Michael Brody-Waite on Leading in Life

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael

Brodie Waite. Michael is a recovering addict, acclaimed speaker, entrepreneur, award winning three times CEO leadership coach and author. Today, Michael and Eric discuss his book Great Leaders Think Like Drug Addicts, How to Lead Like Your Life depends on It. Him, Michael, Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Man, it's a pleasure to have you on. We're going to discuss your book, Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts, How to

Lead Like Your Life depends on It. And I'm excited to talk about that because you're in eyes background and stories. There's a lot in common between us. But before we get into the book, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which

represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops. She thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. So, first of all, what it means to me is that me being on here right now is meant to be because I used that parable and my first keynote that I ever delivered as a paid gig to carry my message before I ever wrote the book. And I always think about when I think about that parable as a recovering out of the difference between the disease of addiction and recovery from addiction. Every day I have the opportunity to feed my disease, the thing that kept me using, and every day I

get the opportunity to feed my recovery. And that may not be totally new to folks that are familiar with recovery and addiction, but it also reminds me of the environment that I found in the corporate world and in the startup world, where my observation was people were almost addicted to hiding their true selves and they were addicted to managing other people's perceptions. And so when I ended up in the working world, I was being told that

I had to literally stop feeding my addiction. And so it became meaningful to me both in my personal life and my professional life, where I was being told in a twelve step meeting, take your mass up, be your true self or whatever, and then I'm going to a corporate world, and it almost wants to reinforce what the

disease of addiction did. And so even though I would go to my meeting and I would feed the good wolf for one hour out of a day, I would go to work and I would spend eight to ten hours in an environment that wanted to feed the bad wolf. And so every day I had to be really intentional in which one that I fed, because I did not want the bad wolf to live. Yeah, I love that. I figured the parable would be one that you know well, because that's of course where I heard it in recovery.

I can't pinpoint the meeting or the time, but I know when I heard it, I was like, oh my god, right, because I heard it in my first year, I'm sure in my first probably six months of recovery, and as I often jokingly say on this show, like I wasn't even feeding the bad wolf anymore. He was eating me. Yeah, that's a great way to say. It was just a very clear message to me about what you just said, either I'm getting better or I'm getting worse, you know.

And the choices that I make about what I do with my time, my energy, my thoughts are going to dictate, you know, do I recover or not. There was a clarity to that that I found really helpful. I think there's also an interesting element where we always think, at least I do about all these decisions and moments in

our lives as he's like big movie moments. And so when I thought about like calling my sponsor, for example, I thought of, you know, the desperate moment where I'm about to use and suddenly I call him and he says the day. And the thing that he explained to me was the only way that call happens is if I call him every single day when nothing's happening for like three weeks, because I have to have the muscle memory.

So that way, when the crap does hit the van and I don't know what to do, it's a default behavior and that gives me the ability right to surprise myself in the really big moment. But it's all these little moments and and same thing actually, if you really want to get out around nutrition, right, like you know that people think about working out the physical fitness, you know, lifting a lot of weight, a lot of physical fitnesses around what you eat, and so the little things that

you eat. It's not like the big fast and so there's just so many applications for this parable that I just I love and I just love this platform as

a result of it. Yeah, I can't remember why or where I was telling this story, but I was talking about that if you looked at the movie version of my life, you'd see these big moments, like the moment that I was in in detox and they said you need to go to long term treatment and I said no, And then I went back to my room and I had a moment of clarity and I thought, I'm going to die if I go out there, and so I

changed my mind. That would show up in the movie. Right, But that moment is not really any more important than the thousands of other completely unremarkable moments where I made the small decisions that kept me on my road to recovery. It's just we pull out these certain moments, we go this moment is really important, this moment is really special, But all those moments together are what equal recovery. It's

the really boring, ordinary moments. I think the other saying in show business too, right, Like uh, an overnight sensation only took ten years to build Yeah, yep, same yep, same thing in the startup world, right, yes, very much so yep. So before we get too much further in the book, the book is titled, as I said, great leaders Live like drug addicts. I love the parallel you've made there. But what I want to do first is not everybody listening to this show thinks of themselves as

a leader. So I want to bring leadership to everybody's level before we go further, so that everybody can kind of relate with this conversation, whether they're in corporate America or not. So let's talk about the ways in which we're all leaders. So I think everybody is respond school for leading somebody, even if it's just leading yourself. And I think we're almost always wrong in the level of importance that we have. We either always assume that we're

too important or not important enough. But when you look at it through the lens of who's watching, there's always somebody in your world that's watching you looking for a queue on how to behave and how to do the right thing and not do the wrong thing, and so on and so forth, and so for me, I think early on the best example of a leader that I was ever given was a sponsor in the twelve step program, And as I became a leadership coach and all these things,

I started to really appreciate the difference because when we think of leaders, I think we think of these command and control style leaders, the general on the battlefield, the corporate CEO that knows everything and doesn't do anything wrong, and where we just think about somebody is responsible for leading other people, period. But like a teacher is a leader, a mother is a leader. A child as a leader

because they're leading themselves. And so how do you teach people how to be a great leader of themselves so that they can lead other people? And what I love about a sponsor is unlike a coach or an expert or even a mentor, the way that they lead you is by showing you how they lead themselves. They don't

tell you I have it all, figure it out. They literally share their experience, and they share their vulnerability, and they share their challenges and they just say this is what I did, and they do not try to manage

your perception in any way. And by talking about how they lead themselves through X situation, like I'll never forget my sponsor telling me about the first six months he had in recovery, had a sponsor that at month six killed himself and he was rudderless, and so I thought immediately in my head, I would relapse and I would go back out because my sponsor was trying to help keep me clean. And then he killed himself and turned out he'd been drinking the whole time. I'd say, this

whole thing is screwed. But what Chuck did was he said, I went back into the meeting and I found another sponsor. And so he's not telling me a pretty scenario, right, He's telling me an ugly scenario. But in that I take a cueue for what do I do and then believe it or not. Six years later, he's no longer my sponsor, and I'm sponsorless, and I need to get a sponsor, and I don't go out, I don't do all this other stuff. I go into a meeting and

I asked for one because he shared his experience. He showed me how he let himself so that I can more effectively lead myself. And I think in that vein every parent, every teacher, every volunteer, whether you're in the boardroom, the mail room, the classroom or the living room. You are leading someone, even if it's just the person in the mirror and the book. You say, the problem is we've become so focused on leading others, we've fundamentally lost

the ability to lead ourselves. Yeah, I forgot that line. You just said it better. So is it weird or awkward that I'm complimenting you for reciting my line? Well? Just it just is. So we all have a role

to lead people or lead ourselves. So let's talk about this fundamental thing that you see here that you're you're in recovery and you see some of the things we do in recovery, and then you go into your corporate world and you see people doing that thing and you refer to that as what you're seeing that all these other people are doing is they're wearing masks. Say a

little bit more about that. Yeah, So, when I was in rehab, one of the first things they did, and this is well before a pandemic and anything else, they slapped two cardboard masks down on the table and they said, we want you to doctor one up to look like the person that you portray to the world, and we want you to make the other one look like the

person that you think you are. And so of course, like the one I show the world has like George Clooney, I'm probably dating myself by saying George Clooney but has celebrities and BMW's and all this like great stuff and don't abs and you know whatever it is that you want. And then the bad mask is me trying to reimagine that advertisement where it shows someone running and says no one ever says I want to be a junkie when I grow up, and and that's that's who I actually

think I am. And so that really helped me because it gave me a very physical context where I could think about when I'm hiding my true self and how addiction to drugs is a way of hiding my true self. So one of the parallels that I draw is when I was an active addiction, there were three things that I did on a regular basis. The first thing was I said yes when I should say no. I said

yes to the drugs. The second thing I did was I hid my weakness, my addiction, and as a result, I starred myself with the solutions to help me get better. And the third thing that I did was I avoid difficult conversations. I think that was going to lead to a reconciliation of my addiction. I was going to avoid.

And so when I went into the corporate world, being armed with a twelve step program, a sponsor, and trying to learn these behaviors, my observation was, and I've since confirmed it with a lot of research, is that all the people around me were doing the exact same things that I did in active addiction. So I said yes to drugs. They were saying yes to meetings, They were saying yes to emails. They were saying yes to projects

that they all thought was unnecessary. Like thirty one hours a month right now are spent by employees on what they believe are unnecessary meetings. If the definition of addiction is doing something over and over again despite a negative consequence, that to me is the picture of addiction. And so another example is hiding a weakness. So I was hiding

my addiction. Well, I remember once when I was at working in a Fortune fifty company, I spent twenty two hours trying to figure out how to use a Microsoft Excel pivot table, when I could have spent ten minutes asking someone and admitting that I didn't know how to do it, and that's leading yourself, right. I could have up my skill level to be more productive, and I was wasting so much time trying to say face in

a corporate environment. And at night, I'm going to a twelve step meeting where the coolest kid in the room is a person that shares their biggest challenge and then they get a ton of help. And so it just didn't jive. And so then the third thing is avoiding

difficult conversations. Man, you want to talk about learning how to do that works some twelve steps, like learn how to do amends right, Like, those types of things are really hard and for people that don't understand that, that's like when we go and we actually own all of our bad stuff that we did. And so when I was in corporate America, they would talk around issues and

a team meeting, everybody would be just managing politics. And I found a stat that seventy percent of employees right now are avoiding a difficl conversation with their boss, coworker or a direct report. And that's before we start talking about customers or whatever. So at night, I'm going to a twelve step meeting and they're saying, basically, you have to be your true self or you're gonna die. I'm going into the corporate world where everybody's teaching me hide

your true self in order to be successful. And I felt very, very alone. And it was not because I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I had long hair and said dud a lot and was from California and had flipbops and hoop earrings in my ear. It was because I was saying note of things. I was having the difficult conversations and I aggressively shared my weaknesses and it's scared people, and it made me feel alone, and it made me feel different and also got me promoted like

eight times and eight years. Yeah, it's interesting because I have some similar experiences. When I got sober, I got sort of into the corporate slash startup world. You know, I had always worked in restaurants before, and I think I got some of the opportunities and had some of the successes I had for some of the very reasons you're describing. You know, I just was kind of who I was. I just showed up and I just would say,

I don't have any idea how to do this. Which you have to do to survive, right, But but so many people that's like the hardest thing for them to do, period totally. Yeah. So I think as you name those three things, I'm like, yeah, I think I kind of did those things. You know. I noticed over the years, I've I've talked about this on the show many times. I don't think I've talked about it recently, but I talked about how authenticity is sort of a buzzword these days.

But the more I was myself at work, and I went through periods of being very radically who I was, and then I would sort of go through periods of like, well, I'm going to try and cover it up, and I'm, you know, sort of like you said, I'm I'm getting a lot of reinforcement to not be that way. But I think even through it all, I managed to remain somewhat who I was. And what I realized was the more I did that, the more I took those chances to be who I was actually at work, the better

I always was at my job. And the thing is that these are like people would call soft skills, but they have hard outcomes and impacts. So Harvard Business Review says that the number one resource that's poorly managed inside of organizations. Today's time. And I've assessed over two thousand leaders at companies like Google and Dell and and startups and nonprofits, and of them report wasting ten hours a week saying yes when they could say no, hiding a weakness,

or avoiding difficult conversations. And so you can sit there and say I need an MBA to be more successful, But my experience was I don't have a college degree, and I'm not I'm not diminishing the value of one. But you could also go into a twelve step meeting and for a crappy cup of coffee and a one hour of your time, you could actually learn a skill that wins you back your time, that can make you a lot more productive. But the problem is, and this is just like what I say in my book, is

I think we've misdiagnosed the problem. I think it's not hard to bump into books on how to say no and how to be vulnerable and how to have difficult conversations, but we keep treating the symptoms. The real problem is is that professionals and leaders are addicted to these behaviors. And the reason I'm so passionate about the professional space. Is what I found in recovery was we talked about

how this will help you personally. I think learning how to not do these three things, learning how to overcome addiction becomes a professional superpower that is not well advertised to the added community. And so most people go, oh, well, you've got to overcome addiction in order to be successful. And I'm like, well, I'm successful because of my addiction. I'm successful because of my recovery, and it's because it

actually treated the problem. I'm addicted to hiding my true self first with the drugs and then my saying yes and all the other kind of stuff. By leveraging my recovery in the professional setting, I was able to be more successful because I was more efficient all that kind of stuff. And so now what I do is I literally help leaders get to the source of the problem.

And I say, the reason that you took that workshop on how to say no and you're still saying yes, the reason you saw that Ted talk got all inspired and you're still avoiding difficult conversations is because your actual problem is you're addicted to wearing a mask. You are addicted to hiding yourself. And what I know about addicts is you can tell us all the information in the world. How did the DARE program work out? It didn't work

out real well for me. They told me not to use drugs, They told me drugs are bad, and I still ended up in an addic Knowledge is not power. Action is power, and recovery from addiction teaches you how to turn that knowledge into action. Let's start with a story that you have that is very similar to a story I have, and you describe your relatively newly sober. You go into a halfway house and they're like, you have to go get a job. So you get an

interview for a job. But the problem is, like anybody who's been in recovery for a while, you've got some big gaps in your resume, or anybody who's been, you know, in active addiction, your resume doesn't look real good. So you walk into the meeting. You've got a choice about what you're going to say. Tell us a little more about that. Yeah, So when I got into the halfway house, you know they're really serious about making sure you're you're

serious about recovery. So they gave you five business days to get a job or you get kicked out. I didn't even know what a business date was. Someone had to let me know because they're an addict that that's not like that. I did not understand business culture. And if you'd ask me what a p M L is, I would have no idea what that is. So they

said five business days to get a job. I've got this huge gap in my resume, and I'm not being honest because what I would say is, for the last three years, all I did was get high, and I don't think that that's going to get me a job. So, uh, I call around. I interviewed all these places and I get no job interviews, and then one place calls me for an interview on day four and it's this place called Sam Goodie. And I always say, like, if you're older than me, you know that as a record store.

If you're my age, you know it's as a CD store. And if you listen three years old, you have no idea what I'm talking about Spotify, right, So I call my sponsor before the interview and I'm like, okay, so what do I tell them when they asked me about my job history? Because I have a huge gap it's not going to qualify me for the job. And I expect him to tell me a way to kind of like dance around it and you know, be able to convince them that I'm worthy of the job. And he says, Mike,

just telling the truth. And you know, one of the things I've done is I've distilled down what I learned and recovering the three principles. And so the first one is practice rigorous authenticity, not just be authentic in a buzzy way all the time. So he was like, no matter how big the stakes, no matter how small the stakes, you tell them the truth. And I was like, okay, well, Chuck, if I tell them the truth, I'm not going to get the job. This job manages the cash register, I'm

pretty sure. Saying that I used all day and I just got to rehab isn't gonna qual find me for that. And then I'm going to be out on the street and I'm gonna end up using again and I'm going to die. What do I actually say? And he said, well, so then you have to learn how to surrender the outcome. So it's like principle too, certainly the outcome. He literally he said this isn't about the job. This isn't about the halfway house. This is about whether you willing to

practice these principles and all your affairs. And so I'm like, well, so then what do I actually do? And so it gets the third principle that I teach, do uncomfortable work, do what nobody else would do. Go in there and tell him the truth. I was scared to death, and the only reason that I followed his suggestion was because the only thing I was scared of more than not getting that job was relapse. And so I walked in. We're in the job interview. I'm starting to sweat. My

heart's racing because I'm scared. We're gonna get to the work history thing. I'm still got like the devil's on my shoulder and the angel on the other side. What do you say? And I start doing what addicts do, and I start thinking about how I can calm him. Oh, I can tell him that I was, like, you know, writing a book. I could tell him that I was helping needy children, and right, I could tell him all these things about this work history. And then I just

think about those three principles. Practice, rigorous authenticity, surrender, the outcome, do uncomfortable work. And I did something that I've never done before, and I did the uncomfortable work, and I told him exactly the truth. I said, I just got out of rehab. I've been using for the last three years, and I'm in a halfway house, and if I don't get this job, I'll be out on the street. And at the end of the job interview, he looked at me and he smiled and he said, when can you start?

And I still get emotional when I think about that story, because I really think my whole life would have been different if you had said you don't get the job and you're out on the street, because it would have given me a conflict that I had to reconcile. But I feel like it was just so perfect because not only did I see that my recovery could be prioritized and I could surrender an outcome and still be successful.

But for my luck, it was the first battleground for my program and it isn't a professional setting, which I think really set the tone for everything I've been doing since I never would have known the interviewing for a job at sam Good he would have meant so much to me, I'd still be telling this story at a time when nobody knows who Sam good he is. But I was fortunate enough to have a sponsor that said, what's true in God's world anywhere, It's true everywhere and

regardless of your definition of God. It was something that really helped me um and I was an atheist at the time, and I learned to surrender the outcome and it really it changed my life. Yeah, that's an amazing story. I have one that's almost identical. I was just out of a halfway house as and I had gotten out of one. It was one that you didn't work in, so it was maybe some like a three quarterhouse or something. I don't know, but I had identified This job I

wanted was with a company called compy Serve. Copy Serve is one of the first online companies. I had no idea what I was getting into. I just knew like they paid really well and there was a gym I could do and it wasn't a restaurant, and I was desperate to not go back into the restaurant business just because that was so tied to my partying and same thing. Get in there and they're like, well, what's with your job history and why are you qualified for this job?

And I just was like, well, i just got out of a halfway house. I'm a I'm a heroin addict, but I'm working this program or recovery, and I'm willing to work really, really hard for you. You know, I just told him the truth and got hired, and that

launched my entire technology career. You and I, we know tons of people that have a story like this, Right, I've got a friend that applied to four different graduate programs and in the first application he lied about his recovery story and and his gap and why he got kicked out of college when he was younger. And then he talked to his sponsor and he was honest on the other three. Guess which one he didn't get into, and guests which once he got into he got into

all the ones where he was honest about it. So the reason I'm so passionate about, like the message in my book, the message I carry in general, is not everybody's an addict, but everybody can relate to being in that job interview and not wanting to volunteer the worst thing about them, right, everybody can relate to that struggle and I don't mean just like, hey, you're not that

great at Microsoft Excel. I mean the worst thing about you, I'm a freaking drug addict, dude, Like that's the worst thing.

And So if everybody can relate to that pitt in their stomach, of of that up in the resume that the weakness, whatever the personal limitations they have, I want them to know that we you and I and others like us are collecting thousands, if not millions of stories of people that go in there and prove that you can take the mask off, that you can be yourself and you can still be successful because of a drug addic can own their story and a job interview and

be successful. There's nothing that anyone else that has something that's holding them back can't do. We just happen to have a more catchy story and more dramatic example. But everybody can relate to that pit in the stomach that I had in that interview. But most people don't have the same incentive that I had. I, like you, I was walking around with a loaded gun pointed in my head that said, you have to practice these principles and

all your affairs or you die. And like I heard on one of your other podcasts, and the things that you talk about, I had other people that believed in these principles you talk in your ted talk about um if you have six people that are committed to the same thing, greater chance of success. When you into a twelve step meeting and you hang out with a bunch of the other recovering outicts that value living by surrendering the outcome, suddenly you can be the different person that

goes into a job interview and you're really real. And I will tell you, since I've become an employer, since I became a CEO and run multiple companies, in my job interviews, I have developed tactics to try to get to a place where I can find out if you have the capacity to do what I did, because I'm more likely to want an employee that can be honest about their weaknesses and their challenges and their failures, because then I trust that they'll be able to grow the

same way that I did. And if they try to like front and wear that mask in the interview, I don't trust them no matter how good they are. Yeah, yeah, So let's talk about the program in a little bit more detail. You've sort of mentioned the three. I don't know if you call them pillars or steps, but practice rigorous authenticity, surrender the outcome, and do the uncomfortable work. But first, before we go into each of those in a little more detail, let's talk about the different types

of masks that people wear. You've identified for common one, and you sort of touched on them here a little bit, but but let's sort of call them out. These are the four common masks that people wear. Yeah, when I developed the mask assessment, I started off with like fifty of them. With my hypothesis true addict I was it was a back or white. It was gonna be none

or a lot. And as I administered it and I started to get feedback and see the trends in the data, I started to see that they all had a common trend. And so the four masks are saying yes when you could say no, hiding a weakness, avoiding difficult conversations, and holding back your unique perspective. And so all four of these masks have a different cost for you as an individual and different costs for an organization, but they're all driven by essentially the fear of what other people think.

And it's all driven by the inability to surrender the outcome. So when you want to say no to the meeting or the project or the task or whatever, you're worried what your boss will think, your team will think. It's hard to surrender the outcome. How to overcome that fear, And that's what an addict is taught to do working until step program. When you think, just like I did that.

If you get found out for not knowing how to do something, you say, I don't know, people are gonna think less of you, they'll trust you less, all that kind of stuff. See, you hide weaknesses. I think difficult conversations are really hard because I mean, you can get kicked out of the tribe. And so as a result of the two most common forms of this that we see is performance management people not giving people constructive criticism that can help them grow, and then customer negotiations and

then holding back your unique perspective. Is is kind of like the cherry on top because that's where all innovation happens and all blind spots get checked. And we see with organizations that you'll have like fifty people in the room and the executive assistant might be able to identify a blind spot or identify an opportunity for innovation, but you don't get access to it because they only want to hear the CEO and they're scared of what they're gonna say, so they hide their mass. In my company,

I had fifty people. We had this thing called the idea graveyard, and all the bad ideas that lived in that graveyard were mine. And that was a way to be symbolic to create psychological safety for all my team, Like, I want your ideas, truly, I want your unique perspective. Truly, I want fifty unique perspectives, not one or two or three.

And I think that right now, professionals not only I mean, we see people that are wearing these masks in their personal life and the professional life, as managers, as CEOs, as direct reports. And like I said, it cost him about five hours a year. It's more pervasive than addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling combined. Yeah, and I certainly think even years of recovery, these things are really hard. I think I end up finding them harder in certain

personal situations than in work situations. But but even within work situations, as I'm as I'm hearing you talk and I'm I'm reviewing my history. I'd like to think why, Yeah, I I always had my mask off. No I didn't, you know, No, I mean there are plenty of times that I did this, Like I think about like avoiding difficult conversations, Like my hardest difficult conversations were with people I managed, yeah, and having the courage to tell them

they were doing well. Yeah, that was my achilles heel. And it took me a while because for a while I thought, well, I just don't want to do it, because I don't want to be mean. I want to be nice. Until I finally realized, like, I'm not being kind, I'm being scared. It's not helping them, it's hurting them in the long run. I mean, that was one that took me a lot of my career to really get better at, and I still feel like it was probably

the area I was weakest. So what we do with the Master programs we take the power of the twelve Steps and how it helps you address addiction, and we turn it into these really simple things that we call an action card that allows anyone addict or not to really apply the power of the Towell Steps to specific

practical situations. Like what you just talked about. So, for example, we have in our program a dude that it is going to be a new father, and he wanted to take three months of paternity leave in a company that doesn't necessarily respect that. And so he knows he's going to be tempted to say yes when he could say no on paternity leave. Right, he knows people are gonna ask him for help, they're gonna want to check in on the plan, They're gonna I do all these kind

of things. It's already happened, and so he had to apply these principles. Practicing res Authenticity means identifying the mass that he wants to wear. He wants to say yes when he could say no, But what he really wants to be is present with his new daughter and his wife. That's what he really wants to be. So surrender the outcome.

He has to surrender the fear of what everybody's gonna think and what's gonna happen to his job if he prioritizes his family, And then the uncomfortable work is he had to actually create a paternity plan that declared I will be zero available, not I might be available a little bit here there, I'll be zero available and then go over it with his manager, fearful of what his manager would say. Right. And so we've got stories of this,

like what you just said. A CEO that was good at giving performance feedback to his direct reports, but terrible at their direct reports because it was awkward because they weren't directly managed by him. But he wanted to give him constructive criticism, and so he said that literally his stress level was at an eight and he was carrying their work and it would be at a three if he could just get over that fear. And this is

the CEO of a sixty million dollar company, right. We have a new employee that started a job and didn't want to say I don't know, and they were inhibiting their ramps. So they used one of these action cards on the mask of hiding a weakness, and they were able to declare I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, and they were able to be more successful.

We got someone that was a corporate executive that quit to become an entrepreneur and she had to work the mask of my unique perspective because she was on the corporate track to be successful, and she decided to do her own thing. But then we also had an entrepreneur that quit their business venture and joined a corporate job because they were hiding a weakness that they were not

a successful entrepreneur. The point is that everybody's like hiding themselves behind one of these masks on a regular basis. And what we try to do is take kind of the self help, personal help, even professional development that's fuzzy, and apply to these really concrete situations that everybody can relate to where you have this tremendous fear and empower them to overcome that fear and do the uncomfortable work as if their life depended on it, the same way

that we learned and recovery. W Let's just take difficult conversations. So I'm avoiding a difficult conversation, whether it be with an employee works for me that is not doing a great job, or why I was in a marriage for years where I avoided nearly every cord. I avoided a lot of difficult conversations, you know. And what I was doing by that was, as you've eloquently laid out, I was trying to control the outcome completely. I've worked with

a lot of people in a coaching program. I'm sure that the hands and the audience are shooting up right now, going that's me. I'm avoiding difficult conversations. So what are some practical ways we can work through that. The first thing is is getting really clear on who you're avoiding them. A lot of times people will generalize, but it's the fear of what another person thinks that puts the mask on our face. That fear is the glue, and so you have to be really clear on who you're scared of.

We're avoiding different conversations everywhere, but the one that really gives you the z in the stomach, the one that gives you the most cost is, let's just say, for example, it is the wife. Let's just say that, since you brought that up, right, I actually had a CEO of a company that was avoiding different conversations with his wife

and they were estranged and it was costing him his marriage. Right, And so the first thing that we do is we say, okay, so the way that you practice for your authenticity is you get really real about, Hey, I'm avoiding a different conversation, here'sho it with, and here's what's costing me so traditional, just like inventory stuff. So surrendering the outcome is where everybody gets messed up. And so this is the pivotal principle.

So really practical tool for anyone listening right now is take out a piece of paper and just literally draw a line down the middle and put can't control on the top left and can't control on the top right. And so when we surrender the outcome, most people intellect stually understand, yeah, I need to let that go. I can't control of the customer buys. I can't control of the wife loves me. I can't control she stays. We intellectually get this. Up until twenty five years ago, knowledge

was power. We're an information overload. Knowledge is no longer power. Action is in recovery, we say action over insight. And so the problem is how do you take that knowing and actually turn it into action. And so the way that we teach people is really simple, and you have to engage literally your body in doing this work. You take that piece of paper and then they can't control column. You write down three things that you can't control related to this person. I can't control the wife, how she

responds to what I say. I can't control what she does next, and I can't control that I feel a way that she may not like. Right, you write those things down. I can't control these things then, and they can't control column You say, what can I control? And here's a tip that can't control columns all about the other person, that can't control columns all about you. So I can control whether or not I'm honest with my wife.

I can control how I communicate with her. So there are ways that I can communicate that are gonna be more effective. And I can control when I communicate with her, like if she's really piste off about something, maybe that's not the right time to bring up a difficult conversation. Right, So there are all these things you can control. And so people when they start going this exercise and go, wait a second, I've just like a pair of binocular has gotten a little bit more clear and what the

variables are here. But then we're not done. I say, go through that piece of paper, and now what I want you to do is I want you to stare it each can't control, and then exit out and literally with a pen, you have to engage your body to do it. Exit out, and you do that for all three can't controls, and as you do that, you will start to all of a sudden release the outcome a

little bit. And then you go down the can't control column and you circle each one, and as you do that, you're literally engaging your body and getting your brain to unclenched on the outcome, redirect all that energy the things that you can't control, and double down on the things that you can. And when they're done with this piece of paper and they step back, I say, look at all the can't controls. If you let one of these go, which one will give you the most emotional freedom? And

it's usually not the one they think is. Their brain will answer, but I'm like, no, which won't give you the most emotional freedom. So maybe it's like, oh, I can't control what she thinks is like the intellectual answer the emotional answers. I can't control how she responds because I'm scared of her response. Put a star by that one, and then in they can't control which one of these

is going to objectively make you more successful? And it's like how I communicate with her will make me more successful? Put a star next to that one, and then I have them write down again, can't control this, can't control this. So just the ones they picked, and I tell them to read it one minute a day, and after twenty days,

they've rewired their fight or flight response. They've rewired their natural inclination to focus on what they can't control and redirect that energy to what they can control, and it actually allows them to go do this thing called uncom will work. And so in that scenario, would you say wait twenty days to have that conversation or would that depend It would be arrogant for me to offer absolute advice because I'm not God. But and you know that, um, but I have to do that disclaimer to feel better

about myself. People when they start doing this work, they get a sense of urgency and they feel like, I gotta do this right now, I gotta do this right now. Depending on how important it is, I would wait, yeah, I would wait now. At the same time reading this little statement every day, it's not to say this isn't black and white, right, So it's not to say that on day fifteen, if a difficult conversation comes up that

you don't like, lean into it and have it. But what we're really trying to do is when when those things come up, when fire flight gets triggered, adrenaline pumps through our body, our field of vision narrows, and we become our lesser selves. And so if you can reprogram yourself to start to have that reflex of Okay, I can't control that, I can't control this. My wife always tells me, you underestimate everything that you learn as an addict.

Literally everything is that you learn how to go from what you can't control to what you can faster than everybody else. And so if fifteen days of reading that card would be enough, I think, but you know, the more the better. We say, after twenty eight days, we want you to do a new card with a with a new thing that you're working on. But it depends on the situation. But generally speaking, I would say, um, you'd want to wait fifteen and twenty days if you could.

And I guess the risk or the thing to watch for there is waiting until we're not afraid to do it, because that they may never come right. So that's why you lead into the next step, which is you're doing this uncomfortable work. You know, I know what I used to get into is sort of a variation on your exercise. I couldn't have put it into those terms exactly, but I would have had the gist of it in my mind. Control can't control. I think it would have been really

helpful to walk through that process. But then there's a sense that, like, I need to figure out how to not be afraid of this in order to do it. And my experience is, yes, managing the fear is good, and then there still is a time that I'm uncomfortable and I need to move forward. Yeah, that's why we don't call it comfortable work. And so like people be like, well, how do I get to a place where I'm fearless, I'm like, dude, I'm a public speaker for a living,

and I'm scared every time. The key is not to be fearless. The key is to know how to walk through the fear. And one of the things that helps is this canon can't control the surrendering the outcome. And you're You're absolutely right. It's not waiting for when you don't have the fear of the pain. It's learning how

to be comfortable with the discomfort. In my experience, though, going back to the thing that you said in your TED talk, The reason that my book calls out building this whole masterie program that has a bunch of other people that are doing the same thing is because if you have other people that value doing uncomfortable work demonstrating how they're doing it, and you all share on a monthly basis, Hey here's where I did my uncomfortable work,

you literally inverse the stigma that you have around the mask in the first place. You inverse the reward center where like so like one of the things I told people when they're scared of like public speaking, is I say, collect detractors. Your job is to get five or tend detractors. Like I was doing social media posting. Someone on one of my videos called me a sociopath, and I normally would have been like wanting to argue with them and be like and at the same time be like, well,

I guess one a sociopath. I probably wouldn't think that I am one. So I don't really know if this is true. But I literally went back to my group that values doing uncomfortable work and I said, hey, I got my hater. And so if you're around other people that are doing this process, which is the real magic of recovery. It's not just a process that you do by learning through a book or through a course or whatever. It's by doing it with other people in the exact

same process and journey. Suddenly you get people that prize doing uncomfortable work. And then when you go into those moments, Like chapter six in my book, I talked about how I went into a bar. I had a year and a half clean and it was an off site for my team, and everybody was drinking, and I wanted to drink.

If I hadn't had a society full of people that were committed to not drinking that I had called before that I was texting during that, I knew I would be able to call after and go to a meeting and see them later and be able to share this story. I would have wanted to be part of that group, and I would take in their value system. So your ability to do this uncomfortable work is is not conditioned on you not having the fear. It's using both this process and other people engaged in this process to be

able to walk through that fear. And what we do in our mastery program is every month professionals meet, they build a little card on the biggest challenge in their life, for the biggest growth opportunity, whatever mask is holding them back. They identify specific uncomfortable work, they go read the card, they go do the uncomfortable work. They come back, report

and do it again, and we're seeing massive breakthroughs. We're just modeling the same thing added to do in twelve step recovery, right, And I love that idea of yeah, we need to find people to do this work with whatever that challenges. You know, it's one of the most valuable things about recovery is learning to ask for help. It is. And you know, one thing though that I

learned is an entrepreneur. I found an organization called EO Entrepreneurs organization for entrepreneurs running business a million dollars in revenue and more. And I thought it would be twelve step for CEOs, and so I went in there and we were all on the same challenge. We were all committed to meeting and sharing stuff. But what I found was everybody was using a different system for how they lead themselves. Everybody had a different framework somewhere using the

integram personally. Others we're using, you know, the entrepreneur operating system professionally, everybody was using a slightly different language, and it's like going to a restaurant restaurant industry guy um at the beginning, and it's like trying to order something and everybody in the supply chain speaking in different language.

It's extremely inefficient. But I could go to downtown Columbus actually true story, and be the only white guy in a meeting in the middle of the projects and feel like different and be able to feel loved and the same. And going to that meeting, say I might I'm an addict. I'm struggling with step two and fifty. People know exactly, like not generally, they know exactly what I'm struggling with. Their experience is tuned exactly to what I need to hear. I felt more loved in that meeting than I did

in Corporate America. Right. And so there's the efficiency of if you're with other people that are working the same system for how you lead yourself, there's an efficiency that is the same efficient. And see when we're all speaking English or we're all speaking a different you know, a different language, I want to be just projected English. But there's an efficiency there that just allows us to be so much more successful and realize our potential. Yeah, I agree,

and I think that's a really interesting idea. Got this program called Spiritual Habits. We ran a group course last I don't know, maybe last summer spring. I don't know when it was. I think it was summer. And what we did is we took the big group in the big group separated into small groups. So we'd meet once a week is a big group, and I'd sort of give the teachings, and then the small groups would meet

once a week. And those groups are still meeting. And what's so interesting about it is kind of what you just said, there's this framework for talking about all right, we're talking about this spiritual habit. We all know what we mean by it. You know. I found that I had that experience in recovery, and I also have had it. I've been a pretty serious Zen practitioner for several years. It's been really interesting because it's just you keep coming

back to the same stories, the same language. Now, what I find interesting about that is that, at least for me, urinized path diverged a little bit in that I'm not real active in twelve step recovery anymore. I've sort of moved away from it, and I have mixed feelings about that. I have moments I think, well, that's a mistake. But at a certain point there were certain limitations to the language I felt that felt like I kept getting sort

of slotted into the same things. So while I think there's a real benefit in that commonality, there's also the question of does that at a certain point perhaps become limiting. I don't know, but I think it's an interesting question. I think in order to have something of value, you need to give something up. Yeah, so there are trade offs and everything. I love that, and so the more framework creates clarity you're going to sacrifice application and value

in other ways that that is worth it. And so I'm still really active in tool step. But I also perceived a limitation, right. I had enough sponsors that would call me and be like, hey man, what do I do with this work situation. I'd be like, just practice as principles and all the affairs, Dude, did you not

read the twelve step? And they'd be like, okay, Mike, that's great, but this is like a job and my boss doesn't work the program, So like, I can't be honest about my you know, vulnerability or my challenge with them, like, actually, you can and it will make you more successful, but

you have to trust that. And what I learned was, at least for me, I was ignoring the fact that the twelve step language and framework wasn't exactly very professionally fluent, and so as much as I tried to apply the twelve Step to professional situations, I lost a lot in the translation. Without being really intentional about making a real translation. I kept using a blunt tool for something that was very nuanced, right, Like, I mean, you know, talking about

a power point presentation. The twelve Steps does not contemplate a power point presentation or Microsoftict'll pivot tables for that matter. It doesn't contemplate negotiating a raise with your boss. It

doesn't contemplate the same goodie story that I told. So what I learned was, Hey, there is a limitation here, and I'm going to take how I took this relatively blunt tool for this particular area, and I'm going to make a very direct translation, and it's a supplement that enhances someone's ability people in my program, recovering addicts or not.

I love the fact that you saw a limitation and you decided not only to pursue higher levels of spiritual enlightenment for yourself, but also turn around and help others. And you and I both know that the that sometimes an addic can get lost doing that. And as long as you don't get lost, which I can already tell just talking to you, you are not um as long as you're not one of the people that get untethered.

It is arrogance to think that, for example, the twelve step is the only way that someone can get clean and stay clean. Like I learned that early on when I had a sponsor that left our program for another spiritual program. I called my sponsor and I said, he's gonna relapse. It's the end of the world. What am I gonna do? Oh my god, he's an idiot. And and he's like, uh, do you know this thing called humility?

And I'm like what It's like, it's pretty arrogant for you to think that you know what he needs in order to keep his program going. There's a lot more to what we do that works for other people. So you're just gonna have to humble yourself and trust that there's a bigger plan. There's more than one way. And maybe he's going to get exactly what he needs. And I got humbled and I learned, and so unfortunately, as

a human is an addict. I want the world to be binary and clean and neat, and it's very very great. It is very very gray. Well, you and I are out of time, but we're going to continue talking about this. I'd like to explore this idea of working in or out of a twelve step program and some of the pros and cons. And I also want to talk about a couple other ideas that you bring up in the book, and one of them is really about how hard it is to spot our own self deception, how hard it

is to see ourselves. So we're gonna talk about that in a couple of other things. We'll do that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post show conversation to other great things like ad free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a poem. And you want the pleasure of supporting the show, you can go to one you feed, dot net, slash join and become a member. So thank you so much, Michael. I have really enjoyed this conversation.

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