133: Mike Simonsen — How Do You ‘Hack’ Happiness?

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Well, this show continues a theme of looking at planning and performance, but from a really radically different place. This show is on the subject of hacking happiness. What would it do if you really hacked happiness? Fulfillment connection with your team and your results is a conversation with a friend and entrepreneur who's grown and done just had terrific business results by taking a very different approach, almost the anti planning approach to building his business. And so listen in. It's fascinating. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast show. We talk about all things scaling up. I'm your host, growth coach Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today is a dear old friend, a business friend from the world of entrepreneurship in the EO or Entrepreneurs Organization San Francisco chapter. We've both been around for a lot of years and I'm excited to have him because he's taken a novel approach to the cycle of planning and so on. Mike Simonson, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill.

Yeah. So you've taken a novel approach. You were talking to me about it at a party over the holidays and I thought, oh, we should do a show about that. It really dovetails with some of the ideas that we were talking about a couple of weeks ago with Vern Harnish. So you have a company, Altos Research. Tell us about Altos and then how did you become an entrepreneur?

Sure. At Altos we do real estate data. We track the US Housing market, every house that's for sale every week. And we analyze all the pricing and the supply and demand and market conditions and we bubble up those analytics for people who care. So it's a data company that reaches Wall street firms and investors and traders and hedge funds. But also we deal with thousands and thousands of real estate agents and people in the real estate profession related who need to reach people Reach consumers, their business with that information about what's going on. How's the market today? So it's a SaaS marketing platform for them. It's email marketing and it's social marketing and it reaches people with that content.

They're just leveraging lots of data to help them either market better or make better decisions.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And really the consumer needs to know what's going on and they turn to their professional and this is a great way for the real estate professionals to do it. And on the investor side, people who have exposure to real estate lenders or traders or whatever to the US real estate market, they need to understand way before the headlines, which of course are lagging by the time the information percolates through to the media. So those people are, are buying big data files from us and we're helping them figure out where their, where their trades are.

Nice. So, and I think we'll see why this is all relevant as we get into the topic of hacking happiness here. And that is that this sort of finding patterns and understanding what's going on beneath stuff is kind of in your DNA. Were you more of data scientist, analyst type, or had you always been an entrepreneur? I don't actually know your early background.

Yeah, actually I've always done data oriented software for 25, 30 years, almost 25 years now.

That's frightening to say that, right?

Yeah, exactly. The 25 years, I guess since. And so my software is always about taking interesting big piles of data and turning it into usable, actionable stuff for people. I've always known that I was going to build a software company, be a software entrepreneur since I was like 10. And it just took me a long time to figure out what that was. And at some time in grad school, I was talking to a person who built a healthcare data company. And I thought there was some real insights about how that a data company scales better than a software company, which scales better than a services company. And I thought, well, I'm going to make a data company. And it just took me another decade after that to figure out what the data was. And with Altos, I just happened to back into it because I bought my little old overpriced piece of shit Silicon Valley house with a giant, giant mortgage in 2001, as the NASDAQ bubble was bursting and I needed to figure out what was going on. And I started building models based on the information that was just starting to become available on the Internet that had never been available publicly before. And I started building those models and pretty Soon I had more information than anybody else in the industry or out anybody else in the world. And in 2000, 2005 I decided to commercialize that and said we're going to take this out to people. And so we've been doing it ever since. 12 years almost, I guess 13 now.

So it was a personal interest in the world of housing that had you go into residential real estate. Really?

Yeah, it was really analyzing a personal need. Like is my. The Nasdaq has blown up, it's Armageddon in Silicon Valley, people are out of jobs and houses aren't selling. Is my mortgage underwater? Like in. What does that mean? Like if I needed to sell, how long would it take? Nobody knew these things at the time and I was able to see better than anybody else's. It was amazing because traditional housing data is focused on tax records, houses that sold six months ago and we look at everything on Friday and publish it out on Monday.

And.

And so we had a whole bunch more insights than I could ever find. And after I realized, I realizing that on a bunch of different fronts and synthesized a few different insights or things that other, you know, I was working in different Silicon Valley startups and seeing the things that some real brilliant software people were doing, I thought, oh, I can take, take that idea and I can use that model and I can. And I turned it into to what we do with housing data.

Cool. Well, we could talk a lot more about the importance of lots of data and big data. We could talk about predictive AI type tools and we could talk. But we're not talking about that today. We're going to talk about Hacking Happiness. And so what does that mean to you? Is that the term you use? And like where did this become of interest?

So yeah, Hacking Happiness is the name of a paper that I wrote originally for my EO forum. It was really a process. It's a multi year process that I've been undergoing but really a catalyst from the fall of 2017, about a year and a half ago, I needed it was, you know, we're at this point, the company's 12 years old, 1112 years old. I am at a point where a lot of entrepreneurs are where I'm a little bit uninspired and because I'm uninspired I don't, you know, you sometimes get lazy. It's interesting in a recurring revenue business like, like ours is a subscription business. Yeah, if you don't sell anything next month, you make the same revenue, but as a result sometimes you don't sell anything. The Next month. And so you can get really lazy, and it's magic when it's working well, but it also, you know, and so I was getting lazy and. And I. You see yourself in this funk, and how do I break out of it?

Yeah. And.

The pillars, as I describe them in my Hacking happiness paper, are things that evolved. Observations about my internal state, my frame of mind, and then what we can do about achieving joy in our work, in ourselves, and what that means for the business down the road. So I organized it in these nine pillars and then started gathering tools and reading a bunch of books and you finding evidence all over the place supporting random hypothesis that I might have. So I pulled it together into this paper and then I executed on it for myself over 2017 and 2018 with really good results. Like, I had a great year in 2018 personally, and the business thrived as well. It was the best year I've ever had. It was unbelievable. And it was really a function of my focus on myself internally, on what I call, you know, these. It's really the hormones of happiness and stress, paying attention to them, the triggers, the functions, how they. How they happen, what they mean, and then working on them.

So what did you actually do for yourself? I kept the studying it part and understanding the drivers of neuroscience chemicals. But what did you actually do?

There are four main hormones that I was thinking about. Dopamine, which is the reward chemical. Serotonin, which is the anchor happiness chemical about joy and satisfaction. Oxytocin, which is the love and bonding chemical. And then cortisol, which is the. One of the big stress chemicals. Stress hormones. So when I feel stress, my stress reaction, some people get directive and commanding, and some people get angry.

Control, dominate.

Controlling, dominate. My stress reaction is avoidance. So when I'm.

You shut down?

Yeah, I hide. I don't want to make that. I want to take that call. And sometimes that serves you well because the problem solves itself. Sometimes it's catastrophically bad, you know. So I'm feeling cortisol. In the fall of 2017, I got to solve this problem. So I did a bunch of things. One of the things I did was I started a meditation practice. Meditation. And I do tm Transcendental Meditation. But the thing that it does immediately is it lowers your cortisol level.

And.

And then what it does over long term, like a workout practice, like, like starting a new exercise regime in, like, by three months, you're physically changed. You can feel the physical changes in your body that people see it. Same thing happens with meditation. So it was a, it was a, it was a physical, physiological change in my body, my production of the stress hormones, how I react to them. Meditation was one of the things I did at that time.

But you're not actually measuring hormonal levels, you're simply noting.

Well, I didn't measure cortisol per se, but I do measure testosterone, and I have for like a decade with my annual physical with my doctor. And what's interesting is, as it turns out, cortisol and testosterone are both made in the adrenal gland. They both take cholesterol as the input. And so when you are stressed, your cortisol production climbs, your testosterone, among other things, drops. And my, after like three to four months of my meditation practice, my testosterone was 25% higher than it had been in 10 years. So literal physiological measure changes in my body and, you know, and testosterone for, you know, guys in their 40s, like, that's the fountain of youth. Like, everything feels better when that's better.

Absolutely. Yep.

So. And that was a function of meditation. It's a function of a bunch of other things too. But that was one of the things I did. The other thing I did for the business per se was.

You have to.

Put in some kind of action plan for the year. You have to build some kind of plan. And I have over the years been really, really unskilled at implementing action plans, one page plans, the type of scaling up or EOS things I've been map, map. All of these things almost universally fail year for me when I, when I've done them. And I was trying to figure out why, and I was trying to look at other successes that I have had when I went. And one of the things I've done over the past three to four years that I had success with is weightlifting. So I've been a weightlifter for my whole adult life.

But.

But you know, you go through waves on and off and you sometimes don't do much. And I was feeling the need to improve. So three and a half years ago, I started a new workout regime, new weight program. And I didn't set any goals, but I did track how much weight I was lifting. And after three and a half years on that program, I've lifted.

So you had no plan or goals, but you.

I measured.

But. But you measured and recorded and recorded. But did you have a schedule? Anything like what?

Yes.

Caused your frequency or did it just.

Yeah, so I did have a schedule. I had a workout plan that was due this on Monday and this on Tuesday.

Okay, so you Have. So there was a plan, just not a goal.

Right, okay. And so after three and a half years, though, I lifted £25 million. And I look at that, and it was like.

And it's a data geek, right?

Exactly. But, you know, remarkable. And no way. There's no possible way I could have set that as a goal, as a bhag, as a.

Why do you say that?

Because you don't have any idea about what the. Like, how much can I lift? How often am I going to do this?

How.

You know, when do I get distracted or discouraged? Like, there's no. I couldn't have gone in advance and go, okay, three and a half years. I'm gonna do 25. But what I did do, because, you know, if. If you set 25 million as a goal and then you go in the first couple of months, you're like, holy shit. You know, I'm. You know, I'm. I got 12, and I only did three days this week. I'm like, oh, I'm so behind. Like, now looking at the plan is itself a demotivator. Like, ugh. Like, it's. It makes me feel bad at how I'm not achieving. In fact, you talked about this in your conversation with Verne Harnish. You said a bhag at a previous company, and it was demotivating. And so that's what I've felt super often. And in this case, now I'm looking back, and now it's. My measurement was it can only be positive, right? It grows every time I look at the thing, because I just did another workout, you know? And so I said to myself, what can I do in my business.

That.

Can only be positive? And what can I measure? What can I encourage and what can I measure? And then how do I track that? And so. And what's interesting is that immediate measure that measure every day. The thing. The number is a dopamine reaction, which is like, good job. You did that today. You lifted more weights. You made these calls. In my case, it was, how many customer calls are you making in a day, in a month? With the assumption that making customer calls, good things happen. So you get a little bit of dopamine when you. When you do these. When you do these calls and you track it. What I'm interested in is that what happens is with dopamine is that when you don't make the calls or when you look at the plan and you're not achieving now, the dopamine falls and the cortisol rises, and this is when you get discouraged because dopamine is a real short term reward system.

So, but what if you create a plan and you say, I'm going to work out every day or I'm going to make calls every day. And then a day goes by and you don't make any calls, you don't make as many calls.

Right. So that's why I don't ever set the plan as I'm going to work out every day. It's, you can look back and go, oh, look, I, you know, I am now at £2 million or I'm now at 50 calls and the next time I look at it is after I made another call and I'm now at 51 calls. So for me the important thing was not to try to set a goal or a plan of X calls per day, but really just track how many you're doing. And now that I'm tracking, I'm like, oh, I get a chance to sneak another one in to get a little more dopamine.

Let me just, let me translate and come alongside a little bit for our listeners. Keep going. So one thing I hear that we do consistently is just pick appropriate metrics to track. I mean we will track different things that are sort of activity driven that you have a lot of control over and then we'll track result oriented ones like I can, like I did so many sets or whatever and now I can lift so much. So we'll track like the progress towards something as well as the activity. So we might track proposals made and dollars booked or something like that. Right. But the key is picking the appropriate metrics and asking yourself, am I still using the right ones? And the idea of having a balanced or leading lagging kind of metric. The one thing I think we don't always think about, like in the execution world, I don't know if it's as related as this of it, but it's like, how could this thing go wrong? Or where could I get out of balance in some way?

Yeah. And in my experience over time, I have never picked the right metrics in 25 years, never. And so unless it's, you know, like this workout where it's like three years later, I'm like, oh, oh, look at that. You know. And so, so my observation was, I get in, we get in this, I call it a dopamine cortisol cycle. You work for a little dopamine but then you miss it and then the cortisol kicks in and you get discouraged. So it's a little cycle and I needed to break out of that cycle. And I needed to do it with serotonin. So my observation is that so serotonin is joy. It's our purpose in the world, it's our confidence. It's a different feeling from the high five of dopamine.

And so dopamine is the reward, the quick hit, the win, the cowbell.

After my serotonin was low. And that's me being bored or vaguely unmotivated or like, yeah, you know, when my serotonin is low and the phone rings now it's like, oh, that's bad news. I don't want to answer it. But my serotonin is high and the phone rings. That's opportunity. I take it.

Yep. So it occurs for you differently depending on how your levels are or expected levels at that moment.

Exactly, exactly. And so my observation was, fix the serotonin inside me. Therefore, when the phone rings, I will be in a much better place. And not just to choose to answer the phone, but also when you're on the phone, you know, when you're serotonin and your oxytocin, which is your. When you're in a state of love and being loved, the ability to handle curveballs and stressor is infinitely better than when you're just on this dopamine cortisol cycle. So if you're in a mode where you get out of traffic and your cortisol is high and you're like, I don't want to talk to anybody. But if you get out, you come in and you have. You're like, you know, we are firing on all cylinders. We're doing good work for the world. Our customers love us. You know, I love the people around me. Now all of a sudden the phone rings and like, let's see what happens today. It's an entirely different set. And it's purely inside me.

So that when I think about. So we work a lot with folks and I suppose some coaches more than others and stuff. But at the beginning of all clients, work is the purpose of the business. Very early on, we're articulating a purpose, a why of the work that inspires them.

Yeah.

So something that they have that has some emotional pull and the purpose centered. Why Work has a kind of spiritual quality to it. It's something enduring and bigger. It's something that's never finished. Right. So they all come up with something like that that like, has some juice for them. Right. And it. It's the purpose, that purpose. And when we create bhags that are organized around purpose, we can get the whole world interested in those versus a financial oriented bhag.

Yes.

Right. And when we take out the date, the the by, when date, that BHAG becomes just an inspiring mountain that we want to conquer. But we're not upset or constrained by that. We're ahead of or behind schedule.

So. Yeah. So I would say, I would abstract it one layer back. I would say that the critical aspect in the work is the serotonin. In the team articulating a really elegantly articulated purpose is an excellent source of serotonin. Therefore it works very well. I would also note that a lousy, poorly articulated purpose is feels hack need and does not generate Right. Serotonin. And it's. And in many businesses it can be really hard to find an elegantly stated purpose. Now, you know, you and I have a friend. Yeah, you and I have a friend, Jim Castilez, whose company, Motive Power Systems. Yes, they, they turn diesel trucks into electric trucks. There.

It's.

This is a save the world company and it's a huge market. It's unbelievable. Their purpose is freeing fleets from fossil fuels. It's amazing. Now here's the thing. We do real estate data. It's kind of cool. We have customers who love us. But it's hard for me to elegantly state a purpose that is, I'm not curing cancer here, you know what I'm saying? So my point is that for me in this business, I needed to generate serotonin to myself. Articulating a purpose didn't do it for me, did not generate serotonin. I had to find other ways to do it. And that's okay because what's important is the serotonin. And if you have a business that indeed has an elegant otherworldly purpose, that's magic and you should embrace it and love it and your employees will very easily. If you have to think really hard about what your purpose is, it's okay to. In my view, it's okay. Let's work on our serotonin elsewhere.

So you and I should have another talk. Maybe we should do a lunch sometime with your team and play around with purpose. I have been so surprised at the work we do with companies. Come up with purpose in a couple hours or less often and. And then it's just a matter of keeping it alive, if you actually have one, and then allowing it to evolve. But, but I'm really surprised. I've had a number of people who said to me how we can't possibly come with a purpose. We're just a generic Business, service kind of business. And then they spent some time noodling around with it and they come up with these beautiful statements. And I had one guy was just afraid to open it up. He just is afraid that they were going to get demoralized. And then they worked on it for 45 minutes in the interesting way that I like to engage people with. We do walks in pairs and we entertain some questions. And they came back with we keep the world working. And it was so beautifully said. And they were just like, wow, now it's on the back of T shirts that they wear around and stuff. And it's a staffing company, you know.

Yeah, that's great. And it's, you know, it's like I said, if it's an elegant thing, it's a super powerful way to generate serotonin. My observation is what I, what we want to do is generate serotonin. And so it's effective and it's effective for the team because it generates serotonin. I would argue like that's, and that's great. Like, you know, I'd argue that what's interesting is that freeing fleets from fossil fuels is like people go to work for like, like they, they say I want to find that company because it has that purpose.

Right.

And, and that is.

Or you could say like creating a cleaner world or something like that. Yeah.

Even freeing a free inflation from fossil. I get it. Like we need to get rid of diesel trucks and replace and make them all electric. And like that's a big purpose. It's a big purpose to clean the world. And so, and so when it works, it works great.

So.

So in my case, you know, my job with myself was to build the serotonin for the year. And so one of the things I did was to break out of the dopamine cortisol cycle is I started recording my moments of joy. So recording moments of joy. And this I think is, is useful tracking, measuring.

Right, yeah. The emotion that would be tied to levels of serotonin.

Yes, exactly. In the instance that is. And what triggered that and what was I feeling. And what happens is by focusing your attention looking for those moments, you recognize them more often. You record them, you relive them and each of those moments you give yourself a little boost of serotonin and your whole well being elevates. And now like the, remember like just by recording my moments of joy now my serotonin elevates. Now the phone rings and now I'm much more likely to take the call because I've Written down my moments of joy, not because I made a plan.

So.

Writing down moments of joy. I also did a journaling technique on my negative emotions. So what are the triggers of the cortisol? And by doing that, it allows to process out, label, process out, remove the ego. And that is by the act of journaling the negative emotions actually decreases the cortisol. And now it lets room for the good hormones to flow. So those were two big steps that I did. I have a dopamine track of the phone calls I'm making, customer call touches. And then of course what happens is when that number builds, now you get good things happening and now you realize that you're good at your job. Serotonin climbs.

Now the other thing for our listeners, both of these activities, the being aware of and tracking the positive and then journaling the negative are both would both live within the world of mindfulness practices, bringing self awareness to your state.

Yes. And mindfulness practices and the self awareness has as related to the meditation has a thing. One of the pillars that I talk about in the hacking happiness paper, one of the pillars is we have this section of the brain called the default mode network. It is where it turns out, it's where we process, basically where our happiness lives or recedes. It's also where we process the thoughts about the ego, about the self, and about our conception of time. So you know, when you look at a list, when you read a list of adjectives, when you're under an MRI scan, you read the areas of your brain that are associated with reading are firing. When you are asked to apply those adjectives to yourself, the default mode network is firing. So what the observation is that all of the mindfulness practices, all the spiritual practices throughout history and to current day leadership, any successful framework about leadership and personal growth has us be in the moment, not in the past or the future. Not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future being in the moment. And it's removing the ego, it's dropping the ego out. It's the team, it's service oriented leadership, it's giving out. And so what we are doing physiologically is calming the default mode network of the brain. We are dropping our cortisol production and increasing our serotonin. It's why when you look at these things, now that we have these high definition functional MRI scans, you can see this super in super detail. And that's why all the evidence is starting to pile up about why meditation works and why mindfulness works and why, you know, basketball coach John Wooden's Framework works because they are all about dropping time, dropping the ego and, and embracing the, the, the gift out to the world. They're. They're so serotonin anchored as. As opposed to dopamine and cortisol.

My wife Lauren and I were talking about. So we both actually work in coaching now. She runs the old jewelry business that we had still and, but, but spe her time doing a little bit different kind of coaching in, in our world. And we were both talking about this negative self talk, the internal conversation, the voice in your head that never is rooting for you to be awesome, but speaking your fears and doubts and things like that. And that goes into like super loudspeaker and highly repetitive mode when we're experiencing anxiety, profound anxiety attacks, that kind of thing is probably a pretty good sign that something else is at work other than your serotonin.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's why, it's why those techniques of journaling the negative emotions and the positive emotions are really effective. So the pillar I use to describe it is that the brain has no coming and going. There's no inbound, outbound. The hormones rise. If I sit there and I stew on that asshole who cut me off in traffic. Hours later, my cortisol is elevated. If I, on the other hand, like, if I look at, if I think about athletic competition and if I stew about losing, my cortisol rises. If I lost and I think about all the things I won in my camaraderie and my team and like, then my serotonin rises, my cortisol drops, my testosterone rises. It is how we process that. It has nothing to do with like, it's the moment it happens is there's a flash of the hormones and then we have all this opportunity to rework the hormones later on.

Well, I noticed like, so if I'm leading a team session or a public workshop or any number of, you know, if I'm up to something in a moment and then somebody like throws some shit in the way, you know, they challenge the agenda or they say, oh, that's all BS or they like, whatever. I, I perceive a threat to my intention and the fulfillment of my purpose. I notice like right away I get triggered and I go there begins an internal thought process, but also like body sensations, a tightening of the stomach, a quickening of the thing of the eyes. Right though I now. And if I don't do it and if I embrace that whole thing and I start to strategize about how to deal with this bastard.

Yeah, exactly.

I've done this so many times, right. And even though I know it, there's, there's like no escape in that route. But if I say, wow, look at me getting triggered if that if instead of thinking about them, I notice myself and I'm like, wow, I really got like, my heart's picked up, the whole thing that, that upset me, what that guy said or that that woman said. And then I, I noticed myself. And then sometimes I, I, it's sufficient just to catch it. Or other times I have to call it. I'm like, wow, I'm really challenged by what you said. It's. I'm suddenly really uncomfortable. I just call it out. Right. In a very authentic fashion and open, vulnerable kind of thing. And I'm saying, well, so let me think about that for a second and let's talk about that. What is that and why? And sometimes they'll be, oh, you misunderstood me, right? And then the trigger's gone. Or other times they'll be like, yeah, no, we need to talk about this. And then, and then that automatic thing which is either like run away or freeze or fight. Right? Fight, flight or freeze are the stress responses that are, that are commonly talked about. Instead of doing one of those. And we often have one or two that we're particularly comfortable with.

Yeah.

I love to smash the other person. We set that aside and then we come alongside them and also alongside ourselves and we start to look together. And I think that's actually where you haven't talked much about it, so we should go there next for the question. But the oxytocin side, because for me, it feels like oxytocin. And love is about connection and acceptance. When I perceive myself as connected, related to the people around me, accepting them, for them, feeling accepted, that's when love's present, right?

Yeah.

There's nothing that I need to change with anyone or anything like that. Love is, is abundant in that moment, whether it's a romantic or familial or even just a business setting.

Bonding.

Yes, that's right.

Teamwork in some fashion. It feels really good. And so I think about, about the human side, the people side of our work. I think about communication work. I think about some of the stuff that we do in that realm. What did you do in the world of the oxytocin?

So oxytocin is gratitude. So expressing gratitude. It is that gratitude about the social bonds. But also, here's an interesting thing, communicating to my team unconditional love. Not. And we think very often like people, I say that to Other business leaders, and they're like, what? You can't do that. You're not allowed to do that. But unconditional love, meaning it's not conditional based on performance. Like, I love you is not based on performance. Because if it's based on performance, it's dopamine and it's hollow. But it's I love you, and then it's I love working with you. I love having you guys around. And then, you know, we give and receive love in the five love languages. Is the book the Five Love Languages. And sometimes it's words of affirmation, Sometimes it's gifts, Sometimes it's quality time. Sometimes it is acts of service, Sometimes it's physical touch. And we can communicate love. Like, if my team has words of affirmation as their love language, like, I communicate love. Some people are gift people. And so giving them the gift, some people need my time. And by the way, that was a big part of my change for the year. So I was doing that with my employees and feeling it in myself, right? So there's no coming and going. It's like I give it out so that I am increasing my oxytocin. I am more loved in my company. Like, I am such a better frame of mind because I am giving unconditional love.

So the. I have a kind of interesting, like a logical or mathematical definition of love, forgetting the language that it's expressed in the. You know, the particular things that land with people, it's this. It's caring plus acceptance. So if I care, but I don't accept, that looks often like hate, right? I'm angry, I hateful. I've got a problem. I care enough. If I accept, but I don't care, that's kind of indifference. Like, yeah, whatever, that person's dirty over there. But they're nothing to me, right? But when I care and I accept, that's love.

Yeah, that's great. I'm interested. I care. Like, I absolutely could see. You could see that.

So if I'm like, what if love isn't present? Right? And it's weird for a lot of people to talk about love in a business setting or other organizational setting, Right? But if you could just set your weirdness aside for a minute and consider, do you care about these people? If you don't care about them, you may be indifferent. That's a different conversation. If you don't accept them, you might find you're frustrated with them. You want them to be some way other than the way they are. And sometimes you need to fire them. Right. Because what they care about, their performance, that kind of thing is inconsistent with the requirements of the organization. But I can still love someone and let them go. Like, you're never going to win here. You need to go.

In the Hacky happiness paper, I have a section on the resources and tools. One of the tools that, that people are familiar with is the criticism compliment sandwich, which is I got to deliver bad news or criticism. And so you sandwich it in compliments. What? The observation that I've had is that that's really lousy advice a lot of the time, but it's lousy because we do, we tend to do dopamine, cortisol, dopamine, meaning you did a good job. This, this is a bad job, this is a good job. And now the person goes away either thinking he's full of shit, he's bullshitting me, or hey, two out of three, I'm pretty good. And so it's lost. Rather, my insight is serotonin, cortisol, oxytocin, we're doing great things. We need you to fix this for the team. But I love working on the team. Now that person, here's the criticism, serotonin, cortisol, oxytocin, and says, I want to be part of this. I don't want to let these people down. So that complement sandwich, if it's dopamine, cortisol, dopamine is hollow, it's fake, it doesn't work. If it's serotonin, cortisol, oxytocin, that's how we deliver that into an opportunity for people to change, for them to register so that they feel good and not, for example, hit their stress reaction, which is avoidance or anger or whatever. So that's sort of the point of turning the whole view of the happiness into the different hormone components, the different component parts of it, because that way it allows us to see that execution. And ideally, you've been giving oxytocin to the team for a month and now I gotta deliver bad news. This person is loved, but they have something to fix.

We've given folks a ton to think about and I think we've covered at least the big parts of the thing. So the typical dopamine, cortisol, cortisol, serotonin, oxytocin, mix of things and how to get them in balance and all working versus just being cycling of the two in the business setting. And I'm going to put a link to your white paper in the show notes for here. So look for that if you want to send Mike a note and understand how he led their strategy day and what they did and so on. Just sent to Mike at Altos Research. I'll also put that link in, in the show notes as well. So we'll put a link to the, the white paper that you've written, which is just a ton more detailed stuff on this. Right there.

Yeah, the, the serotonin strategy day was my. So 2017, 2018, it was internal. My plan for 2019 is how do I take this whole system for my team with the assumption that all good things cascade from having us be in the right happiness, joyful, content, purposeful place. And so we didn't set any dopamine goals for the company, we only set serotonin goals. And what's interesting is you mentioned dealing with a tough person in a consulting environment. You know, one of the things I did was first of all, I had my team record their moments of joy before they got to the session. Like they said, I said, you know, we're going into strategy day. What I want you to do is write down the moments that you felt most joyful. Be prepared to share. That was their homework. And then when we started the session, we started with a group meditation. The group meditation calms the dmn. So taking out time, being in the moment, giving gratitude and removing the ego. So cortisol drops before we've even started talking. We bring the cortisol down, we bring people. And so now Mr. Throw up objections is way more in a content space ready to absorb and perform. So that was one of the techniques I did, is lead with a guided meditation.

All right, we need to wrap the show. That's awesome stuff. I think people are going to use this. I mean, I've begun to even use some of these things. We started talking about it last week with Vern or two weeks ago with Vern. As we record this today, I'm in the middle of my personal planning and annual planning and I'm about to do collaging because I find that's a very sort of purpose driven, engaging kind of way to create a picture of my year end that I want to see at the end of next year. And so we're going to give you all this stuff about some of the ways to bring this and elevate or take a new approach to your creating the future of your business and getting yourself in a great place. So thanks so much for coming on the show.

Hey, my pleasure.

Yeah, we bring a new show like this every week, so subscribe, share it with somebody else like it, all that kind of stuff like and subscribe right Is the mantra that we ask of you. Like help us spread it. If it's useful for you, share it with somebody else. You'll get some oxytocin and and maybe some serotonin. Hit off that and find us every week@scalingcoach.com along with all the other shows that we've done, I don't know, 132 now or something like that, on every imaginable topic that you might find out there, along with with downloads of free tools and the Scaling up book and all that kind of stuff. Scalingcode.com thanks again Mike. See you soon.

Thanks Bill.

I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Verne Harnish. Our show is produced by Crystal Carson and the audio production is done by Podfly Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge and show notes compiled by Ein Codina with proofreading by Tim McGowan. Once again you got some value out of the show today. Please pass it along, share it like it, subscribe, do all that stuff, help us spread the good word and grow the show and let us know the parts that you love. Drop us line@info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and Keep Scaling up.

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