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.com. 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?

Yeah.

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 Well, once you have 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 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 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 or a 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 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— You're 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? And 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 Hull 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 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.

Right.

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 and 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 you think about this during the '70s 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 the scale? So the dilemma that we have isn't the idea of knowing what to change. And, 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, 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 had 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, uh, from our, uh, it's called the sympathetic, as I said, nervous system.

Mhm.

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. 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, like, and 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 your 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. Um, I, I've been on the radio in Boston and in Cleveland last year because of my research on addiction, uh, 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, Mm-hmm. 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 gonna 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, and they see by learning some new skills and talents, whether it's through the master's program in, 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, um, 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—

All right. 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 more