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Thanks for listening and see you next time. Hello, and welcome to Coaching, Performance and Wellness by IDEMS Coaching. Today, I'm excited to introduce you to Mike Robbins, author, speaker, coach, and podcast host. Mike regularly shares his insights with companies like Google, Wells, Fargo, and eBay on accelerating talent performance, a topic that obviously lies at the heart of what
we do at Idemics. In this episode, we're excited to dive into three of Mike's books and topics that deal with three areas we see lots of individuals struggle with at some point in their personal and professional lives. Change, vulnerability, and trust. Mike, Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Sam. Nice to be here. So Mike tell us what made you
because HOMA coach and your focus on leadership and teams well. My story to coaching and ultimately speaking and writing and now podcasting is kind of an interesting one in that I started out as an athlete. I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay area where I still live, and I was a baseball player all growing up. I actually got drafted right out of high school by the New York Yankees. Didn't end up signing a contract with the Yankees at that
time because I got an opportunity to play baseball in college at Stanford. Went to Stanford, played baseball there, and then I got drafted out of Stanford by the Kansas City Royals, and I did sign a pro contract at that point, and you have to go into the minor leagues even when you get drafted by a major league team and sign a contract, So I try to work my way through the minor league system. Unfortunately, Sam I got injured.
I was a pitcher and I tore ligaments in my elbow and I was twenty three when I got hurt and had a series of surgeries and then was forced to retire at the age of twenty five. And I was, you know, really bummed as you could imagine. But one of the rushing right when you set your sights on a goal that's so right that you've worked so hard towards. And you know, I started at seven years old playing t ball and you know, single mom, we didn't have any money growing up
in Oakland. I figured this was my shot to you know, be someone to make it, and it doesn't happen. So I'm devastated personally, but one of the things, well a couple of things that I had found fascinating as an athlete, particularly by the time I got to college and was playing professionally. On the individual level, what I noticed was it wasn't always the most talented people that were the most successful, and it wasn't always the most
successful people that seemed the happiest and the most fulfilled. So I was curious about that. And then on the team level, I noticed it wasn't always the teams that I was on that had the best players that were necessarily the best teams. Like, talent was clearly important, but I was on some teams with really good talent, but we would underperform because I don't know, the coach was weird, or the egos were off, or something didn't work.
And then I was on other teams where it was like the talent was decent, but the team was fantastic. We like made each other better, we wanted to win together, we rooted for each other, and so I thought these things were just sports related. I get my first job in the late nineties. I come home, I'm sort of licking my wounds personally figuring out who the heck am I what am I going to do? I get a job working for an internet company in nineteen ninety eight in San Francisco,
basically every days. Yeah yeah, it was dot com boom time, and I'm like, I'm a fish out of water, right, I'm this twenty five year old kid, who's you know? I went to Stanford. I It wasn't like I wasn't intelligent, but I'd never really thought of anything professionally
besides baseball. But now I'm selling internet advertising and I'm like, you know, and really interested in my own personal growth and development, also going down the path of trying to kind of heal from my whole experience and figure out what am I going to do next? And the world of coaching was kind of new at that time in the late nineties, Like people there was you know, I'm taking workshops and I'm meeting people on there. I'm a life
coach. What the heck is that? I'm a business coach? What's that? And so I was benefiting from coaching and reading a lot of books on personal development and taking a lot of workshops. And the more I did that, the more I was like, I think I want to do that, Like like I would I would go to the workshop and I would pull the workshop leader aside and I'd be like, how did you get to do this? Like how do you get that job? You know? Or I would
I would read the book and be like this person's really interesting. How did they get qualified to write this book? Like what does that take? So that started me on the just curiosity path of like what would it take for me to do that? And then the universe intervened, as often happens. I get a job in two thousand working for another, you know, a startup and we're all going to get rich because it's going to go public, and then the dot com bubble burst and I lose my job and I'm like,
oh God, what am I going to do now? But I had just met my wife, Michelle's we've been together for a little over twenty three years now, and she had started her own business. She had a staff and company, and she was also interested in coaching, and she and I decided to get some training at the Coach's Training Institute and she really encouraged me, like, hey, you have a passion for speaking and for coaching and
write, like you should do this. And I was like, Okay, I'm twenty six, about to turn twenty seven, Like, I have no idea how to make any money doing this. But influencer wasn't a job at the time. No, it wasn't a thing. There was. Yeah, there was no social media, there were no blogs, there were no podcasts. You had to like write a book or write articles or I don't know, somehow become you know, or starting to get coaching clients. Anyway,
that's how I started. In the year two thousand and one. I decided people were like, go back to college, or go back get an advanced degree in psychology or in you know, organizational development. And the thing is, I love to learn, sam but I hated school even though I did decently well, I just didn't like the structure give and me both. Yeah. So here's what I decided. This was my whole plan was like I decided I was going to design my own curriculum is what I called it,
and I was going to spend that first year. And I figured I it might be lean, which it was. I figured I might go in debt, which I actually did. But if I went to school, I was going to go into debt anyway, which other and at the end of it, I knew I wouldn't have a degree, but I figured aout the end
of the year. If I couldn't get any coaching clients, or I couldn't figure out how to speak and actually get into anyone to pay me, or I couldn't write anything that anybody would actually publish or read, then I should
probably go find a job. And you know, that first year was pretty lean, but ultimately what I was able to do and what my real passion was speaking is I started speaking and a bunch of more traditional companies, the Kaisers and Wells, Fargo's and Chevrons of the world that are based here in the Bay Area, they had a bunch of gen xers like me who had gotten laid off from their dot coms, and they were having some cultural issues
at the time of baby boomers and gen xers trying to work together. And I started coming in to talk about teamwork and culture from my perspective as gen xer but someone who'd played baseball and been in some diverse environments. And then I started to develop some material around how do we find common ground and how do we work well together? And that's really what kind of started my coaching
and my speaking business. Twenty three years ago and all these years later, you know, I've had a chance to write five books and work with a lot of amazing companies all over the world. But you know, and I've learned a lot in the last twenty three years, for sure, But the foundation of a lot of my work sort of started in my early life and from what I learned as an athlete and what I kind of started off doing
all those years ago. Yeah, and you gave yourself the runway, right, like a limited runway, where you gave yourself a year to sort of explore this, knowing it would be hard, but you also took the risk and went into something that wasn't such a well developed profession the way it is today. We're coaching now as a much more developed profession, right for sure. And I say to people all the time, I mean, I'm sure
people listening. There's lots of different folks listening for different reasons. But the thing about getting into coaching or speaking or writing or podcasting or influencing in whatever way, is like, there's so many more opportunities to do it now,
which is awesome. It's also very crowded and it's harder to stand out so in those days it was tricky because it was like there were very few points of entry and I was really young and naive starting, which again, in hindsight, was a blessing because if I had been a bit older and had a family and kids and a mortgage and the whole thing, like, I don't know if I would have done it, would to take the risk,
Yeah, yeah, I would have, you know. And at the same time, there are a lot of opportunities today for people, you know, a company like yours, for people to come in. I was looking for, actually what I wanted to get hired by was like a small boutique consulting company or coaching company where I could be mentored and sort of be an apprentice,
if you will, and they had some clients. But I couldn't find that, and I started my business when the economy was down, the dot com bubble had burst, and it actually ended up being a blessing in disguise. But it was actually pretty hard, to be honest, I'm sure, yeah that at all. I think getting anything off the ground, you know, partly because of the uncertainty, partly because you're so resource and time constrained, and the pressure to get it right while you're having to basically do everything
on your own, is you know, certainly not to Minimus. So Mike, you've had a ton of experience doing this. Now you're sort of twenty five to thirty years in here. What are some of the most common challenges that you observe in leadership development and what are the topics that you specifically like to tackle and work on through your coaching. Oh wow, I look, I mean, I actually think the last couple of years have been super challenging
for all of us for a whole bunch of reasons. And look, even pre pandemic, most leaders that I'm working with, even super senior leaders all the way down to kind of you know, new managers inside of some of the big companies that we work with. You know, just the struggle around how do I show up, how do I manage my time? What do I focus on? What's most important? It's kind of like the balance between you know, skills and results and then developing emotional intelligence and you know,
human and sort of people capacity. I think that's ratcheted up to a whole other level over the last few years because so much of what leaders are dealing with, whether again you're working in a very small company, you know, a nonprofit, a government agency, or a big, huge fortune five hundred company that the people issues, the human issues that we're all grappling with, you know, conversations around mental health, conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion,
conversations around well being. You know, again, not that these things didn't exist a decade ago, but like the way that they exist now, there's so much being put upon leaders. It's hard, and so mentions of the problems have really amplified right totally. And I also think one of the things I was at a conference. I spoke at the Work Human Conference in San Diego earlier this year, and Esther Perel was one of the other speakers,
and she said something really simple but profound to me. She was talking about sort of American culture, Western culture, and basically saying that over the last number of generations, for a whole bunch of reasons that we could go deeper into, but like things like institutions like the church, say, or like spiritual institutions that many societies were sort of based around, doesn't really exist in our modern society for a and therefore work has become everything for everyone that
your workplace is supposed to be meaningful and you're supposed to be passionate about it, and your manager turns into your therapist and spiritual advisor and all these things. And she was talking to all these HR professionals and basically saying that, like, your job has gotten way harder in the last couple generations because the expectation now that's put upon you. And again, I think in some ways there's a blessing to that that people like me and you can do what we
do and bring a more holistic approach into work. That's really important. But the dark side of it is there's so much pressure in the system and there's so much put upon leaders and everybody that I think most people I know and work with, even the really effective, successful leaders, are struggling with just the amount that's expected of them. No, I totally agree with that.
I think the lack of institutions, the kind of dimensionalities that have really shifted in terms of the problems individuals are dealing with, and then those consequently come into the workplace are just so many more And in many ways, the role of a leader is equal parts coach, psychologists and sort of professional skills leader, right, And I think it's those first two that are relatively new in
a work case context. There's certainly not skills that are developed in those earlier rungs of professional development because they're kind of not necessary then, and they're absolutely essential the minute you begin to lead a small or a large team. Well, and you know, I know we want to talk a bit about change, but you think about how much change there's been over the last couple decades. I just think of my own life and my own career, right,
I'm about to turn fifty in a couple months. I started doing this at twenty six and in the last twenty three twenty four years, just my own work. Like the topic that I started to speak about initially and then I still talk a lot about this foundational work is appreciation. And I remember twenty five years ago, as I'm starting this, people saying to me, appreciation. First of all, what is that? Why is that important? Why
would you talk about that at work? Who cares? No one will pay you for that, you know, And I would show up in my suit and tie to these events, and I'm trying to make the case for like why appreciation is important? And half the rooms if not more of the rooms I was in, people look at me sideways, like what are you talking about? Right? You know, fast forward to today, and it's like,
you know, recognition and appreciation and engagement and all these things. I mean, we're talking about millions and billions of dollars that is put forth by companies to make sure that people feel valued and appreciated so they don't lead.
So you know, all this stuff, and it's amazing to me because I look at that and just think about, oh my gosh, like the ground beneath my feet personally has shifted so much in the time that I've been doing this, and I'm not inside of an organization managing you know, a big p and l and lots of people necessarily. So again, for anybody, whether someone's twenty five years old or sixty five years old, you know, again, the younger someone is, the less they've had to deal with the
massive amount of change. But that's another thing that I do notice is that people who've been around a bit, while they have a lot of wisdom and a lot of experience, which is beautiful, it's been a massive amount of change for anybody who's and older that's still work in these days when the rate of change is sped up right right, Yeah, yeah, it's and it's
important I think to just understand acknowledge that. And me I think sometimes too, even when you think about the pandemic and kind of where we are in the cycle, it's like, thank goodness, the pandemics behind us. And I don't think we any of us have fully comprehended what we've just been through and what we're still navigating through because we can't, like we have to keep
going. We can't just stop and contemble. And that was crazy and what you know, but there's been so much change in the system, and again not just in places like Silicon Valley where I do a lot of work, but just in everyday business, like how we do work, how we show up to work, even you and I having this conversation on Zoom and people listening to this podcast. Again, it's so ubiquitous to how we operate now.
But like, this wasn't happening ten years ago. No, it wasn't even happening five years ago, right, And again we just kind of keep rolling with it because we sort of have to, and we focus a lot. We got to pivot, you got to be resilient, you got to adjust, you got all those things are true, but they do take a toll. And sometimes, like I'll look at a post or a photo or something from ten years ago, or my wife and I reflect on something,
we'll be like, geez, it's really different today than it was. You know. That so true? You know, Facebook memory from twenty ten or whatever. Totally true. What's a perfect segue into I want to talk a little bit about your book, Mike, Nothing changes until you do, which is a very apt title, and in it you note that most of us really struggle with our relationships with ourselves. Yeah, even the most successful people, leaders, at the tops of organizations, celebrities, whoever it may be.
And that struggle has sort of birthed, in my view, and epidemic of you know, pretty pithy but superficials right about how to help oneself and
how to diminish self criticism and self doubt. And at the same time, we really continue, at an individual and societal level to perceive our own value as very directly connected to our jobs, our finances, our appearance, our children, you know, And why is it that changing ourselves is perhaps the most difficult thing and how do you coach people in the first instance, become aware of what they need to change, and then actually to make that change.
Look, it's I mean, it's a great question. It's a hard one because I think I know for me, and I think this is true for just about every other human that I work with. You know, we're all different and unique, and we have our different backgrounds and personalities and ways we enter the world. But like, the relationship that we have with ourselves
is probably the most important human relationship that we have. We get almost no training on how to manage our relationship with ourselves, and it's not even really a thing that gets talked about that much because it's either either completely ignored or if we do start to talk about it, it seems somehow selfish or self
absorbed, or like, what are you talking about? But I think back as an athlete, it's like how I felt about myself, the level of confidence or lack thereof that I had in myself had everything to do with how well I was able to perform on the field personally and for my team. I think about this in you know, twenty plus years of being with my wife, Like when I feel bad about myself, I'm not as good of a husband, right, right, It's like she can tell me how much
she loves me and how wonderful I am. But if I'm feeling bad about myself, I'm going to see the world the way I see myself. And so again, the first part I think is for us to kind of reconcile at some level. How do we focus on ourselves and take care of ourselves and manage ourselves and work our relationship with ourselves and not think that there's something
wrong with that or weird about it? And look, you can be self absorbed and completely obsessed with yourself in a way that's detrimental to you and everyone around you. So that's a thing. But then once we get past even though, okay, I understand that it's important for me to have a healthy relationship with myself, then the question is how the heck do I do that? What does that even mean? What does that look like? You know?
And again, sometimes when I'm coaching someone, we'll talk about, you know, kind of getting a little bit into their self talk, like what do you say to yourself about yourself? And most of us, even relatively successful people, our self talk is not that positive it's not that empowering. Like and I will say to other people and this is true for me, Like, if you talked to someone else the way you talk to yourself, how do you think they would feel about you? Yeah, and you know,
for the most part, it's like an eh. There's a story that I often share about this from many years ago and Michelle, my wife, when I first met. Actually it was in the early days of me starting my business and all that, Like it was hard and I was scared.
I and I just had this about six months into dating Michelle, about the same amount of time of starting my business, and I felt so bad about myself and was so defeated and I don't what am I doing and I'm an idiot and I should never started this and I need to go get a job and this is the stupid right. And I was on the phone with her, just telling and she says to me, after I rant for three or four minutes about myself, Okay, my, you know, first of all,
thank you for being real. I appreciate you sharing how you're feeling. I totally get it. But then she said, I have something really important to say to you. And I said, what's that? She said stop talking about my boyfriend like that, and I was like, what she said, You just said some really mean things about yourself. And look, I know you're struggling, and I know you're being vulnerable with me, But if someone else said those things about you, I would be pissed and I would
defend you, and I would basically tell them to knock it off. I love you and I believe in you, and just because you're you doesn't give you the right to talk about yourself like that. And I remember being on the phone that day, Sam. In the first I was thinking, Man, I like this woman. She is awesome. But I was like, it never had occurred to me. Oh, when I'm mean to myself, when I'm disrespectful to myself, when I talk negatively about myself, even in
my own head. Yeah, of course it's detrimental to me at some level. I know that it's actually disrespectful to my wife, to our daughters, to everybody who knows me and actually loves me and cares about me. And so I will often say to people like again, if for no other reason, if it's hard to just do it for yourself, do it for the
people that you love. Yeah, And Again, it's tricky, right, and I'm not trying to say this in some holier than that way, Like I have my moments every day where I'll think something or say something negative about myself. Of course I do, I'm human. But I think the more we can bring that into the light and the truth is that, the better and the stronger that we feel about ourselves authentically, not like I'm the greatest.
I'm not talking about ego or arrogance. That actually then allows us to be kind, to be loving, to be present, to be engaged with other people in a genuine way, And the more diminished that is within ourselves, the more diminished it is with everybody else. So again, leaders, like again, it's the cliche of all cliches, but it's like you got to put your own oxygen mask on first. We all know that, we all say that, and most humans I know, most leaders I know struggle
with that. Yeah, I mean, it really is. It's self awareness, right, and it brings to mind. Actually, a really close friend of mine said this to me. Someone had said this to her in a very different context, but this statement has really stuck with me, which is we tend to judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Yeah, and I think if we apply the same lens of judging ourselves by our actions, our actions in fact change our level of self awareness shifts yep,
and we become healthier, more productive human beings ultimately totally. And then the other side of that, I love that saying too, because the other side of that, the whole assume positive intent. If you then are judging other people, not that we're giving them a pass if they do things that we don't like, but just assuming, I bet that wasn't malicious. I bet they weren't trying to do what, you know, because again, most people, most of the time, in my experience, their intentions are good.
The actions the execution isn't always great. Yeah, you know, I was just listening to a podcast interview this morning with doctor Becky whose name my last name I can't remember. She's a parenting expert. She was on with Deck Shepherd, but she was talking about, you know, she wrote this book called Good Inside, and the basic premise, right, she talks about it in the parenting context that our kids and us were good inside and sometimes we
do bad things. Right, our kids, whether they're three years old, or we've got teenagers at my house seventeen and fifteen, so like they're really good humans and sometimes they do things that drive us crazy. Right, And so it's like same thing with employees. It's like you have an employee that
they do something, or someone who works with you, a coworker. But it's like, can we come from that place of assuming positive intent about ourselves about others and then yeah, we have to have some hard conversations with people or give feedback or talk about things or let someone know that didn't work or that wasn't what we wanted, But it doesn't have to be from that deeply kind of shame based place that we're bad or wrong. And I think the
place that we do that the worst sam is with ourselves. Yeah you know what I mean. And in some ways it's like one of the blessings of my life actually was that I played baseball all those years, because baseball, even if you're listening and you don't care about baseball or don't know much about baseball, there is a ton of failure in baseball. Like even when you're
really good, you fail all the time. Even when the team's really good, you lose a lot well, This is why team sports are so important, right, Like, there is a reason that when you talk to a lot of older generation managers or executives, the in fact look for people who have played a team sport, right because the learning that from having to work with a group of people to get everyone pulling in the same direction, to get everyone to show up with their best foot forward each time, and the
self awareness that builds from that is massive, totally. And I think all my years of playing sports, and I say, the reason why I'm grateful for baseball is like the losing, the failing. I never liked to lose and fail. I still don't like to lose and fail, but I've lost and I've failed a lot. Yeah, And what you learn when you fail, as painful as it can be, is like you're not a bad person because you failed. It just didn't work or you didn't execute or whatever.
I mean, sometimes it's luck, it's crazy. I mean, it's all kinds of things. And then you have to realize, like winning is fun usually, losing is not as fun usually, but it's all kind of part of this cyclical process. And I think we live in this world now today. I get concerned sometimes because it's like everybody gets a trophy, right,
we don't want the kids to feel bad. So you can take the test seven times until you get an A and it's like, Okay, I think I understand where that impulse comes from because a few generations ago, like we shamed people and said you're dumb and you're no good and you sit over there, which wasn't healthy either. But you and I were talking before we hit record on the podcast. Sometimes like we swing the pendul in the other way and we swing it too far. And one of the ways that I talk
about this with leaders is understanding the difference between recognition and appreciation. Recognition is about performance, about outcome, so you want to recognize people when they deserve it, so they have to meet or exceed the standard. Appreciation is about valuing people and caring about people, something that we can do all the time and is actually essential. So you appreciate people all the time, you recognize
people when they deserve it. So it's not an either or. It's like, oh, I can value and care about everyone all the time, and that's an essential thing to do, especially in the crazy stressful world we live in today. But I'm only going to recognize people when they actually deserve it, because if I say good job or way to go all the time, and there's no difference between great and good and mediocre and poor, that's actually
detrimental to everybody's development and performance. Yeah. Absolutely, I'm glad you brought up appreciation because in a way, the flip side of never perceiving ourselves is enough is gratitude, right, Yeah, and also the subject of many supericialophorisms. But yes, I have my own theory about this, but I'm really curious to hear yours on why it is that we struggle to appreciate the positive aspects of our life and instead we're constantly focused on the negative, the thing
we don't have right right. I mean, look, some of it I believe is biological and some of it is cultural. So the biological part of it is, like you and I and everybody listening, we all have a negativity bias in our nervous system for survival. Yeah. So even if you consider yourself an extreme optimist, our nervous system is designed in a way to store negative memories in our amignalist so we don't have those things happen again,
which is great. It's like otherwise we'd get hit by cars and fall downstairs and burn our hands on stoves all the time because we wouldn't remember, Oh that's a bad thing. Oh that's a dangerous thing. And we walk into a room and we immediately look for threats. Most of this is unconscious, right, but we look for threats. And again, depending on our age and our race, and our gender, and our background and where we came from and our traumas and all the things, like some of us are even
more heightened to the potential threats. All of that is to keep us safe, quote unquote and for survival. So we have to go against our biological wiring in a lot of cases to even look for and find the good things. And then culturally what happens. And again, you think about the world that we live in. You live in New York City, I live in San Francisco. We're all on social media and everyone listening to this podcast. Part of the reason you're listening is like, you want to be successful.
You want to be effective, whether you're a manager or a leader, you have your own business, you're an employee early in your career, trying to move along whatever it is. We are looking out at the world and seeing all these things, especially now because we can scroll on Instagram and everything else that everybody else seems to have, and it points to things we don't have or that we may want, and so therefore there becomes this sort of obsession
as a culture with more and better or different. And again there's a healthy part of wanting that ambition or then wanting something new, wanting something different, wanting something more, but there's also a real dark side to it. And for the most part, like we're not really trained on how to have relationships with ourselves, We're not really trained on ways to have healthy desire and healthy ambition. It's kind of an either or all or nothing kind of dynamic.
And look, I've struggled with it a lot of my life. I mean, I'm a three on the Enneagram, which also means I'm an achiever performer personality type, which you know, we were with some friends over Thanksgiving and our good friend as a therapist and studies the anagram, she's also a three, and she was saying American culture, Western culture is like a toxic thing culturally that we're obsessed with performance, appearance, you know, outcome, and
we think that that, and look, everyone listening has had this experience in either a small or significant way. We go for some goal, whatever the heck it is. I'm going to graduate from COG. We lawed and applaud the extremes. Right, we do when someone says, I remember listening to an listening to an interview with some entrepreneur at some point, tech tech guy,
and and he talked about how to increase his productivity. He listens to podcasts at three times the normal speed, and I just kind of want I don't even understand that, you know, right, It's just and somehow like the journalist sort of you know, goes, oh, that's amazing, I've got to try that, and it's like, no, you don't actually,
because it's sort of absurd. And you know, rather than approaching a goal or something that we want and desire through a lens of what's the learning and development path that can get me there potentially, rather than just sort of the envy and the negativity of why don't I have this right? Right, is
a much more productive way to go. But as you said, we're not taught that in a way because particularly in the US, and it is really different, I think from Europe in this regard, Yes, we are taught to our cultural value system only rewards success, right, right, It does not recognize kind of anything other than that totally, And it's always about the result, not the journey totally. And you know, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's something I know I've struggled with. It's been
a big part of my work for all these years. But at some level, right, And I'm thinking about this too in the context, like again, we have two teenagers in our house. Our older daughter is literally in the other room right now, finishing up college applications all the U sees here out in California, the college. They're due on the thirtieth of November,
right, So this is a big thing. And as the more I've been paying attention to this and supporting her, the more I'm like, oh my god, this whole system is so screwed up, Like there's such a different way. I don't know, I don't have the answer to how it could be different, But there's so much pressure on these kids, and it's so much harder to get into college these days, and degrees are less valuable than
ever, and it's more expensive than ever to go to college. But I'm like watching myself and my cohort of fellow parents at this age and stage. And on the one hand, what I say to my daughter and I mean this in my heart. Listen, honey, we don't care where you go to college, like we love you. We want you to be somewhere that you feel good about, that you're proud of, and that where you can
thrive personally, emotionally, socially, academically, all of that. And at the end of the day, when I see someone post my kid got into Yale, right, there's a part of me that's like, well, damn good for you, you know what I mean. Like, because we live in the world where it's like that's like one of the ultimate things that we start out in the world. Here in America and in the Western world, it's like, where do you go to college? Seems to matter a lot.
And I then sometimes struggle with this notion of like, Okay, does it really matter and why does it matter? And why do I care? And why do we all care? And yeah, in the scheme of things, you put that on your resume and it's going to differentiate you from someone else. But what are we talking about. Like when I was in college, I remember this one of my first realizations. I got to Stanford, which is this great school, and I was super proud of being there.
But even back in the early to mid nineties when I was there, everyone was asking each other what are you up to or what are you doing or what classes are you taking? And I was a kid my junior year in college got suicidally depressed and it come from a family with a lot of mental health issues, and was like, no one's asking me how I'm doing. And it wasn't their fault that I was depressed, but I was like,
we're not even talking about And I appreciate that. In today's world, whether it's young people or those of us who are not so young anymore, we talk more about mental health. But at the end of the day, to your point, we're still back to We're obsessed with outcomes and results and success, and we don't even often ask people how they feel about the success or what was the journey to get there. It's all about the story and ultimately
the achievement. But every single one of us has had an experience where we achieved something that we thought was going to be the thing that was going to make us feel good about ourselves, and not only did it not, in a weird way, it made us feel worse because it's like, oh damn,
that wasn't the thing. That's why all the way circling back to our relationship with ourselves, when I'm coaching someone and I ask them, what's the goal, what's the thing you want to achieve that you think would be like the beyond the beyond, right, and they tell me the thing, whatever it is. I start this company and we grow it and it goes public, or I write this book or whatever the heck it is. It's like, Okay, I fall in love with this person and we build this amazing
family. And Okay, if you had that, how do you think you would feel in general? And how would you feel about yourself? Yeah? Okay, I would feel accomplished. I would feel grateful, I would feel proud of myself. I would feel whatever, you know, awesome. And again, I know it sounds almost too corny, but it's like, okay, but why aren't we feeling that right now? Because that's just something that
we can access. Yeah, like you could have a million, it's a it's a you're on a path, and you can't be unhappy at every point on that path other than when you get to the end of it. Right, Like, it's just a very stressful way to live your life totally and at some level again without getting too you know, we're all headed to the same place ultimately. I heard someone say this years ago and it really resonated with me. They were talking about life, and they were like, look,
we all know the destination of this thing. We're gonna die. We don't know when, we don't know how. But it's like we're all on a train, and that train everyone's on the train, and everyone gets off at a different point, but the end point is the same for everyone. And what he was saying was like the weather changes outside of the train all the time. Sometimes it's sunny and it's beautiful, sometimes it's like a blizzard,
and it's everywhere in between. And he said he was saying this, and I just found it so inspiring, Like I've decided that I'm going to Yes, I'm interested in where I'm going and where I'm headed, and those things matter to me, but I want to get better at learning how to appreciate the weather as it changes. Because it's always changing, right, And just because it's sunny doesn't mean it's going to be sunny the whole time.
Like sometimes it's going to be stormy, and sometimes it's going to be overcast. And and for me, again a three and achiever type and someone who's coaching lots of people and leaders and teams who are trying to accomplish great things,
it's like, oh my gosh, that's so important. And how do we not in a cliche kind of corny thing that we post on Instagram, but in a real way that we actually live, Like how do we remember that when like things are hard, or we get scared, or I don't know, a global pandemic happens, or you know, we lose our job or someone close to us passes away or whatever. Because those are the things where it's like, you know, another cliche, but so many cliches are
cliches because they're true. It's like, circumstances don't define us, they reveal us absolutely. Our inspections. Yeah, really hard. It's like I would define us totally. Yeah. So I want to quote to our reader something that you've written in the past, which I thought was very well expressed about vulnerability. All too often we relate to vulnerability, especially in certain environments,
relationships, and situations, as something we should avoid at all costs. However, it's vulnerability that liberates us from our erroneous and insatiable obsession with trying to do everything right. Yeah, give us an example of how you've seen this manifest with a leader and how you've coached them to accept and express their vulnerability. You know, the one that just popped in my head is not one
hundred percent answering your question, but I think it's related. I was I was delivering a workshop at Google. This was about ten twelve years ago, and you know, mid level managers, and the workshop was on building authentic relationships and embracing vulnerability. And this woman raised her hand in the group and she said, you know, something just hit me that I don't think i'd ever quite connected the dots. She said, there's another woman who works here
at Google who I grew up with. We went to high school together, and we weren't super close, but we knew each other, and we come from the same town and we're the exact same age. We went off to different colleges, we've had different careers, but we're both here. She is now way farther along in her career than I am, just in the matrix
of the company, right. And she said, And as I'm reflecting on this whole notion of vulnerability, what I realize I've always admired about her is that she seemed to not I don't know if she didn't care, or she just had more courage or whatever, but she would raise her hand and put herself out there and just go for it. Oh yeah, And she said, I think that's probably why she's been so much more successful than I've been, if I'm really being honest about it, you know. And I appreciated
the openness of her saying that. And then we all as a group, we're kind of having a discussion about that. That again, vulnerability is scary, it's hard, it's uncomfortable. Right, What does Brene Brown says? It's risk, emotional exposure and uncertainty. And if we can lean into those things, if we can embrace those things, if we can move towards those things, not against the not away from those things, even though they're scary and uncomfortable, and you know what, we might lose, we might fail,
we might fall flat on our face. We might ask the person you know for the job and they say no, or for the sale and they say no, or for the date and they say no or whatever. But again it's like again another cliche, but it's like the answers always know if you don't ask, right, and the difference between the person who's willing to ask and the person who's not willing to ask, and I'm both of those people, depending on the mood and the situation. Quite frankly, if I
ask, I might get the thing. If I raised my hand and I stepped forward, it might happen. But if I don't because I'm scared, it's a default no. Yeah, yeah, it's you know. And again and I don't say this in some way like this isn't about like just suck it up and like no, it's like no fear to me, that's ridiculous. And again, what I wish I would have known all those years ago. Sam as an athlete, Like I was really good at baseball and I
would get really really nervous and I thought something was wrong with me. I thought that was like just weird or weak or insecure or bad like something like that was my internal dialogue was like, you're not very good and you don't have enough confidence, and and I'm looking around everybody else and they all seemed way more confident than I felt. I did not know at the time, and I wish I did. They were all feeling some version of the same
thing toooil. Yeah right, I mean again, Look, some people are genuinely more confident than other people. Some situations were genuinely more comfortable than others. But in general, we compare our insides to other people's outsides and they
don't match, and then we think I'm crazy or I'm flawfush. Yeah, But in reality, like everybody is feeling that, And a big part of my work is not to be weird about it or force people to share stuff they don't want to share, but to try to take some of that inner dialogue and put it out so that A it's not just roaming around in our head and making us crazy, and B when you say it out loud, what you find is that other people are like, oh, you feel like
that. I feel like that, And all of a sudden, like the big secret is now out on the table. That like, everybody's feeling some version of their own insecurity or doubt or fear, and if we can talk a little bit about it, we don't have to spend so much time and energy hiding it. And what I find when I work with teams and we can do that, or when I work with leaders and they can express some of that, even to me, it's like, okay, putting it out
on the table. Now, what are we going to do now? If we're not wasting all that time and energy performing for each other and actually connecting with each other, now we can do some great things. Yeah. Absolutely,
it brings to mind. You know Lisa Demore. I read a bunch of her books as the Mother of Teenagers, and particularly two teenager Girls, and she talks about this idea of you know, so many adults, when young adults come to them and say they're nervous or anxious or stressed about something, the reaction is, don't be anxious or don't be nervous, don't be stressed, And in fact, that seeks to obviate what they're feeling and sends this message of oh, you mustn't feel that somehow, when really what we
should be saying to them is it's reasonable that you're feeling this way. Let's talk a little bit about why you're feeling this and what you might do to address that totally and to normalize it. And you know, it's interesting you say that. So our older daughter, Samantha was with me a couple months ago. I had a speaking engagement in Las Vegas and she wanted to come, which was kind of a big deal. You know, Dad is mostly cringey to both girls these days. But she wanted to come, and she
was interested. And I mean we were going to go do some fun things in Vegas, which interesting place to take your seventeen year old daughter. But she came to my speaking engagement and she wanted to come. I mean she's seen me speak a bunch when she was little, but the last few years not so much. And I purposefully said to her and I wasn't. I meant it, and I felt it, but I wanted her to know.
Right before I went up on stage, I leaned over and I said to her, Samantha, I'm so glad you're here, and I'm feeling really nervous. And she looked at me kind of funny, and she's like why, And I was like, well, two reasons. First of all, I'm speaking to a group of dentists, and I don't usually talk to dentists, so I'm a little nervous, like I don't know what exactly how this is going to resonate. This is a different audience than I'm used to speaking.
It was a dental conference i'd gotten invited to, and I said, and secondly, you're here, and you know, I'm just like, I'm aware of you being here. So I'm just feeling nervous and I'm wanting to do well and I'm wanting not to screw up, right, And she looks at me kind of surprised, like, dad, what, and then she immediately goes in it was very sweet, dad, So you're gonna do great, and she starts to like kind of coach me and sort of pump me up. But the reason why I did it, though, is I wanted her
because she was gonna see me get up on stage. And look, I've been speaking for twenty plus years. I'm pretty good at it. When you see me on stage, it does not look like I'm nervous at all. It looks like I'm totally comfortable and I'm telling jokes and I'm going get right. I wanted her to know this is actually what's genuinely happening inside right now. And I'm gonna go up there and you're gonna watch me do this thing, and there's no way for you to be able to feel what I'm feeling.
But I wanted to normalize to her that, like, even at fifty years old, like I still get nervous and it's okay, it doesn't freak me out, and I'm I go do it anyway, and you know what I mean, Like totally, I think we don't do enough of that as leaders, as parents, as human beings to say to each other like, yeah, I'm kind of worried about this thing or nervous. Yeah, and I'm gonna go do it anyway. And I might still do a great job, but like I still have some doubt or some fear or some insecurity or
whatever. That to your point, it's not a bad thing. In fact, what we know about emotions is like we can't selectively mute emotions. So if we say I'm not going to feel scared, I'm not going to feel angry, I'm not going to feel jealous or whatever emotion, we don't like what that does is it mutes all the other ones we want to feel. That mutes the gratitude and the joy and the love and the excitement. So it's like my work also focuses a lot on can we again bring our whole
selves to work? Can we be vulnerable enough to be real? You know, one of the most the most vulnerable emotions in life is joy. Yeah, because it's love is appreciational, right yeah, Right? If I tell you that I love you, if I express my joy and how happy I am about something, it could go away. And you know what, in life, it will because emotions ebb and flow and the thing that we're so
joyful about. Right, You fall in love, you get married, it's wonderful, and then it's not so much, and then you get your heart broken and your marriage ends, and it's like, well, what am I going to do? Never love anyone else again because it didn't work out, you know. Never try to go for the promotion because I got fired from the job. Never try to start the company because the last time I tried it didn't work again. Those are real experiences in life that we have to
work through. But like that is part of what ultimately success and fulfillment is about. Is like failing picking ourselves up, learning from it, licking our wounds and going I'm going to try again, and trusting in that process. Right, And it's super vulnerable, right, because it's like I've already you
know. I think about this sometimes in my own life, and I realize there are some things that like I have failed that so much that sometimes I don't want to try again, and I have to reckon with that, like well what is that about? Yeah? And then oh, can I pick
myself up and go for it? And sometimes even in life, when we've lived a bit and we've had some wisdom and experience, we also have some trauma and some disappointment and some frustration in there, and we start to say to ourselves consciously, well I can't do that, well, I don't do that. Well I tried that before and it didn't work. And it's like, yeah, okay, so true. So I want to bring us to
our last topic. Trust. Yes. So culture is a word that we hear over and over and over, and a lot of the research on trusted organizations really sort of focuses on two ideas, right. One is how important trust is in shaping individuals' perceptions of fairness and justice within an organization. And then the second is that trust isn't just about anticipating others' behaviors, but it's
also about the perception of sort of morality within the organization. We're living in a time when, as we were saying earlier, trust and institutions it feels like has never been lower, right with the collapse of organized religion, with media, what it is, social media, et cetera. Tell us if and why you feel trust is at a low and how do you work to build trust in for individuals, in teams and then ultimately in their organizations. Well, there's a lot there. I mean, I look at trust on
three different levels. There's inner personal trust. So like again, let's say you and I work together, or we're friends, or we're in a family together. Do we trust each other? And that process, as we all know, is tricky. Trust can be built, it can be broken, but it really is a one to one phenomenon. It has a lot to do with, by the way, our willingness to be real with each other, our willingness to be vulnerable with each other, our willingness to take ownership
to repair when something gets broken. And again, we don't get a lot of training and trust, And it's a really tricky thing. Everyone says trust is fundamental to relationships, it's fundamental to teams. It's all leadership. We all know that. But it's like, so there's that, Then there's group trust, like team trust, which another way to think of that, we
talk about psychological safety. Psychological safety means what the group, the team is safe enough for what risk taking, speaking up, challenging one another, you know, debating in a healthy, productive way, taking risks, failing. Not that we want to, but we know any of those things can happen within a team. And I'm not going to be shamed, ridiculed, kicked out of the group simply because I made a mistake or I had a different
opinion. Then there's more organizational trust, and that one to what you're speaking to. That one's tricky because it's like, well, how do I trust the company or the institution. You know, I'm employee X over here and
the company has thirty thousand employees. Like what I often will say when I'm talking to the CEO or the senior leaders and they're wanting we want there to be more trust in the organization, I would say, we got to go down to first, interpersonal one on one trust and group trust, team trust, because that's how people actually interact with their world, like their experience there.
You know, most people's experience of the company they work for is the experience they have with the manager that they report to and the teammates that they have. So if we do really develop and work on and focus on interpersonal trust and group trust psychological safety, that can have an impact. However, the institutions as a whole, to your point, there's a lot of things
happening in our society these days, government institutions, corporate institutions. It's not that people weren't skeptical or even cynical about them, you know, five years ago, ten years ago, but there does seem to be a really heightened sense of a lack of trust in institutions. And some of that I think is warranted and justified because you know, companies and government organizations and others like don't always do great things, and you know, it's hard when that happened,
you know, in the nature of how work is. We were talking about this earlier, but again, a couple of generations ago, you went to school, you got a job, and you worked for the company for fourty years and then you retired. Yeah, that's not the way it works anymore. Well, and it wasn't an individual's success was in a zero sum
game, right. I think increasingly there's this sense in our society. And it was interesting in a conversation Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell we're having, they were talking about how this idea of success being more zero sum, you know, isn't that recent. It sort of began in the in the seventies and eighties really, right, And you know, with a societal value increasingly that one success implies the failure of someone else, Right, That just creates a
lot of insecurity and negativity and a lack of trust in those institutions. Where As you said, you know, for many of our parents, Parrence generation, they had won maybe two jobs, right, and that was their life, right, And the expectation wasn't that I'm going to go here and leverage that, and go there and leverage that and then get in early here and it was going to go public and we're all going to get rich or whatever
that I mean Again, it's a different paradigm. Like one of our clients is Lawrence Livermore, National Lab out here in California where I live, and people that work at the lab, and I've been partnering with them for about ten years. I mean people work there for thirty forty years. I was on a Zoom call with a senior leader there who's been there and saw yesterday, and I was asking, how, remind me how long have you been
at the lab? And she said only five and a half years. And I said, you know what's amazing, And I said, if you were in Silicon Valley five and a half years, in most you're like an old timer. You've been around forever. Right, And again, it's all relative. And again I'm not necessarily arguing that one's better than the other. It's just a different paradigm. And so in terms of trusting the institution, and again I'm an optimist, but I don't think that people have as much stake
in the institution anymore. And again, think of COVID and hybrid working and virtual working. Let's just say I got a job working at Company X in late twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, and I'm working from home and I interact with everybody on Zoom and like I've literally I mean maybe I've been into the office a couple times. I don't even know people. I don't even
have any physical connection to the place, So again it's tricky. But I mean, even if you're the CEO or you're the chairman of chairperson of the board, there's only so much you can do that's going to inspire trust in the people inside the organization or institution to trust it. And the more you can do to make good decisions and be transparent with things sort of organizationally,
the better. But at the end of the day, it is going to come down to the individuals and their individual relationships with each other, one on one trust and that psychological safety of the time, like that's where you can really move the needle the most from a cultural standpoint. Wonderful, Mike, Thank you so much. We'll pause there. I have a feeling we're going to need to have another conversation about a whole list of topics we did not
cover today. Yes, I probably should have warned you upfront that I'm not short, short winded, so we will do that. We will do that another time. Thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www dot viidmix dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.