One of the things I love about being an executive coach and organizational consultant is how creative I get to be and how many different things I get to try.

Every year, at least 10 or 20 pretty significant books on related topics get published. They talk about personal performance, about how to get people to change, how to get teams to become more effective, and how to get organizational culture to shift.

Helping clients navigate change is definitely fun, but it can also feel like an infinite candy shop. It's hard to choose a single approach as the right one, and hard to combine a bunch of different approaches into anything resembling a coherent strategy and action plan.

And the truth is, when you look at the field of consulting and coaching, we don't have a great track record.

As in, there's a lot of stuff that people do that seems nice—and just doesn't work.

I remember when I first went back to graduate school for public health. I had this naive idea that anything that had a good message was good. So I thought that DARE—Drug Abuse Resistance Education; the drug education program where police would come into the community and tell kids not to do drugs—was great.

And then I started looking at the research that DARE just didn't work. The kids who went through DARE were using drugs at least as much as kids who'd never been exposed to it.

And then I started looking at abstinence-based sex education and realizing that there were more teen pregnancies there than in communities where kids were taught how to use birth control and how to talk to each other about sexuality and sex.

Stuff that seemed like it was obvious, wasn't.

Those revelatiopns made me realize how badly we need science in the social sciences to inform what we do.

And that is all by way of teeing up today's guest, Dr. Richard Boyatzis, who's written a book called The Science of Change.

It's a guide for changemakers, for practitioners, for scholars, for academics, for community organizers, for honorable politicians, and for activists.

It explores key questions relating to how we bring about change.

What's the recipe? What are the intructions. What are the key elements, and what are the tipping points to pay attention to?

In other words, how do we put it all together and lead change effectively and not just creatively and heartfeltly.

It's not an easy book. But it's for you if you really want to understand how to create change the most micro level—the personal—and in concentric rings outward, to the familial, communal, societal, and national levels.

Links

The Science of Change, by Richard E Boyatzis

Helping People Change, by Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith, and Ellen van Oosten

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, by Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin

You Can Change Other People, by Peter Bregman and Dr Howie Jacobson

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Start with Why, by Simon Sinek

This is What It Sounds Like, by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

One of the things I love about being an executive coach, an organizational consultant is how creative I get to be and how many different things I get to try because, every year there's like 10 or 20 pretty significant books written by people about this and that and how to do this and how to get people to change and how to get teams to grow and how to get organizational culture to shift. And.

It's fun, but it can also feel like an infinite candy shop. You really don't know what to do. And the truth is, when you look at the field of consulting and coaching.

We don't have a great track record. Like there's a lot of stuff that people do that seems nice and just doesn't work. I remember when I first went back to graduate school for public health and I had this naive idea that anything that had a good message was good. So I thought, dare the drug education program where police would come into the community and tell kids like, don't do drugs. Well, that's got to be great. And then I started looking at the research that communities that had dare had worse drug problems than communities

that never had that or had alternate approaches. And then I started looking at abstinence based sex education and realizing that there were more teen pregnancies there than in communities where kids were taught how to use birth control and how to talk to each other about sexuality and sex and like all this stuff. Well, it just seems like it should work, but it wasn't.

And so it made me realize how badly we need science in the social sciences to inform what we do. And that is all by way of teeing up today's guest, Dr. Richard Boyatzis, who's written a book called The Science of Change that really is that it is a guide for changemakers, for practitioners, for scholars, for academics, activists about how we bring about change and what are the key elements? What are the

the tipping points, what are the different strategies that apply at different times and places and how do we put it all together and lead change effectively and not just creatively and heartfelt Lee. So it's not an easy book. There are some chapters that are easier than others. But this is for you if you really want to understand what we know.

about how to create change on a micro level and on societal and even international levels as well. So without further ado.

Dr. Richard Boyatzis, welcome to the Plant Yourself podcast. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I want to talk about your latest book, The Science of Change. And so one of the things that's made me realize is that I don't trust most of the other books that I have read about management, self-improvement, leadership, because they're such a small slice of the research.

And you have a research pedigree going back 50, 60 years. So I wondered if you could just like tell me, I being too harsh on like, you know, the popular bestselling books? Am I right? How are you being too gentle? Because I would I would venture to say probably the vast majority, maybe 80 percent of the publications and people who give talks are based on other people's research, not even their own.

Now, are they interpreting the research and reporting it correctly? No. I mean, one of the things I go over in chapter six is a lot of people in talking about changing have repeated the 10,000 hour rule of practice. Well, that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, who was a terrific writer. I read all of his books. I happen to be reading

the original study that he built that whole chapter on, because it was one major study. And then there have been some subsequent things, but that was the one that talked about the 10,000 hours. And it turns out that the 10,000 hours was what it took to become an international award-winning concert pianist. I mean, it's not the kind of stuff that you and I would normally want to change on.

like having a better work-life balance or being healthier or something like that. Secondly, a huge amount of the data came from people recalling how much they had practiced from their teens onward, which has at minimum from one study at 15 % to 20 % inflation and everything. So it's not to say you don't have to practice a lot to change something. Of course you do. But is it 5,000 hours? Is it two and a half thousand hours? We really don't know.

But the 10,000 hours, I think is an example of what I'd call a marketing or popularization that diverges from what the actual research said. That's one issue. The second issue is a lot of people have a great experience. my God, I had this transformative, you know, meditation retreat and the, you know, meditation helps me heal and feel great. And I've, you know, read a few things in newsletters about how

healing it is now all of a sudden this person becomes an ambassador for meditation, which, you know, I used to teach people to meditate in the seventies when I was treating alcoholics and drug addicts and not meditated on and off throughout my life. And the results are very strong and clear, but how many people go about proselytizing without being careful about the research and saying, you know,

when can it be too much? I remember making the point to the patients I was treating in the seventies that if they stopped drinking or stopped taking heroin and all of sudden exercise six hours a day, they're just trading addictions. They're actually not getting better. And so I think you are understating the importance. And the reason why I decided, even though my last four books,

I mean, my first five were research books. The last four were practitioners oriented. This one was for scholars and what I call advanced professionals, people who give a damn about the difference between hype versus what do we know or, and what do we don't know? Because, you know, they, all of these fields of change are filled with

people getting carried away. Well, this is the experience I had at X or, you know, I saved this city's education. So therefore I'm going to talk about how to change whole countries. So whether we're talking about individual change or country level change, community organization in between, the problem is, you know, we need good science. Otherwise we don't have an intellectual integrity with what we're proselytizing. So thank you for noticing it.

both on the specifics, but also, in my case, on trying to tackle the whole range of sustained desire change at all levels. Nobody's done that before, actually. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the reasons I'm 40 % through the book, the moment when I should be 100. I should have been 100 % last week and be having conceptualized. But it's just, I mean, first of all, like I'm a practitioner. So I'm a coach and a facilitator and a trainer. You've just, you

made me throw out about two thirds of the interventions that I have been relying upon, not necessarily completely, but certainly they're not panaceas. like one of the things I keep getting every page is nuance about dosage, about timing, about context. So, for example, one of the things that's blowing me away is about like where the idea of smart goals came from.

reusable boosters for the moon base, earth station, space station and all that. And when I discovered psychology and got into it, it was around the issue of how do people help each other in particular, why did these really nerdy managers we had in this research unit? I mean, all of these two departments I worked in were all Sheldon's. were all anywhere from super smart to scary smart, but we were all weird.

There was one normal guy in two departments, but the two managers weren't. And therefore I was profoundly affected by this notion. Meanwhile, you know, having immigrant parents and living the whole immigrant experience in New York city and then in a working class neighborhood and then another one out on Long Island, it became very clear to me that people do change. And yet.

A lot of the time we spend with people that are supposed to be helping us, whether it's managers or therapists or teachers or whatever, isn't working very well. jump ahead. The one thing that became clear is you have to use complexity theory to understand the change process. Now, complexity theory, as we now call it back in the seventies, we call it catastrophe theory, basically claims

that change, human change, whether individual or in our collectives or in our family relationships is nonlinear and discontinuous. So you want to be more sensitive and interpersonally thoughtful, you're not going to make five minutes more eye contact each day. You you want to be less volume challenged, you're not going to lose a half a pound each day. Some days you're going to gain weight, some days you'll lose weight.

So that notion of discontinuity ends up being very important because as you say, I keep talking about rhythm and dosage because we have to be more patient. And when we're not patient with ourselves about how much we're changing, we actually feel guilty. We get depressed and stressed and we close down. Or, you know, you, I used to say,

You you go on a diet, you know, and the first day you're eating all, you know, the salads and this is, and that's, and staying away from all the white foods and all that. And you go home and you feel righteous. And the second day you kind of make it through, you know, like you're championing all this rabbit food. Third day, somebody at work does something which is really asinine and really pisses you off and makes you mad. So you go home.

And you don't say, let me have some lettuce. You say screw that. And you grab a glass of red wine, or in my case, you know, Ben and Jerry's chunky monkey ice cream or something. So the dilemma is when you have these discontinuous processes, what you want to do is figure out what occurs at the moments that it's called emergence. When one of these

positive indications of change occurring pops into your consciousness as a human. And that's where as a part of my theory, I have these two psychophysiological states called the positive and negative emotional attractor. They are three things happening at once. One, it's the difference between the hormonal nervous system of being in the sympathetic nervous system called stress.

or parasympathetic. And the example there is we all have a lot of stress in our lives. And in fact, it's annoying stress that really brings you down. Then occasionally something really acute like COVID, but the annoying stress is enough to make you compromised, cognitively, emotionally, and perceptually each day. And people who think, well, I'm going to help you lower your stress level. That's a fool's errand because what it means is okay.

You'll be impaired, but you'll only be mildly impaired. The medical research is very clear. These are antagonistic states. The only antidote to stress is to go into what I'm terming renewal. It's actually technically parasympathetic activation. Now, many of the things that you're involved in and you've championed over the years, like meditation, yoga, prayer, modest exercise, are things that have medically been shown to activate this.

parasympathetic process. The second dimension is a neural network. And there are thousands of them in our brains that are operating, but there are a number of them that are activated on a regular basis in a normal day at work and at home. And one of them is the task positive network that's activated when we have to solve a problem or make a decision. You know, do I want to eat Chinese or Italian tonight? That all the way to

How can I figure out how to get a larger audience for my podcast? Those are things that the task positive network helps us do. The other network that is very present a lot is called the default mode network. And that's the one that enables us to be open to a new idea or another person. These two networks are again, antagonistic. As soon as you activate one, you suppress the other. That's now been well established.

in neuroimaging studies and in a number of the fMRI studies I've done, because I've been working with one of the theoreticians and experimentalists in this theory of these opposing domains, Professor Tony Jack of Case Western Reserve University. And what happens is stress activates the task positive network. these two axes very often feed each other.

And then the third dimension is positive versus negative affect. So here's the point that you so graciously gave me the opening for, for my first eight hours talk, is that the positive emotional attractor is the state in which once you bring a person into it or you experience it, you're now open to new possibilities. You're actually open. I mean, if you're a client in a coaching relationship, you may actually listen to the coach.

Whereas most of the time, know, we're, you know, our minds are elsewhere. So not just in coaching, but in any kind of relationship. So the key is how do we, and there's so many things in life that bring us into the NEA, the negative emotional attractor for good reason, because we have to, we have to survive, but there are all these stresses around us all the time. It turns out that one of the things is activating the task positive network is thinking analytically. Now what,

So I've been at, and I've been training coaches since the early seventies. So I've been at this a long time, but you know, to get certified, you have to take these tests and submit these things. So I'm going to the test saying, remember what we thought good coaching was in the seventies. Remember what we thought good coaching was in seventies. So one of them is, and this is true of several of the certification programs, that you have to take the client's presentation to presenting issue as the context of the coaching session.

and you should articulate a specific goal for each session, nevertheless the relationship. Well, we now know from repeated studies that that does the opposite. That closes a person down perceptually. I literally they go from 180 degrees peripheral vision to 30. It it arouses a defensiveness. And then you say, you know, well, why do we do it? Because

But it turns out it doesn't at the beginning. If it's going to help, it's going to help about 80 % of the path into a coaching relationship. Because it's in here's the mechanism. As soon as you get specific about a problem or a goal, you activate this task positive network, which causes you to focus. Now that's the good part, because you're focusing and you get something done. The problem is you're now focused.

what about all the other stuff going on? And if you prematurely decided you know what the issue is, you've now eliminated the real issue. Or you're, as we used to say in more clinical work, you're treating the symptom, not the problem. So the dilemma is goal setting, specific goal setting or focusing on the problem has a place, but it's very far down the exploration of a helping relationship.

And that's something that it takes these FMRI studies and hormonal studies to be able to show. Sorry, I think I answered three of your questions all at once. anyway, yeah, no, it's and again, so I have always been trained to set, you know, we're always like, what's the goal? Where what are the objectives? What can we accomplish in this session after reading half of Chapter one?

of the science of change, I had a coaching call with a client and instead I just sort of like we kind of luxuriated in his vision of who he wanted to be. He's a startup entrepreneur viewing the startup as a as a practice grounds. First, it's very important to him, the startup, but he's also seeing it like this is how I practice becoming the person I want to become. I said, well, let's let's see what happens if we just luxuriate.

in the person he wants to become. And part of me was going, do I get paid for this? this feels like we're not, you know, I'm not on the assembly line like, you know, like Lucy and Ethel making wrapping candies. We're not we're not getting stuff done. But if and so I have to kind of reconceptualize like the coach. how did how did how did it feel by the time you got to the end of the session?

You know, it was so what we what we got to was he had this sort of renewed energy, this renewed connection with himself. You know, it felt like that this is this is like we refueled. Yeah, yeah. And that's the P.A. The NEA bite by practice deflates your internal energy source because you have to exercise emotional self-control and it's fatigue. You know, it's using up energy.

Well, these PEA moments or renewal moments reinflate that source of energy. But I think your example, Howie, is perfect because if you started out saying your goal of relationship and then even today's session is for me to help you make progress about this startup, you would have missed the fact that this startup is a part of a bigger issue for him. And that bigger issue

if you will, his strategy, his vision, his sense of purpose is the kind of person he wants to be. And he does it through not just one, but numerous startups. And that's a great illustration of if you'd gone down the usual path, you would have prematurely concluded something that wouldn't have been as powerful. So now as I'm bringing this in, I'm starting to think about, the

the dance and what's appropriate when because obviously I started to think when I read your previous co authored book, Helping People Change, I read it too quickly. And what I got was PEA good, NEA bad. And I have to go reread it because that's not what you said. That's right. That's right. But what I'm getting is it's sort of left foot, right foot in a certain sense. If you want to make progress, you absolutely need.

The NEA, you need to be able to focus to create goals to do hard things. But if that's the entire focus, then you are depleting yourself and you're running on fumes after a while. Well, what you're doing is exhausting the sustainability of the effort. mean, most people can work on something for a few weeks. But that's why I keep saying I'm working on sustained desired change.

Let's go back to this. I do this exercise in most of my speeches or even the webinars where I ask people to think of the people in their life who have helped them the most.

you know, think of a number of people. Then I asked them to think of a moment with them in which they learned something important. If I'm doing this live, I have them pair off and share a story with somebody. And then I ask them how it feels. I've done this exercise literally on all seven continents and about 65, 70 countries. And the human response is profound. They activate the PEA because they're activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Why? Because all of a sudden they're

thinking about somebody that cared for them and they feel gratitude. And it invokes a very primal emotion, like vision invokes hope. Goals invoke you testing whether or not you're getting there. the vision, so what we're saying is there are in coaching, there are two levers that we have now pinpointed through a whole series of research studies.

that are really powerful to help the client change. And we've got these longitudinal studies supporting that. One is aimed toward the vision, the client sense of purpose, not a short-term goal, because that's where the meaning is. The other is that aim toward having a, we call a resonant relationship, one where there is a degree of mutual caring. so, yes.

those things are absolutely crucial. And the challenge that we have is how do we do that when everything around us keeps saying, well, are you making progress? Are you making progress? Well, you know, it's like sometimes I remember when back in the nineties, when I started talking a lot about this with top executive groups around the power of vision, I remember them often, well, suppose I asked somebody what their dream is and the dream is not to work in my company.

You know? Yeah. And then my response is, well, they aren't now, you know, just because their body's showing up doesn't mean they're showing up. I think the engagement numbers tell us that. I mean, if 80 % of the people around the industrialized world who have full-time jobs aren't engaged in their work. And now we know 50 % are feeling stress over amounts of stress every day. And 20 % are feeling lonely every day at work. It's horrendous. You're going to tell me that people are going to work feeling

know, the joy of life and their excitement? No. So as you started now, I look forward to you getting to chapters seven and eight, because that's where I talk about the quality of relationships in the science of change. And I use a phrase in opening chapter seven that relationships are the agar-agar and the Petri dish of life. It's the context for everything. And if your relationships are defensive, annoying,

or contentious, you're going to be in stress all the time. And now, as you so accurately pointed out, I mean, for the longest time, people in the positive psychology movement drummed me out of the court because they say, you keep talking about why negative experiences and working on weaknesses is relevant. And then they finally figured it out. And I got a lifetime achievement award a few years ago from the International Association. But

I'm not saying that they're equally important. I'm saying that they're both important. And it's the managing the balance between, and if I'm specific, these PEA and NEA moments. We in fact published a study that was the result, the paper that was a result of, we reported three studies in the paper. We had three studies before that too, showing the same thing, showing that the dosage each day of even 10 to 15 minutes of PEA moments.

is so powerful in helping you with satisfaction, resilience, empathy, decreasing stress, anxiety. And a lot of it had to do with, you don't need an hour and a half at lunchtime to get renewed. You need six 15 minute moments throughout the day because you're re-sorting your emotions. And that's where COVID and being remote has wreaked havoc because we lost.

all of the interpersonal context, not all, but most of it. So, yeah. So I have a bunch of responses to that more than I had time to scribble. But like, there's a couple of problems that are obstacles that arise in my mind about, you know, operationalizing this. One is most of the books that I have read about change, about growth, development.

I think are modeled after outliers. And you talk about this and atch right need for achievement for achievement, right? It's like a small group, maybe 25 % of the population. Right. Right. Has this unconscious drive that's completely separate from anything that they're working on. And those folks seem to be able to get by if I'm if I'm understanding it correctly, seem to be able to get by with more NEA.

and less PEA and they're just like this this inner drive to and they're better with they do better with goals, with the progress thing. And I don't know if those people tend to be more vocal or they tend to rise in our system. Right. What happened in the research is people with high unconscious drive, this need for achievement that McClellan did, which is the desire to always do better, whether it's

you know, dropping your driving time to work or this or that. They're always measuring things. They do really well in 144 countries of the world with sales and with entrepreneurs starting new companies. Well, shit, because because I took Clifton Strengthfinder and my 34th strength, which is to say my biggest weakness was achievement. Well, in the Strengthfinder.

achievement may mean accomplishment. And that's a little different than this unconscious drive. Because if you ask people, you know, what's your achievement drive consciously, they'll talk about pursuing aspirations. This drive is this utility measurement. You always are looking for the cost benefit analysis. It's a little different. But what I would contend is that somewhere in the late sixties,

early 70s, people started noticing that the outstanding salespeople and the outstanding people who started businesses

had this thing is a compulsion. And then they started saying, well, if that's the case, then if we want people to do better, why don't we have more people do this? And that's what gave rise to the smart goals movement. But it missed the fact that when people are in that unconscious drive, they love the game. They don't like team sports. They like bowling or golf, depending upon your social club. They love the measurement.

And I would leave these and go, God, I wish I could just not care what I do. Right. Because the people who would be like the richest ones there would be like, I just sell stuff to people. I sell what they want. I can do the research. I can do the keywords. I can do the surveys and I don't care what it is. I'll source it from China. I'll sell it. And I'm like, like it felt like a handicap to give a shit about my contribution.

I like, I wish I could just not care. And then I would be so successful. Yeah. So and that's where you run into the thing of, so you make a lot of money, you accumulate a lot of assets and you die. Do they put your net worth on your tombstone? No.

And now because of the taxation system, even your heirs don't benefit that much. Try moving to Spain. Yeah, right. I spent enough decades there to know. the, so the dilemma, the interesting dilemma here is we're starting to get away from this more simplistic, narrow way of looking at work. And

So we pretty much realized in every country that you can't separate work and personal life because that's a bit schizophrenic, that you're a whole person. You're the same person, whether you're at work or at home. So the question ends up being not how do you separate them, but how do you make things consistent around them? And one of the issues keeps coming back to relationships. Well, if you're focused on tasks,

you're not focused on relationships. So it leads us to the, this, to go back to your very first question to me, this almost seesaw effect you need to do with these states of P E A N E A. And I would contend that because the N E A is so much more powerful, negative emotions are stronger, not better, stronger. And as a result, you have to over sample the positive.

So in research that we've done, know that coaches are more effective when they have two to three times the amount of minutes in coaching sessions in the PEA rather than the NEA. And when that happens, you're creating a balancing effect. Now I'm not advocating this balance because I'm a Libra, which I am, or the fact that seven of my nine planets, yes, I still contend Pluto's a planet.

7 of my 9 planets were in Libra on the hour I was born. That to me is fun, but it's not a causal factor. I'm dealing with it because when you look at the human body and then what happens in our interactions, because we now know you're infecting people around you every moment with your neural activations. We go brain to brain with other people all the time.

The only people who can't do that well are people on the spectrum because they have some dysfunction in the default mode network. So the question for you as a coach or you as a parent or you as a person or you as a leader, are you infecting people around you with hope, with caring, with mindfulness, with energy, or are you infecting them with fear and defensiveness?

Well, so that leads right into my second obstacle or objection, which is as a coach, and I know this is, you know, it's complex and it takes skill and learning. But basically, like putting people in P.A. is kindergarten compared to what I can do in terms of strategic planning and resource allocation. Like I feel like I'd get paid a lot less if people knew that I was just sort of.

infecting them with positivity. It feels less, you know, professional. You're not just infecting them with positivity, okay? Because if you wanted to just do that, you'd give them a drug. What you're trying to do is move people into it periodically so that as they pursue their vision, their dream, their sense of purpose, they're able to get renewed in that effort.

and whether they're trying to change something as simple as, you know, giving more powerful speeches or trying to motivate an organizational change. I mean, let me get back to this at the organization level. I would contend if you actually study the last five times you were a part of any organization that attempted to change, you would discover that rational strategic planning did not motivate change, period. Why?

You need it because you have to prove to the bank you're worthy of a loan and you have to decide who, where to hire people, resource allocation. But it doesn't motivate anybody to change. What motivates people to change, going back to this PEA versus NEA, are emotional swarms. And really effective leaders create these emotional swarms. Now, demagogues create negative swarms, but the effective leaders

and parents, would contend, and coaches create positive swarms. And that's where you want to keep asking, what are we doing it for? What's the meaning? What's the purpose? And that's where the keeping the PEA in your sight ends up being very important, keeping the vision rather in their sight. one of the things I'm hearing in terms of popular literature

is Simon Sinek's Start with Why, which has echoes of this. Like, remember the why the big vision. I always felt like there was no real research involved in that book. was kind of looking at these companies that succeeded and then reverse engineering. What's the research base for

that idea that it's vision that motivates that he'll talk about, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. I part of it's my research that I write about in the science of change. And we alluded to, we wrote about, but in more emotional terms and stories in helping people change. So the research is just beginning now. There are only a handful of published studies showing that at the organizational level,

on purpose-driven organizations are doing better in terms of adapting and being resilient. We notice it sometimes when we look at the gazelles, when we look at the phenomenal breakthroughs of Apple now, and it wasn't the first two versions of Apple, it was the third when jobs came back. That was the good one. The first two were failing. Well, not failing, but they weren't doing well.

Microsoft, it wasn't until Nardella took over under Gates and Bomber, they were underperforming. Yeah, they were making a lot of money, but compared to the resources they had and the people they were doing that, they were a lot of three product company. But Nardella comes in and all of a sudden the whole thing changes. You look at an Elon Musk, what is it? Now at the really big level, look at what these people are doing.

And Sony's products, I think were actually technically more elegant. you know, the damn TVs last 30, 40 years, you know, I can't get a new TV until one breaks. So it's a pain in the ass for me. But but all of a sudden, you know, the iPod scratched the Walkman. And Apple TV became a new streaming giant, whereas

You know, Sony Trinichons are still around, but they're an also ran. So the issue is purpose really is key. And if you focus on just return to stockholders, then everybody feels like they're an instrument, they're a cog. And why would you give your energy? Why would you give your creative moments that you have these blasts of insight on Saturday morning?

into the organization unless you felt it mattered. So I think this sense of purpose is beginning. Is there a lot of research on it right now? No. And people have talked about it theoretically. Our research is actually pointing to the underlying mechanism that makes it work. And I'm grateful that people like, you know, Simon Sinek and even Covey.

package and proselytize like Malcolm Gladwell, other people's research, because part of the research they proselytize is mine. But let's separate out people who do a better job of packaging or communicating it versus where the ideas come from. I'm not taking anything away from Simon Sinek. The guy's really great presenter and really good looking, and I'm jealous of both, but

Anyway, so we don't have much time. You have another podcast coming up in a couple of minutes, but I do want to cover this idea of the ought self. And that's not a you. It's you like I ought to be this or I ought to do this. And it feels like that has been a wrench in the works of just about every person I've ever tried to change. And a lot of the ways that I've been coaching have just jammed that wrench deeper into the gears. Right.

And it hurts, it hurts to talk to you about it because I want to do do-overs. got my point. What else? Yeah, well, that's exactly right. Now, look, when we try to get 26 to 28 year old MBA students to develop a comprehensive, you know, looking at physical health, spiritual health, contribution to the community and vision, including jobs, but where jobs is just one part of a whole life thing.

It takes us about a month to get them through exercises and classes and discussions to write and talk about a compelling comprehensive vision. When I do it with the 50 year olds in my executive doctoral program, it takes three to six months. Why? Because the more you succeed in life, the more you live, the more other people are loading ought selves onto you.

You know, it starts with parents and grandparents and your culture, maybe even your faith. And then it becomes teachers, then it's professors, then maybe sports coaches, then it's managers, then it might be a spouse, then it's your in-laws, then it's your own children telling you what you ought to be. So a lot of people, and this was the point of the helping people change book, a lot of people try to help others by telling them how they should change. And that's

I regret deeply, which is you can change other people. And sorry, I haven't read it, how you don't need to, you know, I mean, for fun, you could. But I mean, it's saying exactly the same thing, right? People don't change. People don't resist change. They resist being changed. We you know, we had a process and yet and it's a beautiful process and it's very much in line with P.A.

And yet, as a coach, I have always thought of the ought self as a little ally that I can leverage. So if someone's like, well, I went out and I keep eating junk food and I want to stop eating junk. Howie, howie, what's your ethnicity? Jewish. OK, you know a lot about guilt.

What you're talking about is creatively using guilt. And, you know, I don't mean to just be stereotypical, but certain ethnicities and certain faiths play more on guilt or obligation. Eastern cultures, you know, with respect for their elders and tradition, collectivist cultures are all ones that function on the basis of getting people to conform.

So it's not a small thing to say, I need to help people look at the odd selves. Now it's also complicated because there are times in life in which something might start out as an odd self, but then it becomes part of your ideal self. Then it flips back to being an odd self. A lot of professional women experience that shift back and forth around children at different stages. The children are an absolute joy in the meaning of life and other stages, you know,

they're a bit of a pain. So you're correct. One of the things that we're doing is trying to help people reconnect with their dreams and to, in a sense, forgive them all of the sense of guilt around other people. Now I say that by also, I want to be very clear that I don't mean that everybody should be more narcissistic or egocentric.

And the ideal self is not meant to be separate from our social responsibilities. So there are always going to be parts of our self that we should live up to. Right. But I think it's useful to just recognize what they are. Yes.

Yeah. So you got to go. But I I want to make sure that people can follow you or like know where you know where to find you if they want to learn more. And I personally want to know how I can learn evidence based coaching from you, because I'm feeling the gap. You've OK. You've any aid me. And I want to I want to pay myself. OK. So first, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Facebook, too, but LinkedIn is more relevant, I think, in terms of work stuff.

That's the easiest. People can Google me and find me at Case Western Reserve. That's my full-time job as a professor. We have programs at Case that the people who have been doing this research with me teach as well as I do. We have workshops. You want to learn to do coaching with compassion. And we have several workshops designed for experienced coaches to get this extra. But we also, if you want more, we have a master's in

right now it's called positive organizational change, but it's really about using a variety of the techniques and approaches that David Cooper writers done with the pre-show inquiry and I've done with the coaching and the emotional intelligence and Diana Villa-Moria has done with DEI. So we have a number of these programs in case, but a lot of the research that I'm doing and have been doing for the past 15 or 20 years, I pay extra

to a journal to make sure it's open access so that a person can download it, the actual source articles. And that's important. Now I see the guitar behind you. I actually just got interviewed by two producers about a documentary about people who do podcasts and webinars, famous people and have guitars behind them. You can't see mine because this is a virtual image of my office.

But I'm a student at Berkeley now trying after a 60 year lapse, I'm returning to jazz guitar. But they interviewed me because music is one of those things that brings us together. Music helps us feel a shared vision. That's so funny. And I know you've got to go like right now. Like one of the things I jotted down, I have a workshop coming up for a team that I'm leading.

And it's going to be a it was a hard challenge because the team is giving like fives out of five. Like they love everything's great. I'm like, I don't even know what to do for them. And the thing that I wrote down was ask everyone to send me their favorite piece of music, their most inspiring piece of music. And I don't think that was I don't think I read that. Susan Rogers published a book. She's a masterful musician, producer, senior faculty at Berkeley. But

She also is a neuroscientist and the book was called, this is what it sounds like. It's all about listening and the, really does a great job because that's where she got her PhD in neuroacoustics. Well, one of her faculty, maybe even her advisor, I have to double check that Dan Levitan wrote the classic book. This is your brain on music, but his new book is called, I heard there was a secret chord, you know, that line from Leonard Cohen's. Well, it,

I just finished it a week ago. I have recommended it to everybody. It is focused on the relationship of music and health. And this is a senior neuroscientist who, because he's also a musician, has really probed and does a marvelous job looking at every, I mean, there's a whole chapter on how music actually helps and may help people with Parkinson's.

I'm very specific. so I would recommend Dan Leventon's. I heard there was a secret chord. Awesome. I will I will get it as soon as I can go on Amazon. Richard, is this? Thank you so much for decades and decades of longitudinal research that feels so right and true and trustworthy. And thank you for taking the time today. And thank you, Howie. And feel free after you read chapters six, seven and eight.

If you want to have another chat, let me know. awesome. Thank you. Be well. OK, thanks. Bye bye.

And that's a wrap. You can find the show notes with everything we talked about links to comma at PlantYourself.com slash six one one six eleven. It has been quite a movement week. So the usual workouts on the beach during the week and then Sunday and all day ultimate Frisbee tournament beach. So running on sand.

And we did good. We won two. lost two. But all the games were close enough to be to be fun and to be in doubt for most for most of them. And there weren't that many people. So I got to play until I was too tired and I was sort of crawling around in the field. And at one point after a turnover, I was making my way back from where I was in the end of the field into the middle of the field. And someone looked at me said, you're too far.

Come closer. I should know where my position is. I just couldn't get there. And then the next day, yesterday we had a paddle tournament. This is Spain. So it started at 9 p.m. and we didn't finish till 10 after 11. And we were in the wrong division. My partner and I, we were in the much more advanced division. So we just watched people destroy us. I think we won one game out of in three matches.

And the good news is that they felt so sorry for us. gave us extra t-shirts, kind of cute. So but, you know, when you lose that badly, like there's something kind of there's like a release like it's hard to even care. It's hard to feel bad. It's hard to get upset. But what I was doing a lot of and I did I did start feeling like that feeling of like, like when I would miss a shot, even though there's no reason in the world I should make these shots against like the two people we played at the end.

The last game were both professional paddle coaches, but I did get a chance to sort of watch how they hit the ball, watch their posture, watch the angle of their racket. So I think I learned something in a kind of a different way than just watching YouTube videos and just getting tutorials. So hopefully, hopefully it'll raise my game. We may have another set of matches on Friday. And if we win those, which we won't, we will play in the.

finals, the final brackets on Saturday, quarters, semis and finals. But in any case, it was a learning experience. And as I said, I did get some extra swag because they felt so sorry for us. That's it for this week. As always, be well, my friends.