High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 170: Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love with Don Hutcheson, Author, Entrepreneur, and Podcast Host

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

What do highly successful people actually do to succeed? For 35 years as entrepreneur, inventor, author and coach, Don Hutcheson has experienced and studied the proven career-building strategies that people around the world have used for literally decades to create lives of success, satisfaction and freedom. Several times a week, he interviews individuals and experts from every career category and profession on his podcast “Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love” which he started in 2015 and has over 630 episodes. Don is the co author the book” Don't Waste Your Talent: The 8 Critical Steps to Discovering What You Do Best.” He has published two magazines and built a career planning company based on his concept, The Whole Person Technology, which Dr. Stephan Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effect People) describes as "Brilliant, powerful and practical."        In this interview, Don and Cindra talk about: Why 87% of people worldwide do not enjoy the work His Whole Person Technology Why you should start with “you who” not “your why” How we can find our purpose and do what we love The difference between systems and our true self You can find a full description of the Podcast and contact information for Don at cindrakamphoff.com/don.

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to episode 170 with Don Hutchinson. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best leaders, athletes, coaches, and consultants, All about the topic of mindset to help us reach our potential or be high performers in our field or our sport. Now before I head over to Don's

interview, I'm going to head over to iTunes and read a rating and review. This one is from MeVans425. MeVans says, practical, actionable advice. What a gem of a show with real practical advice. i love listening to each episode as i walk away with a nugget i can immediately apply to my life thanks so much for a great show thank you so much me vans 425 i super appreciate your comment and your rating over there on itunes if you listen to this podcast regularly or you're tuning in today and you really enjoyed it, I'd encourage you to head over to iTunes or iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher Radio,

wherever you're listening, and please give us a rating and review. That would be awesome. And keep these interviews free. So today I've interviewed Don Hutchinson. And what do highly successful people actually do to succeed? You know, for 35 years as an entrepreneur, investor, author, and coach, Don Hutchinson has experienced and studied the proven career building strategies that people around the world have used for literally decades to create lives of success, satisfaction, and freedom.

So several times a week, he interviews individuals and experts from every career category and profession on his podcast, Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love, which he started in 2015 and has over 630 episodes. Now, as a podcast host, I have such appreciation and respect for that. Don is the co-author of the book Don't Waste Your Talent, The Eight Critical Steps to Discover What You Do Best. He has also published two magazines and built a career planning company based on his concept, the whole person technology, which we talk about in this interview, which Dr. Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, described as brilliant, powerful, and practical. Now in this interview, Don and I talk about why 87% of people worldwide do not enjoy their work, his whole person technology, why you should start with your who, not your why,

how we can find our purpose and do what we love, and he talks about the difference between systems and our true self. Two of my favorite things in this podcast was our discussion about how our passions and interests are within us since we were born. I'd love your thoughts and comments on that. I definitely feel like my passion and interests were within me ever since I was born. So I'd love to hear what you think about that. And my favorite quote from this interview is,

quote, you are the master of your destiny, end quote. Before we head over to the interview, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for listening today. I'm grateful to have this podcast to share a positive message each week, you know, to really help you be at your best. And I've appreciated everyone who's reached out to me

to let me know that this podcast has helped you in various ways, maybe in your profession or as an athlete or coach or maybe somebody who works in mental training. So I just want to say thank you. And if you'd like to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you'd like to tell me something about the podcast or provide a suggestion of somebody who I should bring on as an expert guest or as a guest in general, or perhaps you're looking for somebody to help you with your mental game. So you can head over to my website, cindracampoff.com, or you can always reach me on Twitter at mentally

underscore strong. Without further ado, let's bring on Dawn. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. Today, I am delighted and excited to bring you a guest, Don Hutchinson. Don, thank you so much for joining us today. It is my pleasure. I'm excited to be here and look forward to our chat. I'm looking forward to talking to you more about your book and your podcast and just

the idea of how to discover our talent. So Don, what I'm wondering is, you know, just to start us off, could you tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about and what you do right now? Oh, sure. I guess as a lifelong entrepreneur, except for Uncle Sam for three years where I was a Russian linguist in the army, I've never had a boss. And I've been really just fascinated. I've been in publishing for about a dozen years and advertising for about a dozen years and in career planning about a dozen years. I'm aging myself, right?

And now on the internet with this podcast for just the last few years. And I've just always been fascinated with how we figure ourselves out, what makes people successful in every facet of that, not just the how much money they make, but, you know, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, physically, environmentally, socially, how do we make it work here on this plane of existence. And so it's led me to this podcast, me and my team and my partner, Jan Freund, to this podcast to address the issue head on every week with a few interviews of people around the world like you who have found their sweet spots. But they share the, like you do with athletes, there's no athlete that's ever made it to the top that went there in a straight line.

They're always ups and downs and turnarounds and defeats and victories. And so we just do that every week on the podcast. And it's been, you know, it's been very gratifying. Excellent. So the podcast name, Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love, over 600 episodes, which blows my mind on. I'm like, that's one of my goals to do for 600. But tell us, now you're doing the podcast, you've written a book on a similar topic, just kind of briefly tell us, how did you get here? And what's one of your highs and one of your lows in that point? Well, I feel very lucky that I got here by from the get-go by trusting my

instincts. I'd gotten out of the military after a few years of service, finished my undergraduate degree at Emory University in Atlanta, and of all things, Russian language and literature, go figure. I was just interested in literature. And I was ready to take a really great job at a private school there and teach Russian. I didn't, you know, business interested me a little bit, but not that much. And just before about a month and a half before I was to do that, a friend of mine was starting a magazine on the outdoor recreation and the environment. And he asked me to join him. And it wasn't particularly well fundedfunded, but I liked this guy, and I thought his idea was brilliant, so I joined him.

And that was probably the most critical decision of my life because since that time, since that decision, this was way back there in the good heavens, the mid-'70s, I've just been an entrepreneur and an inventor. And imagine if I'd just gone off into academia and, I mean, I wouldn't have stayed there, but I didn't know that. So I did that for about 10 years and I guess I have about a 10 or 12 year attention span. Then I, after leaving that enterprise, I got into the advertising space because I was fascinated with what advertising agencies did, and I still am, and did that for about 10 or 11 years. And that was a very gratifying time because I had

recruited some really brilliant partners and a great team of people. And we sort of set records, speaking of records, we set records around the world for the creative work that our team did. And that led me into the sort of the underpinning of what we're doing with the podcast today, an idea that was about the education and career planning space. And with a brilliant psychologist that I happen to be in the army with and also graduated from Emory University, we came up with a modality and an approach that, well, it's turned out to help, you know, 50 or 60,000 people over time and is rather seminal to how you figure out yourself and what you want to do.

So obviously, that's something we're going to dive into today, learn more about, like, how do we discover our own talent? How do we continue to do what we love? And what do we do if we don't do what we love or we're not doing what we love. So Don, you know, just before we kind of dive into the topic in terms of what your expertise is, you know, I always like to ask people the question about time that they failed and what they learned from it. And the reason I ask that question, especially at the beginning of this interview, you know, is I think to keep it real and to help people connect with you. But also, I think there's a lot we can learn from difficult times. So, what do you think, Don? What's an example of a time you failed and what you learned from it?

Oh, it's just real easy. It just is etched in my mind and the minds of my partners and allies indelibly. We had, as I said, we built a successful publishing company for a decade and a highly successful ad agency for 12 years, sold that to a big international firm. And I, with this brilliant psychologist, we created this thing, which today is called the Highlands Company that I'm affiliated with. I don't own it anymore. And we just set out on this path to solve the problem of how you figure yourself out and how you get to create an education and career plan that makes sense. And we did it for 11 years. And it was very successful. We licensed people around the world. And we were set to go for

the next big growth phase because we've been growing very aggressively. We had several hundred people that were licensed to present this stuff. And we got sideswiped like thousands, tens of thousands of other people by the dot-com crash. Yeah. And that was not a fun thing. We'd invested serious money into that and had allies around the world. And in that particular time, it just wasn't our karma to go forward. We ended up selling the company. And it was brutal. It was really brutal.

Because it was an idea that we believed a million percent in, still do. And the company's going on today, by the way. Of course, going very strong. But it was a big blow. So I'd had 25 years of success. I mean, I had setbacks and issues, but this was the first real serious setback that I ever had to face. So I had to regroup, which I did, you know, with going inside myself and the love of friends and family and just taking some time off to think about it. And then I moved forward and did some other things and invented another, another idea and another space that, that worked well.

But here we are 15 years later, that was in 2001, as listeners know. And what is it now? 17 years later. And we've had the podcast going on for three years and now we're taking all that work that we created and developed and putting it into an initiative called the Talent Team that uses the assessment and the whole person technology that we developed all these years later. But now we have this wonderful thing called the internet to help it get out to the world in a much greater way. So when you think about that, Don, in terms of like, what's the biggest lesson you learned

from that dot-com crash? And, you know, what's a take home? How can we apply what you learned? Well, there are a whole bunch of them. I mean, the net is that you just need to be mindful and just not so caught up in your idea that you don't have a contingency plan or that you don't have a fail safe plan. I mean, we weren't out there thinking we were bulletproof and that nothing could stop us. But, you know, after 25 years of a lot of success, we and all the feedback we had from clients from day one of this company I was was telling you about uh and also corporations you know from ibm to coca-cola we just thought we were rocking the house and uh we were but you know there were lots of people with with other great ideas and

resources that were hit the same way so just having a contingency plan plan or just, I don't know, sort of this conservative air of knowing that things like this can happen and you just need to be ready for it and just have some resources available that you might not have had otherwise. For sure. And, you know, I think about that time when you were with the Highlands Program, and that's where you wrote the book we're going to talk a little bit about today and where you developed the whole person technology, which you're continuing to use. So, you know, there's, I sort of believe that there's always a reason for everything. And these moments in time help us discover our talents, what we're intended to do, and, you know, just help us continue to gain these experiences that build on top of each other. Well, I couldn't agree more. And it's not as though when that stopped in 2001 that I said, oh, great, I'll go do something else and come back to this.

I had to move on. I just had to, I had to just cut those ties and with love and compassion and say, okay. And so, but yeah, I'm with you. I think there's, there's some kind of a great force in the universe that, you know, I stayed true to the concept. I knew the concept was right and worked. And I even did, did a development mental magazine for lawyers that was built on that, that worked very well. And so when so when I was time to do the podcast, it was obvious that the topic that we were going to do was around what makes people successful and how people get through this and how they take charge of their own destiny and not leave it up to outside forces and elements. And so, but I didn't know, honestly, when we started the podcast, I wasn't sure we were

going to introduce this thing called the talent team and provide all those know, honestly, when we started the podcast, I wasn't sure we were going to introduce this thing called the talent team and provide all those assessments, tools, and insights that we created way back then. I didn't have that in mind. I just thought, let's do a really powerful podcast. We were influenced by John Lee Dumas and Kate Erickson and their success. And I thought, okay, this will be meaningful. It'll add value.

I have three goals. After create something out of nothing, I want to do good, have fun, and make money. And I thought that in that order, and I just thought the podcast would be a way to do that. And we'd monetize it with sponsorships and so forth. Nice. Do good, have fun, make money. So let's dive into the podcast. Over 600 episodes of Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love. And you interview every Monday through Friday, you know, someone who has discovered his or her true talents and abilities and figured out how to use them doing what they love. So tell us about, you know, what are one or two themes that

you've learned in terms of listening to people's stories and how have they become to understand their talent and their ability or how have they decided to understand their talent and their ability, or how have they decided to move forward with doing what they love? Peter Drucker said in 1995, the father of modern management, according to many sources, Peter Drucker said in a Harvard Business Review article called Managing Oneself, most people think they know what they're good at. They're usually wrong. Furthermore, they're not good at knowing what what they're good at. They're usually wrong. Furthermore,

they're not good at knowing what they're not good at. Well, that sounds funny, doesn't it? It just does. How can that possibly be? Well, after studying this for almost 30 years, I can tell you, and looking at the statistics from Gallup after also 30 years of doing all this seminal research around the world, the reason 85% of people in last year's study, just launched this year, and 67% of people in the United States are not engaged in the work they do fully is because that's one of the key reasons. There are other factors, but if we know, people say you've got to start with your why. Okay, you've heard that from everybody. Well, okay. I think you start with your who. Until you know yourself, I mean, you know, the philosophers, the Greek philosophers have

been saying know thyself for thousands of years. But until you know that, until you really know who you are and what you're good at and several other factors, how can you possibly set a course to get somewhere? How can you know not only your why, but your what and your how and your when? How can you know that if you don't know, you know, what makes Sandra Kampoff, Sandra Kampoff or Don Hutchison, Don Hutchison? And most people don't. And so, you know, when you, the stats that you're just giving us about the Gallup poll, if I could add one more thing to that, you know, the Gallup poll suggests that 1% of U.S. employees say that they love what they do at work. So only 1%. Don, why do you think that is? Well, actually, somebody said that outside

of Gallup. I quoted that. There's some other study that was done that comes up with that stat. But well, because of the reasons that I said, I think we are so short term oriented and outer directed and wealth, power and status oriented. And I like making money. But I think we're so reactive in our decision making that we, you know, I heard the other day from a guest on the show that in New York City, there's this vicious, it's a little strong maybe, but there's this intense competition to get their kids into, are you ready? Not Harvard or Yale or whatever, but into kindergarten. Wow. Right. Does that make you cringe? I don't know about you, but that makes me cringe. I was out playing in the dirt and trying to just be a kid. So it's become even more intense. That's called helicopter parenting by another expert we had on the intrinsic internal rewards of what makes us unique, is it any wonder that we head off to,

my partner at the Highlands Company headed off to Princeton because he could get into Princeton, not because there was something he wanted to study there. And people can't tell you how many lawyers that I've interviewed and coached over the years in my past who headed off to law school and that huge commitment of time and money without ever interviewing a lawyer. Why? Well, why? Well, okay, because lawyers and doctors and it's that old

classic from the baby boomer generation of which I'm one that, well, you just want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or et cetera, et cetera, a dentist and take care of your career. Well, okay. How's that working for you? Lawyers are one of the most unhappy professions. And I've got a lot of lawyer friends and they're doing well and they like it, but lawyers as a whole are not that happy. So I think it's very hard unless you get your true north, as another guest of ours said, unless you get your true north and say, who am I? And you dig into that for a long time, it's going to be hard to pick that college or technical school or university or that first career that's going to be hard to pick that college or technical school or university or that first career that's going to be at least a starting point to figuring out your journey and

your strategy, your personal vision, if you will. So in terms of, Don, where do you tell us to start? If we're starting with who we are instead of why we do it, where do we start in terms of helping us understand what our talent is? You stop. Whatever you're doing, you stop. I don't care if you're 16 thinking about you want to go off to college or you're, you know, 66 looking at pre-retirement or retirement or mid-career, you stop and you get out of the matrix. We're all caught in the matrix and it's just the exigencies of life on this planet, especially in America. I'm proud to be an American. We're all caught in the matrix and it's just the exigencies of life on this planet, especially in America. I'm proud to be an American. We're just so intensely competitive.

But until you pull yourself out of that and give yourself time to think and feel and be in what you're doing and pay attention to it and not just keep charging ahead. Whether you're an artist or an entrepreneur or a marketing whiz, if you stop and you take some time, it may take you a month, it may take you a year and a half, but until you stop and pull back and pay attention to what's going on with you outside of your thinking, but inside of your whole beingness, which is far vaster than anything I can imagine, but I know we're not just our brains. Until you do that, it's hard to develop a true north. Absolutely. And when you think about, you know, there's hundreds of people you've interviewed now who are doing what they love, you know, what's one or two themes or insights you've learned from them? Well, they were able to, this sounds like a cliche, but we've done 650 interviews now, actually.

Well, they were able to do just that at a very young age or at some key point, one that we go through five or six turning points, they were able to get a perspective. They were able to trust their instincts and face their fears and listen to that wee small voice inside, whether they were, you know, six years old or, you know, at different stages of their life. the options in front of them without thinking they've got to just lock into that decision on that education or that job or that promotion opportunity without thinking about how it impacts the various dimensions of their lives. Because we're more than innate abilities after consciousness, which is the starting point in my view, but after innate abilities, you've got to factor in what you learn. Innate abilities are how you're hardwired. We can talk about that in a minute. But your skills are what you learn, your knowledge and skills. Your passions are what have been driving you since you were a little person. Your personal

style is your personality and emotional intelligence. Your family influence or influences are about as seminal as it gets. Your vision, I mean, your values have to do with your character. Your stage of adult development is your age and to do with your character. Your stage of adult development is your age and what influences you there. And then finally, your vision and goals is how you put all that together in some kind of blueprint to at least be a guide along the way. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah, you know, and I enjoy listening to your podcast. I think what I learned from people telling their stories is that it's not linear, right? That they have to leave one workplace or one career to move forward towards their passion and their love of what they're doing.

And I also really enjoy how you always ask them about their point of no return. Tell us what that means and what have you learned from your guests about the point of no return? Well, great question. That happens, again, it can happen when you're, that can happen when you're in organic chemistry your freshman year in college and realize that you don't have any science abilities because you could memorize formula in high school, but in college, you had to really think about it. That happened to me. So that was a point of no return when I realized I wasn't going to be a dentist.

But it can happen when you're, 650 interviews, it happens in all kinds of ways. We just had somebody on the show recently that was amazingly successful. This is a very young person, just turned 30, and they had a fabulously successful career in the pharmaceutical business, and they couldn't have been making more money for their age and their experience, but they just woke up one day after several years of that and said, wait a minute, money, this is great, but there was a whole other dimension to themselves. So whether, you know, we had a lawyer that was, oh gosh, in her early 40s that had been a managing partner of a top 100 law firm and had everything going for her, except one thing. It wasn't using her innate abilities. So while the abilities for managing things are entirely different than the abilities for solving intricate legal problems.

So she'd been using her management abilities, which were fine, but she'd been letting lie fallow her conceptual abilities to solve intricate legal problems. So frankly, she was just bored. She had the guts, the great courage to talk with her spouse and her family and her partners and say, hey, this isn't working for me. Of course, they were all scared, right? They thought, oh my gosh, she's running the show here. We've got this great income. We got all these perks and everything. But what the truth of it was, once she could come out with that and people could live with it for a couple of months, they were able to, she was able to,

they found somebody that could do the job even better than her. And she could move on into a dimension of corporate law that she loved and thrive even more. But how many people are willing to do that? One out of 50? I mean, not many. Because you don't want to upset the apple cart. And I respect that. to do that. One out of 50, I mean, not many, because you don't want to upset

the apple cart. And I respect that. I respect that. It's just, what's your life worth to you? I think that's one of the reasons for that statistic that you're talking about with high percentage of people who are highly dissatisfied with their work. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it is. I mean, fear is, again, a cliche, but fear comes up as a top reason, and just the acculturization, we called it the lemming conspiracy, you know, that systems are the backbone of our world, whether it's a family system or an educational system or a religious system or a corporate system. That's the mechanical structure, the Newtonian physics of our society, right? And they serve a purpose. Without systems, it'd be chaos. But systems are not the heart and

soul of the world. They're just a good structural piece. The heart and soul is the quantum physics of it, in my opinion, which is your heart and spirit and what drives you as an individual, your values and your passions and your interest in how you want to contribute to yourself and the world at large. And if you can pay attention to that as well as the other factors, then you've got a real chance of falling into that small percentage, whatever it is, you know, 20% or so of people who really just thrive in what they do. I think what you just said was really important. So I want to repeat it. You know, it's figuring out and listening to what drives you and your passion and how do

you want to contribute to yourself and the world? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I started this journey. Can I tell you how I got into this? Absolutely. I started this journey when I was the fortunate founder of an advertising agency that really thrived for about a dozen years, and thanks to three brilliant partners and some great staff people, won critical acclaim and was highly profitable around the world. And I was talking to a young superstar at our firm, and this was way back then, this was 1988. And I said, how did you get from, you know, this good school in Atlanta to this other fine school? She went to an Ivy League school and found herself at Hutchison Shetsey. And she said, well, I took this assessment. And so I immediately thought of the Myers-Briggs or the Strong-Campbell or a zillion other assessments out there. And she said, no, no, this was something that took seven

hours, seven hours, okay, took a couple of days. And it told you how you're hardwired, which you can know at 14, to communicate, problem solve, learn, make decisions, etc. And you got this extensive reporting and you got this long feedback for a couple of hours. And she said, I saw how my innate talents laid out. Well, 10 days later, this is where I lived in Atlanta. I found myself in Buckhead, Atlanta at this research firm, and I went through that assessment over a couple of days. And it changed the course of my life because it explained me to me like nothing ever had. And I'd had a successful career. You know,

I was already in my early 40s. And so I was so taken with it that I ended up, I've been in that field for 12 years. It was fabulous, but it was time for something different. So ended up with the consent of my partners and all, we sold it to a top international firm. And we developed this program with this brilliant psychologist that utilized that as a starting point. We turned it into a computerized assessment, not just a paper and pencil. Now it's three hours over, you know, at your computer that you can do at your own pace, but that was the starting point. And like I said, the research on that has been around for 90 years and a million people have been through it, but we built on top of that,

the other factors I alluded to earlier, not just that's a great starting point, but then you've got to put into what we call the whole person approach where you've got to look at the other dimensions of yourself. So we developed, we ended up developing a three-month course that helps students and people at different stages of their life do that. And the most exciting thing about this, Sandra, was that we did research, hard research on the outcomes and just blown away by it because we worked with corporations came to us. So we worked with Fortune 500 corporations and they put managers and employees through it. And what we found is if you get that compass, if you get that true north

and you get your who, then the overall performance improvements, optimism went up 52%, and ability match went up 30%. Overall performance went up 36%, not three or six, which are high, but 36%. If you get those things in sync, then you are the master of your own destiny. I mean, it doesn't mean that life isn't hard, doesn't mean you're not going to have setbacks, but you're at a different place than if you don't know your true North. Absolutely. So Don, tell us the name of the assessment. Yeah, well, it's called the Highlands Ability Battery. And that's what it's been called for a long time.

And then when we sold the company in 2001, this wonderful group of people took it over. I don't own the company anymore. We have access to the content through because we're allies and friends, but, um, yeah, it's, it's been around through a research foundation that we, uh, we worked with and, um, it's, it's really a, it's really a game changer. That's what we're going to be offering through the talent team here in the next couple of months where you can go through this and get the starting

point of understanding your, your 19 innate abilities and how they work, work with you and what you're good at. And it works interpersonally works in personal relationships as well as in your career or a profession or whether you're in a corporation. Oh, excellent. Thanks for clarifying that and telling us about that. And, you know, I think about what I'm hearing is there's true consequences and

outcomes to understanding your true north and, you know, what is your talent and your innate talents. Don, let's talk a little bit about your book. So, Don't Waste Your Talent, The Eight Critical Steps to Discovering What You Do Best. Tell us what made you decide to write the book. And then I'm going to ask you just a few other questions, follow-up questions from that. Sure, sure. Well, we've been doing the company, which was then the Highlands Program, today the Highlands Company. We've been doing that for four or five years. And we had so many case histories of just thousands and thousands of students and people at different turning points, not just students, but adults at all stages, that it was obvious that we had to codify this in a way that we could get the story out there and reach wider audiences.

So we just outlined the journey of what got this psychologist and I into this niche in the first place. He was the, it was like on a small scale, it was like Jobs and Wozniak. I was the Jobs, the guy that had the idea and he was the Wozniak that had the science and a brilliant, brilliant man. Bob McDonald is his name. And so we figured out that we deduced that it was time to get that out. So we put together this book. Actually, we'd written one book that addressed the problem of systems called The Limit Conspiracy,

How to Redirect Your Life from Stress to Balance. And that was what I talked about earlier, how hard it is to think outside the dots. And that book had done well. And now we wanted to go deeper into the whole personal approach. So we wrote a book that outlined all of that. Excellent. You know, one of the things I really liked about the book, so I appreciate that I had the opportunity to read it before this interview, that you talk a little bit about your true self versus your system self. And you've already talked a little bit about systems, but tell us the

difference between those and why understanding those two, your true self and your system self, what's the outcome for us? Well, we are, we live in systems. I didn't know too much about systems still. Bob and I got together and he had this whole PhD in psychology and explained it all to me. But, you know, we started out in family of origin. And whether we have just the most loving family, or we have a family that's not so functional or whatever, it's ideal of the former. But we are so influenced by the family system and the overall family system that it shapes everything that we do. Whether you want to be a lawyer because your dad was a lawyer,

or that's the last thing you want to do because your dad was a lawyer that's how that works and then the expectations of family extended family have a huge influence on you so the first leap that people have to make and again this is what's fantastic about the interviews we've had everybody talks about this in the well the most people talk about it when we do their interviews, the influence that the parents had. And so your system self is just being so outer directed and short term focused and wealth, power and status oriented and reactive in your decision making. Like I said, my partner at the time went to Princeton from a good private school because he could get into Princeton. That's not a good enough reason. I mean, maybe he, I mean, it turned out okay. He ended up graduating from Emory, but he didn't know enough. I mean, the counseling we get in our schools and everything is well

meaning, but it's not very exhaustive because they just want you to get into a good school because it makes them look good. And they have about as much information on you as they can grasp in a one hour or two hour interview, but it's not enough. So, you know, the first part is breaking free into the clearing to listen to your own self. And hopefully your parents will be supportive. If they're not, then you've got to have the courage to say, well, when I told my dad, I didn't want to be a dentist because I didn't have a clue what real chemistry was about. To his credit, he said, well, son, it's your life. So, you know, I went on and finished my undergraduate degree and became an entrepreneur. But, you know, other people have to fight against the torrent of their parents' expectations. But you've got to do it. You've

got to break free. And so would you say your system self is when you're outer directed and your true self is when you're inner directed and your true self is when you're inner directed? Yeah, absolutely. When you're inner directed and you're meaning driven and not just wealth, power, status driven, and you're long-term oriented and not short-term oriented and you're strategic, not just reactive, that's your true self. The people we have on the show, the vast majority,

it's been amazing that we've been real blessed to have all these amazing people. But yeah, you don't get to where you are. We hadn't had one person on the show that was in this disconnect state that sold out to the system. And again, it doesn't mean corporations or families or religions are bad. They're not at all. They're just taking care of themselves, but they can't take care of you. And so once you can see yourself apart from the system, you may decide to be a lawyer like your dad or mother. You may

decide to stay at a big corporation that you've been in for 20 years because guess what? It uses your talents and it uses a lot of your values, but you have to have the guts to think of other options and just explore if there are other ways to express who you are as well as what you're doing. And so what I'm hearing from you is like the best way to do that is to really give yourself time to think and feel the emotions and get connected with them. Yeah, yeah. You know, I love journaling. You know, I think journaling is amazing if you only journal for five minutes a day, which is what I do.

But if you write down what you're thinking and feeling and the experiences you had that day, just in a few sentences, you do it on your computer, do it. I like hard copy stuff too. If you do that, and then you look at it a month later or six months later, you'll be amazed. It's like a little short story or short novel of your life. You'll realize that, good heavens, I've been doing great at this job in terms of the economics and the parts of it I like, but overall, I'm stuck in this particular role that only uses, like the managing partner of the law firm. You know, she was good at that, but there was a whole side of her that was even more expansive and used more of who she was and allowed her to contribute more, not just for herself,

but for the organization and for her clients. But she had to get quiet to come to that. Oh, okay. Excellent point. So Don, when you're, you know, I think about your book, you know, Don't Waste Your Talent, Eight Critical Steps to Discovering What You Do Best. Tell us a little bit about these eight critical steps and why they're important. Well, the first one, thanks. The first one is, the whole idea of the whole person approach is to not be reactive, not be knee-jerk, and not just to take one dimension of yourself. As I said earlier, we are emotional, spiritual, intellectual, relational, environmental, social beings. We're not just, Chester Bernard said, another favorite quote is, we hire people for their skills, but the whole person shows up for work. Well, we're not just skills or knowledge. And we are whole people. So we put together this look at the thing. So after you understand how you're hardwired, that's a very key starting

point. But then look at what you've learned over time. Because you can't really fight against your innate abilities like me in chemistry. I could have muscled my way into chemistry, but I've never been good at it because I'm not wired that way. But you can learn skills. If you're an introvert, you can learn how to do sales skills or give presentations. And there are all kinds of things we can learn the knowledge that we get. Your passions and interests, like I said, have been in you since you were born. It's amazing how many people have tell us they discovered those or they followed their passions early on or they didn't follow them till 30 years later, but they're always in there. So if you're quiet and you, what do you gravitate toward? You know, what do you do when you don't

have anything to do? I mean, if you're structural, you might find yourself, if you're real busy and working 60-hour work weeks, you might find yourself enjoying taking apart a bicycle or fixing your car or something. I mean, because you have these spatial relations abilities, and that gives you some satisfaction. So it's important to, you know, to pay attention to that. Then personal style, of course, everybody knows from the Myers-Briggs and from the powerful resource called emotional intelligence, you can't really fight that either. Because again, if you're a high introvert, it's going to be hard for you to be the lead salesperson on this account, because that's not how you like to engage people. You like more quiet time. Then family influences,

I've talked about in detail. Those are vital because we tend to model those in a certain way or fight against them. Your core values, of course, are the key to your character. What do you care about? If you're a health person, do you want to be working for a cigarette company, you know, or some other company that sells bad food? And then the career development cycle is we go through seven turning points in our lives. And every five or six years, we talk about this in the podcast, every five or six years, the one that's so famous is the midlife turning point. But from the time we're a young person, we go through turning points where things are altogether different when you're 22 than when you're 42, 52, or 72. So you've got to take into account those influences. And if you look at all this stuff holistically, there's an overall

personal vision side where you can say, okay, I've got this template that's not locked in stone by any stretch, but at least it's a basic structure or outline of you and your options. And you keep working on it all your life. Most people spend more time planning their annual vacation than they do their careers because they just get locked into that matrix or that living conspiracy. But if you've got this template and you like to take notes and you like to journal or, you know, just be a part of a women's circle or a men's circle where you chat about what matters, you know, just be a part of a women's circle or a men's circle where you chat about what matters to you. You just keep active in your beingness, if you will,

not just in your worker self or your system self. You know, and Don, probably the most impactful thing that you just said to us was like your passions and your interests are there even when you're born. They are. It's allowing yourself to get in touch with them and listen and, you know, then acting upon them. Right, right, right. I didn't know until I was in my 20s that I just,

I'm an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, but I don't know my mother's profile, but she could be in a line at the movie theater and she wasn't an extrovert at all. She was an introvert like me, but she, you know, she just connected with people. She just had this heart-centered approach to connecting with people, whether she was in a store or where she went to church or whatever. And I inherited that. And I, yeah, I connect with all people of all walks of life and all backgrounds. And so that was just an innate character proclivity that has held me in good stead throughout my life with the people I work with, the clients that I attract and so forth. So it's all in there. It's always in there. You just have to pay attention to it and give yourself permission to listen to it. That we small voices it's called. Excellent. So Don, if people want to learn more about the book,

don't waste your talent or the podcast, Discover Your Talent, Do What You Love. How would you tell them to reach out to you or where can we find you? Well, just go to, thank you, discoveryourtalentpodcast.com. They can go there. There's a contact box in the upper right-hand corner. They can contact us and tell us, you know, whatever they want to tell us or whatever they want to know. And, you know, we'll get back to them. And if they're interested in this program called the talent team that we're coming out with in a couple of months, they can say, put me on a list. And we'll, you know, we'll certainly do that.

And when we come out with that initiative or that project, we'll, we'll let them know that, you know, they can go to the podcast and listen there. They, we've got a Facebook page, discover your talent podcast. We're on Twitter. And also on LinkedIn, Don Hutchison, Discover Your Talent podcast. So we're out there. We're out there in all the major social media. I'm impressed.

650 episodes over three years. So that takes a lot of grit and passion, Don. Well, I'll tell you, we've got a great, thank you. We're now doing three interviews a week instead of five because we're going to introduce the talent team and we just couldn't we couldn't breathe and so but but even three is a lot of commitment and yes yeah it we've got a wonderful team we've got a wonderful team and I'm proud of it and I'm especially gratified that we get to know people like you and have people like you on the show that share their stories because the feedback we have from around the world is just amazing.

It's just amazing. We want to keep that growing and now offer these resources and tools to those that are interested through the talent team that allows people to not just get inspiration from our listeners and our experts to actually take action and find themselves in that small percentage of people that are using the best of who they are. Excellent, Don. You know, I loved just hearing more about how you discovered your talent and how you're helping other people do the same and podcasts and your book is so impactful. Don, here are the things that I got from your interview, the most important things. I loved that you talked about how we really need to start with who, not why. So who we are instead of why we do what we do. I think that's really insightful. Talked about how when we understand our true north, that allows us to be a master of our destiny.

And then, you know, just in terms of that our passion and our interest are inside of us, you know, when we're born. And so it's about discovering that and really listening and being in tune with our thoughts and our emotions and what's going on in inside of us. Well, I think you got the whole deal right there. Thank you so much, Don. So, you know, if you could give us some final advice or final thoughts, what do you have? I would say, please stop. Just please stop. And whether you're making all the money you want to make and you've got everything you want or you're working, doing in your sweet spot, you're Michael Jordan playing basketball every day, just be reflective a little bit.

I think consciousness in terms of just being aware of yourself and your spiritual, emotional, intellectual, relational self is the vital piece. And just, if you can just stay there, keep your health, keep those you love close to you and be respectful of others that you can do anything you want to do and we'll all benefit. Outstanding, Don. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and sharing your passions with us today. It has been my pleasure, Sandra. I wish you continuing success. Thank you, Don. Thank you so much for joining me today on the High Performance Mindset. If you'd like to learn more about the mental game in business, sport, and in life, you can pick up your own copy of the Beyond Grit book and workbook at

beyondgrit.com. The book and workbook covers 10 practices to help you gain the high performance edge and provides practical strategies and tools that work. Adam Thielen, a Pro Bowl wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings, wrote the foreword, and you can learn his insights on how he implements the mental game. And a special offer for the listeners of the podcast And you can learn his insights on how he implements the mental game. And a special offer for the listeners of the podcast, you can use the code FREE SHIP, that's capital letters and all one word, FREE SHIP, to get free shipping of the book and workbook at beyondgrit.com. Have an outstanding day, my friends, and be mentally strong. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset.

If you liked today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.