Transcript

Episode: The Neuroscience on Better Thinking

Joel Miller:
You probably know this, but human beings do not have fur or fangs or scales or really anything that animals out in the environment have in order to thrive. What we do have is an advanced brain, and I’m talking about a roughly three-pound problem-solving powerhouse between your ears. It’s that advanced brain that has allowed us to go to the moon, cure polio, even plan tailgate parties. And importantly, and this is probably why you’re actually here, it enables us to start and scale businesses, but here’s the tricky part. It’s understanding how your brain thinks that enables you to optimize what you’re able to do with it. That’s why I’m excited about today’s episode.
Hi, I’m Joel Miller, chief product officer here at Full Focus, and today we’re having a conversation with Michael and Megan all about their new book, Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts With Your Thinking. They’re going to cover five key insights from the book that’ll help business owners like you learn how to optimize your thinking so you can get clear on what you want and clear the path to get it. And then I thought, “Let’s apply this in a coaching setting.” So I actually asked one of our Business Accelerator coaches, Kevin Jennings, to come on the show and talk through how he applies some of these insights in his coaching practice with our clients. When we come back from the break, we’ll jump right into our conversation with Michael and Megan.
Michael, Megan, I’m so excited to be here with you. I wanted to hear about how the launch of Mind Your Mindset is going. The book’s been out a week now. You’ve been doing podcast interviews talking to live audiences. Tell me what the reaction has been like.

Michael Hyatt:
I think people have been super excited about it. I probably say that with every book, but I think this one, people have really become intrigued with the message because they know if they could harness their thinking or redirect their thinking in a different way, that it would make all the difference in the results. And especially when we begin to outline it and talk about the neuroscience that’s behind it, that’s really a different take than most books on mindset take. So I think people recognize how it’s different and they’re excited to apply it to their lives.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
From my perspective, what’s been really fun about having all these conversations on podcasts that we’ve had is to hear the sense of hopefulness that the people listening to those podcasts come away with, to realize that the things that you think are malleable. And that if you start to play with them and you start to realize that these stories that naturally just pop into our heads don’t have to be fixed, that we can actually step into the driver’s seat and direct the stories of our lives so that we’re able to ultimately take better actions that lead to better results. That’s a really exciting and empowering idea, and it’s fun to see people get a sense of that, in some cases, for the first time.

Joel Miller:
Full Focus is a goal achievement company. That’s what we call ourselves, and I think of this book, we actually have other books like Your Best Year Ever, that is a goal achievement book, but Mind Your Mindset is also a goal achievement book because when you set out to do something, you will invariably reach a place where you can’t make any further progress, where you are invariably stuck. And what this book shows is actually how to get unstuck and how to then make the progress you need in order to accomplish your goal.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Somebody said to me the other day, “Well, this seems like a new direction for you.” And I said, “Well, actually, it’s not.” Part of what we do is help show people through our tools and our coaching how to close the gap between where they are and what they want in their lives, the goals that they have. And what we’ve really done in Mind Your Mindset is we’ve really just gone upstream. We’ve said, “We think a lot about…” and we talk about this in the book, of course, “We think a lot about what actions we need to take. What strategies are going to get us to our goals?” But most of us don’t spend enough time thinking about the thinking that drives the actions that we take that ultimately determines whether or not we find a path to our goals and what we want most in our lives. So in a way, this is like a prequel to all the other work that we’ve done after all these years, and I’m so excited to have it out in the world.

Michael Hyatt:
I love the language of a prequel, because that’s really what it is. It’s probably the first and most important thing that you could read from Full Focus because thinking is behind everything. Whether you’re trying to be more productive, you’re trying to build a successful business, you’re trying to acquire more personal freedom. It’s the thinking that is the beginning point for that. You’ve got to think differently if you’re going to get different results.

Joel Miller:
One of the things that makes this book different, as you mentioned, is the science behind that kind of thinking. The subtitle, in fact, is: The Science That Shows Success Starts With Your Thinking, and I thought that it would be great if we could actually dig into some of that science because it is fascinating. It is something that I haven’t seen in a lot of other places, and I thought, let’s just jump into that because the neuroscience actually can show us how to get to better thinking. And so I thought let’s cover five insights from the book, from Mind Your Mindset, on the neuroscience of thinking, and I thought I’d just tick off five insights that I found as I was going through the book and just get your reaction to it. What do you think?

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, sounds great.

Joel Miller:
Okay, so the first insight is that your brain thinks by connecting neurons. Tell us more about that.

Michael Hyatt:
I think of this like the container store, that you go into a container store and you get a storage bucket for a specific thing that you want to store in your garage or in your basement or your attic. Well, that’s kind of how your brain works. There are different cells that store different kinds of things. There are concept cells that store or tag people, places, things, ideas, and then it just files them away. But then, how it arranges those concept cells is really where the magic happens, because those become the neural pathways that shape the stories that shape our lives.
But again, those linking neurons are another thing, but they’re the raw ingredients of the stories that your narrator tells you. And we talk about this concept in the book of a narrator, and essentially what we’re doing is personifying the neural process, is that there’s a person that lives inside your head whose voice sounds remarkably similar to yours, who’s running color commentary all the time based on whatever happens in your life. The role of the narrator is to tell you what everything means and where it’s going. And actually, it’s a gift because it keeps us safe, it helps us to survive, helps us to thrive. But sometimes those concept cells are not arranged in the right way, and that’s where we have to interject or intervene and take action.

Joel Miller:
You quote a science writer in the book, Leonard Mlodinow, who actually, he talks about this like hardware, that those arrangements of neurons, they are the hardware of your thinking, of your ideas.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think this is a really interesting idea, ironically, because most of us haven’t thought about the fact that the things that we think are actually happening in our brain. It’s almost like our mind and our brain are two separate things, and in reality, what’s happening cognitively for us is also happening in our brain itself. And it’s neat to have that explained so that we can understand that this is not just something that’s happening at a cognitive level. The thoughts that we think actually are changing the hardware, the physical part of our brain as well.

Joel Miller:
That takes us to insight number two, because what you’re describing, Michael, Megan, that sounds like it’s just automatically happening. And one of the insights that I found fascinating in the book is that the brain seems to always have an answer. It might not be right, but it’s always got an answer.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think about the brain like one of our teenagers, and they always know the answer to everything, and about 50% of the time they’re completely wrong. And our brains are a little more sophisticated than that, but not necessarily a whole lot, because they think by analogy and comparison, and they’re always trying to answer, “What’s next? What’s next?” Remember, your brain primarily is concerned with your safety, with your survival, with protecting you. And Joel, you and I were riding to work today, and we were talking about how our brains haven’t necessarily evolved quite as fast as our environment, and so they’re still really concerned with those basic things, and that’s not bad. That’s good because most of us live a relatively long period of time thanks to this work our brain is doing.
However, when our brain encounters something that’s new, it’s going to try to understand what’s happening based on what it already knows. It’s always referencing the past as a way of predicting the future. So that’s how our narrator, that voice in our head that’s always running the interpretations, is able to take the best guess. And unfortunately, sometimes it might be completely wrong, but our brain would rather be wrong than without an answer, which I think is just fascinating.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, you can live for days, weeks without food. You can live for a few days without water. But you can’t live for five minutes without stories. And your brain may be wrong in terms of serving up its best guess, but that’s preferable to no meaning at all. We have to have some meaning. But that also opens us up to the possibility that sometimes our brains get it wrong, and sometimes we need to interrogate those stories and ask ourself the question, “Is this really the way it happened? Is this really what it means? Is this really what’s next?” All that’s legitimate, which ought to bring us into a state of humility, realizing that maybe we’ve taken two plus two and gotten five, and we have the wrong answer, and we need to go back and look at the equation.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s like our brain is just really obsessed with certainty.

Michael Hyatt:
Yes.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s just that some things are too complex or too multidimensional to be understood in a snap judgment. And so sometimes the first thing that our brain serves up is just wildly off base. And so part of what we’re trying to do in Mind Your Mindset is give you some really practical tools to begin identifying these stories that you tell, not because you’re doing anything wrong when they pop up and the stories in and of themselves maybe aren’t that helpful. Your brain’s just doing what it knows how to do. But so all of a sudden, you can begin to discover your agency of interrogating those stories you identify and ultimately, as we talk about in the book, imagining something that’s more empowering that’s going to lead you to the results you want in your life.

Joel Miller:
That takes us to insight number three. Okay, so in the book you talk about the fact that the number of potential thoughts you can think are practically infinite, and this goes back actually to the first point that you have these concept cells, these neurons that are busy tagging people, places, things, ideas, assembling, reassembling, what we talked about there in insight number two. And the array of combinations of those neurons are practically infinite, which means the number of thoughts you can think are practically infinite. Tell us more about that.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, as it turns out, the brain hosts a network of about a hundred billion neurons, give or take, and as a point of reference, that’s roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way. Then each neuron connects with some 1,000 other neurons in various parts of the brain, which, if you do the math, that makes for 100 trillion neuro connections. So our stories, all the thoughts that we come up with that compose those come from these connections, which means that the potential thoughts you could think, Joel, as you said, are practically infinite. And this means the number of stories that we might create or entertain, and thus the strategies we can employ, are practically infinite. The story we’re telling ourself is not, quote, “the truth.” It’s not the only way that we can understand reality. There may be another story, or 100 other stories, or thousands of other stories that could be based on the same fact set and be as legitimate. The question is what’s the most empowering? What’s going to serve us in terms of what we’re out to accomplish in the world?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love this insight because, to me, this is where it becomes really hopeful. When I think about my own work as a coach and I think about where I see people get stuck, it’s usually that they feel like the strategies that are available to them are really limited. They’ve tried everything, and it didn’t work, or they can only imagine it could work this way. And what the science tells us is that the ways that it can work are practically limitless, and that ought to be encouraging to all of us because if you’ve found yourself up against a situation that you can’t quite figure out how to get a breakthrough on or why what you’re trying isn’t working, or no matter how many things you try, you haven’t quite gotten there, you’re probably not nearly at the end of what’s possible in terms of what you could think that would ultimately predispose your brain to look for different strategies, but I think that’s the key.
Most of us don’t realize that the strategies that we see as being a good fit for the situation that we’re trying to address come directly from the story we’re telling ourself. So if you want to have access to different strategies that might get you that breakthrough that you want in some area of your life or your business that you feel stuck in, then you’ve got to start telling different stories so your brain makes different connections around the strategies that it could employ to get where you want to go. But that’s really exciting to me.

Michael Hyatt:
Joel, sometimes people talk at our space about breakthrough thinking, and that’s kind of the holy grail or the holy quest, is, we need a breakthrough idea here. Well, a breakthrough idea, physiologically speaking, is an idea that’s outside of the neural pathway or the habituated ways of thinking that we think. And so if we can find a new neural pathway, a new set of connections, a new set of neural associations, then we could really expect that we could get a breakthrough that would be meaningful.

Joel Miller:
You give a word picture of this in the book, which I thought was fascinating. It’s a quote from Steven Johnson, where he talks about the number of web pages that are out there on the internet. There’s like 40 billion something web pages, basically. And if you go back to then how many neurons you have, how many potential neural connections you have, you’re talking about, this is the quote, he says, “If you assume on average of 10 links per page, that means you and I are walking around with a high density network in our skulls that is orders of magnitude larger than the entirety of the worldwide web.” And I just think about the fact that if every one of those potential thoughts is a page in your head and you can go Google something better than what you got right now, your brain has way more resources than the entire internet to come up with that.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, I can’t even get my head around that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s so cool.

Michael Hyatt:
But it’s true. And that means that we may think we’ve exhausted our resources or we’ve thought every thought there is to think. We haven’t even started. There is so much more capacity inside the hardware that we’ve been given that we really need to take a step back and say, “Hey, let’s make another run at this.”

Joel Miller:
One of the reasons why we sometimes get stuck on a certain path is that our potential thoughts are limited by our assumptions and our goals. Tell us more about that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
This is where the rubber meets the road, because this is where we get in our own way and we don’t even know about it. I think that if we go back a couple of assumptions, this idea that our brain is biased to certainty. It wants to answer the question; even if it’s wrong, that’s a better outcome than not knowing. That’s part of what’s happening here. When our brain comes up with assumptions and we’ve defined what we want out of the world, that is going to predispose it to look for solutions that confirm those assumptions and the goals themselves. And so when we’re pursuing big goals, which is something at Full Focus that we’re really passionate about, I mean, we are a goal achievement company. This is where our research is; this is where our passion is, and we want to help people close that gap between where they are and what they want in their life.
The assumptions are the biggest obstacle, not the visibility of the goal, not how the goal is framed, not the real limitations of their resources. But it’s the assumptions that they have about how the world works, how they work and what they’re capable of, and how other people are and how they work and how they are in the world. Those are the real limitations that shape how we have access to certain solutions or not. And the problem is, is that these assumptions feel really true to us. I mean, our brain wants them to feel true because that’s where it gets that certainty. And so really, they’re just stories, but we’re telling ourselves the stories over and over again in such a way that they feel absolutely like facts. And once we start to develop the self-awareness that we talk about in Mind Your Mindset, you can begin to start shaking loose your assumptions from the facts themselves, which is going to give you access to all those almost limitless thoughts and solutions that we were just talking about in insight number three.

Michael Hyatt:
Another helpful concept I think we talked about in the book is cognitive bias and even confirmation bias. But it’s like once we’ve come to a conclusion, now, all of a sudden, it’s going to limit the evidence or the facts that we even notice. So for example, if I’ve decided that I’m going to buy a new Tesla and I’m trying to convince my wife that that’s a good idea, I may do a Google search, but I promise you I’m going to disregard any negative reviews about Tesla. I’m only looking for the facts that support the conclusion or my goal in this case, and that becomes relevant, and everything else is irrelevant.
It’s also why, and a lot of people have used this example, but if you decide to buy a Tesla, and maybe you weren’t familiar with that car brand before, now everybody is, but in the days when they first came out, you weren’t familiar with that brand, but once you saw one or you took a test drive in one, now you see them everywhere, right? Because now all of a sudden you notice based on the goal that you have, which is to buy one.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That reminds me of the quote from neuroscientist Beau Lotto that we use in the book, who says, “If you attack a problem with the wrong assumption, there was nowhere to go but deeper into that assumption, whether you’re getting further from the truth or not.” It’s like we’re a victim of our own assumptions at some point.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the challenges that all of us face is we can’t always see our assumptions. And this is the huge value of a coach, and this is one of the things our Business Accelerator coaching program does, is that our coaches have been educated and trained on seeing other people’s assumptions and understanding the underlying beliefs that are shaping their reality. We can’t always see this for ourselves. It takes somebody else calling us out or helping us see what is otherwise invisible. So that’s a huge value of coaching.

Joel Miller:
So that is going to take us to insight number five, and this actually ties back to number one; it can improve insight number two, and it expands what’s possible from insight number three and four. So this one final insight wraps everything up, but you talk about a rested brain being one that will make new and surprising connections. It’ll make better thoughts available to us. Why is that?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, we talked about earlier this idea of our brain’s practice of best guessing, and that was in insight number two. And again, it really likes these simple go-to answers, which is why our narrator often gets stuck on one interpretation as the only possible one. We’re just stuck on a loop there. But when we disengage, when we sleep, when we get rest, when we’re not working on that problem, maybe you’re out fishing or running or taking a nap or you’re on vacation, that top-down executive functioning part of our brain takes a rest. And when that happens, the bottom-up thinking takes over.
This is called our default mode network, DMN. And the default mode network is really, really good at making these less obvious connections, and it’s often working when we’re not. This is why you hear people all the time, this has absolutely been true for me and so many of the clients that we coach. You have your best ideas in the shower or when you’re out on a walk, or when you’re just doing something that has nothing to do with that problem that you’re trying to solve. That’s when your brain is working behind the scenes and is really coming up with things that otherwise you couldn’t think of if you were just employing your executive function.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. And one of the things that I think happens there is when we’re in business mode and we’re actively working, a lot of times, our peripheral vision in a way is surveying the landscape looking for threats. And if we detect that we’re not safe, if our brain detects that, then it’s going to again reflexively do the tried and the true. What are the things that we’ve done in the past to defend ourselves? What are the things that we’ve done in the past that have worked for us? And one of the things that happens when we’re rested, whether it’s in the shower or golfing or fishing or otherwise not defending ourselves, is we have the opportunity to jump out of that rut and to think new thoughts. And so when we’re at rest, that makes it possible. That’s why, Megan, you were pointing out, we have our best thinking when we’re the most rested or the most relaxed.

Joel Miller:
This seems like a indirect argument for work-life balance. If you are spending 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week or more, plugging away at a major project or a goal, and that’s your total focus, you are actually going to be setting yourself up for a problem. Whereas, if you disengage around, say, 40 hours or whatever your magic number is, you go home, you pursue the hobby that you have, you just disengage, you go exercise or walk or whatever, you are going to be able to access thinking that when your butt’s in the chair and you’re driving hard against that deadline or whatever, you are going to miss, and you may actually, for less time, get better results.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, for me, how that looks is that if I’m trying to grind away and solve a problem late at night after I’ve already spent a lot of mental resources during the day, it’s usually really unproductive or it takes three or four times as long as it would otherwise. If I have a good night’s rest and can just relax, sometimes if I can serve it up to my subconscious before I go to sleep and let my subconscious work on it while I am asleep, I’ll wake up with the answer. Or, for sure, I’m going to do better work in the morning; I’m going to be more creative in the morning because I’ve got more resources to apply to the situation.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I think this is so true. And another thing, from a practical application standpoint, that I think you can do is to begin being flexible on how you think about problem solving. So if, for example, you have a really difficult HR situation or you have a really tricky product thing that you’re trying to sort out, rather than sitting at your desk in front of your computer or rather than being in a meeting where you’re sitting across from someone, put your walking shoes on and go out and walk around the block or in your neighborhood, listen to a podcast or some great music, or go look at some art at the museum.
My guess is, this has been my experience, is that you will come up with things that you couldn’t have come up with in that traditional office setting, that you wouldn’t have the same kind of breakthroughs or the same kind of creativity or innovation if you weren’t engaging your body and your mind in a different way. And I think sometimes we forget that, particularly when we’re business owners and CEOs, we can make those choices. We don’t take advantage of them very often, but we certainly have the autonomy that we can do that and it can be a great access point to better thinking into this default mode network version of our thinking if we’ll just get out of our ordinary context that keeps us mostly connected just with that executive functioning.

Michael Hyatt:
Most of us don’t think of relaxation or goofing off as a business-related activity. We have an action bias. We want to take action. And I was talking to a entrepreneur over the weekend who said, “Man, I just feel so guilty when I take time off. My team is looking at that.” He said, “We’re pretty transparent with our calendars and everybody sees everybody else’s calendar. And if I have something on the calendar like fishing or golf, then my team thinks I’m goofing off.” This was a story that he had about what his team’s thinking. And I said, “But is it valuable to the business?” And he said, “It’s literally the most valuable thing I do because when I’m in that space of restfulness, is when I dream up or cook up the best product ideas, the best marketing ideas.” And he said, “It’s hugely valuable.” And I said, “Well, tell yourself a different story. Don’t feel guilty about that.” And maybe you have to explain to your team how all this works, but that’s just good neuroscience.

Joel Miller:
One of the things I love about Mind Your Mindset is that it is grounded in good neuroscience, and these insights come directly out of that. I thought I’d just recap them here. Insight number one: your brain thinks by connecting neurons. Insight number two from the book: your brain always has an answer, but it might be wrong. Insight number three: the number of potential thoughts you can think are practically infinite. Insight number four from Mind Your Mindset: your potential thoughts are limited by your assumptions and goals. And then insight number five: a rested brain will make new and surprising connections, making better thoughts available to us.
One insight I want to come back to just to make sure we focus on it enough is insight number two: your brain always has an answer, but it might be wrong. This is key because, as successful business owners, mostly what your brain comes up with is right; it mostly works most of the time. It’s actually, though, when you’re wrong and don’t realize it that you’re exposing yourself to a problem. The best remedy is to get aware of the fact that you can be wrong; in fact, probably are more than you realize, at least in small ways. And recognize that, with that possibility in any given situation, a little humility will help you avoid creating an even larger problem for yourself. After the break, we’ll come back and apply these ideas in a business coaching context.
Now it’s time for a special conversation with one of our Business Accelerator coaches. This is Kevin Jennings, and if you know Kevin, he is an exciting and insightful coach, one that can really get to the bottom of a lot of problems and challenges that his clients face, and in part, it’s because of how he applies some of what we heard earlier from Michael and Megan to coaching. Kevin, thanks for joining us today.

Kevin Jennings:
Happy to be here, Joel.

Joel Miller:
All right. I’ve got a question for you. So you’re on with a client, and you hear, coming from the client’s mouth, some words that indicate that they might be believing something not exactly true or something maybe not tenable. And as you’re hearing it, you think, “Ah, that’s a limiting belief. I bet you that where they’re stuck is this very spot, and if I can just get them to see that, I can help them get unstuck.” How do you do that?

Kevin Jennings:
Yeah, I will do a couple of things. I think the first thing I might say is, “What I hear you saying to me is…” and I would kind of repeat back what I hear them saying, but then I ask, “Well, how did you learn that? What makes you come to that conclusion?” And typically you’re going to hear something about an experience prior to the one they’re in that gave them the evidence for this circumstance.
And so then I say, “Okay, well, let’s explore that a bit.” And we try to just slowly but surely work our way through the details of that story. And what comes out is sometimes the fact that the stories might be similar, but there are clear distinctions where we are applying a strategy that maybe they should have applied to the other circumstance that they’re misapplying in the new one. And so we get to slowly but surely uncover those stories, and then when I say, “Okay, separate of the strategy for this circumstance, I heard you saying something about yourself,” and we tried to break that down as well.
But it really is curiosity. And I think that that’s what typically is most effective for me and for the client, is we don’t have to assume anything good or bad about what we’re exploring. Let’s put on a different hat. So I even to some of them say, “Okay, I need owner you to investigate CEO you.” And sometimes it’s just giving them permission to access perspectives they already have. But sometimes the leader or the manager can’t see as clearly what the owner would see if they gave themselves a second to separate that. And so that’s typically what I try to do is help them access different parts of themselves.

Joel Miller:
That’s interesting. We had on the show not long ago, Ethan Cross, who talks about the Solomon Paradox, that Solomon was really great at dishing out advice for other people, but made a pretty nice mess of his own life. And the Solomon Paradox says that, as applied to yourself, that if you talk to yourself in the second person, like, “You, Joel, go do this thing,” you’re more likely to recognize the authority or the validity of that voice than if you’re just talking to yourself the way we normally do, just like letting thoughts bubble up in our heads. And I hear you actually applying a version of that very same thing as you’re working with clients. You’re helping them step out of their perspective so they can get a different vantage on their problem, and suddenly they already had the answer, but now they can see it more clearly.

Kevin Jennings:
Absolutely. The most common one is how salesperson them is despised by CEO them, right? Salesperson them says, “We’re going to close this deal.” And the closer in them, the one that wants to win, will sell a client that does not fit their ideal customer, because now they’re in the thrill of the chase and the hunt and the winning of the money. And it’s almost like a different person takes over their mind. They oversell; they overbook the company, and then CEO them is like, “Well, thanks a lot, salesperson me. You just did us all in. Our systems are going to fall apart. I’m going to be up all night thanks to salesperson me that couldn’t walk away from a deal we knew was a bad deal.” It’s like, “Exactly.” And the minute, whenever I say that, you can see light bulbs coming on, like, “Oh, my gosh. Yes, I did that to myself. Yes, it was me.”
So I think, but it gives a opportunity to distance the issue from their identity because they’re so quick, and I mean human beings, I want to say they, we are all so quick sometimes to extract lessons about our identity from things we should be learning lessons for around issues.

Joel Miller:
That’s fascinating. That also relates to what you said a few minutes ago about assumptions, and I thought maybe we should jump back to that for a second.

Kevin Jennings:
Sure.

Joel Miller:
The neuroscientist, György Buzsáki, Michael and Megan quote him in Mind Your Mindset, talking about how the brain is always taking its best guess in any given situation. And so if it’s ever encountered anything like this thing before, it assumes that that’s true in this new case and just jumps to the conclusion. And what you find is very often the context is radically different, or it’s different enough that whatever you thought worked before doesn’t exactly work now. You don’t have a fit, and yet you still try the same thing. And that’s where people go wrong. How can you help people see that the context has changed or the circumstance has changed, and maybe what they learned in one setting doesn’t translate to another?

Kevin Jennings:
I do start with having them try to extract what is true about this circumstance. So for example, I’ve got a team member, they’re just dropping the ball. I’m so frustrated. I’m tired of jumping. “Okay, great. Why did you hire this person?” “Well, they’re great at this. They’re great at…” “Oh, okay. So they’re not awful at everything like you just said they were?”

Joel Miller:
Yep.

Kevin Jennings:
“Okay, so what are they great at?” “Okay, fantastic. All right. Well, are they applying in this circumstance?” “Yes, they’re great people, but their people-pleasing in this circumstance is hurting us.” “Okay, so your team member is misapplying something they’re actually great at in the wrong context or in an inappropriate way.” And so sometimes it really, once again, it goes back to, okay, can I help them put voice and externalize what they know to be true about the circumstance, not the meaning they have about the circumstance, but what’s actually happening in the circumstance? And then maybe have them do the same thing with the previous circumstance that they learned the insight from, so they can see the differences between the two in the context.
But I think the main thing is our assumptions and the facts sometimes seem so interconnected that I think I’ve to slow down and say, “Okay. Now, is that another meaning you gained from it? Did they say that to you, or is that what you heard them say?” “Well, basically.” “Okay, what does basically mean in this context?”
And I’ll have to admit, in those moments, it can be frustrating. You’re like, “I’m annoyed. I don’t need you to tear down. You think I’m not smart enough to discern what I heard.” “That’s not what I’m saying.” Again, even now, my coaching in that moment, if I’m not careful, can be used to support assumptions or tear them down. But I think we have to say, “Okay, I’m going to slow down and help you investigate the elements that have built the story that is driving our current strategy.”

Joel Miller:
And that strategy, why this matters, of course, is that that strategy is what is getting you your results. And so if you are bumping up against a wall, if you’ve reached the end of what you’re capable of doing, if your team has run aground, if you cannot seem to move the needle in the way that you want, one of the fastest ways to figure it out is to actually go back upstream before the strategy and look at the thinking that developed that strategy.

Kevin Jennings:
Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

Joel Miller:
Related to assumptions blocking our progress, sometimes our goals actually skew what we can do or see. Also, I read St. Clement of Alexandria, say, once, a long, long time ago, that a shepherd and a wolf look at a sheep in different ways. And that’s a goal comment. That’s a comment about the uses of something or the ends to which something serves. And when you think about a business owner, a goal is something they have out in the future. They’re going for that, and that is going to give them a tunnel vision. And I wonder, do you ever run into clients that have problems that come up that are actually goal-related?

Kevin Jennings:
Plenty. I mean, some of them are just why are we doing this goal in the first place? I mean, obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, you know, with Business Accelerator and Full Focus, we talk a lot about goals and how they’re well-designed or poorly-designed. And so there’s definitely a part of that, because sometimes even the story behind the decision for the goal is interesting. I’m not fulfilling our dream if we don’t double in revenue. Well, what is that even for? What do you mean by that? What story do you have concocted about your success in what it does or does not mean if you don’t hit certain financial metrics? What is this enabling versus what are you trying to prove to yourself? And so there’s a lot there. I think what I would typically say, though, is the assumptions around not just why we set the goals but, once again, how this goal has to be achieved. So that tunnel vision is usually on a how or not the destination, but it is the primary or best method to get there.
And that’s usually going to be a strategy that we learned somewhere else along our journey. Many of us, when we’re setting our goals, we already have a strategy in mind. It takes a little bit of… it takes a lot of discipline, actually, to slow down and say, “Okay, let me open myself up to the plethora of strategies that are actually available to me.” What happens to most of us is we pick a strategy we’ve always used or seen work for a friend. We misapply it. It fails, and that’s when we finally slow down to say, “Okay, what went wrong here?”

Joel Miller:
Right.

Kevin Jennings:
And that’s obviously where coaching is so valuable. We can help you reassess that reality and help you identify the story, and pick a new strategy. But that’s where we typically see is there’s an assumption around the best strategy to even achieve a goal. And we’ve already locked in. So our head’s down just getting the work done. We’re no longer pausing even to assess if that’s the best way forward.

Joel Miller:
Well, in some cases, people actually conflate the strategy and the goal. They’re like one thing in their mind.

Kevin Jennings:
That’s right.

Joel Miller:
And that’s a problem because if the strategy doesn’t work, now you are even questioning the validity of the goal sometimes.

Kevin Jennings:
Absolutely. And to be fair to each person listening and to us as well, if we’re trying to achieve goals, I mean things we’ve never done before in our life or business, why are we assuming the strategies we already possess would work anyway?

Joel Miller:
Good question.

Kevin Jennings:
Because we’ve never been able to get that result in our lives up to this moment, and now, magically, I already have the strategies to achieve things I’ve never done in any context in my life. Just watch me, right? Well, where’s that even coming from? And so there are some things there that I think we have to unpack to really make sure we are not in our own way.

Joel Miller:
Kevin, you’re a coach. You help people do this all the time. Is there, however, a time where you’ve had to do this for yourself?

Kevin Jennings:
Yes. Yesterday, this morning, and a year ago. I mean, it happens once you are aware of the fact that there is a story driving your strategy, and that strategy is getting you results. You never see your strategies the same again. And for me, actually, Joel, I got to give you a little bit of credit, you actually helped me plant a seed on this, and you were talking to me, and when you were first introducing this to us as coaches and we had a chance to talk one-on-one and I said, “I would use some stories that I had had on my life for some results I was getting before.” And we came to the conclusion that I had a toxic view of hard work. I had this idea that hard work had to feel hard and grueling in order to be meaningful work.

Joel Miller:
I remember this conversation.

Kevin Jennings:
Yes, sir. It was the first time I thought about the fact that doing what I was best at, I could never do with a clear conscience because the work didn’t feel grueling, which meant I would never lean into my strengths. I leaned into my weaknesses more, thinking that was where the work is. And so I was never going to enjoy my work. I didn’t care if I made more money, had better clients, was more successful. I wasn’t going to enjoy work until I allowed myself to enjoy work because I recognized that the work I didn’t enjoy, I didn’t have to do. I could share that with my team. I could find someone who liked it. There was nothing to earn in that story, and that’s just one of many. That was just the story that kicked off my journey, actually, of saying, “Okay, you can do this all the time. You can do this all the time.”
And I mean, yeah, I do it all the time. What is the story behind my strategy? Why did I think this was the way to do it? And it almost has nothing to do with my goal and actually has less to do with my problem I’m facing, which is always a bit frustrating, like, “This is not the problem at all.” But the key thing is it can change your world every day when you view your strategies through a different lens.

Joel Miller:
Kevin, that’s great, man. Thank you for being here.

Kevin Jennings:
It’s a pleasure, and I hope that every single person gets Mind Your Mindset. Sincerely, this work has been the most transformational work in my personal life in the last 24 months.

Joel Miller:
Right on.

Kevin Jennings:
Well, and I’m not BSing. That’s why I can say that. I’ve been telling everybody since you did that with coach retreat, I’ve been like, “When the next book comes out, buy the book. When the next book comes out, buy the book.” I mean, I keep talking about it. I’m like, “This is the one. This is the one that’s going to change your life the most.”

Joel Miller:
That’s a wrap for another episode of the Business Accelerator podcast. If you’d like to get Michael and Megan’s new book, Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts With Your Thinking, go to mindyourmindsetbook.com.
And if you’re a business owner and you’re interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com/coach. That’s businessaccelerator.com/coach. We help busy but growth-minded small business owners just like you, scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. And if you’d like to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com/coach.
That’s it. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help you accelerate your business.