207- Courage to Leap & Lead with Richard Boyatzis, part 1

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead.

Be brave and be bold.

Wow!

Let it roar.

Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courage-consulting. Where you can find all the episodes and other excellent resources, all at courage-consulting.com. Now, here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

Hello everybody. It's CB Bowman, Courage to Leap and Lead. And you know, during the summer, I take a little respite and I use that time to garden. And I must say, My back is killing me, but my garden is spectacular. People are stopping by. So I bought those little metal tags. So now I'm going to tag all my plants. I'm so excited. And my summer squash, Jagunda. My vegetables, Jagunda. I'm so excited. But during this time, and during this time, it gives me a chance to really reflect On what I've accomplished during the year, what have my colleagues accomplished during the year, and what do we need to know to do even better? And watching things grow from seed gives me so much to ponder as I'm sitting there with the little water fountain going and thinking, what can I do better? And lo and behold, my dear, dear colleague and friend. Dr. Richard Boyatzis has come up with a mind-bending piece of research which has resulted in a new book called The Science of Change. And what he talks about is how do we make change everlasting, permanent? And as I talk about courage, I think, and my new book that'll be coming out next year, hint, hint. The old book, Courage to Leap and Lead. The new book, Courage to, and I won't tell you yet. I think, wow, this is great. You're writing about courage, but is change— is courage sustainable? On a long-term basis? Because I talk about microcourage, small acts that get you to the bigger act. Now the question is, how do we make that bigger act permanent? Or do we need to? Would it be too much for us in our psychic to constantly be in courage mode? So let's talk to the expert. Doc, what do you say?

I think, by the way, CB, congratulations on your garden.

Thank you.

I think that is a magnificent thing because it contributes not just you're being productive growing plants, flowers, and vegetables, but it also is aesthetically so engaging.

So it's my little slice of paradise, which my husband's about to kill me if I spend one more cent. on this paradise. But yeah.

Well, once you got so many vegetables, you have to open a little stand in front of your house and sell them. Tell them it'll help defray the costs.

That's what he wants to do. So welcome.

Okay, back to you. Thank you again. It's great to talk to you again. I think that my work fits in Under the notion of the courage to change. Well, as human beings, we have a characteristic which technically is called homeostasis. It means we tend to stay the same.

Okay.

You know, there is a— there are a lot of pressures around us to not change. And yet, if we don't change, we atrophy and die from the cellular level to our behavior to our marriages or our partner relationships, to our organizations, to our communities. We have to continually adapt and change.

Mm-hmm.

And yet you think about what are all the messages we get? Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know, and all these things that basically say don't change.

Mm-hmm.

It's because of this need that people have to not change. It's, it's what's technically called a regressive force. It pushes you to not, to avoid something new and different. We all want to be a part of the human group. We don't want to risk disapproval. We want people to think well of us. Well, people who change are the poppy in a field of cornflowers, as one person once said, which is you stand out. And it's tough because people around you don't really want you to change, uh, on the whole, because they can count on— even if you're an addict, they can count on your behavior in that way. So, and in organizations, I mean, come on, the whole concept Of, as Chester Barnard said in 1938, of a corporation, of our company, is to create control and conformity. And he also said to help facilitate collaboration. But you know, the whole idea is that in our companies, people want the the people in power want predictability and certainty. Well. You don't get certainty and predictability if you're engaged in change. So I would contend, from the individual level of, you know, being in your home with your family, to contemplating a behavior change or an attitude change, all the way to communities deciding to alter how they handle homelessness, or in organizations to create a culture of development, which we need to complement the culture of performance. I mean, right now the engagement numbers say we have a motivation crisis. 80% of people yet again in the new Gallup report that just came out, 80% of the people with full-time jobs everywhere in the world are not engaged. And now they're estimating in the United States alone it costs the economy, I think they said $8.9 trillion A year. But let's say on top of that, in this new report that Gallup issued, they collected from all their Q12 surveys. It also says that 50, 49%, wasn't quite 50, but 49% of the people at work felt lonely every day. I mean, that's huge. Now that I think is a growing trend in part because of technology, but COVID really took a whack at that. So people are—

Giving me so much I want to ask you about. So should I let you finish or should I interrupt you?

Well, let me just wrap up the issue. So what I'm saying is I think my work relates to your theme of courage because what I study is how do people go about sustained desired change? So it's not just change for change's sake. It's desired change. It's things you want to change. And then the question, as you raised already, how do you get it to sustain? We know that the half-life of knowledge from an MBA program, top 20 ranked, was 6.5 weeks. That meant when people took the same final exam on their required accounting course, they could only produce half of what they did when they took the exam the first time, 6.5 weeks later. We know that from corporate training, leadership training, there is about an 11% increase in social and emotional intelligence behavior, which is really paltry given the amount of money spent on leadership training. But we also know from a lot of research that within 3 weeks to 3 months, it's all gone out to zero. Psychotherapy, you know, Hans Eysenck showed decades ago that yes, people who had a year of psychotherapy were less depressed, but so were the people on the waiting list. So you have this sense, and then you look at the organization level. I mean, Sears Roebuck was the mail order company for 150 years in the United States. They were doing what Amazon started doing not that many years ago, and they're gone. You know, Blockbuster's gone. Netflix is thriving. Sony is limping along. Apple is gangbusters. And what— when you start to look at these organizations, or if you look at the— in the nonprofit sector, things like the National Park Service, or in the social services, YMCA versus Whole house. What you continue to see at the organization level is the organizations that continue to thrive are the ones that continue to innovate, and they develop this. And it's tough because people in their industry don't like it. I mean, look, one of the biggest innovators of our current era CEOs is Elon Musk. The guy is absolutely brilliant. And yet a lot of people have this negative view. And I think the negative view is because he has the courage to change. He has the courage to challenge the assumptions of what we're doing and how we're doing it.

Okay, that's what—

that's what all my work is about.

So, okay, I must stop you because you I hope I have everything that I wanted to ask you about. So let's start backwards. Elon Musk. I think I'm going to disagree with you about why people have a negative perspective. And of course, I'm not people. I'm just a person. I think it's his— it's not his innovation. It's how he presents himself, as, as many people would say, a pompous ass. Right? So I think we have to be careful to separate the quality of innovation from the personality. Yet, on the other hand, I have to agree with you. And I'm not sure why I agree with you. Because when I look at Steve Jobs, He was not a favorite child by any stretch of the imagination, but a brilliant mind in innovation. So now my question becomes, do you have to be an asshole to innovate?

Or— No, no, I think— well, first of all, I am not condoning dysfunctional personalities or abusive verbal behavior. Because that's horrible. And, you know, we get too much of it from the news, and we seem to have all the politicians of all the ilks seem to be so invested in what I'm calling these regressive forces, these forces against change that basically condemn somebody who stands to be different. And in fact, I would say that it's because they're innovating and succeeding that a lot of people resent these folks. Now, on top of it, they sometimes don't act really nicely and it gives us the excuse to dislike them. But I think the dislike, I think the dislike is because they're innovating and they're doing it well. You know, we okay without getting into some of the current hot topics that are going to trigger a lot of your audience. No, no, I don't.

I don't.

I don't have that much courage. So, but let's let's get back to this issue of if the courage to change and and you think about this during the seventies when I was spending a lot of time doing therapy psychotherapy with alcoholics and drug addicts and training therapists. One of the things that was very clear is most of them would be back drinking within a matter of weeks or months. I mean, it's a very depressing field to be in.

Mm-hmm.

And the recidivism rate, by the way, hasn't really improved that much for alcoholics or drug addicts. Or now you've got it with even with teenagers and all these opiates and all that. So part of the problem is What does it take to all of a sudden change your behavior? Well, if you're in a family where people are used to you acting a certain way, they don't want you to somehow show up differently, and the immediate reaction is not to trust it. So what, what I'm talking about is the fact that the act of engaging in change and then trying to do it in a sustainable way, so it just doesn't last a few weeks like You know, after New Year's Eve you say, okay, I'm gonna get fit. So you join a health club, you go for 2 weeks and then you stop. And as any of us who are volume challenged know, you know, when you're trying to lose weight, who the hell wants to get on a scale? So the dilemma that we have isn't the idea of knowing what to change. And it sometimes isn't even the issue of starting the change. It's sustaining it. It's keeping it going. And that's where you have the big challenge of what's learning and what's sustainable change.

Okay, but wait a second, Richard. We have sort of thinned out the conversation and spread it wide because I feel like we're linking a culturally negative behavior With innovation, and I'm not sure the two go together. So what I'm saying is, I'm not sure we can compare an addict, uh, of, of drugs to somebody who creates new products and services in terms of liability.

Or you're, you're right, you're right, CB. What I'm doing is, and My theory, my intentional change theory, one of the features that makes it unique is that it's a fractal theory. And that means that at every level of human collective, the change process, according to my research, is identical. So the way you get sustained desired change for individuals follows the process that you've heard me talk about before. with the pull towards renewal, the pull towards the vision, the power of our caring relationships. Well, it's the same in our dyads. It's the same in our teams or families. It's the same in organizations. It's the same in communities. It's the same in countries. So what I was doing was I was jumping levels, which does make it more confusing.

So how— okay, so That's fine. But bring this into your mind and tell us how we can link the innovative with the addictive behavior, because I think that's very interesting.

Well, let's go back to the courage to change. Now, every time you try to learn something or change something as an individual, you have to practice a certain amount of emotional self-control. Because you're going to not do something and you're going to try to do something else, or you're going to have to stop the way you did things and you're going to practice a new way of acting or thinking or feeling. Emotional self-control activates when you, when you exercise that or you use it, it activates a hormonal system called the sympathetic nervous system, which in common parlance is called stress.

Mm-hmm.

And the fact is that even before COVID before all of the current political and social disruption, most of us had too much stress in our lives. We were suffering from chronic— what's labeled chronic stress. You know, we were getting 8 to 12 episodes of stress a day. And I'm not talking about acute stress. I'm talking about your cell phone drops a call. Or, you know, as we got into this show, you would put on, loaded up the new form of Zoom, and you were talking about, you know, where's that button? That, that's a mild form, or what I call annoying stress. The fact is that most of us go through 8 to 12 of those on a typical day, and that means that we're getting overloaded. Because when we are in that mode, the physiological arousal of stress from our— it's called sympathetic, as I said, nervous system.

Mm-hmm.

You're activating a set of hormones in your body that prepare you to defend your body. So right away, it moves blood to your large muscle groups so you can fight, or your legs so you can flight. But in the process, it shunts blood away not just from your extremities, but also from networks in your brain that you might use to learn something, because your brain is saying, we're going to protect the organism, and it's more important that you breathe than you learn something. The other thing that happens is, as these hormones start to flow in your body, it turns off your immune system. So all of a sudden now you're vulnerable to a lot of these bugs out there. And on top of that, it stops the process called neurogenesis, which is the conversion of stem cells. In the adult human, we have at least 2 places in our brain that have stem cells that can become new neurons. And because today, if you're awake a full day, you're going to lose 85,000 neurons. They're going to die. Now, you start with a few billion when you're, you know, you enter adulthood, but you have to replace them. And that's called neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons that happens from these stem cells. The problem is that one of these stress episodes, even annoying stress, stops neurogenesis. So what's going on? I mean, look, stress is necessary. We can't wake up in the morning without activating the stress system.

Yeah.

We can't decide what to have for dinner without activating the stress system. So stress is necessary and it's useful. It helps us to make a decision or get things done, but it's not healthy. And at the level that many of us as professionals or as managers or as helpers, coaches experience it, it causes cognitive impairment. We can't think creatively or at our best or scan the environment. It causes emotional impairment. We close down defensively and it affects our perceptual impairment. It's even been shown that one of these, a shot of the hormone that induces, is a part of the stress thing, reduces your peripheral vision from 180 degrees to 30.

Really?

Yeah. Boom. And then if you give yourself a shot of the alternate, the renewal system, as I call it, the parasympathetic, it opens it up again. So the dilemma that we have is the very engagement in change invokes stress. And if you're a coach or a leader or a helper, a parent even, you're going to feel an extra dose of stress from what Dave McClelland used to call power stress, Because you feel responsible for other people. So you have all your own, plus those of your client, subordinate, patient, student, family members.

Okay, but we're still, we're still moving ahead. I still want to know the connection between the innovative and the addict in terms of change.

Sure. The addict, as I was talking about, because I was talking about biochemical addictions of alcohol or drugs.

Yes. I like this term better, biochemical addictions.

Right. The same thing can be said of those of us who are addicted to caffeine or nicotine or sugar or salt. So There are a lot of addictions that are dysfunctional. I've been on the radio in Boston and in Cleveland last year because of my research on addiction when they opened up online gambling.

Mm-hmm.

Which I think is horrible because I'm not opposed to gambling if people have the money, but that's not who bets and who spends the money. So it becomes a trap.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and okay, so back to this issue. So when you're in a behavior pattern, you, you're used to acting a certain way. Not only are you used to it, and it serves you a whole lot of purposes to keep doing the same thing, but the people around you are used to you acting that way.

Okay.

And so if all of a sudden you want to change You not only have the challenge of, and I would call it the courage, you have to use the courage to work on that change. Or in the case of innovation, learning something, exploring something, and then making the change. But you also have the problem that the people around you are not going to look positively about it. I mean, the average age of my degree students in my full-time job at Case Western Reserve University is 44. And I teach in 3 programs, all of which are folks in their 40s or 50s who are having some kind of a midlife crisis or transition. And they decide instead of having an affair or, you know, starting to, you know, just doing skydiving, they decide to get a master's or an executive doctorate. Every one of them faces the fact that whether they're in their 40s or 50s or some are even older in their 60s, And when they announce to their friends and family that they're going to do a master's in positive organization development or an executive doctorate, people look at them and say, you're what at your age?

Yeah.

And what they're saying is they're looking for something new. They want to contribute to society in a different way. They feel like they've succeeded. They want to give back. Excuse me. And they see by learning some new skills and talents, whether it's through the master's program in OD or change, or it's through the executive doctorate where they learn research and then are able to, you know, give talks and help people think about whatever the issue is, they see it as something really positive. So this leads us to one of the observations in all 58 years of my research that goes into this book and, and other people's research. I mean, I, I really shocked the editor. Oxford University Press is publishing the book. I shocked the editor because, um, my references are 115 pages long. So it's a lot of other people's research that I'm integrating. But at any rate, one of the key discoveries that we have now evidence from the neurological level to the behavioral level is that what drives change and what sustains it is your vision, not goals. So when you set a specific—

Time out.

Sorry.

Okay. Time out. Vision versus goals.

Now, what do I mean by vision?

Wait.

A vision is—

Wait, wait, because I have to come back to a different question I was going to ask you, and I want to make note. So you said vision. Please define the difference between vision and goals.

Good.

Okay.

A vision is your sense of purpose, your sense of meaning. It's your dream of what your ideal life could be 15 years from now.

Okay.

A goal is very often something specific. And we now know, in contrast to what a lot of the coach certification agencies require us to say, when they say, you know, you'll be a better coach if you have the person define an objective, a goal at the beginning of the coaching session. We now know that that isn't just not a good idea, it's wrong. Because when you set a specific goal at the beginning of a process, it activates a neural network, a network in your brain that causes you to focus on the task, which is a good thing. to get something done. But look at my expression here. As you focus on the task, you're narrowing your field of vision, and you're going to miss all these other possibilities. So when you get somebody to focus on a goal too quickly, they're prematurely— you don't know if they're solving a symptom or the problem. You don't know if they're dealing with the problem or the bigger issue. So what we have discovered and shown in repeated studies is that when you make sure that the context for coaching or any form of helping is the person's vision, their ideal self, their dream, their sense of purpose, their meaning. Now, goals, specific goals are very helpful in the change process, but toward the latter stage. I'd say the last kind of 20% of the path. And it turns out, as we've shown, and a variety— when I say we, a variety of my colleagues have shown that when you revisit your vision, when you even repeat to yourself why you're doing something, what's the bigger picture, what's the purpose, you get a burst of this renewal process I was just talking about. You actually get a burst of hormones that are the antithesis of what stress does, and it's the only antidote to it. So my explanation is the reason—

So wait, I have to ask you. So my focusing on the garden and watching things grow during this period Is a good thing because I'm not focused on the specific goals of the Association of Corporate Executives.

That's right.

I'm focused on the vision.

And let me put it in more, as you said, simple terms. You're giving your hormones a break.

Oh my God, I love this.

And And what we know is that when you do things in nature, and this has actually been shown in, in some medical research, when you do things in nature, it's almost meditative because you're becoming one with nature.

Mm-hmm.

And it has this quality of activating this renewal process. So if you think of it as a source of energy. What happens is moments of stress deflate the amount of energy. Moments of renewal inflate.

I have to tell you this. The other day, I was digging in the garden to plant some ground cover, and I saw beetles and worms and centipedes. And when I first started gardening back in New Jersey, I would be freaked out about it. Now I say to myself, oh, this is a good thing. The flowers and shrubs will thrive better. And I just made the analogy through my coaching, and you know where I'm going, so I don't need to say it. Oh my God, this is just amazing stuff. Yeah, keep going.

Now, and you know, and you can imagine what it's like for me. I, I grew up on, um, 42nd Street right off of Queens Boulevard in Queens. And the only trees even in our neighborhood were down by the railroad tracks and they were dead. So—

Same thing.

Ah, got it. Okay. So, so for you and I to get to the point where we're enjoying these parts of nature is not just a big move, but it's also really healthy. So when you think about, and, and it's really a balancing act. Because like I said, we need stress, but we need renewal. And because stress is so powerful, the negative is always more powerful as a defense. We have to, in my language, oversample. We have to have more renewal or positive experiences to compensate for the stress. And Dan Goldman and I and Uday Andar and John Osiri published a series of studies in a paper 3 years ago showing that in a given week, in a normal week, you need more moments of renewal than moments of stress to have more satisfaction, more well-being, more resilience, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

So the idea is during a normal day, you want more moments, more 15 to 20-minute moments that break up the day in which You have a chance to talk with someone. You have a chance to garden. You have a chance to pet your dog. You have a chance to do something, or even just meditate for 15 minutes. But the idea is, it is really good for us to break up the day this way. Now let me come back to the innovation theme. I said you're cognitively impaired under chronic stress. There have been a series of studies showing that when you're experiencing this chronic stress, even annoying stress, that you're less creative. You can't see alternatives. You don't scan the environment well, so you don't notice what your clients or customers are thinking or what your family members are saying or feeling. And you're not able to handle concepts that are really complex. When you're in this renewal state, the opposite occurs. So the other thing that has to happen is you actually have to be able to achieve innovation. You have to be able to think it up and then run with it for a while. And that requires putting yourself It's the opposite of working hard at it. One of my— I decided to return to my guitar stuff after 60 years away from it. But this time I want to focus not on dance music and all that because I never did rock, but I wanted to focus on jazz. And I'm taking a series of courses. I finished 2 of them so far in jazz guitar at the Berklee School College of Music. The largest, second only to Juilliard, you know, colleges in the US. And it just, marvelous courses. And they're set up, the online courses, although I could take them in Boston, but I don't want to have to be in Boston every week downtown. But they're set up so that, you know, they have the online stuff and the exercises and all that. And then once a week you have an hour with one of the faculty. And one of them, uh, a very prominent jazz guitarist that, that's been around for a number of years— he's been on the faculty for 30 years— Bruce Bartlett. I remember him saying in one of the sessions, and he repeated it, he said, toy with it, don't work at it. When you're trying to explore this chord or this progression or this arpeggio, play with it. And it was marvelous because when we— what he was doing, he was reacting both to me and one of the other 15 members of the class who, you know, were really intense at focusing on it. But what was doing is that was holding us back from not only enjoying it, but being more playful. So the interesting, if you will, dilemma Is that the more we try to solve a problem, the less creative we're gonna be.

Hmm.

So the issue is, again, you see my hand motion? What opens us up rather than closes us down? So again, you think about these renewal experiences inflate our energy pool and the stress deflates it. So during the day, you want to be able to go back and forth. During the week, you want to be able to go back and forth. And for example, when we're coaching someone, very often— I mean, one of my former doctoral, executive doctoral students who got a PhD a few years ago, Amanda Blake, does a lot of work on somatic coaching. She's even written a book about it. and other research studies. She opens every one of her coaching sessions with some deep breathing exercises with the client.

Brilliant.

Because that's one of the things that physiologically puts you in this moment, um, in which you're, you're renewed, you're more open. So when we're in pursuit of sustained desired change, We need to build in more of these moments. Now, I've been referring to them as renewal. Technically, in my intentional change theory, I call it the positive emotional attractor. It pulls us toward this state, and it's a combination of a hormonal system and, and a neural activation in the brain, and, and some affect, some emotion. But the idea is You need to feed that on a regular basis. And part of what I opened with earlier was saying, um, why it's so important to have coaches or a, um, a group of people that are your support group or your personal board of directors, because a lot of the people around you are not going to be a source of these positive emotional experiences. It's going to be the opposite.

One instant, you— I just want to tell you, when you see me looking up, I'm looking at the timestamp that you said something so I can go back to it.

Okay.

And, you know, so it helps me with my dyslexia. When you're saying something that I think Oh gosh, I want to write about that, or I want to refer to it. So it tells me where in the recording you are. I understand with 2 things. One is, how do we— and you just gave a hint— how do we as corporate executive coaches create a sustained change with our clients? Is it all on us, or is it a partnership? Um, and 2, if we create sustained change, does that mean we're locked into that change? Can we ever change again, or should we ever change again? No.

No. So let me answer the second question first. Um, the whole idea that I'm talking about, about these moments in my, my theory, in my model, let's say we go into this positive emotional attractor, is that we're more open.

Hmm.

So what's happening is we have to periodically go into that, if you will. It's like checking, are we heading in the direction we want to head in? I mean, this is one of the dilemmas. I actually have a— there was a sentence I used in the book that I decided I liked because, just to repeat, that one of the problems we often have with goals is that when the goal, when the pursuit of the goal shifts from something you want to do to something you have to do or should do, a characteristic which I call the ought self— it's the person you're supposed to be to fill other people's needs— activates. And that activates the negative emotional attractor, the opposite to the positive. And as that is engaged, it turns our motivation into a compulsion. And often single-minded stubbornness that replaces reasoned thought or openness to an alternative. So without that, we get stuck. And when we get stuck, we're going to defend and revert. What do we revert to? The way we acted before.

Okay, if, if positive change is related to a vision, then if we need to change again, does it mean our vision has shifted? And is that a good or a bad thing?

That's a great thing. Uh, Udayan Dhar and I published an article 2 years ago in which we talked about the ever-morphing emergent form of your ideal self or your personal vision. I mean, for years I've talked about the fact that if people spend months developing their personal vision, and if they're in a, a loving relationship, they have their partner, spouse, roommate, whatever, develop their vision, and then 2 people come together with a shared vision. Doesn't have to be the same, but, you know, if you're in a pair relationship, you have 3 visions. Well, I would contend that each person should be revisiting their vision, not every year. That's a bit of manic, but every 5 years, every 7 years. There's a very interesting statistic in why universities developed this notion of the sabbatical every 7 years. And it has to do with, I think, an Old Testament statement about the 7-year cycle. So I think that that's key. Now, there are people who latch onto a vision too quickly, and very often, I mean, it's like when I'm working with 26-year-olds, it takes them about a month to come up with a very compelling holistic vision where they have their physical health, their spiritual health, their romantic health, their contributions to the community, and their jobs. It's all— that's what I mean by holistic. It's comprehensive.

Mm-hmm.

When I'm doing this with the 48-year-olds in my executive doctorate program, it takes 3 to 6 months. Why? Because the more successful you are, the more layers of what I call ought-self you have to peel back.