Start With A Win - How to De-Crapify Work and Make Time to Think

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam talks to Juliet Funt, the founder and CEO of The Juliet Funt Group, an efficiency training firm. Juliet and her firm are on a mission to “de-crapify” work, helping business leaders and organizations unleash their full potential by unburdening talent from busywork. She is a renowned keynote speaker and tough-love advisor. Juliet is the author of A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work. Between meetings, emails, reports, and decks, there are so many low-value tasks that sit on top of the talented people in organizations today. It keeps our teams from being able to do their best work. And COVID has only made the problem worse with more Zoom meetings, over communication, and extra emails. Juliet shares her analogy of building a fire and how creating space between the materials is essential to allow oxygenation to happen. In the same way, people need to have space to not only recuperate, but to step back and think and let ideas build. Team members and leaders can be more creative and engaged when they’re allowed a strategic pause to think purposely about the next chapter of a project or the business. Juliet believes that leadership is often over-focused on the logistical questions of “where” (where people sit, where should people work, where we sell) when they should be focused on “how” (how do we want to communicate, how do we want people to work). These questions pave the way for a redesign opportunity in how organizations operate.Juliet also shares about what she calls The Wedge, which is a wedge of time inserted between two activities in your day—between a meeting and a meeting, an emotionally challenging email and your response response. By taking a few micro-moments to process what just happened rather than just jumping to the next thing, our brain can actually better retain information and think more critically. And even if it’s only for a few minutes, that “white space” should be completely open time, think about anything we want in those times, which also gives our brain time for ideation and creativity.Episode Links:https://www.julietfunt.comA Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Workhttps://www.julietfunt.com/book/Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejulietfuntLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julietfunt/Order your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from top of the 12th floor, REMAX Global Headquarters here in Denver, Colorado. It's Adam Canto, CEO of REMAX with Start With A Win. In studio with producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? That's right. Fist bumping distance.

Bam! Right there. Oh, you're both there. We are both there. Yeah, isn't that weird? That was like one of those movies where they reach through and then the other guy's hand comes out on the other side. Exactly. Well, hey, let me introduce our guest to our audience here.

Juliette Funt is the founder and CEO of the Juliette Funt Group, an efficiency training firm. Juliette and her firm are on a mission to decrapify work, which don't we all want that? Helping business leaders and organizations unleash their full potential by unburdening the talent from busy work. She is renowned keynote speaker, a love advisor, tough love advisor. I love this. I want to hear more about tough love. Well, I wish I was a love advisor. It's more of a tough love advisor, but I'm going to write that down as a goal for the future. And then also an author. I mean, what does she's like the Renaissance woman, you know, a minute to think, reclaim creativity,

conquer busyness and do your best work. Juliet, welcome to the Start With A Win podcast. That's me. That's me. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Yeah, we're so glad to have you here. And I love this theme here today, eliminating busyness. There's way too much of that in the world, and we all figured out a way to how to add more of it during COVID for some reason, busyness and noise and, you know, crap. So we need to decrapify. I mean,

talk about spot on. Tell it. I mean, how'd you come up with that? What, what led you to go, I'm going to eliminate business and decrapify your life. Bam.

What, what got us there? I, I spent 20 years in people buried in crap. So if, you know, I thought somebody should get this off of these lovely people. It was about 10 years keynoting and consulting and about 10 years running the company where

we do this systematically. And the amount of meetings, email, paperwork, decks, reports, and just low-value junk that is sitting on top of most talented people while they try to do their day is completely unsustainable. You said it. COVID just made it worse. The Zoomaholic marathon every day from 7 to 7, the ridiculous, anxious communication that has just increased chats, increased email, increased all the places where we put our free floating anxiety during this trauma has, has upped the ante even further. So it's not a new problem, but it's a frightening time. If we started, if we're ignoring it still, we are really checked out. Oh, totally. I mean, where are people going right now? I mean, it's, you know, you talk about what causes employees

to transition to autopilot mode, things like that. I mean, there's a lot of autopilot. And I mean, I was just at a mastermind two weeks ago, and we talked about how people will generally only deliver the 25% that they need to. Tell us about this. How are they not making the most of their time at work? And what can we do about that? When you started the question and you said transition, I thought you were going to say people transitioning out like the great recession, which, uh, uh, great resignation, which is happening now. It's not just that they're moving from engaged to checked out. They're actually exiting the building, which is a really important thing to talk about as well. Tolerated misery of all of this nonsense

work all day long does fuel the fact that people are finally saying, I'm out of here. So that's a separate thing. In terms of moving toward most effective use of talent and time and energy, I think maybe we start with the foundational metaphor that is of the book, of our work, which is that of building a fire. And if you imagine that you're building a fire, you could have perfect dry crumbly newspaper, and you could have all the right wood. But if you missed one critical ingredient, that fire would never, ever ignite. And that ingredient is space. It is the oxygenating room in between the logs and the stuff and the pine needles that makes those flames ignite. And human beings are the same.

They need to have space, not only to recuperate, which is where people's minds go first, but they also have to have space to step back, to be strategic, to reflect, or to let an idea cook. And it is that crap that we were talking about is extinguishing the oxygenating space of the day. That's why it's tied so directly to the burnout that we're just seeing everywhere because human beings need space. And so when you return that oxygenating space to work, wonderful things happen. People can have more creativity. They can have more engagement. They can take a strategic pause is the terminology we use, and they can think purposefully about the next chapter of a project or of their business. And there's no time in history that I've ever seen where leaders, especially, more need to take a pause, have some space and decide what exactly do we

want this next design to look like? We almost have a blank page. It's so thrilling. We could take decades of annoyance and extinguish it right now because of the redesign opportunity that COVID has been a catalyst for, but only if we take space to think about it, not if we just charge ahead. I love that redesign opportunity. Oh, it's huge. That is a golden nugget or, I mean, a diamond in the rough, whatever it is, it's the hope diamond more than anything for people. And people are missing that because we've got all these pressures from every different direction. And if you throw into this, into the mix, when it comes to employees, when they work from home, whatever, you've got single moms who have a child at the kitchen table,

which is now the desk and boardroom and whatever else you want to call it. You've got things coming at you from every direction and you turn around and there's no escape. So you're right. It keeps compounding upon us. But I mean, you talk about you need that space to breathe, that air in the fire to really allow it to find its potential. Why did we lose that? Why did we default to that when COVID happened, when the pressures of society? And let's face it. I mean, pre-COVID, the pressures of society were building. They were starting to build and build and build and build. And we got to this point where like, now we got COVID, we got social issues, we got all sorts of things going on. And then it all went into everybody's head and we have a bad situation. You know, what do we need to, where did it come from? Why are we in this situation? What do we need to do? I think you're smart to track it backwards because

we have a number that we use in our practice called the million for 50 number. That means that when you take corporate waste, and it could be in a bank, it could be for realtors, it could be anybody who works professionally. If you take that waste, we typically see about a million dollars of waste in wasted talent time for every 50 people in an organization. That's the million for 50 annually number. That number is based on data that we've been collecting for over 10 years.

This is not a COVID phenomenon. This is the way that work has transpired for a very, very long time. Then COVID hits. We all lose our minds as we had no choice not to. Now that we're at this tail where people are designing what they're calling hybrid, what is a problem is that leadership is over-focused on questions about where. There are questions about where should people sit and where should people work and where should we sell real estate and where should we keep real estate. The where questions are logistic necessities that we need to get through. But the how is what's going to bring people together in the next decade of work. The how of how do we really want to communicate?

How do we really want work to feel? How can we teach people to be more empowered? How can we give more autonomy that people have been craving and starving for so long? This is that design opportunity that I'm talking about is for leaders to step back and really think through what are all the things that are suboptimal about the how of the way that we work and how can I fix them? Can I go, you know, those meetings they call a skip level meeting where the big boss talks to the people below the next rung? How about skip levels meetings? Let's have the big boss talk to people six levels below and say, what is it like for you? Do you work at night

after your children go to bed? Do you wake up every day and eat three espressos just to open your eyes? What is it like for you? And then change those hows. That's amazing. Because I mean, really what you're talking about is everybody's leading the burnout, right? Or got there. We're getting there. 52%, isn't it? That's's leading the burnout, right? Or got there. You know, we... We're getting there. 52% isn't it? That's the number. Yeah, it's a terrible number.

You know, there are mental health issues. You know, there's fear, overwhelm, anxiety throughout society. It's like we all met at an intersection and everybody had a green light and we all ended up in the middle together. It's challenging. So, I mean, my question to you, because I think a lot of people are, and we've had this conversation before. Let's not call this new people.

I mean, it's, you know, we've been talking about this for almost two years now, folks. And I get to sit on these mastermind groups and roundtables with other CEOs and we go, what's your biggest problem? Mental health. Okay. So what happens with mental health? And obviously we're looking at business productivity. We're looking at shareholder return, shareholder value, things of that nature in running businesses. But we also have to look at how do we care for our people so that they want to provide that to our shareholders. Because if you take care of your people, your people take care of your business.

But watch how slippery it is when you talk about mental health, because we are advising a lot of companies on exactly what to do right now about employee wellbeing. And if we sit here and we say the words mental health, to me, the image that comes to mind is an individual person who's suffering in ways that are varied. But some of that image for some reason

makes it feel like it's their problem. They're feeling low or they're depressed or they can't handle it or they're falling apart. It is a very easy slide into this person being responsible for falling in this environment, where often it is the environment. When you study burnout, it's not that often that the person is missing skills or fortitude. It is that they are in an unproductive or toxic environment for employee well-being. We talk about it like you can fix the car, that's the employee, the high-end vehicle, but you also have to fix the road because if there's all these potholes and obstacles and things in the way, they can't proceed. What I'm trying to do when I have an audience of those kind of people you're talking about is sit with them one at a time and really

do intense visioning about what kind of road are you going to create that makes those cars zip along easy and well, not just how can I hire an extra therapist for this person, which is kind of how it's going in a lot of situations. Exactly. We're reverting to human nature, which is to blame the person, not the framework. When in fact, the framework is harming the person. And I 100% agree with you on that. It's fascinating when you think about that because, I mean, that's really how we approached it from the beginning of COVID of, hey, we care about everybody

and we understand that the environment's changing, which is going to put stress on everybody and business leaders out there, or maybe you lead yourself and that's all you lead. But the reality is, Julia, you're 100% correct. Everybody stop and take a look around. Are you putting yourself in a framework and an environment that's causing you harm? And what adjustments do you need to make in that? Or maybe it's changing the environment completely overall. But don't revert to that until you need to. But take a look around and observe and understand that,

hey, I can be happy. And is this the right place for me or is this the right environment? And there are steps to take and maybe be exciting to pivot to, okay, what do we do about this? What do we get leaders to do? What do we get individuals to do?

Because there are two different tracks here. Is there one that would be better to start with for your particular audience in terms of leadership or individual application? I would just like to hear your perspective on that. I mean, it's what are you seeing the most in business and society and in entrepreneurs? And what recommendations do you have on that? I mean, how do they decrapify their world? Let's do both. Entrepreneurs, realtors, solopreneurs, they have a much harder time because they don't have as high a percentage of corporate crap to deal with. If you look at, I don't know, giant company, G-E-P-N-G, something with an E in it. There's going to be mounds of

unnecessary complexity because corporations aggregate it like the Tribbles in Star Trek. They keep coming in the bigger corporations. But if you're a solo or an entre, chances are your list is reasonably lean. You're pretty much doing the things that you feel that only you can do. And so it becomes harder. In order to insert space, the best way to do it for a solopreneur and entrepreneur is to begin with an interlaced approach as opposed to looking for a chunk. When people think, I need a little white space or I need a little thinking time, they tend to go for, I need a 30-minute block or I need an hour to just step back. It's not really realistic for most people to begin that way. What's more realistic is to think of a

tool we call the wedge. I'm glad we're on video. For those of you listening audio only, my fingers are up like a steeple. I'm imagining a wedge of time that's inserted in between two of the activities of your day to uncompress them and add oxygen. So between a meeting and a meeting, between a question and answer, between an email that is emotional and your response, if you start inserting these little wedges, it can be 3, 5, 7, 12 seconds and you can begin. You feel, oh, there's that oxygenation is starting in the in-between moments of the day. So from that solo and entre perspective, I believe we start with

the wedge and don't sabotage ourselves by trying to go for long stretches that feel impossible at the beginning. So what does that wedge do for us mentally? I mean, what experience do we get out of that? Because you're right. It starts building up and building up and building up and Zoom runs into Zoom, runs into meeting, runs into Zoom, and you're going, ah, and you're overwhelmed. I mean, is it just two or three minutes of meditation or is it a moment outside? It can be anything you want, but meditation and what we call white space are different things. So meditation, and I meditate also, meditation is a practice that has instruction. So if you meditate, you know that you focus on something that's a candle, a mantra, your breath, then thoughts intrude, you usually label them and you return to your point of focus over and over and over and over a million times. That instruction means that you're not following thought. The kind of strategic pause that we teach, where we build in something called white space, is completely open time. That means we follow

thought. We have no instruction. We're not returning to breath. We can think about anything that we want in those times. That's where that creative ideation gets really rich. I'll give you an example, and then I'll come back to the rest of your question. That's where that creative ideation gets really rich. I'll give you an example and then I'll come back to the rest of your question. There's a guy named John. He's a security guard at a Fortune 200 company that was a client of ours. What's really funny is in this company where they pride themselves on a lot of innovative patents, John, the security guard, actually holds the record for having the most patents in the company over the people in the innovation department. We sat together and we talked about why. I know he's a very unique thinker. He's a

brilliant man. But I also believe it's because his job is 5% prescribed action and 95% waiting, white space, making sure that he's ready. So in that time, he thinks and he ideates and he plays with ideas. And no one is judging the validity of his thinking time because he's supposed to be sitting there waiting. And the punchline of the story is two different times this man was promoted out of security and into innovation. And both times after about six months, he went back to security because he got assigned tasks within the innovation department that got in the way of his creativity. So this time can be so valuable if we find ways to give it to ourselves just to let ideas flow, but there's more. There's the frontal lobe, which is the executive center of our brain,

finally having time to reboot because it can't reboot if it keeps going, going, going. And there's also our ability to get in touch with feelings or things that are cooking inside of us that could distract us all day long if we don't even have a minute to acknowledge them. So all sorts of wonderful things can happen in that space. Okay. So I have a question for you then about that because this is, I mean, mind blown here. I'm just loving this conversation. I'm sitting here reflecting on myself, as I'm sure our listeners are on themselves in the white space, that they're searching for those white space moments in their life. A couple of those that come to mind where I really have an extensive amount of creativity are treadmill, shower, or just, you know, like going out and sitting in the sun in my backyard.

I live in the woods. So just going and sitting in the sun in the backyard. But I can't do anything else besides those things. And you know what I find myself doing is running for a pad of paper because the ideas just start pouring out of me. Right. That's what happens. That's the, so in the book, there's an origin story of white space and it has a couple of different compartments. There's part of the name came from looking at paper calendars of executives and looking for the white. And part of the idea came from when I was a young mom, when I first had my kids,

we decided we would lie down with them to wait while they fell asleep because they wouldn't fall asleep any other way. And so in that time, I had three kids in a row, two years apart. It's six years of basically lying in dark rooms with no sensory stimuli of any kind for 20 to 30 minutes every night. And as a really high energy person, this was really hard at first. And then I realized that I too, I would dash out of those rooms when whichever baby fell asleep looking for a pencil and a pad, because in the white space of the dark, there was this amazing creative flow that wasn't interrupted by cell phone, wasn't interrupted by distraction, and you've experienced the same thing most people do when they give themselves a chance to turn on

that channel. And that's what's so beautiful about watching this come to life for people. Wow. Okay. I've just identified those moments. I mean, thank you. That's incredibly powerful because now I can leverage that as strength in my life. I can't. For the business application, what I would add is also don't underestimate the micro versions of what you just described. So the run, the shower, the sun is all great, but you'd be surprised coming off a call or coming out of a meeting, sometimes if you took 60 seconds to just let what just happened cook a little longer, you'd be amazed at the ahas that come out of that as opposed to just jumping onto the next thing. So it can also be that interlaced variety,

that wedge variety that we care so much about. Awesome. That's incredible advice because I was just thinking back at the last meeting I was in where you go for a few hours and you're like, bam, right into the next one and you don't get to process what just happened. And really what your brain does is just goes, boop, bye. So I mean, you're right. You lose the value of that conversation, I think. So hopefully the people that was in that last meeting with me aren't listening to this. You didn't lose all the value of it. I'm sure just a portion. We didn't leave the meeting until we said, okay, what did we get out of this? What are we going to do with it? So for what it's worth, your guys are okay. But I have a question for you. Your book, A Minute to Think, Reclaim Creativity,

Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work, recently published this summer. Obviously, this is a glimpse into that book. What else can we learn in that book? And what can we expect if we apply what's in that book? Yes. The goal of the book was to do two things, was to first of all, let people know that they were not alone in this experience of misery at work. And the second was to let them know that it is absolutely a solvable problem. For an individual, a team, or an organization, that there was a path that I wanted to create for people that was a directed, clear framework to walk out of one place and into another place. So in the book, you'll see that the sections of the book lead

you to understand the problem, which is always necessary, and then adopt the tools and shared language that you need to reliably and permanently change the situations we've been describing. Awesome. Great information. I encourage everybody to check out the book. I'm sure you can find it by searching for Juliet Funt or A Minute to Think. So wherever you can buy your favorite books, Amazon, things like that. Yes, it's everywhere. Okay. All right. Juliet, I have a question I ask everybody that's on the show, and I'm really excited to hear what you have to say about this because I love how you think.

So, Juliette, how do you start your day with a win? The introductory course to taking space, the baby step that everyone can do is to insert a wedge between opening their eyes and getting out of bed. And that pausing right there at the beginning to say, how am I? What's coming up? What do I need to shake off from the night or the day before? And what do I want this day to look like? That is arguably the most important wedge of white space that you can take in your entire day. And I'd say that's one that I'm pretty reliably batting. Now I'm going to get myself into a sports analogy. I'm either batting 100 or 1,000. I don't know what the good one is,

but I'm batting something very high on that one. So I would say beginning with thoughtfulness and not launching into activity too fast. Awesome. You're batting 1,000 with that, Juliet. That's the one. There you go. Hey, ladies and gentlemen juliet fun author keynote speaker coach trainer consultant just a really

smart person that we you need to listen to what she's saying because this matters a ton and just a fantastic human being so julia thank you for being on start with a win thanks great to be here if you're ready to create personal and business success, subscribe to this podcast and head over to wherever you get your books and order Start With A Win, the book. Thanks again for listening. And for more great content,

head over to startwithawin.com. And until next time, start with a win. you