Harnessing Professional Strategies & Tech Performance Tools for Personal Growth w/ Chris Cravens #177

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$500 off your first hire. I would just keep doing things like that because of that philosophy of in the absence of clear leadership step in. Be the one who was responsible and it goes back to that anxiety from childhood. There are people who have much healthier outlooks and I've just never been wired that way. I would love to be wired that way. I'm not. So I have to basically an interrupt loop in my process to question each decision I make as I go to do a new thing or take on more stuff. Is this the right thing for me?

For me to do right now are I am making my life harder? I'm Jerry Lee, founder of VOC. If you're looking to create a better work life balance or if you just want to bring the same level of energy free. I'm going to focus in tensionality and intensity to your personal life that you do with your job. This is the conversation for you. In this episode we talk about how to harness professional strategies and tech performance tools to improve our personal growth with Chris Gravens.

We cover applying strategies like OKRs and post mortems to our personal goals. We also talk about how to build habits and accountability within your personal life, combating negative self-talk, rewiring your brain to focus on the present and not on past failure and other practices to help you bring more effective work life balance into how you operate.

Let me introduce you to Chris. Chris Cravens was the first chief information officer at Zingha and Uber and led digital transformation at Splunk as VP of Engineering. He is an active strategic advisor, coach and investor to startups. Chris and I were mid conversation when we hit record discussing the role of anxiety at work and how it can be a default pattern and response for high performers.

So don't be alarmed when we roll right into it and start talking about anxiety. We take the conversation right from there. Enjoy our conversation with Chris Cravens. Yeah, so first week of Uber, I've had this thing that I've done a couple of times where I end up starting a job in my bosses and there, which is really good in some ways, right, because you get to know what's going on without that extra color of there's always an amount of like turd polishing no matter what.

So I step in and I'm like trying to put my head around this problem of OK, I just hired on to build the IT organization that and you know we were in 24 cities, you know, we had growth goals, funding goals, we had some objectives in place about what we're going to do.

And I'm starting to put together my plan and strategy and I mean, I didn't even have it in draft yet and I'm sitting there at my desk and working away and I overhear this conversation between two other folks in the office and they keep saying new headquarters, new headquarters.

Oh, I know that I'm going to have some piece of that because you know, we need to make sure that everybody has internet connection and you know, right kind of technology in the facility and meeting space and you know tools and I'm like, OK, you know, I did a lot of that when I was at Zingha and pretty familiar with it.

So I go on and tap them on the shoulder and I'm like, OK, so what's this new headquarters thing and they tell me, oh, we're going to we're looking for a space. So we're going to take down X amount of square feet and that it, like OK, who's running the project who runs facilities and it was like blank, blank, blank, oh, we don't really. Yeah, don't really have anyone can do it. I'm like, OK, who's done commercial real estate before and real estate contracting nobody.

Does anyone done any construction or buildouts before nobody like OK, I've done those things. I'll take it. Like OK, cool, you own facilities. That's big first week. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would just keep doing things like that because it's like because of that philosophy of in the absence of clear leadership step in be the one who was responsible and it goes back to that anxiety from childhood of lack of structure or pick an assortment of childhood issues.

Right. But this thing that leaves you with this feeling like I am the only one in this situation who can go do this. You take this giant personal responsibility and end up like you said signing up for too much. Right. So there's this this thing there of the anxiety running out well ahead of logic reason and clear ability to execute in a lot of ways that sums up the startup leadership experience though.

Right. Because we all kind of do that. Well, it's like the people that can do that and and do that more readily like tend to succeed or like I see if you define success as in like taking on ever increasing scope of responsibility. Yeah, which is how we define success, right? If you think about it, it is absolutely how we define it. At least at a subconscious level. Now, not everybody gets that message from this.

There are people who have much healthier outlooks who look at that and they're like, well, fuck that. I'm just going to do the thing that I know I'm responsible for. Yeah. And I've just never been wired that way. I would love to be wired that way. I'm not. So I have to I have to basically an interrupt loop in my process to kind of question each decision I make as I go to do a new thing or take on more stuff.

Is this the right thing for me to do right now or am I making my life harder? Yeah. So is that is that your interrupt loop? Because like for me, I'm thinking like I need that interrupt loop. I need the check to say like is this stemming from like your default pattern of anxiety or is this something that you consciously want to choose to take on and make sense for given goals, priorities, values, whatever. Like how do you tip it off that?

Yeah, typical is a strange word because I don't know if I've done it enough to have a typical way to do it. But I think that the mental model that I try to put in place is again, it's like borrowing these things from my professional life that then I can apply in my personal life.

Like I have spent so much more time developing tools and skills in the professional world. And then, you know, I realized that I put 90% of myself development effort into work and, you know, 10% into myself, which is such a bad ratio. Right. Because you know, I mean, that was what I was focused on. I was in this mode of like, OK, caveman brain.

Go out with club, go Silicon Valley, go make money and the wiring that I have that says, you know, go in and just step up and go do it. And also don't give yourself credit for it. Don't accept credit for it. Don't accept compliments.

Assume that you need to do it perfectly the first time out. And if you don't then berate yourself like all these really good healthy habits. The thing that I try to do now to get back to the mental model is similar to what I would do with like project planning and looking at, you know, OK, I've got an organization of X amount of people, whether it's, you know, two or 200 or 2000.

We have a certain amount of stuff that we need to get done. Do we have the right skills. Do we have the right capacity. Do we have enough people basically and do we have enough clarity in what we want to go do to achieve something. And if so, what do we think we can achieve? You know, what's, what's feasible.

And then what's the thing that's stretch and what's the thing that you fall back to if that doesn't work. And I've gotten really good at that in the work context. But I'm still pretty bad at it with myself. Like I still overestimate how much I can get done in a given day.

And I mean, it's obvious with things like, you know, if you've ever done this, let's say you're on travel and you're going someplace like, well, I want to see a bunch of things while they're so you load up and you're like, well, I want to see, you know, eight things a day for the next four days.

It's just kind of amazing. It's like you can schedule yourself to death. I've done this a couple times on trips and then realized like I had a bunch of things scheduled and I got like a third of them accomplished. And I enjoyed that one third of things. So I tried to really be much more critical and force the prioritization of what do I really want to go see and what's feasible. And the same way trying to apply that like, okay, what can I really do that's feasible.

I can do things every day to take care of myself. Like I just did a Peloton ride this morning before getting on because I knew like I would I wanted to get exercise done before we talk because I would be clearer mentally. I'd be in a better headspace more focused. You know, so I try to to structure things so that I'm really attending to the things I know I can do and attending to my own physical and mental health first.

And then everything else I can get done after that. That's great. The thing I haven't gotten good at yet. And I'm still really working on is then the things that fall below the line. Trying to not give a shit about them. Yeah, yeah, that part's hard. It's it's it is so true. Like I find myself worrying about a lot of things. So I want to do one quick thing.

I want to back up a little bit and then I want to ask you like, why do we typically fall into this pattern where we like invest 90% of our time into like applying all these things professionally and only 10% of the time personally. But for folks listening in we kind of just rolled right into the conversation. I wanted to do a quick framing just so people know like what did I just jump into and and what's going on and what's the context here.

So just want to set a little bit of context. So indulge me please for a second Chris and then I want to ask you why I think what's interesting is like for folks listening in like they come to the show because they want to learn things that will help them be a better professional. You know, be a better leader make a bigger impact in the business right and what's interesting is when you talk about that is like we fall into this default pattern where we want to spend 90% of our time doing that.

But I think what's fun is the intention of our conversation is to look at some of what I'll probably label as like performance tools or in frameworks that we commonly find in the tech world but applying that consciously and intentionally to our personal lives. And a quick background context for like how we arrived at this conversation so that people are caught up with us the first time you and I connected was back when we were talking about session ideas for our conference last year.

The session that you did was really honest and personal discussion on burnout and one of the questions that you reflected on when we first connected that really resonated with me and sort of sparked this conversation was this question of like what am I doing right now for my life and does it work for me.

That simple question like maybe pause and became kind of a big anchor point for my new year and one of the other things we talked about kind of in tandem with that that I think shape inspired this conversation was this question of like what are the professional behaviors that I can apply my personal life and it made me realize like those two things connected was that like all of the areas where I felt focused consistent where I was making progress all of them were like in this work category because I was applying all of these things more intentionally and rigorously but none of them were personal and I was trying to reconcile the

kind of that gap and so when you start talking about this idea of like you know you come into Silicon Valley startup life and you're like 90% optimized professional 10% optimized personal I'm like yes this is my life right now and like and I want to know why I so I think to go back to like the question of how we got here you know the intention of this conversation is like how can we make that shift so can share a bit about like you know why are we why are we just more intentional structured with in our professional lives and why do we avoid or like deprioritize like bringing that same level of intentionality and structure to our personal life.

I think there are a lot of cultural norms around this were I think the expectation for so long and I think the current work climate is different than work climate that I came up in and the climate that I came up and it was you just do your fucking job and if you're going to complain about it there will be somebody else who will do it and I think some of that is because I came up and Jen exer came up and you know hard economic times and finish school there's a recession you get things built up to a point. Oh okay the mortgage crisis wipes everything out.

Right okay get everything built up again. Oh no we got to work now we got this now we got that there's just like these things along the way and I think also to be really blunt people just didn't give a fuck about your feelings in those days.

It's like okay feel however you want but you still need to just get this done. I think we've started down this path of understanding that your best self you're bringing your best self to work gets you the best outcomes and that best self needs attention and care and feeding and if you don't attend to that you are putting yourself at risk you're putting your objectives and your team at risk you're putting everything that is that you're trying to do at risk.

I think that was just kind of something that nobody talked about for a long time. I think it makes a lot of sense and I think also the getting an understanding of how well you're performing.

Of how well and performing is such a strained word right. So how are you doing how are you how is existence for you in this context and do you feel like you've got the resources of available to go after these things and go do these this kind of work and if you don't why don't you and what can you do about it how do you make a trade off and then kind of further

understanding like what is this kind of sprint mode where you're really charging hard and I notice it's a sprint mode it's not a marathon mode. I don't personally believe that anyone can run super hot for a long period of time without negative impact. You know, but there are definitely times where you got to do more and you sprint during that time and you put in a ton of work in a short period of time to get something done but then you should go back to something more reasonable thereafter.

Right. And being able to consciously make these tradeoffs and understand like I'm going to borrow from this self care maintenance running my body my life you know maintaining this piece of things. In a borrow energy from that to put the energy into the work thing but doing that consciously is totally different from just abandoning and I will call it abandoning like abandoning your responsibility to care for yourself to be able to put that into work.

And I think I definitely was one of those people I tipped much more towards abandoning my own self care to do the work and you know if we take it back to our kind of professional life. I think this is like the equivalent of taking on massive technical debt or neglecting platform development in favor of feature development and sometimes there are appropriate times to do that.

You know if you are especially in consumer if you are going hard for new users you're focused on feature you're focused on. And you're also going to be delighting users and bringing them to the platform and getting them. Transacting and running whatever process there's a lot to be said for that right.

If you don't have those users the business doesn't continue if you don't have those users you really don't need a robust platform you can run on anything but so much of the time we find ourselves in situations where we build a lot of capability and we can neglect the underlying infrastructure neglect the platform neglect.

And measurement or security or what have you and I think it's so similar when you don't put a conscious framework around borrowing energy from how you care for yourself and put that straight into how you do work.

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Revello simplifies the hiring process for each month that you decide to keep your developers employed with Revello you get to decide who to offer. Revello simplifies the hiring process for each month that you decide to keep your developers employed with Revello you get to decide who to offer. How was that shifted when you first started doing that to now in terms of how you apply this framework or structure to setting intentions or goals for your personal life? I think there's two big things.

One, I used to do it on much more of a strict cadence where I would do the same thing with work. I started at the beginning of the year with a strap plan. Here's my objectives for the quarter and I want to hit these measures by here and these measures by there and go and reassess at every quarter.

I didn't need to run my life on the same kind of cadence that I would run a company on. It's a different level of coordination. I found that after a period of time, once I had a structure kind of up and going it in place and I had some basic things covered, it became really heavy weight. It just became more overhead than was really appropriate and that overhead was really helpful for me at first to get to the point where I felt like I could do the thing.

It was something to go after where I didn't know whether or not I could do it. It's like, oh, no, because I had got to the point where I was like, geez, I can't do pull ups. It's no way I could do pull ups. I just said a goal, five pull ups. By this amount of time, go do five pull ups. I think, oh, okay. Well, if I'm going to do that, then I know I need to go start small and I'm going to go do whatever, go do a progression of things to build to the point where you can do pull up.

It's much easier to get there that first time with a bunch of steps along the way. Now it's like, okay, more familiar with this. I can peel back a little bit from that deeper level of detail and think more, I mean, kind of bigger structures, almost like moving to a macro kind of approach and think about things like, okay, I know I have my blood pressure range that I want to keep things in.

I have a weight range. I want to keep things in. I have clothes, I have a certain size that I want to remain in. And I have the main thing is just how do I feel? That's the hardest one to measure, right? And it's something like, you know where you don't know, and those kind of binary things don't really translate that well to Ocarrers.

Do you have any type of reflection questions that you ask to help sort of illuminate or clarify? Like some of those emotional states that you want to achieve more often than not. I know it can kind of ever flow, but are there certain questions or reflections that have been helpful to help shape that intention? Yeah, I think the main one that I go back to is, am I treating myself the same way I would treat a beloved friend or family member?

Am I showing myself the same love, respect, and care that I would show someone else? That's a big one. I think also just asking really critically, am I prioritizing this? Am I actually going to do the work? Or am I setting a goal that I'm not going to ever be able to achieve because I'm not actually doing it?

Yeah, and that is so much the case with, especially when people look at their fitness journeys. And if you're in this point, and for anybody who's in this point, my heart absolutely goes out to you when for whatever reason you're not in good physical shape, and you wish to be in good physical shape. That is a really hard journey, whether you were fit and then became unfit and wish to be fit again, or whether you just always had kind of an issue with that, it's a hard thing.

And I think especially we have so much baggage around being fit, thin, beautiful, rich, talented, right job, right car, right look, right partner, right lifestyle, right, you know, swagger. And that stuff's all bullshit really. It's not necessarily a thing that makes you happy. So really being clear on what do I actually want and how do I really get there and trying to make small moves along there.

I ended up losing about a hundred pounds all said and done and I put a few back on since then and I've been the process of losing nose again. But through that process like if I would have just sat down and said, okay, I know losing a hundred pounds. Okay, now what, you know, it's like, how do you go Marshall again. That's just too big too much of a block level. Oh, pick objective this black box thing. I've got to go do that.

Same way it's like if you sit down and you say, well, I got to build a billion dollar internet company. Great. How are you going to do it? What's your plan? Yeah, so some of those same things of getting to clarity. You know, and in this world, it's, you know, what's your thesis? What's the thing you're going to build? How do you test whether or not you have PM Fed?

How do you scale it? How do you, you know, ensure that your revenue model is supportable and is going to work and scalable? How do you then continue to grow the business? And in the personal context, it's really no different. It's like, I got a big hairy objective on how I'm going to take care of myself. But if I don't break it down and think about things like, okay, how do I get to this point? Yeah, it just becomes really difficult.

And because it's in that personal realm, at least for me, I found it so much easier to beat up on myself and just not have that positive self reinforcement. And it's gotten pretty good at that in the work context, but the personal thing was definitely lacking. So it became an opportunity to really exercise that no pun intended. And to use those kind of waypoints along the journey as proof that I could do the thing.

I was going to talk a little bit more about the negative self talk part because what's so special. I think about this conversation is like we can sort of divide and introduce an imaginary line between your personal and professional context, but like the negative self talk can show up across that whole spectrum of existence.

And so what was maybe different between the positive self talk, like within the work context. And then how did you apply like your ability to do that in that professional context to then like the personal context? Like how did you introduce more positive self talk in moments where there are high risk negative self talk things going on? I mean, the first, honestly, the first way I started doing it was really by correcting myself when I would engage in negative self talk.

And the place where this really showed up first for me was out on the golf course. I played a lot of golf at the time. And I picked up the bad habit around negative self talk. I didn't learn negative self talk from playing golf. I knew how to do it already. I already knew how to treat myself like shit. But I saw other people doing it a lot.

And golf is a great venue for this because it's exceptionally difficult. 95% of golfers or maybe it's higher now 97 whenever there's some huge amount of golfers are shooting 90 or higher. So they're an 18 handicap. So playing at a high level is really difficult. There's very few people who really do it.

But we have this kind of warped idea around it because you're like, oh, okay, it's a par four. That means that almost every golfer is going to shoot well 90% of golfers are going to shoot at least a five on. So if you kind of reset around that, maybe the performance isn't really that bad. And more to the point, if you're constantly providing negative reinforcement, you're never really rewarding your good performance.

So it becomes this thing where you assume that every shot is going to look like a tour pro shot. You know, you're going to be able to get on the green from 220 yards with a four iron and have it land soft right next to the pin, make a birdie putt, like all this stuff, like just like you see on TV because you got the clubs to do the thing just like on TV. And they're the same clubs that this pro uses or that pro uses.

And then what ends up happening is you set this really high expectation in your head. And then you swing the club like a normal human does not like the point 0 to 2% of golfers that can actually play on tour or whatever number is I just totally made that point is it's tiny, tiny number and you're part of the big, big.

So then it's like you miss the shot and then you know there's the invariable moment of self abuse, you know some people like slam the club in the ground some people stop around in a circle and up for a minute some people just get in the car and see.

And I was definitely one of those people like I would get really frustrated and one of the worst things that ever happened is I went out in a practice round and we only got 14 holes in by shot two under par through 14 holes and was the best to ever play it and shot lights out.

And then I missed a single fairway didn't miss a single green I'd never shot like that and I'm like oh we're going to dominate this tournament the next morning I came out and I couldn't hit it straight at all and my partner was like the hell happened.

But in that moment your respective rate this is just part of what happens and in that moment the last thing that's going to help me hit the shot better the next time is after I hit the shot and it doesn't go great for me to start into this lecture internally about why I'm a piece of shit.

And I'm not going to be productive the same way and seen so many times where you're in a work context and a discussion around what to go do or how this thing went sideways or why did it go down or whatever turns into something that is just not productive and it becomes about personalities about personal conflict about finger pointing. I mean this is why we have things like blameless post mortems right I think it's really huge to be able to bring that blameless culture to your personal life.

Okay, cholesterol is too high. Did I do something wrong? Well from a metric perspective yeah okay I ate too many fries and too many burgers. So I mean I'm a bad person. No. Instead I like burger in fries. So I don't need to blame myself for that. It's probably not a good idea to continue engaging in it from a health perspective right but certainly blaming myself like calling myself a piece of shit for wanting a burger.

It's not going to help just won't move the thing forward in the way that you want. And if you're more interested in achieving the outcome then you are in a scribing blame or being right which is an interesting one when you're thinking about like beating crap out of yourself because you're never going to be right.

You know it's that same thing do you want to be happy do you want to figure out how to move this thing forward do you want to sit in this kind of bitter place of I am right and someone else is wrong as a result of it. And that's this binary thing where I need to be the good guy so I need to make somebody else the bad guy. Tab it formation to me is pretty simple. It's hard but it's simple.

The key is don't wait to be motivated just do it any do you know work through your lack of motivation by doing the thing you don't want to do because you ultimately like if you make the decision is something you want to do even if in the moment you don't want to do it. Like I want to get back to the point where I'm training 90 minutes a day again I haven't trained 90 minutes a day consistently in a year so a deal with injury.

So I want to get back to that I am somewhat motivated to get back to it but I'm not at the point yet where my motivation is translated into an intrinsic thing that makes me get up and go out to the gym every day. So I put it on my calendar and I look at my day and I figure out when is the time that I can do this I have my time that I prefer to do it so right now I'm in this mode where I have my day set and then I shoehorn exercise in where I can.

The place where I want to get is I have my exercise and I shoehorn in the rest of my day the right. So it's just a different level of prioritization but if you wait for the motivation to come what feels like intrinsically you will wait for a long time and not really get the results that you want because we just don't work like.

Do you have something that helps you like bridge that gap of like I'm not motivated to like actually doing the thing what is what's your approach to like overcome that I'm not feeling motivated today to do it to actually then like start the activity.

Yeah I try to do something that's more attainable and then I put it on my calendar because I am one of those people I live by my calendar I mean I put everything on the calendar yeah the time I need to go take my kid to school when I'm going to go have coffee with somebody.

Time that I'm doing you know deep work I block everything and some of that is my own 80 D if I don't do that I tend to focus on whatever is kind of buzzing around at the surface and I will allow myself to be distracted all day long.

So fighting that distraction to me structure is such a big answer there and that's not the things for everybody some people are really great at structure right out of the bat and they're going to have no problem with that so maybe for folks like that it's having a plan that's achievable it could be a thing like if you struggle to figure out what you should do within those periods let's say it's exercise let's just keep with that.

And if it's thing of like okay well I'm great at making the time for myself to exercise but I have no idea what I'm doing okay that's good get a personal trainer can't hire a personal trainer can't afford that just doesn't work whatever cool go find some reliable sources of information on YouTube and do some research and set yourself up so that when that time comes you already have a sense of what are the things I need to do and you put in some pre work ahead of it so you say okay well I'm going to put my 30 minutes towards exercise and then if you spend 26 minutes trying to figure out what I'm doing.

26 minutes trying to figure out what it is that you're going to do you're just going to be frustrated you know or you go to the gym kind of stand there and like I guess I'll do some of these and I'll do some of these and I don't know what getting it to the point when it is time to do it when it's time for that 30 minutes of activity where you're going to do it what you're going to do you have a defined beginning middle end and then when you're done celebrating that and that could be you know just taking a moment for some positive self talk I think that's really important especially when you're getting started to do it.

So I'm getting started to take a beat at the end of that period and say like I did the thing like for me I put my workouts on a whiteboard and I do that so at the end of it I can look and say okay I achieved that I completed it you know and that's important to me to have that sense because then the next time I come out I know that I've already done a hard thing and it's easier the next time it's easier the next time the next time the next time and it shifts for me anyway from this feeling of perpetual challenge that is hard and I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm doing hard and I don't know if I get to to just another day of doing hard things that I'm used to doing hard things and I can do new hard things because I have all of this track record in history right and that's for me where my confidence my motivation and that sense of positivity comes from.

I'm sure enough how powerful it is to have clarity on exactly what you're going to do and also the power of like having some type of coach or expert authority there to help provide that type of guidance because I'm thinking about like any time where I've had like a lot of massive acceleration and like new personal goals that I want to have it's like it's oftentimes always because I've had like a coach to tell me exactly what to do and how to do it there's a little bit of personal accountability that I know I'm going to show up and then there's not that gap like cognitive gap where you're like where you have that pause of like I have no idea what I'm going to do.

The biggest false start has been with running for like five years of set a very shallow goal of like wanting to do a big distance race or whatever and it never really had like the accountability and I also never really signed up to have like the social pressure of like getting it done but then I also had absolutely no idea how to begin to like tackle a big goal like that until I found I use you know this is shameless plug for Nike run club.

I think it's the coolest app ever because they have like a coach that tells you exactly what to do the whole plan is laid out and the starting cost is so minimal and so for me that's been such a big metaphor to realize like here are the strategies that I need if I want to tackle a new goal in my personal life where that's physical mental emotional whatever it is like having that type of clarity and structure is so powerful.

So when you're talking about all this I'm like yes, oh my gosh, like I feel like someone for clarity now because I'm like this is the new thing that I've discovered for myself. Oh totally totally I you know I think that makes so much sense and especially when you're doing something new I'll just say it's not often that we go to do something new when we're an expert just doesn't happen.

You know some people are intuitive about things and just pick stuff up really quickly great most of us don't do that so engaging an expert who knows how to do that is good. The other thing like you said accountability like I quickly moved from working with my trainer twice a week to three times a week and then I really went hard at one point and was doing five days a week and part of why I did that was number one I was really motivated and I was getting in great shape.

The second part of it was I had laid out for myself for big athletic goals that I was going to go after for that year I ended up breaking my knee two weeks before the first one of them so it shot the season for me but I was plan to do a trail half a century ride a tough

year early on then there's one thing like I was going to do a more you know if you haven't done that that's like a crossfit hell day but this was my my plan and I took this to my coach my trainer and I told him like here are my objectives and this is when I want to go do so we need to tip the training plans towards me being able to do this so I had an outcome in mind I had some ability or some level of measurement around it I had some level of structure around it because I knew like for some of these things like for the top my

I knew what the obstacles were so it was fairly easy to then work backwards and say okay what are the kind of abilities that I need to have to be able to achieve this right and then from there I've got this accountability partner because he believed me right because there's always this thing like you can tell yourself and I did this for years when I want to do blah blah blah and set some be like again it's the big black box until you break it down it's abstract and our brains pay attention when we set goals and we don't achieve them you know it's not good

like you start to kind of document your own opinion of your ability to get this done and that negative reinforcement becomes problematic so sometimes you need that accountability partner who's just says okay all right you want to go do that I'll get you ready to go do that it may not be easy but ok we'll do it

We'll do it and it became much more about that accountability and then a built relationship With that person and it became about spending that time together and Working with someone to really invest in this objective and now I'm at the point like I learned enough through that process

To be able to program my own workouts. I still do stuff from time to time like I'm actually about gonna go have lunch with him today Because we don't see each other in a while Just gonna go hang out, but I put in the effort now or I've learned now over time and through doing this enough Now I have the familiarity where it's like okay I can just walk out to the gym and quickly write up some stuff on the board and like make the decision going in first

Like okay, what am I gonna work? I'm gonna do I'm gonna do back and legs to it great Here are the things I'm gonna do for that and here's the structure and I know how to structure the workout How to set things up so I'm giving the right combination of movements at the right way to give myself challenge and Get the outcome that I want, but I didn't have that at the beginning, right?

I needed to bring in these other levels of expertise and Again that accountability Partnership today one final question one to ask Chris just in terms of you know You're talking about this mental narrative where your your mind pays attention to the time three set a goal and you don't do it

And it creates this this downward spiral and now I was wondering like if you could share How do you outside of getting an accountability partner to be sort of the champion to help you kind of regain that belief that you can do it? How do you trip that up or rewire that mental circuitry where you don't believe that you can accomplish the goal that you set?

Yeah, that's a great question because we can't all like go out and hire a personal trainer obviously I think there's a couple of things When the accountability partner thing I think is huge and you know It can be somebody else also like I had a thing going with a group of buddies where we were all going through similar kind of fitness journeys during COVID I had a group text and then every morning on the group text when finish your workout you'd send a note to the text say done

It's just a real simple way to do it with like a half dozen people on the thing not a lot, right?

It doesn't need to be huge and I think actually it becomes harder as it gets huge because it gets intimidating But when you see you know other folks saying alright, I did the thing like oh it's a nice reminder I got to go do the thing right and it gives you somebody to bounce that off of I think that's one part of it I think the other thing is going back to what we're talking about with thinking errors and asking yourself what else could be true when that

Negative because that is ultimately like you create negative self-talk that then is reinforced by your interpretation of your pattern of behavior The pattern of behavior itself you could have a million reasons that are totally valid as to why you didn't do the thing So much of the time are conditioning especially in high pressure companies high pressure situations is it doesn't matter Why you didn't do the thing you should have done it anyway and I will tell you that's not helpful

It does matter what you didn't do the thing and not only is it okay to let yourself off the hook You have to to make progress my opinion you can't make progress if you're using under energy to be yourself up Like all that energy has to go into making the chain and when you're Taking that energy away from making the change to put it into negative self-talk You're not putting everything that you can into it right so it's the what else could be true thing I didn't do this before you know

I want to go do this but I feel like I can't do it because I didn't do it before it's like okay You didn't do it before so what that's not today. It's not right now. Can you do something right now? Right and if you can take yourself through that process and really be Accepting of the fact that you didn't do it before I hate to be one of those people Says just let it go because I think that's one of the least useful pieces of information and advice ever

So we'll just let it go. Okay. Well, I don't know what the hell that means. What am I let it's like how does that work? And I think it comes down to like can you let yourself off the hook for the things that have happened in the past? Can you accept that the things that have happened did happen irrespective of why they have Outside of the concept of right wrong blame any of that because that stuff doesn't help It doesn't make it easier to do the thing that you're doing now. So why do it? Chris?

Got some rapid fire questions to transition to as we kind of soft land getting out of the negative self-talk rewiring on how to approach goals. What are you reading or listening to right now? I'm actually listening to book on tape. I've been going back through and listening to the Satanic verses by Solomon Rushdie What's a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you?

Agile methodologies have definitely had a big impact on me. I try to use some aspects of that in daily life I think the thing that I probably adapt the most is like keeping a con bandboard for stuff that I need to do

I could just make it easy. My neighbors are great at that So I have some neighbors down the street that have a little farm They're both intact like one is insecurity the other ones a data architect and I go over to their place And you know, they've got like a giant window that is just covered with posted notes of all the shit to do on the farm

I feel like mine's pretty reasonable. I have a whiteboard and I throw my posted notes up and I move things along Need to but I keep that pretty simple But it's a it's a good visual reminder for me because I am so ADD and I need that reminder like again

It's like I need the calendar. I need the visual reminders I need like all sorts of things to keep me from just staying in that surface level and actually getting into the things I need to do What's a trend that you're seeing or following that's been interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet? Ah, that's a good question. You know, there's this new thing called generative AI that's been pretty cool

I don't know if anyone's really picked up on that yet. It's pretty quiet on that front not a whole lot of people are talking about it Yeah, it's new. It's definitely new, you know, I think that you know, maybe companies like Nvidia or Supermicro got a chance in this one Yeah, I really have not been in that world and trying to go look for new things I've just been so so focused on the basics right now

And that's definitely the way that I do things like when I have the energy the basics the platform is basically attended to then I go and attend to the other things And I've been so focused on the platform for the last nine months basically her god

It's been almost a year since I injured my shoulder. So one I'm gonna throw in here that's kind of related to some of the The like different modalities that you've introduced so you mentioned breathwork a couple times as like a practice that you introduce for yourself I think like the breathwork sauna called plunge studio right now is a huge mega trend

I think it's going to become even more popular. It's going to replace all of the things in the strip mall that used to be like the you know chain massage studios and things like that Like that's my belief. I could see that definitely like you go and it's like candy corn, you know, payless shoes, Wimhoss. Yep, 100% 100% right next to your frozen yogurt like that's that's the thing. That's the thing. Yes, that's how they cool the frozen yogurt

It's like a symbiotic relationship. You need the complimentary businesses just all working together. You need the ecosystem. Yeah, although if you have a coffee and you're cold plunge then you're kind of cheating Fair enough fair enough last question Chris is there a quote or a mantra that you live by or a quote that's been resonating with you right now

The one that I keep going back to that's kind of my my version of the like let it go quote is it is what it is or just sometimes It just is you know because the thing that I get to is there are lots of things in the world that do not work the way that I want that I have no control over And the thing that ironically gives me a little bit a bit of peace with that is just you know trying to do the best to accept it

And that's a phrase that really resonates for me. It's just like it just is Chris we we started off rolling into this conversation Talking about how like our core anxious patterns can be strengths in the professional setting and how that lends us to probably scale up

The leadership opportunities and the impact that we have within organizations and we then dove deep into how to take these same Sort of structures that we find in the professional world and apply that to our life to like accomplish better goals to

tend to our personal lives in a more effective way all the way down to like addressing the negative self-talk and maybe a deep internal belief that you can accomplish a goal I just want to say like this has been an absolute treasure like this is one of my favorite conversations ever to talk about

Thanks for your time and thanks for sharing so much about how you think about an approach doing this and integrating it because for me personally I struggle with like the concentration of most of my time spent in like the professional realm and to even consider

How to apply this personally is is such a big leap. So this has been a lot of fun. Thank you It's absolutely my pleasure and you know my hope is I know it took me a long time to figure out that I could put effort and attention Some place other than my professional life and that it was not only okay But it was incumbent upon me to really put more attention on my personal life and build that foundation up So I am really hopeful that even if there's just one person out there who here's the message

And it allows them to let themselves off the hook and do that sooner in life than I did or to better outcomes. That's amazing a powerful intention to close on with that Chris

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