Why You Quit Every Goal You Set (And It’s Not Laziness) - Damian Hughes

0:0090 % of people that set a New Year's resolution, if you go six months later, only 14 % will still be pursuing it. He said there's not. So when did that relationship begin with the life coach? There's almost three traits that have to be in place for high performance to then happen. Now if those three factors are not there, you can't achieve high performance is what the evidence tells us. It's not that they're not committed and they don't mean to get healthier or they don't mean to be more successful or they don't mean to journal more. but the doing it is often difficult. Something called the say-do gap at no stage was prioritising my own self-care.

0:37So I was talking to myself when I was knackered. Just get up with it. Fucking idiot. Stop whinging. Just man up. How would you feel as somebody spoke to your son in the way that you do what you've just described how you're talking to yourself? Failure is the price of ambition. If you're incapable of speaking to yourself kindly when you fail, how do you learn?

1:03before we get started with the episode our books are now open if you need help getting in front of the right people finding your dream customers or winning new business we might be able to help why not outsource your sales to we have a meeting just go to wehaveameeting.com damien thanks for being here well thank you for having me lads i'm really excited for this we always start our podcast off the same way yeah so who are you and what problem do you solve that's a good question um so my name's damien um and i probably solved the problem of translating the abstract idea of how do you create high performing cultures into something really tangible and practical and useful nice okay so high performing cultures obviously long before the podcast of the same name how do we define a high performing culture well that's i mean that's often the starting place of any conversation you have with somebody that wants to create it is so how do you define it there's no there's no definitive definition there's no dictionary definition you can go to it's up to you to define it and i think that's often the interesting conversation you can have with people because people's definition of high performance is going to be literally unique to them i mean we on the high performance podcast that i co-host we've done over 500 interviews and we start similar to yourselves with the same first question of what is high performance the 500 interviews we've not had five we've had 500 different definitions of it i think the closest there's two that i that i that i've nicked and i'll share with you one was from phil neville uh the at the time it was the england lionesses head coach but um at the time i was talking to him at his hotel just outside of old trafford and uh i don't know if you remember during the pandemic he opened it up for free for nhs workers to come and get like respite care and i was having a cup of tea with phil and i said to him off i love what you did there and he went mate he went in life you just got to do the best you can with what you've got in the moment you're in i'm like what and he went just about doing the best you can in the moment you're in with the resources you've got and i was like let me just but to me that came pretty close to defining what high performance and high performing cultures as it's doing the best that you can do and that'll be different than the best i can do in the moment you're in which is going to be different than the moment i am with the resources you have which is always going to be unique to you so that's almost the starting point of every conversation with people that are looking to create high performing cultures is so what's your definition of the best what resources do you have and what's the moment that you're in because if we can answer that we can help it translate it the second definition though that i'll give you comes from a new york prize winning author called charles doohig and when i asked him that question he went mate it's about having high ambitions but not fucking up the rest of your life going after them and i was like i love that one as well because again it's almost like the shadow side of high performing cultures people think it's about the relentlessness and the grind and the non-stop working but then you go but you wake up one day and realised that your personal life is in ruins.

4:20You know, the people that you love most haven't seen you. You've torched relationships of people that really mattered. Your health is in ruins or whatever it is, you guys will have seen that in your world as much as I have in mine. So I think it's often helping people with that to translate that abstract idea or what society tells us high-performing cultures are. No, no, what do you think it is? and let's start and we'll work backwards from that. So when you're around, obviously you've been around so many different high-performing cultures, teams, individuals. If you break it down to that foundation level, what would you typically see at like the grassroots level that you could say this is kind of existing across all of you?

5:04Yeah, so I mean that's a brilliant question because that was the same question that Google tried to answer back in 2010. So what they realized, Google, was that they were brilliant at gathering data on their employees. So they could find out, for example, that if a new manager greeted an employee on the first day of employment, go 15 months later, that employee tended to be about 20 % happier and more content in the workplace, which is an interesting fact, but relatively useless beyond that first day. But what they were finding out was all their data gathering was about individuals. rules and yet most of their work was delivered via teams so they said well how do we gather data that under that helps us understand how high performing teams work and the reality was they didn't have much data so they commissioned what was called a meta analysis looking at all the evidence out there to go and explore the formula for a high performing team and what they discovered is there is no formula so it goes back to that first answer we're saying don't don't wait for someone to come along and give you the definition of do this this and this so they spent three years it's a famous project called projects aristotle looking at this and they said oh well they'd find evidence say that say high performing teams get on really well and they go well there's evidence that supports that but there's also evidence that conflict in teams can lead to high performance or high performing teams are having the smartest people in the room well there's evidence for that but there's evidence for a diversity of thought.

6:35So they couldn't find anything that was definitive. And then they decided to look at it through the lens of behavioral norms. And that was where they struck gold because what they found is there's almost three behaviors, there's almost three traits that have to be in place for high performance to then happen. They're almost like the bouncers on the door that they stop you getting in to even access high performance consistently. So the three that you'll find in any high-performing culture is that, first of all, everyone's got, they call it like a sense of purpose, but it's just a sense of direction.

7:06Everyone knows where you're heading, what you're trying to achieve. The second one is you have a sense of belonging, that you sense that you're all in it together. And then the third one is this idea of psychological safety, that you know you can fall, you can stumble, you can make mistakes, and you're not going to be ostracized, you're not going to be demonized or made to feel ridiculous for doing it. Now, if those three factors are not there, you can't achieve high performance is what the evidence tells us so you go into any team where where success is happening sustainably i guarantee you'll find evidence of those three those three factors so me and zach are both fathers so we have young children when you think about like instilling that into children or people that you've met throughout the years and you're thinking well that has come from that point there how do you think about kind of building these habits and instilling habits from a young age oh is it i mean that's a really good question jack i mean i'm a father myself my kids are a bit older than than you're two uh but but i can probably go back to my own childhood to understand it so i know we're from manchester but i um so i grew up on the north side of manchester um in a place called moston which around the district where i grew up it's now cut off in In 2000, it was categorized as Europe's third poorest district, which isn't a badge of honor, but it gives people from outside of the area a sense of the social deprivation, a lot of the challenges that people grow up in that area understanding.

8:42But my dad ran a boxing gym in that district, so he ran it before I was even born. So I literally grew up within the confines of a boxing gym. and what I realised when I was in like more in adulthood than in childhood because at that age he's just inside that old anecdote about two fish in water and someone says how's the water you know what's water you don't know anything different because you're in it but I was around two things that really resonated in adulthood one I was around high performing people so I was around people that were going off to Olympic games and then coming back and training the medal I was around people that were sort of dedicating their life to becoming world champions and then actually watching the journey as they went and did it and the stumbles and the falls and the successes.

9:35So what I came to realize was high performance happens in the shadows, not under the spotlight. It's the years that precede it where you see the dedication, the healthy habits, the work ethic, so that goes into that moment. So I was seeing that, and literally, if you'll excuse a pun, I had a ringside seat to it. But the second thing that really resonated was I was around high-performing cultures. So I gave you a snapshot of the sort of social deprivation that happened in the area. And this was like an oasis in the middle of it. People could come to the gym and never set foot into a boxing ring.

10:11They could come in there and you'd get old men that had just come and liked being around and watching the young fighters. you'd get people that just came to do a workout gently or people that just wanted to come and just get a bit more physical confidence. So I was around that. And to explain it, back in 2017, Manchester Council named a road after my dad in honour for the work that he'd done in the community. And it was like a really bitterly cold January day. And me and my brothers and my sister were there. and there was about 400 people turned up for it for the road naming that day. And me and my brothers were looking around at the people that I gathered and 80 % of them had never set foot in a boxing ring.

10:5880 % of the people had been members of the club but had never boxed. But they'd been members of it and they came along and talked about the impacts that the habits they'd learned in that environment had taught them about as parents, as partners, as professionals in all other aspects of their lives. So I'll give you an example of it. You weren't allowed to come in and use bad language in the gym. Now, that wasn't a moral judgment of bad language is bad. It was literally, it was seen as a lack of discipline. If you come into an environment and you feel you have to fill the silence by swearing, that shows that you've not got full control over your mouth and your thoughts, which means that that lack of self-discipline is likely to cause you trouble if you choose to step foot in a boxing ring because you're likely to be a bit more wild and erratic.

11:46So there was all little habits that were ingrained in you from that really young age that I was around it. And I was just seeing it and sort of being immersed in it. So to come back and answer your question, it's a long-winded answer, but talking about doing it with kids, again, it was always that idea of you can give them a habit as long as you then explain the rationale behind it. This is why we're doing this. This is what the phrase I use is non-negotiable behavior. This is the behavior, but this is the habit. But you need to explain the reason of why that habit exists. I'm thinking now about, you mentioned purpose before.

12:26So your dad's boxing gym. If I'm a talented boxer in the local area, it's probably quite easy for me to find purpose because I think, well, I'm pursuing this to get me out of this area. but then bringing that into an organization where okay the leadership maybe they've got the purpose because it's making money to sell the business okay how do you instill purpose in the team well again is it so you it's a really good question because we need to understand this idea that we need to have a sense of direction that we all need it so almost telling people the story what's the outcome here so you start with the outcome in mind and get people embracing that sense of this is what we're trying to achieve.

13:07So you can do it in lots of different ways. If I was running a team, you might get them to almost see it from the perspective of the end user. This is how it makes my life different, better, improving it, easier, whatever it is, you get people to understand it and then just see the difference that you're making, however small that it can be. So, you know, we were talking off mic before around we interviewed Simon Sinek and he saw that offer the book, Find Your Why. That why question is, I mean, it predates Simon Sinek, you know, and you can find it in lots of different ways. But the best example I've seen of how a team could do this, of finding their equivalent of their why and thinking about it from the end user's point of view.

13:59came from a different source. There's almost like four questions we can ask. Because I think, again, we get into the habit of, if you ask a singular question, you narrow your focus right away. You know, what's your purpose? Not sure. Or what you're passionate about? Lots of things. It becomes quite difficult to answer. The best questions I'd ask is, and you need to keep going back and getting into the habit of revisiting them, are four questions. and I'll give you the context of where these questions come from. Interviewed a guy called Dr. Peter Atiyah, who's one of the world's leading medical experts based out in Austin in Texas.

14:37And Peter Atiyah talks around, he was involved in a study to understand about, so he wrote a book called Outlive, where he asks the question of, in most of the Western world, average life expectancy is 78. And yet he says we're built for something called procreational success. we're actually able to live into our 90s and yet so he asked the question what happens to those 12 years that many people leave on the table so then he started to explore well who does live to 90 plus and then he was linked up with a journalist from the national geographic called dan bootner to identify what they call blue zones these are areas around the world where life expectancy goes into the 90s and then he went to visit them and explore them and given the geographical diversity you couldn't just turn up and go it's because of the climate or diet or they eat this type of fish because it was different in in in all of these areas but then when he went to the japanese community they went we've got a word for what you're looking for and the word in japanese is ikigai which translates as what gets me out of bed in the morning and these are the four questions that's not just a singular question we get in the habit of going what am i really good at so that's your first one that any any of us can ask or you can ask it as a team as well so so what are we really good at here the second one is um what do we love doing so what do we really enjoy and then the third one is and how do we make a difference to the lives of other people by doing this now there's a fourth question that spins off it i think and it happens as a default of you getting the first three answers right is how do we make money by doing this but if you can ask those three questions on a regular enough basis and ask what percentage of our time do we spend enjoying it playing to our strengths and making a difference to others eventually you'll find a place where that sense of purpose comes alive of its own accord nice i think that leads nicely on to you had a guy on years ago called rick lewis oh yeah a billion one of my favorite guests i love that episode so we were building our team first hires we've never been in management before and I sent it to Jack and was like, you've got to list this episode.

16:46So all that stuff around like never being too big to set the bins out and stuff like that, we still talk about that now. It feels like those values are in essence habits that kind of underpin the purpose. But I don't know about you, I've met lots of businesses where you say, what are the values on the wall? And I think, I've no idea what they mean. They're so inaccessible. So where do you think people go wrong and where can they go right with those? Well, thanks for bringing up the Rick one, Zach, because I'll tell you the context of that. Like, so it, I mean, he's a big six foot seven, like he's a unit himself.

17:18And like charismatic, you know, smart and obviously ultra successful. And he came in and so he's got like an aura about him. And when I've done the research, I'd read interviews where he goes, oh yeah, I run my business on these principles. But then the, but then it never said what the principles were in the interviews. so I was having a chat with him beforehand and I said to him I said I keep reading these interviews where you talk about your principles but I don't know what they are I can't find any reference and he went ah that's because I don't tell anyone and I went what and he went he said I don't share them with journalists or the outside world and I said why and he went well he said if I told them to you they're really easy to lampoon or make fun of or they look too simple so he said so out of context they look ridiculous so i don't really share them but he went but i'll show you them so he gets his ipad out and he starts going through them and the like like the first one is like the competition is always outside the glass so don't compete with your teammates the other one was if you think you're too important to take the bins out we'll get your job just taking the bins out right so he's going through them and i'm instantly going these are brilliant these are great now and then jake humphrey uh comes over and he's not heard the first bit of the conversation about where he says i don't share them and i'm saying jake rick's just showing me these principles that he runs his business and he's really successful by so jake with no context goes well why don't we use them as a structure for the interview then rick now so he doesn't know rick doesn't share these and then he looks at me he looks at jake and he goes you know what why don't we and we'll go through it So it felt a real privilege that we literally structured the interview around.

19:00Tell us why taking the bins out is such an important principle of your business. And then he explains it. Well, it's just this idea. Well, first of all, he tells us his own backstory. So he grows up in America. His dad's a fireman. His mum worked as a cleaner for a while. And he's like, just that idea of a discrepancy of treating somebody with disrespect just goes against my own values of what was brought up with. So he starts explaining it. The competition is always outside the glass. He went, it was a high school basketball player. And the idea that your teammates would be trying to like cut you off by the knees or get one over you just went against it.

19:38And I've seen that you've got to stick together. And I'm really glad you mentioned it because I think when you start thinking about these things, like too many businesses or teams try and be too clever or intellectualize it or even worse, they make it so abstract it becomes impossible to to to argue against it do you know what i mean so you go um we believe uh in passion well who's arguing for being this passionate yeah do you know i mean or we believe in integrity well who sat around that table suggesting that acting without integrity is a good idea so the first almost rule for anybody that's saying how do i create my own principles or non-negotiable behaviors is well think about who could argue for the opposite of it and if and if nobody can it's probably too abstract it's probably too abstract to do anything to be able to offer something conflicting it needs to be something that's really tangible obvious and that people could go i get that i understand it but i can see it and i can therefore or say something about it, if I do it, I can't see what integrity looks like.

20:53But if you tell me that integrity is about, if you tell me that you're going to do something, you can pretty much, you can hold me to account to deliver it. Well, now we're getting closer to something that becomes real and is almost discussed in the same language that we're talking like here. Do you know what I mean? Like nobody talks about, so like, I've got a real issue with sort of like business chat. Do you know what I mean? and people go, oh, we need to work with greater synergy to consider the structure. Imagine telling your kids that. Imagine having a conversation with your kids that, you know, around the dentist, we need to work with greater synergy here as a family.

21:28Well, it doesn't mean anything. You say we need to have each other's backs, we need to be kinder to each other. Make it accessible and therefore get rid of the abstraction. We are entering a new era of outbound. Four years in, we have a meeting has levelled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us. And we've put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club. We've helped close deals up to 950 ,000. We're doing it all. Phone, LinkedIn, email, direct mail. There's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket. So if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time, inquire today.

22:16yeah and i love that we in our in our kind of organization we talk we call it pub talk but the way you'd ask your question if i was on a if i was on a cold call with you i'd never say what is the impact of that you'd be like what does that mean then what happens yeah i think it's like how do you bring it down to its simplest form hub talk pub talk i like that that's great you have to be able to say in the pub for it to pass the test yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly like nobody yeah exactly if you think about some of the some of the shit you hear people talk about in the sort of corporate setting imagine yeah yeah so how do we just like bring it back to what would you say in the the queen's head or whatever it is yeah so as this episode comes out damien it will be the start of the year yeah and we know that people will be they would have done their ice baths they would have cleaned their fridges out they would have set their goals and they would have established their new year's resolutions and their habits as you think about people doing this where will people typically go wrong so that in two months time that they've kind of messed it up and it's a car crash well again so it's a really good question but i'd i'd avoid even using pejorative terms like right or wrong there's no right or wrong you know what i mean like most people are doing the best aren't they and where sometimes does our best fall short well there's some there's some reasons behind it i think and there's research on this that says that like out of 90 of people that's at a new year's resolution like people might be doing now as they're listening to this i think the stat is that if you go six months later only 14 will still be pursuing it so something called the say do gap right is that that that psychology talks about this idea that people talk a really good game and it's not that they're not committed and they don't mean to get healthier or they don't mean to be more successful or they don't mean to journal more but the doing it is often difficult and it's in that gap where you say so what can we do different the easy way is to think of it in first of all do something really small right don't don't try and change your life because you don't need to change your life right so do something really small just commit to something that like i'm gonna floss after brushing my teeth do you know what i mean it's something like as really simple as that you're going to brush your teeth anyway so so floss or something like that or you'll just do i've spoke to some people like dr rongan chatterjee that talks about when he's making a cup of tea in the morning he just does like some squats you know what i mean so that's like the first smallest step he could do about i want to get a bit healthy i'm just going to squat while i'm waiting for the kettle tomorrow because i'm going to be waiting anyway so do something really small the second one is do something quite simple don't don't it like if it costs you money or if it involves sort of making huge like huge significant investments you're probably not going to do it so keep it really simple right so like that idea of wrong and doing his squats not costing him any money and he's going to be waiting for the kettle spoil anyway and then the other one is just just make it something you can do quickly so something that is not going to take up a huge amount of time because most of us are time poor i mean you know like you guys know it you've got kids they're looking after your kids running the business doing your podcast doing all the other things where like the idea of carving out an hour somewhere in your day can feel quite intimidating but you can carve out five minutes.

25:51So I think if we do that things and make it small, make it simple and make it speedy that you can do, we start to narrow the say-do gap and then it stops us feeling that we're going wrong or we're making a mistake or we're making an error because then that just reinforces the sense of failure and we get ourselves in that spiral. What we want is a sense of progress and those three areas allow us to narrow the gap of what we say we're going to do. and then actually following through and doing it. I like that. I thought it was so interesting earlier, Damien, where you said, well, let's break that down.

26:27It's not right or wrong. And I think that that leads into this self-talk. And we've had it with people in our sales team where we'll jump on a call and they'll be like, I'm an idiot or I feel stupid. And it's like the negative self-talk. What have you learned about the importance of self-talk when it comes to high-performing teams and high-performing individuals? well so it's really important topic jack i think when you've so we're all doing it all the time we're all engaging in this self-talk so the first one is just to recognize that that we are doing it that that inner voice is ours you know so i think when we first recognize that we go oh okay right so there is a degree of control that we have over it as long as we can acknowledge it and first of all acknowledging it can be really interesting but if you want evidence on it like there's a guy called martin seligman he's the head of psychology at penn state university he's probably the leading expert on self-talk over the last 30 40 years and he's done evidence that talks about um he did one study with finnish men it's men from finland that he talks about so he did a study with men from finland where he found that those that tend to have a greater of control over their self-talk.

27:46There's health benefits in terms of their recovery rates from illness or injury or just their general overall happiness tends to be better. People that control it. He's found it with mothers who suffer less from postnatal depression, right? In sales terms, he's found that teams that can almost have a way of being able to articulate how they talk to themselves and therefore to each other tend to be more successful. So there's lots of personal and professional benefits sort of controlling this what he said is that it's often catch yourself doing it so the first thing i'd advocate is i've got a mate who's a tennis coach and the way he gets people to control self-talk is he says imagine you playing doubles tennis and imagine you speaking to somebody in the way that you're speaking to yourself if they're a partner and if you think never say that to them right well there's the first thing just to catch yourself getting into these patterns of the way you're speaking to yourself can often be unkind and unsparing and pity uncharitable but then we need to look at what are we saying to ourselves and there's and seligman advocates there's three p's that we need to be careful of and you just gave an example of one jack when you when you offered what some of your sales is when i said well the first one is we personalize things oh i'm an idiot i'm stupid they don't like me right so you've made you've made you've taken a set of circumstances that you might have had a customer say no to you and you've now made that mental leap to attribute it to something about you your personality or your character right you've done that they've not called you an idiot they've not said any of that stuff so first one is don't personalize it just externalize it it was just a person saying no right the second one is uh the second p is we make it permanent every time this is always the way this this will never work right so look you've taken again a rejection and you've made that mental lead to make it a rule that says every time i ask the answer is always no so you've made it permanent so how are you going to go into the next one if you've already unconsciously decided that the answer is no you probably your preparation might not be as sharp or your enthusiasm might not be there or your willingness to keep adapting so permanent is the second mistake that we make and then the third one is pervasiveness where you go everybody hates this nobody likes this customer we're all fed up right so what you've done there is you've now surrounded yourself with an echo chamber of your own of your own opinion coming back at you for you're not listening to diversity of thought you're now listening to the same people telling you what you want to hear or they're not doing that but you're editing out what they've told you to do it so the first one is recognize that self-talk is normal the the the the second trick is listen for the kind of content that you're talking to yourself and then if you're thinking this is not particularly pleasant just try and catch yourself making one of the three p's of permanent pervasive or um or personal and just try and counter it with an alternative i mean for me like it's something that i'm i'm still learning so i don't claim i can sit here and tell you that is the response but i don't find it easy to do myself like i i and i've and it's cost me to my detriment where often like i've so for me it was when my son was born i remember sort of going pretty close to a breakdown about 18 months after it and part of it was because well i went to the doctor with a persistent cough and i was like it's not going and one day they said just come with me he said i look in the mirror there what do you say what do you mean and he went look at the bags under your eyes look how exhausted you are look at how gray your skin looks he went you're this isn't the cough something deep is happening in your life and what I'd realized was that I thought being a dad I had to I had to do my best to provide for my wife and my son at the time I was running a business so so I never said no I was working incredibly hard I was then trying to get home and be the best that I could and get up in the night and sort of be around and be really enthusiastic and do all of that and at no stage was prioritizing my own self-care.

32:22So I was talking to myself when I was knackered. Just get on with it. Fucking idiot. Stop whinging. Just man up. And when I caught myself having those conversations with myself, it was only the doctor flagging it. They're like, that was pretty horrible. And it was a friend of mine who was telling the shot afterwards, how would you feel if somebody spoke to your son in the way that you do, in what you've just described, how you're talking to yourself? And that thought left me bereft. that was genuinely like, I'd be horrified if I thought anybody ever spoke to a son in that way. And then it made me realize that I needed to role model a better way for him.

33:00I couldn't then say to him, oh, don't ever let anyone speak to you badly. Cause then you go, you do when you do it to yourself and you've seen the cost of it. So I don't sit here claiming that I've got, got the answers. I can give you an answer, but I don't claim that it's a definitive answer or that I know what I'm doing. I'm sort of stumbling my way through it as well. Our book is out now. Sales is therapy is available everywhere. For people who are looking to get better at communicating, asking better questions, closing more deals and bringing in more clients. Beware it is not for the faint of heart or for closed-minded people.

33:40You can buy it in all good shops, links below. You touched on something really interesting around kind of the labels we give ourselves and the labels we give things. And I'm sure you've had the same experience. We've sat with a lot of entrepreneurs who've got ADHD. They say ADHD is a bit of a superpower to them. Because of my ADHD, I was able to achieve X thing. And equally, there are people that you meet in life who would say, because of my ADHD, I've not been able to achieve something. So how do we think about the way we label attributes appropriately? Well, again, it's a really smart question, because i i think often we allow labels to get to get attributed to us without even knowing it you know what i mean like there's a famous study that was done in i think it was at stanford in the in the 1970s where they showed footage of a young girl playing uh in um uh in a garden right and for some people they were told that like there was evidence of sort of like the area she grew up in you could see it from from the footage but like it was a poor working class district in america the same girl was then put in footage where it looked like a more middle class stable environment and people were asked um assessed the intelligence of that girl and what they found is that these were all academics the girl from the poorer background they attributed her with less intelligence now you might go yeah but that's in the 60s or 70s there was a study done in in the 2000s with the Charter Institute of Psychiatrists, where they gave them a report of a guy that had attacked a ticket inspector on a train.

35:23The only thing they changed in the report was the name. So the name on one report was this was a guy called Harvey that had attacked them. In the other report, it was Wayne that had carried out the attack. And what they found is the psychiatrist, when they were asked to give their initial response, tended to judge that Wayne was probably a criminal or drug abuser. Wow. An alcoholic. Harvey was just having a really bad day. Do you know what I mean? So you see how these labels are happening all the time and it's often not done with sort of malicious intent. It's just we're all using like heuristics, mental shortcuts to be able to navigate our way through.

36:03You know what I mean? So we're meeting here in London, aren't we? you know what I mean and as northerners down in London sometimes you know that people have got a mental shortcut for how they might perceive they'll hear your accent and they've probably got a judgment on the last northerner they met or their view or if they've ever been up north or what they think the quality of life is there or your educational attainment this is all happening and it's not so it's not to sort of say it's good or bad it's neither it just is but we have to then sort of ask deeper questions to be able to get beyond that stereotype and understand it so that charles duhigg i mentioned earlier when we said about the um about the um the questions that are his definition of high performance when he said it's about going after high high achievement but not fucking up the rest of your life when i was talking to him he he'd done a brilliant book called super communicators which is how the world's best people are able to engage and get on with them so from a sales point of view it's it's worth reading but he talks about this idea of that every conversation you have is going to be one of three types it's a hug a hear or a help conversation so how you can get beyond the stereotypes is let's really listen to the person that i'm talking to and every conversation he talks about this idea of high centrality to get on with somebody and see them for who they are rather than who you think they are we need to almost connect and that's what psychologists call it high centrality so every conversation is either somebody's talking to you and they want to just bounce an idea off you and they just want you to listen there's a sounding board that's a hear conversation some people are coming to you and saying listen you guys work in sales and you're experts on this and i'm wondering what advice you would offer me that's a help conversation and some people come in going there's a manner of really tough time at the moment and wondering if i could just talk to you around it that's a request to be hugged and if we can understand which conversation we're having we get very quickly beyond these stereotypes and see the person for where they are rather than where we perceive them to be you've got me thinking now around the biases and the heuristics one thing that gets talked about a lot of the minute is be your most authentic self right yeah and the more i hear about biases and heuristics and things that i think is there any such things an authentic self surely it's impossible to have an authentic self well so context is always key isn't it you know what i mean that your authentic self depends on where you are and who you would surely then i think that when people say oh like bring your whole self to work really yeah imagine taking your kids in Imagine sort of coming to work when you're dealing with that.

38:54I think, again, it goes back to our original conversation of it's a really lovely idea and it sounds abstract and nobody's sat there going, no, no, don't bring your whole self to work. Just bring. So nobody feels comfortable to disagree with it, but actually it depends on the context that you're operating in. If you want to be part of this high-performing culture, let's start by looking at what we're good at, what we love, and how we make a difference to other people. then from that we'll identify the behaviors that we don't compromise on the vic lewis thing the principles that go when you come into our world and we work together we don't we don't trip each other up you know we do talk kindly to each other you can start getting into that level of detail and if and then what that offers people is the chance of that clarity and that transparency people go ah that's not for me that's okay that's right so you can be authentic somewhere go and find somewhere else where you can be somebody that can still behave authentically but you can't come into this culture and sort of pick and choose the bits you like and the bits that you don't you find with like i see a lot more especially on online now maybe this is people being more authentic and being more honest but these high performers have these like highs and lows of burnout and and kind of these dips of motivation what's your what's your take on what what motivation actually is because we know that motivation is the thing that that might get you out of bed in the morning but eventually when it's nine months into the year and you have kind of gone well that initial motivation to sign up to the gym or do something simple do the squats when i'm making a cup of tea that's gone and it's merged into something else what what's your take on that well again it's a really smart question jack i think so this idea of motivation isn't just you either got it or you haven't it's a spectrum think of it like a line rather than uh rather than an run-off switch so if you think of it from and at any state like it's all legitimate you can use whatever gets you to where you need to be on that spectrum so where again if you don't mind me referencing the original research for this stuff if people want to go and explore it back in the 1970s there was two psychologists at rochester university in new york a guy called edward deecy and richard ryan and and these were the guys that did a test it was basically a puzzle test and for half of the group that was doing the puzzle test they were paid for getting it right or for working on it as well as they could the other group were told just do it just for like the kicks like just see how you get on with it and what they found is that when they then took um when they took payment away from the people that had originally been paid for it their motivation to keep persevering and find an answer faded a lot faster than the group that had just had their curiosity and interest ignited so what that led dc and ryan to talk about is this spectrum of motivation from extrinsic where we're doing things for the pure reward of pay bonus fame fortune how clicks likes whatever you want to do it from there the external measure right the way through on the other end of the spectrum so you do it for intrinsic motivation i do it just because i love it now there's lots of stepping points along the way for that but if we start to understand it as a spectrum rather than an on-off switch we understand that we can tap into it at any stage so i spent some time with alistair brownlee the double olympic gold medal winning triathlete and he said i use all types of motivation so he said so getting out of bed at five o 'clock in the morning to jump into an icy swimming pool he said i never feel motivated i've never once had the desire the intrinsic motivation that that's exactly what i want to do at five o 'clock in the morning so he said so i think of the spectrum and i go i would treat myself to a really nice warm cup of tea and i'll get out of bed first and then when i'm out of bed then i'll find something else to do it and go it might be but I'll feel great at the end of this session or I'll think about that gold medal.

43:06So it'll constantly tap into different reasons at different times, at different stages. Like Keely Hodgkinson's another good example because I think these Olympians are doing four-year cycles. Do you know what I mean? Where for four years they're training for this one day to go and perform. They're almost the people we need to be listening to on this. So Keely Hodgkinson tells a story that when she was a young girl, then she was running the Greater Manchester Cross Country Trials. She said, I knew it was going to be really tough against this rival. So her dad said to her, if you win this race, I want to buy you a pair of new shoes from Selfridges.

43:44And she said, that was the impetus to dig deep when I was running at 15. And then she said, and gradually I came to her, I love running for the sake of it. When she got ill and she couldn't run for a while, she was like that tapped into that intrinsic motivation but just love running because that's where i feel i'm at the freest i'm at the happiest and yet when we spoke to her before she went off to paris to the olympic games in 2024 she was like no i want to buy myself a porsche if i win gold medal now i met her two weeks ago when i said did you buy the porsche went no i tried it and it wasn't for me but the point is she was using different stages along that scale of intrinsic motivation of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to to be able to get what she wanted but to break it down again into something where because people are okay i get that but there are three things of intrinsic motivation that actually if you can tap into these it'll get it'll burn for longer and brighter and more sustainably than just going for the clicks the likes and the uh and the bonus and again this frees from dc and ryan's work they talk about true intrinsic motivation is three things first of all it's this sense of control that you're choosing what you're working on and you're choosing what the standard is the second one is you're choosing a sense of mastery so it's something around that you love the craft of it you want to just get better at the sheer craft of what it is that you're working on and then there's something about um a sense of safety again so this idea that i feel like i can fail but it's okay i can keep working on it it's a decent mind say that when you get the three things of those three pillars that gives you the springboard to tap into intrinsic motivation that is actually the one that is going to burn brightest for you so there's a lot of those examples there damien were like positives and i love like the i say trick in the brain but it's like those mini like contracts with yourself and it could be the pair of shoes the the car i feel that probably a lot of entrepreneurs as well will probably have this the motivation comes from maybe a trauma or or a pain where it's a case of i'm getting and it goes back to this self-talk of i'm getting up at five in the morning because you're an idiot you need to get faster you need to be better you need to what what side effects have you seen or maybe learned about when when it comes from the motivation or the discipline comes from maybe a place of trauma yeah so again you'd be surprised at the amount it sounds like you've you've met enough people that are coming from that place of running away from a pain or a scar or or some kind of issue that they're trying to prove prove that they're not who that is what i'd say like the most famous one that i've sat down with was johnny wilkinson on this so johnny wilkinson we sat down with him and he asked us a question he said how uh how long do you think the joy of kicking that winning goal to win the 2003 reunion world cup lasted for now i don't know what you what you would answer if if that was you in that situation how long do you think you'd be surely it's months and months yeah well years you've been dining out on it for years he said it's about 20 seconds no he said it was 20 seconds he said literally he was watching the trophy get passed around his teammates and he's thinking shit i've got to do this again in four years time i've got right what do i need to do next so i think and he talks about this idea of just constantly being driven i've got to do the next thing the next thing and he had this lovely line he said what you've got he said what i've come to realize is there's no point climbing the mountain if the view is not going to be worth the climb so he's like you've got to make sure that the climb is worthwhile because you might get to the top and realize it's not all that and i think this is one of the things i've seen lots of people coming from a place of trauma they're almost driven and driven and driven to keep going and get there and go having all that millions in the bank hasn't fixed how I feel.

48:04Do you know what I mean? Like having that fleet of smart cars in my garage hasn't made me feel significantly better for longer than I felt. So I'm basing it on what we've seen, that there's a study that was done by the British Olympic Association years ago called Trauma Leads to Triumph. And what they found is that for some people it can do, like coming from quite difficult circumstances or having some traumatic event can be framed in a way that becomes rocket fuel for you. But you still need to turn up and face that trauma at some stage because it's not going to fix what the issue is. So, again, I'm very reluctant to use terms like this is right or wrong.

48:50There's nobody to tell you that. But I would say, is it helpful or unhelpful? It can be helpful for a period. I can recognize it. Johnny Wilkinson, I would say that his own traumas were helpful to him to have a stellar rugby career as it helped him. Post-playing, he would tell you, no, I've had to go back and revisit it. So that's the question I'd ask anybody that's maybe faced it. Just ask yourself, is this helpful or unhelpful? That's really nice. I like that. Someone that you had on that, I don't know if you'd say you disagreed with, you were quite happy to push back and i think who would be as well was simon squib oh yeah um and his narrative is like education's totally broken don't bother learning anything just go and start a business and fail on your own what what was your take from that stance what were you what were you fears like you wanted to push back on yeah he was an interesting character simon like and again i think this is a point that i'm like a bit like what you guys said i'm not there to judge you i'm not i when i sit opposite i want to understand you i want to step into your world and see it from your perspective because it worked it's worked for you and it's successful so we're trying to understand how uh how do you see it so i push back on him because again i often feel that when people talk about extremes this is right this is wrong well there's very few things in life that you could you can categorically state is right or wrong it might again it probably goes back to that last answer of does this help you or not and i think when he was sort of so strident about education being broken and not useful i was like well i can see your argument for some things but not others like when i go to the doctor i'll get a sense of confidence that my doctor's been through seven years of medical school you know what i mean to to be able to diagnose the issue i won and hopefully give me a solution for it now does that mean all doctors are infallible no it doesn't but there's a certain level of robust training that you need to go to when i get on an airplane i don't want to feel that the pilot is learning the job i want to feel like he's made the critical mistakes that mean that i can still get there so that was my challenge back to simon i think i think when you go to an extreme place you leave yourself vulnerable to counter arguments and but you know what it's worked it it's worked for him i think the other thing i've i struggled a bit when simon was coming on was like he was talking very much about um social media and how i mean that's fueled his success so i get that but he was talking about how social and social media can be really helpful and good in some cases but he was talking about all kids they should be teaching this in primary schools and giving kids access to going on social media in primary schools and i was like i'm not sure about that do you know what i mean because i've i've been lucky enough to speak to people like jonathan height the guy uh the sort of social psychologist that's explored this for his books uh the anxious generation and the happiness hypothesis and he's given he's presented as with evidence that goes this probably isn't a good thing for kids to be exposed to so my challenge to him was to almost like rather than just accept the narrative and go this has worked for you but i'm careful of anyone saying something is right or wrong or broken or fixed it is is a bit too simplistic i felt i like it i think that's the stance that we have as well is too when it's too simple it's too extreme and could you end up with a world where loads of people are starting market agencies and not really know much about it and then a lot of stress and pressure and all those types of things it doesn't feel like a good outcome yeah well i feel like you know i mean john height i referenced him there so he like i love his work for a long time his book the happiness hypothesis was like the most gifted book that i would give to people say have a read of this it's quite a thick lengthy book but it's worth it and he and then i've always followed his work since then but he did a book called the coddling of it or he wrote a paper in 2010 called the coddling of the american mind right that he then translated into a book where back in 2010 he was sort of sat with his colleagues at university and he did the thing that you get to an age and i think everyone does it where you go kids are different these days kids are different one of his colleagues went are they and he was like yeah yeah he's like why what why if you're making that as a statement you big statement like that and there's big evidence why are kids different anyway i don't know so he then did this paper that explored it and the reason the year 2010 is relevant is because that was what he said was the first generation of kids that were going to university as adults or 18 plus who had grown up exclusively online in a digital world.

53:55And then he wanted to understand. So what does growing up in a digital world do? Because it's not that kids are different. It's just, they've been conditioned differently than what those of us that didn't grow up in a digital world did. And his conclusion is there's three things that the digital world does. And it's one that you've just touched on there, Zach is that the first one is everything is black and white. It's right or wrong, good or bad. right and so it simplifies the world into that binary choice you're either on my side or you're the enemy do you know what i mean so and you're saying that people starting marketing agencies i get i i i can do that i'm sure you can but there's a craft to it that you need to understand the second one is that is that what um he has this lovely line he says what doesn't kill you makes you weaker so you surround yourself with an echo chamber well if you grow up online you don't hear many conflicting views because you're only hearing your own view repeated back to you follow people you like and identify with so very rarely do you hear conflicting views and then the third one is we mistake feelings for facts so then when you hear somebody that contradicts you or challenges your view i feel hurt yeah yeah but that's not a fact it's just an emotion and it's an emotion that'll pass quite quickly so that's john hight's view on what the world has given us but I think what it then lends us to is that because we see the world through such simple terms everybody goes well I could do that then do you know what I mean so like if you think of it like people sometimes say to me in the 500 interviews you've done on high performance what is it that you've noticed about these people you go it's probably the thing that isn't there it's like a quiet trait so it doesn't scream at you but when you when somebody points it out you go it's pretty much everyone i've met is humility and humility is often if you think of humility as like your your levels of confidence and then on the bottom uh axis it's your depth of knowledge there's almost three stages to humility it's not saying i'm humble it's actually a mindset that goes first of all you get over yourself remarkably quickly because when you're on the outside you go I could run a marketing agency but that is what is called peak idiot stage peak idiot stages because you don't understand what's required to run a marketing agency if you've never worked in one or you've you've not explored it right so you go oh it looks easy I could do that it looks glamorous and then if you can get over yourself quickly you get into what's the second stage which is the valley of humility where your confidence dips but what you learn and your knowledge increases because you're making mistakes you're failing you around people that are running marketing agencies you you're asking them questions you're being curious you're trying stuff and the longer you can spend in stage two the valley of humility eventually you get to stage three which is the hill of knowledge where you're running a successful marketing agency and you know why you're successful and you're not afraid to go back down into the valley to pick up more information you can use but if you've only grown up online the danger is you find yourself stuck constantly at peak idiot stage because you're constantly looking at the world for this simple narrative and when it's easy i could do that they're doing it wrong and like we've said there's no right or wrong it's just if we explore it through a different lens of going let's try and understand why they've chosen to do that love it damien i feel like we could talk to you all day thank you so much for coming on we always end the same way what what's one question that people that have been listening to this episode should ask themselves oh that's good um you can have that if you want yeah thank you i might make that yeah yeah what's one question they should ask themselves i don't know it's like are you treating yourself with the kindness that you would treat other people because i think if you're going off to high ambition i know there's certain people that listening to your podcast want to use it in some some context to improve what they're doing you're going to fail like that we i love this line from a guy called greg hoffman he was the chief marketer of nike that i interviewed and he had this line that he said failure is the price of ambition so if you're going to go after any ambition failure is going me baked in at some stage of the process so if you're if you're incapable of speaking to yourself kindly when you fail how do you learn because all you do is beat yourself up oh what an idiot i should have been better than that i'm going to make that mistake so your ability to learn is naturally going to be slower than your competition so if there was one question i'd ask anybody listening to this to ask is are you treating yourself as kindly as you can because that is your ultimate competitive advantage.

58:48Great question. And you've got a new book out. So if people want to find you, get hold of the book, I guess, where can they grab that? So, yeah, there's a new book called Micro Habits, which is sort of just tiny changes people can make to go after their own definition of high performance. So it's out now wherever people choose to buy their books from. But, yeah, we basically can raise it. We've done over 500 interviews on high performance. We've got the 50 most powerful and simple habits that people can use, whether it's to motivate themselves better, give feedback to their partners, or even just about identifying what their own targets are.

59:30We've got habits from some of the planet's best achievers that have been broken down and given a bit of the science behind it. Amazing. Thank you so much, David. Thanks for having me, lads. Cheers.