The Communication Mistake Almost Everyone Makes (And How to Fix It) | Greg McKeown - EP 778

31:29Of course, that's what people are experiencing. Of course, people experience primal panic. And so in that state, it's very easy to stop seeing other people just biologically. We move into that different mode. Now, your broader point is, I think, exactly spot on, which is what happens when what I would describe as an artificial process generates the sense that we need to see each other as threat. Because the The same functionality takes place, the same primal panic, the same exaggeration of positions. And we haven't used the word so far, but I do think that the polarization, what we would mean, what could be covered by that word is, in its richest sense, is the single, it is the primary threat that we face.

32:37I believe that. I believe it's more important than any other political difference. So however much I might disagree with somebody about some policy, some issue, however important that is, it is not as important as the growing level of distorting contention that is infecting us. Because in the simplest sense, what is happening is that we're approaching a noise threshold. And the difference between noise being loud and then you pass a point where the decibel level, a very small incremental increase of noise makes it impossible to understand the meaning. Anyone who's experienced that with a radio ever in their life, one degree more on the dial, you can still hear words, but you don't know what's being said.

33:39And so it's very subtle difference. And I think that we are approaching that point. The data is alarming. I think the most alarming statistic for me has been how many people have stopped speaking to a family member or friend because of polarization. when I started my research it was one in six when I was writing it up it was one in five when I most recently searched for it as I was writing it up it was already described as more than one in five it's not obvious to me that it is obvious to me that the forces in play right now will continue and we can be at one in four and one in three and one in two if you get to one in two okay now you can't do anything if you can't understand each other you can't do anything else there isn't an anything else everything else that you could possibly want to do grows out of the foundation of being able to understand each other be able to figure out what they mean figure out what you mean and you have to have a certain level of safety to be able to do that.

34:49And being constantly on this high alert with each other, primarily, I would say, because of social media polarization profiteering, I would say is the primary cause, although there's many others. Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated, the problem, the level of risk we're in. Now, and one of my favorite researchers who unfortunately passed away from cancer was Emile Bernal, who really studied this at Wharton. And I loved him for the fact that he would thrust himself into conflict of the largest size, and he would go and help the other side see each other. Because I think, especially here in the United States and in much of the Western world, we are so fixated on either or thinking that it just drives us to one extreme or the other.

35:40And I wish people would adopt more both and because it would help us profoundly see the perspectives of others and get us off of these cliffs that we find ourselves on that have become so divisive. Here's what I think can be done about it. Actually, let me tell you a story that I think is an important illustration of what I think is the solution. It's a business example. You go, so about 10 years ago, Microsoft just had a decade, lost decade. And they bring in the new CEO, Satya Nadella. He comes in. What's he going to do? He's got no end of things he could do because there's all sorts of innovation cycle problems.

36:33They've just canceled Zoom, which itself, when it came into existence, was two years behind the equivalent product at Apple. and eventually they just fail at it, right? So that's just one of many illustrations. So what does he do? Very first meeting, I interviewed the president at Microsoft, so he told me the story, is that he came in and he gave everyone a copy of Nonviolent Communication. And that's not normal for that culture. That was a hugely symbolic thing, but also wasn't just symbolic. It was symbolic about the very, what he believed was either the central issue or a central issue. And you can map from there a little like the butterfly effect, that symbolic action and how it reverberated outwards.

37:23I don't mean that alone, but how that helped to create a tonal change and actual skill development. And he was modeling it constantly. So it was genuinely how he was going to lead. And he considers it the most important thing he did over the next six months, next year, was a serious kind of change of communication with people. And in doing that, he would call people up, brand new employees of the company, and just ask them questions and listen to them and really try and gather insight from them. And so the logic of this is not the benefits of being understanding. It is the benefits of actually understanding.

38:03That is not the same thing at all, because what people say is not of equal value. There's something that people know that is disproportionately valuable. Anyone he's speaking to as the CEO, they have something that's really a signal in the noise. They have insight. But the problem about meaningful things is that they feel disproportionately vulnerable to share them. So if you try and scream at people to get them to say what they really feel, well yeah that's not really likely to happen you have to create enough safety and enough genuine curiosity that people go okay well let me share i will share i'll try and make sense of this myself with you he said that all those insights all those signals is what helped him to be able to define the vision and the strategy for the company over the 10 years he's been there he's gone from 350 billion to 3.5 trillion, depending on the day, one of the few companies ever to be a$4 trillion company.

39:09And this is at the heart of it because it affected those signals, what then help you to make better decisions or less stupid ones, be less wrong at least, which will help you to be more innovative, which mean you can do things faster than your competitors because they are still dealing with noise while you're dealing with signal and so on. And so he's a signalist. That would be my new language for that, right? That's what he leads as a signalist. I love that story in terms of what can we do about the polarization. That doesn't sound like a polarized story. In one sense, it isn't. But what I love about it is that if you can improve through the throughput of understanding, if you can increase the throughput of meaning sharing, even a tiny amount, then you disproportionately improve everything because it's the actual bottleneck.

39:58is what the resistance is made of. If I were to say it in simpler terms, I would say it like this. I know that when my wife and I, if we're in an argument, sometimes we'll laugh, maybe we'll laugh afterwards, occasionally in between it. And we're like, we don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. The meaning has been lost. And it just goes to show that threshold moment. If you can reduce noise even a little bit, suddenly everything makes more sense. Everything works. And vice versa is also true. That's really what happened at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. And I think it's a good, an optimistic, but a helpful case study for what we're going through.

40:41Our culture is also sick. It is sick for exactly the same reasons. The patterns are the same. The disagreements weren't there over politics, but they were over directions of products and how to communicate in meetings. But the dynamics are the same because the symptoms, There's a hundred symptoms, but the cause is still the same understanding gap between people. Greg, I'm going to just share a story with you and I'll try to keep it as short as I can. So I first met Steve Ballmer in 2005. I was a senior executive at Lowe's reporting directly to our CIO. And at that point in time, Lowe's was one of the only big box retailers that wasn't running Microsoft operating systems in our store.

41:26because it was so costly. And not only that, it opened you up to security vulnerabilities and all kinds of patching and overhead. So we ran a very Unix-based ecosystem. And because of that, all our registers were really dumb terminals. And we were just running this simple OS on them. But it was extremely powerful because our systems rarely went down because each store could function independently in the way that it had built. And I remember Ballmer coming in and having this meeting. It was myself, Steve, our CIO, and one of my peers. And he was like just pounding his fist on the table. How dare you not use Microsoft products?

42:14And it was just, if you knew Steve Ballmer, you know what I'm talking about. Of course. No, for those that don't know him, you just look up his famous, you can do it. It's one of the first viral memes of the internet is him screaming, is the developer's speech. And you can search that up, Steve Barmore developer's speech, and you'll see a certain glimpse of a way of operating. Carry on with your story, please. So I fast forward six years from that, and now I'm a CIO at Dell. And one of the presidents I'm working with is this guy, Ron Gehrig, who's in charge of our smartphone strategy. And we had two devices we were going to launch on, the Android, which is what we wanted to launch the streak on, and then this Microsoft platform.

43:02And we had made the decision we were going to go to Android. So Bomber flies out, has this meeting with us, and it's the exact same meeting he had with me at Lowe's. He's vehemently just caustic, screaming at us, et cetera. And we stood like we did at Lowe's. We're not changing. We're going with Android. And then he unfortunately met with the CEO of Dell, who came out of that meeting and told us we're launching the product on Microsoft OS. And I remember Eric said he had like a team meeting of his direct reports and he said, we're dead on arrival. And that's exactly what happened. So then I fast forward three years from that point and Balmer asked me to come and become the CIO at Microsoft.

43:51And I'm on my round of interviews going around and just meeting one executive after another who is just miserable. The whole environment there is just infighting and more infighting. And the last interview I have was with Satya, who begged me to take the job and just give it two or three years because he thought there would be change in the works. And he was explaining to me what his vision was, which is exactly what he implemented. But I personally didn't think I could last that long in the environment. So that's my Microsoft. That's a fascinating story, right? And it's not really a story about whether you should have made a different decision or not.

44:33That isn't even the point about the story. In a way, the story, one way to think about it is how much all of us are conditioned in certain ways. Your experiences with Steve Ballmer, right? Like not the only conditioning experiences, but those experiences previously, when you then see it again at Microsoft, you go, Look, I can't sign up for that kind of feeling all the time. And yes, actually, you're a different thing, but we don't know. Will you be successful? Is one person, is it going to turn it around? Is there going to be something different coming from it? And fortunately, I would say in a lot of ways, he has been successful.

45:13But I love the story. I love the background. I love the support of this observation. Yeah, they were famous for it, right? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, screaming that in meetings. Then you go from that to nonviolent communication is a big culture shift that's being attempted. But building on it, though, it's the reason I even shared the Satchel story that we went down this sort of Microsoft riffing here is a solution that is an antidote. And it was first described in 1952 by Carl Rogers. and I'm not going to suggest that he's the only person who's ever written about this, but it was a very important breakthrough.

45:56Certainly he thought that. Of course, Carl Rogers, but so many people don't now, but Carl Rogers was arguably the most important psychotherapist of the 20th century. Certainly within therapeutic circles, he's considered the most important.

46:14he gives a talk it's called communication on its blocking and facilitation it's one speech he published it later in books verbatim as the same speech but he describes in there what he felt was a test tube solution that is a micro solution to what he thought was the big macro problems of the time. And he said, if you follow this simple procedure, then you can take, put people in rooms in totally polarized positions and help them to make enormous progress in rapid periods of time if they'll obey a single rule. Are you familiar with this? Am I already sharing something you already know? Or is this on the edge of that knowledge?

47:04It's on the edge of that now. I'm very familiar with Carl Rogers. Of course. So much has been written and validated about Rogers' general views, but this particular article and his particular finding has been much, much less studied, perhaps for some of the reasons we've already been discussing. But this is the rule. The rule is you only get to make your point after you've made the other person's point to that person's satisfaction. That's it. Right? So now that's the change in the normal communication shape. And he said, when you do this, he says, especially if he says, if you bring a third person in, like a neutral, he called them an understanding catalyst.

47:50So someone who's a neutral third party who is just there to help people do that. because it sounds so simple, but my goodness, in practice, people can struggle with this so deeply. It can be one of the hardest things they've ever tried to do. And then at the end, he throws down this gauntlet in a way. He says, what we need to do is take this test tube solution. We need to replicate it. We need to codify it, refine it, scale it. so 72 years later i can't find any academic publication that has done this now there might be it could be under different names and so on i don't know but i've looked pretty deeply and can't find anything and that's what i've been doing is to try to do that and so one of the things in the process so we've been literally built a listening lab we bring two people in at a time and help facilitate this rule and so all sorts of people, we've had a head teacher, a principal, and one of their teachers, police chief, one of his direct reports.

48:56We have husbands and wives. We've had parents and children, all sorts of dynamics of business and non-business, business partners, all sorts, and have been studying the interchange and how, what to do and so on. You can simplify this process into a four word loop and it's this, right? It's listen, reflect, speak, confirm. That's it, right? That's the entry point. Yeah, it's pretty simple. It's a loop that really matters. And there's a balancing within these steps because listen is, okay, that's me making it safe, let's say for you to say what you mean. and the reflect is then me trying to find words to name what it is that you haven't yet said out loud but you really do mean better than you can so I'm saying what you mean well then having got to that clarity and that might take a few iterations but then it's my turn right I need to be able to know how to say what I mean which is itself a new skill my experience is almost Nobody says what they mean for lots of reasons, including they haven't figured out what they mean yet.

50:12This is not nothing. And then the final step, and that's in the loop, is confirm. That is, I don't take it for granted that just because I've said what I mean, even if I've said it clearly, even if I'm practiced at it, I don't assume there's been understanding. They have to say what I mean. And so there's this kind of very simple but clean equilibrium there in that pattern. And you can look at it graphically and you can break down specific skills and phrases that people can use in each of them to try to reduce the noise and increase the signal flow between people. And it's been really quite shocking to see how this has played out in these sessions.

51:00Greg, I know you're a big fan of Gandhi's work. So if you just took what you suggested with that loop, what would happen if you combine that with Gandhi's idea of reducing oneself to zero? Because as I see this, if in a lot of what you're talking about here is ego, and removing oneself of ego. So to me, it would have a compounding effect the way I think about it, but I'm interested in your thoughts. I want to connect directly with the Gandhi question, but I want to do it this way and you'll see why. There's a, in the early 1900s, you've got the first telegram and radio operators. So there's new cutting edge technology.

51:42And the people that were trying to utilize those technologies started using a metaphor for what they're doing, signal and noise. We've been using that as a metaphor throughout the conversation. Signal was the message you're trying to send and noise is everything in the atmosphere right like the literal physical noise interference that exists and they knew from very early on that there was a relationship between the two and they knew the relationship was approximately more signal power will help and if you could reduce noise power then that will also help but it took 50 years until there was a researcher was able to articulate the mathematical relationship.

52:28So the law of information communication. And if I were to summarize that law in its simplest possible form, it would be this. Is clarity equals signal divided by noise. Now, that is really important. And unless somebody is particularly mathematically inclined, it won't be obvious even when you first hear it what the importance of that is. But what it means is that noise is the determining factor. A tiny reduction in noise will have a greater impact on clarity than increasing signal. That's the point. And in fact, if you just want to stay mathematical for a moment, if you can reduce noise to zero, then what happens to clarity is it reaches almost to infinity.

53:17That is the law. And that isn't just like a nice idea. That law has been utilized by almost all technologies that are trying to send out messages or receive them ever since. And so that is a great deal of our modern life is shaped by that. It's a very profound insight. All right. So if you can reduce the noise, clarity increases. That's the import. Now you use the phrase. I know the phrase, of course, used that phrase myself, that Gandhi, one of his key insights for being able to have this disproportionate impact in India was to reduce himself to zero. If I can cut out that noise, then that will help.

53:59And he was clearly correct. We're going to tie all these together. is also almost verbatim language that I got from Eric Maddox. Okay, so we're going to take this signal-to-noise ratio equation. Okay, we're putting that aside. Gandhi, you've mentioned, we touched upon it. Now I want to talk about Eric Maddox, and this will all thread together. Eric Maddox worked in an intelligence agency, and he was a Mandarin translator. But he also took an eight-week course in interrogation techniques. So that's just minimum standard basic certification for being able to do interrogation. He does it. He almost fails the class.

54:48He doesn't like it. He doesn't like what he's learning in there. and he just goes, okay, put it aside, go back to what I was doing. Until the Iraq war erupts, and as they're trying to gather together personnel, they're just literally looking through, okay, who has these two things checked on their employee file, and he matches the combination. what it means in practical terms is he is sent immediately out of the blue to the front lines in Tikrit in Iraq with no he's never interrogated a prisoner ever and now he is required to do that 10 12 hours every single day so the military would go and collect people that they thought might have information of interest and he would follow a procedure, a protocol.

55:45And the protocol was exactly as I'm about to describe it. Well, I already know you're guilty. And I've got all the information here in this vanilla envelope here. I already know. You're going to Guantanamo for the rest of your life. The only way that you can get less than Guantanamo for the rest of your life is to cooperate with me. And if he could have somebody successfully go from a state of non-cooperation to cooperation, that's called breaking them. And he states the number that in this industry, if industry is the right word for it, but in this discipline globally, the rates are about 4 % success rates.

56:25So very low success rates using this approach. And he does this for days. He hates doing it. He thinks the whole thing is stupid as he did in his interrogation class, but he doesn't either have the courage to do anything different, or doesn't perhaps even know there's a different way. He just doesn't think this is a very good way until one of the prisoners turns to him and says straight to him just eyeball to eyeball he says you don't get me and you don't want to get me and that pierces him because he knows that's true he knows that's built in baked into the protocol he's using and it's yeah well that's it you've named it.

57:04I feel naked. What are we doing here? I don't even want to understand the other person. I'm assuming the whole story is what I already have defined. I'm just trying to coerce them using that existing story. So out of fear, they're going to break. Well, from then on, he's, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. And so instead, what he does is he moves into, to, I don't even, I would just, a signalist, right? I don't have better language than this. He just goes in there, listen to really lose himself in the other person's story. Okay, tell me all about it. Tell me everything. Just keep them talking. That was the goal, just keep them talking so I can keep hearing and understanding.

57:47He said, when he did this, he said, every person we spoke to, he says he now believes it with everyone in life, a drop in breadcrumbs for us. and they're testing to see whether there is real interest. What level of safety am I at? How much do they want to understand? And if they don't, if they're just here to judge or if they've already judged, I'm not interested. I know from the testing. And he said he found that they were all sharing it. And when he listened and understood, they just keep going and keep telling. He said by the end of an interrogation, he knew already very clearly, didn't take expertise, he felt.

58:25Five places they've lied. He wouldn't stop them all the way. Just keep letting him talk and talk. But he could feel those shifts, those, let's say, little micro body glitches. And so he'd just go back to them. Okay, listen, I've heard your whole story, but there are these five moments that you've talked about this. Let's go back and talk about each of these and what's really going on. So Eric Maddox starts doing this and within nine months has the most complete picture of Saddam Hussein's network of anyone in the military in the world. Nine months. Compare that 11 years with finding Osama bin Laden.

59:06Nine months. Some of the prisoners were helping him now. They were fully part of his leadership team. in being able to put this network together. And he's able to identify exactly where Saddam Hussein, on the last day that he is in duty, is where they identify exactly where he is. And that was the night before, the moment we all remember, where Saddam Hussein is found coming out of what was called the spider cave or whatever, a spider hole. And this is Eric Maddox. Okay, Eric Maddox, what's the connection? Back to your original question with Gandhi. reduce myself to zero. He said the key to doing this was what he called, I'm going to erase my mind.

59:50I begin by erasing my mind so that I can even begin to visualize their world, their story, their narrative. And so that I think is a similar point. The noise, now he doesn't use this way, but Carl Rogers, he doesn't use the word noise, but the enemy, what he calls the blocker, is our tendency to evaluate other people before we've understood them. And he said that this is the idea. That's the noise in the equation. So putting that aside, pausing and trying to lose ourself, where do they come from? How are they seeing it? What do they understand? What does this mean to them? And staying with it is just the key to getting signals to be revealed and connecting those signals, whether it's Gandhi in India, whether it's Satchin Adela at Microsoft, whether it's Eric Maddox in the middle of a, one of the noisiest environments you could even imagine.

1:00:51In those kinds of environments, there is such a way to break through. And so this intent to understand and be understood and no other intent is, it represents a significant paradigm shift from what we are doing now and what we have even experienced in our lives. And once we discover it, the world opens up to us. Craig, what you're going to find is so uncanny here about this whole discussion is the mattering effect is all about the mattering signal and how it gets erased, which I call through the slow fade, and then how we rebuild it. And so the whole book is the architecture of rebuilding the signal.

1:01:34Yeah, it's beautiful. So I had no idea we would have this type of conversation, but I really appreciate it. We didn't even get to talk about your two phenomenal books. So I'm going to just bring them up because I'm sure that's what the readers came in to hear about. Let me connect the dots. If you want, you put this at the beginning. But for 10 years, I have been asking the question, what is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless ideas in practice in the world of relationships, teams, organizations? What's the primary bottleneck? The answer, to my surprise, is that it isn't talent.

1:02:18It's not strategy. It's not execution. The primary bottleneck is like confident misunderstanding. We are wrong. We think we're right, and we act upon that. And that's it. That's it. There's a Tapper game that was invented. You may be familiar with it, given that you know the Heath's work. But it's a 1990 dissertation written by a PhD student at Stanford University. And it wasn't the main thing even that she wrote about, but the first experiment that she ran was a game where two people, to a dyad. She had 40 in total, 40 people, and they had the experiment three times. And the experiment was person one would tap a song to person two, and person two had to guess the song with no words, no music, no humming, no singing, just tapping.

1:03:18But before she did that, she asked the question, well, what's your confidence level as a tapper? What confidence, how confident are you the listener will get it. And on average, they said 50 % across the 120 experiments. In practice, they were successful three times out of 120, so two and a half percent. Now, she didn't ask the listeners their confidence level. So I've replicated this study more than once and found that that listeners are as confident or more. So you have this perception problem, and it's not about some peripheral issue. It is about the primary mechanism of life, because nothing gets done without correct understanding between people.

1:04:09So it's not nothing. It's not trivial. And if people are massively overconfident in their ability to understand and be understood, then they just go through life ignorantly wrong. It's the psychological, the interpersonal equivalent of everyone thinking they're above average drivers, right? Their incompetence makes their incompetence invisible. And that's what's happening with understanding is that we learn communication is the most important skill in life. Understanding is the most important skill within that. We learn what skills we do have for how to do that from our family of origin primarily.

1:04:47And that's where it's invisible. No one announced to us, this is really limited communication, by the way, that you're observing here. This is really dysfunctional, in fact, and you'll have to learn some new. No one ever says that. So you're just going through life invisible, taking those skills with you, taking them with you. You become the CEO of Microsoft. That doesn't mean you've learned better skills. It just means that you are in a position to utilize your same skills and cause unintended damage all along the way. This is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism. Why? Essential things are so much more vulnerable.

1:05:25Trivial things are safe and easy, like an importance iceberg. The top is easy, obvious, and safe. Underneath, it's way down below, enormously valuable. Those are the essential subjects with the essential people in our lives. But you just can't live out essentialism without learning how, without upgrading your ability to communicate with people who matter most about the things that matter most. And so that's the bridge from essentialism to the subjects that we've been talking about today. This is the unlock. This is how to unlock people, relationships, teams, organizations. This is the core. This is the heart of the matter.

1:06:03And well, Greg, I love the discussion today. Where can listeners find out the most about you? Well, look, one thing people can do is they can just go to gregmcewen.com. They can sign up for a free course. It's called Less But Better. It's a 30-day email course. It comes with printables. It's a high-quality course. You'd normally pay money for it. It's for free. They can sign up there in about 10 seconds. If they do that, then they'll become part of the ongoing conversation. And it'd be great to have them. And please check out his books, Essentialism, which sold millions of copies, and Effortless, which I always thought it was funny when I read essentialism because effortless is actually in the book.

1:06:48Very much so. But I don't think a lot of people got it. So I was glad you wrote the second book. Yeah, I agree. They missed the second paradigm shift. And I think that's to some extent because books can contain one big paradigm shift. That's one of the lessons. And so I really wanted to go there because there's so many people who are just buried in the noise we've been describing, overworked but underutilized, and particularly insecure overachievers. That's who I wrote the book for, Effortless for. They're just so burdened by mental models they don't even know are there. Like one of my favorites is that people believe that easy equals lazy, and insecure overachievers do anyway.

1:07:35And they don't. Those aren't the same things. And so once you can unlock that, you can open a very different kind of way of living. Just I'll maybe say it this way. You don't write a book called Effortless because you think life is easy or even that it should be. You write it because life is a catastrophe. And it is for almost everybody, almost all of the time. That's what I've learned listening to people. Oh, my goodness. That I don't think I've ever spoken truer words than that. So effortless is an attempt at saying, look, if you can't work harder, if you already did that, if you're already doing that, then what if there is a gentler, wiser, smarter, better, even easier way to take off some of that edge, make life that a little more livable, a little more doable, a little less exhausting, a little less harsh on you and everyone around you.

1:08:35And so I wrote that as a kind of, it's like an insecure overachiever's guide to healthy productivity. And I really have enjoyed being able to see people find that at the right time. Greg, I know you don't do many podcast interviews. I'm so grateful and so honored that you gave me the opportunity to come on Passion Start because I know it's going to be profound for our listeners. Thank you again so much for coming. John, it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Greg McKeown. One of the profound concepts that I hope stays with you as you walk away from this episode is the core rule of communication.

1:09:16Clarity equals your signal divided by the noise. When things get tense at home or at work, our default reaction is usually to turn up our signal power. We speak louder, we argue harder, or we over-explain our side of the story. but the math reveals that cutting out the noise is what actually changes the equation. A small drop in emotional noise yields a massive increase in true understanding. When you drop your defensive judgments and practice that simple loop of listening, reflecting, speaking, and confirming, you create the conditions for real understanding to emerge. In our next conversation, we're tracing this exact arc to its ultimate destination.

1:09:55I'll be joined by global researcher and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham to explore a question that makes a lot of leaders uncomfortable. What if the force that drives the highest levels of performance isn't pressure, accountability, or incentives, but love? Marcus has studied millions of data points on human behavior, and he's discovered that extraordinary work doesn't come from force and compliance. It comes from environments where people feel truly seen, valued, and safe enough to bring more of themselves to what they do. We're going to look at why certain experiences stay with us while others disappear.

1:10:28Map out exactly how you can stop your daily interactions from drifting into cold, invisible spaces. But when we humans try to vocalize the extreme positive experiences that we have in life, the word we use is love. And I kept changing it, frankly, over the years. I kept changing it to something more palatable to the business world, like passion or joy or engagement or satisfaction. And those are really good words. but the actual words people use they don't use delight they'll use the word they use is love so really for me it was a wake-up call to go listen as a researcher if people are spontaneously using a word or a set of words you don't dismiss it or try to change it for them as though they were wrong you interrogate the word what do they mean until next time remember that flourishing is rarely found by adding more to our lives often it begins by reconnecting with what has been there all along.

1:11:23I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.