The One You Feed - Michael Bungay Stanier on Starting Well to Finish Well

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of 6 books that have, between them, sold more than a million copies. He’s perhaps best known for his self-published book, The Coaching Habit, which is the best-selling book on coaching this century and is already recognized as a classic. He founded the training and development company, Box of Crayons, which has taught coaching skills to hundreds of thousands of people around the world and he created a book in partnership with Seth Godin which raised $400,000 for Malaria No More. In this episode, Eric and Michael Bungay Stanier discuss his new book, How to Begin.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Michael Bungay Stanier and I Discuss Starting Well to Finish Well and…His book, How to BeginTools to deal with fear and anxiety when they ariseSitting with the tension of ambition and contentmentThe secret is, once you have a goal, the key is to stop worrying about the goalThat we unlock our greatness by working on the hard thingsThe three steps that make up the foundation of actually beginningThe key of beginning well that helps you stick with a projectHow to set a Worthy GoalThe ways Worthy Goals can evolveHow to the prizes and punishments of various commitmentsMichael Bungay Stanier Links:MBS WorksHow to BeginTwitterFacebookInstagramWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Michael Bungay Stanier you might also enjoy these other episodes:Michael Bungay Stanier (Interview from 2016)How to Get Things Done with Charlie GilkeySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You have to get a goal that lights you up, that you care about, that you can invest in, because you're talking about a chunk of time of your life that you're about to spend on this. It's going to be meaningful for you. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Bungay-Stanier. He's the author of six books, which have, between them, sold more than a million copies. He's perhaps best known for the book The Coaching Habit, which is the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book, How to Begin, helps people be more ambitious for themselves and for the world.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B,

as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Michael. Welcome back.

Eric, it's so nice of you to invite me back. Thank you. It's a pleasure to have you on again. I don't know how long ago it was that we had the conversation. It's been several years for sure. I do know that I've gone back to your book, The Coaching Habit, a number of times to pull out good questions. Oh, thank you. It's a great primer on some very good questions to ask. So I've gone to that, but we're going to be talking about a different book today. We're going to be talking about your latest book, which is called How to Begin, Start Doing Something That Matters. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable.

Yeah. There's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd love to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, first of all, I admire you telling that so well still, because I know you must have told that parable many times now as you set up your shows. And you know, I thought about this. I think what this resonated,

made me think about this time round is not only what I'm trying to feed the good wolf but what I'm trying to not feed the bad wolf you know human nature is wired to add rather than subtract we have a default which is like the thing to do is do something or do more and often one of the great ways to make change and make progress is to remove stuff and stop doing stuff and step away from stuff. So rather than just look at what's in the light and, you know, I think about things around how do I decenter myself is a big part of the work I'm doing at the moment. How do I move out of the spotlight so I allow other people to move into the spotlight? And that's both requiring me to feed the good wolf in terms of a humility and in terms of a letting go of some things like status and control and authority. But it's also around kind of not feeding the bad wolf, which is like,

what do I hold on to too long? Where am I protecting my ego too much? Where am I feeling fragile about stuff that I don't need to be fragile about? And so the power in this parable for me is, it's like, just like your logo, which is like, there are two wolves and you need to manage both of the wolves. You need to feed the good wolf, but you also need to starve the bad wolf and make that an active choice rather than just a passive one. That's a great take. And it made me think of, you know, this year for me, the main thing I'm focusing on, you know, oftentimes people pick a word for the year and I pick the word love. But the reason I picked the word love to a large extent was because there's

that phrase, you know, that the best way to get rid of fear is love. And what I realized is that there is a distinction in how I do my work when I'm coming from a place of just focus on love and service versus a place of fear about making it. And to your point about what I realized was I could spend lots of time trying to figure out how to get more energy, how to get more creative, how to get more. But the first and most important thing for me seems to be just pull the fear out. Right. Just pull the fear out of the work. And naturally, for me, it comes alive in ways.

And so what you just said there kind of resonates with me and kind of where my brain is right now. Well, how do you pull the fear out? Because that sounds like everybody's nodding. There's nobody who's not nodding at the moment as they're listening to this. But I'm like, it's letting more love in and pulling the fear out is hard, deep work. And I'm curious to know how you actually do that so that you can see the shift? Yeah, well, a few things. I mean, one is actively working on cultivating the love. So, you know, in my life, it's moving my meditation practice more towards meta practice. But a lot of it is just what do I moment to moment put my attention on? Right. So, for example, we've got this program called Spiritual Habits, and there's a version one of it,

and then there's sort of an advanced version. And the advanced version, we're running people through it for the first time, and some of those lessons are still being created. And about this time each week, I'm going to deliver the lesson Sunday. It'll be the first time I've delivered it. And I can start to notice the gnawing of fear. Yeah, yeah. to notice the gnawing of fear. Yeah. Yeah. And so one thing I can do then is just turn my attention towards the care I have for the people in the group. You know, it doesn't solve it, but it is sort of a consistent reorientation. And I think the other one too, right? And I think those of

us who have enough need to do this regularly is recognize I have enough. I've already won. Am I rich? By no means. And I left a lot of money on the table when I left my corporate world, but I make it by. And I'm not in danger of not making it by. And I can just kind of relax into that a little bit and remind myself of that. So that's kind of how I'm doing it these days.

I've just come to the end of the three months leading up to a book launch. And even though this is my sixth or seventh book, I still found myself getting wound around the axle of how the anxiety about making it for the book launch. Even though there's one part of me going, it's only a book launch and it's just a day and it passes and it's the long game that you're playing that matters. All of that's my intellectual conversation, but my emotional thing is a kind of churn. Yeah. And there were three things that I used, different kind of mantras, I guess, in some ways, to help me manage this and help the people who work with me manage me as well.

The first comes from an article i read in i think gq about the world's greatest free diver you know these people who take huge breaths and then they dive as far deep as they can using nothing but their own body and a kind of a fin attached to their feet and you know it's one of the things which is like you get this wrong you're dead literally i mean it's not a metaphorically death it's a real death and yeah when i have a competition coming up i just keep connecting to the joy i feel in doing this to remember the joy so i'm like oh that's helpful remember the joy of it and then the second thing comes from a spiritual teacher whose name has escaped me but the story goes roughly like this he's i think maybe in maybe in the Buddhist tradition of some version.

And he's teaching. He's, you know, up on a little dais, and there's hundreds of people seated cross-legged in front of him. And as he's teaching, halfway through it, he leans in and he goes, should I tell you the secret of my life? Of course, everybody's sitting down and leans forward because they're like, yes, that's why we're here. And he goes goes i don't

mind what happens yeah and i was like oh that's so good because you know with this book launching there's part of me that really minds what happens i wanted to yeah do well and be noticed and be talked about and be passed along all that sort of stuff and you know one of the mantras is just to go look i don't mind what happens i don't mind i'm committed to a process i don't mind what happens and then the third mantra that particularly i when i work with angely who's on my my little team she has it on her board behind her so i can see it when we talk on zoom week i read it and it's a saying we've already won so it's like every time we're struggling we're like yeah we've already won this game like look at us we're happy we're content we're resourced we're doing work we love we're serving people

in the way we want to serve them we've already won what's happening in the moment is just miscellany we've already won it hasn't been 100 successful by any means i've still been wrapped around the axle but that's that's decreased the anxiety a little bit i love that we've already won. I think that is a great one. It reminds me of a quote I've heard, which is, I won't get it right, but it's basically, remind yourself that there was a time that you fervently wished for what you currently have. And that's a really good one for me, because I'm like, yeah, I've already won. That's a great one. And then the previous one about I don't mind what happens. There's a Zen phrase that goes something along the lines of the way is easy for he who has no preference, right? And of course, we have preferences, right? We're always going to have preferences. But when we move them from it's got to be this

way to I prefer it's this way, it's a lot easier. I think that's a great way to lead into your book, because your book is about doing work that matters. And I'd love to tie where we've been to the book. And the way I would tie it there is to say, you know, in doing work that matters, and in your book, there's a fair amount of figuring out what do I mean by that, and getting specific about what that is, which is a way of setting ourselves up in a way to mind what matters. And this is a question I've asked over and over on the show, which is sort of how do you balance for those of us who have ambition? And we could talk about ambition because I think you define it well. But for those of us

who have ambition, how do we balance that with also just being able to appreciate exactly what we have today? I'll hand it over to you after that partially formed question. Well, there's a lot there, but I think I'm not sure this is a balancing thing. I'm not sure I know how to balance it exactly. I think it's a tension. And I think you sit with the tension that on the one hand, you have absolutely hopefully found something that is a worthy goal. That's the language we use in this How to Begin book. It's a worthy goal. It's thrilling. It's important. It's daunting. You've worked it and you've drafted it and you've tinkered with it and you've kind of poked at it. So you can kind of say, yeah, I care about this. I care about

making this commitment to something like this. It matters enough to me. But I do think that once you have the goal, the secret is to stop worrying about the goal. It's a paradox. It's misdirection in some ways, kind of like a magician. It's like, look over here when actually the world's happening on the other side. Because the emotional heart of this new book is the phrase, we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. And we don't unlock our greatness by crossing the finish line and holding up the trophy. We unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. It's in the doing that we get to see the best version of ourself emerge and become defined and just kind of evolve. So, you know, 25 years ago, I read the definition of change,

and it was in the context of kind of organizational change. There was somebody going, I've read all the books. You know, it's all bollocks. This is what change actually looks like. We set a target. We run like hell towards it for a bit. After a while, we stop and we look around and we go, now where are we? And we set a new target and we run like hell towards that. I thought that was a pretty good description of actually what change

mostly feels like. And you set your target, you go, this is definitely worth it. But then you get seduced into, in a good way, into doing the work. Because, you know, the irony is often when you hit your target, you're like, that's great, celebrating that for the moment, but now what's next? You know, you have that kind of like that next, whatever the next thing is for you. I sit with the tension of it. I keep coming back to the worthy goals I set myself and work with on my team. We talk about it and we check on it. I keep coming back to the worthy goals I set myself and work on my team. We talk about it and we check on it. But then we specifically work in six-week cycles. At the start of a six-week cycle, we go, what could we really achieve in six weeks that we would be proud of? And then we work

really hard for six weeks. And after six weeks, we stop. And Angel and I look at each other and go, well, how was that? What did we learn? What worked? What does that tell us about us and about the work and about the goal? And then we kind of reset and then we do another six-week sprint. I think that's the answer. That's an answer. That's half an answer. You asked me half a question, I'm giving you half an answer. So it's a perfectly balanced dialogue. Fair enough. And as you were talking, it made me reflect on kind of where you end the book, which is you talk about a piece of paper you've got on your desk. Can you share that? Because I do think it kind of speaks to this. Yeah. It comes from the German poet Rilke. And the English translation of the poem is called

The Man Watching. And it's an amazing poem. And I'm not a religious man, and it draws on biblical imagery in a way that I think is extraordinary, even though I don't have that kind of tradition that's important to me. But it talks about wrestling with an angel. And, you know, there's a very famous story in the Bible about Jacob wrestling with the angel. And the way this poem tells it is like, you know, you've got to be clear, the angel doesn't wrestle with just anybody or everyone. You have to be doing something that matters for the angel to wrestle with you. And you will always lose when you wrestle an angel. That's the way it works.

There's no chance of victory, but you are shaped in a way in that moment of engagement with an angel that is extraordinary. And the final lines of the poem say something like this, his goal is not to win, but to be deeply defeated by ever greater things. And that for me feels powerfully resonant because I'm in midlife, I'm like 53 or something or 54, somewhere like that, early 50s, early mid 50s, as somebody once said. And I'm now old enough and I've been around long enough to know that I can take on a bunch of things that I can probably win at, do okay at, get some form of recognition in terms of money or status or whatever. I can do that. What's the constant call for me to stop me kind of settling

into a stagnant version of myself is to take on ever greater things, be deeply defeated by ever greater things. And I love the permission to take on ever greater things, and I love the permission to be deeply defeated. That feels amazing to me. I mean, it's what you were saying earlier on, Eric, around there was a time when I was longing to be in the position I am right now. You're like, it's time. This's the whole focus of the book. It is not a how to keep going, how to have a five-year plan. It's about how to begin. And so you have three broad,

I don't know if you want to call them steps that make up the foundation. So walk us through those. Sure. So the three broad sections are, first of all, define a worthy goal. Like how do you actually get a goal that's worth taking on? The second broad step is commit. And this of the three steps, this is kind of the deepest work, which is like, are you really up for this? I mean, really, you really are for this? Because we've all had goals that we've kind of abandoned too quickly, too easily, walked away from, and some of us will have some regret around that. This is how to minimize regret by you really going, am I up for it? And there's some tests around that. And the third broad step is to cross the threshold. I can't promise how to get people to the end of the journey because once the journey starts,

who knows? But if I can get you to take three bold steps across the threshold, it's game on. Something exciting is happening now. And I'll give you some tactics around how you can sustain the journey, but we don't get into how you finish the journey because that's your adventure to plot out. Yeah. I do think the thing that's interesting about it though, is that by beginning well in the way that you lay out, you make it more likely you'll stay on the journey. Yeah, totally. That is a key motivator of why I wanted to do this, which is like, I have a graveyard of abandoned projects and things that some of them I'm delighted that I stopped working on, but some of them I've got some regret around. I wish I, why did I stop that? That felt like it could have been powerful.

And for lack of focus or lack of courage or lack of understanding about what I was taking on, I stepped away from it. And I am just trying to increase the odds that you find something that lights you up and that you have the courage to cross the threshold and get going on it. Because once you do that, I mean, was it Goethe who says like beginning has a madness or a boldness to it, something like that. So I'm like, let's get to that madness, that boldness, that magic of beginning something. That's right. And I think what you're doing in the book balances sort of the two extremes that I see people go to. There are people who just start boldly 50 things over and over and over and over, right? That's one type of problem by not preparing

for it. And then the other extreme is we never get across the threshold. We have a tendency to get stuck in thinking about it. And I think that the book does a nice job of sort of threading the needle between those two to make sure that whichever side you tend towards, there's things in the book that pull you back to that middle point that allow you to get through. Well, Eric, you know, the writer Jim Collins, good to great fame, has a metaphor that's helpful for this. It's helpful for me anyway. And he says, look, a good strategy involves bullets and cannonballs. And even if you're kind of anti-war or anti-guns like i am i guess this is still a helpful metaphor because he says look firing bullets which low risk experiments helps you figure out what the

real target is and you want to fire a bunch of bullets until you finally go this is it and that's kind of the process of trying to work out what your worthy goal is and then once you figure out what the target is, you fire your cannonball. I mean, you commit. And Colin says, and I think this is the point you're making, is some people spend their whole life firing bullets and they never have the courage to fire a cannonball. So they dabble. They do little bits. They kind of make small steps, but nothing big happens. So they don't bring their attention to it. And other people just fire the cannonball way too early. They're like, I haven't thought this through at all, but I'm going to invest my life savings into it. And it goes wrong, because it

almost always goes wrong. And they are taken out of the game, because they've no longer got the resources to be able to commit to something in the way that they want to. So this whole idea of slow down a little bit so that you can go fast when it's time to go fast, I think is a really powerful way of thinking about this golf setting. Yeah. And I think that analogy is really good for sort of illustrating those two extremes. So let's move into these three steps a little bit more. You do talk about setting a worthy goal, and I love how you say that a worthy goal entwines ambition for yourself and for the world. Say a little more about that.

Yeah, so the quick backstory of this is after The Coaching Habit, which as you said at the introduction was this kind of amazing best-selling book that has taken off. I wrote a second book called The Advice Trap, which was written because, whereas I knew some people read

the coaching habit and went, I love the seven questions in the book and I'm using them and it's changing the way I'm leading and interacting with other people. There's a bunch of people who went, I love the questions. I just don't use them. I was like, why is it so hard to shift our behavior even when we want to shift our behavior? And the advice trap was a deep dive into behavior change and what are the hidden resistances to change that we all have. And I got to the end of that book and put it out in the world and I was like, I've made a good start on that, but I still haven't quite cracked the formula around behavior change. It's a big thing to try and crack. So I started to try and write a book on, okay, let me have another go at thinking around behavior change and trying to find a way of making it accessible and understandable for people.

Wrote a first draft, sent it off to some friends. My friend Misha, two days later, emailed me and went, I've read the first 50 pages of your book. No idea what it's about. It's not very good, is it? I was like, oh, you know, everybody knows first drafts suck, but sometimes you don't, you kind of want to hear it, you kind of don knows first drafts suck, but sometimes you don't. You kind of want to hear it. You kind of don't want to hear it. So I'm picking through the rubble of this draft. And the phrase that came out was, you know, we unlock our greatness by working on the

hard things. I was like, got it. That feels like the thing to base this book around. So this is how the worthy goal idea came out. So for the first time in a long time, I was really sitting with the literature and the research around goals. I was like, I don't really like any of this. I don't like smart goals because a smart goal is a formula of reduction and tidying up. Keep it specific, keep it measurable, keep it actionable, keep it

timely. It's all about the kind of the logistics and the doability of the goal without ever asking, is this the goal? Is this the right goal? Right. And then the other acronym people really know are BHAGs, bold, hairy, audacious goals. That is another Jim Collins idea. And like the bullet cannonball metaphor, which I love, BHAGs, it's a great hook, but it tends to be organizational. It's like a really big vision, like in 20 years time, this is what we're trying to be. And it just felt that it was inaccessible for most people. BHAG just felt too hairy and too

audacious. I'm like, what's the middle ground? Not to mention it's a terrible name. Yeah. Well, he's good at metaphors. I don't like the idea of hair in my goals. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that are wrong with that. I would agree with that, but it worked. I mean, it's a phrase that's caught on. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, so we've got to find something in the middle here. It has to be thrilling. Like you have to get a goal that lights you up, that you care about, that you can invest in because you're talking about a chunk of time of your life that you're about to spend on this. because you're talking about a chunk of time of your life that you're about to spend on this. It's got to be meaningful for you. And I wanted something that

would counteract the tendency that some of us have, which is to adapt goals that have an obligation to them. I should be doing this. I ought to be doing this. Oh, it's expected that I'm doing this. You know, this is the thing I need to be doing now because. And lots of us carry that weight of that, either through external pressures or sometimes internal pressures that we're like, I should be doing this by now. And thrilling allows you to throw that off and just go, what makes me rub my hands together and go, oh yeah, this is the goal for me. But if it's just that, you've got kind of like the worst of self-help, which is like, oh, it's all about me it's all about

staring at my navel and anything that makes my life feel better it becomes solipsistic and narcissistic and self-indulgent i'm like it needs to be more than that i mean there's a place for self-indulgence don't get me wrong but for a worthy goal i want it to be important and important is about serving the world in some way and reading a book book by Jacqueline Novogratz, who is the founder of Acumen, which is a kind of cool nonprofit venture capitalist firm. And she wrote a book called A Manifesto for a Moral Revolution. In that was the phrase, what if you could give more to the world than you take? I was like, damn, I wish I'd written that.

That's a great phrase. So for me, I hang important on that. Can you leave the world better than you found it? How do you give more to the world than you take? And in that you have a goal that serves you and serves the world. You have internal motivation and external motivation. And the third element is daunting, which is like, how do you find a goal that will

help you grow, stretch you, break you, crack you open a little bit so that you're on the edge of your confidence and your confidence and your experience and your sense of self so that you have a chance for that next version of you to emerge. Because you're not feeding the same wolf. The wolf you feed today is not the wolf you fed five years ago or 10 years ago. You're looking to feed a different wolf. You're looking to, in some ways, find the next version of the good wolf. And to that, you've got to be on the edge of who you are. And that's what the daunting piece is around. I want something that makes you go, this makes me a bit sweaty. I know how to start this, but I don't know how to finish it necessarily. That's when it's daunting. Thank you. So Hey, y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves

to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the process, you talk people through really writing three drafts of this worthy goal. And I want to read something you wrote for reasons beyond just the way they're used in the book. Because I tell people about this often. I say, you know, people who are even best-selling authors struggle with a new book, right? And you wrote, you know, the step one is to write a crappy first draft. And you said, this is true of every draft. I'm not the first to say it, but I can attest to its truth. The first draft is always crappy. The first time I write anything, it's thoroughly mediocre. It's tepid and confused. It's overstuffed and underbaked. It's too specific and too vague

all at once. I love that, A, because it talks about how you can be bad in so many ways all at once. But I also think it's so important that people hear from people who've been very successful, right, that this is hard. And the first thing that comes out of you sucks. And so this was a great opportunity to reiterate something that I end up talking to coaching clients about often. Well, let me support you by telling the story of the coaching habit. I spent three or four years pitching that book to a New York publisher. They kept turning me down. They're like, Michael, we love you. We love the idea, but we don't love this. Could you just go away and have another go at doing this? I'm like, okay. And literally,

I wrote six versions of that book, each one that got turned down. And I finally said to this publisher, all right, I got lost, but I found it again. And I'm really clear what I want this book to be. It's a really crystal clear vision now and this is it i'm putting it on the table and it's a yes or no decision it's not i go back and write an eighth draft it's like yes or no and they went no i was surprised i was so i was so sure i was calling their bluff but but no they called my bluff and i was like oh man you know they published another book of mine and sold a hundred thousand copies which is pretty good yeah you know i really thought they would bet on me even if they didn't fully bet on the idea they went nope i was like ah turned out that was one of the best things that's happened to me because i then went away and i self-published the coaching

habit and i managed control of it and when i wrote the version that came out in the world it didn't take me long at all to write that version of it because I'd spent six years writing eight different versions of it before I finally had a book that looks effortlessly written and simple. I'm like, ah, oh, the blood and the sweat and the tears that soak those pages. You have no idea. So I have a question for you about that process. How much did the ideas in the book change and the core concept in the book change versus the presentation of it over those iterations? So the fundamental idea stayed the same, which is I am trying to un-weird coaching because I had a very clear frustration, which is I think coaching is a really powerful technology of

personal change. And it gets wrapped up in obfuscation and woo-woo-ness and black box-ness, and you have to be a people person to do it. There's a whole bunch of barriers that make coaching feel inaccessible to a whole bunch of people. Sometimes that's because of barriers of privilege. I mean, coaching remains a very white, very middle class, very middle-aged profession. Sometimes it's a barrier of kind of expectation, which is like, look, I'm a marketer or an engineer or a doctor. I'm not a coach. I don't want to be a coach. I'm like, okay, I'm going to unwind coaching. I'm going to make it feel like an everyday way of showing up and being with each other.

And that idea didn't change. How I wrote the book changed a lot. At one stage, it was going to be like, here are my favorite 150 questions. So I wrote that book, and it sucked. It was like the most boring book in the entire world. And then I played around with the order of questions and i played around at one stage every chapter had an amusing inverted commas anecdote about me and my life because i wanted to role model vulnerability and failure so i was like

here's a funny story and my editor was like is this a biography or actually a helpful book i'm like it's meant to be a helpful book. She's like, can you cut all the stories out because we just don't care. I was like, okay. So it went through a lot of shaping, but the core idea, that's what kind of kept me going. It's like, this is why you want a worthy goal, which is like, I've got a purpose here, which I'm really trying to answer to. That's just helpful in thinking through how things evolve. I'm kind of moving us along here. But so we find a worthy goal. We work through these drafts. There's lots of great questions in the book about different ways to think about them and how to refine your thinking and trying to get to a worthy goal that really speaks to who you are and what you want to

accomplish. And in the book, you do a really nice job, I said this to you before we started talking, of talking about you doing this for two goals that you had. So I'm wondering if you could share what your two goals were that you sort of iterate throughout the book on. Yeah, so one was a business goal, which was to stop being the CEO at Box of Crayons. So I founded a training company 20 years ago or thereabouts. And I'd become clear that I wasn't very good as a CEO. I mean, I was kind of okay, but it was mostly because I was blagging my way through it. And I didn't have any accountability

because it's my company. I don't know that word. Say that again. You were blagging your way through it? Oh, I think it's British. I was kind of, you know, BSing my way through it. Yeah. It's kind of like putting up a front and tap dancing over thin ice. That's all kind of wrapped into blagging. And so I'm like, okay, I needed to step away from that role. And, you know, in the book, I wanted to role model how that changed because the goal starts off with me stop being the CEO. That felt most real. I was like, I just don't want to stop doing this because I'm not very good at it. And it's also taking me away from the work that I feel I can best do in the world. And then that evolves as I go through different iterations. And then the

other one was to try and launch a new podcast, do a new podcast. And I've done podcasts in the past, but I had this idea for a podcast that I felt was really nourishing on a personal level. This isn't about business. This is just about a creative project that I was excited by. And The Worthy Goal starts with this idea of a new podcast in the world. And so the goals start there, and then they sort of evolve through these three drafts. You get clearer and clearer. So let's talk about the stepping away as CEO. How did that go? And maybe the first telling of it, the first version of it, which I think you said was to stop being CEO of Box of Crayons.

What was the final version? Yeah, because the first version is really easy. I just stopped being the CEO. It's actually not that hard. All it does then is cause chaos all around me as I walk away from the role of CEO. You know, things burn. And it evolved to something like a gracious transfer of power. So this felt, you know, the same but radically different.

Because one was about me just stopping, doing the thing that wasn't great for me anymore. And the other one spoke to a deep value of mine, which is talked about right at the very start of the show, which is around how do I enable others, transfer power to others, step out of the spotlight so others can step into it. And it's a very foundational part of the work I want to try and do, which is around how do I give power to people who don't yet have the power that they might. And so once I understood that

this was about a transfer of power, then I understood all the ways that me as a founder can screw that up. Because founders are notorious for screwing up transfers of power. They're like, no, I definitely want a successor, but I'm just going to keep my fingers in these pies and make these decisions and kind of muck it all up. So it created a commitment, which was around I'm managing a process that is about how I grow as a person and as a leader, how I understand where my vulnerabilities are as a leader and what might undermine this transfer of power and how do I manage that? And how do I support Shannon, who stepped in as CEO, to be the best CEO that she could be? So it became radically different, even though from the outside, it was the same

thing, which is me stopping being CEO and Shannon becoming a CEO. This desire and core value around stepping out of the spotlight so that others can step into it and giving power to people who haven't had it. Can you share a little bit about the evolution of that goal for you, where it sort of started to show up for you and how it sort of grew into being a core value? Yeah, because it's a new realization since we talked last, Eric. So when we decided that Shannon was going to become the CEO, we hired a coach for two years, a year before and a year after. And so I spent a year kind of getting used to the idea of not being the CEO at Box of Crayons, which is not a small thing because it's a company I founded and I led and been the face of for 18 years or something. So there's a lot of me wrapped up in that.

And I was also finding it very difficult to imagine what would happen after box of crayons like okay i'll just rip out the thing that i've devoted 20 years of my life to now what existential crisis i don't really want to have an affair or buy a red car so what am i gonna buy you know buy a twenty thousand dollar bike wear lycra so how. So how will I manage this? And I dreamt about possibilities, but they all felt a bit plus or minus 5% similar to what I'd already been doing. And then I had this breakthrough experience with a woman called Erin Weed, based in Colorado. And she does a process called The Dig, D-I-G. And when I read about it, I was entirely skeptical about it because this is what she promised. She said, look, I'll sit down with you for two, three-hour conversations. We'll

do it in person or we did it virtually. And you'll talk to me and in real time, I will create your operating system out of the words that you use. I'm thinking to myself, well, this sounds totally woo-woo, and I'm not that great at kind of woo-woo stuff. I'm also a pretty good facilitator. So I'm like, if you're a bad facilitator, we're over because I'm terrible at being facilitated by a bad facilitator. So I was like, this is probably a waste of my money and time. But there were a couple of testimonials on her website from people I admired. So I was like, I'll give it a crack and I'm a bit lost anyway. And I was like, I probably know what my words are going to be. They're going to be coaching and creativity and possibilities and

all the stuff that I'm kind of immersed in at the moment. So I went through this process with Erin, which was brilliant. She is a brilliant facilitator. And I'm not quite sure how she pulls this off, but she does an amazing job at kind of, in the moment, co-create with you what your ecosystem is. And it turns out that I have three words. One word is confidence, because one of the ways I show up in the world is a humble confidence. Like I'm grounded in who I am and the flaws I have,

but I'm also confident about who I am and the flaws I have. The other was onward, which is about a sense of progress and about looking to the future. And then the word at the heart of this is the word power. And it turns out that I've got stories from my past which are all about disrupting the status quo, even though I tick all the boxes of privilege, white, straight, male, road scholar,

overeducated, English speaking, ridiculously good looking, blah, blah, blah, all of that. You know, I'm constantly trying to disrupt some of that stuff. I've got stories stretching back as a wee boy doing that. So I was surprised by all three of those words. I wasn't expecting any of those words to show up, but it, for me, was what unlocked a new world of permissions and possibilities around what I could put my attention to. And that was a significant part of helping with this transition, but also helping to figure out what my next thing was. And so how did confidence, how did that word lead you forward? We've talked a little bit about the power word.

Yeah. How did the confidence word lead you forward? In some ways, it's a reminder and an encouragement to show you're working. Just as we're talking about, you know, in this book, I show my stories and I'm like, here's me going through this and here's me trying to write a book and here's me trying to do a podcast and this is where I got it wrong and this is how I figured it out. And, you know, the feedback I get with people going, it's really helpful seeing that. And you don't see it that often because, you know, history is most typically written by the winners and it makes it sound like everything was easy and perfect. And I'm like, I'm confident enough in who I am to kind of say that, look, the more interesting thing to talk about are the struggles rather than the victories.

And I can role model a confidence around it's okay to be in struggle and kind of be defeated by ever greater things. So I think that's the confidence comes from around I teach by how I try and show up in the world around that. Yep. That makes sense. I do think there is a certain amount of confidence needed to have the vulnerability to show struggle. is the speaker and they're like and mary won the bronze medal in her under 10 freestyle 50 meter race and then she was the high school well this and this is this list of achievements and it's like both boring and intimidating at the same time when i'm introduced my little thing is like michael was banned from his high school graduation mich Michael left law school being sued by one of his law school professors for defamation. Michael was fired here. Michael worked as a laborer and managed to knock himself out digging a hole.

I've got an endless amount of stories of me stumbling around. I'm like, look, I've achieved a bunch, but the more interesting things are around how human I am. And you're human too, so let's connect in a way that I can serve you best as a teacher. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when

you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea. Soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's move on to number two, which is to commit. Yeah. I really like this section because it really talks towards an idea that shows up in the coaching world, sometime in the behavior change world. I think you illustrate it very well, which is sort of this competing priority thing. Yeah. Yeah. I say I want this, but there's all sorts of other things that are going on under the scenes that I haven't

acknowledged. I think you've got a great coaching question around this too, right? I can't quite remember it, but it's basically in order to do that, what are you going to not do or what are you going to give up? Yeah, that's exactly the question. To kind of tip my hat to the intellectual forebearers of this, you know, there's a guy called Ron Heifetz, who's a leadership writer in Harvard. And then two educational psychologists, Bob Keegan and Lisa Leahy, wrote a book called Immunity to Change. And immunity change is a really powerful idea wrapped up in a book that's a little under-edited. It could be a little tighter, I think, in terms of my preference for books anyway. So this kind of tries to build on some of that and face the heart of what it takes to commit.

So it basically asks two questions. It says this, first of all, imagine having to find a worthy goal, you decide not to take it on. You know, you walk up to it and you walk away from it. What are the prizes and punishments of that decision? What's the benefit for maintaining the status quo? What's the loss by maintaining the status quo? And the the loss by maintaining the status quo? And the truth is there are benefits for you not taking on your worthy goal. You don't risk reputation and relationships and money and time and expectations of yourself and expectations of others. All of that stays pretty safe in the kind of lockdown. But if you've defined your worthy

goal well, you understand the price that will get paid, not just by you, but by those that your worthy goal would serve if you actually took it on. So you kind of weigh up prizes and punishments and you hope that kind of the punishments outweigh the prizes. It's a bit of a mind flip so that you're like, you know what, not doing this, the cost to me in the world is greater than the comfort to me by not doing this. And then you ask the same basic question, but this time, imagine that you're fully committed to the worthy goal. You're like, I'm going to push my chips in. I'm going to go all in on this.

What are the prizes and punishments of that decision? Well, the prize is kind of like, yeah, this is what I'd get. This is what I would get in growth, in change, in status, in opportunity, in impact, all of that great stuff. But it also says, but what's at risk if you were to really commit to this? What's the opportunity cost? What's the reputational cost? Who will you piss off? Because you will annoy some people if you take on a worthy goal, because you are disrupting expectations. You are making choices, which means, as you just said, you're saying yes to some things or you're saying no to other things.

And you're weighing this up as well. And in weighing these two questions up, you'll get a sense of, yeah, I am really committed to this or I'm not sure. If you're not sure, that's a great outcome as well because then you go back to the first part of the book If you're not sure, that's a great outcome as well. Because then you go back to the first part of the book and you're like, let me take another crack at this worthy goal. Because I want to get to a place where I'm like, as best I know, my best guess is that I'm up for this game. I love that idea of really thinking about prizes and punishments from both directions, or comforts and costs. It often seems to me that you could almost sum up the downside to a worthy goal a lot of times with its comfort, right? All kinds of comfort, the comfort to watch

Netflix shows seven nights a week and eat popcorn. But I'm always amazed by, particularly as I get older, but I don't think it's unique to me. I see it in lots of older people, how comfort begins to become a higher and higher value. I agree. And I mean, Eric, roughly how old are you? I will be 52 in May. Yeah, we're pretty much peers in terms of that. And I do think that for people of our age, many people come to this crossroads. You know, there's an American writer called David Brooks who wrote a book called The Second Mountain about this, which is like your first mountain is your career and you climb it to get status and money and all the stuff that a job hopefully gives you. But at a certain point, you've won that game and you have a choice to make, which is like,

do you climb the second mountain? The second mountain tends to be more about legacy and meaning and impact in the world. And so certainly for one audience for this book, I hope, are people who are asking themselves, look, I'm not on TikTok, so I might be old, but I've got another 30 years left. Like, I want a good life. I don't want to just play golf and watch Netflix and wear stretchy trousers, although stretchy trousers are quite comfortable. Stretchy trousers are pretty good. Exactly. Okay. And the technology has come a long way, really.

So flattering. I find the wide waistband just holds my stomach in nicely, but that's another story. So this is really for people who are like, in some ways, I'm still at my best. I'm wise, I'm smart, I'm resourced. I've collected some scars, so I have some wisdom along the way. I've got a better sense of who I am, better than I've ever had before. How do I play that hand? And hopefully, it's not just watching Netflix, although there's a lot of good stuff on Netflix. It's really an awful lot of great TV these days. It's daunting. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, comfort is something that I want people to be nourished. I want self-care.

I'm not sure I want that much comfort. Yeah, I find it a thing I am sort of consistently battling against. Or I don't even love that term, but I'm on the lookout for it. against, or I don't even love that term, but I'm on the lookout for it. There are certain signs I see in people becoming old, and I'm using that word in the negative sense of it, because hopefully we do get old chronologically, but there is a certain stereotype or negativity to it. I think excessive comfort is certainly one thing I see. The other that I'm always on the lookout for is always thinking that the past is much better than the present. That's one I look out for. And then there's a third and I seem to have lost it. Oh, it's getting bad at technology,

which I am like, you know, I'm not going to go on TikTok necessarily, but I want to know I could. Yeah, I get that. So, you know, cryptocurrency and I just, it I just, it's sort of that new, it's continuing to learn piece. The other thing that I'd add to that, Eric, that I read about recently was getting to a point where you think you're done, that the next 10 years or 20 years are basically going to be the same. And the exercise that I heard this person talking about, whose name I can't

remember, was like, look how far you've come in the last 10 years. It's like a long way. It's like unimaginably different to what you actually thought was happening. And basically, this is a common answer. It's like, how far have you come in the last 10 years? The human answer is a long way. And then the second question is, how much do you think the next 10 years are going to be pretty much the same as they are now? It's like, yeah, mostly. And we've got this neural bias in our brain, which is like we think the future is going to be pretty much the same,

even though the evidence from our past tells us that a whole bunch of stuff changes. And I think part of that resistance to that spiritual sense of oldness that you're talking about, which is stuckness and comfortness and no longer growing, is just to go, oh, you're not done yet. a guy who's got a podcast about books. So yeah, for a lot of my life, I regarded reading a novel as a vastly superior activity over watching, say, a TV show. Yeah. Or a movie. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've started to revise that view a little bit. And I've started to look at like, well, what do I get out of a really well done television series? And is it that different than what I get or do out of a novel? And I'm kind of

curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I have a master's degree in literature. Yeah, my wife has a PhD in literature and a master's degree in library science. So in case you're worried, you're thinking about where our natural bias is, it's towards books. And there's stuff on the TV that blows my mind about how good it is. It's extraordinary in terms of how it's produced and the nuance that it has and all of that stuff. I think one of the gifts of fiction is it allows you to create empathy with a character you might not otherwise understand. You might never get inside the skin of somebody. So you have somebody like me, who's a kind of left-leaning, liberal, over-educated, this, that, and the other. I can read a book by a young black science fiction writer and understand a world and a point of view that I could never self-generate. I think with a TV show, you're

never in the skin of the characters. You're looking at a story unfold. And there's something that stories tell you that are about the rhythms of life and the kind of archetypes of characters that you can meet in the world so i think you get that as you do in books as well but i think a great book will trump a great tv series and as a example of that. I'm just finishing reading a science fiction series called The Expanse, which is amazing. And I don't even like science fiction, but this is a nine book series written by two guys. It's co-written, even though it's a single named author that's a nom de plume of these two guys. I think they worked as assistants to j.a.r the dude who wrote the game of thrones books anyway it's a sprawling opera it's available as a tv series as well i think on

prime i think and as good as the tv series is and it is pretty damn good the book is just another level up because you're in the brain of a megalomaniac and you're in the brain of the rebel forces and then you're in the brain of the the plucky hero in a way that the tv show can't fully immerse you in there's been a lot of studies showing that fiction does grow empathy and i've kind of wondered you know how different is the empathy that's generated in fiction than there is in a TV show, because a well done TV series, you end up really pulling for people you never would pull for, right? If it's done well, you become very sympathetic to everyone. But your point about being in the brain of and and the other point that you made that made

me think was like, any book I've ever loved, and the movie of it. I've always thought the book was better. The one thing I do think and this is kind of goes both directions as I was thinking about with fiction, you're generating all the visuals yourself. least in my case almost entirely from things that i've seen or even if somebody's describing something i haven't seen it hovers around my memory in some way which is both positive and negative whereas a tv show or a movie can show me things that my brain could never even reading it could see so i think there are trade-offs i guess guess for me, for a long time, the gap was like, you know, a book was like a score of 90 and a TV show was like a score of 15. And I think the gap is closed in my mind. Books still win, but the gap has certainly closed. I love the Lord of the Rings movies. I mean, they're amazing. But in some ways, watching that, as extraordinary as it is, that world building has lessened my experience of

reading the book because i remember reading the book and just going i can't even see the edges of this world yeah it's like it's got a vastness yeah whereas the movie it's it's constant within a screen yeah some of that might also be about how strong people's visual imaginations are i do not have a good one. Like my visual imagination, that's just not one of my strengths. So it also makes me think a little bit when you were saying that about like the movie diminishing the books. Like it's the reason that when I was a 10 year old, I thought music videos were like the cool thing. But as I got older, I was like, I do not want to see a music video because this piece

of music means so much to me and it connotates something in me. I don't want anybody trampling on that. Yeah, I like that. Okay. Well, you and I are at the end of time for the main conversation. We're going to continue for a few minutes in the post-show conversation because we did not really get to talk about crossing the threshold. So you and I will do that in the post-show conversation because we did not really get to talk about crossing the threshold so you and i'll do that in the post-show conversation because perfect i dragged us down a ludicrous fiction versus tv no no you got me talking in rabbit hole and it was yeah yeah but i was monologuing a bit so apologies if i'm talking too much no listeners uh you can get access to this post-show conversation, other post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem,

and all kinds of other stuff by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Michael, thank you so much for coming on. We'll have links in the show notes to the book. And is there a website you want to point people to? Yeah, sure. Like How to Begin is the website for the book. And then if you want more about me in general, mbs.works is the website for that. Perfect. And again, there'll be links in the show notes. You can just click on through to those. All right. Thank you, Michael. So much fun to have you on again. I'm really glad we got to

make this happen. Yeah, it was a delight. Thank you. a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, For more information, visit OneYouFeed.net.