← Managing Your Practice
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Foreign.
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Hi everyone, this is Kathryn Williams. I am head of Practice management here at Dimensional Fund Advisors. And if you've listened to this podcast previously or even as a client participated in our annual Global Advisor study, you know that capacity constraint is a top three growth challenge for many firms. This can be in the form of needing human capital, a lack of technology, or even just dealing with ongoing operational inefficiencies. Regardless of the reasons, when you and your team have the added stress of lack of time and capacity, it's been my observation that things like the ability to learn, the ability to seek innovative solutions, and even your firm culture may suffer. And certainly we may not always bring our best leadership selves to the office. So what's happening with our body and in particular our brain during these times? And more importantly, how can you and your team not only survive these challenging periods, but thrive as an organization? Joining me today is someone who not only focuses on this in a relatively large organization, which you'll hear about in just a moment, but has also written a book and frequently speaks around the world on the subject. We actually met in the UK where he was there to speak at a conference. Mark Sparvell leads Microsoft's efforts on social learning and how education technology can impact adult learning. He's also the author of the book called Good Brain, Bad Brain. You can't believe everything. You think we should all get T shirts that say that I believe. Mark, it's great to have you with us today.
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Delighted to be here, Katherine.
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So let's start first, and I'm thinking specifically about where you begin relative to good brain, bad brain, and this idea of we're operating with this device between our ears and there's some programming that's already there that we have to, at a minimum, be aware of. So when we think about this connectivity between that positive mindset, how can it lead to increased productivity? You know, starting with the brain, as you were writing this book, doing your research, what stood out to you relative to this little device? Well, big device in our head, right?
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That's right. With as much processing power as I think 500,000 Xboxes. And as you say, we, you know, the human brain has changed very little in the last 50,000 years. In fact around about 10%. Some studies suggest it's become a little bit smaller, but has become more complex. And the human brain was originally designed with one primary objective which was survival. That was all. It's a survival oriented brain. And over the tens of thousands of years, the brain has evolved. You know, it's Adapted to life on the ground. It's developed higher cognitive functions to be able to predict and analyze and to abstract and reason, and importantly, to be able to socialize and cohese. So running underneath it all is an orientation for survival, which means in our modern world, sometimes we can't believe everything our brain is telling us. In fact, we can't even believe everything we see and hear. Not because it might be a deep fake, but because we're constantly filtering out the world based upon what we're telling our brain is a threat to our very survival. A good example would be procrastination. If workers are procrastinating or you as a leader are procrastinating.
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Yeah.
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You can view that as a problem, as a liability. You could also take a strategy from the book and reframe that to what it is. It's the sign of a healthy brain. Procrastination is a healthy brain protecting you from something you've decided is a threat. In my case, I'm at the moment planning an executive briefing for Thursday, and my sock drawer is tidy and I've got a loaf of bread sitting and rising. Why? Because I've convinced myself that that executive briefing is going to be a pain. It's going to be torturous. I'm struggling with it. My brain, my survival brain, picks up the threat and says, I'm going to help you avoid that, Mark. Make you sleepy, make you hungry, find something else to do. My challenge is to come up with a strategy around that and go, okay. Procrastination is a healthy brain. And you know what? This event on Thursday is an awesome opportunity for me to show the very best of what we do with AI And I kind of force myself to pivot away from a threat, because every time we think something is a threat, our brain kicks in to protect us from that through fight, flight, fear, or fawn passive acquiesce.
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B
So we may not be struggling or using our brains to determine is that woolly mammoth a threat to us Right from way back when. The original brains, we'll give our ancestors a little bit of a nod there, but it sounds like, based on the research, the way the brain reacts is kind of the same as it used to be, even if the threats are a little bit different. And we have to think purposely about that. Yeah.
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And we can easily be hijacked in this modern world by our own emotions being triggered. So somebody speaks harshly to us in an exchange in the office, we attend a training session, and we feel like we're not being listened to a threat is triggered and an emotion is produced. Resentful, frustrated, angry, despondent. Unless we collectively develop our emotional intelligence, that's the ability to recognize, understand, label, express emotions, we're always at risk of being hijacked.
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That's something you touched on in the book. The sort of the difference between the EQ and the EI and even what's conscious and what may not be conscious. Can you talk a little bit about your observations as you were thinking about how does the brain handle this? And then how do we park it in the workplace at times as well?
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Yeah. Or how do we invite it into the workplace but in the right way? There you go. It's a strategy in the book. The power of the reframe. I guess it would be useful to make it really clear that, you know, this is not developing an emotional intelligence as a leader. And helping to develop that in our staff is not an agenda around making everyone happy. You can have fierce conversations. You can be tough on the topic and kind on the people. You can still do that. As you said at the start, you know, we're all working in hyper competitive resource restraint conditions. There's that VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, the drive to deliver. The challenge is when we start to think and treat people like human resources instead of as humans. They end up becoming disconnected from a sense of purpose and ownership and they lose motivation. And once you've lost motivation, the best you can get is compliance through threat or reward. And compliance is a poor substitute for motivation. At a surface level, it can look similar. It's a bit like a narcissistic boss can be confused with a incredibly confident boss. They look similar, which is why we constantly need to get better at being emotion detectives rather than emotion judges. Because you can't work out how people are feeling by what you observe or what you hear. You can only work out by engaging in a conversation with people. But again, it's not about giving everyone a smiley face sticker and organizing a burrito truck to come. You know, that's not terrible. But building culture happens one conversation at a time.
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Going back to what you were talking about earlier around motivation and even procrastination, which is sort of like, what am I giving my attention to? What do I have the energy to give my attention to? And particularly, you know, as both of both you and I have said, when you're in a really fast paced, really kind of crunch environment, one of the statements that I often hear, I don't know if you hear this too, is Like, I just feel like I spent my whole day reacting like I never got an opportunity to be proactive. And for me, that's not a tactical thing. That is an emotional thing relative to sort of how you're feeling when you put all that together and you think about, you know, you mentioned in your book about how at any given time about 40% of the brain is wandering around. Well, you know, and so which, you know, I can relate to that. In fact, I may be a higher percentage than that on any given day. But how do you wrestle that? How do you sort of get control over that and really start to harness it, so to speak, in a way that changes the way you're behaving or the way you're thinking about a situation?
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Yeah, that's great. Because we have limited cognitive resources. Right. You know, our brain is amazing, you know, with more than 90 billion neurons, more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. It's designed for adaptation. It likes stress. Believe it or not. It's actually hardwired for stress. It just doesn't like being out of control. And that's a really important part here because the moment people feel that they're out of control, their brain is no longer operating at its best capacity. Stress is good adrenaline. You know, you get a, you know, a rush. You get neurologically, physiologically primed to deal with it. But stress, which exceeds your capacity of time or energy becomes distress and that becomes harmful. So a comment on the brain designed for stress. When you talk about, you know, that day where you feel somebody feels like they've spent the whole day reacting, you know, it sounds to me, I would say that there's an out of control brain because they're going, I'm out of control. I can't find the time to catch my breath. And you're right, 40% of your brain at any time is wandering. It's what it's wandering towards, which can make it useful, wandering or problematic. The unfortunate thing is the brain is like Velcro for negative thoughts, and it's like Teflon for positive thoughts. You know, we might have about 8,000 thoughts a day. You know, about 80% of them aren't pleasant. And that's, you know, that's not a terrible thing. It's how our brains were built. We constantly were looking for threats 50,000 years ago. The brain exaggerates the threats to get your attention. Limited cognitive capacity. We do that at work now. And wandering mind will often ruminate and it will stress and it will chew over negative things. Because unfortunately, unless you take control of it, that's what it's designed to do. So a wandering brain, which isn't controlled, looks for bad stuff. And of course, in a busy day where you're reacting all the time, your little quiet subconscious is continuing to add fuel to the fire of misery. Misery loves company. It's going to find things. It's where short breaks are. Mindfulness again, it's not yoga pants and hemp seeds with a goat on your back on a stand up paddleboard, but it's taking like one minute in the course of a day to let yourself be present and listen to your own thoughts. Listen to outside, reduce some of the overstimulation, in a sense, bring down your cortisol, lower your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, elongate your brain waves within a minute or two minutes. And emerging research has shown that regular practice of, of mindfulness or meditation, they actually can measure impact on the strand, the telomere strands at the end of your DNA. It literally can change your DNA, which means you can pass a disposition on to another generation with intentional practice. So when somebody gets to the end of a day like me, let me say this. Being emotionally intelligent does not mean that you're always happy and relaxed. Like, I get stressed, I get worked up, I feel my brain is scattered in a thousand places. I get the palm sweats. The difference is I know it's happening, I know why it's happening. I'll spend time labeling it. Like this morning I thought, what is it? It's dread. I'm dreading this review. Me dread, good. I label it. And then as I've mentioned in my book, I got 20 things I can try. And you know what? It might not work. I might still feel dread afterwards. But guess what? The brain hates being out of control. And I've just given it a little bit of control by saying I can try 20 things. Let me try an act of gratitude. Let me try a reframe, let me try listening to some music, let me try some box breathing. Let me try some horizon scanning. Let me talk sense to myself. My brain goes, we are in control, Mark. Like we are in control. We got this. And you come down, you bring it back. If you don't have the strategies, if you don't have the ability to think about your thinking, you'll never be able to regulate your thinking. You'll be hijacked and you'll get to the end of the day and go, I need a margarita.
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Right? Which you still might need one, but
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you still Like I said.
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But at least you've named it.
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Yeah. This is not an agenda to discount or diminish or dismiss unpleasant emotions. There are no bad emotions.
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Right?
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There are pleasant and unpleasant, high energy, low energy. And you know what? They all matter and serve a purpose. When I'm delivering a keynote, I want to feel stressed. I want to be. When I'm planning one, I want to be frustrated with myself to push myself for the best. You know, I want to be in that kind of unpleasant, high energy phase when I'm like, I want that. But I also know how to get from that to just feeling content or quiet or pleasant. I don't want to jump to joyful because that some days that's just too much of a leap. But I know how to get from there to there, or at least to try to. And again, as you're trying it, you're telling your brain, I'm in control. Because you can't believe everything you think your brain is sometimes telling you to remain there. Here's a quick example. Holding a grudge. Like how many people in the workplace, you know, feel like somebody's suggested that they're not doing their job well? And I just hold onto that grudge, you know? And the reason people hold on to grudges is it gives them a reward. The reward is there's a little bit of moral superiority. You know, I. I remembered to organize Kathleen's birthday cake and nobody else put money in. I'm going to hold that grudge because I'm the better person here. Research has shown when they sent people to climb up a mountain with a backpack filled with weights in it, one group engaged in an act of forgiveness. One group had to think about the grudge. They did this same study over and over and over again. Wow.
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Fascinating.
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Every time the people that hold the grudge report the climb to be steeper, longer, and the backpack heavier. It turns out that carrying a grudge is just weighing you down. And in the book, I call that be like Elsa from Frozen. Just let it, Let it go. Let it go. It doesn't even mean you need to forgive and forget.
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Right, Right.
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But just like, literally let it go. Cause it's just a poison candy that you are sucking that your brain is telling you tastes real sweet. It's doing you harm. It's doing you harm in the workplace, and it's doing you harm in your personal life.
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So what if for any of those listening today who are in, you know, formal leadership roles, I use this phrase carefully, but do you have kind of a go to question or set of questions. If you see someone that maybe they are sitting more in sort of that distress state and may not be aware of it or, you know, so it's one thing to recognize it within ourselves, but in a leadership role you often have to at least be willing anyway, I hope to recognize it in other people. Do you have a thought or an advice on what are some things you can do if you're trying to understand if someone else is maybe sitting in that place?
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I think there's a couple of things in that answer. One is when something like that comes out of the blue, it's often not successful. It's got to be part of what we do. It's got to be part of that culture building piece that sits in within that workplace. Certainly if we're talking about dealing with big emotions, we're not dealing with human resources here. We're dealing with humans who have a life and complexities that they don't leave it at the door. They might think they do, they don't. It's running as an app in the back of their mind. The fact their child's been suspended, their elderly parents are unwell. And again, this, this does not mean for every people manager that you need to act as a personal counselor all of the time. But it means that you need to be creating environments where people do feel comfortable at times to talk about how they're feeling. I run a team within Microsoft. It's a virtual team. We have our weekly meetings. I invest two minutes with small warm ups. They might be emotion check ins. How are people feeling today? It might be something funny like last week was bad hair story. Limit yourself to 30 seconds. Go bad hair story. What happens is you instantly reduce cortisol and stress. Importantly, in the workplace, you create a buffer between one activity and another. You know, we run from one thing to another, you know, thinking that we are able for our brain is able to swap, swap, swap. You're just convincing yourself that you're a bit out of control. It's like mindfulness by stealth. And as a result, the team expect that every week. They enjoy that. It doesn't take up any time. Sometimes it's just done in a text chat. Sometimes it's just, it's a just a quick check in. What it does is it signals a few things. It signals that you as a person matter. It signals that having a pause is really important. However you do it, like it's important in our busy, complicated lives. And when we do emotion check ins, it's Important because it recognizes that, you know, humans are social creatures and learning is a social process. We're all in the business of learning. When we're in organizations with adults, if we don't understand how adults learn, if we don't understand the science of motivation, then we're always going to struggle to drive any change. You know, I always say emotions are the gatekeeper to motivation, to cognition, how we think, and to attention. Emotions are the gatekeeper to those three. And in the workplace, we want our workers to be motivated to have focused attention and to be able to process and think clearly. The only way to do that is to recognize that emotions direct that. And the role of a leader is significant. There's an effect called the emotion contagion effect I talk about in the book, which is how emotions are caught. Essentially, we're like super spreaders. You catch the emotions from your boss. This is a function of mirror neurons and a whole range of other things that have been built into our survival brain to make us connect to people. So if, you know, you're nodding, I'm nodding. You know, if somebody's rocking an invisible baby in the line of the supermarket, you start to do that. It's. We're kind of biologically engineered for social orientation by mimicking one another, including emotion. So as a boss, you've got to be real careful about what you're spreading. And again, it doesn't matter. I mean, every day is Pollyanna. All emotions matter and serve a purpose. But you can be fierce on the topic and kind on the people. And to your point, if somebody in my team was. If I kind of picked up that possibly that they weren't feeling great, you know, we've come out of a team meeting. I would always. And I do, my team would. Would tell you this. I would follow up with them privately, just with that simple, open question, which is, how are you feeling? And then, you know, is there something that you need from me? And if it's in the real world and I see somebody sitting and they're looking, it's always important to have an invitation to say, is it okay if I just sit with you? The worst thing is to what do you need from me? Or how can I help you? They may not need to be fixed up. In the book, I talk about being clear about your purpose of a conversation. So I say to Catherine, hey, Catherine, you know, you've come to me said, hey, can I have a chat with you, Mark? You know, about some stuff going on. My first question is, do you want me just to listen. Do you want some advice or do you want me to reflect back? Or do you want. What do you want me to do? I just want you to listen. The worst thing we can do at times is try to solve people's problems because they start off presenting the solution, resenting the solution, and if you keep pushing it, they end up resenting the person. And that applies for families too. You know, like if you keep solving a problem, again, what are you doing? You're doing two things. You're taking the control away from the person. The brain hates being out of control. And the second thing is that you're overstepping. You're not giving them the opportunity to solve their problem. And in doing that, the second thing is you're communicating to them, unfortunately, a belief that they can't manage this themselves.
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B
We're going to come back in a moment. I absolutely want to talk a little bit about the 21 strategies that you have in the book. And I think even as you and I were preparing for the conversation today, you know, I think if you were to take any of those individually or even at face value, they're fairly straightforward, they're fairly simple in concept, but the act of doing them, I would even submit the cumulative effect of doing them as well can be really powerful. So I want to come back to that in a moment. But you've touched on motivation and you know, as I was saying in the opening comments, when you're in a bit of a pressure cooker, when things are moving fast, particularly if things are moving fast and you didn't create that speed, right, you're sort of having to keep up and come along with it. The motivation to learn, the motivation to do more than what's just being asked to put in front of you, in my experience, can come down a bit. And that's where I think you lose out on great problem solving, innovating, using your imagination, all those things. Feel free to push back on me. But as you've studied motivation and particularly in the workplace, what has stood out to you the most?
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When we look at our workplaces, as I mentioned at the start, we are all dealing with adult learners. We want to be learning organizations, you know, mostly anyway. Yeah, well, people come to our, you know, people come to work with two hands and one brain. Sometimes we make a lot of use of their hands and sometimes we don't make a lot of use of the resource of their brain. Motivation is tricky. Okay, we're motivated. If we go back to our kind of 50,000 year old brain motivated to acquire and protect, you know, to acquire resources, to defend those resources. You know, that's what we want. I did a talk for a bunch of CIO data scientists last year, and it was around the role of empathy as a productivity hack. But we got onto this topic of motivation, of course, and I said to them, have you ever implemented a strategy, you know, around a new data governance protocol that seemed great only to have it fail? And all of them went, all of the time. And I went, this is because people, their brains are designed to acquire and defend resources. Those resources can be power, prestige, money, land, whatever. And it's changed, right? Like the currency now is different, it's information. But anytime you implement a change, that creates a threat for a Catherine. Because am I going to lose my job? Is my job going to become redundant about this? Are you going to take away some of my status has that new intern seems to be really smart and. Well, suddenly what happens is your drive to acquire and defend is under threat. What happens? Your emotions get triggered, you become defensive, you become locked down, maybe more rigid in your thinking. Unless you're emotionally intelligent, you get completely hijacked. This change is bad. And I'm going to either be passively aggressive and not buy into it, or I might even actively undermine it in the lunchroom, roll my eyes theatrically and say, yeah, we've tried that a thousand times and it's never worked in the past. So. But I'm going to go through the motions. There's no motivation, right? Like no motivation for the success, because it's been approached in a way that has gone head to head with people's emotions, and you trigger that the message for the data governance people was around. So how do you approach these changes? You know, you approach them by understanding how adults learn. Because guess what? A change is learning, right? What is learning? Learning is acquiring and applying new skills and new knowledge in a new context. And regardless of what we think in business, when we give somebody, you know, they've shifted into a new PMM role, or this person shifted into, you know, this new role. They're adults finding themselves in a position where they need to learn. And I say to people all the time, do you understand the science of motivation? Do you actually understand how adults learn? If you're designing training, if you, if you helping a career progression for somebody in your team, do you know how adults learn? Because they don't learn like children, because they're not children. It's very different. You know, adults want autonomy. They want autonomy, and they don't want study time, you know, they want autonomy. What do they want? They want you to tie it into their past experience. They want to realize again, that's the control in the brain. You're not dumping this new thing. This is a build on of my experience and knowledge. If they don't know the big picture, they won't be motivated. Like, you gotta thread that through. In my case in education, I say, how does your AI agenda connect directly to your vision for the Department of Education in the Philippines? Like, how does it thread through? Because otherwise you're just doing training over a technical function. There's no motivation for a human there. In fact, it's just threat and risk and confusion. Tie it to the big picture. Keep in mind that adult brains, the prefrontal cortex basically locks in at about age 25. And that's unfortunately where a lot of cognitive flexibility comes from. One of the three required skills to flourish in the age of AI. This is why little kids, up to the age of 25, little kids have wild imaginations. Like why? Because their prefrontal cortex doesn't set until age 25. So what that means is when you're dealing with adults, sometimes they will struggle. If you come up with, we're going to do an imagineering activity around the, they're like, maybe not. The other bit of a bit about adults is they're social learners. And again, it comes back to learning is a social process, therefore it is tied directly to emotions.
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B
What does that look like? What does social learning?
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Social learning involves like people. Basically. Anytime they're intentionally brought together to learn together, the magic number from research apparently is three. Okay, not two people, not four people, not six people, but three people. A process happens of dialoguing. It's called knowledge exchange, which means that information in your short term memory is actually translated through a social engagement into your longer term memory. So three apparently is a powerful number. So rather than having people sitting one to one in front of a computer doing their mandatory training in security, you know, much more powerful to, you know, coordinate it, whether it's online or face to face, where three people are working on different parts of it and bringing it together or presenting it back or engaging in a Q and A with one another or doing, I mean, there's a million strategies other than just watch and do a quiz. And on that adults are highly motivated by problem solving, unlike necessarily kids, because adults are bringing a wealth of experience, practical know how. So anytime you're using real world scenarios or you've based the learning within their current workplace environment and they're solving problems that are real and helpful that they can see contribute to their daily job, then they become motivated. So all of those things about adult learning turn on an adult's brain to be motivated. When they're not in that place, they're turned off and you end up with compliance or passive kind of acquiesce to the work.
- [30:46]
B
Well, thank you for reinforcing how at several of our conferences recently, we've seen just a ton of enthusiasm when we do case studies and we ask people, people to get together and you know, talk about it, solve, you know, of course it's always easy to solve someone else's problems and to solve our own as well. But to your point, in terms of thinking about real world solutions and application, you know, if anyone's trying to get folks to get motivated or to think about solving, certainly for us, a lot of that case study work has really fired that up.
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A
There's a bit in the book I always get the word mixed up. It's a German word. I think it's Charles and Freud and it's.
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B
I was gonna let you pronounce it, not me on the podcast.
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A
This is what. But this is why people love case studies, because they secretly enjoy others having an unpleasant experience. Again, we can't trust our brain. Right. It's like flawed. You know, that's why they love. Whenever I present on a cyber threat and I use a, a real example of something terrible that's happened to an organization and the impact. And then the. You could hear a pin drop. People are loving it. Scholzen Freud has kicked in. They're vicariously loving the, the tragedy. It's why people look when they're driving past an accident and it's what runs out. Unfortunately, a lot of our media cycles. But that is part of what it means to be human too. You know, sometimes we find humor in inappropriate situations and that's all that makes our brain flawed. It's a brain that's designed to take shortcuts. To summarize. And that's how even fake memories come into play, where you're like saying to your partner, I put the keys down by the counter when I came in the door. It never happened. It's just that you've done it so many times in the past. Your brain has just like, basically, yeah, it's turned off record and it's just reusing an old piece of information.
- [32:42]
B
Well, certainly, as you were talking about learning change in business, what does that look like? I'm thinking a lot of the Firms in our industry that are undergoing rapid change, lots of learning. When there's been some sort of an M and A activity or a change in leadership activity, we have a lot of that happening with the registered investment advisors that we work with. That hit home as you were talking about that. I mean, talk about an environment almost like a pressure cooker, if you will, whether you're the buyer or the seller. But whatever that result resulting entity is, there's probably as much learning, stretching and change happening at that time than maybe even in the history of that business.
- [33:22]
A
Absolutely right. It's like being, for a lot of us, it's like being in an instapot. You know, there's a lot of pressure. And it doesn't mean, again, that we all won't use harsh words or conduct ourselves in ways that. But again, emotional intelligence means that we recognize it when we do it, and then we take the right steps to fix that up and it becomes a good thing for everybody as leaders, when we think out loud, process. When we at times say, hey, you know what, Elizabeth? Yeah, I didn't manage that well, you know what? You're now a super spreader. You know, I always talk about, like, empathy is great. Compassion is empathy translated into action, right? So, like, empathy is awesome, but compassion is where you translate that into action and you do something with that empathy. And again, it doesn't mean somebody's dogs died. And you say you should take the rest of the year off and forget the deliverables and timeline. You know, like, this is super traumatic. How can we best support you through this and still keep project running? Like, as bosses, we've still got to keep things running. But the little bit of a pause, the little check in, the little bit of empathy, the expression of compassion goes a long way into turning on a sense of connectedness in people. And people want to feel connected to the bigger purpose of the business. They want to feel connected socially because humans are social creatures. And you can do that through simple strategies, simple conversations. But as I said at the start, it doesn't mean that everybody needs a smiley face sticker and a packet of Tim Tams all the time. That's nice, but.
- [35:09]
B
And thank you for the solid Australian reference there with the Tim Tam. So always welcome. And anyone listening can call either one of us to explain what the Tim Tam slam is if they don't know what that is.
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A
There you go.
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B
We can do that. Talk a little bit about the happiness set point, which I found really interesting because it goes in especially going back to some of the comments earlier around the brain doesn't like to feel out of control. So how much of our wiring and what's in our control on that? Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, it's a super interesting one. And you know, you've probably come across people, we all do in our lives, in our work, who seem to be oriented towards just naturally to more positive mindsets and those who are maybe a little bit more negative, more cynical. And we probably see those in our families and you probably see in families also, dispositions seem to be threaded through Margaret and her bumbly positive outlook seems to be reflected in her great niece, which is an act of those telomeres, those strands of DNA. Some researchers believe that we have a set point around our disposition or our mood of about 40%. So 40% genetically set, you know, Catherine's either going to be basically, you know, positive, happy, pragmatically optimistic.
- [36:25]
B
I'm going to be a Tigger or an Eeyore.
- [36:29]
A
And then there's another 10% which is directed by life events. Winning the lottery, getting a good job, married, you know, some good fortune, external events, 10%, that's not a lot. There's another remaining 40% that is in your control where with intent you can frame up your mindset. And it's hard when people talk about soft skills. I say, geez, there's nothing soft about them at all. You know, if you want to find a tough boss, find me a kind boss. Because it's hard work to make decisions that are kind on people but still deliver, you know, the business objectives. If you want to find a tough kid, find one who can self regulate. I always say in schools, you want to find a tough kid, find a kind kid. And in fact a big mission should be be the kind person. Because it takes a lot of strength to do that. And you gotta understand your brain to do that too.
- [37:31]
B
Based on what you're describing, I mean, I could see very tangible real benefits to. Even when you're mapping out a project plan, for example, and you're putting it in front of your people, everyone's got their marching orders. Being equally purposeful about checking in with them and where they're at as you are, did we hit that deadline or not? Did we hit that budget dollar or not? Just building that in and the opportunity to bring compassion versus empathy if needed, I think can be really important. Especially if it's a big initiative. Not everybody's going to have control over the entire project. Right. And so that can be a stressful don't know what your. If that resonates with you or not?
- [38:11]
A
No, it does. Like, you know, in education we use a number of emotion check in tools with students, log in online, and it gives you, if you like, an emotional heartbeat over the top of academic and workflow. What that cues you into is where there might be problematic points. So imagine this with a large project you're running. If you could see at a point in time that just about 80% of the team was reporting unpleasant emotions, stressed, frustrated, you know, angry, exhausted, like you can intervene, then you could pull people together to say, what's, what's this issue? And then you can find and unblock it. But unless, you know, people will tend to be compliant and they'll just suffer in silence, that doesn't mean they're working to their optimal. And you'll end up with burnout retention issues, especially if the next project runs the same. And then you find, oh, the issue is maybe it is timelines, maybe it is lack of clarity, maybe it is cohesion within the team, maybe it is a mismatch between the overseas teams and time zones. And unless you know how people are feeling within that flow, you can't identify and address it. And the flip side is you find a flourishing project and everybody's in blues and greens. Like, you're like, what's going on there? What's the root cause of success? And let's get more of it. And I bet you'll find there's an investment in social engineering, in social collisions, intentionally bringing people together. What happens when humans come together? We engage in tacit exchange of knowledge of not just know what, but know how you know, it happens when we come together because we're social creatures. Back on the 40%, you've got this gigantic 40% in control. They've done some studies which have been really interesting, of lottery winners. So lottery winners whose 40% was kind of basically negative, they win the lottery, they feel great, their 10% is flush, they're feeling like awesome consistently, you know, I think it's 18 months later, they feel the same level of kind of unhappiness with their life that they did before they won. And part of that is a function of a myth of happiness that we're good at understanding it and we're not. Humans consistently overestimate the intensity and the duration of happy or unhappy experiences. So when something bad comes up, you've lost your job. It's like, well, my life's ruined and it's going to be ruined forever. I'm going to End up poor and old. It's not going to happen. Or I'm buying a new car. This new car experience just makes me happy. The first week I drive it or that big screen tv, I'm just like, wow, it's so big. And then guess what happens a few weeks later. We've just normalized it, right? That's the challenge around, you know, happiness and people's perception around what will bring them happiness, how intense will it be and how long will it last? And some people call it the hedonistic cycle. And they mistake distraction and entertainment for happiness, which is much more tied to purpose and contentment. And it's measured by psychologists and called subjective well being, which is our view of how content we are with what we have and what we're able to do with our lives.
- [41:44]
B
So as I mentioned, in Good Brain, Bad brain, you outlined 21 strategies that people can deploy, pull from, really purposely exercise. What are some of the two or three that are really go to for you that you found? They're all fantastic. I wish we had time to talk about all of them, but I would love to know if there's two or three. Or maybe I'll reframe the question a little bit. But are there two to three that if someone is just like, I'm really gonna lean in on this, I wanna do these two or three maybe in the next few days. What comes to mind on that?
- [42:17]
A
One simple one. For remote workers particularly, you know, we're in a cave like I am now, and I'm facing a wall and I'm talking to you. That's not, that is not a normal situation. And my, my 50,000-year-old brain is worried about what it can't see, right? I don't know if there's a threat. I'm not conscious of that. My subconscious is worried. So what I need to do, and I literally do this every hour I'm standing facing the wall, is I go out onto my balcony and I physically turn and look. I call it horizon scanning in the book. And it sounds crazy, but I say out loud, there is no threat here. There's no threat here. Okay? And I'll often use that term during the day if I'm finding myself getting worked up at work, I'll stop and I'll look outside and I'll just simply say, there's no risk, there's no threat. Because our mind, that 40% of it wanders away, is wandering away and it's imagining threat and risk and then it's exaggerating. That, as I mentioned before, bring that control back. So that's one. The other one, which is super important for me is it's called Talk to yourself like a Cat Lady. And I love that scene in the Simpsons where the lady throws the cats. But These days, with AirPods headphones, everybody thinks you're on a conference call. We can all talk to ourselves now without people thinking that we're somehow deluded. You couldn't have done that 20 years ago.
- [43:51]
B
Have you been watching me on any flights that I've been on recently?
- [43:55]
A
Talking to yourself either internally, so they're your internal thoughts, or externally. Saying it out loud is a really powerful processing strategy that gives you a sense of control. And you can talk to yourself. In the book, it suggests some scripts. You can talk to yourself, which might be affirming conversations, encouraging yourself. We've got to be compassionate to ourselves before we can be compassionate to anybody else. Sometimes they're reminder conversations to ourselves, and sometimes they're reframing conversations to ourselves so you can have have different sorts of conversations with yourself. Another weird quick tip to do to extend that is you can turn on like copilot or chat GPT and you could say to it, listen to my thoughts, and when I'm finished, give me a summary of any insights. And you can actually leave a generative AI to listen to you and then just reflect back what your ramblings were. And you'll find when you look at that, what happens is you go a little bit of control. My mind feels emptied. I bought my busy thoughts back into myself and by expressing them out loud, you know, it helps me get some clarity of thought and calms me down.
- [45:10]
B
So strategy 16, number 16, they are numbered, is all about staying grounded and getting outside. And I was thinking about even the first strategy you mentioned about walking out on your balcony. I have to think. If you then have the added benefit of looking out over some sort of greenery. You know, studies have shown that even if it's artificial, greenery like that still has a positive impact. But tell me a little bit about what getting outside, getting grounded has meant for you.
- [45:36]
A
Yeah, there's. I mean, and there's a bunch of research that's been done around there in Japan. It's called Shinren Roku, which is forest bathing, which is different from taking a hike. It's really like being kind of mindful while you're out there. There's also, even though it's not necessarily got any hard evidence to back it up, there's a theory around grounding which is the importance for. For us to take our shoes and socks off and go outside and ground our feet on grass or sand or water. And when you think about it again, as humans from 50,000 years ago, you know, we encase our bodies in stuff, in fabric and materials. We might not touch the ground a day, a week. Some people will go a month, six months. And there's a bunch of theories around it which suggests that, you know, human body is electrical. Our blood is filled with iron. When iron spins around, it generates an electrical current and also a magnetic field. So does the planet. It's got a molten core. It's spinning up a magnetic field. It's electrical. You generate as much electricity to light a light globe. You know, humans are electrical creatures. So there's something about that. I do it. What I do is I come back from the gym, I kick off my shoes sometimes, it's freezing. I stand there on the grass by the lake, and I just take a minute, and in that minute, I just go through a list of, you know, five things that I'm grateful for. And on that, it turns out your brain doesn't really care what you come up with. You could say, I'm grateful for donuts, but the fact if you, if you do that every, every, every every day, what happens is you kick start a little app in the back of your head that starts to scan the horizon for things it's grateful for instead of scanning the horizon for threats. And then the next time you do it for the 30th time, you go, I'm grateful for my, you know, my friends for listening to me. Or I'm grateful for, you know, the smell of vanilla. It just starts to rewire your brain to be calmer, happier, and therefore more productive.
- [47:44]
B
We'll talk about a great question to start a meeting out. What's one thing you're grateful for after this weekend or a moment of gratitude or anything? Let's talk about a quick question. That's a great, great one.
- [47:53]
A
Yeah. One of my favorites leading up to Christmas was, you know, one. It was all about senses. One week was talk about a smell that reminds you of Christmas. You know, talk about a sound that reminds you of a family gathering. Talk about a texture that elicits. And people talked about unwrapping things and sticking things. And again, what I was intentionally doing then was having them think back to pleasant experiences. And that's really important. Like, we need to do two things. We need to anticipate pleasant experiences in our lives. Otherwise, our life is just Meaningless. Anticipate pleasant experiences. Once we've had those, reflect upon them, remind ourselves of them. It's where social media is good. It will tell me, oh, Mark, you were having that, you know, awesome moment in, you know, Machu Picchu, you know, seven years ago, and you stop and you think, oh, I felt great. We've got to anticipate in the book, I call it anticipate anticipation. Look forward to something, being with people, having an experience. The Danish call it hygge. You know, this sense of pleasure in the everyday. It doesn't mean Disney World. It can be a candle and a fresh loaf of bread. It could be friends and a glass of wine. It can be a solitude. Walk on an empty beach. But look forward to doing those and then remind yourself about them.
- [49:21]
B
We were talking the other day about this idea of whether you're in a work environment, talking about an initiative with your team, but this idea of starting the sentence with imagine, imagine we're $5 billion, imagine we're 400cl from now. Imagine you are three years further in your own personal career journey. But also imagine again being five years old and what, you know, what was that memory, you know, at Christmas time? And using your example, I think there's some power in starting a sentence. There's an invitation in starting a sentence around that. Because, you know, we haven't talked a lot about this. But you do talk about that power of imagination and how our brain is wired around that.
- [50:01]
A
Totally, yeah. It's how we spark curiosity, you know, and curiosity is a massive driver if we go back to motivation. Curiosity is an invitation to explore. It's a motivation to understand. And when we ask people to wonder or we ask them to imagine, we give them the permission to practice considering possibilities. I call one of my keynotes that I'm about to present, it's called the Power of possible. And I frame it up around the questions, what might be possible, what might be possible if every person had what could be? And I call it imagineering. It's like engineering the imagination. And it's a great practice for cognitive flexibility. As I said, adults, prefrontal cortex kind of gets a little bit locked down at age 25. We need to work on, especially with our adults, you know, over 25 year olds in imagineering activities because it kind of keeps their brain oiled towards exploring possibilities, imagining alternative outcomes. And that's the hotbed of innovation in organizations.
- [51:15]
B
I'd love for you to just talk for a few moments about some of the initiatives that you're particularly focused on in your work. And we were talking about what we call that virtual training paradox. And how do you keep. Keep learners engaged in today's environment? I'd love for you to just talk for a few moments about that in our remaining time here.
- [51:33]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There was a research paper that came out recently and Microsoft was involved in it, and I thought your audience might be interested in it. And as you say, it's called the virtual training paradox. And so this is where, you know, remote workers are engaged in professional learning or training. And. And what's the paradox? The paradox is the training is described by the people delivering it or designing it as highly effective because lots of people did it, they completed it, they got their badge, their certification, their credential. Good. But it turns out Most of them, 75%, are lacking learner engagement and accountability. So it's actually not. Not resulting in implementation and impact. It's not moving into shifting any needle. And if I go back to what I said at the start, it's become an exercise in compliance and completion, not an exercise in learning and implementation. You know, the reasons for that come back to, as we talked about earlier, a lack of understanding around how adults learn, a race for compliance and check a box, and certainly a need to step back and go, are we about learning or are we about training? Because training, you know, is like, it's not making sausages. You just can't churn the meat out into the skin. That's not what it is. It doesn't mean that every adult learning experience needs to be, you know, wildly in person or gigantically motivated. But with the proliferation of virtual learning and training in all organizations, it's a great cost effective way to scale up impact. The learning design, we would call it in education, the instructional design needs to take into account principles of adult learning, which I went through at the start, and they need to be reflected within there. And it also needs to kind of recognize the role that emotions pay attention by tying that training back to the broader objectives, by ensuring that the adult's voice is heard, their experiences are bought in that it is social, it's tied to the big picture of the business. People understand all of that. Otherwise it becomes sausage making. And you want to have a charcuterie board, not a sausage on a plate.
- [54:03]
B
Another great opening question for your group too is what's your favorite thing on the charcuterie board? We could do that. I love that.
- [54:08]
A
I literally do that. I was running a focus group in Europe and all I did was. And it was a virtual Focus group. I had a picture of a charcuterie board as the opening slide. And as people came into the meeting, I literally asked them what's missing or what's interesting. And you know what? Everybody instantly connected. People connect around food again. Humans are social creatures. We always have been. We enjoy sharing stories. Sharing stories is as old as time when we deny that humanness in our experiences. And we can all run the risk of being replaced by AI. You know, we're humans. We're great at cognitive flexibility, at creative judgments. We're great at emotional intelligence. You know, we're great at folding fitted sheets. AI can't do any of those things yet, but, you know, they're the bits that make us uniquely human. And what's interesting is where you look at the Top 10 Skills for Flourishing in the Age of AI in Business, published as the New Future of Work Report 2024. The first five are incredibly human qualities. The last two and three are very technical pieces. But, you know, we bring moral, ethical frameworks. We bring rich experiences. We bring an understanding, or we should, of emotion, curiosity, creativity, ingenuity, compassion. We bring that. That's the unique value. Add that we bring to our workplaces. And we use our co pil assist us in running alongside us for a bunch of other sort of activities and tasks to drive efficiencies.
- [55:43]
B
Well. And I think everything you just described is so. It's critical, it's necessary, it's where people and organizations flourish. And so part of our objective today was to say, hey, if the business is feeling really compressed right now, really constrained, there's some pressures going on. In my experience, those are the things that sort of are the first thing that kind of fall off the list. Right. Because then you just revert to, we gotta get this stuff done. I'm just reacting. And so my encouragement, I think our encouragement is to create space for these things. Cause that's where you get innovation. That's where you get really incredible problem solving, certainly for advisors listening. That's where you get creative solutions for your clients, which is incredibly powerful. And all of that struggles if you're not allowing space for this. And so hopefully that came through in our conversation too.
- [56:33]
A
I hope so. Yeah. When I'm running sessions for organizations outside of education, you know, I constantly reiterate that this is not something extra to add on the plate. This is the very plate itself. And right now, in our current work environments, you know, do not think that this is wasting time. This is a strategic investment in culture building, in retention and attraction of quality Staff in driving productivity, in unlocking innovation. And the strategies are kind of simple, but they have to be committed. As I said at the start, we build culture one conversation at a time. And humans are not resources. You know, they're humans who come to the workplace. And as a boss, it doesn't mean that everybody's happy all of the time. It doesn't mean we're not going to crack the whip, because we've got timelines that are being pressed down upon us. But to reiterate what I said before, you can be fierce on the topic, you can be fierce on the timeline times, and you can still be kind on the people and importantly, kind on yourself. When as a boss, you fail and you're angry and you're frustrated and you've let your guard down, and that's what it means to be human. There are no bad emotions. They're simply helpful and unhelpful. The emotionally intelligent leader recognizes, understands, labels, expresses, and ultimately regulates to the benefit of all.
- [58:05]
B
And I love what you said. This is not something you put on the plate. This is the plate itself. And that's incredibly, incredibly powerful. Mark, it has been such a pleasure to speak with you. I'm really excited. Particularly this book has made it to the Dimensional Summer Reading List, which those of you have been longtime listeners of the podcast, you know that we publish a reading list every summer. So those of you listening, if you're interested in getting access to the full Dimensional Summer Reading List, which is books, readings and podcasts that the Dimensional team loves and loves enough that they wanted to share with you all, this book has made it on that list. You can find that list in the description of this podcast that you're listening to right now, or you can reach out to Dimensional and we'd be happy to share it. Mark, thank you so much for your time today. It was a pleasure to speak with you.
- [58:54]
A
That was a great conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
- [58:56]
B
Katherine, see you soon. Thank you. And for those of you listening, if you want to know more about how Dimensional works with advisors, please check us out@dimensional.com until then, take care and we'll catch you next time.
- [59:08]
C
Thank you for joining us for Dimensional Fund Advisors Managing youg Practice Podcast. For more information, please visit www.dimensional.com. dimensional Fund Advisors LP is an investment advisor registered with the securities and Exchange Commission. The views, information or opinions expressed during this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of Dimensional or its affiliates. Dimensional is not responsible for and does not verify for accuracy any of the information contained in the podcast. All expressions, information and opinions are subject to change. This Podcast is distributed for informational purpose purposes and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, products or services. Please consult with qualified legal or tax professionals regarding your individual circumstances. Investing involves risks. Risks include loss of principal and fluctuating value. This podcast is available for private, non commercial use only. You may not edit, modify, or re redistribute this podcast without the express written consent of Dimensional. Dimensional assumes no liability for any activities in connection with this Podcast or for use in connection with any other website, computer, or playing device.