The Psychology of Leadership With Sébastien Page

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2:31I'm Maura Ahrensmele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. I know if you listen to this show, you're probably a fan of psychology, but how can you directly apply principles of psychology to leadership and to your team? Well, we have Sebastian Page. So Page is the chief investment officer, and I'm reading this, head of global multi-asset at T. Rowe Price. He's a big deal in finance. He's always on television talking about the markets. But Sebastian is kind of a renaissance man, and he's a writer. And when he was facing a stressful and hard time in his own life and career, he turned to psychology. He turned to personality psychology, the big five, sports psychology, and positive psychology.

3:20and I think it's really fascinating how he took these disciplines of psychology, which, you know, there are some that you could argue he left out, and we get into that. You know, there's a big focus, obviously. We've learned a lot from sports psychology on the great role of stress and optimizing human performance. I, of course, am an emotions person, so we try to talk about that. I think that what we come up with is that leadership is such a nuanced thing and that we can't look at it in any singular way. Like most things in life, leadership is a both and proposition. And so while we want to optimize our own performance and we talk about lots of ways to do that, we also need to remember that we're only human.

4:08We have bad days. Our emotions play a big role in how we show up at work. And sometimes we just got to take one for the team. So I love this discussion because we kind of have a lot of banter and discussion about how to choose almost the right psychology frames to apply to leadership, which I know you're going to love. So my conversation with Sebastian Page, who is author of The Psychology of Leadership, which is a great book that I highly suggest, and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price.

4:42Well, Sebastian, it's wonderful to have you. We've had many false starts in getting this recorded, and I appreciate you sticking with me because I love what you do. I just think it's incredible. Well, likewise. I've been looking forward to this, so I'm excited. Thank you. I want to ask you a little bit about your own drive here, but first I'm going to ask you a question that I like to ask some of my guests, which is what does leadership mean to you? Leadership to me is all about showing the direction of travel. Leaders should see their number one role as setting the long-term goals. I mean, think about it, Maura.

5:26If you don't set the goals, who will? It's so important to show the direction of travel. What are we trying to achieve together? And when you do that, you need to be able to then bring people along. But in a nutshell, that's what leadership means. Also broadly, I have a strong view that leadership is not given to you. And it's a cliche, but you really need to earn it. You show the direction of travel. This is where we want the organization, the team, the family to go. By the way, I think everyone's a leader in their lives. If it's just by example, they're still a leader. This is where we want to go.

6:10This is how we're going to get there. and will you follow me? And people will only follow you if you've earned your leadership position, not been given. I mean, you know, you can exert your authority in the short run and say, I'm the boss, I'm the boss, do this, but that doesn't work in the long run. Okay, Sebastian. So here's the really hard question. How do you bring people along and how do you earn it? Here's one thing I learned in the psychology of leadership. And mind you, I published this book after 25 years as a leader. And some of the things I learned recently, some of the things I learned while writing the book, you always learn with leadership.

6:55One of the key ways to bring people along is to understand how they are wired. I ended up writing about a third of the psychology of leadership about personality psychology. Are you dealing with someone who's high or low in neuroticism? By the way, there's no good or bad answer to this question. High neuroticism can be fantastic for high performance, depending how you frame it. My anxious achievers. I know, that's what you're about. Are you dealing with someone who's high in openness? to new ideas? Are you dealing with someone who is conscientious, who you know is going to be on time and organized or not?

7:42And on and on. And understanding these personality traits then allows the leader to adjust how you approach people and how you convince them that they should be on board with you and with the organization for specific goals. You know, to make this very tangible, someone who's very conscientious, give them some strict metrics to reach. Give them some measurable goals. Someone who's less conscientious, appeal to something else, usually their creativity. Two different ways of bringing people along for the same goal. So I became absolutely fascinated more with personality psychology. I personally score high in neuroticism.

8:29So I spent a lot of time researching that and how stress can be obviously bad, but also a source for motivation and fuel for high performance. And then ultimately in the book, I took my own personality test and I published the results. Where did you take it? Just for listeners. How'd you do that? So you can go online and all you have to Google is big five personality test. Now everybody has their favorite personality test. Myers-Briggs is very popular in business. The advantage of the big five is that it's the one that has the most research behind it. It's the most accepted in academia, and it has the most scientific studies that validate it.

9:16So I like it. It also happens to be very simple. The five personality traits spell ocean, O-C-E-A-N, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, we all know about that one, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Look, when you take those surveys, you kind of know by answering the questions how you're going to score, right? They feel a little bit silly that way because if the question is, do you get anxious when you don't know the results and you're waiting for the results of something, like a test? Well, if you score high, you know it's going to score high neuroticism. So it feels a little bit silly, but what's the most useful with these tests is to compare your answers with a large population of people that have taken the same tests.

10:10That's right. That's where it gets really interesting because we might all have a bias to answer a certain way, but how do your answers compare with others? But for me, personality psychology is such an underrated skill set in business, in persuasion, and it dovetails with one of the most important leadership skills that is the most underrated, which is not talking and being convincing and selling people. It's listening. And Charles Duhigg has a great book that he just put out recently, Super Communicator. He's the author of The Power of Habits. He's a fantastic author. In Super Communicator, he explains that you can convince people very counterintuitively by listening, not talking, and just asking questions.

11:06He has a remarkable example where parents did not want to vaccinate their children. And I'm not going to take a position on vaccines. Let's forget all the politics of it or the science of it. But you're trying to convince a parent to make a decision that they're emotionally against vaccinating their kids in this case. They had doctors come in with research. Here's the empirical study. You're going to, you know, there's no downside in terms of health outcomes or whatever data they had. Then they had so-called persuasion experts, and they kept trying different methodologies, different people to convince the patients to get their children vaccinated.

11:48And then they brought in a CIA expert in persuasion. And the CIA experts sat down and would ask the parents a series of questions to better understand why they were making that decision. Yes. And through the questions, they manage for people to rethink their own bias against that decision. Listening, asking questions. It's amazing. And you see it in really good salespeople sometimes. 100%. That's why introverts can be such powerful salespeople, right? Introverts are such powerful leaders because, you know, introverts may have a natural inclination to listen more than they feel the need to fill up the room.

12:34I mean, I think for me also, this is where my study and my obsession with anxiety is so important. When you're anxious, you really have a hard time listening. You can't, right? Your brain, A, is not present. Your brain is either in the future or in the past. And you are so sort of invested in and anticipating the outcome or how the other person's going to think or all these things that you tend to talk or you tend to shut down and not hear. So it really takes a level of emotional flexibility and the ability to manage your own emotional regulation to be able to listen in the first place, doesn't it?

13:20It's so interesting. I hadn't made that connection, but it's absolutely right. Think of when you're anxious all the way to the fight or flight response. You're in your head about something that you're worried about. You're not in a listening mode. Nope. But you know what? anxiety in general can be productive if it motivates you to improve, if it motivates you to prepare for a discussion, right? You might not in the moment feel like listening, but just generally a certain level of stress increases performance because biologically it increases your focus. That's right. So if you can harness it, it might be a stressful discussion.

14:06For me, if I'm on the air on live national TV talking about investment decisions, am I listening to what the anchor is asking me because I'm in full, like my heartbeat is racing? Well, I am if I'm not over the tipping point. If I'm just nervous enough to perform well and focus, but not too nervous that I lose my focus. The mistake I think, Maura, that most people make is they assume they should be at zero stress. And they try to push their stress down to zero, whether it's for being present and listening in a conversation or generally for performance. And that is the wrong assumption. You can't go in life beating yourself up for feeling some level of anxiety.

14:52A lot of situations require it. It's amazing how some athletic performances will rise. for sprinters, for example, if they're really nervous, sports psychologists will call it activated. They'll reframe it, but it's basically a form of anxiety. They're going to run faster. They're going to perform better. They're going to perform better, but they're going to perform better if they understand that being anxious is okay, right? If they've reframed that being stressed and anxious is not harmful. I mean, you know, I think you're so right, And I think it's a lot about the mindset too of like, F yeah, I'm anxious.

15:33You know, I once interviewed a sports psychologist and he told me about a baseball pitcher that he had worked with who, you know, after they worked together, the pitcher said, you know, it's not like I don't feel the butterflies. I feel the butterflies in my stomach more than ever. But instead of them being a chaotic swirl in my stomach and my brain, they're in formation. And it's like, I can follow them into performance. And I always thought that was such a beautiful metaphor. I love it. I love sports psychology. It ended up being a big component of the psychology of leadership. I consulted with a sports psychologist who at one point told me all elite athletes are incredibly neurotic.

16:16They're worried about losing. They're high, strong. but they understand the mindfulness aspect of not pushing back against the stress or the anxiety, ideally reframing it into excitement and fuel for performance, or at the very least being mindful that it's happening and accepting it, not necessarily fighting it. Okay, I'm anxious right now. of course I'm anxious because I got to make this three-point shot and there's 10 seconds left in the basketball game. That's right. You know, just a quick mental. It's amazing how sports psychology has made its way universally. I saw a survey, eight out of 10 baseball team have a full-time sports psychologist on staff.

17:04The sports psychologist I worked with to write the psychology of leadership himself is an athlete, has 40 national titles in the sport of handball, but also coaches Olympic athletes, NFL players, Major League Baseball. You know, it's a shame that in business we're only scratching the surface. We're not there yet. Okay, well, let's talk about that. So first of all, I want to talk a little bit about the psychology of leadership and your three pillars that you delved into, why you chose those three. My audience is pretty familiar with all this stuff, but I know that they'll be interested in why was this what you felt most applied to leadership specifically.

17:45So I want to talk about that. I want to talk a little bit about the application of sports psychology because I think it's fascinating. And then I want to talk a little bit about you and your journey, why you decided to pursue this. Obviously, you have an extremely demanding day job. You are on national television talking about big financial matters all the time. And, you know, what is your relationship to this work and why did it feel necessary for you? Where do you want to start? Do you want to start with the psychology of leadership or do you want to talk a little bit about your own story? I can answer both at the same time because the book starts with my own story.

18:24By the way, when I finished the book and sent my father the manuscript, my father, who was a finance professor, he replied in a slightly snarky way, I believe, what, are you in HR now? Wow. And for him, for a finance professor, for a numbers guy, for me having spent my career in quantitative finance and economics research, he was a bit puzzled that it was, why are you writing this? Why are you so interested? I said, well, first of all, I have to manage high-performing teams. And the bottom line is that I got interested in the psychology of leadership because I was stressed at work. And I was saying what I've just told our audience not to do.

19:11I was saying to myself, I was doing what I'm telling your audience not to do. I was telling myself, why are you so stressed? You know, that was my self-talk. You've been doing this for over 20 years. You know how to do this. Why are you so stressed? I was beating myself up. I was stressing about stressing. And that's when I started exploring sports psychology. And that opened up a whole world of positive psychology. So your question about how did I choose the topics and the pillars of the psychology of leadership, it starts with my self-improvement. I write in the introduction, dear reader, you're reading this book for self-improvement.

19:53I wrote it for the same reason. And there was something in there about Marcus Aurelius, but my editor asked me to take it out because he thought it sounded arrogant and I don't want to sound arrogant. Marcus Aurelius is very chic right now, though. It's like, you know, he's everywhere. Yeah, and my point is that famously meditations was not meant to be published. I don't know. That's what scholars think. They look at it after the fact. So apparently he wrote meditations. one of the maybe most impactful self-improvement books in history, right? Because it's transcended centuries. Marcus Heraldus was writing this as a journal for himself to help himself out and keep ways of living and wisdom and advice in mind.

20:39So when he writes you in, you need to do this or think about this that way, He's, scholars assume, talking to himself. To himself. Anyways, that's part of my journey for writing The Psychology of Leadership. It starts with what I needed and a discovery of just a positive side of psychology, Mara. If, you know, it is just so underrated. Look, we think of psychology as essentially treating anxiety and depression. On the clinical side, it's super important. But it turns out that if you just go on Google Scholar and look at articles, about half the research in psychology is on the positive side. What makes people thrive?

21:27How do you achieve high performance, ultra high performance, the sports psychology aspect? There's an example I like to give when I'm asked to introduce the book, and I want to give it to you and your audience because I think it makes the point pretty clearly. Felix Boomgartner. Does the name ring a bell? He's not famous. He should be more famous because he did something amazing. Because we've had Michael Gervais on the show. Okay. Okay. That's the punchline. So listeners go, yes, yes. That's the punchline is that Felix Boomgartner went up 24 miles to the edge of space, highest altitude balloon flight, and then he jumped out.

22:05He skydived. It's unbelievable. In 2012, first human being to break the sound barrier, he skydived for 10 minutes. You know, he had no idea if he was going to pass out. He was in free fall for four minutes. I think it's even worse than that. I think he didn't even know if his arms would stay connected to his body. Yeah. Right? Or with the force that all of his limbs would be torn off. I mean, who knows? No one's ever done this, right? So let's call this ultra high performance, also ultra high risk taking. But when I introduced this, and I'm glad you had him on your show, I always make the point that Felix Boongartner was coached by a sports psychologist, Michael Gervais, leading up to the event, all the way to the day of the event, he was talking in his ear.

22:53I love that example because it speaks to not just high performance, ultra high performance, doing amazing thing with the positive side of psychology. And my view is that in business, we're not there yet. And there's so many applications of positive psychology that you can develop, personality psychology. I ended up organizing the book in terms of principles, ideas for best practices for leadership, based on different aspects of the positive side of psychology. So Mara, in a nutshell, that's how like my story intersects with this. This is an ad for a book, but not just any book. It is a book that will change the way you think about business and maybe how you run your business.

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28:16I can say that I published a book maybe a few months before ChatGPT came out. So I had to actually download the papers. And, you know, like a lot of, like happens a lot in academic research. I read most of it, skimmed some, but some. I have experience with quantitative models and scientific research in finance and economics. So for me, I could use these same skills if I see a T-stat or some testing or empirical study. It was a lot of fun because it was just applying some of the same skill set. But these are the three broad categories. And under that, I bring in a lot of interesting research. but also I combine this with my own experience as a leader in high-performing organizations and stories.

29:08It's important to me to have stories that tie the research together, and I want to keep my reader going. Yeah, of course. So it's not just a big research dump, you know. No, it's a really interesting book, and I encourage everybody, and also I'll give a plug to your really good sub stack as well. I want to talk something before we get into the sort of specifics and principles. I want to talk about the role of work. Yeah. One of the things that I think is really cool about sports psychology in particular is that it really centers the work. It really centers the goal for the goal's sake. I mean, no offense.

29:49If I was Felix Baumgartner's mom, I would be, you know, they'd have to put a stun gun on me. I would be so hysterical. You know, I don't attempt to explore the motivations of someone like him. Obviously, they're not typical. But I think what's really beautiful about it and what's really beautiful about you as well is that there seems to be something that is motivated by the joy of work, the joy of pushing yourself, the joy of learning and achieving. Talk about that. Do you find that the great leaders that you study have an ability to sort of center the work? I'm so glad you bring this up because we don't talk about joy enough in business.

30:38It's all gloom and doom. But some of the top leaders that I see in my world, they enjoy the work. I mean, it's not pure joy every day. It shouldn't be. There's a struggle. But they enjoy the struggle, if you will. If you go to stoic philosophy, learn to enjoy the struggle. I know hyperachievers that could retire any day, but they keep going and they clearly love what they do. We don't talk enough about this, the joy of the work, the intrinsic motivation. Daniel Pink, famous psychologist and author talks about intrinsic motivation as being superior to monetary rewards. That's a little bit controversial and counterintuitive.

31:25Yes. But if you can draw on self-motivation, it will matter more for your performance than getting a bigger bonus. Now, here's a manager saying this, you know, it's, I know. I want to push back on that. You did say it was controversial. I mean, I think, and Michael Gervais was interesting when I asked him about this, he said basically like, you know, the highest performers that I would work with, you know, NFL guys, whatever, would, would, would be extremely intrinsically motivated, but also motivated by the money, the fame, the celebrity, whatever, whatever it is for them and not feel guilty about it.

32:04Because I think that sometimes, you know, we, we do get very hopped up on the passion train, right? That this needs to be all intrinsic motivation, but that's not really realistic in our society. So I just want to, if readers are feeling guilty, I don't want you to feel guilty. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I was listening to a podcast once and it was some great thought leaders, I won't name them, talking about how everything they do is intrinsically motivated because they help people better themselves. And I'm out running and I'm listening to this podcast and I really like them, but they're pontificating and it's not 100 % real.

32:51I'm like, yeah, you look at your social media and how many followers you have and yeah, you want to make money. And it was wonderful because at one point one stopped and said, but let's just be clear. Exactly. We like being famous and rich and successful. Right, and to your example, there was no sort of guilt associated with that. I think these are fantastic goals to have. The intrinsic motivation is important and to stay level-headed and to center around what matters. What matters for happiness, according to positive psychology, the number one factor is the quality of your relationships with others.

33:33It's not how much money you make. If you look at surveys, though, and you ask people in their 30s and their 20s, what is your main goal in life? You get 80 % want to be rich, 50 % want to be famous. I think that's all good. I mean, I've always had very material or specific goals in my life. But I think it's not a but, it's not an or. I think it's an and. Yeah. as you suggest. And when I think about sports psychology, if you're just obsessed with the win and you hear some famous athletes say, all I care about is winning, it's a little bit different than the concept of mastery. And if you've had Michael Gervais on your show, he'll talk about mastery versus ego.

34:26It's a famous model in sports psychology. Take two golfers. I can't play golf to save my life. but let's use golf because it is a mental game. An ego-motivated golfer will get happy when they lower the handicap and they can brag about it to their friends. A mastery-oriented golfer will get excited by improving her swing. And when she comes home, she'll tell her husband, today, I improved my swing and it's awesome. That's the mastery aspect. Now, translate that to business. In money management, if we get better at research, that is fantastic if we can run meetings more efficiently and get the best out of the meeting participants that's fantastic those aren't measurable goals those are mastery oriented goals and again I think it's an end you do want to have measurable things and process mastery oriented I mean I I struggle a little bit with this too though because at the same time as as positive psychology, you say, is saying that the most important factor for happiness is relationships.

35:37The more obsessed we get with sports psychology and performance psychology, the less we center relationship. And I find this a little challenging as a parent of an extremely competitive athlete who, you know, I think struggles with this in his own life. You know, And just when I think about society and then I think of all the incentives that we just talked about, I mean, our society is incentivized towards money and fame and notoriety. So how do you square this sense of, you know, being motivated by mastery, personal mastery, performance with the sense that we are at the end of the day also relational beings who need to be in community with each other?

36:25Do you see a contradiction ever? Love it. I love that nuance. The beauty of sports is that you usually have a team. And even if it's an individual sport, you work with others. We just had an Olympic gold medalist skier talk to our investment team. That's an individual sport. But she was talking about how important it was for other members of Team USA to get along and support each other. There's a massive relationship, social aspect to high performance, even in an individual sports that gets into the practice of sports or any endeavor that requires a team in business and the process of fostering personal mastery.

37:17I would also say that mastery applies to teams. You know how we talk about flow a lot and how it's important or beneficial. It's a great state to be in for high performance. You know, you lose track of time. Your skills are fully engaged. You're really into it. The same aspect applies to teams. I see it in meetings sometimes. Yesterday, we're having an investment debate about something. And we were going back and forth with ideas. and we trusted each other to disagree candidly and the intellect was all there. And for me, when someone challenges my idea and someone I trust, my intellect goes into hyperdrive.

38:07I perform better. I focus better. I stress test my own thinking. What was happening in that meeting, Mara? We were in team flow. Yeah. It's fascinating because Mihaly Csetsmahe. Csetsmahe. Csetsmahe. Mihaly Csetsmahe. Thank you. Well done. I got to learn this once and for all because I talk about him a lot. And every time I apologize for mispronouncing his last name. Csetsmahe. Well, he talked about being in flow in conversations. Like in a podcast, we're having conversations. Kind of in flow right now. So there's a team aspect to mastery. There's a team aspect to flow that should not be underestimated.

38:48Yeah, I think that's right. I think about, so I know you have children who are athletes. Your daughter plays volleyball. Yes. Well, you did your research. I try. One of the things that I think about a lot in the context of team, but in the context of my kids is how the rise of club sports is really challenging for all this stuff because the club sport mentality, the AAU mentality, the college recruiting mentality, again, incentivizes individual performance so much. Yeah. And I really worry, I really worry that we are not teaching people the right values anymore by optimizing personal performance so, so much.

39:48Because, you know, sometimes as a leader, you need to sort of not be the smartest one in the room. And sometimes as a person, you're going to have a shitty day and you need people to cover for you. You know, like not every day is a win. So how do you think about that as a dad, as a leader, as a boss? it's crucial for organizations that people have a team orientation as well as a personal performance orientation but why do you have a company why do you have a team if the pieces aren't working together in business is just crucially important i agree with you the change in orientation in club sports and the you know who made who makes which team and that that in particular is very individually focused.

40:43Once the team is put together, then over the season, there's an esprit de corps that builds. That's true. I completely get it. I had someone once come to my office and I was doing his year-end review. I told him, look, I'm looking at your peer feedback and your job performance is good you got things done but you have sharp elbows and people are not happy working with you and I don't think you're making the team better that's right the person pushed back he said look you asked me to do something that required breaking silos in the company and that required ruffling feathers, I got it done. I wouldn't have gotten it done without getting some people upset.

41:36So I thought he had a really valid point. But then it gnawed on me. And I'm, does it have to be that mutually exclusive, the individual performance versus the contribution to the team's performance? It just bugged me. I pulled data from 240 separate evaluations I'd done over the prior eight years. For each of them, for each individual at each point in time, I had their individual performance and their team contribution, which we call a collaboration score. I created a scatterplot of data. Now, if this person was right, I would see a negative correlation. The higher the individual performance, the lower the collaboration score.

42:26That would be, to me, the symptom of an unhealthy culture. What I saw was a beautiful, positively correlated scatterplot. So I was glad to see that in my teams, the high performers are also high collaborator. A beautiful, pretty tight scatterplot. This person saying, I had to piss everyone off to get this project done, had a high performance score, but they stood as an outlier, in fact, in their collaboration score. So I printed it out. I sat down again with this person and I said, I heard you. I think it's a false premise that individual performance and collaboration are mutually exclusive in our organization.

43:20And here's why. Here's the data. And that person over time improved their collaboration score and became still a very effective individual contributor. That to me is, you know, you can do it. people listening to this, if you run teams, like you can try to do this, right? If you have data in your HR department, you can pull the data and see, is it positive or negative? That's right. Well, because you're clearly by measuring a collaboration score, clearly incentivizing for a collaboration score. If you weren't measuring it, then people wouldn't think it was a big deal, probably. Good point. And that is part of our evaluations.

43:57How well do you contribute to the team. And so incentives matter, whether in sports or in other teams in business, if you have an incentive and it's measured to collaborate to the team, if you count the passes as well as the goals, then you have the incentives in place to, again, I think the theme of our discussion so far, Maura, is and, not or. Both and, as Wendy Smith would say. Yeah, hard goals, you want to be rich, and you're intrinsically motivated. Mastery and ego, collaboration and individual performance. The joy at work and the challenge of it. That's right. I'm trying to wrap the discussion in a nice little bow, but this is a theme that we're discussing here.

44:52I think that's life. You know, I mean, I think that that's a challenge for us. We love an either or. You see it in our politics. You see it in the AI discussion. Either AI is going to take all our jobs or it's going to be the magic thing that cures cancer forever. And sadly, I think most things are a both and. I agree. Which is messy. It's interesting that you bring up AI because we have a few scenarios we can debate. Will it be and or or will AI take people's jobs or will new jobs be created and we have co-intelligence, meaning AI and human? A quote that I like is from the CFO of OpenAI who said, you know, your job won't be replaced by AI.

45:50It will probably be replaced by someone using AI. I don't believe that. I think that's bullshit. Sorry. Well, I don't know. You know, there are views that we'll get 20%, 25 % unemployment. I think what I'm seeing so far is that deploying these technology actually requires a lot of new types of jobs. Yeah. I tend to be an optimist. So I think that the economy can thrive and people can thrive and have jobs, just different jobs, like every other technology transformation in history. I might be proven wrong, but my view is kind of, you know, there's going to be new jobs. and people, it's, you know, it's not going to be the jobs apocalypse.

46:37I hope I'm wrong. But you said, which part did you say was bullshit? Oh, I just think the quote about your job will be replaced by someone using AI. I think it's, I mean, I think that's, yes, fine. That is true. But I think that to me, it's the ultimate both and that many people will lose their jobs and many people will gain jobs. You know, it's not going to be this total wipeout. It'll be spotty here and there, you know, and I think that that huge uncertainty is really challenging. So I want to move into emotions because, you know, emotions are so important. and I think that sometimes, again, get a little bit pushed aside in all of this.

47:33So I would love for you to talk about your own relationship. Let's talk about anxiety, my favorite emotion. Yeah. But you can pick another emotion. How has anxiety shaped your life, your work, how you think of yourself as a leader, how you change? How do you think about your emotional life in the context of being a leader? I think the myth that leaders are just always cool under pressure, it's a nice quality to have. But I do think it's a myth. I think it's normal to experience pressure. It's part of delivering high performance. in the psychology of leadership, I approach it with a model called a Yerkes-Dodson's curves.

48:23It's a model that maps performance to your anxiety or stress or activation level. If you're at zero, your performance is actually not at its highest possible level. And as you increase your anxiety or activation, your performance actually goes up, up to a point of optimal functioning. below which the curve then goes down. If you're chronically stressed, if you're stressed at an unhealthy level, it's horrible. It'll impact your appetite, your sleep, your mental health, your sex drive, everything in your life. It'll kill you. But it is an inverted U-curve. It's called the Juerk-Statzen model. And I absolutely love that model because it means embracing and reframing a certain level of anxiety in your life and understanding its link to performance.

49:18If stress helps you focus, biologically, right, going back to our ancestors, the lion shows up, your body activates to run faster and to be very narrowly focused on the immediate threat. So if you accept that premise that it helps you focus, my rhetorical question, or maybe you can answer it, Maura, but if someone's going to do surgery on you, important life-saving surgery, do you want them at zero stress? Or do you want them a little bit anxious about it so they double-check the scans and their focus when they do the procedure? Which one do you want? Do you want the one that's super chill? I want a neurotic surgeon for sure.

50:03There you go. There you go. So that's how I kind of brought this into my life. There's a dark side to this because at some point I talk about goal-induced blindness. I think if you score high neuroticism, you're more subject to goal-induced blindness, which is defined as you're so obsessed with your goal with achieving that you lose sight of other non-goal-related aspects of your life. That could be your personal health. That could be your sense of ethics. You might start cheating just to reach the goal. and I love the example of Simone Biles it's not in the psychology of leadership because I started reading about it after I published the book but in 2021 as you know she famously walked out of the Olympics because she was stressed she had the twisties which apparently in gymnastics is when you're in the air and you don't really you lose your sense of direction and position.

51:02Terrifying. And she was over-trained. Mm-hmm. Not everybody were supportive of her public decision because she's the top gymnast. Why would she walk out of the 2021? It was supposed to be the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. And what happened next is that she was very public about controlling for goal-induced blindness. She didn't call it that way. But she would tweet about taking time off, about sleeping a good night's sleep. She would tweet about, oh, I had a wonderful Sunday. I watched Netflix and I went to church. And so I like to tell people, Simone Biles became a better gymnast by watching Netflix on Sundays.

51:52And I wrote an article about this correlating mental health with physical health. You know, we take care daily of our physical health. Why not do the same for mental health? And the title that's been published internally at our company is Watch Netflix on Sundays. I like that. But Simone Biles then came back in 2023 and won four gold medals. She became a better gymnast by watching Netflix on Sundays. I mean, she sure did. But I like figuring stuff out with other people. And that's why I like Notion. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place.

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56:16She's also been open. I mean, the thing that I love so much about Simone Biles is she's been so open also about the emotional journey that it took to get to a place of peace. You know, she said, not only did I feel like I was letting down my team, I felt like I was letting down America. Like the guilt. I mean, talk about a powerful emotion, the guilt. And I think that one of the things that I want people in leadership and anywhere to understand is that, you know, our emotions are how we make meaning of the world. And sometimes they're true. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes anxiety hits us and it has nothing to do with reality, right?

57:00Like we can be stressed at work and anxious and we can be stressed at work and anxious and there's absolutely no reason to be. The more we understand that piece of it, I think then we become truly free to perform at our best because when we are locked in by emotion, we are stuck. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. And I think it's so important that you bring up indirectly, implicitly the clinical side of things because that's different. And it can be a physical reaction. I've had people close to me that have suffered from panic attacks. and sometimes when I was in the room and I could tell there was nothing that had changed, right?

57:45It was clearly a clinical situation. I think we have to differentiate a little bit. But it doesn't have to be clinical. You can have a huge amount of anxiety. It doesn't mean you have an anxiety disorder. It means something from your past has been triggered or a big fear has been. So, you know, again, it's not always clinical. Yeah, no, I agree. uh there's a there's a whole range and in a sense I would see clinical as on a different uh scale if you will or a different axis but also you know when I think about my own experience with anxiety or with stress um you know there are moments where I think you're right there you don't really know why.

58:35You know, it's not a clinical issue, but there's actual like really credible research about the gut-brain connection. That's right. And you're like, why do I feel stressed today? And you're like, oh, yeah, I ate junk food all day yesterday. Right? There are all these sort of connections we don't necessarily make. And that's one more reason for not to beat yourself up. Like it could be the gut brain access, your gut bacteria that's misaligned. Sleep is a huge thing. You know, if you are under five hours, four hours, you're basically, first of all, as impaired as if you were over the legal limit if you're driving.

59:20But also you'll see your stress spike. You'll see your emotions spike for that day as well. Yeah. Yeah. I once took a wonderful sort of mini course on emotion and negotiation. And one of the things that I learned and that I never, ever forgot is the impact of our emotions when we're negotiating. and someone told the story of they were trying to negotiate for a salary raise with their boss, but their boss reminded them of their stepfather who they hated. And that when they would get in the room with the boss, they would all of a sudden emotionally go back to a place of being 12 years old. And that understanding this was the most powerful unlock.

1:00:15Because again, the boss was just the boss. The boss was not the stepfather. He just sort of had a beard and talked like the stepfather. But our brains are constantly making those connections for us. And there's so much going on. So much. With the internal emotions in the brain. I was lucky enough to get on Jim Quick's podcast. He's a brain expert, a learning expert. And for him, I prepared the statistic that the brain is 2 % of your body mass. It consumes 20 % of your calories. It's fascinating. And they have these studies that chess players in a tournament will burn 6 ,000 calories in a day. I can't, like, I'm a runner.

1:01:04I can't even manage. Even if I ran a marathon, I wouldn't get to 6 ,000. And they're sitting there and they're competing at chess. So there's a lot going on there. It's really funny. This is just not based on science at all. But I do notice that a lot of, myself included, quite high-strung neurotic overthinkers are very thin. Because, you know, we're sort of like, we're sort of that body type. Like we're super wiry and we're strong real tight and we're kind of lean and stringy. And it's funny that that kind of makes sense. I wonder if the fact that our brain is always in overdrive, like never shutting off means we're burning a ton of calories and we're very tense.

1:01:47Probably. It's not fun. Yeah. Yeah, probably. As we close out here a little bit, I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about loss and why losing is really powerful and important. And I want to end with your sort of, you have this think about death principle. Yeah. Which is really interesting to me. Great way to end the discussion. Yeah, right. Let's think about death. Cheerful. Well, but maybe we should. So let's talk a little bit. A little bit. I mean, obviously, Roger Federer, it was Roger Federer, right? gave an incredible speech about how much more he had lost than won. And talk about why being a good loser is the sign of a champion, I think, as he said, something like that.

1:02:41Sports psychology is obsessed with losing. Winning is fine, is great, but you learn the most from losing. And in sports psychology, that's the opportunity for improvement is how you handle it. So Roger Federer told his students that of the 1 ,500 matches he had played, he had won, I think it was 80 % of them. But he only won 54 % of the points he ever played. So Roger Federer, one of the top tennis players of all time, lost nearly half the points he played. He just had a tiny edge. What he said next is beautiful. He looked at the students, you know, eager students at Dartmouth, and he said, the best in the world are not the best in the world because they never lose.

1:03:36In fact, they lose repeatedly. Yeah. But they have learned to deal with it. And then he told the students, what you need to do is learn to adapt and grow. It's super inspirational. And that's why I think that speech went viral. But it was fascinating for me as I started researching sports psychology is how much of it is about losing and the resilience and how you handle the loss. I also want to add nuance here. We sometimes obsess a little too much about our mistakes. I see it in my teams. We got it wrong. Let's talk about it. Let's think about it. There's a famous example from the 70s, this football coach, Tom Landry.

1:04:22would show football players reels of the games, and he would pause and repeat the segments where the players had really messed up so that he would show them, look, let me tell you what you did wrong right here so that you can improve it and not do it next time. But it turns out, and this is in the literature, the players were rehearsing their mistakes mentally. Of course. And it was creating more anxiety. In political communication, we don't lead with the negative when we want to change behavior ever. Right. Because it frames that, oh, the negative is the norm. And in that example, Tom Landry just flipped the thing completely and showed the highlights.

1:05:10Here's a play you made really well. Do more of that. And it improved. The players improved way more. And the Dallas Cowboys, they went on to win the Super Bowl. Yeah. So yes, losing, learning from losing, developing resilience. These things are super important. But since the theme of our discussion, Maura, today is and, not or, I will say and celebrating and reinforcing what you do well and your strengths and your wins is as important. Hmm. I like that. Okay, so take us out on the ultimate loss, I guess, which is the end of your life. If you think about the fact, so we all go around in life thinking we'll never die, right?

1:06:00And this is where I injected a little bit of philosophy literature into the psychology of leadership. because to me, this idea of thinking about death sounds morbid and depressing, but it can actually be comforting and put your day-to-day challenges in context of the fact that we're all here for a short amount of time. It sounds very philosophical, but taking that perspective and thinking all the way to one of the most famous self-improvement books of all time of Stephen Covey, Begin with the end in mind. You know, what do you want at the end of your life to look back on and be proud of? Let that guide your day-to-day values and decisions.

1:06:48It might help you avoid goal-induced blindness. It might reinforce the importance of relationships with those around you. Go and hug someone today that you love. Why not? This is important. This is someone that's going to be with you for a long time. that's maybe a family member, maybe a spouse. I know it sounds preachy a little bit, but since you asked, I just think this idea of taking perspective with very, very long-term objectives and the fact that, look, no one gets out of here alive, you know? So why not have joy along the way? Oh, I couldn't agree more. I'll just share that for me, that sort of realization led me finally to give up a lot of anxiety that I had been carrying and acting out.

1:07:37It was frankly just a habit, again, because I am quite a neurotic personality. And I just thought, I don't want to look back on my life and think about all the times that I ruined things because I was anxious. When in truth, I have no control anyway. Yeah. So I think that's really powerful. Well said. Well, thank you so much, Sebastian. Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

1:08:04That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

1:08:36Thank you.