Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Juliet Funt on Why It Is Vital to Have a Minute to Think EP 210

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

In this episode, we talk with Juliet Funt (@thejulietfunt) about the importance of having a minute to think and how it can help us achieve our goals and live our lives to the fullest. Tune in to hear her insights and recommendations! Juliet is the author of A Minute to Think, nominated for the Next Big Idea Club curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Susan Cain, and Adam Grant. She is an evangelist for freeing the potential of companies by unburdening their talent from busy work. Brought to you by American Giant (get 20% off using code PassionStruck at https://www.american-giant.com/) and InsideTracker (get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store https://info.insidetracker.com/passionstruck). What We Discuss with Juliet Funt Juliet explains why reinserting “white space” is vital in our days. This is the time when we can breathe, contemplate, prepare, and create. The name came from looking at the literal white spaces on a lightly scheduled paper calendar and discovering that those open blocks reveal how many opportunities that day could hold. To access it, you take a strategic pause. Stop what you are doing, and white space will rush in. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/juliet-funt-a-minute-to-think/  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/jOCOkAQ5CM0  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Dr. Nate Zinsser, a West Point performance psychologist? Catch up with episode 204: Dr. Nate Zinsser on How Do You Create a Confident Mind ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the passion struck podcast what we need to do is change the tenor of work when the lever is on as well We can't just keep retreating into vacation days to solve that and so that is unaddressed why because it's a really hairy tricky complicated problem to change behavior and systems enough to make the lever on time Pleasant enough to make the lever on time pleasant, but that's what we need to do. The challenge is to not use time off as a reason not to change time on. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the

best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 210 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked is one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn,

how to live better, be better, and impact the world. You're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, both on Spotify as well as the PassionStruck website. These are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show.

Just go to PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, earlier this week I interviewed multiple number one New York Times best-selling author, speaker, performance coach, Robin Sharma, and we discuss his brand new book, The Everyday Hero Manifesto. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. We now have over 10,000 of them globally on iTunes alone. We so appreciate it when you give us a five-star rating, and I know our guests love to hear comments as well. Now let's talk about today's episode. Is it possible to reclaim creativity?

Conquer business and do your best work at work. Our guest today, Juliette Font, will discuss what is really causing our business. How to take a strategic pause? Conquer the thieves of time, learn to simplify our lives and unhook from the culture of now. In our discussion, Juliet uses memorable stories, easy to use tools in razor-sharp instruction, a carve and escape route from the overwhelm of low-value tasks, and the daily avalanche of meetings, emails, decks, and reports.

Juliette Font is a tough love advisor to the Fortune 500 and a warrior on a mission to de-craftify work. Her book, A Minute to Think, Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Business, and Do Your Best Work, was nominated by the next Big Idea Club and was Michael Hyatt's leadership book for November. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let the journey begin. I am so excited to welcome Juliet Funt to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome. Thank you so much. Well, I always liked to allow the listeners to get to know the guest on the show. And I thought maybe a good way to do that was as I was doing my research on you, I stumbled upon a little bit of a life moment that you had. Can you tell me about your failed ride share

and what it taught you about speaking your truth? What a great little corner to start in. We'll just go right there. That's fun. I was in an Uber or we'll call it a ride share with my two younger kids who are 12 and 14 but are a little bit young for their ages and we were in this car and we just went into a progression of worry some interactions with this driver. First, the music was really, really loud. I asked, turn it down and I got that look in the review mirror. Like, I already hate you.

And then he was driving kind of fast and a little dangerous. And I asked him to slow down. And then one time he reached to get a headphone cord out of the little center compartment thing while we are on the freeway. And if you know the 75 freeway in Atlanta, it is not a place where you want to do anything other than pay attention. It is a very difficult place to drive. But on each of these progressive moments, I noticed how nervous I was to say what I needed to this

20-something stranger who I would never see again. And there's a little teeny thing in the back of your mind that remembers that they rate you and I use Uber constantly for work so you don't want to be painted as some terrible person. But I asked him about the music and then he looked in the review mirror and begrudgingly turned it down a little bit, and then about three or four minutes later, I noticed the driving. In each one of these, I had a moment where the need rose inside me to say something. And then I felt really nervous.

I felt really nervous to say what I needed. And it was wonderful that there were two kids there to be observing, because of course, you're always conscious that you're modeling when your kids are there. To say in a gracious way that doesn't villainize this person, I'm sorry, I'm going to need this to be different. And then, painfully, five minutes later, to have to say something again, it was a real test of, I'm a very strong person.

I speak on stage in front of 10, 12,000 people. I'm not a nervous person, but just that interpersonal moment of, I'm going to say something and you're going to like me less right after I say it. And yet, I still have to say it. And it turned into a wonderful conversation on LinkedIn that went kind of in a lot of different directions from, was it because I was a woman and he was a man was because, I mean, just a lot of different nooks and crannies of that conversation, but at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how much authority

you have in a lot of circles of your life. It's a scary thing to just say what you want to someone else who's gonna be disappointed with what you ask. Well, I think it's a great way to start out the interview and I think all of us have had our uber or lift moments. Sure.

Of panic or can you please turn down the music because it's so obnoxious and I'm there with you, but it takes on a different dimension. Yeah. I'm sure some social psychologists could break down the power differential of this is my car, but I'm the guest and it's my music. I mean, it's a fascinating thing if you really break down. I had one driver really school me that this is my car

and I'll have the music be, you know, it's too loud for me everywhere. So that's not an uncommon thing to ask. And it's to really be gracious. It was a beautiful moment of allowing myself to slow down and open up, because of course you lock it down quick in your mind and say, I'm the customer deal with it. And then to open and say, yeah, this is his environment.

And he's in it all day long. How does it look from his perspective that we call it the 360 POV to really look at all the different points of view. There's millions of opportunities a day to look within and figure out how you could be a slightly more open person. And when you have kids around you again, I think it accelerates that willingness. Oh, it sure does. That is a definite. I have found with my kids. They're both now out of the house, just dropped the last one off to college, but I've been through many of those moments.

but I've been through many of those moments. Well, you are a very prolific public speaker and I recently had Jason Fyfer, who's the editor of Entrepreneur Magazine on the show as well, who also does a lot of speaking. And I asked him what his biggest tip was for people who want to get into public speaking and he told me it was interlocking moments. So, he said in his opinion, the worst thing you can do is memorize your speech and he tries to keep these stories fresh in his head that he can apply regardless of the situation.

So, he can change them up based on who he's speaking to. What would be your biggest advice to the listeners or viewers? Well, I'll piggyback on when he said just to share a technique, and then I can move on to, I think, my biggest advice. Do a lot of coaching of professional teams now in the virtual setting. So how to present virtually, how to look in this little tiny green dot and actually make eye contact and be present and pleasant. And they have a lot of folks have trouble with reading on camera.

And then they go all the way over to memorizing as he was saying, it can be a little bit stilted. So a really wonderful middle ground that you can play with is an acronym trap, TRAP, is test record absorb practice. And here's how you do it. You test your content, just like he was talking about, a story, another story, try it this way, try it that way. How do I want my flow to go?

And at some point, I advocate that you do write it and you lock it down like a script and that you record that. You record yourself saying it, but the A is the interesting part and it leads to the naturalness that he's talking about to absorb is is you play that recording when you're shaving or when you're cutting carrots or when you're folding laundry and you let the scripted content drip into your

head so that little phrases become locked. And then when you practice, you go back to that freedom because all of that is inside of your mind. So a lot of speakers play with that dichotomy between improvisation and scripted and there are benefits to both. But I really like his approach and maybe I would add that technique of trap to get there. It's kind of hard to get there and feel the confidence without beginning with a script. So that's something that they can play with.

I would say my biggest tip is completely in a different area of authenticity. I think I've been speaking for 22 years and I notice in every speaker there is this other character. I call it the speaker persona who crawls up onto them when they are on and it's a little different than the person that they are. And if you pay attention, you'll notice yourself say you're standing in the wings at a theater type presentation or you're about to walk on in front of a conference board to present your six or seven people are even waiting in Zoom room, you'll notice this personality shift that will threaten to occur. Just sort of now, I'm going to get into the mode that I'm in when I'm doing a presentation. And your voice might change a little bit, your posture might change a little bit.

And if you shake off that person, kind of, I'll say, no, thank you, and you go back to you. It'll crawl back up. And you say, no, thank you, and you go back to you. And the more times you can return to the true north of, how would I be if I was talking? And then I just turned, I was talking to a girlfriend, or turned, I was just talking to my children. And I keep returning to that authenticity and rejecting the lore of becoming a different person. While I'm speaking, I believe it's that authenticity,

that return to you that makes you engaging. authenticity that return to you that makes you engaging. Well, I'll tell you one thing. Since I've started this podcast, I have had to do a lot of practice. And I remember when I started doing the solo episodes, which I do almost every Friday, and I look back now and listen to them, I'm like, oh my god, they were terrible. But you're right. Over time, you get more comfortable and you figure out how, after a while, just to be authentically you and vulnerable and everything else, and it sounds so much natural when you do it that way, then when you're trying

to force it or at first, I was trying to memorize them, and that certainly doesn't work because you end up tripping yourself up, left and right. So. Yeah, it's like riding a white water. You have like a little memorized section and then maybe you riff a little and then a little memorized section.

And the more you speak about the same things, the more certain phrases get stuck in your head. And then a whole story will get stuck in your head. And then for me, there's content that I've been talking about for a decade. And so it depends on where you are in that spectrum. But the most important thing is to keep that fluidity. I've done speeches in the past.

I remember one about 20, you know, about 10 years ago. And it was one of those big shift moments in my career where I was scared backstage. It was a lot of people and it was high end. And I can't remember who it was for. But I remember over memorizing it. And it just came out so stupid. And what happens when you do that is the minute that you go off of what you have memorized, now you're in trouble. Because you're only comfortable when you're riding in exactly the way you've practiced it. And

you'll lose it in a way that is invisible. They'll see it in your face and you'll, you ha, ha, ha. And if you forget something, you beat yourself up afterwards. As if they knew, as if they had the script in their hands, which they don't, it's something that you can definitely finesse it over time in the Zoom version, which we now all have to accept is a permanent part of our presenting reality is a whole different ball game of confidence and competence and technical skills, which we all need to learn. There's a lot to unpack.

I think we're noticing a lot of teams this year say, well, we kept crossing our fingers that this was going to be over at some point, but it's not. Yeah, I'm not sure it's ever going to go back. In fact, I have this theory, it's really not my theory, it's a social cycle theory where basically things travel in cycles and they come back. And I believe we've been living in this cycle of about a hundred years now. And you've seen this rise and people who are working for large corporations and at the same time, a huge decline in entrepreneurship and smaller business ownership.

But I think is we have these new technologies, AI, everything else that's hitting us, we're going to go back in a time where I think most people are going to become independent contractors. This is my theory. And because so many jobs are going to get displaced over the next 10 years, four to 500 million of them is what they're saying. And so you're going to have to continually reinvent yourself. And I think it's going to be harder for people to do that within the confines of companies. And I think we will have more independent contractors who are working for multiple clients is where I think things are going.

I could be wrong, but. It's an ambiguity for people. I just can't get. There's a John Cotter principle he wrote about change lot. He talks about change coupons that you have a certain number of coupons that you can spend emotionally and viscerally on the experience of constant change. And when you're out of coupons, that's when you get a little rough with your family and that's when you get depressed, that you just can't ingest any more movement in the

system. And I think we're out now, but sadly, we've got some more change coming. And I think people now have gone through two and a half years of constant change, went to the office. So I'm back to the office. We liked, now we like being at home. Now it's time to go back again and again. And so now the threats of the word recession and layoffs happening, it's just gonna continue.

So the way I believe that people can ride that is to really have a moment to sit with that ambiguity and not run away from it. Shake hands with it. Yep, I'm a human being and human beings hate ambiguity, and here it is again, and really, really, really to be cognizant of how much of it we're carrying, because I think we're out of coupons a long time ago.

I think that's a great analogy for it. And I'm going to jump now into the main reason that you're here is this incredible book that I'm putting up here and on YouTube. We'll make sure we do a bigger splash, but it's called a minute to think. And we're going to talk a lot about space today, but I wanted a senior executive in three fortune fifties, and then did a lot of work and private equity owned companies eventually becoming the CEO of a few of them. And so I very much know what it's like to live and breathe in these environments and the 12 hour days that you have to reside in.

So I thought it was really great that you opened up the book talking about how our time is under attack because I certainly felt that way when I was in this corporate positions. And you mentioned how Gallup shows that 23% of workers feel burnt out more often than not with 44% of them experiencing it often. And then you have their other poll that shows that 70 to 85% of all workers, billion full-time workers worldwide are disengaged, which to me is just shocking.

Why do you think it's becoming harder for people to find balance and alleviate burnout? It's a really tough scenario that we've been in and going into, but I think we should overlay first with the foundational metaphor of everything that we're going to talk about. Otherwise, we want to have a container to answer that question that you just asked me. And it's where we open the book with the idea of building a fire. And I would really love everyone to think about this analogy because it really leads to everything we'll cover. If you're building a fire. And I would really love everyone to think about this analogy because it really leads to everything we'll cover. If you're building a fire, you have to have certain ingredients you want to have good wood,

you want to have high needles, newspaper, what have you. But if you skip one ingredient, your fire will never, ever, ever ignite. And that ingredient is the space in between the things that combust. And that space draws a spark into a flame. We believe very strongly that people are the same ideas, are the same work teams are the same to have to have a little oxygenating space around them just to think, breathe, step back, become objective, recover,

close your eyes, think great, follow a creative threat, all these things require space. So if we don't understand the space analogy, we won't understand where we're going. And we call that kind of time, white space. The reason that we call it white space is because in the old days of coaching executives where we'd open up there at the time paper calendar, the first line of ingip investigation was to look for actual white spaces where were their openings, unscheduled time on the day, is that determined everything, it determined the pace, the cadence, the flavor, the pressure was their white space. And so that's our work is to bring that oxygenation. And I think that

people are in a really difficult juncture right now. I think that first of all, it's so funny to hear that disengagement stat brought back right this minute with all the quiet quitting, because we've been watching people quietly quitting for a very, very, very, very long time now. It has a name and a brand and a thing and it's on HBR. But people just being so unhappy that they can't even pull it together to care about work. There's so much misery, so much lack of humanity in these environments that you're talking about. And in the pandemic, there was a door that opened to this.

And this conversation started about burnout and are people okay? And we started doing wellness days, which I can tell you my opinion I've been a minute if you like. And then a really, really interesting thing happened in Q1 of this year was almost like a psychic message went out to all corporate leaders and we just sort of said,

all right, enough of that now, let's get back to work. And something happened this year. I've really been watching this Q1, Q2. It's almost as if the burnout never happened. But real people never recovered. They just pushed it down. I'm really concerned about the health and longevity and wellness and stamina and engagement of people

because of that sublimated burnout. It really has never been addressed in the pandemic. Well, on the issue issue when you push it down and I've talked about this a lot on the podcast is it doesn't go away. You're just delaying in evidence, it's like trauma. And if you don't do something to start alleviating it, all of a sudden, you're going to end up finding your whole system is out of whack because it's not only going to affect you in mental ways, it's going to affect your relationships,

it's going to affect your mental health, it's going to affect your spiritual health, it's going to affect your emotional health and you'll find yourself down this spiraling nose dive that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but unfortunately so many people are experiencing today. is really important to life. And some of those corporate bosses, that's not the language they speak. The language that they speak is to add one more thing to that list, which is it's also going to really, really get in the way of good work. Your work is going to suck because you're completely fried. And so if someone's listening who doesn't necessarily get galvanized by the wellness, human, spiritual angle that you rattled off there, the person that you hired, you chose because they had capabilities and talents.

And then you put them in an environment where those capabilities and talents are constantly squashed, gives you a poor return. It just gives you a poor return on the investment of that human being on the buying of their brain. And so from every angle, it's really important to start to change this. Yeah, and I'll just make this real for a listener. When I was the CIO at Dell, my day would typically begin at 5.30, and at that point, I was checking in with AsiaPAC, and I was checking in with Europe to start the day,

and interfacing with my direct reports, because I've direct reports in 15 countries and talking about what we're going to do today. Then I'd roll into work 738 o'clock and I was back to back meetings all day long until 6 o'clock. I'd get home, maybe do dinner with the family, and then at about 8.39 o'clock, I'm back working, trying to get through the emails, and I would have almost 1,000 of them a day. So it got to a point to me where if it wasn't addressed to me, I wouldn't even look at it because I didn't have time.

And then, I'd wake up and do the same thing, and then every two weeks, I was traveling globally. And so I had to do the reverse from another country. And after a while, your system just gets so out of whack. And you have no time to think. And for me, that's the most important thing. I think a senior executive or a leader needs to do is have those times for creativity,

because that's where you get the brilliance. And if you eliminate that, you know, perform nearly as well as you do when you allow yourself to have that space as you call it. I couldn't agree more. And what's funny hearing you say it like that is a story is if we lined up a bunch of corporate people and had them tell their parallel stories, we'd also back and say, that sounds crazy. The visceral feeling is that sounds crazy, but it's what we do, and it's what we continue doing, and it's what we ask people to do. Now, things have changed because hybrid came in, the pandemic shook it up, and we started doing

these wellness days. And I said I would refer back to that. The wellness days are a good thing. Half day Fridays are a good thing. The promoting more vacation time is all a good thing. But it focuses on an idea that work is a lever and goes on and off. Like one of those big giant cartoon levers with a big red end. And what the bosses who care are trying to do is they're trying to turn the lever off. Go home for a well estate, go to vacation. But what they ignore is that the minute the lever goes back on, we excuse and tolerate the same pressure and media and crazy pace. What we need to do is change the tenor of work when the lever is on as well.

We can't just keep retreating into vacation days to solve the evidence of that is unaddressed why because it's a really hairy tricky complicated problem to change behavior and systems enough to make the lever on time pleasant, but that's what we need to do. And that's the challenges to not use time off as a reason not to change time on. Well, I had a really interesting interview with Jeremy Atley. It's not released yet because I'm under embargo because his book isn't released yet. But if you're not familiar with them, he is a professor at the D school at Stanford. And in all their research that they've been doing, they are showing just how much

creativity and ideas are so important for a leader and I don't want to give his book away. But he highlights two CEOs who were in charge of these huge behemoth companies. And in one case, companies. And in one case, the chairman of the board told him that he needed to take Friday off. And so he thought, well, okay, I'll maybe make my life a little bit easier. I won't attend as many meetings that day. I will leave it to this. And he goes, no, because I don't want you to work at all. He goes, I want you to take it off, because you need to have time to digest everything that's going on. Your biggest job is to look at strategy,

to look at what's happening. And there's no way you're going to do that if you're keep running yourself into the ground. And I thought it was really interesting that they're finding this and their research and actually teaching it now to their program cuts across kind of all the programs at Stanford. And so they're teaching this MBA students to aspiring lawyers, et cetera, which I found pretty unique.

Let's take that story apart though, because see how interesting it is, I completely agree with him taking the day off to just become objective. But watch this is, if Monday through Friday, he was working exactly the way that you described. And Friday, he doesn't touch work at all. You see that there is still no space in which work related ideas could cook in his free mind. There is no white space where on a Tuesday or on a Wednesday, he could just sit back and go, you know, we're thinking of going into that market. I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder what that would lead to. And just mall. And so that's why the use of white space when you're on, when the lever is on, even in small, interstitial pieces

is really important. And interstitial is an important concept. Not everyone's going to take an executive link session of 30 minutes of white space. But you can add a minute, 30 seconds, five seconds, and it just kind of opens up the pace and snappy cadence of the day, and it changes the way things feel. I'll give you an example. One of the places that we really advocate people take white spaces between meetings, obviously. So we have a really simple rule they can think about. Instead of letting your meeting calendar look

like a paint swatch that you described with color color color color color color color, you just use the rule with your team never let the colors touch. And what we would like to see is stripes, little stripes of white between each and every meeting, 5, 10, 15 minute stripes. Now, what that does, now all sorts of little wonderful things can unpack inside that white space. You can look back at the meeting you just came from. You can make a note or have an insight. You can learn something.

You can go within. You can say, I'm a human being. Should I pee, eat, close my eyes? And then you can look forward and you can learn something. You can go within. You can say, I'm a human being. Should I pee, eat, close my eyes. And then you can look forward and you can say, who's next? John. Who is John? Who is this person? And you can really become present and available and tailored. And all of that happens in that little straight. So we're not saying you have to go on a high hill and take an hour of white space by any means. It's foundational even when it's small. I think that's great advice.

And I wanna go back to the example I gave of working at Dell and had I done it differently. I think just like I gave the analogy of their emails that you're addressed as the two where you have to take action versus a ton we get in corporate America which you're just CC'd on because someone wants you to know everything that they're doing. And I think meetings are the same way. I think there are meetings that you go to where you're the decision maker and you have to be there on spot and make that decision. But I found so many of the meetings I was in were just informational.

And half the times I wasn't making a decision, I didn't really even need to be there, but you feel so compelled to. In some cases, it was because I was attending staff meeting for one of the presidents of the business, or this new brief found on a project they wanted to do. Looking back, I wish I would have said no to more of these meetings, and in the same way I was trying to do with email, but constraints on the ones I would attend, so people knew what was priority to me, and it would freed up so much more time in my day to actually do the strategic work. I would have

Absolutely, that's what we teach when we do training programs and we stay with companies for a whole quarter We're giving them systemized ways to make those Nose possible because it's scary. It's pretty scary You were a big shot and you were scared to say no So imagine the little shots trying to get the words in their mouth that feel safe to say, I don't really think I'm valuable at this meeting. It's such a frightening cliff of a moment. It becomes less frightening when you have comradery and when you have norms around you, when you have one white space pal and then you develop a tiny

little white space team. And then now you have 30 or 50 people who know the concept, now you're building a norm and you're no longer an outlier to have boundaries or make smart decisions like you're talking. People have a very hard time doing that all by themselves. But if you look at a contrast, talking about all the things that happen when executives can't think in this kind of crushing pressure, let's look at the flip side.

There, and actually it's a GE story. There was a, oh, he said Dell, but it's a GE story, these gentlemen that we worked with a man named Brandon and his team at GE, kind of genius type brainiacs that work on the power grid. And they were so smart, this team of guys that they used to kind of kidnap them

and send them to hotels to fix a problem. So they get the five or six of them and they'd say, you're going to Buffalo and we'll let you out when you've solved the problem and they would live in these hotels. And he told me that there was very intense work that went on, but on Thursdays was always the day. Thursdays was the day they had breakthroughs. Thursdays was the day that if something was going wrong, they had an aha moment and they stopped it

and they realized it in time. So of course I asked him why Thursday and he said, well, Wednesday we'd do the laundry. And so on Wednesday every week, they had to step away and fold and listen to the tumbler and they got lost in thought and they were free and they had mental liberty and that of course was the day where many many many things clicked and the joke of the team was if you came in and you had an unproductive

Thursday they would say what's the matter you didn't do your laundry because they knew that instinctive feeling and these two extremes your jam pack never breathed day. And the idea of that Wednesday, when you're just stepping back, we find hopefully a reality right in the middle there that real workers can start adopting. Yes, because I think it's completely unrealistic to just do some of these things overnight, but to your point, if you can just start out small. In fact, I had Dr. Sarah Medneck on the podcast, not sure if you know who that is, but she's really one of the foremost experts on sleep.

And she recently wrote this book called The Downstate. And what she found is that if you take five to ten minute breaks, it could be walking out in nature, it could just be a mindful moment, just allowing yourself to decompress. It's almost as if you're in REM sleep and it has this effect of rejuvenating the whole system and they've tested this in their labs. And I thought it was really interesting that the science matches up to what you're recommending. It absolutely does. We have science in the book as well. There's a study at Cornell. They took office workers that were working on computers in Wall Street firms. They gave them very short

breaks, increased their productivity and reduced their errors by 13%. Another one in the journal of cognition, they took four groups. Everybody had to do a task for 50 minutes. Only one of the four groups took two breaks in the course of the 50 minutes, they were the only ones that remained constant in their effort, energy and precision. And the course of the 50 minute task, there's lots of proof that gray matter like x-white space. And this feeling of, we deserve it also. In addition to can we prove it and can we prove this science and will it help business,

human beings deserve to be able to move a little slower and have permission to say no and have a feeling of that grace. If there's ever been a time in history where workers have more power and they can say, I want it to be different. I really believe it's now. It's this door has been open with all these changes.

I think it's now. Well, if not now, then whenever, what is it going to be? This would be, I agree with you, probably the best time for this to happen. I wanna jump to chapter four of your book, and in that you discuss why our assets can become our liabilities.

What are the four assets that many leaders bring to the workplace, and when taken too far, how can these assets become risks? And I was hoping you could maybe then also twist that to our personal lives as well. Oh yes, it flows all the stuff that we talk about kind of flows back and forth because it's universally human. The chapter you're talking about is called the Thebes of Time. It came out of us looking at busyness for, I've been doing this for 22 years for a really long time and looking at the fact that there were lots of things that made people at the end of the day have that feeling of, I'm just overloaded.

I can't do another thing. And by the way, I don't even know what I accomplished today. Many of those things were outside of their control. There were things like seasonality of an industry or executive leader decisions that were outside of their control. And yet they blame themselves. They felt like I could just find the right filing system

or reread getting things done or do another podcast. I would crack this, but really it was systemic. And that systemic quality broke down to four main drivers that fueled all professional overload. And that irony that you talked about is they're actually good things, but they just ran a mock. And so the thieves are drive excellence,

information and activity. Drive the desire to do more and build and grow excellence which can so easily morph into perfectionism, information which morphs into information overload and activity can just become frenzy when it is unleashed. And what we saw was that people also had personality components of these, I'm an excellence person. I'm the person who redid our business cards four times because the teal wasn't right. And that is who I am. So I'm always going to double down on areas where something

can be more precise. But information people, they get lost in dashboards and spreadsheets and the internet and Google searches. And then there's drive people who plan too many projects in the same month. And so for each of these personality types, and also for the personalities of organizations, we have to be very cautious about the thieves. And a lot of our process is to look at each thief and figure out how do you actually disarm it. And that would be chapter five, the next chapter, which we may or may not go through, called the simplification questions, is a system to take away the power of the thieves,

to recognize them, create new self-talk, and actually put them back into their right size when they can serve us as they are assets. I refer to chapter five as the core tenants to basically to decrapify your day. Yes, yes, I love that term. What are the idea of those questions is really important. We'll have trouble doing them all on audio, but if you want to send them later or post them on the show page or something, the four simplification questions, they should go on every wall. They are the method. They are the antidote, for sure. Well, I thought this would be a fun question. Why does so many people today fall into the

relish of the hearty thwop of a big tuna of corporate waste hitting the deck? I love it when you quote something from the book, if we're gonna be cognizant that the thieves are running our day, we have to figure out how to tame. We have this tool, the simplification questions, I'll give them to you verbally, but there'll be a little hard to track that's why it's great to post them on the show notes.

So the questions are, and this gets to the tuna, is there anything I can let go of? Is the solution to drive? Where is good enough good enough? Is the solution to excellence? What do I truly need to know? Is the solution to information? And what deserves my attention?

Is the solution to activity? And when you do this over and over, if you post the questions, if you ask them a lot to yourself, you're developing a mindset of what we call being reductive. Not the reductive has other meanings, but we're talking math now, the mathematical sense of to reduce, to let go, to not be additive, to have less stuff. That is the cutting of the emails, meetings, dextre reports all the waste that is clogging up the day. That waste, by the way, has a dollar value. It's about a million dollars of annual talent time for every 50 people in organizations.

So it's very expensive. And there are two types of waste. The tuna is big things that you can cut. And the grill is little teeny, tiny waste that is your advantage to remove. The tuna would be, I'm going to let go of a market. We're going to let go of a product. We're not going to build a new course this year.

That's being reductive in the area of tuna. Crayl is, I'm going to shave five minutes off every meeting so I can breathe. Or I'm going to learn how to write with radical brevity. So every single email I send has 5, 10, 15 less words to keep the weight off of other people. And so between tuna and krill, it's absolutely amazing to see how much weight you can remove. I just finished the case study of a software company that regained 22 hours per person per month from a combination of tuna and krill. And why were they able to do that? They did have a very charismatic leader and that was part of it, but they just looked. They took a minute to think and they did what

you said you weren't willing to do. They looked at each meeting. They looked at their emails. They looked at their Slack channel and they said, what here is really neither benefiting us or contributing anything to the company. And they made a team decision to do less of that. It's not impossible. It's just we just have to begin with either tuna or krill. And most most people it's safer to start with the krill Well, it's interesting how some companies are now employing behavioral scientists inside them I just interviewed Jesse Wisdom who for a number of years after she got her PhD Went to work for Google and they were actually having her look at I want to work for Google and they were actually having her look at employees' work habits and how could they change it up to one make employees healthier, but to make them more creative,

to make them happier, to bring more engagement. And I think that's really interesting to have either social psychologist or behavioral scientists doing jobs like that because when you start looking at the macro things that are happening to your analogy, there is so much waste that's happening and people are performing nearly at the levels that they could have if you take a deeper look at what they're doing. Absolutely. They have ankle weights on every single day and they're afraid to say no. They don't know what to say no too. They have ankle weights on every single day. And they're afraid to say no. They don't know what to say no to. They have no leadership modeling and the ideas of saying no

even someone at your level was kind of just stuck in the feeling of, well, I have to do this one. And I have to do this one. And I got to send this one. And I got to CC nine people on that one. And we're just in a trance about that. Yeah, for sure. Story in the book. Yeah, I don't know if you remember the story that ends the email chapter, but there is this wonderful guy who I met. He was a car salesman. And he was new and he really wanted to sell a lot of cars and he got excited about it. And he worked in the old days where the way that they would communicate in his company, his auto company was they would send out a Manila envelope every Wednesday and

every Friday that had all the stuff in it that we would now get an email, memos and announcements and housekeeping and such. And he was really trying to sell cars, but then he'd get the Wednesday memo and he'd sit at his desk and he'd try to read it and get through the packet. And then by Friday, he wasn't even done with Wednesday, he got the Friday when he starts getting behind. He has no time to sell cars. So he goes to one of the guys on the lot that's sort of a big shot been around a long time. He says, I'm how do these packets work? I'm just getting behind here. And so Mr. Big Shot takes him out to his car in the parking lot, his own car. And he opens up the trunk and he shows him in this car exactly three things,

a case of water, a jack, and a gigantic box of unopened Manila envelopes. And he says, I get it, I write the date on it, I throw it in here, and if no one ever asked me anything about it, I get rid of it in six months, and no one ever asks. Now, I always have to say that story, and then I have to preface by saying, or pre-post-fist by saying, I'm not being flippant about the importance of some of the things that are coming from the corporate mothership, but we need a lens where we can see how much unnecessary communication is actually coming at us, and that we have to be much more discerning of what we choose to care about. It's 10 times more than we need, and we have to pay attention to where is the gold and where is the waste.

Well, I'm going to jump from this topic to another one that I think we're going to enjoy talking about. My podcast today has Dr. Cassie Holmes on it and Cassie is the foremost expert in the world on time and happiness. And in our discussion, she talks a lot about the need for vacation time. And it's something that you reference as well. So what is the importance of vacation time, which, and all these other countries, it seems, like throughout the world,

they take a whole month of August off, and this and that. And we get our two weeks, whatever you have. and most people don't even end up using it. Why is that such a mistake? Vacation is unbelievably restorative and we all know that but the place in the vacation conversation where I really stake my claim. I agree with everyone who's saying we need more vacation, we should take it, we should take every day of it. It's ridiculous to be paid to take these days and not take them. But my corner of this argument is disconnected vacation. The difference between waking up in Cancun and checking email before breakfast room service versus waking up in Cancun and not checking email before breakfast room service is a million miles apart. And the reason is that I really feel that every day of vacation takes you further away from work.

In a linear way, like if you were driving from New York to LA, you wouldn't turn around every four hours and check on New York just to make sure it didn't need you. You would keep going to get to a different destination. And when you've been on vacation for a week, two weeks, three weeks, I've had a disconnected month before, you arrive at a different place, a place where you connect with parts of yourself you've forgot about, a place where your eyes and your head feel like they seek clearly in a way that you haven't really accessed probably in a long time. And most importantly, when you turn around and you think about New York, you've become

fully objective. You are objective about the work that you do and the place that you work and the people that you work with and you see them in a different light where I promise you if you keep checking, you don't have those gains. So the real call to action for me with people is to attempt that disconnected vacation. Now what they need on the other side is some way to be have it be less scary when they come back. And the tool for that is called a reentry day. I think that's in the book. The reentry day is simply the first day when you return from a disconnected vacation, you'll feel terrified on the Sunday to open the email on the Monday. It'll be just overwhelming unless you planned it before you left. The whole day should be blocked with

reentry activities, four hours on email, maybe two hours on one-on-one check-ins, zero meetings, zero projects, the day's purpose is to reenter. And when you have that container, then it's less scary to disconnect in the first place. I love that, the reentry day. I wish that was something I would have employed myself. And I have to tell you, I made a major change in my vacations after I had this one when I was at Lowe's. And with this big briefing coming up where once a month we had to meet with the CEO and all the presidents of the different divisions.

And we would go through the entire IT portfolio. and all the presidents of the different divisions, and we would go through the entire IT portfolio. And I had this just incredibly important project at the time that I was lead on that I was gonna have to brief. And we go on this vacation down off of Wilmington to Baldhead Island, it's supposed to be this time of just getting some free space to myself.

And I ended up getting bombarded the entire time by calls. Then I had to leave because things were falling apart three days in to go back to deal with them, then deliver the presentation to this committee. And then by the time I got back, it was as if I missed everything about the vacation that I would have had. And after that, from that point forward, I tried on the vacations I did to say, unless it is absolutely a world, it's coming to an end, do not bother me,

because I'm not gonna be looking at emails, I'm just gonna put my phone to the side and try not to do that, but it's harder than you think to completely disengage like that. So you need to first of all buy a real real camera because then you won't have the rationale. You get a car with a GPS, separate GPS, and a real camera. And now you've eliminated two reasons where you think I have to have my phone with me all the time.

Because I have to take pictures and get around. And then you lean into it. And I mean, you can go so far. There's a gentleman in the book, a CEO, who actually started paying his people to take time off. He called it paid, paid time off. And if they returned for a one week of truly disconnected vacation, they got a $7,500 bonus.

And if they checked email one time, they lost the money. And so people who get this, who believe in it, why would he do that? Why would he give that much money away? Because he knew that he gets back a different employee at the end of that week. He's willing to invest the money to transform the weary shallow thinking employee into a vital deep thinking returner.

And that's why he pays that money. We believe in it really strongly. And I think it will become more and more of a trend as this post pandemic burnout is felt. People are going to understand that taking the days is not enough. They're going to understand that you actually have to take rest during the days, rest from the topic. The other thing you can do is treat your weekend as if it's a short vacation as well. I did an article on that and it was really hard. I noticed myself in the pandemic,

we were recovering like everyone else. There was this day where I woke up and thought, I don't remember when I had a full weekend. And you kind of forget how to do it. You sit and try to read fiction and like you're from another planet. You don't remember how to do it, but you can get it back. You certainly can.

Well, we have touched on chapter seven a couple times now and it's the chapter where you go into managing email. And I was gonna ask you some questions about it, but since we've already covered it, I'm gonna let this one go because I want the listener to buy your book. And I will tell the listener that in there, Juliet provides some great advice on how

you write size your email and questions that you can ask yourself to do. So something that you definitely want to check out. I'm going to jump to chapter 8 and you introduce the 50-50 rural. What is it and how can you apply it to your work and life? I was just talking to my 14 year old about the 50-50 really yesterday, although I never would use that. A mommy teaching term and then it would turn off, but the 50 50 rule is anything that upsets you at work is 50% your fault until you've asked for what you want. You have to ask, you have to find a way to ask. So Alex was in a personal finance class and the teacher talked so fast that he can't take notes. And all the other kids say the teacher talked so fast that they can't take notes.

And no one's ever told the teacher because it's scary. So it's scary to say, excuse me, Mrs. Soans though, you talk so fast that can't take notes. But until someone has said that, it's 50% the students fall than 50% her fall because bosses are the same. They may not always know what the things are that you need. Colleagues are the same. And so we work for that accountability, that onus upon ourselves to say, it's so fun to use the recreational blaming to escape from my inner life here. But if we really slow it down, what is bothering me and how I actually ask for what I want? And then maybe if it's a corporate ask, we can get more organized and say, have I made a note, maybe asked again in three to six months,

or have I kept a record of the methods in which I have asked our given feedback so that there's documentation of the thread, or am I just complaining? I think the 50-50 rule really opens people up to see, I mean initially it might make you feel, oh it's my fault, the word fault is a heavy word, but it's also my power, my opportunity to say, I have 50% more power to change the things that drive me crazy at work than I thought I did yesterday, once you really ingest that reality. Yeah, thank you for that. That's really good advice. I also liked this, and I think it came from that exact chapter as well, and that's the analogy of the hourglass and how you use it to decide what to say yes and no two. Yes, the hourglass is probably another model you're going to want to ask my

office to send you if you want to post it because it's a little visual so it'll be hard to see but people want to say no and they don't have a model. So the white space hourglass is a slow model of deciding what to say yes and no two. I can give you kind of an appetizer version of it. At the beginning of every question, we're gonna have what's called a flash response. I wanna say yes or no. And where we get in trouble is when we let our flash response out of our lips too fast.

But if we slow it down a little bit and we start funneling through a couple of filters we can ask ourselves, for instance, what would my motive be if I said yes? Am I just kissing up? Am I afraid? Or conversely, do I have genuine interest or lack of interest? Then maybe we would go through what was the history of my previous yes and no's? Have I messed up in the past or maybe I volunteer too much and then I feel resentful? Or I don't join in enough and then I feel left out. And then what's my future? How do I look ahead

and say, would this yes or no change tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and what would that feel like? And when you get good at this, by the time you get down to your considered response, it's a minute. You're not belaboring this long process. You just sort of think of you're one of my motives. What have I done before? How's it going to affect my future? I think this isn't now. And it just gives people an organized way to think through their opportunities. Well, thank you for giving that and I will have to get that so I can put it in the show notes for the listeners. In chapter 11, I'm gonna jump to that. You talk about getting good at joy. How do we focus on more joy in our lives?

It was funny that in a business book, there was a lot of conversation about whether the personal chapter should be the second to last or the last chapter in the book, because the last chapter of the book is the note. It's the piece of music that you walk away humming and the idea of a business book ending with a personal chapter was a bit of a conversation. But at the end of the day, if you look at work-life balance, I have always been on team life. And I believe that work is

something that we do so we can facilitate the rest of our life. And if we have space at home, we are setting up that container. If we have uninterrupted time in the weekends, if we have more time for leisure, what we'll notice is that there are actually two different types of joy that we could be pursuing. And high joy is exhilaration, passion, exertion. It's where adrenaline and thrill is part of the equation. And then there is deep joy where it's sort of a warmer oatmeal going down sort of feeling where you're thinking about pride in your work or deep love. These are mellower feelings, but the recipe of the two of them is so important and all of them need space. You can't touch joy if you got your AirPods in and you're running through the house at a million miles an hour.

So I really was excited to leave the book on a note of, yeah, we're going to learn the same called white space. I'll give you 10 chapters to transform the workplace with it. But at the end of the day, we need space, our kids need space, our joy needs space in order to flourish. Well, Juliet, I typically end these episodes by asking the author if there's one thing they wanted the reader to take away from the book. What would it be? But I'm going to ask it a different way. And that is, how does taking a minute to think change the nature of our lives. It gives us more respect, I think, for each minute. That each minute when paid attention to has richness, whether it be a hard emotion that we need to feel or whether it be a moment of joy that we

want to not miss, slowing it all down just makes it richer and makes it better and more effective in the workday. But again, my passion, the really reason I get up in the morning is to make sure they take it home with them. Okay, and I have one fun question I like to ask. If you were selected to be an astronaut and you were on the mission to Mars and the powers it be told you that you and your crewmates each could lay down one law, one regulation, one, you know, universal thing for civilization on Mars, what would it be? Oh, good one. It might be that when you call your credit card company that you're connected immediately to a live human being. I think that would relieve more pain than all of my work, but let's say,

since we're on the theme of it, I will stick with a month of disconnected vacation per person per year. Okay, I'm sure millions of people would love that idea. Well, Juliet, if the fans would like to get to know you better, what are some ways they can do that? Yes, please. They can come to my website, julietfund.com. They can get the first chapter of the book for free and they can also take the busyness test, which is a wonderful thing to do in teams. It's a small quiz that will show you exactly where in your daily activities, busyness is robbing you of that space

and what to do about it. Well, Juliet, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was such a joy and your book was fantastic. So I highly encourage the listeners or viewers to buy a copy. We'll put a big picture of it in the show notes with a place that you can buy it. So we'll make it very easy for you to highly encourage the audience to buy Juliet's book.

I found it so useful and I will have it plastered all over the show notes with links for where you can buy it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you again for being on the show. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Juliet Funt, and I wanted to thank Juliet and Zilker Media for giving me the honor of having her on the show. Links to all things Juliet will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please use our website links

if you desire to buy a book from any of the guests on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for you or listener. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles and we now have over 420 of them for you to check out along with exclusive content. Please go and subscribe. I'm at John Aramiles, both on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. If you want to know how I book amazing guests like Juliet, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the

Passion Struck Podcast interview I did with Jeffruker, who is a pastor, veteran, podcaster, author, and speaker. Jeff leads the unbeatable army. He's a decorated soldier who enlisted in the United States Army at 18 and went on to retire with almost 23 years of service. In 2017, he was inducted into the US Army Ranger Hall of Fame. I don't mean this as an exaggeration. I have told people for 30 years, the toughest job in the military is serving as a private in the Ranger Regiment. It's not getting into the unit that alone has an extremely high attrition rate, but the first year in that unit is brutal. And there's well over 100% over that first year because the leaders

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