Happy Holidays from The Science of Success!

Consider this mashup to be your personal little Christmas present from Me, Austin, and our team over here at The Science of Success. For this Holiday Special we brought you some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, Courage, and much much more. You’ll certainly recognize some of these guests such as Brene Brown, Oscar Timboli, as well as some potentially new faces like John Wang, Dacher Keltner, and more.

Now, usually I’m the one asking the guests on the show to give you some homework but this episode I’d like to ask something of you. This week, find some time to express gratitude and do something special for someone else. This may be as simple as calling a family member, friend, colleague or mentor and letting them know you care about them. Maybe it’s writing a letter to a long lost friend. Perhaps it’s even donating some of your time to help those in your area who may be in need this season.

Whatever it is, express some gratitude towards your fellow human beings. It’s hard to believe we’ve been running the show now for over 3 entire years. It’s been a true honor of mine to help bring so many lessons to you all and to help everyone unlock some of their hidden potential. I can’t wait for 2020 and another exciting year on The Science of Success. As always, feel free to drop me a note at matt@successpodcast.com and have a great end to 2019.

Yours,
Matt

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the Internet, with more than four million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. Hey, it's Matt here, and I wanted to reach out and do something a little bit different for this special episode during the holiday season. As many of you know, we released a mash up on gratitude during Thanksgiving this year, and many listeners wrote back in with feedback that they really enjoy the compilation format. And so for Christmas this year, we wanted to expand on that and bring you some of the best moments from the show for Christmas this year. 

Consider this mash up to be your personal little Christmas present from me, Austin, and our team here at the Science of Success. For this holiday special, we brought you some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, courage and so much more. You'll certainly recognize some of these guests, including Brené Brown, Oscar Trimboli, and more. But you might see some new faces on there as well. People from back in the day like John Wang, Dacher Keltner, and some exciting guests from our archives. 

Now, usually I'm the one asking the guests on the show to give you some homework. But in this episode, I'd like to personally ask something of you. This week, find some time to express gratitude and to do something special for someone else. This may be a simple as calling a family member, a friend, colleague, or mentor and letting them know that you care about them. Maybe it's writing a letter to a long lost friend. Perhaps it's even donating some of your time to help those in your area who may be in need this season. And one of my personal favorite things to do is to buy toys for Children that are in need through a program like Toys for Tots or the Angel Tree. It's so much fun, and it's a great thing to do around the holiday season. But whatever it is, express some gratitude towards your fellow human beings. 

It's hard to believe that we've been running this show for over four years now, but it's been a true honor to help bring so many lessons to you to help everyone unlock, even if just a little bit, help everyone unlock some of their hidden potential. I can't wait for 2020 and for another exciting year here on the Science of Success. As always, feel free to drop me a note. My email’s matt@successpodcast.com. I hope you have a great end to 2019 and I hope you enjoy this special Christmas episode. 

Yours truly, Matt, Austin and the entire Science of Success Team. 

[00:02:5] MB: Are you a fan of the show? And have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting, and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the home page. That’s successpodcast.com or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word ‘smarter’, that's “S-M-A-R-T-E-R” to the number 44222.

We sat down in a previous episode with our past guest, the legendary podcaster Dan Carlin, to uncover how we can make sense in today's confusing world. If you want to find some clarity in all the chaos and confusion, listen to our previous episode. Now for a Christmas special. 

[00:03:57] MB: I totally agree and coming back to the people the perspective of the people who were in the arena versus the people who are in, as you put it, the cheap seats. It’s funny because I have so many young people who are listeners of the show, and I have nieces and nephews who are in high school and college, and they're so scared sometimes to just take the first step. They're so scared, as you put it, to show up. Why are people so afraid?

[00:04:22] BB:I think there are a lot of reasons, and I think some of them are demographic. I think some of them are informed by race and class and gender. I mean, I think it’s complex. But here’s what I would say. When you think about young people, and this is my 22 years of teaching graduate students. We don’t teach people how to get back up after they fall. Because we don’t teach people how to rise, they never take the leap. 

Can you imagine if you didn’t know – If you physically fell and you didn’t know how to get back up? You’d spend your whole life tiptoeing around. You’d spend your whole life like bracing your palms on the hood of a car when you step off the curve, then you would follow the car with your hand until you open the door. Then you’d hold on to the oh shit handle as you try to get into the seat. You would never let go of everything and just walk, because you’re deaf ear would, “If I fall, I don’t know how to get back up.” 

The same thing is true in our socio-emotional world. If we don’t know how to get back up after failure, disappointment, or setback, we will spend an enormous amount of energy making sure we never have to get back up. 

So, for me, I have a lot of bounce. I have a lot of bounce. So, I’m willing to take chances, because I’m very secure in my ability to get back up. I think even if you think about going back really to young, young folks. Even if you think about letting kids experience adversity.

So, one of the conversations my husband and I had very early on when we were brand new parents is we both come from like divorce parents. A lot of really hard, hard shit. Stuff that we would never want to subject our kids to. At the same time, we both really respect our own and each other’s resilience. Did I just say he’s a pediatrician? He’s a pediatrician. So we have a lot of parenting conversations. 

So, the big finding we came to was we need to let – There’s a line between adversity and trauma and we need to let our kids experience adversity, not so much trauma. That kind of sets us back. So, I think having experiences with adversity and knowing how to get back up makes people braver, because they’re willing to take a chance.

[00:06:43] MB: Such a powerful analogy and really shines light on this notion. I love the example of walking around with a fear of never being able to get back up. Because it’s so clearly highlights the idea that the truly important skillset is not whether you’re prefect at walking, but it’s just learning how to get up over and over again. 

[00:07:08] BB: I mean, that’s it. I don’t even know who said the quote, but someone has a great quote that says, “The most important number is not the number of times that you fall, but the number of times you get back up.” That is so – I know it’s like cheesy, like queue the rocky music or whatever. But it’s just true. 

So, what we know – I mean, for me, to be honest, Matt, if I think about all of my work over the last 20 something years, I don’t think that I’m more proud of anything that the research that we did on courage and the fact that courage is teachable, observable and measurable. It’s four skillsets.

But one of the key four skillsets is learning how to get back up. The first big skillset is the ability to vulnerability. We call it rumbling with vulnerability. The second one is really knowing what your values are and how to live into them, because people who are not super clear and just very gray clear about their values and what those behaviors look like are not as brave. They don’t risk the fall. 

The next one is braving trust, learning how to trust yourself and other people appropriately. Then the last one is learning to get back up. So we can teach these things. But I got to tell you. As I step back and think about the way that we parent today. Not everybody, but a growing part of parenting, I think, unfortunately. The way schools are set up. We’re not teaching courage skills. 

[00:08:42] MB: I couldn’t agree more, and in many ways that the root of that idea is what underpins our entire project with the Science of Success as well. I want to dig in to all of these different ideas. So let’s start at a high-level with courage. What is courage? When you say that, when you talk about it, how do you think about how we define courage? 

[00:09:04] BB: It’s interesting, because I don’t have a definition for courage that’s any different than data-driven definition for vulnerability. We define vulnerability as the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome. The definition of vulnerability as a construct itself is it’s the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. 

I spent like probably, I don’t know, maybe 5 years, because I spent 90% of my time in organizations, big, fortune 10, big Silicon Valley companies, teaching courageous leadership skills. So, I spent so many years trying to convince people of a relationship between courage and vulnerability. Then it got very clear to me one day when I was at Fort Bragg working with Special Forces, and I asked a really simple question, which was – Because everyone thinks vulnerability is weakness. Everyone thinks that it’s oversharing. Everything is soft. 

So I asked this question, “If vulnerability is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, give me a single example of courage in your life on the field, off the field, other troops, other soldiers. Give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed or experienced yourself that didn’t involve vulnerability, that didn’t involve uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.”

It was kind of just silence and you could see these troops, they were just shifting in their seats and uncomfortable and a couple of them started putting their heads in their hands. Then finally one guy stood up and said, “Ma’am, there is no courage without vulnerability.” Three tours, there is no courage without vulnerability. 

So, I think any conversation that we start around what is courage is it’s the willingness to put yourself out there when you can’t control how it’s going to go. If you’re putting yourself out there and you can kind of control or predict the outcome, you’re not being that brave. You’re probably doing good stuff, maybe, but you’re not being courageous. 

[00:11:06] MB: I just got goose bumps when you said that. Such a powerful definition, and it’s something that’s so important. It’s such a needed message in today’s world, today’s society. I feel like so many people stick to what’s comfortable and what’s safe and they’re so afraid to step into uncertainty and to step into risk. 

[00:11:31] BB: Yeah, I mean, it’s the Special Forces soldier. But it’s also the guy sitting across from the person he loves and thinking, “Shit, man! I want to say I love you. Should I wait to say it? Maybe I should wait for her to say it first. Okay, you know what? I’m going to be brave. I love you.” That’s also courage and vulnerability.

[00:11:53] MB: Yeah, that’s a great point. It spans the spectrum, right? It’s these every day moments of life and it goes all the way back out to these heroic achievements in the military and beyond. 

[00:12:06] BB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the CEO of the startup looking for funding and being turned down 50 times. It’s the 51st time. That’s brave. That’s courageous. That’s vulnerable. So, this mythology that vulnerability is weakness, we just cross the 400,000 pieces of data mark, which was a big mark for us. There is zero evidence, zero, that vulnerability is weakness. It is by far our most accurate measure of courage. 

In fact, we have a daring leader assessment. We put together an assessment for courageous leadership, and we worked with MBA and EMBA students at Wharton, at UPenn, Kelog, at Northwestern, and the Jones School at Rice. We spent three years putting together this instrument. Make sure it’s valid, reliable. Basically, it’s as simple as this. I can tell you how brave you are by measuring your capacity for vulnerability. 

[00:13:12] MB: It makes perfect sense, because if you’re afraid to be vulnerable. By definition, you’re coming at that from a place of fear and scarcity. 

[00:13:22] BB: Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that you just said every day scenarios, everyday situations. Yeah, I didn’t know how this podcast was going to go. I don’t know that I’m going to get on it and give it a shot. If I screwed up, it’s going to be out to tons of people, but it’s saying something to your roommate like, “Hey! Dude, you can’t keep leaving your shit everywhere. It’s not working.” It’s sitting down with your boss and saying, “Hey, I understand I messed that up, but the way you’re giving me feedback, I can’t hear what you’re saying. So I want to learn from you, but when you’re yelling and screaming and pounding your first, that doesn’t work.” 

[00:13:58] MB: One of my favorite quotes of yours, and I’m paraphrasing this a little bit, but it’s this idea that vulnerability is not as hard or scary or dangerous as getting to the end of your life and asking yourself what if I had shown up? 

[00:14:14] BB: For me and for the people I’ve interviewed that are late in life, I cannot imagine a more terrifying thing. I do not want to look back. There are two things that are really important to me when I look back on my life and my career. The first one is I do not want to look back and wonder what if. What if I would have said yes? What if I would have tried that? What if I would have said I love you first? 

The other thing is I want to be able to look back and know without question that I contributed more than I criticized, because criticism is so easy. It’s not vulnerable. It’s not brave. Contribution, super brave and hard. Because everyone will have comments and thoughts about what it is. There’s very minimal risk of failure and criticizing. 

That’s why the Teddy Roosevelt, it’s not the critique who counts. For me, it’s really not the critique who counts. So if you leave some kind of really shitty tweet and your avatar is an egg or like the little icon or some movie star and your handle isn’t your real name, useless to me. Block or mute forever, whichever is easiest for me. 

But if you leave a really hard thing for me to hear, but it’s respectful and your name is there and your picture is there, there’s a 95% chance, if I see it, I’m going to come back and say, “Tell me more. I’m curious. Why do you think that? I’m interested. Can we dig in?” I might DM you and say, “This is a really interesting point.” 

I mean, someone made a point about something that I said in Braving the Wilderness. I was talking about Black Lives Matter and why it’s important and I was talking about the dehumanization of people. A woman said, “There's something about the way you framed this sentence that felt privileged and tone deaf to me.” At first I kind of recoiled and I’m like, “Oh my God! I’m out here supporting this stuff that like I’m taking a lot of heat for, and then yet I'm still tone deaf.” But I was like, “Tell me more.” 

We had this long conversation on our DM's on Twitter and I called my agent and said, “Stop the process. Is that a real thing? If need to change something. I wrote something that was in a privileged blind spot for me. I need to change it. I can make it better.” They stopped him and changed it. Random House did. So, feedback, even hard feedback, constructive feedback, difficult feedback, is not the same as being a critic your whole life and never risking vulnerability. It’s just not brave.

[00:16:52] MB: So, how do we start to step into vulnerability, or as you called it, rumble, with vulnerability?

[00:16:58] BB: The answer is pretty counterintuitive, because here's – When I spent the last seven years studying leadership, and I mean talking to everyone, leaders from everyone from Pixar, to Special Forces, from oil and gas companies in Singapore to people who work for the White House, like across-the-board. Talking to Fortune 10 CEOs, really asking what is the future of leadership. 

So, it was the first time I had ever done a study where the answer saturated cross. There was not a single participant who said something different than, “Oh my God! The future of leadership is courageous leadership. We've got to have braver people and braver cultures.” We are facing too many geopolitical, environmental, just technology, everything is shifting so fast that if we don't have courageous people leading, companies won't make it. Organizations won't make it. Governments won't make it. 

So was interesting is my hypothesis was wrong. So I assumed that the greatest barrier to what I call daring leadership or courageous leadership was fear. So as we started moving into this what we call selective coding, I went back to some of these leaders and said, “Wow! Okay, we're hearing it's brave leadership. We hear the only people who will be standing in the next five years and really meaningful leadership capacities are courageous people, building courageous cultures. How do you stay out of fear?” 

These people looked at me like I was crazy. They were like, “What?” I said, “You’re a daring leader, how do you stay brave all the time?” They’re like, “I'm afraid all the time. I don't know what you're talking about.” I was like, “What?” But you’re a brave leader.” They’re like, “Well, you can put me on whatever list you want to, but I’m scared all the time.” 

So, as we started digging in and digging deeper into the data and interviewing more people about that, what I learned was it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave. It's armor. Armor gets in the way of us being brave. Armor gets in the way of us being vulnerable. 

So, the difference is, let’s say, you and I are both leaders, and we're both on a scale from 1 to 10 thought – We’re both scared five. So, Matt’s a five scared leader, and I’m a five scared leader. But as a daring leader, Matt, you're aware of your armor and you choose to be vulnerable and show up and take it off even though it's really seductive to put it on. I, on the other hand, am not aware about how I use armor to show up. So, I stay in my armor. 

So, the first thing we have to do is understand – I mean, you can’t do any of these without self-awareness. So the first thing is understand what is your go-to-armor. How do you self-protect when you're in uncertainty risk and feel emotionally exposed? 

For me, it's perfectionism. I get emotionally intense and can talk over people. This is not mine particularly, but some people, they use cynicism as armor. Some people – And this is not mine either, but – I mean, trust me. I have a shit ton of it, but these just happens to not be mine. A lot of people have to be the knower. So when they’re vulnerable and feel exposed, they become the knower, and it's more important for them to be right than get it right. 

So, we have to figure – I’m a pleaser. That's definitely mine, and I know when I'm wearing my pleasing, good girl, make everyone around me happy armor, because the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1,000 pounds. I become a really resentful, angry person. 

So, where we start with learning how to rumble with vulnerability is examining what myths were we raised believing. Were we raised believing it's weakness? Were we raised believing that it's over-sharing? How were we raised?

Then the second question is what armor do I use to self-protect. Am I the blustery, posturing tough guy? Am I the knower? Am I the cynic? It's all bullshit. None of it matters. What is our armor? Does that make sense?

[00:20:54] MB: That totally makes sense. I love the little quip about how the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1000 pounds. 

[0:21:03.0] MB: Definitely. So you touched on and talked a little bit about the band. Just to reiterate, what is the One Kindness Challenge itself? 

[0:21:12.9] JW: It’s actually a really simple thing. Now at the end of the day, like I said, we all want to do kind things. We all realize the power behind kindness, but it’s easy to forget, even right here with us right now. You could think of a time where you’ve done an act of kindness, it could be recently, or it could be from a little while back ago, and I want you to picture that. Picture what it is that you’ve done, or picture what it is that you’ve been seeing somebody else do, and how that made you feel, how that experience felt. 

Like, just take a moment, just really immerse yourself in that memory and how did that make you feel? What are the feelings that you’re going through? What are the experiences that you’re going through in your body? And in that moment, even just now when you are remembering it, when you are picturing yourself there now, what you’re experiencing could be one of a few things. Maybe you are experiencing some level of warmth. Like warmth that is starting up at your chest area, and it could be feeling like this calmness, this serenity and happiness. 

So what is happening there is that your kindness is actually triggered by this thing called the vagus nerve, which is right at base of our brainstem, and the vagus nerve basically controls things like your digestive track and your body functions, but more importantly, it controls your heart and your heart rate. So this has been linked in a lot of ways, the Vegas Nerve to empathy, and feelings of sympathy and empathy, which is why a lot of times when we see somebody doing act of kindness, you get that same feeling as if when you were doing it yourself. 

If you have ever watched those videos, you can go into these great series of videos that are made by a Thai insurance company, and one of the videos has this guy just going around doing these daily simple acts of kindness, and he’s just going around helping people do things like water plants, and helping old ladies cross the street, helping street vendors, giving some money away to somebody who’s perhaps living on the street and not as fortunate as he is, and he’s not a rich man or anything like that. He’s no Bill Gates, he’s no Elon Musk, or some great philanthropist, he’s just some guy trying to make people’s lives better. Every time I watch that video, I get that same feeling. I want to tear up. I just feel like this amazing sense of joy and everything like that. 

So what I’m experiencing, what you’re experiencing in that moment when you’re watching that and feeling that, and remembering that, is that you’re getting a hit of dopamine. You’re getting this hit of oxytocin in your body, where that level is going up, and you’re feeling what scientist have now called “The Helper’s High”. It actually is kind of a high, because you really do get this thrill from it. So our goal with the movement is very, very simple. 

We’re trying to get as many people doing a daily act of kindness, and like I said, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing a massive act like, “Oh, I’m going to go out and help build a shelter, build a hospital down in Peru,” or if you are doing something extremely simple, which is just like, “I am going to open a door for somebody, I’m going to help that lady in the parking lot with her groceries. I’m going to go up at someone and say, ‘Hey listen, I just want to say I really appreciate you and what you’ve done.’” 

Or you might write a note of thank you to my old high school teacher, or my old friend who once helped me and I never got to really express that. All of those count as acts of kindness, and the funny thing about that is that, as it turns out in these studies, there’s not a massive difference between the size of the work that we do, but there is a massive difference in the consistency. 

Which is to say, if you do one act, like let’s say you do one massive act in one day, and then you don’t do anything again for six months, the effect of that is not anywhere near as powerful as if you were to do, let’s say, 21 days of these smaller acts, which is why we tell the people who are part of our movement, we say, “Look, you could participate in this, we hope you participate in it forever, just what an amazing thing you’ll be doing in the world, but at the very least, try it for 21 days. Do it once a day for 21 days, and see how it makes you feel.” 

I can guarantee you, it will change your life. It would change the way you see the world. It would change the way people look at you, which is another thing that we talked about, which is actually kindness makes you look more attractive to the opposite sex, and to other people, which is great, but it would change your lifestyle. It would change how you feel. So our goal is to try to get a million acts of kindness out there, because it’s very clear that right now, we need to more kindness in this world more than ever. 

Whatever your politics is, whatever your background or culture or history is, I think it’s pretty clear that right now the world is going through some changes that, let’s just say, there may be more to this, right? People are becoming a little bit more disconnected. People are becoming a little bit more distant from each other. So we need to build that back into our societies. So that’s what the movement is about, We’re trying to get people to go out there and do 21 acts of kindness at the very minimum, and just watch their lives change. 

[0:26:09.4] OT: I'll flip it the other way though, Matt. If you think about the teacher who made the biggest difference for you at school, generally people say it's the teacher that listen to them. Is that true for you?

[0:26:21.4] MB: That's a good question. I don't know if it's true for me or not. The thing that taught me how to listen is that I was a debater in high school and you have to be able to listen really intently to understand what the other side is saying and doing.

[0:26:34.4] OT: How did that make you a better debater by doing that?

[0:26:38.7] MB: We're flipping the script already. I like it. It made me a better debater, because – and this is something that as you're well aware and you’re evangelizing this idea around the world to be successful at anything. I apply this in business and life, across the board. You have to understand what someone else is doing, what they're saying, what they're feeling, what they're going through, to be able to respond, to be able to provide a solution. 

That was true, whether it's a response in a debate, all the way up to whether you're dealing with a management crisis at a company. It's the same fundamental thing. You have to be able to understand what's really going on and what's really happening and confront reality as best as you can discern it. To be able to do that, you really have to listen very deeply.

[0:27:24.5] OT: The leaders I work with Matt and you highlight this from the debate. One of the exercises I set them is for today, the next day and the next week, listen to somebody in the media you fiercely disagree with. In doing, so not a person who's right in front of you, like it was with your debate, but if you can tune your frequency to make sure that you listen to somebody in the media, whether that's on TV, or radio, or a podcast, whatever they have as an opinion, make sure it's the opposite to you. 

Then you can start to understand the difference between hearing and listening, because if you listen to someone you fiercely disagree with, suddenly you'll become conscious not only of their assumptions, their judgments, their prejudice, anything you find that's different in your historical experience to them. You’ll also start to notice that as a mirror back to yourself and you wonder, “What prejudice am I holding? What assumptions am I holding?”

A really simple tip for everybody, if you want to become aware of your listening blind spots, those things you're not even conscious are true for you. Spend one day out of t6he next seven and spend 30 minutes listening to someone you fiercely disagree with through the media. 30 minutes is important, because for five minutes you can hold it, maybe even for 15 minutes you can hold it. Once you go past the 18-minute mark, you start to get frustrated and you start to get angry and you start to wanted to bake that person there. A really simple, practical tip for everybody; if you want to become conscious of your listening blind spots, listen to somebody you fiercely disagree with.

[0:29:07.5] MB: Yeah, that's a great tip and a great strategy. I want to come back to something you said a second ago that I think bears digging into more, which is this notion of the difference between hearing and listening. Tell me more about that.

[0:29:18.1] OT: We all hear, in fact the very first skill we learn inside our mother's womb at 20 weeks is to distinguish our mother's sound from any other sound, Matt. At 32, weeks you can distinguish Beethoven from Bon Jovi from Bieber. The minute we come into the world, we come into the world on very active birth. The moment you scream is when the clock starts. That's when on your birth certificate, the time of your birth is defined by the time you scream. We spend the rest of our life screaming to be noticed.

Yet, the very last thing that leaves us as a skill when we pass away, when I interviewed a couple of palliative care nurses and doctors is hearing. Hearing is listening to sounds. In fact, while you sleep, you can hear. It's really important that you hear while you sleep. It's part of our survival instincts. Listening is the ability to make sense of what you hear. The difference between hearing and listening I always say is the action you take. Nothing is more frustrating when you have a conversation with somebody. You nod and you commit to do something and you don't do it. The next time they come back they go, “How did you go with that?” You’re, “Oh, I forgot.” They interpret that as, “Well, you heard what I said, but you really didn't listen.”

For most of us, listening is about making sense of what we hear. Deep listening, on the other hand, is helping the person who's speaking to make sense of what they're saying, because too much of listening is fixated on ourselves and understanding what we need to do to make meaning of what they're saying. That's handy, but a really powerful listener helps the person speaking make sense of what they're saying, not just you make sense of what they're saying as well.

Most of us in the 80s and the 90s, they had this amazing movement called the Active Listening Movement, which is focus on the speaker, notice what they're saying, nod, use non-verbal affirmatives like, “Mm-hmm. Mm,” or, “Tell me more,” as an example. The reality is all that's helping you to do is helping you to listen is interesting. Helping them to listen to themselves is even more important.

Matt, there's three parts in neuroscience I'd love everybody to understand before they leave the podcast today. If you are only taking one note, this is the note I'd be taking; if I got run over by a truck and I hope that one thing I pass on to the world is these three numbers. I speak at a 125 words a minute. You listen at 400 words a minute and I think at 900 words a minute. We're going to deconstruct each of those numbers.

This is the maths and science of listening. It's the neuroscience of listening. If I speak at 125 words a minute and you can listen at 400, Matt, you're going to be distracted. You're going to fill in the gap. I'm going to sound boring and there's 300 words you're going to fill in your head, because you can. If you want to try this out, just turn the podcast up to 2 times speed and you'll still be able to make sense of what we say. Blind people can listen at up to 300 words a minute, because they've trained their mind to do that. For blind people, the speed at which they can listen increases their ability to literally see their environment around them.

If I can speak at only a 125 words a minute, a horserace caller, or an auctioneer can speak it up to 200 words a minute, you can still make sense of that, but we're all programmed to be distracted. Again, it's happening for you right now. I'm not speaking fast enough and you're filling in the gaps for those 300 words that I'm not speaking fast enough for you. It gets worse. If you're on your cellphone and you're sending a text message, or a WhatsApp message, or anything else on that phone, it's impossible for you to notice what I'm not saying. It's impossible for you to notice my body language.

Here's the frustrating thing for me as the speaker, I've got 900 words stuck in my head and I can only get a 125 words out at any one time then. The maths is really simple. The likelihood, that first thing out of my mouth is what I'm thinking, there's a 1 in 9 chance, or 11% that what I say is what I'm thinking. I'm at the stage in my life that I'm spending more time with a doctor than I'd like. If they said to me I've got an 11% chance of surviving surgery, I'd be asking for a second opinion. The reality is in a conversation, we should be asking for a second opinion as well, Matt.

[0:34:00.5] MB: I want to explore a couple of the things you said. Those are some really interesting stats. Coming back to something you talked about a second ago, tell me about this idea of how do we help somebody listen to themselves? I might be phrasing that incorrectly, but how do we focus on the other person and the idea of deep listening, how do we help them make sense of what they're saying, as opposed to just actively listening to them?

[0:34:23.5] OT: Yeah. Sot he very first place to start is to remember if there are five levels of listening, level one is not paying attention to the speaker. Level one is listening to yourself. You can't be conscious enough to focus on them. 

They're listening if you've got the last conversation that you just had in your head, or the next conversation, or the fact you've got to go to the gym later on this evening, or the fact you've got to sort out something on the weekend, or you've got a dinner party, or you've got a birthday party and you've got all this noise going on in your head before you even get to the conversation. It's impossible for you to help them listen, until you listen to yourself. You need to be an empty vessel in the conversation, so you can focus on them.

A lot of us come into the conversation as if we jump into the passenger seat of a car and forget to put our own seat belts on. We're driving away in the conversation and all of a sudden, if they slam the brakes on, you're going to go through the front window, because you're not in the same swim lane as they are. You're not in the same conversation. Three really quick tips, Matt, to get you centered, ready for that conversation to help them listen to themselves.

Tip number one, switch your cellphone off. Oh, wow. That's crazy talk. I know. If you're addicted to your phone, which about 86% of us are, just switch it to flight mode then. In flight mode, you can take some notes, but you're not getting notifications coming in. In the data that we've done, 1,410 people, the biggest struggle people have with listening is the distraction of the cellphone. That by far makes up the biggest distraction.

If you want to improve how you've listened and you've got the cellphone switch to flight mode or off, here's two other tips; tip number two, drink water during the conversation. Just a glass of water for every 30 minutes in a dialogue. A hydrated brain is a listening brain. The brain represents 6% of the body mass, but it consumes up to 25% percent of the blood sugars of the body. It's a really hungry part of the brain.

The reality is a hydrated brain can get more blood sugars there faster. Brain that isn't taught how to listen struggles with how to listen. We do a lot of work in the prefrontal cortex when it comes to listening. This is the most modern part of the brain. When it's untrained, it feels hard. A lot of people say to me, listening makes my brain hurt. I always say you're doing it wrong. If that's how you're doing it and we'll explain what that means shortly.

Tip number three is simply this; the deeper you breathe, the deeper you listen. If you can notice your breathing and deepen your breathing, the more oxygen you can get to the brain, the more likely it is that your brain will perform well on the task of listening. Three things before we even start fixating on the speaker is to get ourselves into a state that we're available to hear what they're saying and more importantly, to hear what they're not saying. That's where we're going to go to next. I'm sure that's prompted a few questions for you, Matt.

[0:37:35.8] MB: Many different things that I want to explore, and so many important themes and ideas. I think the place I want to come back to, those are great tips – I really love. I want to reiterate, or emphasize the point you made about putting your cellphone in airplane mode and even the idea of actually telling somebody in a conversation, “Hey, I'm going to put my phone in airplane mode, so I can really focus on you and this conversation,” is a really powerful gesture.

[0:38:01.5] OT: It reminds me of a have a great story I have to share with you. About 11 years ago, Peter was flying from Seattle Microsoft head office. He ran about a 100 million dollar business for Microsoft. It was not insignificant. You figured this guy's pretty busy. I was hosting 20 CEOs in Australia in a roundtable, where he would be at the head of the table. We were in a fancy-pants hotel that had this big boardroom table and he literally just flown in from Seattle that morning. He's straight into the meeting. It was 9:00 a.m. and he was at the head of the table.

What Peter did next really changed the way I thought about listening. He sat down. I introduced him. Then Peter said, “I'm really sorry. Please forgive me. The most important thing I can give you right now is my attention.” With that, he stood up. He took his cellphone out of his jacket pocket, switched it off and put it in his bag. Now what was interesting was what happened next with the other 20 CEOs sitting around the table. What do you think happened then, Matt?

[0:39:10.2] MB: I don't know. They all put their phones away?

[0:39:12.9] OT: Yeah. 14 of them put their cellphones into their bags. Now what that did for the other six was interesting. I don't know if it shamed them into doing something, but I'm guessing the rest switched them into flight mode. 

For a lot of us, we can bring about change just by role-modeling that change. In most meetings, when I do that, the person I'm working with will reciprocate. If we want to bring about change, it's not about asking everybody else to make that change. If you can simply role-model, make an example that you're going to switch your phone into airplane mode, you'll be surprised what happens to the other person, but more important what happens next on the quality of the conversation.

[0:39:57.4] MB: I love that point too about saying the most important thing I can give you is my attention. I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but that was such a powerful example, such a great gesture. It's something that's so simple to do and yet, it's hard and it's not necessarily easy.

[0:40:16.8] OT: What happened at the end of the meeting was fascinating. These execs, they got these amazingly tight schedules. They're in the country for two to three days and they have all these very highly leveraged meetings where he was just going to other locations to do very similar kinds of meetings. I do briefed the group for the next half an hour.

What was fascinating was they said they were expecting the group to talk about the future of technology, or something else to do with technology, or technically orientated conversations. That's what they were expecting from Peter in that dialogue. What they said was – Peter was just asking each of them what they were struggling with personally. He created a pretty safe environment. That group, I know stayed connected well after this event with some of the challenges they were talking about themselves personally. The value that Peter created wasn't just the value around what he talked about technically for a very brief period of time, but he helped everyone listen to each other. That again is a really powerful thing we can do.

A lot of the times if there's three, four, five, six people in the room, we generally hear from the loudest. We don't take the time to make sure that everybody is being heard. That's really critical. Again, the difference between a recreational listener and a deep listener, a powerful listener and impactful listener is their ability to listen to what's unsaid bad. 

Back to the point about helping somebody make sense of what they're saying themselves, the most potent thing we can do as a listener is to help them make sense of those 800 words stuck in their head. Back to the maths again, I speak at a 125 words a minute. I can think at 900. That's an average. Some people can think at 600 words a minute. Some people can speak way up, I think way up to 1,600 words a minute.

On average, we speak at about – I think at about 900 words a minute. If I say the first thing that comes out of my mouth, unless I'm a great actor who's rehearsed my lines well, the likelihood what I say is what I mean, is 11%. You get probably better odds going to Las Vegas and playing the slot machines, or going on the roulette wheel. The odds are going to be much better for you there.

Here's a couple of simple, practical tips; when somebody says something, treat silence at the end of what they say like it's a word. Listen to the beginning of the word, the middle of the word and the end of the word. Treat silence like it's another word. In doing so, what you'll notice is they'll either unpack another 125 words in their head. Well, they’ll pause. Might bow their head down a little bit. If you can remember these simple phrases, what else? Tell me more. How long have you been thinking about this? What else? Tell me more. What else have you been thinking about this?

All of a sudden, just magic happens. You'll be nodding as I say this. What they’ll do is they'll draw their breath and they'll use phrases like this, “Hmm. Well, actually. What's really important on this topic is.” Or they'll say, “Hmm. Now that I think about it, what I haven't told you is.” Or they’ll say, “Hmm. What I've said is interesting, but let's focus on this.” It doesn't matter how it comes out, Matt. What they're doing is exploring what stuck in their brain.

You see, our mind is like a washing machine. While we're on wash cycle, it's sudsy, it's dirty, it's moving around and it's not making much progress. When we speak, it's like the rinse cycle of a washing machine. It's clean water it's coming into our brain. As we speak and express this idea, what's happening to the neural pathways and the synaptic connections is that creating an electronic circuit for the idea to be expressed.

Then the idea takes a concrete form, where we can look at it together, we can analyze it together and more importantly, the speaker can see it and notice it. For most of us, if we just practice saying, “Tell me more,” you'll be shocked what you hear. More importantly, they'll start to understand what they mean, not just what they said the first time.

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[00:48:30] MB: So getting into the data a little bit, what does the science say? Again because one of the big things on this podcast, we like to be data driven. What does the science say about how to acquire power?

[00:48:42] DK: It’s so funny, Matt. I think a lot of people maybe a lot of your listeners like if you ask them, “All right, be honest, do you want to have power?” They'd feel a little bit uneasy or queasy, right? Like, "Oh, I don’t want to grab power," and in a new way that’s because we think of power as Machiavellian. But I really define power as your ability to advance the greater good, to alter states of people around you and make them do good work. And I think that fits a lot of different social scientific definitions of power that you could apply at the international level. 

So that begs the question of how we gain power, and this is where I was really surprised in writing The Power Paradox about how much we’ve learned to answer this question in the scientific literature. So we gained power, for example, by really listening carefully and really taking in the wisdom and thoughts of other people around you. Abraham Lincoln, in the historical accounts, was just a great practitioner of this art of just empathy, listening, hearing people well, gaining collective wisdom, actually gains you power. 

Another way we gain power is, to put it really simply, by being kind and pro-social. In hunter-gatherer societies, there’s a prize winning essay that summarizes who are the leaders in 48 hunter-gatherer societies living for 200,000 years in the conditions of our social evolution, that really in which our social structure started to take shape. And Christopher Baum observes, it’s really the person who is fair, impartial, humble, and kind, right?

So studies are starting to show, for example, in the competitive altruism literature that if I share, if I’m kind, if I express gratitude, for example in the work of Mike Norton in Harvard in social networks or organizations, people will respect me more. They'll give me status and I’ll have power and influence. So I think in a way, we’re returning slowly, with a lot of exceptions in the world, to our evolutionary roots of power being founded in kindness and empathy and being fair and humble. You seemed shocked. 

[00:51:04] MB: Oh definitely. I think it’s a very counter intuitive finding. If anything comes to mind, I’d love to maybe hear one or two examples from the research kind of about how you came to that conclusion. 

[00:51:15] DK: Yeah, so let me give you a couple of examples, and I think these are just scientific tidbits out there, because I’ve been speaking in really broad terms. So what studies find, for example, is that if you are able to read other people’s emotions well and in The Power Paradox, this book, I present a couple of fun tests of like reading emotions from people’s facial expressions or drawings of emotion. If I can empathize in that way, I actually rise in financial analysis firms, right? I gain more power. 

If I’m a school kid and I’m in seventh grade and I’m facing the Lord of the Flies politics on the playground and I know how to read people’s emotions well, just detecting emotions in their facial expressions, once again I gain social power. If I am working on a team — this is a recent study from MIT by Woolley and colleagues — I am working on a team, we've got to solve some hard problems and I’m listening carefully and asking good questions., really simple practices, my team does better and I gain power, right? 

So these are all specific examples of how, you know, this counterintuitive notion that being good to others actually gets me power. A final example of Adam Grant and Francesca Gina, if I am the manager and I am trying to get people to do things and I simply say, "Thank you," right? I express gratitude, those people are more productive and enhance my influence and power. So there are a lot of new findings that tell us that Machiavelli was wrong, that the pro-social tendencies are pathways to power. 

[00:52:58] MB: I want to unpack a lot of these different pieces. I definitely want to dig into this idea that the mind is embodied and also relational. I want to talk about three pillar training. I want to talk about the wheel of awareness. Before we get into any of those, to contextualize this a little bit more, I want to hear your story about your experience in Namibia.

[0:53:17.2] DS: Yeah. Well, our institute is called the Mindsight Institute. For years when I was in medical school in the 70s, I noticed that my teachers didn't sense the mind and that is they treated people like bags of chemicals. It was very strange. I dropped out of school for a while. Before I came back, I made up this word mindsight for how we see the mind. You have physical site, where you see things like chemicals, or the body, or whatever. Then this mindsight, it's a different system.

Flash forward many years, we became very interested here at the Mindsight Institute as to whether other cultures that represent in some ways, not the influence of contemporary culture, would they have words that try to communicate about the inner nature of our subjective experience, or what we're aware of? That would be how you'd look at the insight capacity of a person to have mindsight, and then how they would use that for empathy. These are two of the three aspects of mindsight. Mindsight is insight into your own mind, empathy to understand the mind of another and integration. The third thing is to honor differences to promote linkages. It's basic kindness and compassion and love really.

We went to Namibia, because there was some reason to believe that genetically some of the ancestors of the group that was the originally the homo sapiens who were the originators of all human beings were there in Namibia. There's some other views these days, but that was the line of reasoning then. We went to Namibia and we went out to different tribal groups and we had the good fortune of being able have a translator with us and interviewed the villagers to see if they used mindsight language. Indeed they did.

That's why we went and it was a really exciting thing. If there was any way to get close to the original ancestors of all of us, we were there. It was a beautiful thing. One evening around the campfire, we were just hanging out with the villagers and I asked the translator to ask one of the villagers a question, because there was a drought there and there was a famine and there was a lot of disease and there was a lot of poverty and people were appearing really, really happy.

It was perplexing from a contemporary cultural view of the importance of material comfort that we associate with what we think success and happiness is. I see a lot of miserable people with a lot of stuff here in the contemporary world, but there we were in Namibia with all these challenges to material comfort, but basically very happy.

The translator says, “You want me to ask this guy if he's happy?” I said, “Yeah. If he's happy, why is he happy?” “You want me to ask him why he’s happy?” I said, “Yeah, please.” He asked the villagers the question. The villager says to me, I will never forget. He says in his language and it's translated back into English for me, he says, “My people are happy, because we belong. We belong to one another in our community and we belong to earth.” There was this silence and I felt incredibly grateful for the response and then this wave of sadness came over me about just thinking about back home in the United States.

Then the villager asked the translator a question who translates it for me and he says, “He wants to know if where you come from, do you belong and are you happy?” I thought about how much misery there is where we are. I said, “There is a lot of experience of not belonging and there is a lot of unhappiness, even though there's a lot of relatively. There's food. There's not the disease you're facing. We have water. I mean, there's a lot of unhappiness and people don't feel successful and they're on this ladder to try to get more successful and more stuff and more of this, more of that.”

We just all stared at each other. That moment has really stuck with me. The whole notion of belonging relates directly to what we're talking about, the mind being both embody and relational. It raised for me back then when I was in Namibia, a deep – it's a question, but it's really like an emotional question thing. What is the self? What it was itself really? My next book is all about this that I'm just starting. This idea of in contemporary culture, we tend to think of the self as your body, or since the time of Hippocrates, you say the mind is just brain activity, or neuroscientists certainly reaffirm that.

That places the mind as the source of self inside your skin and case body. I think there's just something fundamentally limiting about that, if not outright wrong, that this villager was really describing the idea of belonging to community and belonging to earth. Since then, a lot of the workshops I do and the connections I have with – I consider people coming to workshops my colleagues. We're all in this journey together trying to learn. The whole notion of an integrated self would be where yes, you have a body and the body is an I or me, it's an internal locus of your – location of your mind, of yourself.

You also have a relational self that's different. It's differentiated, but it's equally as important and yet, it's not really a focus of what we often do in contemporary culture. It's all about I, me, mine; this internal thing. A relational self will be like an us, or a we.

I started teaching these lectures called from me to we, which sounds cool, it rhymes. One of my online students had come for this in-person workshop and she got really angry at me very appropriately and she said, “I'm really mad at you.” I said, “What are you mad about?” She goes, “The title of your talk.” I said, “What's wrong with my title?” She goes, “It's me to we.” I said, “Well, what's wrong with that? We is important.” She goes, “Yeah, I know we is important, but why get rid of me?”

I go, “Oh, my God. You're right.” She goes, “Shouldn't I be exercising my body?” I go, “Yeah.” She goes, “Shouldn't I be understanding my personal history and where I came from and my relationship with my parents, parenting me inside out approach?” I said yes. “Shouldn't I sleep well?” I said, “Of course, you do all these things.” She goes, “Isn't that all the internal experience?” I said, “Yes, it is.” She goes, “Why would you want to dop me?” I said, “You shouldn't.” She goes, “Well, come up with another name.” I said, “Okay, well how about not only limited to an internal me, but also extended to a relational we?” She goes, “That doesn't rhyme at all.”

I said, “Okay, okay. If you can integrate itself, it would need to be a candle.” Now I'd say this is like a candle is both the wax and the light. You're going to be the wax of your body as a me, but the light of your relationships which is a we. If you integrate that, you maintain both somehow. “Me plus we equals mwe,” I said to her. She was very excited about it.

I've been using we mwe, M-W-E as the simple three-letter word. We've been getting all sorts of other foreign languages born from English, other languages to come up with their own version, like you don’t know it’s in Spanish and things like that. It's been fun, because mwe allows you to have your internal experience, but also puts right into the word the relational identity as a we;  me plus we equals mwe. That's what came from Namibia.

I was realizing that belonging and not just fitting in, but actually belonging where you're maintaining your me, but you really are part of a we, so you're a mwe, is I think for me the, or from mwe, it is the way the belonging lesson from Namibia has come through in what I'm working on now.

[1:01:25.2] MB: Clarifying this for the listeners and making sure that I understand it as well, this idea of the relational self; in a very real and scientific sense is the notion that our minds are composed of in one aspect are relationships with others and with the world as well, is that correct?

[1:01:42.0] DS: Absolutely. When you put the mind as this embodied relational, emergent process is coming from energy and information flow, then basically what you do is with that view, you realize skull and skin don't limit that flow. It's an artificial divide to put the mind and the self, which I think comes from the mind to limit that by your skull or by your skin. The system is energy and information flow just as you're saying, Matt. It’s inside your body and, underscore and, it is also in the energy information flow you are sharing from the body you’re born into, so you do have an internal me for sure. We're not denying that. And you have a relationship with other people and the nature around you, which just to make it two P’s, we'll call that the planet. It's people in the planet is the connection that creates your relational self. It's really an interconnectedness.

[01:02:42] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say, “Hi,” shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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