The Habits That Make People Successful | EP 928

0:00There are two big things happening at one time that I've never done before. I'm going on a book tour for my new book, Make Money Easy, and I'm doing a podcast tour at the same time. It is going to be big, and I'm going to seven cities in 10 days. Get your friends, get your family, bring everyone you know to these cities. I'm coming to Austin, Texas, New York, Boston. We're going to Nashville. Then we're going to Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. Make sure to get your tickets right now. go to lewishouse.com slash tour again bring everyone you know if you're looking to create more financial freedom and abundance in your life and you want to see a massive guest live on the school of greatness show get your tickets i can't wait to see you there hi my name is lewis house and welcome to the daily motivation show

0:58I'm actually going to tell you a story about a person in academia who is the most important person in my career as my dissertation advisor. He creates an environment for people to thrive, and it actually took me a while after I had graduated as one of his advisees, and I was trying to advise my own students and figure out what was the secret sauce that made him so wildly more successful as a coach and mentor than anyone else in our field had really, I mean, stratospherically more successful. You had all the obvious stuff, all those obvious ingredients, like responsive and new as stuff. But there was an unshaking belief.

1:34Like he treated you like family. He was there for you. He believed that you could do it. He always was giving that positive reinforcement. Another thing that he did that I think is so interesting and related to research is he He sort of created, I'll call it, like mentoring circles within the students he was coaching so that we were not always just being coached or mentored or advised by him. Right. But he would put us in the position to advise more junior students. There's this wonderful research that I write about in the book by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who's a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern.

2:06And she had this amazing insight when she was doing research for her dissertation. She noticed that she was interviewing all these people who were struggling to achieve their goals. And as she asked them what they thought might help them achieve more, because that's what she was interested in. How do we increase achievement? They all had these really deep insights, you know, struggling salespeople and C students. When she got them to introspect, they actually knew a lot. They maybe just hadn't gotten there and no one had asked them. They also really liked being asked, like, what's your advice?

2:37How would you coach someone who was in your shoes? And she realized most of the time when someone is struggling or when we're coaching someone, And our instinct, even if it's unsolicited, is to just whip out some advice. Like, here are the seven things that I think will help you get further. And it can be really demotivating because it conveys, like, I think you're kind of, you know, you haven't gotten your stuff together. You don't have the answers. I have the answers. I'm going to give you the answers. And that's our instinct. And she thought, what if we flipped the script? What if instead of putting our arm around someone and giving them advice, we said, what would you do?

3:07And actually literally. How would you coach someone else? And not even just how would you actually have them coach someone else. Like put you in the role of a mentor and coach to someone else who has similar goals so that you feel like you're on a pedestal. Wow, someone trusts me to give this kind of advice. I must be kind of cut out for this. Maybe I'm better at this than I thought. And then you're going to start introspecting in a way you might not if it was just your problem. Because you've got to help someone else. And you don't want to let them down. And then when you do that, you actually figure out, well, I've got some good ideas.

3:37Like maybe I do know something. And then once you've told someone else to do it, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't do it yourself. Right. So this is another sort of social trick. Max would put us in these sort of advice giving circles where the senior students are working with a junior. And he rarely gave advice, actually. And I think that also helped build confidence. It made us believe in ourselves in those roles. And I now actually have an advice club of people who are former Max students. We sort of try to keep this going even beyond that point in our lives where he was coaching us.

4:07And each of us, we're at similar career stages, all professors, similar goals. And we reach out to each other for solicited advice whenever we're facing a challenge, a career challenge, and aren't sure what to do. And it's just been totally amazing. So it's this peer group of people who support each other, care about each other. There's friendship. That's all built in. We see others achieving, and it helps us see, oh, if they can do it, I can do it. But then also we get to give advice, and we grow from that as well.

4:49Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

5:39Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.