Breakthrough Mediocrity To Greatness With These 4 Strategies | Adam Alter

25:46So even sometimes when we recognize that there are these traps, there's a resilience piece to this that I think has to be discussed. And some of us haven't really faced many hardships in other areas. So we work with a lot of top performers. And when things come easy in other facets of our life, then this plateau and this one thing that we really want can really be that roadblock to our success. Yeah, I think what's really useful is to kind of take the decision away from the person and say something like, instead of going for as long as you think you should go, you should always add 10 or 20 or 50%.

26:18So that way, you've got a rule of thumb, a kind of algorithm that guides your behavior. So if you think this thing that you're doing is worthwhile, if you've decided that it's worthwhile enough to spend time on, then it needs to be worthwhile enough to spend 150 % more time, or 50 % more time than you originally thought. And then if it is, you should go to the point where you think to yourself, my intuition's telling me I'm done, and then continue again for another 50%. And if you're then still not finding that you're getting anywhere, if it feels like you're diverging from where you want to be, or you're not getting any closer, you're not converging on some goal, then leave it behind, because there are a lot of things we could be doing without time.

26:55But don't leave it behind before you've added that extra 50%, because often that's where the magic happens for many of us much of the time. And so I think that kind of algorithm or rule that guides your behavior is really liberating, sort of constraining yourself by that rule is liberating because it takes the decision away from you, means you don't have to make this discretionary decision every time you're deciding how to spend your time and effort. And so I find that's really useful for a lot of people. Yeah, I love that. And I feel like it's really rewarding on the other end of it to sort of know, okay, if I put in the extra 50, then I feel, then I know outside of whatever internal dialogue that I'm having, that I gave it a really good effort, right?

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30:36I just wish I hadn't spent so much time being in that before I realized it was time to leave. Or I spent so much time in this career, I wish I hadn't spent all that time before I left. But that extra time that you took to figure it out, that it was time to go, is critical because that's how you get to the point where you aren't questioning it anymore. You know that you kind of explored it to the ends of what it could be, whether it was a relationship or a career move or whatever it was. So I think that extra 50 % is partly a kind of form of reassurance that liberates you to do the next thing if it happened not to work out.

31:08So it's got the value of maximizing the chance of success. But if there is no success there, it liberates you to pursue whatever comes next. And we often diminish that wisdom. And we don't realize we've received that wisdom. On the flip side, many of us, if we're getting the wisdom from a coach or a third party, we'll still want to work through it ourselves. We still want to put it into action. So that wisdom, when you've gained it, you've unlocked it. Instead of the outside perspective, it's even more valuable for all the rest of the decisions you'll make in your life versus picking up another book on decision-making or watching another podcast on decision-making.

31:44Yeah, I think that's right. I think living through that experience is critical. I think there are some things you can be told, but for most things that are important to us, we need to experience them to feel that we know the answer to that question. So I'd love to dive into the heart because I know emotions, and we tend to work mostly with men, a lot of lone wolves who tend to tamp down those emotions or label them as negative, not want to confront them or deal with them. But they are a big hurdle to us finding that success we're looking for and oftentimes leading us to feel stuck. So what insights do science give us around managing the emotions piece of the equation?

32:21Yeah, I mean, I think the first big thing is even just paying attention to emotions and realizing that being stuck is incredibly anxiety provoking and that that's okay and inhabiting that place in your life is an acceptable thing to do that before you can move on with strategy and with behavior you need to be comfortable where you are or at least accept where you are even if it's not comfortable. Also kind of realizing that taking the pressure off is really valuable. One of my favorite examples is of Miles Davis when Herbie Hancock who the great jazz pianist started auditioning with Davis and his band, Hancock was absolutely overwhelmed because he was playing with some of the best jazz musicians of the age, and he just felt totally overwhelmed by the experience.

33:05And he started playing with Miles and the band at Miles' house. And Miles, a couple of minutes after they started jamming, Miles threw his trumpet down on the couch and went upstairs, and they didn't see him for three days. But over that three days, Herbie Hancock, he relaxed. He started to play more expansively. he started to kind of noodle around a little bit and he sort of said to him so he describes this in this great YouTube video where he says you know I realized that this might be the only time I'd ever get to play with with people of this stature and I just wanted to inhabit it and enjoy it and really experience it and and then Miles you know at the end of the third day Miles comes back downstairs picks up the trumpet and starts jamming with the band again and Herbie is surprised to see him there and at the end of the day Miles says to Herbie you know that was great are you ready to play with the band, will you join us next week?

33:55And Herbie says to him, you kind of left after five minutes. I just thought I'd bombed the audition. I thought that was it. You were disgusted with me. Miles said, no, I have a really good sense of when I need to be out of the room. I know that as a leader, part of my role is to turn down the pressure because I know from seasoned musicians, I can pressure them as much as I like. They're still going to perform. You were not performing because I was in the room. And he recognized that. And so he was known for being an absolute hard ass. He would shout at people on stage, but having that ability to recognize when to turn down the temperature, whether you're a leader or whether you're someone who's pressuring yourself is really critical.

34:32So I think that's one of the most important lessons about heart is that it's okay to feel bad in the situation that you find yourself in, especially when you're stuck. And that's sort of a first step before you can start to move forward is to recognize that and turn down the temperature a little bit. In one of our programs called Unstoppable, which is all about getting people unstuck, we want them to understand what it feels like to be in a heightened emotional state. Because without identifying that, or at least having an understanding of when you're going into that, it's difficult then to navigate once you're already in the heightened emotional state.

35:13And once you're in the heightened emotional state, that state is driving your actions. So it's difficult to think clearly, to understand, to be able to slow things down and to create space and to look from different perspectives. Because that heightened emotional state is what's driving everything at such a pace that it's certainly difficult then to get unstuck. And that's, as I was saying earlier, this is where the frustration starts to settle in. So in order to recognize that, and this goes with having that connection with those emotions, so that you understand what those triggers are, so that you can navigate them.

36:01You can understand them before you walk into something such as a rehearsal room with Miles Davis and his band. There's also another story with Miles and Herbie. And I can't remember where they were performing, but they were performing live. So it's in the moment. And as somebody who's performing live, you're so in the moment. Anything else makes you self-conscious in that moment. So you want to just let go and just do your thing and be the music. Well, Herbie, being a young man that he was, clanked some awful notes in a section that Herbie, that Miles was coming in afterwards. And of course, Miles understood what was happening and he had to change up his arrangement in order to make Herbie look okay.

36:59and the performance not to completely turn into a train wreck. And Herbie recognized that Miles had changed up the notes, which alerted him to, oh, he probably did that because I probably made those mistakes. And Miles' own intimidating and keeping everyone walking around on eggshells didn't let Herbie know that he knew that Herbie messed up until I think it was maybe a day later or something where Herbie started to get a little bit cocky about the performance or whatnot. And Miles let him know that the only reason we were in that position was because I fixed it because of you clanking around on these bad notes.

37:47But again, when you're in those moments, your emotions are carrying that performance. They're carrying your actions. And so it's incredibly important to know what those triggers are, when you're in a heightened emotional state, what you can do to avoid a heightened emotional state if it's not going to be beneficial for you to be in it in order to grow. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think in general, this idea of sort of preparing when you're in a cold state for those hot states, the moments you're on stage is so important. And that's why checklists are so great. Even if the checklist itself is not a particularly great checklist, the act of having steps.

38:36This is even true in sort of combat situations, Navy SEALs, Air Force pilots, they all have, things are moving fast, but they have like, I have to do these four things. And they're so ingrained in me. They're often four things, by the way, a lot of these little models There's the OODA loop, which has four steps. There are all these different steps that, all these different models that have four steps. And I think they're all designed to do that. They're designed to take these very hot states and turn down the temperature. And I think that's what Miles did so well in the example that you're describing and in the one where Herbie was auditioning.

39:11He figured out exactly what the right temperature was, and it was less than what it was before he turned it down. In that hot state, it's also very hard to channel your focus because you're feeling not only the emotions, the tension, everything else going on. And oftentimes failure in those states feels much more terrifying and frustrating than in the beginner stage when you recognize that I'm going to fail often and it's going to be OK. But in those moments where the pressure is on and failure has a real consequence, whether realistically or just intrinsically for yourself, it can be difficult for you to manage that focus.

39:49And whether it's four steps that are clearly articulated that you know you can zoom your mind in on to slow things down, to slow down that pace, because along with the emotion comes even more of that speed that we are talking about that works against us. Yeah, I think that's true. True. You know, one of the things that's very useful is to imagine before you do whatever the thing is where you're worried about failing, whether it's a musical performance or you're an athlete and you're going to be on some important race or meet or something like that, is to imagine the worst case scenario. So what if I bomb?

40:22What if I'm a hundred meter runner and I trip over on the first step or I false start? What if I'm a swimmer and I don't swim as fast as I'd like or something goes wrong off the block? I play the wrong notes and everyone laughs at me. how bad is that? Is it revocable? Is it something you can overcome? Almost always the answer is that things are more fixable or they are revocable in ways you don't imagine until you fully inhabit that failure. And we spent so long trying to distance ourselves from failure that we never let ourselves even imagine what it might be like. There's something incredibly liberating about saying, what's the worst case scenario?

40:55Let me spend just 10 minutes inhabiting that world, which is a world that I hope never to happen to have to live in. But in thinking about it, in dealing with it, in imagining it, I kind of soften it a little bit. And it means that when I do get to performing, I know that even the worst case scenario is not as bad as I thought it was. So you, again, are turning down the temperature on that very hot state. Yeah. And that negative visualization, oftentimes we just focus on the positive, right? We want to succeed and thinking about positive things happening to us. But what we found in working with our clients dealing with social anxiety is oftentimes that negative visualization doesn't come to fruition in reality.

41:32So whether it's approaching that executive at the networking event that you're excited to talk to and tripping over your words or freezing up, or it's a beautiful person across the restaurant from you that you want to talk to and freezing up. And then actually being in that moment versus the visualization of everyone's looking at me or laughing or that person's going to ignore me. That so rarely happens, but we hold onto the negative visualization because we're like, well, this has to happen because all of our internal focus is on ourselves. And we often think those around us have that same focus on us when in actuality we don't.

42:05So I love that having a positive visualization is helpful, but then also thinking like, what are the absolute worst case scenarios, feeling it, seeing it, and then recognizing that you're gonna end up in between. Oftentimes there's no perfection. So that's where life is. It's in between those two things. And you've basically created an opportunity for you to succeed in that versus getting so hung up on the visualization of the absolute negative and freezing up in those moments. You can even do the thing that you're worried about and see that it's not that bad. So there's this really great assignment that a lot of people in social psychology classes do.

42:42And I've done this with some of my students before, and it's based on an old experiment that was run in New York City in the seventies, where you're supposed to get on the New York City subway and ask someone for their seat, which you never do. That is a massive violation of all sorts of norms. And the act of asking someone to do that, it's hard to imagine this, but if you get on the subway and you're in the moment and you're about to ask someone for their seat, it is so overwhelmingly terrifying for most people, for most sane people to do that, that they sweat, they feel horrible about it. They do it.

43:13The person gets up usually because they're like, is this person something not right with this person? I'm not going to challenge them. But the act of doing that and going through that process and dealing with the discomfort of it all is so liberating that after the fact, people say, I feel like I can do pretty much anything. You know, you go through that state of hardship because it reveals to you that you got through that. There are a lot of other things you can get through. It's about sort of imagining the worst case, but also it's sometimes about putting yourself in that situation of discomfort to make the rest of what you do feel just that bit lighter.

43:44Yeah. We call those comfort zone challenges and we have a variety of them inside of Unstoppable. one of our favorites is a lie down challenge. So pick a high traffic area anywhere and just lie down. And oftentimes the thought of, oh my God, I'm going to be impeding people. People are going to point at me. I'm going to be flush, bright red. And exactly that after completing the challenge where no one bats an eye, you feel invincible and you feel like, wow, what else can I conquer in all these other areas that I'm feeling discomfort is holding me back. So lowering the stakes but feeling discomfort can often create opportunities for you to move towards discomfort in higher stakes environments.

44:22Right, exactly. So you have a story in the book about timid guppies, and I know some of our listeners tend to be a little timid. So I'm really curious for you to share how looking at timid guppies can influence the idea of the long game and what we can learn from them. Yeah, so this is an old study that looked at these guppies. Guppies are these tiny little fish and they are the prey of a lot of bigger fish including the sunfish and a number of other fish and this study was done in these big tanks where you have a whole lot of guppies some of them are more timid some of them are a little bit more more brash and more curious and so the researcher wanted to know if there's a big predator fish and they the guppies have never seen this fish before who's going to survive is it the ones who kind of puff themselves up and go over and they're like, let me check this out?

45:14Or is it the timid guppies who sit in the corner and say, I'm going to let that brash one do the work and then we'll figure out the next steps from there? And he documents this over a period of days that all of these curious guppies who are not timid, who are very, you know, they have all the traits that we think of as kind of alpha. You know, they're out there to kind of preen, they're curious, nothing's going to hold me back. They all get eaten, one after another. They're curious and they get eaten. And the timid ones are like, okay, I've got all the information I need, and they hide. And that doesn't mean you should always hide.

45:48You shouldn't always be the timid guppy, right? But in certain situations, there is a tremendous amount of value in not being first. And that's the kind of the broader lesson you can draw from this, that waiting is often very valuable. If the worst case scenario is happening, that you're essentially getting eaten, then it's better not to be eaten. But if it's not about being eaten and it's just a matter of waiting for someone else to let whatever happens unfold, you can watch the way it's happening there and then you can tweak what happened for that person and make the better version. So if you have a business, watch someone else fail or do whatever they're doing, make three tweaks that then bring out the very best version of that thing.

46:28And I talk in the book a lot about this idea that you've got to be the first to market in everything. You've got to be the first person with every idea. almost never true. Almost always it's the third or the fifth. In the case of Google, the 22nd search engine, if you do the best version of the thing, often that's when you attract the most interest and the most money. I think the lesson from the Timid Guppies is just that very often being first is fetishized as this great aim. Very often, it's just not the right way to go. Well, the other thing that you can take from that is that everything has been done.

47:04So if you're stuck at something, right, you have to understand that you're not the first one who's been stuck at this point. Do a little research. We have everything at our fingertips now to figure out how others before you have gotten through that and start taking some pages from their books of how they accomplished that. And through a few trial and error, you're going to figure it out. Now, the obvious is we're going to fail. And a lot of times those failures can feel like massive setbacks and can be reasons to quit when we feel stuck. So what does science show us as a way through failure to use failure to our advantage in these situations?

47:47Yeah. So the two end points here are every time you fail, you should quit because there are a million other things you could be doing with your life and why life's too short, just move on. And And I think they're very interesting. They basically say that our menu of options is so great that if you're really struggling, if it feels hard, if you're experiencing discomfort, why do that to yourself? It's not necessary. But then the other side of the spectrum, and there are lots of books written about this, is you should never fail. You should never quit, sorry. You always keep going. You keep going to the end of whatever the thing is.

48:21And I think a sort of smart position is somewhere in the middle, which is to say, when you fail, there are kinds of failure that are good and kinds of failure that are not productive. And if you're consistently failing and not getting closer to some goal that's desired, that's probably when it's time to move on. So when you fail, you should do a little audit and say to yourself, is this a failure that's getting smaller than the failure that came before it? You know, if I'm trying to learn a language and whatever the metric I'm using to judge my success, I'm not meeting that metric, but I'm getting closer, well, then there's some value there.

48:51But if I'm trying to learn this language and I haven't made any progress, My brain can't hold any more vocab. I'm forgetting all the grammar. Maybe it's time to give that language a miss, you know, move on to the next thing. And so I think a lot of it is just sort of working out am I converging on whatever desired goal I'm looking at or am I not getting closer or sometimes you even get further over time from that goal. And then I think that's a good lesson. That's time to move on. Now you mentioned earlier hot streaks and some of us in hearing that might be a little worried that we had our one hot streak and looking at our career moving forward, what can we do to create another hot streak?

49:29Yeah, so it's at least one. Most careers have at least one, many have more. So that's the good news, that if you've had a hot streak, there's another one around the corner, but you can manufacture them basically. And what this research is really fascinating, it looked at painters and filmmakers and people in a number of scientists as well, people in all sorts of different domains. And it basically described these two processes that come from evolutionary biology known as exploitation and exploration. Exploration is when, imagine you kind of turn a corner and this is hunter-gatherer era, you're looking for food, you turn a corner and there's this huge landscape, a hundred acres in front of you, you have no idea where the food is.

50:08You don't know where the animals are, you don't know where the berries are. You can kind of rove around and roam around, try and find patches that might look fruitful, but you can't also be digging really deep, you know, many layers deep into the soil and going into caves and whatever. You have to either use this strategy of exploration where you go broad or you can use the opposite strategy, which is exploitation, which is where you say, hey, there's a fruitful patch over there. I'm going to explore it to the ends of the earth. You know, I'm going to dig really deep. It looks like there might be some berries there, but I really want to make sure, or there's a cave there.

50:41There might be some animals there that I'm interested in. I need to spend a bit of time exploring. So exploration is going broad, exploitation is going deep, but you can only do one of them at a time. To find a hot streak, the suggestion is that if things are going really well, you should keep exploiting. But if you feel like you keep hitting roadblocks, it's time to explore again. And one of the nice rules of thumb in working out whether you're exploring or exploiting is if an opportunity lands on your lap, do you say yes or do you say no? During periods of exploration, everything should be a yes.

51:14You're voracious, you're hungry, you're omnivorous, you eat everything, you say yes to everything. I want to try everything. I actually, I give a talk to freshmen at NYU and that's what we talk about. So you say yes to everything. And that's what college should be. But then at some point, if you say yes to everything, you're never going to really explore the thing that you're doing and you're never going to hit that hot streak. So, you know, if you look at people like Jackson Pollock, the painter, he became very well known for his drip technique, this one technique that he pioneered that was different from anything anyone else was doing.

51:45But if you look at his work five years before he hit that period, he was doing everything under the sun. He was trying a hundred different techniques. It's kind of fascinating how diverse his work was before he hit that hot streak period. And so the key is to jump between exploring and exploiting, that whenever you hit a roadblock, you go back to exploring, you wait till you hit sort of a fruitful patch, or you say, I'm going to explore for six months or a year or two years and then move back to exploitation or four days of the week. I'm going to explore the fifth days for exploitation, whatever you want to do.

52:18But those two explore, then exploit. That's the route to hot streaks in careers. That's what a lot of the research shows. Yeah. It's so impactful, not only in your career, but also for the work we do with your social life is recognizing when to cut bait and move on from a group, maybe even move to a new town, city location versus, you know, when to really exploit and things are going your way. And I think in so many domains in life, we get so caught up in the exploration because of all these algorithms vying for our attention and all the different pieces of information. And sometimes we'll get to this analysis paralysis.

52:57And for us, part of doing this podcast is taking these insights and making them actionable. And all the coaching we do is about taking action. I know many of our listeners are very cerebral, excited to read your book, but we know breaking through requires action. We can't think our way out of being stuck. So are there some hard and fast rules or some habits we can build that create the action in our life that leads to us getting unstuck? Yeah. So the exploration exploitation divide is really an important one that tells you how to act, what kinds of actions are fruitful at different times. I also think there's something about a curiosity mindset.

53:32This mindset, it's interesting if you find successful people, particularly people in fields where everyone's been doing something a particular way for a long time, but then they do something different. And I was on a hunt for these people. I found an Olympian who did this with the backstroke. There are a number of examples in athletics, but there are also examples in business and in art and in other domains. And to do that, you have to be curious and you have to push back against orthodoxy. And kids are good at that. Every kid does that. You know, that's how kids learn so fast, but adults don't do it.

54:03And so the question is, how do you become an adult who does that instinctively? Or if not instinctively, you learn to do that over time. You become the kind of person who pushes back on everything, at least internally. And you ask why, does that make sense? And what that does is it sort of forces you to become an experimentalist. It's adopting a philosophy of basically a scientist where you say, hey, look, I can imagine three different ways to go about whatever it is. Three ways to interact with other people to maximize the chance that I'm going to form a good bond with them, or three ways to do this thing in business where I'm more likely to make the money I'm looking to make, or three ways to try this athletic pursuit.

54:40And then actually try them out. Be curious about them. Experiment. Give yourself a week with each one or a month with each one and then see which one works best. And so adopting that experimental mindset is incredibly powerful. And then, you know, the last chapter in the book is titled Action Above All. And the idea is that, yes, it's important to slow down. You know, you've got to pause, you've got to think about the emotions and strategy and all of that, but you'll never get unstuck if you don't act. And so the Action Above All chapter talks about the fact that often we are trying to maximize everything we do, like you're acting and you're looking for great success, for perfection, essentially.

55:16But the best outcomes often happen when you do what's known as satisficing instead of maximizing. Satisficing is when you say there's a sort of good enough. And I can hit the good enough, and then next time I might get a little bit better. And I know I don't have to invest every single resource in acting right now for the very best outcome in this particular situation. And Jeff Tweedy, the songwriter for Wilco, the band Wilco, talks about this idea that being a creative is exhausting. You wake up some days and you don't want to be creative. So what he does is he begins by kind of pouring out the bad ideas.

55:48He'll spend 20 minutes just thinking about bad music. How would I write a really bad, boring song now? How do I write a sentence that's boring and trite and that's not interesting? Because the act of doing that, which is really easy because you've lowered the threshold, kind of prepares you to do the good stuff that comes later on. And so very often just acting, even if that action is a kind of sideways action, it doesn't get you exactly where you want to be, lubricates the wheels and then pushes you in the right direction in the long run. So I think acting above all is a really sort of important basic final message from the book.

56:21It gets difficult for a lot of people because the result that they're always looking for is perfection, right? They want it to be great. They want it to be perfect. They want it to be acceptable and approved by other people. And if you start to create through a lens of having other people accept it and approve of it, you're already putting yourself into a difficult situation because you don't have control over those people. You have control over yourself and what you're putting out and your happiness and pursuit of whatever that is. And getting to a place where you can just write badly or play guitar badly or paint badly for the sake of that pursuit to then be able to craft something.

57:17That's the challenge of it. I mean, for a lot of our clients, when they are doing new things for the first time, and you used the word license earlier. It's like AJ and I give them license to do so many of these things terribly so that we can look at them and talk about them and find out where we can improve on these areas. We've gotten into a place where social media, and certainly things like Instagram, just shows everyone's Picasso, right? It shows everyone's perfect vacations, their perfect work. And again, discussing Jackson Pollock, we don't see all of the work that took to some of these final prints, these final projects.

58:02So learning to do things badly is going to be incredibly helpful. And it's like, you don't need to think of it as failing. You just need to think of it as that's the action that you're taking in order to gain some momentum. And I think a big part is stacking skills. So oftentimes we get so hung up in maximizing and being the best at one skill. We don't realize how much of an unlock it is to satisfy three skills, but stack them on top of each other to really have that breakthrough. You don't have to be the world's greatest songwriter, but if you can stack songwriting with lead guitar, with then being a great tour manager, all of those skills stacked together are going to allow you to leap forward when everyone else is getting bogged down and maximizing one skill.

58:47Exactly. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that we often assume that getting from 90 to 100 is what we should be pouring our attention and energy into. But very often being at a 90 on three things is a much more efficient use of your time and energy if you're looking to ultimately maximize. So great to have you with us, Adam. We love asking every guest of ours what their unique X factor is. What do you think makes you extraordinary? I love the idea that I'm extraordinary. I'm going to just assume that that's true for a minute because you guys have given me that label. so I'm going to take it and run with it.

59:18But what I would say is that being easily bored and being someone who cultivates variety has been, for me, incredibly valuable and it's unlocked a lot of ideas and options and avenues for me. One of the things I do in my life in general is to try to cultivate as much variety as possible so that I'm constantly trying new things, different things, that my work involves a whole lot of different elements. And I think being an academic who writes books and consults and speaks and does all sorts of other stuff is a sort of perfect career for someone like that. So I think there's some great value in cultivating variety in your life in general.

59:55And that for me has always been, I think, a sort of unlocker because if something isn't going well, you've got three or four other things that you can turn to. And that's always been a great kind of cushion for me when I'm bouncing around trying to figure out what to do next. Well, your dynamism has definitely come through on the podcast here and in your book. where can our audience find out more about the work that you do? I guess I'm most active on LinkedIn. I do sometimes post on Twitter slash X. I don't know what we're calling it these days, but I do post there as well. I've got a, I've got a website.

1:00:26My, my NYU webpage has all my contact details. It's the thing about academics. Everything's public. And I also have a homepage where I post my latest writing and thinking. Awesome. Thank you for joining us, Adam. Thank you, Adam. Thanks so much for having me.

1:00:49Johnny, we know with all of our clients, the most important step is action. And that's the only way you can start having that breakthrough. Absolutely. And recognizing when it's time to change those actions and behaviors is incredibly important. As Adam was saying, people being stuck, sometimes they don't even recognize. they don't recognize it for weeks, months, sometimes years. Well, we got a great shout out this week, right, Johnny? Yes, we do. I thought this was very amusing, so I wanted to read it out to you guys. I'm just going to go ahead and read the email. It starts off, it says, Johnny, I just wanted to thank you for that phone call on September 5th.

1:01:32Though it's not the right time for me, I'm putting things in motion to be able to attend one of your programs in the future. But just having that phone call with you gave me a new level of confidence. So thank you for that. I actually applied to and was offered and accepted a position to be on a construction crew lead with a new company. Now, I don't know exactly what voodoo magic you pulled, but it led to me being more confident. And apparently I charmed the owner of this company enough to offer me a job with 20 % pay increase, and an opportunity to develop an entirely new to me leadership skill.

1:02:13Now, that being said, once I get my ducks in a row with certain depths and finances, I will be investing in myself and joining the Art of Charm. Now, I know to you, it's just a routine phone call, but for me, it changed my life in three days. Thank you, Johnny. Well, thank you for reaching out to us. And this is why we love what we do. AJ, these skills changed you and I's lives. And that's why we put them in a podcast form to get them out there to the public. And hopefully it changes your lives. And we want to hear about that. And that's why we love working directly with all of our coaching clients.

1:02:55That's right. We personally work with each and every one of you. And it's a big reason why we continue this passion of a podcast. Did you know outworking your competition only gets you more work? Now, there are better ways to set yourself apart from the competition. If you're looking to make partner, build a high-value network, or grow your social capital, it's time to unlock the secrets to elite human dynamics. Imagine what you can accomplish by mastering the art of influence, persuasion, and rapid rapport building. With our elite human dynamics programs, you'll gain the insights and the skills to captivate any room, influence any decision, and create connections that last a lifetime.

1:03:35After coaching over 10 ,000 plus clients and 17 years of research and training at the Art of Charm, we've built the leading human dynamics programs. You'll get personal feedback, rapid skill building, and elite strategies to unlock your X factor and give you the ability to stand out, be memorable, and make an impact. Take your communication from ordinary to extraordinary with our personalized plan of attack. This is not a one size fits all. Our programs are tailored to your skill level so that you can get the best possible training. Join an elite network of professionals, business owners, military special forces, and engineers closing deals, winning friends, and influencing high value people.

1:04:22Don't put off your full potential any longer. Apply today at unlockyourxfactor.com and you might even talk to Johnny like our shout out this week. That's unlockyourxfactor.com. Before we head out, can you do us and the entire Art of Charm team a huge favor and head on over to Apple Podcasts and rate and review our show. It raises our visibility and helps others find the show. And a huge thank you to our producers, Eric Montgomery and Michael Harold. Go out there and have an epic week.

1:05:17That's your taste of black only yesterday. Yeah, but I remember you. Oh, yeah, I remember you.

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