Michael Bungay Stanier on Starting Well to Finish Well

We tend toward negativity, 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 bungay stain here. He's the author of six books, which have between them sold more than a million copies. He's perhaps best known for the book The Coaching Habit, which is the best selling coaching book of the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book, How to Begin, helps people be more ambitious for themselves and for the world. Hi, Michael, welcome back. Alright. Gis so nice of you to invite me back. Thank you.

It's a pleasure to have you on again. I don't know how long ago it was that we had the conversation. It's been several years for sure. I do know that I've gone back to your book The Coaching Habit a number of times to pull out good questions. Thank you. It's a great primer on some very good questions to ask. So I've gone to that. But we're gonna be talking about a different book today. We're gonna be talking about your latest book, which is called How to Begin. Start

doing something that matters. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, 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 grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents SS well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd love to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. First of all, I admire you telling that so well still, because I know you must have told that powerful many times now as you set up your shows. Um, and you know, I

thought about this. I think what this resonative made me think about this time around is not only what I'm trying to feed the good wolf, but when I'm trying to not feed the bad wolf. You know, human nature is whire to add rather than subtract. We have a default, which is like the thing to do is do something or do more. And often one of the great ways to make change and make progress is to remove stuff

and stop doing stuff and step away from stuff. So rather than just look at what's in the light, and you know, I think about things around, how do I descenter myself. There's a big part of the work I'm doing at the moment. How do I move out of the spotlight so I allow other people to move into the spotlight. And that's both requiring me to feed the good wolf in terms of a humility and in terms of a letting go of some things like status and

control and authority. But it's also around um kind of not feeding the bad wolf, which is like what do I hold onto too long? Where am I protecting my ego too much? Where am I feeling fragile about stuff that I don't need to be fragile about. And so the power and that's parable for me is it's like just like your logo, which is like there are two wolves and you need to manage both of the wolves. You need to feed the good wolf pelts, you need to stop the bad wolf and make that an active

choice rather than just a passive one. That's a great take and it made me think of you know, this year, for me, the main thing I'm focusing on. You know, oftentimes people pick a word for the year, and I picked the word love. But the reason I picked the word love to a large extent was because there's that phrase, you know, that the best way to get rid of

fear is love. And what I realized is that there is a distinction and how I do my work when I'm coming from a place of just focus on love and service versus a place of fear about making it. And to your point about what I realized was I could spend lots of time I'm trying to figure out how to get more energy, how to get more creative, how to get more But the first and most important thing for me seems to be just pull the fear out, right, Just pull the fear out of the work, and naturally

for me it comes alive in ways. And so what you just said, they're kind of resonates with me and kind of where my brain is right now. Well, how do you pull the fear out? Because that sounds like everybody's noting. There's nobody who's not nodding at the moment as they're listening to this, I'm like, it's letting more love in and pulling the fear out is hard, deep work, and I'm curious to know how you actually do that so that you can see the shift. Yeah, well, a

few things. I mean, one is actively working on cultivating the love, so you know, in my life, it's moving my meditation practice more towards meta practice. But a lot of it is just what do I moment to moment

put my attention on right. So, for example, we've got this program called Spiritual Habits, and there's a version one of it, then there's sort of an advanced version, and the advanced version we're running people through it for the first time, and some of those lessons are still being created. And about this time each week I'm going to deliver the lessons. Sunday will be the first time I've delivered it,

and I can start to notice the gnawing of fear. Yeah, And so one thing I can do then is just turned my attention towards the care I have for the people in the group. You know, it doesn't solve it, but it is sort of a consistent reorientation. And I think the other one to write, and I think those of us who have enough need to do this regularly, is recognized I have enough. I've already won. Am I rich by no by no means? And I left a lot of money on the table when I left my

corporate world. But I make it by and I'm not in danger of not making it by, And I can just kind of relax into that a little bit and remind myself of that. So that's kind of how I'm

doing it these days. I've just come to the end of the three months leading up to a book launch, and even though this is my sixth or seventh book, I still found myself getting wound around the acts, all of how the anxiety about making it for the book launch, even though there's one part of me going, it's only a book launch, and it's just the day and it passes, and it's the it's the long game that you're playing that matters. All of that my intellectual conversation, but but

my emotional thing is a kind of churn. Yeah. And there were three things that I use different kind of mantras, I guess in some ways that to help me manage this and help the people who work with me manage me as well. The first it comes from an article I read and I think g Q about the world's greatest free diver. You know, these people who take huge breaths and then they dive as far deep as they can, using nothing but their own body and a kind of

a fin attached to their feet. And you know, it's one of the things which is like, you get this wrong, You're dead literally, I mean, it's not a metaphorically death it's a real death. And when I have a competition coming up, I just keep connecting to the joy I feel in doing this, to remember the joy. So I'm like, oh,

that's helpful, remember the joy of it. And then the second thing comes from a spiritual teacher whose name has escaped me, but the story goes roughly like this is I think maybe in the Buddhist tradition of some version, and he's teaching. He's, you know, up on a little diets and there's hundreds of people seated a cross legged in front of him, and as he's teaching, halfway through it, he leans in and he goes, should I tell you

the secret of my life? Because everybody's sitting down, like leans forward because they're like, yes, that's why we're here. And he goes, I don't mind what happens. And I was like, oh, that's so good, because you know, with this book launching, there's part of me that really minds what happens. I wanted to do well and be noticed and be talked about and be passed along all that sort of stuff. And you know, one of the mantras is just to go, look, I don't mind what happens.

I don't mind. I'm committed to a process. I don't mind what happens. And then the third mantra that, particularly when I work with Angeley, who's on my my Little Team, she has it on her board behind her so I can see it when we talk in zoom. I read it and it's a saying we've already won, because like every time we're struggling, we're like, yeah, we've we've already won this game. Like, look at us. We're happy, we're content, we're resourced, we're doing work we love, we're serving people

in the way we want to serve them. We've already won. What's happening at the moment is just miscellany. We've already won. It hasn't been a successful by any means. I've still been wrapped around the axle. But that that's that's decreased the anxiety a little bit. I love that we've already won.

I think that is a great one. It reminds me of a quote I've heard, which is I won't get it right, but it's basically remind yourself that there was a time that you fervently wished for what you currently have. You know, like you know and That's a really good one for me because I'm like, yeah, I've already won. That's a great one. And then the previous one about

I don't mind what happens. You know, there's a zen phrase that goes something along the lines of the way is easy for he who has no preference, right, And of course we have preferences, right, We're always going to have preferences, but when we move them from it's got to be this way too. I prefer it's this way.

It's a lot easier. I think that's a great way to lead into your book, because your book is about doing work that matters, and i'd love to tie where we've been to the book, and the way I would tie it there is to say, you know, in doing work that matters, and in your book there's a fair amount of figuring out what do I mean by that and getting specific about what that is, which is a way of setting ourselves up in a way to mind

what matters. And this is a question I've asked over and over on the show, which is sort of how do you balance for those of us who have ambition And we can talk about ambition because I think you define it well, but for those of us who have ambition, how do we balance that with also just being able to appreciate exactly what we have today. I'll hand it over to you after that partially formed question. Well, there's a lot there, but I think I'm not sure this

is a balancing thing. I don't, sorry, I know how to balance it exactly. I think it's a tension, and I think you sit with the tension that, on the one hand, you have absolutely hopefully found something that is a worthy goal. That's the language we use in this how to Begin book. It's a worthy goal. It's thrilling,

it's important, it's daunting. You've worked it and you've drafted it, and you've tinkered with it, and you've kind of poked at it, so you can kind of say, yeah, I care about this, I care about making this commitment to something like this. It matters enough to me. But I do think that once you have the goal, the secret is to stop worrying about the goal. It's a paradox, it's it's it's misdirection in some ways, you know, kind of like a magician. It's like look over here, when

actually the world's happening on the other side. Because the emotional heart of this new book is the phrase, we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. And we don't unlock our greatness by crossing the finish line and holding up the trophy. We unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. It's in the doing that we get to see the best version of ourselves emerge

and become defined and just kind of evolve. So, you know, twenty five years ago I read the definition of change and it was in the context of kind of organizational change. There was some really going I read all the books, you know that it's all bollocks. This is what change actually looks like. We set a target, we run like hell towards it for a bit. After a while, we stop and we look around and we go, now where are we And we set a new target and we

run like hell towards that. I thought that was a pretty good description of actually what change mostly feels like. And you set your target, you go, this is definitely worth it. But then you get seduced into in a good way, into doing the work, because you know, the irony is often when you hit your target, like, that's great, celebrating that for the moment, but now what's next? You know, you have that kind of like that next whatever the next thing is for you. I sit with the tension

of it. I keep coming back to the worthy goals I set myself and work with on my team, and we talk about it and we check on it. But then we specifically work in six week cycles. At the start of a six week cycle, we go, what could we really achieve in six weeks that we would be proud of? And then we work really hard for six weeks, and after six weeks we stop and angs and I look at each other and go, well, how is that?

What do we learn? What worked? What does that tell us about us and about the work and about the goal. And then we to kind of reset, and then we do another six weeks sprint. I think that's the answer. That's an answer. That's half an answer. You asked me half a question, I'm giving you half an answer. So it's a perfectly balanced dialogue, fair enough. And as you were talking in it made me reflect on kind of where you end the book, which is you talk about

a piece of paper you've got on your desk. Can you share that, because I do think it kind of speaks to this. Yeah, It comes from the German poet Walker, and the English translation of the poem is called The Man Watching, And it's an amazing poem. And I'm not a religious man, and it draws the Biblical imagery in a way that I think is extraordinary, even though I don't have that kind of tradition. That's important to me.

But it talks about wrestling with an angel. And you know, there's a very famous story in the Bible about Jacob wrestling with the angel, and the way this poem tells it, it's like, you know, you ought to be clear. The Angel doesn't wrestle with just anybody or everyone. You know, you have to be doing something that matters for the angel to wrestle with you. And you will always lose when you wrestle an angel. That's the way it works.

There's no there's no chance of victory, but you are shaped in a way in that moment of engagement with an angel that is extraordinary. And the final lines of the poem say something like this, his goal is not to win, but to be deeply defeated by ever greater things. And that for me fields powerfully resonant. Because I'm in midlife, I'm like fifty three or something, or fifty four, somewhere

like that, early fifties, early mid fifties. Somebody once said, and I'm now old enough, and I've been around long enough to know that I can take on a bunch of things that I can probably win at. You know, do okay at get some form of recognition in terms of money or status or whatever. I can do that. What's the constant call for me to stop me kind of settling into a stagnant version of myself is to take on ever greater things, be deeply defeated by ever

greater things. And I love the permission to take on ever greater things, and I love the permission to be deeply defeated. That feels amazing to me. I mean, it's what you were saying earlier on Eric Around. You know, there was a time and I was longing to be in the position I am right now. You're like, it is time. This is the struggle I wanted, yea, yea. So let's move into the book itself. The book is called How to Begin, Start Doing Something that matters, And

it really is about how to begin. That's the whole focus of the book. It is not a how to keep going, how to have a five year plan. It's it's about how to begin. And so you have three broad I don't know if you want to call them steps that make up the foundation. So walk us through those. Sure, So the three broad sections, first of all, to find a worthy goal, like how do you actually get a goal that's worth taking on? The second broad step is commit This is the three steps. This is the kind

of the deepest work. WHI like, are you really up for this? I mean, really you really up for this? Because we've all had goals that we've kind of abandoned too quickly, too easily walked away from, and some of us will have some regret around that. This is how to minimize regret by you really going. Am I out for it? And there's some tests around that. And the third broad step is to cross the threshold. I can't promise how to get people to the end of the journey,

because once the journey starts, who knows. But if I can get you to take three bold steps across the threshold, you know it's game on. Something exciting is happening now, And I'll give you some tactics around how you can sustain the journey, but we don't get into how you finish the journey, because that's that's your adventure to plot out. Yeah, I do think the thing that's interesting about it, though, is that by beginning well in the way that you lay out, you make it more likely you'll stay on

the journey totally. You know. That is a key motivator of of why I wanted to do this, which is like I have I have a graveyard of abandoned projects and things that some of them when I'm delighted that I stopped working on, but some there's some of them I've got some regret around. I wish I why did I stop that that felt like it could have powerful and for lack of focus or lack of courage or lack of understanding about what I was taking on, and

I stepped away from it. And I am just trying to increase the odds that you find something that likes you up and that you have the courage to cross the threshold and get going on it, because once you do that, I mean it. Gerta who says like beginning as a madness or a boldness to it something like that, So I'm like, let's get to that madness, that boldness, that magic beginning something that's right. And I think what you're doing in the book balance is sort of the

two extremes that I see people go to. There are people who just start boldly fifty things over and over and over and over. Right, that's one type of problem by not preparing for it. And then the other extreme is we never get across the threshold. We have a tendency to get stuck in thinking about it. And I think that the book does a nice job of sort of threading the needle between those two to make sure

that you know whichever side you tend towards. There's things in the book that pull you back to the middle point that allow you to get through. Well. Eric, you know, the writer Jim Collins Good to Great Fame, has a metaphor that's helpful for this It is helpful for me anyway, and he says, look, a good strategy involves bullets and cannonballs.

And even if you're kind of anti war or anti guns like I am, I guess this is still a helpful metaphor because he says, look, firing bullets, which low risk experiments, helps you figure out what the real target is. And you want to fire a bunch of bullets until you finally go this is it. And that's kind of the process of trying to work out what you're worthy goal is. And then once you figure out what the

target is, your fire your cannonball. I mean, you commit, And Colins says, and I think this is the point you're making is some people spend their whole life firing bullets and they and they never have the courage to fire a cannon ball. So they dabble, they do little bits, they kind of make small steps, but nothing big happens,

so they don't bring their attention to it. And other people just fire the cannonball way too early, Like I haven't thought this through at all, but I'm going to invest my life savings into it, and it goes wrong because it almost always goes wrong, and they are taken out of the game because they've no longer got the resources to be able to commit to something in the way that they want to. So this whole idea of slow down a little bit so that you can go fast when it's time to go fast, I think it

is a really powerful way of thinking about this golf setting. Yeah, and I think that analogy is really good for sort of illustrating those two extremes. So let's move into these three steps a little bit more. You do talk about setting a worthy goal, and I love how you say that a worthy goal in twines ambition for yourself and for the world. Say a little more about that. Yeah, So the quick backstory of this is after The Coaching Habit, which, as you said that the introduction was this kind of

amazing best selling book that has taken off. I wrote a second book with The Advice Trap, which was written because whereas I knew some people read The Coaching Habit and when I love the seven Questions on the Ball and I'm using them and it's changing the way I'm leading and interacting with other people, there's a bunch of people who went, I love the questions, I just don't use them. I was like, why is it so hard to shift our behavior even when we want to shift

our behavior? And The Advice Trap was a bit a deep dive into behavior change and what are the hidden resistances to change that we all have. And I got to the end of that book and put it down in the world, and I was like, I've made a good start on that, but I still haven't quite cracked the formula around behavior change. It's a big thing to try and crack. So I started to try and write a book on Okay, let me have another go at thinking around behavior change and trying to find a way

of making it accessible and understandable for people. Wrote a first draft, send it off to some friends. My friend Misha two days later emailed me and went, I've read the first fifty pages of your book, No idea, what it's about. It's not very good? Is that? Like, oh, you know, everybody knows first draft suck, but sometimes you don't. You kind of want to hear it. You kind of

don't want to hear it. So I'm picking through the rubble of this draft, and the phrase that came out was, you know, we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. I was like, God, it that feels like the thing to basis book around. So this is how the worthy goal idea came out. So for the first time in a long time, I was really sitting with the literature and the and the research around goals. I was like, I don't really like any of this. I don't like smart goals because a smart goal is a

formula of reduction and tidying up. Keep it specific, keep it measurable, keep it actionable, keep it timely. It's all about the kind of the logistics and the doability of the goal, without ever asking is this the goal? Is this the right goal? And then the other acronym people really know are be hags, bold, hairy, audacious goals is another Jim Collins idea. Unlike the bullet cannonball man aphore, which I love, be hags. It's a great hawk, but

it tends to be organizational, you know. It's like a really big vision, like in twenty years time, this is what we're trying to be. And it just felt that it was inaccessible for most people. Be hag just felt too hairy and too audacious. I'm like, what's the middle ground? That's immensely it's a terrible name. Yeah, well, he's good at metaphors. I don't like the idea of hair in my goals. Um. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that are wrong with that. I would agree with that,

but it worked. I mean it's a phrase that's caught on. So I'm like, okay, so we've got to find something in the middle here. It has to be thrilling, Like you have to get a goal that likes you up, that you care about, that you can invest in, because you're talking about a chunk of time of your life that you're about to spend on this. It's got to be meaningful for you. And I wanted something that would counteract the tendency that some of us have, which is

too adapt goals that have an obligation to them. I should be doing this, I ought to be doing this, so it's expected that I'm doing this. You know, this is the thing I need to be doing now because and lots of us carry that weight of that, either through external pressures or sometimes internal pressures that were like I should be doing this by now. And thrilling allows you to throw that off and just go what makes me rub my hands together and go, oh, yeah, this

is the goal for me. But if it's just that, you've got kind of like the worst of self help, which is like, oh, it's all about me, It's all about staring at my navel and anything that makes my life feel better. It becomes salt cistic and narcissistic and self indulgent. I'm like it needs to be more than that. I mean, there's a place for self indulgence, don't get me wrong, but for a worthy goal, I wanted to be important and important is about serving the world in

some way. And reading a book by Jacqueline Novogratz, who is the founder of Acumen, which is a kind of cool nonprofit venture capitalist firm, and she wrote a book called a Manifesto for a More Revolution. In that was the phrase what if you could give more to the world than you take? I was like, damn, I wish i'd written that. That's a great phrase. So for me, I hang important on that. Can you leave the world better than you found it? How do you give more

to the world than you take? And in that you have a goal that serves you and serves the world.

You have internal motivation and external motivation. And the third element is daunting, which is like, how do you find a goal that will help you grow, stretch you break, you crack you open a little bit so that you're on the edge of your competence and your confidence and your experience and your sense of self so that you have a chance for that next version of you to emerge because you know you're not feeding the same wolf.

You know, the wolf you feed today is not the wolf you fed five years ago or ten years ago. You're looking to feed a different wolf. You're looking, in some ways find the next version of the good wolf. And to that you've got to be on the edge of who you are. And that's what the daunting pieces around and want something that makes you go, this makes me a bit sweaty, like I know how to start this, but I don't know how to finish it necessarily. That's

when it's daunting. In the process. You talk people through really writing three drafts of this worthy goal, and I want to read something you wrote for reasons beyond just the way they're used in the book, Because I tell people about this often. I say, you know, people who are even best selling authors struggle with a new book, right, And you wrote, you know, the step one is to write a crappy first draft. And you said this is true of every draft. I'm not the first to say it,

but I can attest to its truth. The first draft is always crappy. The first time I write anything. It's thoroughly mediocre. It's tepid and confused, it's over stuffed and under baked. It's too specific and too vague all at once. I love that a because it talks about how you can be bad in so many ways all at once. But I also think it's so important that people here from people who have been very successful, yeah right, that this is hard and the first thing that comes out

of you sucks, you know. And so this was a great opportunity to reiterate something that I end up talking to coaching clients about often. Well, let me support you by telling the story of the coaching habit. I spent three or four years pitching that book to a New York publisher. They kept turning me down, like, Michael, we love you, we love the idea, but we don't love this. You just go away and have another coin doing this.

I'm like, okay, And literally I wrote six versions of that book, each one that got turned down, and I finally said to this publisher, all right, I got lost, but I found it again, and I'm really clear what I want this book to be. It's a really crystal clear vision now and this is it I'm putting on the table, and it's a yes or no decision. It's not I go back and write an eighth draft it's like yes or no, and they went no. That was I was surprised im, so I'm so sure I was

calling their bluff. But but no, they called my bluff and I was like, man, yeah, they published another book of mine and sold a hundred thousand copies, which is pretty good. You know. I really thought they would bet on me even if they didn't fully bet on the idea. And they won't. No, Like, ah, don't know. That was one of the best things that happened to me because I then went away and I self published a coaching habit,

and I meant to control of it. And when I wrote that version that came out in the world, it didn't take me long at all to write that version of it, because I spent six years writing eight different versions of it before I finally had a book that looks effortlessly written and simple. I'm like, oh, the blood on the sweat and the tears that soaked those pages. You have no idea. So I have a question for

you about that process. How much did the ideas in the book change and the core concept in the book change versus the presentation of it over those iterations, so the fundamental idea stayed the same, which is, I am trying to unwird coaching because I had a very clear frustration, which is, I think coaching is a really powerful technology of personal change, and it gets wrapped up in obfuscation and woo nous and black box nurse, and you have

to be a people person to do it. There's a whole bunch of barriers that make coaching feel inaccessible to a whole bunch of people. Sometimes that's because of barriers of privilege. I mean, coaching remains a very white, very middle class, very middle aged profession. Sometimes it's a barrier of kind of expectation, which is like, look, I'm a marketer or an engineer or a doctor. I'm not a coach.

I don't want to be a coach. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna unwird coaching and I'm gonna make it feel like an everyday way of showing up and being with each other. And that idea didn't change. How I wrote the book changed a lot once they once they you was going to be like, here are my favorite hundred and fifty questions. So I wrote that book and it sucked. It was like the most boring book in the entire world, and then I played around with the order of questions

and I played around. At one stage every chapter had an amusing inverted commons anecdote about me in my life because I wanted to role model vulnerability and failure. So I was like, here's a funny story. And my editor was like, is this a biography or actually a helpful book. I'm like, it's meant to be a helpful book. She's like, can you cut all the stories out because we just don't care. I was like, okay. So it went through a lot of shaping, but the core idea that's what

kind of kept me going. It's like, this is why you want a worthy goal, which is like, I'm a purpose here which I'm really trying to trying to answer to. That's just helpful in you know, thinking through how things evolved. I'm kind of moving us along here, but so we

find a worthy goal. We worked through these drafts. There's lots of great questions in the book about different ways to think about them and how to find you're thinking and trying to get to a worthy goal that really speaks to who you are and what you want to accomplish. And in the book, you do a really nice job. I said this before we started talking of talking about you doing this for two goals that you had. So I'm wondering if you could share what your two goals

were that you sort of iterate throughout the book on. Yeah. So one was a business goal, which was to stop being the CEO at Box of Crayons. So I founded a training company twenty years ago thereabouts, and I'd become clear that I wasn't very good as a CEO. I mean, I was kind of okay, but it's mostly because I was blagging my way through it, and and I didn't have any accountability because there's my company. I don't know that word. Say that again. You were blagging your way

through it. I think it's British. I was kind of, you know, bssing my way through it. Yeah, it's kind of like putting up a front and tap dancing over thin eyes. That's all kind of wrapped into blagging. And so I'm like, okay, I needed to step away from that. And you know, in the book, I wanted to role model how that changed. Because the goal starts off with

me stop being the CEO. That felt most real, like I just don't want to stop doing this because I'm not very good at it, and it's also taking me away from the work that I feel I can best do in the world. And then that evolves as I go through different iterations. And then the other one was to try and launch a new podcast, do a new podcast. And I've done podcasts in the past, but I had this idea for a podcast that I felt was really

nourishing on a personal level. This isn't about business. This is just about a creative project that I was excited by. And the worthy goal starts with this idea of a new podcast in the world, and so the goals start there, and then they sort of evolved. Through these three drafts, you get get clearer and clearer. So let's talk about the stepping away is CEO? How did that goal and maybe the first telling of it the first version of it, which I think you said, was to stop being CEO

of a box of crayons. What was the final version? Yeah, because the first version is really easy. I just stopped being the CEO. It's actually not that hard. All it does is then is caused chaos all around me as I walk away from the role of CEO. You know, things burn, and it evolved to something like a gracious

transfer of power. So this felt, you know, the same, but radically different, because the one was about me just stopping doing the thing that wasn't great for me anymore, and the other one spoke to a deep value of mine, which has talked about right at the very start of the show, which is around how do I enable others transfer power to others? Step out of the spotlight so

others can step into it. And it's a it's a very foundational partner of the work I want to try and do, which is around how do I give power to people who don't yet have the power that they might. And so once I understood that this was about a transfer of power, then I understood all the ways that me, as a founder can screw that up, because founders in

the is for screwing up transfers of power. Like, no, I definitely want a success, but I'm just gonna keep my fingers and these pies and make these decisions and kind of muck it all up. So it created a commitment which was around I'm managing a process that is about how I grow as a person and as a leader, how I understand where my vulnerabilities are as a leader and what might undermine this transfer of power and how

do I manage that? And you know, how do I support Shannon who stepped in the CEO to be the best CEO that she could be. So it became radically different, even though from the outside it was the same thing, which is me stopping being CEO and Shannon becoming a CEO. This desire and core value around stepping out of the spotlight so that others can step into it and giving

power to people who haven't had it. Can you share a little bit about the evolution of that goal for you, where it sort of started to show up for you and how it sort of grew into being a value. Yeah, because it's a new realization since we talked last era.

So when we decided that Shannon was going to become the CEO, we hired a coach for two years, a year before and a year after, and so I spent a year kind of getting used to the idea of not being the CEO Box of Crayons, which is not a small thing because it was a company I founded and I led and been the face of for eighteen

years or something. So there's a lot of me wrapped up in that, and I was also finding it very difficult to imagine what would happen after box of crayons, Like, Okay, I'll just rip out the thing that I've devoted twenty years of my life too. Now what's just aential crisis. I don't really want to have an affair or buy a red car. So what do we go all by? You know, by a twenty tho dollar bike where like for us? So how will I? How will I manage this?

And I dreamt about possibilities, but they all felt a bit plus or minus five percent similar to what I had already been doing. And then I had this breakthrough experience with a woman called Aaron Wheat Taste in Colorado, and she does a process called the dig d I G And when I read about it, I was entirely

skeptical about it because this is what she promised you to. Look, I'll sit down with you for two three hour conversations, will do it in person or we did it virtually, and you'll talk to me and in real time I will create your operating system out of the words that you use. I'm thinking to myself, well, this sounds totally woo woo, and I'm not that great at kind of

woo woo stuff. I'm also a pretty good facilitator, so I'm like, if you're a bad facilitator, we're over, because I'm a terrible at being facilitated by a bad facilitator. So I was like, oh, like, this is probably a waste of my money and time. But there were a couple of testimonials on her website from people I admired, so I was like, I'll give it a crack. And I'm a bit lost anyway, and I was like, I

probably know what my words are going to be. You know, they're going to be coaching and creativity and possibilities and all the stuff that I'm kind of immersed it at the moment. So I went through this process with Aaron, which was brilliant. She is a brilliant facilitator and I'm not quite sure how she pulls us off, but she does an amazing job a kind of in the moment co create with you what your ecosystem is. And it

turns out that I have three words. One word is confidence, because one of the ways I show up in the world is a humble confidence, Like I'm grounded in who I am and the flaws I have, but I'm also confident about who I am and the flaws I have. The other was onward, which is about a sense of progress and about looking to the future. And then the word of the heart of this is the word power. And you know, it turns out that I've got stories from my past which are all about disrupting the status quo.

Even though I took all the boxes of privilege, you know, white, straight male, Rhodes scholar, over educated, English speaking, ridiculously good looking, blah blah blah, all of that. You know, I'm constantly trying to disrupt some of that stuff. And I've got story stretching back as a wee boy doing that. So

I was surprised by all three of those words. I wasn't expecting any of those words to show up, but it for me was what unlocked a new world of permissions and possibilities around what I could put my my attention to. And that was significant part of helping with this transition and also helping to figure out what my next thing was. And so how did confidence, How did that word lead you forward? We've talked a little bit about the power word. How did the confidence word leaved

you forward? In some ways, there's a reminder and encouragement to show your working. Just as we were talking about, you know, in this book, I showed my stories and I'm like, here's me going through this, and here's me trying to write a book, and here's me trying to do a podcast, and this is where I got it wrong,

and this is how I figured it out. And you know, the feedback I get where people going, it's really helpful seeing that, and you don't see it that often because you know, history is most typically written by the winners, and it makes it sound like everything was easy and perfect. I'm like, I'm confident enough in who I am to kind of say that, look the more interesting thing to

talk about other struggles rather than the victories. And I can role model a confidence around it's okay to to be in struggle and kind of be defeated by ever greater things. So I think that's that that's the confidence comes from around I teach by how I try and show up in the world around that that makes sense. I do think there is a certain amount of confidence

needed to have the vulnerability to show struggle. Yeah, and it's so much more interesting, you know when you go to a conference in those days when we went to conferences and somebody introduces the speaker and they're like, and Mary won the bronze medal in her under ten freestyle fifty meter race, and then she was the high school. Well this and this is a list of achievements, and it's like both more ring and intimidating at the same time. When I'm introduced my little thing is like Michael was

banned from his high school graduation. Michael left law school being sued by one of his law school professors for defamation. Michael was fired. Here, Michael as worked as a laborer and managed to knock himself out digging a hole. I've got an endless monel of stories of meat stumbling around. I'm like, look, I've achieved a bunch, but the more interesting things around how human I am and your human too. Sol's connect in a way that I can serve you

best as a teacher. So let's move on to number two, which is to commit. Yeah. I really like this section because it really talks towards an idea that shows up in the coaching world sometimes in the behavior change world. I think you illustrate it very well, which is sort of this competing priority thing. Yeah, I say I want this, but there's all sorts of other things that are going

on under the scenes that I haven't acknowledged. I think you've got a great coaching question around this too, write I can't quite remember it, but it's basically, in order to do that, what are you going to not do or what are you going to give up? Yeah, that's exactly the question. To kind of tip my hat to

the intellectual forbearers of this. You know, there's a guy called Ron Hifitz who's a leadership writer in Harvard, and then to educational psychologists Bob Keegan and Lisa Lahy wrote a book cord Immunity to Change and Immunity Changes a really powerful idea wrapped up in a book that's a little under edited. It could be, could be, it could be a little tighter, I think in terms of my preference for books anyway. So this kind of tries to building some of that and face the heart of what

it takes to commit. So basically asked two questions, it says this, First of all, imagine having to find a worthy goal you decide not to take it on. You know, you walk up to it and you walk away from it. What are the prizes and punishments of that decision. What's the benefit for maintaining the status quo? What's the loss by maintaining the status quo? And the truth is, there are benefits for your not taking on your worthy goal. You don't risk reputation and relationships and money and time

and expectations of yourself and expectations of others. All of that stays pretty safe and the kind of lockdown. But if you've defined your worthy goal, well, you understand the price that will get paid, look just by you, but by those that your worthy goal would serve if you

actually took it on. So you kind of weigh up prizes and punishments, and you hope that kind of the punishments away the prizes are kind of it's a bit of a mind flip, so that you're like, you know what, not doing this, the cost to me in the world is greater than the comfort to me by not doing this. And then you ask the same basic question, but this time, imagine that you're fully committed to the worthy goal. You're like, I'm I'm going to push my chips in I'm going

to go all in on this. What are the prizes and punishments of that decision? Where the prizes kind of like, yeah, this is what I would get, This is what I would get in growth and change in status, an opportunity and impact, all of that great stuff. But it also says, but what's at risk if you were to really commit to this? What's the opportunity cost? What's the reputational cost? Who will you piss off? Because you will annoy some people if you take on a worthy goal, because you

are disrupting expectations. You are making choices, which means, as you just said, you'm saying yes to some things that you're saying no to other things, and you're weighing this up as well. And in weighing these two questions up, you'll get a sense of yeah, I am really committed

to this or no. Sure. But if you're not sure, that's a great outcome as well, because then you go back to the first part of the book and you're like, let me take another crack of this worthy goal, because I want to get to a place where I'm like, as best I know, my best guess is that I'm up for this game. H I love that idea of really thinking about prizes and punishments from both directions or

comforts and costs. It often seems to me that you could almost sum up the downside to a worthy goal a lot of times with its comfort, right, all kinds of comfort, the comfort to watch you know, Netflix show seven nights a week and eat popcorn. But I'm always amazed by particularly as I get older. But I don't think it's unique to me. I see it in in lots of older people, how comfort begins to become a higher and higher value. I agree, and I mean, Eric, roughly,

how old are you? I will be fifty two in May. We're pretty much peers in terms of that. And I do think that for people of our age, many people are coming to the crossroads. You know. There's an American writer called David Brooks who read a book called The Second Mountain about this, which is like, your first mountain is your career, and you claim it to get status and money and all the stuff that a job hopefully

gives you. But at a certain point, you won that game and you have a choice to make, which is like do you climb the second mountain and the Second Mountain tends to be more about legacy and meaning and impact in the world, and so certainly for one audience for this book, I hope people who are asking themselves, Look, I'm not on TikTok, so i might be old, but I've got another thirty years left, Like, I want a good life. I don't want to just play golf and

watch Netflix and where stretchy trousers. Although stretchy trousers are quite comfortable, ts are pretty good exactly okay, And the technology has come along way really so flattering. I find the wide waistband just holds my stomach in nicely. But it's an of the story. So this is really for people who are like, in some ways I'm still at my best, Like I'm wise, I'm smart, I'm resourced. I've collected some scars, so I have some wisdom along the way. I've got a better sense of who I am, better

than I've ever had before. How do I play that hand? And hopefully it's not just watching Netflix. So there's a lot of good stuff on nefing, really a sweful lot of great TV these days. It's really daunting. Yeah, yeah that's true. So yeah, comfort is is something that I want people to be nourished. I want self care. I'm not sure I want that much comfort. Yeah, I find it a thing I am sort of consistently battling against. Or I don't even love that term, but I'm on

the lookout for. You know, there are certain signs I see in people becoming old. And I'm using that word in the negative sense of it, you know, because we all hopefully we do get old like chronologically, but there is a certain stereotyper negative to it. I think excessive comfort is certainly one thing I see. Uh. The other that I'm always on the lookout for is always thinking that the past is much better than the present. That's what I look out for. And then um, there's a

third and I seem to have lost it. Oh, it's getting bad at technology, which I am like, you know, I'm not gonna go on TikTok necessarily, but I want to know I could. Yeah, I get so, you know, cryptocurrency, and I just it's you know, sort of that new it's continuing to learn piece. The other thing that I'd add to that, Eric that I read about recently was getting to a point where you think you're you're you're dumb that the next ten years or twenty years it

basically going to be the same. And the exercise that I heard this person talking about his name I can't remember, was like, look, how fi you've come in the last ten years. It's like a long way. It's like unimaginably different to what you actually thought was happening. And basically this is a common answer. It's like, how part of you come in the last ten years? The human answer

is a long way. And then the second question is how much do you think the next ten years are going to be pretty much the same as our now? It's like we have mostly and we've got this neural bias in our brains, like we think the future is going to be pretty much the same, even though the evidence from our past tells us that a whole bunch

of stuff changes. And I think part of that resistance to that spiritual sense of oldness that you're talking about, which is starkness and comfortness and no longer growing, it's just to go, oh, you're not done yet, and the world's not done with you yet, so you know, rub your hands and jump in and jump in. Yeah, I'm going to come with a question out of left field that has been on my mind a couple of times lately, and since we just talked about lots of great TV,

here's my question. And this is a guy who's got a podcast about books. So for a lot of my life, I regarded reading a novel as a vastly superior activity over watching, say a TV show or a movie. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've started to revise that view a little bit, and I started to look at like, well, what do I get out of a really well done television series and is it that different than what I get or do out of a novel? And I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that. Yeah,

I mean I have a master's degree in literature. Yeah, my wife has a PhD in literature and a master's degree in library science. So in case you're worried you're thinking about where our natural biases, it's towards books. And there's stuff on the TV that blows my mind about how good it is. It's extraordinary kinds of how it's produced and nuance that it has and all of that stuff. I think one of the gifts of fiction is it allows you to create empathy with a character you might

not otherwise understand. You might never get inside the skin of somebody. So you have somebody like me who's a kind of left leaning liberal, over educated, this, that, and the other. I can read a book by a young black science fiction writer and understand the world and a point of view that I could never self generate. I think with a TV show, you're never in the skin

of the characters. You're you're looking at a story unfold, and there's something that stories tell you that are about the rhythms of life and the kind of archetypes of characters that you can meet in the world. So I think you get that as you do in books as well. But I think a great book will trump a great

TV series. And as an example of that, I'm just finishing reading a science fiction series called The Expanse, which is amazing and I don't even like science fiction, but this is a nine book series written by two guys. It's co written, even though it's a single named author. That's a norm the plume of these two guys. I think they worked as assistance to J. A. A, the dude who wrote the Game of Thrones books. Anyway, it's

a sprawling opera. It's available as a TV series as well, I think on Prime I think, and as good as the TV series is, and it is pretty damn good, the book is just another level up because you're in the brain of meglomaniac, and you're in the brain of the rebel forces and in you know, you're in the brain of the the plucky hero in a way that

the TV show can't fully immerse human. There's been a lot of studies showing that fiction does grow empathy, and I've kind of wondered, you know, how different is the empathy that's generated in fiction than there is in a TV show, Because a well done TV series you end up really pulling for people you never would call for. Right if it's done well, you become very sympathetic to everyone.

But your point about being in the brain of and and the other point that you made that made me think was like any book I've ever loved and the movie of it, I've always thought the book was better. The one thing I do think, and this is kind of goes both directions. As I was thinking about, with fiction, you're generating all the visuals yourself, but you're also generating them at least in my case, almost entirely from things that I've seen, or even if somebody's describing something I

haven't seen. It hovers around my memory in some way, which is both positive and negative, Whereas a TV show or a movie can show me things that my brain could never even reading it could see. So I think there are trade offs. I guess for me, for a long time, the gap was like, you know, a book was like a score of ninety and a TV show is like a score of fifteen. And I think the gap is closed in my book still win, but the gap has certainly closed. I love the Lord of the

Rings movies. I mean they're amazing. Yeah, But some ways, watching that, as extraordinary as it is, that world building has lessened my experience of reading the book, because I remember reading the book and just going I can't even see the edges of this wald. Yeah, it's like it's gonna vastness, whereas the movie it's constant within a screen. Yeah. Some of that might also be about how strong people's visual imaginations are. I do not have a good one.

Like my visual imagination that's just not one of my strengths. So it also makes me think a little bit when you're saying that about like the movie diminishing the books, Like it's the reason that when I was a ten year old, I thought music videos were like the cool thing, But as I got older, I was like, I do not want to see a music video because this piece of music means so much to me and it connotates something to me. I don't want anybody trampling on that. Yeah,

I like that. Okay, Well, you and I are at the end of time for the main conversation going to continue for a few minutes in the post show conversation because we did not really get to talk about crossing the threshold, So you and I'll do that in the post show conversation because I dragged this down a ludicrous fiction versus TV talking. Yeah, but I was monologuing a bit, so apologize if I'm not talking too much. No listeners.

You can get access to this post show conversation other post show conversations, add free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem, and all kinds of other stuff by going to one you feed dot net slash join Michael, Thank you so much for coming on. We'll have links in the show notes to the book, and is there a website you want to point people to? Yeah, sure, like how to Begin

is the website for the book. And then if you want more about me in general, MBS dot works is the website for that. Perfect, And again there'll be links in the show notes you can just click on through to those. All right, thank you, Michael, so much fun to have you on again. I'm really glad we got to make this happen. Yeah, it was a alike. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You

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