#1675 Optimise Strengths Or Develop Weaknesses? - Bobby Cappuccio

shifts dumped on top of them. And as I'm studying the signs and symptoms of burnout, because there was a lot of things that were going on that they didn't understand why they were happening, and it was just so bizarre. So I just kept ignoring it. But as I'm studying more about burnout to you know, help other people, not me, of course, I was like, oh oh wow, I'm deep in it myself.

have a presentation. She goes, but you're presenting Tuesday and Wednesday night. I said, well, look, I have a presentation, but not what you're talking about. I don't have slides, I don't have a video, I don't have She goes, what do you use it's so funny. Oh, I just my mind. I can't really send you that, but I'll bring it with me on the night. So I don't know why I went down that road.

I'm not saying coaching is the only tool, but just to make a long story short, the audience absolutely loved it, and they're going to be brought in and present for the board and they really prepared, like for a twenty minute presentation. They prepared several hours to get as you know,

when you're getting into presenting, that's normal, that's admirable. But one of the things I warned them about is now that you're going out and you're doing this you're going to get a lot of advice on how to present, and most of it's going to come from people who have never really presented before, but they never really present well. And a lot of it's going to be on creating power points and what the power point should look like. And that is about two percent, if you're lucky, of

the total impact. So it's just it's just I think people have a lot of anxiety around presentations. When I don't have a presentation, what is this gay get.

which I completely understand. And I will say the worst preyer, I've done four horrendous presentations in the last four years, horrendous, and each one of them were standing in front of an academic board presenting my research, and I will say I used PowerPoint like a motherfucker because I was so terrified.

It's funny how the person who can talk to a thousand people comfortable, comfortably is terrified to talk to four people and every time, every time you know, on my rating, if I would rate myself one's ten, every time I was a two or three, I was so fucking terrified. But anyway, I guess it's context dependent.

exceedingly well. And then you get into a different context, and someone who performs at a very high level finds themselves in a position where they're struggling. That's not a lack of skill, that's a psychological dynamic. That's a story you're telling yourself. That's how you're framing the situation. I mean, so much of presenting is what's going on in your inner world and how that shows up in your outer world.

And I think it's cool to hear that people that are at the top of their field still struggle with the same things that other people are kind of self conscious and afraid of.

I actually agree with you. But yeah, but then when you go and you know, we want you to just stand in front of these four professors and tell them about your research and while why the world needs it, and you to fucking take this out of the darkness and bring it into the light of new evidence and data and whatever. You know. So but you know, you get that we're all works in progress. You know, I think, I think for people like you and me that stand in front of a lot of audiences and write and

teach and coach and all of these things. But for me anyway, I think it makes me more relatable. I don't do it to be more relatable, but I think the fact that you know, I'm pretty good at some things, I'm not bad at others, and I'm fucking terrible at a bunch, but I'm a work in progress. And you know, I find waited till I got all my shit together

and got everything fully functional and operational. Before I coached or taught or spoke or wrote or did a podcast, I'd never do anything, you know, I think.

I think sometimes we look at other people and we judge ourselves by that comparison or other people look at individuals and judge them by what I'm competent in. It's rediculous, isn't it.

Get stuck with a crab, because he'll build a city within about six months.

a question. Which you've written this is all your stuff, and then I want you to riff on each thing for about three or four minutes. How's that?

I wish I wasn't as creative. I wish I didn't have the ability to concentrate and focus and get into flow. I wish I didn't have the level of working memory to go ahead and innovate. I wish I didn't have

greater resilience. Because when you're talking about sleep, and this isn't like you don't need me to rattle on, and if you don't want to read the ountless thousands of peer reviewed studies that all point to the same exact thing, that the percentage of people that can get by on lack of sleep and still function, because there is a percentage of people that can do that, according to the research,

and that percentage is zero. I mean, just go out shortcut read Matt Walks Why We Sleep, Go through that with an open read it once, maybe read it twice. I mean, you know you have the time to do this if you have this psychological frame, because we know you're not wasting time on frivolous things like sleeping. Read the book and then let's have a conversation. Sleep is one of those well being practices. Here's something that's really important about well being. So Gallop, I don't want to

go off on a tangent on this. Gallup did over one hundred million intensive interviews with people representing ninety eight percent of the world's population. So it's not like people in Melbourne believe this and you know, and a little bit in Hong Kong, but we don't know about the

rest of the world. And they found that the number one predictor of well being was in fact job satisfaction, right, And that's not a surprise when you unpack it and when you when you understand the reasoning and how they explain that by the way well Being at Work by Clifton and Harder, great book if you want to read more about that. But there's also an inverse relationship. The greater your level of wellbeing, the greater the likelihood that

you're engaged and resilient in your work. Because right now, lack of wellbeing, lack of resilience and burnout. Not lazy people who are tired, very driven people who for a variety of factors, have gotten to the end of themselves. And the harder the try, the worse they perform. Sleep is a critical as are multiple wellbeing practice as critical piece of that puzzle. So I don't know if that really answers your question, but you did say.

the pursuit of happiness a misguided endeavor? And go.

faster and evading more and more people. I think not not to respond to a quote with a quote, but man search for meaning, written by doctor Victor Frankel, he has the unique distinction of having paid dearly for the insights he arrived at when he was alive, being a prisoner at auschwitzen Dachau. And he wrote that success like happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue as an unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater

than oneself. I think when you identify what you value, what is meaningful, what inspires you, what makes you feel alive, and you go after that thing, you dig into it and you do the work, not necessarily because it's going to bring about an outcome, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you do it for its own sake, because it's intrinsically valuable. And if you go beyond actualization to transcendence, you do it because it contributes to someone or something

bigger than you. I think happiness is what shows up inevitably, but I think happiness as a pursuit is almost a guarantee that it will elude you. And that's not to say that hedonic pleasures don't have a place. They really do, You know, I want to go out with my wife and you know, from our roof deck and watch a sunset. I want to have a glass of wine. I want to eat some great food and have great conversation. But

that's by itself, is kind of fleeting. That'll make me happy, like you know, for for the sum total of an hour. But I think, you know, digging into meaning and your life's again work and well being. You got to ask your sol can I just can I just tangent off of this format for one second because.

west coast of the US. And before the presentation, I'm sitting with her and we're just we're just getting to know each other and I'm just like, I'm just a complete fanboy. And I asked the question. You know, everybody talks about well being, but it's like mindset. Everyone's got a different definition, you know being that well being is at the center of Gallup's research. How do you define well being? What she said was brilliant. She said, well

being is everything that's important to you. In other words, everything and everyone you love, what you think about most of the time, and the experience you have of living. I was like, wow, that's amazing. So when you talk about happiness, happiness is a byproduct of living in alignment

with well being. And it's not just about you know, smoothies and meditation and yoga poses, all of which may or may not be great, right the smooth The smoothie is a little bit iffy, but it's it's it's about vision, it's about purpose, it's about optimization. Otherwise you're not going to get there because there's going to be too many disruptors that's stopping you from enjoying a life of well being.

And when you're when you're enjoying a life of wellbeing, I think you're just so much more valuable to yourself to others impactful. I'm not talking about it on a global scale. I'm talking about a personally meaningful scale.

stress more effectively? The answer is both yes and no.

more harm than good. So, in other words, if I'm struggling financially and I say with confidence, I am, you know, wealthy and financially independent. All I'm really doing is illuminating the distance between where I am and where I really wish I need to be. So that's that's not a good thing, because somebody who is something doesn't have to continually profess it, Like someone who feels strong and resilient isn't sitting there going I am strong, I am resilient.

I am strong, I am resilient. So those types of affirmations contradict my actual belief system about myself. It widens the gap, it doesn't narrowly. So that's the first thing. Second thing, Abrahem Sene, I think that I think that's who I mentioned in that post. I've referenced him a

lot of times. He took groups of people and without getting into the details of the study, they were framed with I will right, so I will wake up and you know, go to the gym at five o'clock in the morning, versus flipping it to will I now I will.

People interesting things happen. Not only did they not improve in their performance or their behaviors that would lead to a certain outcome, they did worse than their baseline, and when asked why was that, It's like, Okay, well, I will wake up and go to the gym every morning at five am. That's my affirmation. But when I look back the past three New Years, my resolution was to lose five kilos. I actually ended up gaining two last year.

So when I do that, I think I'm kind of full of shit all little bit, and I keep reminding myself of my lack of self efficacy and follow through every time I do that affirmation. So if I flip that will I Well, that's an open ended question, and that does a couple of things. One, it doesn't allow for the possibility of no, you won't that little voice in your head every time you say I will you know, I will pass up on the dessert and then the

cheesecake comes around and it seduced me. You know, something like that. But what it also does is it allows for you to engage your prefrontal lobes, the planning executive reasoning action take taking center of your brain, the part of your brain that allows you to imagine something in the future and start to create plans that support that

future outcome that you desire. Questions have the ability to do that because when you're in a state of high anxiety, when you're in a state of high doubt, or you're kind of feeling afraid, or there's a disruptive emotion that's getting in the way of you taking action. When you start to ask yourself questions, you start to upregulate your

executive centers, your prefrontal lobes. So questions in the form of affirmations could be highly valuable, like will I wake up or or what is it that I know about myself that makes it likely I will wake up at five o'clock in the morning and go to the gym, Because now you're starting to not only on a neurobiological level, up regulate the centers of your brain that you need to lay those plans, but you're starting to search for areas of strength for attributes that you've utilized in the past.

It's an expansive and highly constructive type of question. So if you're affirming something, it's got to be rooted in something you value. There has to be an emotional impetus behind that affirmation, and it has to be rooted in something that's not contradictory to all of the evidence that you've shown so far, and sometimes flipping that into a question could be very useful.

we've we've stopped. So the statement was sometimes the hardest part of making meaningful changes in our lives is simply getting started.

level of initiative. So it's deeper than that. But when you take a look at predictability around behavior change, let's look at one of the most ubiquitously utilized models of therapy and coaching, which is motivational interviewing by William J. Miller and Stephen Ralnick. There's certain levels of predictability and it could be framed in the acronym DAMN CAT right,

So DAMN stands for desire, ability, reasons, and need. So when people start talking about a desire to change, like instead of I should, I want to, that's a predictor of what is change talk where you start to not only acknowledge the need for change, but you also talk about the strategies for change and the frameworks by which you're going to initiate change. A stands for ability, right, like I can do this. A lot of times we have a desire, but we have very low level of

confidence in our abilities. Or sometimes it's flipped like I know I can do this change, but I really don't have a strong, deeply rooted desire for it. And then there's reasons, and then there's there's a need, right, Like what's the need for me to change. And there's that story about this three frogs sitting on a log on a hot summer's day. One of the frogs thinks to themselves, you know what, I really want to jump into that cool pond and cool myself off. And the question is, well,

how many frogs are now sitting on the log? And the answer is still three. One frog thought about it, wanted to do it. Doesn't mean they took any action and followed through. But all of those are predictors of change. Talk. Now, where the predictors start to get amplified is in the cat. The C stands for commitment. When somebody starts to go from I want to to I will, it's a much

stronger predictor. Or the A is activation where I'm ready, like everybody has this magical day Monday, Monday, I'm gonna do this, or the first of the year, New Year's resolution. When somebody is like I'm ready, when is ready now? Right? That becomes a much stronger predictor. But the strongest predictor that you are going to follow through in a series of behaviors that are in lined with an outcome is when you start to utilize the languaging of I am.

That's when you already have taken action. So sometimes it's not about changing everything. Like I want to lose weight, So tomorrow I'm going to stop drinking. I'm gonna stop eating my favorite foods. I'm gonna sign up with it. If you could just do one thing, but get going, Like right now, what's the most accessible thing? I mean, obviously all those things are important, but what are you

willing to do right now? Because once you start doing something, even a small thing, that supports a level of self efficacy, and it also starts to change your identity. Like so if you take a look at the work of BJ Fogg, which I know Paul Taylor has talked about extensively, or James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, we overestimate the power of discipline and will power in the long term, but we underestimate the power of restructuring our environment and

our identity. So if you really want to do something, what's the most powerful indicator that you're that person that's going to take that action. If you've already started taking that action, you already start to see yourself at a small degree as being someone who is health conscious, as being an exercise. So the most important thing is to get going with something.

It's just the check in, right, You're like, your task is not to turn up on Monday night and listen to me for an hour and a half or two hours and take notes and ask a few random questions. Your real challenge is what happens after Monday night at nine o'clock. You know, It's like what I care about. I don't even care if you turn up because it's all recorded. They can watch it whenever I want them

to turn up. But what I really care about is what happens in one hundred and sixty six intervening hours, you know, between Friday and Monday night at nine and then the following Monday night at seven, you know, like, tell me what you're doing, because it is that it is that you know, like you said before, is knowledge intelligence?

Like I'm like, yeah, there are so many knowledgeable people who are not necessarily intelligent or are not applying the knowledge in an intelligent way and therefore not creating the outcomes they want. But fuck, they know a lot, they know a lot, they're just not doing a lot, achieving a lot, or changing a lot. And that's that is

another three hour podcast right there. But just that I think also, mate, like the idea of fully committing I think scares people because people people some people like a get out of jail card. They want to be able to give themselves an escape clause like look, I tell you what, I'll see how it goes. I'll no, don't fucking see how it goes. Do it just yet? You know.

But sitting on the metaphoric couch waiting for a sign from the universe, crossing your fingers, hoping that you might get inspired this week was fucking plan ever, no argument there.

eat pizza. It's done for some people, like closing off any other possibility, like shutting the door on pizza and never looking back, really works for other people for so many reasons. I have an act of recidivism. I eat pizza and then I'm done. Oh my god, I've I've fallen off the wagon. Start small and do Here's a story. I just remembered the story.

to be honest, but you're a fucking idiot. After I'm swallowing the cake, I mean, ask Nick, what are you doing? And she's like, okay, I've brought friends over. I was out and I want you to come out and join us. And we just brought a cake and you're not going to pull this not eating cake shit, and she.

unquote diet. Right, this is back early like in my bodybuilding days, I had such a hard time starting a diet because I really loved bagels, and I loved pasta, and I absolutely loved pizza. And you would start and then something would happen, and then you start again. But after a while it becomes harder and harder for you to get off track. For a few reasons. There's loss of version. Right, there's I've put in so much work and effort, I don't want to blow it. But there's something,

there's something deeper, and it goes back to identity. It's just I am the type of person now that eats a certain way. And my girlfriend was like, knew that I had gotten so deep down this rabbit hole of what I do and do not eat, and it was part of my identity. It's just like the only way I'm going to break this is if I force them to have some cake. There you go, you broke it.

You've had cake, Come out and have some more. Because there was no way that I would come out into the living room, sit down and have cake with people at three in the morning. Just wouldn't do it. Or two in the morning whenever. So if you're going to start, how's about this. Don't change anything you eat. If you go out and you have your pizza, don't change that. You go out and you have whatever you define as junk food, don't change it. Add something to your diet.

Start to add plants, Start to add a variety of vegetables to things that you're already eating. One, if your diet's bad enough, you desperately need those nutrients to begin with, you're doing your body a world of good. But two, at a very small level, you can't deny that you're doing things that a person who's conscientious about their health is doing. After a while, those behaviors are going to

start to expand. Like in the gym business, some gyms will do the research and they'll figure out if somebody walks through the front door of our facility eight times within a month, the likelihood that they're going to stay and they're not going to cancel their membership after a month goes up exponentially. So those gyms can say, Craig, you know, I know that you haven't been in a gym, you know, for the past decade, and you're not really

sure if this is for you. What if that concern was not even an issue, you didn't have to worry about follow through at all. What would you do right now? What would be your first step? And they can give you a money back guarantee. You know what, We have a money back guarantee because we understand people are uncertain. As long as you come to the gym eight times this month to prove that you've given yourself and this

new lifestyle a chance. If at the end of thirty days eight visits you're not happy, we'll refund your money, no questions asked, because they know if you've walked into that gym eight times, the chances of you doing that are very slim.

I'm having these side effects. You know, I wake up at the morning and there's this lesion on my face. We don't know what drug is doing it. So sometimes starting small, but start works.

This is back in the day when a lot more people smoked, but quite a lot of people who smoked more than fifty cigarettes a day, which seems crazy, but back in the day was not totally rare. And I knew that if I said to somebody who smoked sixty cigarettes a day, okay, so today's your last cigarette, the chances of that sticking were zero, And so we would literally set a smoking goal for the week, you know,

fifty a day. And people are like, I can't believe you're setting a goal for him to have fifty cigarettes to day. I go, well, in the if you step out of the micro and zoom back into the macro and you see what I'm doing, and you realize that this person's been smoking for thirty years, the chances of them stopping today because I said stop today are zero. So fifty cigarettes today is better than sixty. And over

time we're going to bring that right down. But the most logical strategy would not be to go cold turkey today. But I love you thinking, all right, we've got ten minutes, let's move on. This one's a little bit different. I like this, I like all of them. Imagine a swim instructor. This is part of a bigger thing. That you wrote. Of course, imagine a swim instructor telling a beginner to

just work harder instead of teaching them proper techniques. I feel like that happens, or a version of that happens. I'll side again for the listeners. Imagine a swim instructor telling a beginner, in other words, someone who can't swim to just work harder instead of teaching them proper techniques. That happens quite a bit, doesn't it.

why being offered. What's left out is the how. Yeah, And if you were an educator in any other domain in life, you were a golf coach and you didn't have the how or a golf instructor is a better way of saying it. Or maybe you were working as an instructor in medical school and you were teaching somebody surgery. You told them what to do, you told them to grind and just cut harder, dig deeper, but you didn't

really get to the how. You would send people out to murder a lot of individuals over the course of their career, and that medical school wouldn't be around very long. But in self help, for some reason, the how is left out. And if you're going to tell people what to do, you need to have viable, executable strategies on how, or you have to have the skill sets to extract

the how from that particular individual. But when you take a look at James Petraska, who's one of the founders of the trans theoretical model of change, one of the things that he says, the reason why people don't get started is because they really do not know what to do. What I think he's getting at when you read how he explains it, they don't know how to do it. I know what to do, I don't know how to do it. And that's a problem that's not executable, that's not strategic.

not trying. Bukowski's thing was, if you want to be a writer for any other reason, then you cannot help but to write. You're doing it for the wrong reasons. Because the quintessential defining characteristic of a writer is not who is most financially successful, who's written. It's someone who writes continualm someone who produces a body of work. Don't try to be a writer. Be a writer. Sit down

and get to the business of writing. And if there's not something that is so deeply emotionally resonant with you where you cannot not do the work. You're in it for the wrong reasons. You're either doing it because you're looking for fame, you're looking for recognition, maybe you're doing it because you want to be admired by the opposite sex, the same sex, whatever, you're doing it for all the wrong reasons, and you're not going to be telling the truth.

And in art, you've got to be truthful because it's about resonating with raw expression. So I think that's what he meant. If you want to be if you want to be anything, if you want to be fit, don't go out and try to be fit, engage in the behaviors, don't try to produce an outcome. That was one of the things I noticed when I was struggling with burnout is I was trying very horrid and I didn't understand why. I don't go out and step in front of an audience and I'm going to try to motivate them. I'm

going to try. But I was doing these things. I was like, where is this coming from? And that's when I was one of the indicators of burnout. There's a difference between trying and being, and I think that's what Pokowski.

him is out. I think it's on the mcg the biggest cricket stadium in the world football austray and Reels Football Stadium, one hundred and something thousand people, and he's screaming in his players and he says, don't think do, don't think do. And that's not kind of a revelation now, but you know, this is like fifty sixty years ago he was he was basically, you know, pointing towards this kind of theme a little bit. I think, so all right, last one, you're ready go on.

because I talk about a lot doctor Martin Seligman. He's kind of like the father of positive psychology. He's done a lot of great work. And when you look at his frame and values in Action, so you could go to like VIIa dot Org, I think it is. Anyway, if you type in values in Action, it'll come up and you can take a version of this for free.

It's a survey that helps you identify your values, and he believes that when you act on those values, which is my definition of authenticity, it shows up as a signature strength that what you're really strong at innately is usually aligned with what's most meaningful to you. So I think when you doubled down on that, not only are you leveraging the very best in you, but you're you're also doing something thing that gives you a sense of resilience. It gives you a sense of optimism, it gives you

a sense of purpose in the face of challenge. It kind of does a lot. Because so here's another Gallop book, First, Break All the Rules. This is by Buckingham and Kaufman. They wrote that, and I think they interviewed something like eighty six thousand or an incredibly large base of highly effective managers, and they were identifying what separates an average leader from an exceptional leader. And one of the qualities

was is that they identify and develop people's strengths. Because if you have people on your team and they're innately weak at something, and you spend a ton of time in resources helping them elevate their strengths, they go from they go from weakness to average. At the same time, the people who have marked strengths and those are being neglected, they're being ignored. That's where you should be spending the

most of time with those people. I'm focused on, how do they expand their strengths their strengths start to decline to average. So now you've built a team of average performers. Yes, and it's counterintuitive, but it shows up in their data. It makes a lot of sense. What are your signature strengths? Spend most of the time there.

optimal use of Tiff? How do we best exploit what each of us are good at? And as you said, you know me me going and rebuilding our website not a good use of me at all. Me uploading the file from this and then publishing it wherever the fuck it goes, and then doing I don't know, like I don't know how to turn this this. All I know is how to press this zoom link and get you and then talk to you and then press end call that's my and come up with a title and write

a synopsis. But actually turning it into a thing that the world listens to that they can press on a button on their phone. And here's fucking Fatty Harps and Bobby Kapucco. I don't know how that happens, but I don't need to.