Heroic Interview: The Power of Agency with Paul Napper & Anthony Rao

Hi, guys, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Paul Napper and Anthony Rao about their great book, the Power of Agency. If you followed our optimized stuff, you know, I am a big fan of agency, but no one had really captured the science behind it in a really practical way until I found this book. I can't remember how I found it, but I'm glad I did. It's fantastic. Paul, Tony, thank you for being here.

It's great to be here, Brian.

It's an absolute pleasure and as I said in the prelude, thank you again for your work. It's been a really formative part of articulating some important themes, not just with our broader community, but with our coaches. We're certifying now. I always love to start these chats at the top. So the power of agency. What is agency?

Agency is the capacity to take charge of your body, your mind, your emotions, to engage in independent thought and take confident action in your life. So it's fundamental to the human experience. It's something that everyone does or attempts to do each and every day. And sometimes we have fuller access to our agency and sometimes we have less access to it, but that's fundamentally what it is. It's our capacity to make good choices in our lives.

And I'd like to add that everybody has the capacity for it. We are born with the ability to do it. It's about though, sort of put it on those lenses and really, you know, going deep and realizing, yeah, you've got ways that you can think and you've got ways that you can behave and that's going to be the game changer.

I think that's great.

And kind of stepping in between stimulus and response, choosing that optimal response more and more consistently. And of course, the book is about how to tap into that power. We've got seven principles. I've got some favorites. But before we get in, do you guys, obviously you rank ordered them one through seven, but do you have a personal favorite one of these principles and practices?

Well, I definitely have one that I do the least well, that's for sure. I have a really hard time with controlling stimuli. I'm a stimuli junkie and that one came first in rank order just because it's so essential to just kind of clearing out the noise and, and the static and having your full self available and present.

But.

We ordered them as you know, Brian, in terms of there's three behavioral principles and four cognitive principles. So the three behavioral are a Little simpler to do. They involve more your sort of behaviors, some of the ways you choose to behave. And the four cognitive principles really are more about how you think and how you manage your emotions. So those have a little bit more complexity to them. They take a little bit more sort of sophistication, but they're all sort of discreetly different principles. And what's interesting is we have a tool that measures people's capabilities on each of these. And it's interesting to see the variability. People, you know, people have lots of peaks and valleys. There's some things that they do extraordinarily well at and practice fully each and every day. And there's some that they really don't do much at all. So it's kind of an eye opener for a lot of people when they take our, you know, take our instrument and are able to see where they fall.

Yeah, that's great.

One of my favorites is the second one. Associate selectively because you know, I do a lot of clinical work. I work with a lot of teenagers and young adults and front and center in an office with a lot of really high emotion happening. And I feel it. I mean I take it home and it affects my ability to perform and to think. So over the years I've just been trying to manage that better and better. And I think just knowing that wherever you put yourself, the people that you're around are going to have a direct effect on your thinking skills.

Yeah, that's powerful. And I loved your reflection Paul, on the first three are kind of the behavioral easier than the last four, a little bit more complex, which is why I focused on the first three because they're more concrete. And I think you make the point really well that they're also fundamental that when you get these things which are more within our control to master in a more discrete, concrete fashion, then it gives us a better shot at dealing with the complexity. At least that's how I read it and love the.

That's right, yeah.

Let me just step back for a moment. One thing I didn't mention is the fact that you talk about that rather than trying to reduce stress in your clients lives. And Paul, from my understanding, you work within the more the corporate environment, management consulting and coaching with Fortune 500 companies. And Tony, you're working more in the clinical therapeutic environment. But I love the distinction you made about the fact that rather than try to manage stress per se, let's step back and cultivate as much energy as we possibly, agency as we possibly can such that stress becomes more fuel than destructive, toxic energy in our lives. Can you comment on that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the more fundamental aspects of human agency, which is that it helps us to be more resilient. It helps us to deal with stress and unforeseen setbacks, because agency fundamentally helps us to feel more confident in our lives and in the decisions we make in our lives. So, you know, we have right now, we talk about this quite a bit in the book, which, you know, I know you're aware of, Brian, but just this idea that there's a lot of overwhelm in our culture right now. Things have accelerated quite a lot. Everybody knows that things continue to change and accelerate. So people are feeling more and more overwhelmed more of the time. And we found that from our research, from our field study. And agency helps people to get control of that, to lessen the frequency of overwhelm because it actually builds confidence. So rather than people taking a pill or trying to work on.

Managing their.

To do list more efficiently, or we're saying take a step back, look at your overall level of agency in your life and focus on building that, because that's what will give you the confidence to be able to move forward and take care of business in your life.

Yeah, that's so great. And one of the reasons why to go back to the first two that were your two favorites, or among your two favorites anyway, the controlling stimuli. I've had a number of conversations with Cal Newport and his new book on digital minimalism.

And he.

And he talks about the baseline level of anxiety that we all feel that's just creeping on us as a society. And of course, in his book, it was basically a treatise on your number one way to build agency, which is control stimuli. Like, if we have this constant cascade and cacophony of inputs, it's going to be impossible to find that centered place of power and agency within ourselves. So I just loved the idea of controlling stimuli as. Okay, before we talk about anything else, let's look at what we may take for granted, but this incessant stream of inputs that we need to digest one way or the other, and it's going to leave us enervated and feeling overwhelmed, anxious, etc. So I'd love to hear more thoughts on that and then also some practical tips that you guys recommend as we look to optimize that aspect of our lives.

You know, Brian, if you look at the history of anxiety in the United States, people have actually tracked it and it just keeps climbing and it's important to know that it really shot up somewhere in the late 80s and through the 90s. And it really correlates or dovetails nicely with the sort of rise of information, the amount of inputs, the amount of devices we have. Data plans are cheaper. Everyone's walking around with a mobile device that now we're what, five, six, eight hours a day on average on these devices. We're not moving, we're not outdoors, we're not talking to other people. Then all that stimulation is really overwhelming the brain. And it's important that people know that the anxiety they feel, it may just be a series of signals that are just keep getting set off, that's affecting their biology and that's actually what they think needs to be addressed. When in fact, if they just sort of cut it at the source, the stimuli that comes in, they could really calm their brain down a lot.

Yeah.

What a lot of people don't realize is that we're actually living amidst a silent epidemic of anxiety. You know, 20% of Americans are diagnosed with a formal clinical anxiety disorder. And we in our book talk about the fact that millions more are either hovering right below that line or, you know, or are dealing with, you know, just periodic bouts of overwhelm. So we are living. And the other thing that Tony in his work in particular notices, and I have too, with my corporate executives, anxiety is contagious. It spreads from person to person. So I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but, you know, if you're around somebody or a group of people who are, who are really, really, really anxious, really ramped up, you're going to start feeling it yourself. It's going to start seeping in to you. And so similar to Cal Newport in his observation about baseline level of anxiety, we're all being exposed to it. We're being exposed not just to the stimuli, but we're all being exposed to the elevated levels of anxiety with the people we surround ourselves with because it's happened to all of us, that's one of the side effects. So these are challenging times. And to your point, Ryan, it's the whole idea about controlling stimuli is getting yourself away from that, taking yourself to quiet places, monitoring the amount of stimuli you expose yourself to, managing it more effectively, just being much more conscious of it. Because what we found is a lot of people aren't even.

Aware of all.

The stimuli they expose themselves to. They just because it's gotten into the background, it's seeped right into our everyday lives to such an extent we don't even notice it. So in any case, it's a very important one, very important place to start.

Yeah, well, and just to go back to the 20% stat that are clinically diagnosed with anxiety and the millions of the rest of the population that's either close or approaching to or just undiagnosed. One of the things that struck me most in Cal's book, to go back to that briefly, was the rise of self harm and suicide among the Igen, you know, who were born and raised and have what he would call solitude deprivation, where there's just no opportunity to actually slow down our brains and our consciousness enough to digest that constant stream of inputs which, oh, by the way, happens to be so toxically negative.

Right.

And kind of being mined on the most harsh stimuli to get our attention hooked on that and then the comparative nature of it, et cetera. But yeah, it's just, it's humbling, you know, to look at that and then to see the effects in such a clear cohort and then also to obviously feel it in our personal lives. Tell us what's like the number one tip as you look, you know, Paul, you were humble about. That's the one I struggle with the most. Like, what's the number one tip that you've experienced as a big gain or perhaps the research has shown to be, try this and you can pull a big lever.

I've got one that, you know, is the easiest to do and it gets back to the mobile device. So you have a smartphone, everybody's got a smartphone. You could be anywhere in the world, sitting in a cafe, some nice beautiful city, looking out, people from all over the place, and everyone's got a phone. They tend to be looking at it. So if you can move your phone further away from you, then your brain will be better at processing information, will have better memory, it'll be able to function more independently. There's research that shows that just its proximity literally to your body, the closer it is, is it in another room shut off, Is it across the room shut off? Is it upside down on a table when you're having dinner with somebody, is it in your pocket? The closer it literally is to you. The studies have shown that people don't function mentally as well, that they're not 100% there. Because why your brain is so used to it. You've had this thing all day long. Every night you sleep with it, you touch it, sometimes you look at it more than the people you love. Right. That this thing has become a part of you, your brain is signaling you constantly. So the number one thing that we do is we say, look, you've got to get control over the mobile device first. And then another really terrific tip, and Paul's used this a lot in his work in his coaching clients, is to get them to filter information and not just be looking at things all day long in a raw way. Trust other people, train them on what.

You need, have them filter it down.

And then you have packets of information that don't overwhelm you.

And I'll say one other thing that I've been doing much, much more with my coaching clients, which is having them get outside during the day, Whether it's walking for 20 minutes around lunchtime or taking a break in the middle of the day, or having a walking meeting with co workers, get out of the office or wherever you are, if you can experience nature, some part of nature, it's just so great for the brain. It helps recharge, it helps deal with overstimulation. Because we live too much, as, you know, in this kind of artificial world of screens and devices and, you know, so natural environments are really a nice. A very positive way to kind of destimilate your brain.

Yeah, that's great. Just got back from the trail right before we connected. It's amazing what it does. And then we encourage. We encourage our community without your technology, you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

But even the podcasts and the, you know, the stuff that's really wonderful. But we need time where at least my own personal experience and just, you know, thinking about it for a second or two, to just let our brains relax, right, and go into that reflective mode, to process and to do so in nature.

And that's such a perfect word, Brian. Reflective. Because one of the key findings from our research is that people are not. They do not have the time for reflection to use their brains as our brains were designed to be used, which is, you know, to reflect on situations, reflect on our lives, reflect on where we find ourselves, reflect on our relationships, you know, and we need that to function at our best and to have full access to our agency. We absolutely need to honor our brains. And our brains need time to reflect because we will not make good decisions if we're not taking the time to reflect on situations. And that's what's getting crowded out. And so, you know, the other point we make in the book is the quality of decision making is deteriorating because people are so overwhelmed. They are so overstimulated, and they're not taking the time and they don't to Reflect, and they don't see other people doing it. So, you know, that's the other thing about human beings. We're a herd animal, and we look to the right, we look to the left, we see what other people are doing. Everybody's got their nose buried in their device. They think, well, this is, you know, this is fine. This is just what we do now. Well, it's what we. Unfortunately, it is what we're mostly doing now, but it's not helping us. It's actually taking us away from.

Better.

Decisions and taking us away from being more fulfilled as well. So it's a big issue.

And to go back to what both of you were talking about on the idea of movement, if you're frustrated, you're sitting there, and we tend to be frustrated because we're on devices and we're getting all these problems we're trying to solve, and new information is coming at us. That feeling of being stuck, literally just physically immobile while you are upset over time can lead to something called learned helplessness. And it's one of the reasons people just give up or become frustrated, end up with headaches and stomach pain and just get so over the top with adrenaline rushes and building cortisol. Because why? They just don't every now and then stand up, just stand, take a break, go to the window, come back real fast, go outside, get some wind on your face, have your eyes sort of go over the landscape, anything, then come back to the problem, then sit again. But these prolonged, sedentary times, the brain is like, oh, I guess I'm trapped. I can't escape. I think I'm going to start to give up.

It's another way, too. The control stimuli principle in our book goes very nicely with the move principle, or what you like to call the energize principle, Brian. And movement and controlling of stimuli work very synergistically because as you said a moment ago, Brian, when people, when you go out for a walk in nature, for a hike, don't go with your electronic device, leave it behind. It'll be there when you get back. So you get the benefit of movement, which primes the brain for extended thought. And you also get the benefit of detoxing yourself from all the stimulation. So those two principles work really, really well together. And we are coaching people to do that, to use them together. So I have to tell you, one of my pet peeves. When I see somebody walking, walking down the street, you know, walking out in nature or something like that, and they're staring at their phone And I'm thinking, you know, look, I appreciate the need to multitask. We all feel like we should be doing at least two things at the same time now because of where our culture is. But that's really a bad practice, the bad idea to do that kind of, that kind of stuff because you're sub optimizing everything, right? You're not, you're not paying attention to what you're reading. You're not paying attention to, you know, your physical body and your natural surroundings. And so in any case, that's. But those two principles work really well together.

Yeah, I love it. And then there's. It goes way beyond like doing something meaningful. It becomes a compulsion. And it's not even for something significant. It's a trivial thing. So it's the latest input and there's just that compulsive, addictive tendency to need to have that constant cortisol, really, of just that adrenaline push. Where again, for me, in my own experience, and what we work with is just like you said, it's going to be there when you get back. Give yourself 30, 45, 60 minutes and then discipline yourself to create more and more of those micro pockets. I loved your point, Tony, about the proximity of the device is going to dictate our connection, the depth of connection we have, our productivity, our sense of empowerment, et cetera. Agency, of course. So all that is awesome. We talked a bit about moving, which again, I love the way you described that we talk too, to connect it back to. One of the reasons why I love your book so much is you brought the science to a lot of the things that we talk about. We challenge our coaches to have 1,000 second breaks. So every 16 minutes and 40 seconds, I personally use a little Timex countdown timer. I get up out of my, my desk, you know, and in the morning I'll do 11 burpees, you know, and then later in the day it's just getting up.

Right. What a smart thing to do. You know, I know some people in the corporate setting, you know, this is. Some people think this sounds very strange, but there are people I know who host squat competitions for their co workers. Whoever's around in the middle of the day in the office. And these are women, these are women who, you know, the woman who hosts it, she does these pretty much every day or she does burpees or something. She does them in office attire in the middle of the day, taking a break. Usually it's around lunchtime. And you know what? Everybody feels so much better. They're so Much sharper and they get a good laugh, and it's just such an amazing thing. And it's so easy to do. It's so easy to incorporate into your routine, if you think about it. But that's the reality is, you know, we as a society, we've become so sedentary and people just don't think of it, right? They don't think, hey, I should be getting up. I should get up every 16 minutes and just for a second and stretch. You know, we don't think that way. But for our brains to function optimally, these are some of the things we need to do. And, you know, we live. You know, it's a cliche to say it at this point, but we live in the information age. What that means is that, you know, our abstract reasoning abilities are being taxed more today than ever before in human history. And so, you know, it really benefits us greatly to pay attention to what allows our brains to function more optimally. And, you know, things as simple as movement and controlling stimuli, you know, those things have a direct bearing on how effective your brain is going to work.

So good. So first one was control stimuli. Third principle is move. Second one is to associate selectively. Is that the way you guys phrase it? Associate selectively? Yeah. So talk to us about that. We touched on it briefly. But just why is it so important? What does it mean to associate selectively? And why is that so important for agency?

I want to give you one high level, and then Tony can jump in because this is one he particularly loves. But our agency, our capacity to make good choices in our lives, it rests on the quality of the people around us. So we, all of us humans, are embedded in. In a social world. The social world around us, each and every one of us is embedded in a social environment. And it profoundly influences how we see ourselves, how we see our possibilities in the world, and also how we learn and how we function. And so agency is about, you know, making the best quality decisions in your life. And the bottom line is if you're surrounded by people who are supportive and encouraging and challenge you and you can learn from them, we are going to be much healthier and much happier in our lives. And the corollary is obviously, if we don't, if we, if we choose to surround ourselves with people who drag us down, who are critical, who are, you know, God forbid, abusive, you know, we really lose. We lose all agency. And so this is a really core, core piece of agency that, you know, we talk about. You just literally cannot. You can't have full access to your agency if you are surrounded by people who completely drag you down.

And I'll add to bring it really into what's happening inside the head is we have mirror neurons. We have a neurological system that replicates or mirrors what it's seeing or hearing, particularly visually. So you've been around people who have really pressured speech or their movements are really erratic, or they sound really worried or their facial things change in their body language. In your brain, the exact same neurons that would have controlled all those muscles are happening in you. You're not going to express them, but we're wired to pick it up from each other because we could be looking at something dangerous and we want to know and get out of there. Now. This happens all the time. You could be in line and someone's frustrated, you can see an erratic behavior and all of a sudden your mirror neurons will just fire and you'll start to experience strong emotions that are similar to the person you're with. It's the reason when we go see a movie, even though we know they're actors, we still feel it. We still literally feel it. So think about that for a moment.

So everywhere you put your brain, every.

Person you're in front of, you're picking up on their emotional valence, their power, if you will. If it's positive, you're going to slide more into an optimistic frame of mind. If it's negative, you're going to go the other direction. If they're anxious, they're scared, they're worried. Whatever the emotion is, you're going to pick it up.

It's so powerful to even consider the impact of that. And again, you guys walk us through the science even deeper science around what's going on with the mirror neurons, etc. Practically speaking, what do we do about it?

I can tell you what I do with young adults and college age kids and some 20 somethings is we sit down and we literally take a piece of paper. Graph paper is great. Literally start creating circles, put yourself in the middle and then start saying, all right, who are the people that I spend most of the time of the day with? And you do different circles. Make the circle bigger if it's more time and closer to you, smaller if it's not. And then you start to plot it out, you start to say, is this a plus or a minus? And all of a sudden you have this quick visual graph. We do it with little kids. It's really interesting to watch what they'll do. They're having a real problem With a bully, they put the bully tiny way farther away, but the bully is close. We have to really, really worry if it's a bad boss, if it's a tough co worker, if it's a tough living situation. You begin to see that graphically these little sort of people that are around us are influencing it. Then we go ahead and we make some decisions. Can I shorten the time I'm with this person? Can I spend more time with this person? And just a few adjustments can be a game changer.

I put many of the executives I coach through a simple exercise. I ask them to make a list of where they get support from in their lives and. And at work. Who are some of the people who are particularly supportive? Whom do they learn from? Whom do they learn from most? And what types of things do they learn from? Various people. And then lastly, I ask them, who's on your informal board of advisors? People you can just pick up the phone and call and say, hey, can I get 10 minutes with you? I'm struggling with something. I need. I need your perspective. So ask them, who's on your board of advisors? And usually people find that there are some people they could use a little more support, they could learn a little more broadly. And so they need to add a few more people into the mix that they can learn from. And they also need to widen their circle of advisors in their lives. And this is one of the key ways that we all grow and develop in our lives is through our relationships with other people. And it's surprising how few of us actually think about this in any kind of systematic way. Right? Until you sort of force someone to actually, you know, think about it, create a list, you know, for a lot of people, it just remains kind of, you know, vaguely defined.

Paul, we're too busy checking our smartphones, and we gotta start by controlling those stimuli, right?

Why it's number one. Why it's number one, Brian.

Yeah, I mean, but again, we're being playful about it, but it's so true because, oh, who has time to do that? The people that aren't blowing their consciousness up every day with, you know, incest and input.

That's right. No, that's really true. Yeah.

And I love the simple practice there. Just Simply bringing just 1, 2, 5, 10% more mindfulness and attention to it. That's agency. I mean, that is the essence of agency, right? Of demonstrating power. And as we do that, our power expands. And as we aggregate, we like to say aggregate and compound these small little incremental gains. Magic Happens over an extended period of time.

Exactly right. Really? It's exactly right. One of the things we say when it comes to agency is all of us really are the sum total of all the decisions we make over the course of our lives. And how many of us really stop and reflect on what is the quality of my decision making? You know, kind of in the past, in the recent past, in the long ago past and moving forward, you know, what's my level of confidence in being able to make decisions for myself and what might improve my ability to make better decisions in my life. So that's fundamental to what human agency is all about.

I love it. That's actually a great way to bring us full circle to the power of agency. We obviously just scratch the surface of. Again, your great book, you mentioned a. Well, so they can get this on Amazon, wherever else they get their books. You mentioned the survey. Is that online? I did it in the book. But is that online as well where we can do an inventory of where we stand in these seven principles?

You know, we have put it, we have an electronic version of it. It's not up online yet. We're using groups of people at this point and you know, when we speak in front of groups, we oftentimes have them take the instrument and they get a little brief report that describes the narrative, that describes their, their levels of agency on the different principles. We have not put it up onto the Internet yet. We're still talking about when and how to do that. But it is up online and it is in the book. The instrument in the book. You can self score yourself in the book.

Awesome. So get it in the book. And then what's the website the best place for them to learn more about you guys?

Www.powerofagency.com and you can take a sample test of the tool. You can take the control stimuli subtest on powerofagency.com perfect. You'll get a result delivered, your results delivered to your inbox.

That's fantastic. I appreciate you both. Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Thank you so much.