anger. I think about what made me angry in that situation and address that. Right. So what I want to figure out is what made me angry. What did that person say or do that that spurred that emotion in me? Let's talk about that. Let's not let's not respond angrily. That's emotional regulation. I have to be I have to be in touch with my emotions. I have to look at them for what they are, which is a positive indicator. And I just use the term positive because it doesn't matter which way they're positive all the way because they tell me something's up. I don't choose my emotions. I choose how I react to those emotions. That's emotional regulation. But all of those things, cognitive and psychological flexibility and emotional regulation require an awareness.

Perry Maughmer

That we have to have about ourselves and thinking objectively about who we are and what we do. And we have to be willing this battle. We fight with ourselves. We have to be willing to let go of a previous identity to form a new one. That's tough. Because there's a lot of discomfort there. Going back to something called the consistency principle. We get this mindset that we are these the set of beliefs and behaviors and that's who we are. And that's not who we are. That's who it's easy easiest for us to be. That's different. Those are very different things. And if the person you that is easiest for you to be right now is getting you all the things that matter to you and those you care about and it's serving everybody perfectly and you can't imagine having you can't imagine your life being better. Change nothing. If you imagine there is an opportunity for it to be different. And again, I use the term different instead of better or worse. I don't necessarily like to judge things, but if there's a way for it to be different, that aligns with what you believe about the future for you and those you care about, then you have the capacity to do it differently. You can evolve into that future self for yourself. Takes energy. It's not fun. But you can do it.

Perry Maughmer

You most certainly can do it. There's lots of people that have. Now, what you're going to need is you're going to need space. Right. You need to create space for thinking and stop constantly doing stuff. In. Just remember, and this is a tough one. Lessons will be repeated until they are learned. Lessons will be repeated until they're learned. And we struggle with this. And then we blame external circumstances in order to alleviate our discomfort at the lesson. But just think about in your life. What lessons have you revisited? Those are the things where your pain is, is where the opportunity is. Where your where your discomfort is is your task. Just remember that where your discomfort is, where your pain is, is your task because lessons will be repeated until they're learned. That's the way it works. So we're getting the messages. I mean, we get that we just sometimes don't pay attention and then we want to blame external circumstances, but we can't give up that. We cannot give up that power. We have to create space to slow down. We have to create space to think. And that means we have to stop doing so much. But we in today's world, we take such pride in being busy and tired. Right. You ask people all the time. I mean, just. I want you to count. In the next week. Just keep a running count of when you ask somebody, How are you? How many people say, Well, I'm busy.

Perry Maughmer

I'm busy. And really it's it's kind of novocaine that we use because if we're busy and tired, then we can we can convince ourselves we're working hard, which, by the way, we probably are. But that's the difference between. Being efficient and effective or working hard. And just think about this. When you see a mouse or you see a hamster on a wheel, they're they're working hard. They're busy, they're running, they're tired. At the end, they can get off. They're they're tired just like we are. But they didn't get anywhere. They're still on that wheel. I think it's Lily Tomlin. It was funny. I think she said that the problem with the rat race is even if you win, you're still a rat. And so think about what do you want to be on? Do you want to be on the wheel? Are you okay with. And if you are, again, I don't care. It's no judgment involved. But you have the capacity to contribute to your world. You have the capacity to contribute to your family and those you care about and your friends and your society and your church and your organization and your community. You have a chance to contribute something unique. But it takes effort. Takes focus. It takes energy, and we're missing it. We want what you have to offer. We need what you have to offer.

Perry Maughmer

All those all those groups that I talked about, your community, your church, your family, your friends, your organization, take your pick any and all of those they need you to be the very best you can be. Only you know what that is. Only you know what you're capable of and only you can make it happen. Nobody else. Nobody's stopping you. Nobody can make you. We're all focused on fighting the same battle. But we can't be constrained. We can't. We can't be constrained by the future self that was created by our past self. We have to accept that our future self just is just a draft that can be iterated upon. Whoever we think we can be today is just step one because. Six months from now. My hope, my wish, my prayer for everybody listening is that you're so much further ahead, because now not only are you move six months forward, but now you're you're envisioning something different than you were six months ago that that that that vision of yourself is now iterating. And you're looking at the ground that you gained, not what you have left to gain. We're always we should always measure backwards. Look at how far you've come, not how far you need to go. Because that's where joy is. Joy is taking that breath, looking at what you've done and using that as a springboard for the future. If you want a different future, then you have to think and act differently in the present.

Perry Maughmer

And had a member of one of my groups said one time it was very insightful. He said he told his team he's like, whatever problems we're facing now today were created 12 months ago by decisions we made. And so if we want to have a different place in 12 months from now, we have to make different decisions today. And that's what we're doing. We create our future by our decisions today. And so whatever. Just think clearly about what future you want and then work backwards and figure out what you have to do today to create that future. And then always be revisiting that and iterating on that. It's never done. I mean, we're never going to relax if you want a life of meaning. There's nothing wrong with that. You always want a constant tension in your life. You always want a future to look to. Because again, if you don't have a future that's compelling for you, then you turn around and look backwards and then essentially you just start to decay and wither. Right. If I don't have anything to move forward to, I'm only going to move backwards. I can't stay in the present. I can't. I can't stay in a spot in stasis. It doesn't work in our world. We can be present. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying you can't stay in the present.

Perry Maughmer

The present is fleeting. If I'm not looking towards the future and allowing that to inform my behavior now, then I'm looking in my past and that's informing my behavior. It's like a gravitational pull. I'm being pulled back into the past. All my conversations are about the past, not the future. Doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter what stage of your career you're in, you should always look to the future. What are you going to do tomorrow? What can you contribute? That's again, where we are. That's how we make a better world for those we care about. And remember, we need what you have to offer, but only you can figure that out. Nobody can make you. Nobody can stop you. Just remember that saying, If you remember nothing else about this episode, nobody can make you. Nobody can stop you. Don't give up that power. Don't give up that authority. Don't give up that opportunity. We need what you have, but only you can do it. Nobody can stop you and nobody can make you. So the question becomes, what are you willing to do? Are you willing to make that future self a reality? And make it a better world for those you care about. That's what we want. That's what all of us want. And it's within our reach to do it. In the meantime, take care of yourself. And take care of those around you. And I'll see you back in the lab soon.