Overcome Chronic Busyness With A Growth Mindset | Eduardo Briceño

Well, you can ask yourself right now, is my goal right now to get something done, and is that my only goal? Or is my goal also to improve and to learn something, to develop an insight or to develop a skill? So when we have 2 goals in mind, to get something done and to improve, we are in what I call learning while doing.

Learning while doing. It's not a crazy idea. We do it all the time, really. If you've ever used YouTube to watch a video on how to replace the cold water gasket on your kitchen sink, you know that doing and learning go hand in hand.

But somehow we lose sight of those learning goals at work. Yeah, we get into modes of just doing, doing, doing, setting goals and getting stuff done. You know, I was actually going to say getting shit done, but I didn't.

I'm so glad you didn't because that would not be good, but glad you didn't say that. Yeah.

Well, the point is that we, we can lose perspective and forget the learning mode is really beneficial to us and to the organization.

And Tim, I think that's key. Learning while you're doing benefits you, your job, and your career on a couple different levels. First, it helps you get better at things, sometimes a lot better. And second, it solidifies a learning mindset that can help you in all aspects of your life.

It also benefits your company by having a more productive employee, which pretty much always is better because it makes you a more valuable asset when expenses get tight and leadership needs to lay people off.

Welcome to Behavior Grooves. My name is Curt Nelson.

And I'm Tim Houlihan. Our guest today is Eduardo Briceño, and he was the voice you heard at the opening of this episode. He brings these messages home with both research and applications in the real world. And we're excited to share them with you.

Eduardo's new book is called The Performance Paradox. And in it, he explains the chronic performance trap, why doing more often prevents you from getting more done.

Oh, that is profound, Curt. Can you just say that one more time?

Sure.

So doing more often prevents you from getting more done. And Tim, I'm claiming that as my reason for not getting enough done on this podcast. I'm just doing more. I'm doing too much already. Cool. Cool, huh?

Yeah, super cool.

All right. So Eduardo writes about how to improve your skills even in high-pressure situations when it feels like there's no time to problem solve and how to beat boredom at work by reigniting childhood curiosity.

And in our conversation with Eduardo, he talks about how he's figured out how to turn live presentations into real-time learning experiences. It's quite an amazing story. And we also talk about how leaders can create an effective learning culture, how to identify the performance zone and the learning zones. And he offers some tips on how to get out of struggling with your career and get yourself into a learning zone.

And Tim, I know you love this part because we even talked about Dave Grohl's drummer battles with Natty Bushnell, a 9-year-old drummer who caught Dave's attention on YouTube. during the pandemic and how the big lesson wasn't just practice, practice, practice, practice ad infinitum. The lesson was practice and reflect, practice and reflect.

Yeah, I love that. I love that too. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Eduardo. And as always, we would be grateful if you shared this episode with a friend or a colleague at work, possibly.

Maybe you have an accountability partner or a learning partner who you share great ideas with. And maybe, just maybe, that person could benefit from hearing this episode too.

All right, Groovers, we encourage you to sit back and relax with your best learning zone mindset and enjoy our conversation with Eduardo Briceño. Eduardo Briceño, Welcome to Behavioral Grooves.

Thank you, Tim and Curt. Great to be here.

We're excited to have you. Very much so.

And we have to find out, have to find out right now, do you prefer coffee or tea?

Tea. Tea. I like that. Nice.

But I have to say, like, I don't drink tea. I just prefer it to coffee. What I actually prefer is hot chocolate.

Hot chocolate?

Oh, oh.

Yeah.

You and my kids would get along fantastically. It is like—

I am sure that we would.

Well, you don't drink tea, but do you also not drink coffee?

I don't drink coffee. I probably have like 1 or 2 cups of coffee a month, and I use it purely as a performance enhancer. Like, you know, if I'm tired and I need to perform, I use it as a drug as it is. It is a drug, and that's how I use it.

Oh my gosh, that's funny. My son has been— again, as we said before we got on air, speed rounds are never speed rounds, so I apologize we're extending this. But my son works at a coffee shop. He's a barista, but he doesn't drink coffee. And so it's always interesting to me, but he has come home with some of the best concoctions for hot chocolate, like white chocolate with this, you know, things. And he's always experimenting with those. So I might have to send you some of those recipes as we're moving forward.

So you're getting me more and more convinced that your son and I would get along well.

All right, Eduardo. Second speed round question. Would you rather go swimming in the ocean or in a lake?

In the ocean.

Oh, any particular ocean? Does it matter?

Oh, an ocean that's warm and clear. And if I can scuba dive and see the wildlife underneath the water, that's just incredible.

Oh yeah, I, I love that.

Have, have you ever lived near an ocean?

I have. I grew up in Venezuela about 45 minutes from the ocean. So, the ocean is a dear childhood friend.

Ah, so that's pretty specific then. Yeah, okay, cool. All right, 3rd speed round question. Do you prefer to have a fantastic, wonderful evening dinner with your favorite musician or with your favorite actor?

Wow. I would say— that's a really hard one, but I would say probably actor.

Wow.

I would go with actor.

Anyone come to mind?

I haven't spent that much time with musicians, but when I have gotten to know actors, they tend to, in my experience, be very socially conscious and want to make the world a better place. And they also tend to be really creative and funny and just engage in really wonderful conversations.

You have some experience with this, it sounds like.

I have some dear friends who are actors, yeah. Very cool.

Very cool.

I like this, Mr. Houlihan. You don't get your musician answer there, and I like that. So, all right.

And neither— That's not a coffee or tea answer.

So far, so good.

This is good.

All right, last speed round question, Eduardo. When we're at work, do we spend more time in the performance zone or in the learning zone?

The vast majority of us in the performance zone.

All right. Well, let's talk about that because this is part of a key component of your book, The Performance Paradox. And we want to get— we want to kind of get your input on that. And for our listeners who may not be familiar with this, can you just talk about kind of the big picture, who is this book for and the kind of main thesis behind it?

Sure. This book really is for anyone. It's particularly for people who work anywhere from people starting their careers to senior executives. And the title, as you said, is The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. And the performance paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. We focus so much on maximizing our results that our results go down. And it's very counterintuitive, but when we are performing, which is when we're trying to get things done as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, we maximize performance in terms of the immediate performance. I do my best right now, but I harm my medium-term and longer-term performance. If I don't engage in something else, which I call the learning zone instead of the performance zone. And so, the learning zone is when we leap beyond the known, when we try things that may or may not work, when we ask questions, when we reflect, when we solicit feedback, when we examine mistakes. And those are things that are not just about only getting things done. So, what most of us tend to get trapped in is just doing the best as we can all the time, and that leads to stagnation.

How similar or different would the performance zone and the learning zone be from a learning mindset or a performance mindset?

Sure. So a mindset is a belief. It's a belief that affects our behavior. A performance zone or a learning zone is like a state of mind that is what you're doing right now, what you're paying attention to, and the strategies that you're using. So this work— I started doing this work when I started working with Stanford Professor Carol Dweck. 16 years ago who has become a dear mentor. And she discovered and coined the term growth mindset. And a growth mindset is the belief that people can change, that we can change, that other people can change, that our abilities and qualities are malleable. And we can have that belief or the opposite, which is a fixed mindset, the belief that people are fixed the way they are. Like, for example, if we think that the reason people are good leaders is because they're natural leaders. That would be an indication of a fixed mindset, or you're a natural athlete, versus everybody can become a better leader and a better athlete. We can have those beliefs either when we're performing and we're on stage, or the game is on and we're trying to minimize mistakes, or when we're focused on learning. So the performance zone and the learning zone is about what we do and how we do it. And a mindset is about what we believe. And of course, a belief can change, and it's a spectrum, and it's malleable, and it's fluid. And so is the zones. We alternate between the 2 zones. And we can integrate the 2 zones and do them both together.

So if I'm at work and I'm in my everyday going about what I'm doing at work, which sometimes is really intense and other times not, how do I know if I'm kind of in that performance zone or if I'm more in the learning zone that you talk about? Are there things that I can identify for myself to kind of realize where I am, or is this just a piece of of component where we kind of have to look at it after the fact?

Well, you can ask yourself right now, is my goal right now to get something done? And is that my only goal? Or is my goal also to improve and to learn something, to develop an insight or to develop a skill? So, when we have 2 goals in mind, to get something done and to improve, we are in what I call learning while doing. So, we have— we are doing things in a way that's going to lead to improvement. When we're only focused on our task list and getting something done, then we're purely in our performance zone. Or another question you can ask yourself is, what am I working on to improve right now? If your answer is, I don't know, then you're in the performance zone. If you know what you're trying to work on and how, then you're engaging in the learning zone.

I think I'm always in that non-performance zone of not knowing what I want to learn or not actually performing either. So I think there's a third component that you missed out on in the book. But no, I think that's— It's really interesting when you think about it because how many times do we— and I'm going to pontificate here, I apologize in advance for all our listeners— but how many times do we get stuck in those situations where, as you said at the very beginning, it's just like, I got this task list, I got to get it done. And you get so myopic on that short-term piece that you're missing out all these other opportunities that, as you said, lead to that long-term kind of growth and perspective. What can we do? How do I get myself out of that trap of being in the performance zone too much, as opposed to kind of more of that learning zone that you talk about?

So I think the first step, which the two of you have talked about in this podcast before, is awareness. Just being able to see what my pattern is and be able to see how the pattern is becoming a problem. So to help kind of listeners see that, a helpful thing to do is to step out of our context and look at fantastic performers in domains where performance can be objectively measured, like a fantastic athlete or a fantastic musician. I know that both of you love music, right? If you think about a fantastic musician playing on stage, they do incredible things. They do them beautifully. And we almost don't notice mistakes, or maybe they don't make any mistakes. But what we don't see is what they do offstage, right, when they're behind curtains. We think that we tend to kind of have a sense that the reason they become so good at playing the cello is that they have spent 10,000 hours playing the cello. But that's not why they have become so great at it. What they do offstage is not just play the cello like we see them on stage. They will— if they're having trouble with a particular part or a particular movement of the fingers, they will practice that particular movement for a half hour. And just practice it and get feedback from how it's sounding and make adjustments. And that's a very different activity than what we do on stage when we're just trying to play the song as best as we know how. So when we're focused on improvement, we're focused on what's beyond what we have already mastered, and we're doing different activities, different strategies than the strategies that we use to perform. And so that's the first thing, is to become aware that in order to become great at something, it's not just about doing that thing a lot of hours or working hard at trying to get it done. Once we have kind of become aware, okay, like, I'm just focused on performance and that's getting me stagnant, then I would say we can focus on what's important to me and what would I want to get better at? And am I engaging in the learning zone regularly with regards to that thing? And so, one question that I ask people is, like, if I could get better at anything, what would I improve? Like, what would that be for you personally or professionally? And so sometimes people come up with things that they believe they can improve, but they're not doing anything to improve. They're not engaging in the learning zone. But sometimes also they might come up with something that they don't believe can be improved. Right. And so that's a fixed mindset. So that's another thing that can get in the way. In order to engage in learning, we need to believe that we can improve. We also need to understand how to improve and we need to have a reason, a reason that we care to put in the effort to improve. And so once we have those 3 things, ideally with a community of people who are also learners and can support us, then we're in a great situation to engage in growth.

No, I love that. And it reminds me of 2 different things. Peter Vidmar, who was on the men's Olympic, the USA Olympic team back in 1984, has become a keynote speaker in different pieces. And I've listened to him a couple of different times. And one of the things that he talked about is because in 1980, the USA boycotted the Summer Olympics in Russia, and the entire men's gymnastic team actually stayed together, and they had another 4 years. And he talked about this idea that people always assumed, as being an Olympic athlete, that they just spent, you know, 10 hours a day practicing. And he said, you can't, you can't do that. There's only a certain number of hours. But then he was looking at and talking about how there was this competition between him and like Bart Connors and some of the other members to Like, just do that extra 5 minutes and focus in on a specific thing. And that extra 5 minutes— and he said, talked about that, or extra 10 minutes over the course of 4 years that they actually did that, the amount of differentiation that that brought. And I thought that was interesting and kind of reminded me of what you said. It's like, can't double the workload that you're doing, but it's how you focus in on that time that you have. And then I have another friend, Mark Hirschfeld, who Tim knows as well. And he made this comment one time. He said that we don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on that experience. And again, I think that plays right into what you're just talking about and that learning mindset and very much of how to do that.

So, well, there's a lot of barriers that conspire to keep us from getting into that learning mindset, you know, to really find that zone. It's hard to get there, to even ask the question, I think, sometimes. What do you think are the most difficult barriers to overcome?

Well, one is kind of, uh, there's a lot of kind of societal norm of performing. Um, in, in the West, we also kind of tend to celebrate how busy people are. You know, I'm just really busy doing so much all the time. But I think, you know, probably the biggest thing is just that, you know, schools haven't been guided or tasked with helping students develop as lifelong learners. And in terms of like, How do I become an effective learner and nurturing my own curiosity and my own exploration and how to do it? And so we haven't been taught this difference that Olympic athletes know, right, in terms of you can't practice for 10 hours a day, but you can perform for 10 hours a day, right? So there's a difference there that most people don't know. That's something we should know in school and learn there, but we don't. And then in school, we've gotten to— the thing with school is difficult because We teach what's easy to measure, right? We want to know how well we're doing in what we're teaching, so we need to measure it in the test and be able to assess so we can correct. And how effective somebody is as a learner is something that's not easy to assess in a test externally. And so we tend to not teach it as a result. We tend to teach things that are easy to measure, even though, like, the person in the room kind of said that, right? Like, you can look at your friends and your family and think about Who's a more effective learner and who is not and why? How could I better support them to become a more effective learner? And then there's so much performance in school. Everything gets graded with a letter or a number. So we learn in school that school is about performing and showing how good you are and proving rather than improving. And on top of that, we are super curious before we get to school. We ask tons of questions. And there's research that shows that when kids start school, they stop asking questions because they start learning that learning is boring and it sucks because the teacher is just talking at you about things, at least for my experience, like they were just talking at me the things that I wasn't interested in and historical facts and figures that I couldn't relate to and rock properties that I didn't care about. And so, what I learned in school, the most impactful thing that I learned in school is that learning is boring. And I was a lifelong learner until I got to school. Right. And so, getting into like to reverse that damage like takes a lot of work, a lot of like learning of what we should have learned and figuring out what bad habits we've gotten into. And then, because of that, society has a lot of kind of norms and momentum and just social norms that we need to overcome.

Yeah. I love the aspect of the— that school is boring and we don't go into it. we come out of it. Gordon McKenzie, who used to be a senior leader at Hallmark, and he talked about he would, you know, he was a creative guy and he would go in and talk with schools. And he goes, I talked to kindergartners and I'd ask people, raise your hand, how many, how many of you are artists? And every hand in the, in the class would go up. And then he'd get to 3rd grade and he'd ask, how many of you are artists? Now there's only like, you know, a 3rd of the hands going up. And by the time he got to 5th grade, it was like one kid shyly in the back, like putting his or her hand up. And, you know, just that idea that sometimes learning in the way that it's being done today saps out some of that natural curiosity and creativity and the fun of learning that you talk about. I think that's very, very true. You talk about this mindset of busyness too, when we started this. What can we do if we're a leader or within the work environment that we have? How can we support those people who are trying not to just be busy for busy's sake and actually put some learning in there? Are there aspects that we can do? As you said, there's a community aspect, a social component of this. What is it that we can do to help those other people that are in this position?

Well, the good news is that we have so much that we can do, whether we're an individual and we want to change our habits or a leader to create a culture in a team or in an organization. And so, when we— a leader can create a culture that is a learning culture so that when people go to work and just collaborate with their colleagues, they want to learn, they want to solicit feedback, they want to talk about their mistakes, they want to experiment. And that happens all the time. And it's, you know, like, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, you know, turn around their culture of over 200,000 people. So, some things that leaders can do is first frame or set the stage. Like, how— like, just get clear about what do we value here? What are our values and what are the behaviors that we want to celebrate and to support and to develop? And so, in a lot of cultures, the behaviors that are that lead people to have high status are knowing behaviors. It's when you're sure of yourself, when you argue your point with only the evidence that supports your point and not the contrary evidence, when you don't solicit feedback because that might be seen as a sign of insecurity or lack of competence. And so, getting clear about, okay, here, we believe that everybody can continue to improve. That's going to help us achieve more and have greater impact. And that also helps us adapt to change and drive change in a fast-changing world, right? Because we can change and adapt and learn from what's happening. And so, what are the core values and the key behaviors, and how do you communicate what those behaviors are? How do you support those behaviors, celebrate when they happen, communicate when they don't happen, and what are the opportunities for improvement? So, setting the stage. Second, kind of figuring out what systems and habits for both the learning zone and the performance zone you want people to engage in. And so, for example, at LinkedIn, you know, the top 100 leaders have a weekly meeting. And when they started working on this, one of the many things they did is they added a section of that meeting to just invite anybody to share something that they learned the prior week and what anybody can do differently going forward as a result of that. That change— just changing the agenda changes the conversation. And so people learn a lot more during that meeting, but it also helps develop a learning culture. And then so people start doing these things more outside of the meeting as well. And then finally, really important for leaders is to think about modeling the behaviors explicitly and visibly, because often leaders, they behave like learners, but when other people aren't watching, they might do that at home, they might do it on their commute. And when other people are watching, we might feel like we need to be sure of ourselves and not ask questions, not solicit feedback, not talk about what we're working to improve. And so modeling the learning behaviors in front of others visibly, but also explicitly. Because if you say, for example, you solicit feedback and somebody else thinks of feedback as a sign of incompetence or as a sign of insecurity, that might lower your influence and they might think less highly of you because you're soliciting feedback. So then explaining again and reminding the people, you know, what feedback is, is something that anybody can benefit from. Even, you know, Olympic gold medalists use it all the time.

You know, I want to make sure that listeners get the distinction between the performance zone and the learning zone in terms of preference and where you want to be. But it's not to say that the performance zone is bad, right?

That's right.

Okay. Can you just elaborate on that? Because there's a It's a better place to be, but it doesn't mean that one is a bad place to be.

Thank you, Tim, for that. Because when I was in the midst of championing growth mindset with Carol Dweck and other growth mindset leaders, we started noticing that performance started to be kind of seen as a bad word, as a bad thing among kind of the growth mindset advocates. But performance and the performance zone is really important. That's how we get things done. That's how we make contributions. That's how we make an impact. And so, the reality is that for the vast majority of us, we need to be in the performance zone most of our time because we have so much to do. But the greatest opportunity is to shift the way we perform so that we are performing and learning at the same time, where we're performing in a way that's also going to lead to learning. But that means that we can't just be worried about just getting things done. But yes, performance zone is absolutely critical. And sometimes for the book and the work that I do, the vast majority of people, when they learn about this work, they say, oh my gosh, I'm in chronic performance. I need to figure out how to embed learning into my life. But there are definitely sometimes people who say, oh my God, this was really helpful to me. I realized that I'm always in the learning zone and I need to add some more performance zone to my life. And there are definitely those people as well, which, you know, that's That's cool as well.

Dreamers, maybe. Yeah. But Eduardo, what can Beyoncé teach us about the learning zone? Wow.

You know, Beyoncé's such a great skilled performer.

She just launched her US or maybe world tour in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I'm living right now. And literally they shut down the entire downtown area, all day, and she was in town 5 days in advance to set up. The show took 5— it was amazing.

That's amazing. She and her team are so good, and that's why they get that response, right? But the only thing that we see is them performing. We see them, how good they are, and that can give us the impression that they're naturals, that this is something that is just special and they're naturals at this. But Beyoncé, after each After each performance, she goes to a hotel room and she watches a video of the performance, and she makes notes about what worked well, but what didn't work well, what she wants to change. And so, she makes notes of it, she shares them with her team, and the next day they meet and they talk about what are we going to adjust for the next performance, right? And it is what they do in the learning zone outside of the cameras, right, where they're talking about what Can we improve? What are we going to change? That allows them to always continue to improve and to reach such high level of excellence.

I find it interesting because I know that, right? I know that we should be looking back at this stuff. And Tim and I have talked about this, like, we need to go back and listen to the old interviews that we've done and kind of identify what's working well and what doesn't. But it's so hard to do sometimes. I think there's a— an element of this that is both from, I just don't have the time to be able to take that hour out, or even if we play it at 1.5, you know, the 45 minutes that it's going to take to, to redo and listen to this and to take notes and to do that, the effort that's involved and all of that. And then there's also another part for me, which is I just like, it's— I've done this. I'm done. You know, to go back is almost like— It feels, it feels like that teacher droning on and on and on, and I'm listening to it. So what, what kind of advice can you give for chronic people who are like me and we don't necessarily go back and reflect and take the, the time or the energy that is required sometimes to do that? Are there any tips that you can help me in improving how I do this or think about it?

Well, I love the question, and I think that's a question that we should all be asking ourselves, right? How am I What strategies am I using to learn and what can I do differently to get better at getting better? And so, here are some ideas. I agree. I do lots of keynotes. I'm a public speaker and I would love— I get the videos and I would love to watch the videos and I often don't end up watching them because I just can't fit it in. But here's what I do. I embed in a lot of my keynotes, I embed live polling. throughout the session so that people can reflect and share their thinking throughout the session. And often, unless we're really tight on time, at the end, I use the same live polling system to ask for people's feedback right there and there, like, 2 minutes at the end of the session. So they talk about how well the session worked for them, but then they also give me— like, they write down what I could do differently going forward. And that is displayed in front of everybody, and I process some of it real time.

Yeah.

to show that feedback is something that anybody can benefit from and it shouldn't be something we're scared of. That doesn't take any time and I get so much information from what people are saying and it doesn't take a lot of time. I can quickly review it later. I don't have to review the whole hour of the keynote or half hour. So, you know, you could ask, like sometimes you do, like your listeners for feedback and they could send you messages and you could review it and then you don't have to watch the video. Like, that's one idea.

Listeners, take that to note. Write those feedback. Tell us what we're doing wrong, not our guests, but Tim and I, because I know we do a lot and what we can improve on. So, there you go. Thank you for that, Eduardo.

And then, you know, and it's not just what you can do differently, but also what they appreciate. You know, sometimes they'll say, I really appreciate that you do this and this, and you weren't aware that this is something that you do that other people appreciate. So, both the information of what people appreciate and ideas for what to change are both Really valuable. So, one thing, one example also of like how to get better at getting better is I've been doing this podcast because I'm doing a book tour right now. And after each podcast episode, I would ask the hosts, hey, you know, do you have any feedback for me in terms of what I can do better? And what they said was helpful. But I realized that a better strategy was what I did today with the two of you, which is before we started, I said, are there things that sometimes your guests do or don't do that you don't like? You know, how do you want me to approach this conversation? And I find that that's a better learning strategy for me because then I can adjust more to what the preferences of each podcast is. But it involves, like, thinking about what am I doing to try to improve and how could I change those learning zone strategies and habits so that I can get better at getting better.

A lot of the book is focused on this very personal aspect of changing ourselves, of growing, being better, being the better me that I can be. But some of it is, when we think about this, happens in the context of a workday and a work environment. And how do we deal with environments, corporate cultures that are sort of like, well, that's not the way we do things around here? How do we confront that, and how do we figure out how to deal with that?

Absolutely. And so, yeah, so part 1 of the book, like chapters 1 through 7, are about the individual. And then part 2 is about teams and organizations, so chapters 8 through 12 are about, like, how can we build teams and organizations? And then part 3 is about how do we perform and impact? But in terms of how to build teams and organizations, I think one thing that it depends on is, like, what is the person's position and what can they most influence and control? So, if I'm an individual contributor, I'm just starting at an organization, I don't have a lot of influence, maybe the biggest opportunity might be to change what I'm doing and my own habits and maybe start some of these conversations with my colleagues to see how they might react and see if we can partner and support each other in each other's growth. Maybe we can meet once a week or once a month to support one another at one area of growth. If I'm a CEO or executive or a team leader, whatever my sphere of greatest influence is, I think first is kind of setting the stage. So, thinking about having a conversation and also not top-down. So, if I'm a team leader, not saying, okay, from now on, we're going to be in the learning zone, but, like, hey, like, just sharing these ideas with your team, whether, you know, I did a 10-minute TED Talk on it. It's a resource that sometimes people share with their teams. They watch the 10-minute talk and then they have a conversation. Hey, what do people think about this learning zone and performance zone? Do people want more learning zone here? Are we doing great, or is there something that we want to work on together? It might be soliciting feedback more, or it might be doing more post-action reviews or mid-action reviews. But how are we doing as a team, and what are opportunities to get better at getting better, is kind of setting the stage. Again, like, identifying the systems and habits, and then modeling learning. So, those are, I think, the 3 things to think about. And it varies kind of whether you're a senior executive or a team leader, But also, like, another kind of question to ask ourselves is, can I get better at influencing? So sometimes we feel like we can influence X but not Y. And we can also— that can be also a reflection of a fixed mindset, right? Like, my ability to influence is fixed. So how can I get better at influencing is something also to ponder and to work on if that's important to you.

I want to go to a story that— sorry, this is another musical reference, but you tell the story of of Dave Grohl going head-to-head with a 10-year-old drummer on the internet. And I was wondering if you could relate that story and tell why was that important.

Great. Well, you, Tim, earlier talked about kind of the quote from John Dewey, which is that we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. And John Dewey was one of the pioneers of experiential learning. So, we tend to think that experience and expertise are the same thing, that if you have like 10 or 20 years or 30 years of experience doing something, that you'll become great at it. But there's lots of research that show that in lots of domains, that's not true. And so, we can develop a lot of expertise, whatever age we are, whether we're really young or we are in our elder age or anywhere in between. And so, Nandi Bushell, When she was 5 years old, she watched the Beatles playing on TV, and she was really drawn to Ringo Starr and the drums. And so she asked her parents, hey, I want to play that. And they got her a set of drums, and she became really passionate about it. They got her teachers, and she became super good when she was 10 years old. It was the start of the pandemic. She reached out to Dave Grohl and she said, hey, my dream is to do a drum battle with you and to one day play with the Foo Fighters. And so, he just kind of laughed and said, oh, yeah, this is cute. And then, his friends were like, no, no, you got to check this out. She's really good.

Yeah.

So then, they went on drum battles and he would record himself playing a song. And then she would learn it and mimic it and videotape herself and send it back over social media. So, this created so much joy and I was following them. And she would even mimic his facial expressions. He was so delightful. It was amazing. And so, then eventually after the pandemic, when the Foo Fighters started playing again, they were playing at the LA Forum and at the last song of the very last song of the night, They surprised the crowd and Nandi Bushell played the drums, which is really, really cool.

It always struck me as like right place at the right time. Like, that wouldn't have happened if they were on tour and he was busy with a lot of other things.

True. Yeah. But then when you— to your question, why is Nandi Bushell so great? Why is she at 10, now maybe 11 or 12 years old? Why is she so good at playing the drums? When you listen to her talk about Why she's so good. She talks about engaging in deliberate practice, what Kurt was talking about. She talks about playing a little piece of a song really slowly at first and getting it really slowly and then a little faster and then another piece of the song and then playing more of the song. And that's different than just playing the songs she likes. I used to play the guitar growing up. And when I practiced, quote, practiced, I would just play the songs I liked. I would play from the beginning to the end. I was a really crappy guitar player because I didn't know how to get better. But like Kurt said, Anders Ericsson, who pioneered kind of the research on deliberate practice, found out that the best performers in the world, they don't do deliberate practice for 10 hours a day, which is what we might assume. But deliberate practice requires A lot of very focused concentration at a high level of challenge. And that's not a concentration that we can sustain for a whole day. So the best people in the world at violin or other things, they engage in deliberate practice for only about between 2 and 5 hours each day because they need rest and they actually sleep more than other people as well. Now, that's deliberate practice. That's in places like athletics and classical music. For most of us, we can't afford to spend 2 or 5 hours a day just focused on improvement without getting things done. And that's why, for most of us, the greatest opportunity is in figuring out how to learn while doing, how to learn while we are getting things done.

It's interesting, though, because I think what you point out here is that we can't mimic the way that some of these experts in these certain fields are doing it, but There's an aspect of that deliberative learning. And yeah, we can increase what we're doing in the performance and learning at the same time. But even when we think about how we're learning at work and how we're learning at these certain things, so Tim and I, for example, we can again think about how do we do the whole interview? How are we editing? How are all of these different things? But really what I'm hearing you say is We probably would be better served by taking small bits of this and really focusing in on those, even in the moment when we're doing it, as opposed to trying to do the larger scale. Am I misreading that, or is that something that you would recommend from just a learning style, or does it depend on the context?

I think it depends on the skill and the context, but that is an effective strategy, I would say. So, for example, In the book, I talk about ClearChoice Dental Implants. They do dental implants for people.

Yeah.

And these are people who often have problems with their teeth, so they can't eat the right foods, they can't smile, which affects their emotions and their personal— their social relationships. So, it has big implications for their lives. But, one of the things they do is they have in every consult room, they have a video camera. And, when patients consent to it, they record all their interactions with patients. And, in between consults, the professional can review the video to see something that they tried differently and see how it went. And so often they don't watch the whole video. They only watch that little section, to your point, about here's what I'm— the specific thing I'm working on is, for example, when people are having trouble with figuring out how to pay for something, like, that's the section I'm working on, or different sections, and they review that little section. So that's one potential strategy. Your listeners are— a lot of them are interested in research. So let me— like a relevant research study is people asked participants how they viewed intelligence, if they viewed it as something that could change or not, so to assess whether they were more in a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. And then they, they were put like in a brain scan machine, an EKG, that, that looked at their brain activity as they were solving problems. And they were trying to figure out like, do people's brains work differently if they're more in a fixed mindset thinking that intelligence is fixed or if they believe they can get smarter. And what they found is that the people in a fixed mindset, their brain was having the greatest activity when they were getting information about whether they got each problem right or wrong. That's what they were most interested in, to kind of find out how smart they were. And the brain was not very active at all at a different time, which is the time when the people in a growth mindset's brain was most active. Now, the people in a growth mindset, also paid attention to whether they got something right or wrong, but they paid even more attention at a different time, which is when they were getting information about what they did wrong, like, so that they could learn from those mistakes. And then as a result of that, in the subsequent problems, they were able to solve those more effectively and their performance increased. So what does that tell me? That tells me everybody is solving problems. Like, if you just look at them, they're just solving problems. But inside of their brain, Like, they're paying attention to different things. So, you know, some of them are paying attention to what they're doing right, and others are paying more attention to what they can do better. So, as we're getting things done, what are we paying attention to is critical. And to your point, it's about being deliberate about improvement, not just about working hard at getting things done.

I love it. Love it.

So, imagine you're on a desert island and you have a year You get to play all the music that you want, but only from 2 artists, only from 2 musical artists. Eduardo, who are you going to take with you? Not the physical person, but their catalog of work.

Well, I have to say the Beatles because they have such a big catalog. If it's just going to be 2, I'm going to pick somebody with a huge catalog and then maybe like Brian Eno just for background music. Wow.

Wow.

I love that. I don't think anybody said Brian Eno.

So with that, Tim, does— because Brian Eno also produced a lot, right? Do you get all of the music that he produced and all the other artists? Can we make a little kind of thing here? Because that—

Are you thinking like U2, for instance?

Oh yeah. I'm just thinking, all right, well, Brian Eno has his own work, but then he's also producer of multitude of other works. That might be a nice little, hey, a way of getting around just as an artist.

I'm going to toss that back to Eduardo. How do you think we should rule on this?

Oh, this is very clear. We definitely should bring free all the produced music as well.

I like this.

Yes. Oh, I like that.

Okay. That's good to know. All right, Eduardo, this is absolutely a pleasure. This is such a treat to talk to you, and we appreciate the time. And the wisdom that you've shared with us. Thanks for being a guest on Behavioral Grooves.

I love Behavioral Grooves. Thank you both for the work you do. You do it delightfully.

And remember, listeners, if you have feedback for us, you know, make sure you send it to us so we can improve and even get better so that we can be in the learning zone. So thank you. And again, thank you, Eduardo. Welcome to our Grooving Session, where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Eduardo, have a free-flowing conversation, and groove on whatever else comes into our non-learning brains. Because Tim, you and I, we just do, do, do, do. We don't, we don't learn, man. We just do, do, do, then do, do, do some more. Maybe we just do, do. Maybe that's what we do.

Maybe we are do, do.

Oh, I am sorry, folks. But no, this was really an interesting conversation because I think what Eduardo did is he laid out things that we all know at some level.

Right.

We've heard some of this before. We intuitively know this idea that we have to be in a learning zone. We have to learn in order to grow and to move forward. forward and different things. And we know that we often get caught up in just doing things as opposed to kind of doing and reflecting. So yeah, I think that's a really important— the difference between a learning zone versus just the performance zone.

It really is good. And I'm glad that you brought that up because he worked closely with Carol Dweck, who laid out the growth mindset, the learning mindset, 30 years ago. So that isn't new. What he does bring to the table is a fresh perspective, and he just continues to— he continues to work it. Something that I just want to reemphasize, I think we brought this up in the introduction, is this idea that he's figured out a way to get feedback in a high-pressure situation. Like, making a presentation, like a TED Talk, is a high-pressure cooker situation, and he's figured out how to turn it into the learning zone.

Mm-hmm.

How to make that an active learning experience as he's presenting.

Yeah.

And it just makes me think, wow, I mean, if he can do that— now, not all of us can replicate that in every situation, but it certainly got me thinking about when I'm presenting, are there ways I can continuously get feedback from, you know, from the groups of people that I'm presenting to?

I think that's great because again, I do a lot of presentations, do a lot of training workshops with, with different companies around the globe. And I would like to think that I'm learning from all of those, but am I doing the job as well as I could? Can I improve upon that? Can I use some of those tips and hints that he did? I used to use polls all the time. I used to always use polls in this, and I've kind of gotten away from that. I think I'm going back. I think I'm going back to using more polls.

Good.

I have a question for you though, Tim, because, you know, I think part of his conversation, he's talking about, you know, the onstage performers, you know, responding to the feedback of the crowd. And you, you're a performer, you're up there playing guitar and singing your heart out. And are you just in your own little world and just playing, you know, with your back to the audience? Or are you picking up cues? How does that work for you?

I'm— thanks for asking. I'm managing the band. Part of it is making sure that we land the plane, that, you know, every song starts and ends reasonably well. But there's also a sense of what's working, you know, like I'm— I oftentimes would find myself, especially with the band, sort of keeping track of how is an audience responding to, like, did we come out of the bridge and go into the guitar lead, you know, in a good way, an effective way that sort of engaged the audience? Do we Was it worth going into the second bridge? You know, was it worth repeating that? Did the audience look forward to it?

Never worth going into the second bridge. I just wanted to let you know. Second bridge is—

yeah. I should have just asked you.

I could have just— I have no idea what the second bridge is. Anyway, is that like the bridge over the second River Kwai, or is that just the first River Kwai?

It's the bridge over the troubled waters, I think, actually.

All right.

So it's interesting though. All jokes aside, that you are taking that notice of what's working, what's not working. And yet we don't always do that at work, right? We don't do those course corrections or even the reflection part of that at work. And I'm just wondering why, why don't we do that?

Yeah, I think what's preventing us is that we're just not doing the reflection part. We're just not stopping and saying, if we're going to get better, instead of just practice, practice, practice, let's practice, practice, practice, reflect, practice, reflect. I think that in some ways it's as simple as that, and 'cause we're not always gonna have the facility to have that real-time feedback, right?

Yeah.

So, but what can we do to make sure that we do a postmortem and say, how did it go?

Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, for me in my own personal life, I do that through my journaling often, right? And so, right, and we've developed out the Brain Shift Journal, you know, plug here for people, but we have a reflection part in that and actually coming out with volume 2 of that and that we even enhance the reflection part and that learning aspect within the journal so that people take that.

Cool.

But how do we do this? Because we talked about— with Eduardo, we talked about creating a culture of learning inside an organization. So outside of organizations buying hundreds and hundreds of BrainShift journals for all their employees, how can leaders do that?

I just want to say, did you just suggest that it's possible for companies to buy hundreds of BrainShift journals for their employees?

Oh, yes. And if they did and they wanted to reach out to me, they could possibly even get a discount on the the $25.99 price that includes shipping, but we could probably work out a deal.

On the Brain Shift Journal.

On the Brain Shift Journal, yes.

That would improve learning.

Thank you for keeping mentioning the name as kind of a key piece here, but yes, there you go.

Well, what you're pointing to though is that a culture of learning is absolutely a great way of thinking about finding your groove, right? I think Eduardo kind of positioned it as leaders. have that obligation, but I think that we all can play a role in that, right? This was— and I think that this was the part where I think you brought up Gordon McKenzie.

Oh yeah, you know, one of, one of your favorite stories from Hallmark. Yeah, that the idea of just like thinking about things from a different perspective and, and making sure that your team and even the organization is in that mode, in that mindset of Well, just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean that we always have to do it this way. And that is, you know, Gordon was a master at that. His book, again, if anybody wants— he's passed away, but his book is called Orbiting the Giant Hairball, which I just love the title of that book.

It's a great title.

It's a really short little, quick little book to read. It's fantastic there. And, you know, but there's other examples, right? There's— who's the new leader at Microsoft?

Satya Nadella.

Yeah, right? I mean, he's, from what I understand, he's doing a fantastic job of taking that learning culture and creating that.

Yeah. I mean, I have friends who have been at Microsoft for many years and lived through the Steve Ballmer years and Satya's reign, and boy, like huge contrast to Ballmer. And it's all about learning. It's much more like a Google mindset, or let's figure this out. We want to have more productive teams? Let's study it. Let's study our teams. Let's actually learn about our team. What makes psychological safety? Those things make a difference. And that all stems from the learning mindset, I think.

Well, and the difference that one person can have. So even if you aren't the leader of your company, You can have an influence, whether it's on your team, your department, your peers. The way that you do something impacts the others around you, and I think that's really important. How are you, or how is your company impacting you on this culture of learning, Mr. Blue Collar?

Oh, it's fantastic. I mean, I'm in a company with more than 50,000 employees. I have 50,000 teammates, and we use the Tollgate process in marketing. which is kind of a structured 3-tollgate process of having a meeting to discuss the concept of what a marketing campaign is going to be, and then a second meeting to discuss how it's going in the pre-launch phase, and then the third is the update on the results. There's sort of an ethos of we ask so that we can learn.

Mm-hmm.

It's really great, and I love that that Learning mindset is absolutely central to what happens within a company that's so big, but it's not reserved exclusively for big companies. You use it at the Lantern Group, don't you?

I mean, but we are a huge company because we're a company of 5, which is like 1/1,000th of what your company is. Pretty much, yeah. So, it's pretty close.

Pretty close.

No, but you're absolutely right, and I think, so it's different. We aren't as process-oriented, obviously, with a company of 5. But one of the things that I constantly am striving to do is create that culture of learning. So, we have, as part of everybody's MBOs, they have a learning and development part. They actually, it's part of their MBOs to sign up or attend a workshop or get some learning within the— every 6 months. We do those MBOs every 6 months. But in addition to that, We also have weekly check-ins, and in those weekly check-ins is always this part about what did we learn from last week in various different aspects. But we also have a whole part of that where you use this Google Sheet, and on the Google Sheet, we have a spot where we add in what we call insights, and they're just podcasts or links to blogs or to articles that are just something that we can learn from or something that we just find Interesting. I mean, everything from like this guy who is the world record at skipping stones to different things about psychological safety to, you know, motivation and engagement across the board. And it's fantastic because every week we kind of talk about, well, what did you put in this week? And everybody is contributing to that. And so it's 10 minutes at most, 5 minutes most weeks. But man, it really changes how we think about things. And sometimes you go, well, skipping stones, what does that have to do? But it just gets us thinking in a different perspective. And I think it's really powerful, really powerful way to do it.

I was today years old when I learned this, right? Yeah, I love that. That's fantastic. I'd like to end the grooving session with a question for you, Curt.

Okay.

Is this grooving session an example of being in the learning zone?

Definitely.

Yeah.

Right? Now that you say that, you think about this, right? We are reflecting upon what we just heard, what we've listened to. And well, for us, it might be a week or 2 weeks, but it's still reflecting back on this conversation and really exploring those pieces of information. I think that's really what the learning zone is, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. I think that— oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Well, I was going to ask, so is this kind of, again, as we talk about finding your groove, is part of finding your groove being in that learning zone? Is there an aspect of learning that is required or bang, Yeah, yeah, I think absolutely.

I think that if you really want to find your groove, you got to adopt a learning mindset to some degree. It's hard for me to imagine that finding your groove takes place in absentia of your curiosity and your desire to improve, just to be the best you can be.

Yeah, and again, for us, it's due Do and then reflect, right? So I know you do-do all the time, but—

I am do-do.

All right, all right. We'll take them. We've taken that long enough, and I think we've learned enough with this grooving session. What says you, Tim?

My brain hurts.

Okay, I could take that so many different places and just like really go there, but, but I'm learning, so I won't. I'm learning and growing. Growing. So I'm just gonna, just gonna say I hope that all of our listeners appreciate this episode and, and that they're learning and growing from, from what we heard here.

Well, that's very nice. And Groovers, you know, you might want to share that learning and growing with some of your friends or coworkers. You could be like Curt and his team. Just share this episode with your team at your next team meeting, you know, so that Your teammates can grow and benefit from these insights as well.

Yeah, quick and easy. Just copy the URL and just send it out in an email to them. Say, hey, great, great episode to learn from. Here you go. All right. So, all right, with that, we hope that you Groovers take the learnings from this episode and go out and find your groove.