High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 522: No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama with Cy Wakeman, Researcher, Speaker and Consultant

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Cy Wakeman is a drama researcher, international leadership speaker, and consultant. In 2001 she founded Reality-Based Leadership. She is the author of three books: Reality-Based Leadership: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace and Turn Excuses Into Results (2010), NY Times Bestseller, The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace: Know What Boosts Your Value, Kills Your Chances, and Will Make You Happier (2013), and her new release No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results (2017). In 2017 and 2018, she was named as one of the Top Global Leadership Gurus by Global Gurus, a Top 100 Leadership Expert to Follow on Twitter, and was deemed “the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace.” In this interview, Cy and Cindra discuss: What it means to operate with “no ego” How our stress comes from our stories How suffering is optional Ways to question your thinking Tools for Reality-Based Leadership The actual time we waste in work-place drama…and it is astonishing! HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/522 FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong TO REACH CY: Cy Wakeman & Reality-Based Leadership (realitybasedleadership.com) Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best. So you can accomplish all your goals and dreams.

So I'm over here following my big dreams. And I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Miss Pac-Man. Yes, the 1980s game Miss Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the High Performance Mindset. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset podcast. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm grateful that you're here for episode 522 with Cy Wakeman. I heard Cy speak this summer at the National Speakers Association Influence Conference and loved every minute of her on stage. And I'm so excited to have her on the podcast today. I have been referring to this conversation with my coaching clients, and I've been thinking about it quite a bit just as I continue to referring to this conversation with my coaching clients, and I've been thinking

about it quite a bit just as I continue to understand and get connected with my own psychology, and I know you are going to love this episode. So make sure you grab a piece of paper, take some good notes, because there are some gems, some truth bombs in this episode. Now let me introduce you to Sai. She is a drama researcher and international leadership speaker and consultant. In 2001, she founded Reality Based Leadership and she's the author of three books, Reality Based Leadership, the New York Times bestseller, the Reality Based Rules of the Workplace, and her new release, No Ego, How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Ent entitlement, and drive big results. In 2017 and 18, she was named as one of the top global leadership gurus by Global Gurus, a top 100 leadership expert to follow on Twitter, and was deemed the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace. In this interview, Sai and I talk about what it actually means to operate with no ego, how our stress comes from our stories.

That's a major truth bomb, so I look forward to hearing what you think about that one. How suffering is optional, ways to question our thinking, and tools for reality-based leadership. She talks also about the actual time we waste in workplace drama, and it is astonishing. To find the full show notes and description, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 522 for episode 522. And without further ado, let's bring on Cy. Cy Wakeman, thank you so much for joining us here on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. You are so welcome. I'm so pumped to have you. I just realized it's like July when

I heard you speak at the National Speakers Association Conference. So I can't believe it's been that many months, but I'm looking forward to talking to you. I felt like your content was so incredibly powerful and I can't wait just to dive in for the audience here today. Thank you. I'm so glad you followed up with the invite. So as we get started, give us a sense of what you're passionate about and just give us an overall understanding of what you do right now. Sure.

My passion is helping people realize that life just isn't as hard as they think it is. That suffering is super optional and most often self-imposed. And so as I watch people go through the same life, some go as if they're floating on air and some go as if they're swimming through mud, their choice. And just from the time I was young, I just thought, you know, this could be so much easier if you would let it be. And so I'm just helping people find easier, more effortless paths through life. And that's really my passion is not everything's a hustle, not everything's a struggle. If you're in the zone, things come pretty easy.

Yeah, I love it. I, after hearing you speak, picked up your book, No Ego. Here we go. How leaders can cut through the cost of workplace drama and entitlement and drive big results. So to get us started, tell us what no ego really means. So it's probably aspirational to think that we can live with no ego because ego is a part of us and the consumer and the chooser of that part of you, which shows up as ego. And the way I help people understand ego is it's a part of your mind that unfortunately many of us learn to see the world through and it's a distorted view of the world, but we don't see its distortions. We've become blind to its distortions.

So the way I explain like what's ego to people is, is that part of our mind that when we're looking through the lens of ego, as I said, our world's distorted. It's like wearing a pair of prescription glasses with the wrong prescription and what ego does is when we're I call it toggled down because if you think about having a light switch invisible on your forehead just a metaphor you can toggle down or you can toggle up and when you're toggled down you're seeing the world through the lens of ego. And what ego does is it takes fact, and it adds, leaving me less room between our cars than I prefer. That's all that happens. And if I stuck with just the fact, I, with my goal being safety and more room, would slow down and allow somebody to come in and I would get for myself the room I liked. And there'd be no victims. There'd be no villains. There room I liked. And there'd be no victims. There'd be no villains.

There would be no drama. There'd be no story. But what happens without us noticing it is we move immediately into story. Oh, it's a guy in a pickup truck. He's a most chauvinist pig. He thinks he owns the road. He doesn't care about other people's safety. He, whatever

story comes up for you. So now we have fact plus story. And most of us believe that hook, line and sinker is truth. That's why my best advice is stop believing everything you think just because you thought it, you're not the thinker, you're the observer. So when my mind does that, I just observe it and go, you know what, let's go back to what we know is true. Otherwise, we make horrible decisions. Instead of slowing down, I speed up like game on, I'm going to take this guy. It's outside my value system. It's consuming energy I didn't have to consume. It is moving out of effortlessness into strife and effort. And so ego is really that lens that says, I'm the victim. Somebody else is the villain.

It's fact plus story. And the best thing we can learn to do is question our thinking and question our story. Is it true? Can I possibly know that to be true? And really look at who am I when I believe that? And who am I when I don't believe that? And, you know, what choice would I like to have? So it's really using our primitive brain, because it leaves us with just the choice of fight, flight, freeze, spawn. And when we're in the higher part of our brain, brain coherence, we have hundreds of options, not just four or six.

Yeah. Love that, Sai. I'm thinking about a confrontation I had a few weeks ago that I'm still processing. And I'm thinking about what you just said through, you know, that lens of that it's fact plus story. And really the thing that's frustrating me is the story that I'm creating around it. It's not necessarily the fact. And I appreciate. And that's where all stress comes from is the story. Reality is never as harsh as the story. Yeah, reality is never as harsh.

And we tend to make up a lot of stories that aren't actually true or accurate. In your book, you talk a little bit about the difference between ego and confidence. And I'd really like you to clarify that for people who are listening, tell us what the difference is there, in your opinion. So ego has a role to play in our lives. And it at times keeps us safe. It tells us where our boundaries are. It's really good for two-year-olds to help them differentiate. So I'm not anti-ego. We just overuse it.

And one of the ways we overuse it is we confuse it in today's, especially the Western world, with confidence. And confidence is very different. So ego is I'm convinced that I am right and others are wrong. It's a polarized game. It is I'm the smartest person in the room. Confidence is I'm pretty confident I can bring a good data point to the collective crowdsourcing Google search in the room. Confident is I have something to contribute, not that I know the answer or that I am right and others are wrong. So confidence is collaborative, creative, cumulative. It maintains curiosity. I'm confident to what I can bring and I'm curious what you can add. And so ego is beyond confidence because it

is a knowing that's usually inaccurate. And so confidence is all about not just confidence in what I bring to the table, but confidence in collectively we're genius. And so if we can create an environment where we all can bring to the table what we add, I'm confident we will come up with our best possible solution at this time. And so it's very different. Ego really sees the world as one up or one down instead of let's all bring it to the table and see what we're doing.

And you can see this. I know some of your listeners are athletes. A lot of them are leaders. It's the difference when you have a team that is focused on a single player or a team that's really collaborating together that uses the talents of multiple players. Ego gets us into a single point of failure system and confidence gets us into a system that's safer because it has multiple points of failure has to happen for things to not work well. So I'm hearing is confidence is more a collaboration,

maybe not feeling like you need to have all the answers, but we can find the answers together as a group. Whereas ego is more like I have the answer, one up, one down. As we kind of talk through this idea of no ego, I'm curious, what are the ways that you would suggest people, leaders, athletes, you know, people who want to thrive, how would you suggest that they choose more confidence over or over being driven by their ego? That's a great question. You know, for those of you out there on a side note feeling imposter syndrome, it probably is a sign you're operating out of ego and imposter syndrome is a very accurate thing to be feeling like a lot of people are like I feel like an imposter I want to get rid of that no listen to that because

imposter syndrome is you either think you have to have all the answers or you have a narrow margin of error for yourself. Whereas if you're an ego, that imposter syndrome is that sneaking suspicion that you are taking a high risk approach, and you hear about this from so many great researchers, is to have the total package of knowledge plus vulnerability, some healthy pride plus humility. It is showing up as Brene Brown would say, without your armor, ego is armor. And confidence is, I can show you my soft underside of my belly. And I'll take my hits as they come. None of them will be disastrous. I mine everything for learning. I have this healthy sense where I can say, here's what I did that helped and contributed. And here's where I'm still growing and learning. And so it has to do with balance. The most confident people are the ones who can be the most self-reflective.

They have periods of their time where they reflect and contemplate. But a lot of the C words will help you know your own confidence, collaboration, curiosity, creativity, connectivity. Like if you're feeling disconnected, you're probably an ego. And so the old way of learning to act and be in a play, I get my part, I win and I memorize my script. And then we come together and we try and make it work. And we have a dress rehearsal and then we put the play on is kind of the ego track. It's single focus. It's me doing my part well and playing well with others a little bit, but I'm still the star. Confidence is more about improv. I show up with my humanness and combined with your humanness

that can be pretty funny um and so if we start and I say let's go to the or you say let's go to the store and I immediately negate you and say I don't want to go to the store. I want to start over. Let's go to school. I've one-upped you. I have said, you're wrong. I want to be right. It's in duality. And confidence is transcending duality. It's the ability to build on whatever you bring forward. So if you say, I want to go to the store, I'm like, let's do that. And while we're there, let's pick up some vodka because mother's coming over today. I not only build on it with the goal of funniness, but I leave you something to build on as well. It's inclusionary, not exclusionary. It's really the new way forward. Yeah, I think that and the new way forward, because I think, you know, as leaders,

we don't want our leaders to have really high ego. You know, I think that creates more of a disconnect between yourself and the leader. And there was something that you said at the NSA event, I think near the beginning, and you said, what if you realized you were the observer, not the thinker? And you mentioned that a little bit, you know, a few minutes ago, and I was like, whoa, that was a really powerful idea for me. And I was curious if you could kind of share, what does it mean to be the observer, not the thinker? And how does that allow us to be more confident over choosing more of like this ego? The ego. It definitely loosens the ego's grip on our reality with this realization. So there's basically

two things that I and my team teach first off whenever we work with leadership groups and employee groups. And it's this concept of ego. And there's two things you need to do as a human being. You have to know how your mind works. Otherwise, you'll keep getting played by your ego. And there's two things you need to do as a human being, you have to know how your mind works. Otherwise, you'll keep getting played by your ego. And you have to understand and accept how reality works. Otherwise, you'll argue with reality, but that's the argument you'll lose like 100% of the time. So most of our stress and strife and drama comes from being played by your ego and arguing with reality. So a lot of people believe they're the thinker and we take them through some exercises to help them understand they're not the thinker. They're the observer of their thinking that they're always

being thought. Now you can commission thinking like I shall do calculus now, but even then it's a calculus, you'll have a distraction about your grocery list. When you wake up in the morning, your first thought isn't of your choosing. You are already being thought when you wake up. When you sit to meditate, if you were the thinker, you could stop and start all thinking. And so the sooner people realize that their mind is like a radio receiver, that there's many signals out there, it's about what they tune into and choose to believe, that frees people up. Like there are oftentimes, I believe, next week something bad will happen.

I don't believe it, but the thought crosses my mind. The superpowers, I get to choose whether I believe it. And I'm like, you know, gosh, that's one thought. And some good things will happen and some neutral things will happen. And I'll just continue on with my day. And that's where the true power comes in is being able to observe your own thinking rather than wholeheartedly believe your thinking. And I'm curious, because I completely agree with that, you know. And I'm, and I think by being the observer, we disconnect ourselves with the thought. We can just kind of see the thought for what it is, not who we are.

And I'm curious because I know people are wondering what's an exercise people could try on their own to help them realize that they can be the observer. one of the best things i recommend is sam harrison's waking up app any type of meditation will really get you skilled at observing not believing your thoughts i also give people just a lot of um ways to question their thinking so one you gotta tune into what you're thinking and then secondly i'm like i would question that um can I know that for sure and so we have all kinds of um things one of my favorites called edit your story exercise and if you're feeling stressed I guarantee you it's your story not your reality and one of the things to do to get things beyond the ego is to bring it to paper and Byron Katie talks about this in the work, but put it on paper, everything that you're believing, uncensored, and then go back and edit that story and take out any assignment

of motive, any judgment, anything you can't possibly know to be true. Get to the facts. And once you start to practice differentiating between the facts of the situation, what's relevant and what's not relevant, you'll get really clear on how often you add in irrelevant information. I can give you an example. I had a gentleman I coached recently. he said, oh my gosh, I just have had the most horrible day. My boss, who's a micromanager called me up. He's checking on this project and I absolutely know what he's doing. He's got this master plan to cancel this project. If he does, it's my fourth project canceled. I'm going to end up being fired.

I have a kid in veterinarian school who wants to save the pandas. And basically pandas in Asia will be endangered because of this horrible manager I have. Like, wow. And true story. I'm cutting out an hour worth of dialogue. And we got down to it. And I said, let's write it all down. And basically it came down to my boss called, check the status of a project. It's behind. I need to update it. It could be something that is no longer relevant to the organization. And as a side note, I have a kid in veterinary school. Now, when you look at the two realities, one's pretty easy to get through in the day, the other one, not so much.

Absolutely. And we suffer all the time. We pre-suffer, we post-suffer, we group suffer. You know, for me, workout comes to mind. When I see that this afternoon, I've got a five mile run. It's at one this afternoon, it's 11 o'clock, I can start pre-suffering. I can be like, oh, that is going to hurt. That is going to be horrible. How would I know? I'm running on the beach. It could be last time I was out there, I saw dolphins. And then I go back and remember past like, Oh, it's going to be hot today. Now we're group suffering. We haven't even stepped foot out into a beautiful beach where we get to move our bodies, which usually I really enjoy, but it's the story that creates all this suffering. Yeah. Right. And I appreciate what you said at the beginning about suffering is optional and tends to come from our stories. I, you know, Sai, I know you mentioned this in your book, and I just want people to pick up your book, No Ego, because you actually give us the step-by-step ways to like edit our story, you know, sit down and write what's happening, you say, and then get a highlighter,

go through it and underline what is actually fact, and then go through these facts and ask yourself, do I know this for sure? And then on a separate page, write down the facts that have survived your questioning. So I think we can all do this with times, you know, with lots of things in our lives, we don't even maybe realize that we're creating a story. And it makes you so much less reactive. Like I recently met with a relative and he said, oh, it looks looks like you put on some weight and before those were like fighting words I'm like screw you and my body's not an apology and and instead I just listened to what he said you have put on weight and I asked myself is that true and yeah

I put on about five pounds um and so I just said you know um that is such a great observation. It's that's so true. And there was just nowhere to argue from there. He was just like, well, what else do you want to talk about? We get into, sometimes we believe things that aren't true, that stress us out. But sometimes we fight over things that are true. It's like, you know, you haven't been an attentive manager lately you know I've noticed that about myself too it's like I've been kind of inattentive like being confident and being able to accept all of you is is a really great place to start in leadership especially because it takes 90% of your battles and dissolves them. So like editing your story dissolves most of the problem before you even have to solve it. So when I work with teams,

I really focus on how do we edit the story? Because most of what you think is a problem doesn't even exist. How do we dissolve it? And then let's problem solve for what truly is an issue where we can improve next that is so powerful and you just said something like accept all of you and I think maybe sometimes we don't want to see maybe the imperfections um and maybe that's one of the reasons that we tell ourselves a different story yeah or seeing things as not perfections or imperfections, just part of it. You know, internal family systems, I come from a therapy background, internal family systems, it's really

all about welcoming all parts, even the one who like is internal nag, like there's value in all of it. There's value in all of it. And I think as leaders with 360s and performance evaluations, and we've really skewed people to hide what they've been conditioned to think is not culturally acceptable, and to overplay, you know, things that are culturally acceptable. And I think in the new workplace, just welcoming all parts of us, welcoming all parts of teammates. And I'm not talking about the destructive part. You know, a lot of people like this is just how I am, I'm gonna bring my whole self to work. And I'm like, you know what, I welcome your whole self, but I'd rather you bring your most evolved self to work. Like, because all of those parts can play at different levels. They aren't an excuse to act poorly, but I really think we need to welcome all parts. And you said something earlier that I want to just get a little more clarity on. And you said said our stress comes from our stories. Tell us what you mean by that.

So most of the time, a reality, I would say for me all the time, my reality is just my reality. And I've noticed my lifetime, I've always been supported with visible and invisible help. What comes my way? Let me start this way. A lot of suffering in human life is because we haven't gotten really good at two things. We haven't gotten good at impermanence, welcoming what's coming and letting go of what's leaving. So our story that we're losing something or our story that something unwelcome is coming is what causes our pain, not the coming and the going. We also think in a lot of duality, like this is good or this is bad, which is a judgment. It's a story about what's good or bad instead of it just is. And so when we look at reality, there's not a lot of suffering. But when we add story to it, there is suffering.

So I'm trying to think of a good example to, I'm out hiking. And out of the corner of my eye, I see something squiggly on the path. And I think one thought, snake. And I'm hyperventilating. And I'm suffering. As I move closer, I see it's just a rope off someone's saddlebag. You have to ask yourself, what caused my suffering? The reality, the rope?

Or the immediate story, the jump to conclusion, snake? Yeah. And when I can start to see that the rope was not a threat, that it was my story, my name for it that was a threat, you'll start to see how often you take fact, add story, and then suffer. Yeah. And I appreciate what you're saying about leadership-based reality, or you said, no, reality-based leadership. Yeah. And it's more about telling yourself what's actually reality instead of listening to the story. Tell us a little more about what reality based leadership means to you. So it really is helping people understand that drama is emotional waste.

Drama is any energy that goes away from well-being and happiness and results at work. So if you think about energy leaks, I think leadership's all about energy management. If you think about energy leaks, when we are looking at drama, how do you get rid of waste? So if drama is emotional waste, usually it's process improvement. And how do you get rid of emotional waste? It's mental process improvement. So I've come to believe that a leader, the role of a leader isn't about motivating people. It's not about inspiring people. It's also not about that opposite. But it's just helping people use better mental processes to eliminate emotional waste. And so, you know, just like when

you're working with somebody in their process, you clean it up, and it goes more effortless. We can do that with our mental processes as well. And I think that's really where so many people have. As leaders, we are letting people in the name of diversity, just think any way you want. Now, I'm not for suppressing how people, what they believe. I heard you speak at NSA, the National Speakers Association, you said the average people spends, average person spends almost 2.5 hours in drama every day. 2.5 hours in drama, right? And you just defined it as anything that takes us away from our focus and our performance and our results um tell us how did you come to find 2.5 hours a day in drama we that was um my second book reality-based rules of the workplace we started to on the

pursuit of quantifying how much time a typical person spends in my last analogy turning ropes into snakes right and how do we quantify that and we interviewed individuals we surveyed individuals we interviewed leaders we surveyed leaders and we were able to find a very tight range this isn't about drama kings or queens, but a consistent tight range that the average human being spends about two and a half hours a day in drama, walking around judging, this is sick and wrong, this shouldn't be happening, not welcoming what's coming, not letting go of what's leaving, resisting change, judging and critiquing others, one-upping or one-downing others, just all sorts of these pockets or these sources of drama that we found. And that's 816 hours a

year per person. So if you're a leader, and I came to you, and let's think about lean, a lot of leaders commission investment in lean or six sigma or continuous quality improvement because they know that any incremental recapture adds value to the process most leaders are chasing minutes and we're able to give them hours of mind share um through good mental processes there's really a qualitative and quantitative benefit to good leaders. But yeah, 816 hours a year. And it's not just that the organization loses productivity. It's that that's time people spend feeling negative, unneedlessly, like it's time spent feeling poorly. And it's of our own making.

It has nothing to do with the reality. Yeah. Yeah. 2.5 hours a day, more than 17 hours a week, 68 hours a month, 816 hours a year. Right.

And then you say, multiplied by the number of people in your organization. And that's your opportunity. That's your opportunity. So for leaders who are listening, tell us what can we do to reduce that drama? And we laid that pretty specifically in the book. We categorized drama into five categories.

So the first category is like 32%, I think, 33% of it in front of me is ego and questioning your thinking and breaking up that relationship where, you know, my, my fact plus story. And so it's really moving people beyond venting. Venting is a behavior. A lot of people, leaders don't understand that when somebody comes to me and they're suffering, I want to respond with empathy. I want to hold space for their experience, but I don't want to collude and validate the sense they're making of their experience,

which is venting. Venting is just a behavior. So when somebody comes to me frustrated, I, as a leader, to help them bypass ego, I really give them two choices. You can step up and be great. What would great look like? And you can impact it, or you can radically accept it

and offer grace, mercy, tolerance, benefit of the doubt. There's only two choices if you want to avoid suffering. But what most people do is they pick a third option. I wanted to stay in bed about it. And most leaders collude with that third option. And it's like you can share your feelings, but we will work on this. We'll either work on the situation and your impact, or we'll work on your ability to accept imperfect realities. We will grow you always.

If you're struggling, then the answer is evolve. The answer is not argue with reality. It isn't throw people under the bus and character assassin. It isn't bent. It's evolved. And so, you know, that's the type of things we teach. But the first category is ego. The second category is lack of accountability.

People are quick to name things externally, which is judgment, blame things externally. But accountability is all about go within and own the point where you had impact or could have had impact and then move through the world more skillfully knowing that. So we talk a lot about personal accountability, second category. Third category is all about organizational alignment and buy-in. A lot of people believe that buy-in is something leaders need to get from me. They need to earn it. They need to, you know, buy me in and it leads to all kinds of dysfunction. Buy-in actually is a verb. And most people, when you step out of accountability, I need to come and make the first step.

I need to buy in as the first step of accountability. We also have a lot of folks that still struggle with change. And that's a category of drama. People are very confused about engagement. The engagement industry has fed leaders a line that we're responsible for the happiness of others. That's completely insane. And we measure engagement and that's completely insane. Because my own happiness is my own accountability. And in the same organization, you'll see high accountables, no engagements of choice, and low accountables expect to be bought in.

And they have very different experiences. So it can't be all about engagements, but engagement plus accountability. Excellent. Yeah, those are the five. Those are the five. I was going to say, and you can also read more about these five in the No Ego book. And Sai, I was thinking about maybe one of them, increasing accountability. And there's something later in the book that I thought was really powerful. And you gave us four factors of accountability.

How does utilizing accountability help with decreasing drama? Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Sure. So when you increase accountability, you lessen your victim stance in the world. And so, and this isn't the type of self-judgment where I blame myself or I take martyr type of ownership. But if every place I can look at my results, and in a conversationally comfortable way, I can say, here's what I did that helped. And here's what I did that hindered. And here's where I benefit from evolving next. And, and I use that to fuel my growth, I can walk through the world more skillfully and more happily. And so we have identified four factors that we gleaned

from interviewing people who maintain states of high accountability. And the first factor is we call it commitment. And the people who are high in accountability will tell you that buy-in commitment is a choice. I'm in or I'm out. There's just no kind of maybe. And then resiliency is staying the course. And it's a little bit about grit. It's also about using the collective, the genius of the collective. Ownership is clearly being able to see my part in success and failure and continuous learning is mining that success and failure for ways I can move through the world differently in the future. And that's a cycle. Yeah, excellent. So the four were commitment, resilience, ownership, and continuous learning. Tell us how we might use

those as a leader to really increase accountability. Sure. A lot of, we test for this. We have metrics. A lot of cultures right now are low commitment. I shouldn't have to, but nobody else will. So they're high resiliency, expensive way to get work done, low ownership. All I know is how everybody else failed me and I had to bail them out. And then continuous learning is learning about what other people should do. And that creates heroics, but martyrdom. So as a leader, you can learn the sages and work the sages. Commitment. I can't buy you in, but I can very clearly say, are you in or are you out? And most of the questions I get are, how do I get uncommitted people to do great work? And I'm like, I don't have an answer for that. And so it's like,

are you in or are you out? And someone may say, you know, I have some issues with the direction we're going. I'm like, dialogue, help me understand what's the fatal objection. Is it immoral, unethical? Does it marginalize a population? Nope, I just don't prefer it. I don't like it. I'm like, oh, you want your preference to trump direction of the company.

Life doesn't work that way. That's how reality works. What are you going to do to get yourself 100% in? Well, I'm not gonna. I don't agree with it. Eventually, I as a leader have to ask, if there's no fatal objections after good dialogue, then what's your plan to transition off my team? Because people are like, I'm not going anywhere.

I love it here. It's like, then what is your plan to get fully joyfully on board? Right. Well, I'm not gonna know. A lot of people think there's a third option, I can stay in hate, I can stay in sabotage, I can stay and I told you so. And so one of the places leaders seem to clean up, this isn't blind followership. This is I can get on board with the goal. And now I'll use my expertise to help you mitigate the risk or to guide the way we implement that you might not have seen. This isn't lack of input.

But really calling the question. That's why when you get on the plane in the exit row, people want a verbal yes. If you're going to open the door. Because they want to know, like, you're not going to open the door because they want to know like you're not going to wait for somebody else once people are in we can teach them resiliency we can teach them how to stay the course use the resources and then we have to do a lot of work on ownership we want people conversational in no shame here's what i did helped. And here's what I did that hindered. And we want it to be a continuous learning environment.

So as leaders, we can call the commitment question. We can connect people in collectively so they're more resilient. We can have a lot of discussions where people self-reflect and contemplate on what was my part in this. And we can help them use that information, that owning it, to know where to evolve next. And that's the facilitation I think leaders really need to do. As leaders, we are not good at integrating learning. What did you learn about yourself from this experience? What does this tell you about you

and where you need to grow next? People having difficulty come back into the office, right? Yeah, we want to accommodate. And so I would ask them the questions. What are you learning about yourself right now? And it's like, well, I know how to be all in at the office. I know how to be all in at home. I'm not good at hybrids. So I want you to adapt the world. What if you just grew in your skill set of hybrid? Right, right. Yeah, so many great points. I I'm thinking about all the content in your book, no ego. And I'm curious, is there, you know, is there anything major we're missing that I haven't asked you about? I think that the power of self-reflection. So how do you move from what I call low self to high self, from ego to brain coherence? The magic

wand really is self-reflection. That's the ultimate drama diffuser. And I talk a lot about my TED talk, TEDx talk, I'm sorry, was about the three questions that will change your life. Yes. And whenever I'm stressed, I ask myself, what do I know for sure that loosens the ego's grip? I'm no longer a victim. And then I can ask myself in this moment, what could I do to help? That puts me back in action. I can stop judging and start helping. And then to get me beyond all of who deserves and who doesn't deserve and what camp you're in and what political part. Like, if I were great right now, what would great look like? Not if I were better than you, but if I were my most evolved self right now, how would I walk through this situation? And a lot of times that's with more silence, more love, more compassion,

more understanding, more grace. It's not if I were great, it's not more directing or more telling. And we get to use this all the time. This morning, I went for a coffee and it was like, I'm stressed. I'm like, this will take forever. I will never get through this line. I'm going to go on caffeine for the entire day. This sounds so trivial. I was like finding myself stressed. It's like, what do I know for sure? This line seems to be moving slower than I prefer. I have many ways to get caffeine if that's what I need. Life is okay. And I started thinking, what can I do to help? And it's like, I could get my order in my head before I get there as I'm critiquing all these people. And then, you know, if I were my most evolved self, like what would I be doing?

I would not be standing in line for coffee. I would be heading home and making a pot myself and I wouldn't be mad about it. I would just recognize some days are like that. That sounds so trivial, but do that a hundred times a day and you will be happy. Yeah. I love it. And I think about it's these little things that can, can throw us off if it's a coffee line or traffic or, you know, uh, a rude client or customer, you know, it's these little things over time that can create more and more stress.

And I love- Let alone the big stuff at work. Yeah, the three questions. Let alone the big stuff at work. People come to you and it's like, oh, logistics screwed up again. And I want to tell you the last 10 years of history. And I want to tell you why they do this crap on purpose and that they're trying to discredit us. I'm like, wait a minute, what do we know for sure? We have shipping sitting in the wrong place. We have a shipment sitting in the wrong place. Okay. What can we do next that would help? Well, let's figure out what options we have. Awesome. Go do that. Like so much of life just is not as hard as we make it. And I could see these three questions of what do I know for sure? What

can I do to help? And if I were my most evolved self, what would that look like? Right. And I could see how that could help us get unstuck. And I could see how leaders could take these three questions and bring them back to their team. So their team doesn't get so stuck or blame, right, different areas. You know, there can be a lot of blaming and complaining about other people. So I could see how that could help us reduce that blame that you're talking about. And those questions, those mental processes, which they are self reflections in our process, not only reduces it in the moment, but people start to know that you consistently will call them to greatness. So when they're about to come

to you with complaint, they're like, Wakeman's just going to ask me if I brought my mostly involved self to work today, I'll just stay here and do that. Like they started to live in other people. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, so you've given us so much to think about. I, my favorite thing so far are your stress comes from your stories. And what if you realized you were the observer, not the thinker? And just the idea of reducing that drama 2.5 hours a day in drama. And that drama really is self-imposed and optional. So people can go pick up your book, No Ego, How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama and Entitlement and Drive Big Res results. Tell us where we can find your other books or learn more about your speaking and keynoting and the coaching that your team does.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We just, I just had a book come out in March of this year called Life's Messy, Live Happy. That helps you do a lot of this on a personal basis as well. We're at realitybasedleadership.com. I also have a podcast called No Ego. And my team does a lot of really impactful keynotes and training. And we're very prolific on social media. I'm at Cy Wakeman, and my colleague is at Alex Dorr, D-O-R-R. And you'll get some good daily food. I love it. Well, thank you, Sai, for gifting us with your knowledge and your wisdom today. I know everybody who's listening really appreciates it. And keep positively impacting the world. I think your work is really incredible and impactful.

And I think it makes a big difference in people's lives. So thank you so much. Thank you, Sandra. Thanks for having me. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes

and to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.