Well, welcome back to the Potential Leader Lab Podcast, and I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today, we're well, 2 warnings before we start out. 1 is, this is simply my opinion, and I'm not recommending you do or don't do anything in terms of how I'm the thing I'm gonna share. And then second of all, there probably will be some cursing in this episode. And whenever I do, I always hear, miss Finky's voice. And miss Finky was my high school biology teacher who would routinely say that cursing is a sign of a weak vocabulary. And I acknowledge that and I'm still gonna go forward. We'll see how it works out.

So today, today's episode is actually about I guess, the question I have for you, the the title would be, can you afford to care? That's my question. And here in front of me, I have this nifty little nameplate for those of you that are seeing the video. And it says, I do understand. I just don't care. And the the funny thing is, you this was the funniest part of this. About it was probably 8 or 10 years ago, My kids got me this for Christmas. The those are gift from my 3 kids. You know? I do understand.

I just don't care. And I have it in my office. And I have it it's actually sitting in a bookshelf right behind my head. So when I'm sitting talking to clients, it's actually they're looking at me. It's it's right behind me. Right? Now, I'm gonna explain it now. Right? So I wanna start off just share a couple of thoughts from people that I I like the way they think and the first is, Anthony Bourdain. And he said, I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don't have a strategy or a master plan or a brand.

I don't care about any of those things. And the second was, Nietzsche, who I I always love. You have your way. I have my way. As far as for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. So just think about those two things. And so the definition of care is to attach importance to something. Now when I say and and by the way, caring requires a combination of cognition, emotion, and action.

It requires energy. This is where this is where the challenge comes in. And this is why I believe we have to be selective about what we care about. Because if you care about everything and everyone, you care about nothing and no one because you don't have an unlimited amount of energy. So to care means to dedicate energy to something. And the challenge is, I do care about I will I wanna be clear. I care deeply about humanity. I'm just not sure I care about all humans, and that's a difference for me.

And I and I can't afford to because it would be exhausting, and I would be useless if I did. I don't think you can have an opinion about everything that happens in the world. They take up space in your head. And it's by the way, it's very expensive and valuable real estate in there. And if you to to be to be caring about and dedicating energy to things that you cannot do anything about. And I think it's even more pervasive in the world today. And I care about things that at all 3 of the fall like, I care about things I can do something about. That's what I care about.

And either either my action or the action of other people, I don't wanna use my energy to discuss things that I cannot do anything about or that I'm gonna actively choose not to do anything about, which, by the way, is 90% of the things that everybody talks about especially today. And and this it's very interesting to me because I get, you know, and this starts with family, you know, clients, everything. People say, oh, did you hear this on the news? You hear that on the news? A, I don't watch the news because I don't care. I I actually don't. Like, I I'll check-in every now and then on things that happen, but I'm not gonna spend my time watching the news. Because I think we all know this, it's been years, maybe even decades, since anybody's reporting the news. They report their opinion of the news. Any almost any station you watch is reporting again, it's their frame.

However, they're framed. They're gonna look at it through that lens. So almost nobody's reporting about events. They're reporting with an opinion about the events and what the events mean, and then we either agree or disagree as opposed to just hearing that an event happened. And for those that have been around and have gray hair like me, you remember back in a time in the, I mean, maybe seventies when you did have news people who delivered the news. And they're they were right down the middle. Like, there was they were they they actually prided themselves on being objective and not having an opinion about things because they felt that if they did, they couldn't report the news. But that doesn't exist anymore.

You're you are things are shared to you and and you guys know technology is horrible about this, is that everything that you listen to or click on, you just get more of that. So we each get end up in our own echo chamber. We get into a vacuum with just the things that we already click on, so we get more of that. So it's just confirmation bias of everything we already believe. So it's just feeding that that cycle. And way too often, I this happens in all aspects of life. I hear people who mistake talking about something with doing something, and talking about it isn't doing anything. So I just think we have to be careful.

And I also believe as we have more experiences, which coincides but isn't directly the same as as we get older, because you can have lots of experiences and not, you know, not age related, but you can just have a lot of experiences. But the more of those you have, you start understanding how limited the resource is, and you begin to get more and more selective, I think, with what you care about. Because you see that your primary things of energy and time are not they're they're not a renewable resource. You know, there is a point where you just run out. And so I think we really have to start, you know, think about asking ourselves some questions before we invest time and energy in things. You know, why should you care? And and what kind of investment are you willing to make? And again, back to, you know, just be honest with yourself. And if you are, great. Like, awesome.

But if if you think about you're getting ready to have an emotional reaction to something, you're gonna pour your emotional energy into something and and engage in a 30 minute conversation with somebody, what are you willing to do, and will it make a material difference in your life or the lives of the people you're talking about? A positive material difference. Because that resource is expended, you can't get it back. So you really wanna think about, is there a better place that I can use this resource than on this topic? Would it be better directed somewhere else that would move me closer to a goal that I have? And I don't think there's a good answer or a bad answer, a right answer, a wrong answer. I just think that it's important that we ask ourselves the question so that we can give ourselves time to answer. And ultimately, the question becomes, will I take any action to positively impact the situation? Is this in was this is this in my lane? Is it my purview to care about this? And if it is, is the result worth it? Is you know, essentially, is the is the juice worth the squeeze? And those are just questions to ask yourself because you have limited resources. Your time, your money, your emotions, your attention, which we'll get to that acronym later. Because, for everything you devote attention to, there's other things you can't. And I'm sure I'm sure everybody can relate to this.

You you during the day, sometimes we're completely in charge of what we invest our time and effort into, sometimes we're not. And so, there are days when you go home and you had a whole idea of several things you wanted to I mean, just something as simple as talking to your spouse about something, talking to your kids about something. You had on your mind that, hey. You know, tonight, when I get home, I wanna have that conversation. And then how many times do you go home and find yourself in you know, thinking about as you're driving in the driveway going, I don't think I can do that tonight. I I just don't have the energy. Like, I don't I don't know that I could and there it is. Right? Your your your tank's low.

Because you've already invested all of that energy, all of that time, all of that attention somewhere else. And now you don't have any left. I mean, how many times do you do that? I know I do it more than I'd like. Where I've thought to myself in the morning, okay, this is important. I'll talk about this tonight. Didn't happen. Because by the time I got home, I was out of gas. Because for every, yes, there is a corresponding no.

It's the way the world works. It's not unlimited. So, another kind of very important side effect of caring is you understand that this stuff is the the way people get kind of amped up about things in our world now. It does bleed into the office. And it and it impacts the emotional states of the people that you work with and for and that work with you for you. Right? Everybody you work with has an opinion about stuff. And the more they care about things, the more kind of amped up they get, the more it bleeds into their ability to focus. I mean, we're even challenged now just to have civil discourse with people.

You know, that that the thing we would do to the to, you know, deliberate matters of public concern in a way that seeks to expand knowledge and promote understanding. How often do you do that? How often do you say that you're having material, meaningful conversations that are expanding knowledge and promoting understanding with your fellow humans? Oftentimes now, it's just debating. I believe what I believe. You believe what you believe. That's it. Nobody's open, because we care. We this under the guise of quote, unquote caring. But now, where it's more judging than anything else.

I mean, we're we're getting to the point now that you can't even question somebody's stance on anything because they care so deeply. So there is no civil discourse. There is no ability to talk about the betterment of anything. Nobody's gonna nobody's gonna change their mind. They're they're absolute about their belief. Now, their opinion becomes a belief that I can't question. That's a quasi dangerous place to be. And, again, I just just start with I I start with myself.

I think about what are the things that I believe and should I still believe them? Because they aren't facts. Most of them are just opinions. Right? I mean, we're not talking about debating gravity with people. Most of the time, and I would say 90 a greater percentage of the time, like, 95% of the conversations we have on a daily, weekly, monthly basis with people that we know and work with, they're not we're not debating facts. We're debating opinions. But oftentimes, we're expressing those opinions as facts, which gives the other party one of 2 options, agree with us or be wrong. We're not we're not trying to learn from each other. Because, again, we care a lot.

That's what that's the that's the the kind of the ugliness of this Is we we hide under the guise of caring about things. When in reality, what we care about is we just wanna be right. I mean, if you think about Edgar Schein wrote this great book. It's called Humble Inquiry. And he defines it as the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, and this last piece, and in building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person. How many times do you talk to somebody and ask them questions with the goal of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in them? I, to be honest with you, see very little humble inquiry in my day to day. I don't see people asking curious questions they don't know the answers to. I see a lot of people asking questions they damn well know the answer to.

Right? Now, why that is? I don't know. I don't know whether they wanna maintain control, they wanna look smart, they wanna bait the other person into lying. I have no idea. But think about that. Think about how often you might be able to ask questions to build a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person. I mean, leading, the verb. Right? The action the act of leading is, in my opinion, to positively impact the emotional states of other people. It's a thankless job and one that is so draining, because we have to be aware of the kind of insidious aspects of over caring.

I mean, if we're trying to help other people do their best work, people do their best work when they're happy, when they feel good about themselves. So you think about it from a leading standpoint. If I wanna be effective in leading, I'm gonna positively impact their emotional state. I wanna have a positive effect on their emotional state. That's tough. Now, what's interesting is we hear a lot about these things in today, and one of them is anxiety. You know, we we we see a lot of things around people have anxiety. And anxiety is when you feel worried or or tense or afraid, and about things that are about to happen or things that can happen in the future.

Right? So anxiety is kind of fear of something that's gonna happen that's unknown. It's generalized. Right? It isn't it isn't something specific because that's fear. Fear is about a specific thing happening. Anxiety is generalized lies about just everything, anything happening. I'm not sure quite, you know, what it is I fear is gonna happen, but something's gonna happen and therefore, I have anxiety, and there's no way to solve that. And we can even have things like hyper emp hyperempathy syndrome. When you're too in tune with other people's emotions and you mirror with the same intensity.

And that's really dangerous now because people feel things so deeply. They they resonate so deeply with people. And so it's really hard to have a conversation that doesn't get, what I'll say is heavy. And if you have hyperempathy syndrome, you might find it hard to regulate your own emotions. Because you, you know, there is a thing called emotional contagion. So you can literally catch emotions from people if you're not careful. So you don't wanna get sucked into that vortex. And then, you have things like generalized anxiety disorder.

Right? It's caring. You know, things you end up with generalized anxiety disorder when you're overthinking plans. It's always the worst possible worst case scenario. You're you perceive everything as threatening even when it isn't. You have really a challenge handling any uncertainty, or you're indecisive and fear of making the wrong decision. You can't let things go. You can't let go of worry like you're constantly worrying about everything. You're trying to plan out everything.

You're trying to plan for every contingency. You know, the general inability to relax, you just feel restless, and you feel kind of on edge all the time. And or you have difficulty concentrating, and your mind just goes blank. Like, you can't process. You can't think. I mean, think about those things about people that you care about. Do you know people that constantly catastrophize? It's the worst case scenario all the time. And we have to plan for everything.

We're planning out every possible scenario for everything. Because we feel that if we do that, then we can relax. We've taken every contingency into consideration, which, by the way, is next to impossible. But we do it because we care. I maintain you shouldn't care as much as we do. You should figure out what's important to you and care about those things. Care about the things that matter to you. Care about the things you can do something about.

Care about the things that you're willing to commit your time and energy and attention and money towards. That's beneficial. But trying to care about everything, have an opinion about everything, have an opinion about what's going on in the news, in other states, in other parts of the world I mean, if you're interested, I get it. Like, it's okay to be interested. Just be on guard about how much time and energy you dump into being interested. Because that that doesn't come back. You lose that. Right? It does it does take a toll after a while.

I actually think a great example of this is just any conversation you see at work, any difficult conversation that somebody has. Because if I've created an outcome that I wanna see from a conversation so I talk to a peer, I talk to a client. I talk to a spouse. I talk to a child. Any of those. Anybody in your life. And you've you've rehearsed the conversation in your head, and you have the solution that you believe is the best solution firmly right here in front of you, that's where I'm going, and you start that conversation, and that person starts responding in a way that isn't conducive to getting where you wanna go, what happens? Does the conversation get better or worse? And from the ones I've seen, it gets worse because now we're moving that person's moving me further away from where I wanna go, so I'm gonna wrestle with them to get it back where I wanna go because I care about the solution. What I don't what I haven't cared about is the person.

What I haven't cared about is building and strengthening the relationship through questions. And through finding being curious about why this person wants to do x, y, or z, I simply had an objective I'm trying to get to, and they needed to align with that so that I could get the thing done and checked off my list. That's not helpful. It's also risky. Because the further that person gets away, the harder I'm gonna try to wrestle them back and the less listening either party is doing. That's what happens when we care, when we care deeply. I think we have to care deeply enough to not care. Right? Because if we care about the person, the result of the outcome's irrelevant.

Like, I don't if my goal is to deepen the relationship, strengthen the relationship, lift that other person up, build that other person up, whatever that might be, then I don't care how we get there. So I'm gonna be flexible in those topics and those discussions. Much more flexible that if I'm trying to drive to a result that I want. I think that's a a significant part of leading, is being able to do that kind of improvisation on the fly. And think on your feet, so that you can still make the conversation beneficial for everybody. Because ultimately, you always do wanna that other person feel built up or lifted up in the conversation. You do want them to feel better after you've spoken with them. That's what you can care about.

But once we start getting really we we start caring deeply about the result that we want, it can get off track pretty quickly. So come up with this little acronym of, you know, worry about your team, your team, t e a m. It's an acronym. Time, emotions, attention, and money. So if you think about this, those are your 4 resources, time, emotions, attention, and money. So if you worry about managing your team, where are those things going? Where am I directing them? Because, essentially, wherever you direct your time, emotions, attention, and money is what you care about. Right? If you're gonna spend your time, your emotions, and your attention, and your money on something, you have given it value, which is back to the start of this, the definition of caring. But if I'm not giving any of those things to it, then I don't care about it, regardless of what I say.

So you wanna manage that. Manage your time, emotions, attention, and money. And make conscious decisions about how you're gonna do that. Because, you know, asking yourself why you care is like is like thinking about an iceberg. You've got that little bit on the surface, but then you've got a you've got a bunch of it below. And and you have to dig into why that what's down below for anybody. If somebody has a a very kind of aggressive emotional response to you, that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's not telling you why.

So if you care, you probably wanna find out why. You wanna you wanna get get below the surface and explore that iceberg and see how deep it goes. And that'll help you unlock kind of the deeper whys behind that person's behavior because that's what matters. What matters is do we understand each other, not do I agree with you. See, those are those are 2 very different things. In fact, here's the other thing just to think about is I don't have to agree with you to care about you. That's the funny thing because now we've built this into unless you care about the same thing I care about, unless you share my point of view, we can't be friends. In what world does that exist? Because, again, we're just creating an echo chamber.

Because if we're gonna just surround ourselves with people that share the same points of view that we have, what are we learning? And here, I'll give you a list of things you shouldn't care about. How about that? I'll just go ahead and give you a list. So think about this. You should not care that other people's beliefs and values differ from yours. None of your damn business. You're not the arbiter of the world. Like, what other people believe in their values are their beliefs and values, and you should not care about them. Now if you wanted to care about them in a way to ask questions and learn, 100%.

That's awesome. You should do that. But if you're only if the only goal when asking them is so you can judge and figure out if they agree with you, I'd tell you to go to hell. It's a waste of my time. And whatever here's the next thing not to care about, the damn outcome. Stop worrying about the results. Start worrying about what you're doing. Start worrying about the process, the activities.

What am I in control of? As far as I know, and I know people are gonna argue with me, you're not in control of any outcome. You're in control of the action that you take, the activities that you do. But if unless the outcome is just based on you and you alone, you don't control it. If anybody else is involved in that equation, it is a wild card. One of my favorite all time quotes was John Adams, who's credited with saying, duty is ours. The results are god's. And if we'd all just focus on caring about what we do and about our day to day behaviors and are we doing the right things, the results will take care of themselves. And to that extent, stop worrying about your all your dreams being fulfilled or other people not being interested in what you have to offer or what anybody else thinks about you.

How about how about that one? Like, just stop giving a shit what other people think of you. Now, there is I will I understand. Right? There's an evolutionary issue here, especially with that, with caring about what other people think of you. Because way back in the day, and again, our brains working on outdated software, when you were ostracized from the group back when we were in, you know, hunter gatherers, if you were ostracized, most likely, you died. I get it. That's how our brain and, again, our brain's not helping us here. Our brain is not our friend. You know? It's and if you're not if you're not the conductor, you're just a passenger on that train, But that doesn't exist now.

But it is how our brain perceives it. And it's actually scientifically, they look at the they look at what our brain the parts of our brain that fire, and it is that way. Right? When we're when we feel socially shunned, we have the same response that if if we're if our lives are threatened. That's how deep that goes in our programming. Because if we're on the outside, if we're not with the in group, if we're not if people aren't talking to us anymore, if we feel like we're, if they've somehow judged us as not worthy of their companionship, our our brain reacts in a way. It's like, hey, you're gonna die. And so we do things that are really silly because we're acting out of self preservation when self preservation isn't the issue. So we have to really understand ourselves and understand when we're acting within reason or not.

Because when somebody is ostracized, the brain the the piece of the brain is called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which which registers physical pain when we have a social injury. And a social injury is something that happens, we get shunned or somebody says something to us. It registers the same in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex as physical pain. So here's some final thoughts. Care about yourself first and foremost, then spread out from there, then those you care deeply about, your family, your friends, coworkers. And then figure out how much you how much further can you go out. Like, how much further? Because when you start spreading that out, it's like the difference between a flashlight and a laser is concentration. They're both light.

So do you wanna keep any of this in reserves for the those people close to you? Spend some time alone. Turn it all off. Be alone with your thoughts a little bit. Be compassionate. Practice interoception, which is understanding your own emotional state and how your body reacts. Get in tune with yourself. Learn to accept criticism. You'll have to enjoy it.

I'm not saying you're gonna love it because as far as I know, nobody loves criticism. It's helpful and it's beneficial, but in the moment, it's very hard to actually appreciate and like it. I get it. I don't think don't be crazy and try to say you're gonna, you know, I love it. Give me no. That's not what we do. But at least tolerate it to the point that you can leverage it and be open to it. And force kind of a face a a fake, awkward, creepy smile when somebody gives you feedback because you wanna, you know, want you want more of it.

But it is hard. I mean, I'm first here to tell you it's it's really hard to accept critical feedback, but it's very valuable. But just care about yourself first, and then then kind of flow out from there. And at some point, you have to turn the spigot off. At some point, it's a limited resource. You're you're carrying what you attach importance to something, value to something. It has to stop somewhere. And make sure you have it turned on for the people that matter.

And I'll leave you with this from Franz Kafka. There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. So take care of yourself. Take care of others. Take care of each other because we need it, and we need you to be a part of it. I'll see you back in the lab soon.