Interview: Lead Yourself First with Mike Erwin

You're listening to Lead Yourself first, an optimal living interview with Mike Irwin and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Mike Irwin, who is a co author of a phenomenal book called Lead Yourself First. Subtitle Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude. My wife Alexandra got me this book after seeing it somewhere in Brene Brown's must read stack of some kind. She got it for me. I immediately read it. Absolutely loved it. As you know, I'm a huge fan of reducing our input. Mike and his co author, Raymond Kethledge really provided kind of a context and a language for me to articulate why I'm so committed to solitude. And again, it's a phenomenal book. Mike is, among many things, the head of the Is it Positivity Project.

That's right, Positivity Project.

Positivity Project, a nonprofit that helps America's youth build better relationships by recognizing the character strengths in themselves and others. He's also an assistant professor at West Point where he teaches an introduction to psychology, the Psychology of Leadership, which I think is extraordinarily inspiring and cool. Mike, appreciate you taking the time to be here and appreciate the decades of work you've put into yourself that led to this book.

Well, thank you very much. Really excited Brian to unpack some of these concepts and these ideas that we talked about in the book and that have so many applications to all of us, I think, in the world as leaders.

Right on. So let's start at the top. I like to start these chats with the title Lead Yourself First. What does that mean for you? Why did you guys decide to call the book that?

So part of the backstory was back in 2010 and 11, as we were starting to come together and collaborate and think about how we wanted to work on this book. A part of it was this idea and this threat of nonconformity. And how do you have the courage and the clarity to know when you're supposed to go down that beaten path and when you're supposed to not conform and to take a different route? So that was like part of the initial seed of the title. But as we came together and we kept on working at it, it became clear that this idea of leading yourself first was. It just resonated with us, both of us, and then also our editors who we worked with on it as well, because it was the clear message in three words, lead yourself first, that, hey, before you're ready to lead other people. And that's what we Think about so often in leadership is how are we engaging with and building relationships and inspiring and mentoring and guiding other people that the first person you got to make sure that you're leading and getting right is yourself.

Right on. And then that leads us to the subtitle, Inspiring Leadership through Solitude. So, you know, a core theme of the book, of course, is the importance of solitude. Talk to us about that, please.

Yeah, and so one of the things about solitude is that it's a word that a lot of us have heard about and thought a lot about, but not necessarily spent much time thinking about how to give an operational definition to it. We define it as the psychological space where the mind is isolated from the inputs from other minds. And so we'll often talk about this. But if you're on top of Mount Rainier and you're piped into your Instagram feed or into social media or into an Internet or an article, that's not solitude. Even though you're geographically separated, perhaps for miles from, from other people. And at the same time you can be in a busy place like a coffee shop, have on your noise canceling headphones, and be writing and be thinking. And that is solitude. And so it really is that space where you reduce the distractions that the mind has and you are able to isolate the mind from those inputs from other minds.

I love that distinction. And you describe it as. And Jim Collins wrote the foreword to the book, which in itself was just such a great four page, you know, synopsis of the challenge of living in the input age and then your, you know, recommendations to deal with that. Talk to us. So the input age, right? Inputs, inputs, inputs. I like to kind of underline words and books that kind of show up thematically. Inputs was obviously a big one here. Talk to us about what it means to live in the input age.

Yeah, so when you think about. And again, this is something we're all so familiar with in our. Just the pace of our daily life right now. But once again, when do you slow down and you reflect and you really think about just how different neurologically is the process for the brain today than it was 10, 15 years ago. When you're talking about how do you consume information? How do you know what's going on in the world around you? How do you resolve conflict? How do you exchange information with other people? There's just so much coming at us from a brand standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, and this idea of the input age is just this relentless onslaught that if you don't intentionally put up barriers and think about how you're going to make sure that you reduce the flow of that input so that the brain just gets overwhelmed and deadened with the onslaught of input it receives all day long. So it was a brilliant way that Jim framed it. I was very fortunate. I was able to serve essentially as his general's aide when he was the class of 1951 chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point. And I was an assistant professor there at the time. And I had this opportunity to see him working up close. And I knew he's a very introverted guy, and this topic resonated with him a lot. He provided a lot of mentorship to Ray and I in those early days of the book. And like you said, even in that four page, succinct, powerful foreword to the book, he did such a great job of outlining the challenges and why it's so important to engage in solitude in the world today.

Right on. Which leads us to what we get when we spend time in solitude. You have basically four big things that we get out of solitude. Clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. Can you walk us through those, please?

Sure. And so maybe a bit of the backstory in terms of understanding how we arrived there. So we first started talking to a lot of people and researching the book and then reading a lot of historical examples. And that really came from Jim Collins's encouragement to think about some of the greatest leaders from the past couple hundred years years and read about them and see if they engaged in solitude in meaningful ways. And so really, we took that two pronged approach, interviewing contemporary leaders, asking them to reflect upon their leadership experiences over the past 15, 20 years, and then reading about these more historical figures. And so what really emerged, trended, if you will, was the fact that there was these four different ways that you just outlined it, how leaders use solitude. And so, just briefly, kind of walking through creativity and clarity, I like to say, are flip sides of the same coin. And so clarity is often achieved by thinking really hard, that really uncomfortable space when you're pushing hard and your brain hurts and you're working on that big essay or you're writing a chapter in a book or a proposal or whatever your job might require. And that's the clarity that you gain through, like, the heavy lifting intellectually that you need to do as a leader. And then the flip side of that coin is creativity, which is very often is just giving the mind space, giving, neurologically speaking, the opportunity for the brain to slow down for those connections that have been, you know, that have been firing all day long to find new synapses and to come up with new ideas. And so I think the best way that you get their creativity when it comes to creativity is by giving yourself that space and allowing it to happen naturally. Whereas that clarity is much more the product of deliberate effort and hard intellectual work. And just a quick note on that is that I think one of the big things out there today we see in the world is especially the rise of the gig economy and remote work and all that. I think there's a lot of leaders out there that outsource their thinking. They outsource it to consultants, they outsource it to members of their staff, and then they literally just get the presentation and then they make their decision and they don't actually do some of that hard analytical thinking that they need to do and that they owe the people whose lives they affect with the decision. And, you know, we profile General Eisenhower at the most extreme example. If your decision is going to affect someone's ability to be alive or dead on down through their livelihood, and are you building a successful business or does your decision cause, you know, an organization to have to fire people or lay people off? So anyways, that's just a bit of a quick aside, but I think it's really important that you know that as leaders, you not outsource too much of your thinking that needs to be done to allow you to arrive at good decisions. And then the other three and four.

Is, you know, can we actually step in there? Sure. I want to kind of shine a spotlight. Then we'll do the three and four in a moment. So. Because I think it's so important to emphasize the clarity and the creativity. And even this morning I'm sitting here, we're recording this, you know, as we're wrapping up 2018, I'm looking at 2019 and really seeing what are we going to do strategically to have the greatest demo impact. And I always start my day in what I call being creative versus reactive. So I do my deep work before I plug into any inputs. And that's just non negotiable as part of my, I call it AM one deep work slot before the family gets up, I've. I'm hammering my 60, 92 hours worth of deep work. Yep, that's easy. I've just conditioned myself to do that. Then I do my, you know, family time, I hit the trail, I come back and it's amazing to me to feel the seductive pull of inputs because there's so many things that I could react to in my day, you know, whether it's the social stuff or the teamwork stuff, et cetera. And literally this morning, I felt this, like, I had to pull myself down into my chair, you know, to actually think. And I was telling my wife the other day just how hard it is to truly think. And again, even for me, when I'm reading and writing and teaching, that requires a level of depth and thinking. But it's way easier than staring at a blank piece of paper and saying what's important and what. Getting really, really clear on what matters. And so I just had that personal, visceral experience today, and I want to stress how impactful your book was for me to get clarity on how important clarity is and what solitude does to our brain. And you guys did a great job on the biographical stories of both the modern and the historical leaders to really bring the point home. But I just want to shine a spotlight on that and emphasize it because I literally just had that direct experience just a few hours ago.

Yeah, well, it's a powerful example, and I hear that from so many different people who have read the book and made that a priority in their life about, like you said, just how important it is. And I like that analogy of having to, like, just force yourself in the chair, because it is. It's just so much easier to do many other things in our given day, but ultimately, if you're not, especially as a leader. And again, this idea, even of just leading yourself first, leading your family, leading. We all wear so many different leadership hats, whether or not we realize it or not, as volunteers and in our churches and in our communities and in our jobs and in our families, there's so many different opportunities that ultimately. Are you putting in that hard work to think, you know, and that's the big challenge of the book, is to say you really owe that you have the duty and the responsibility as a leader to. To do that for the people that you lead.

Yeah, I'm going to go. We're going to get to 3 and 4. But I want to emphasize this again, because you guys have a really funny line. What does it mean when you're in the whole. Outsourcing your thinking, you know, and. And kind of, as Cal Newport would say, you know, being a human router, you know, not a leader, like just a human router, like impulsively replying to things. And what does it mean that. That most, quote, leaders are responding to emails within minutes, if not seconds, and what are they doing during the rest of their day? And you make the point that, you know, if we're serious about our responsibilities, we won't do that. Like, we'll step back and we'll see just how pernicious that is to truly being effective. And again, you can get by doing that in today's world, because everyone's doing it. But as Cal says, to go back to him, doing deep work, reducing the inputs, going into solitude, leading yourself first is simultaneously more rare and more valuable. And even if you're getting by and performing well, again in quotes, what are you capable of? Because you're leaving a lot on the table when you're not embracing solitude and going deep. Right.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's so spot on. Obviously, I couldn't agree more. But it is really, it's something that you talk about. And obviously Cal new you and Cal and other people who think like this and trying to challenge the way that people think, I think is important. And I think we're seeing a bit of a pendulum swing with a fair number of people out there. But I'll tell you, there's still a fair number of people out there that don't buy it. I was actually yesterday, I founded a nonprofit called Team Red, White and Blue back in 2010, and it's kind of scaled across the country over the past eight years. And students at the Yale School of Management were doing a case study called the Accidental Entrepreneur on me and trying to put themselves in my shoes. They. So they had a bunch of financial data and they had a bunch of different things that they could look at and at about the three year mark of the organization, kind of give me some feedback and all that. And one of the questions was, is solitude integral to being able to make really important and breakthrough life decisions? And only about half of the students there who are about 28, the average age 27, 28 years old, were basically agreed and said yes. So there was about half the students in the room that day that basically said no. Really, creativity and clarity is achieved primarily through interacting with and brainstorming with other people. And so I think we have a ways to go to continue to convince more people of the power of solitude. Because for me, in Team Red, White and Blue, it played a massive role. As you read about in the book in 2010 and 11, those long runs that I would go on by myself is where I gained a lot of inspiration and emotional balance and clarity to better lead the organization. So anyways, just as a side note in this story from a business school where they're challenging students to think about, well, how important is solitude? That some are there and some have quite a ways to go, I think.

Yeah, that's awesome. And again, part of a longer chat, but it's going to be yes, and you're going to develop the ideas in partnership and in communication and collaboration, etcetera, Those positive relationships, etcetera. But. But we've got to start without the inputs. And then just as an aside to listeners who kind of are following along with my work, it's do it first thing in the morning. That's when your mind is freshest. That's when you have the opportunity to really, almost like you kind of reboot right from all the inputs from the day before. You kind of digested those over the night. You're fresh, go deep, then come out and lead others after you've led yourself first. Again, I'm just preaching to the preacher here.

Yeah, no, it's awesome though. Spot on.

So then we covered our first two of Solitude's big four, clarity and creativity. And so we talked clarity. Actually, let's talk creativity for a moment longer. So you mentioned going to Mount Rainier, and you're on Mount Rainier. You're by yourself, yet you're plugged in. Then you're not allowing your brain to kind of go into its default mode where it processes different things and kind of that subconscious or whatever you want to call it, processing occurs where a lot of creative insights occur. And it makes me think of how impulsively or compulsively or both people are attached to their smartphones, where I go on my hike every morning and X percent of the people are literally pulling out their phone in the middle of this amazing.

Yeah.

Opportunity to be alone. And boom. It's almost like I can see them blowing up that opportunity to actually have a truly creative thought because they just got another input. So let's. Let's just spend another moment talking about that.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah. I mean, you see, you just hit on a big one that I think there's so many missed opportunities for creativity. And the hard part about it is it's hard to be able to measure because you don't know what you didn't think of or what creative idea you didn't come up with. Right. So a lot of times people think, oh, yeah, I've been creative. But like you said, how much more are you capable of? And my challenge to people all the time is, hey, don't listen to me. Don't take my word for it. Just actually try it and run your Own personal experiment. And if you give yourself that space and that time, that 30 minute walk with the dog in the morning, that hike, that run when you're out pulling weeds, sometimes even if you're just driving the car and not listening to talk radio or to music or talking on the phone, just give yourself that time and sit down, see what happens and what kind of creative solutions you can come up with. What you find is most people will circle back and say, geez, wow, yeah, that really does work. And these new ideas will descend upon people's minds in those moments. It's one of the things I think people can better convince themselves if they at least give themselves a chance to practice it more intentionally. And then they know when they're stuck and they need to come up with a creative breakthrough solution or, or a creative leadership decision that, hey, going off on your own is actually the best way to prime and, or come up with that decision that is going to be creative.

I love it and I'm so sold on it. I don't do email, I don't even use a smartphone. I want to drive in my car. I never ever, ever listen to anything. It's just these little pockets of opportunity to create again. To go back to Cal, who's such a great compliment to your work to, to embrace boredom. Right. And you talked about Eisenhower, Walken and all these old leaders and generals, et cetera, who didn't have the opportunity to distract themselves. Boredom was just an inherent part of life until very, very recently, which again, you guys describe so well in the book. So first two, clarity, creativity. Let's talk about the third and fourth. Emotional balance and moral courage.

Yeah, and I love the first two, but these last two, there's a reason why we kind of built the book on clarity and then creativity, emotional balance and on through moral courage. I mean, emotional balance to me was very personal for me when I was going through reintegration from my third deployment. So I Iraq once, Afghanistan twice. And then I went to graduate school to study positive psychology and leadership at the University of Michigan. And when I was there, you know, it was not a very military state. There was no active duty military bases in the entire state of Michigan. And so I struggled with the reintegration and I struggled with the guilt, knowing that a lot of my friends and colleagues were going back over to Afghanistan or Iraq or being injured, you know, in some cases being killed. And I struggled emotionally with that. And so to me, solitude and specifically running, but also just finding space in my day, like you said, waking up Early I became a father at that time. So staying up late at night and sometimes just by the fire, or waking up really early when he would wake up, those kinds of moments afforded me the space mentally to be able to have that self talk. And you probably heard the phrase before, running is cheaper than therapy. That's a saying that a lot of ultra runners will use. But you get out there and it's that space for you to kind of talk it out in your head and say, you know what? Even though a lot of people are telling me that, hey, Mike, don't worry, you did your 28 month deploy, you did your piece. Now your job now is to focus on your studies and move on that no matter how many people tell you that there's only one person that can convince ourselves that, yes, it's not my fault, or I've done my piece and it's you. And you have to arrive at that on your own. And I don't see how you can arrive at that in the presence of, in conversations with other people. It's only something that has to be kind of tapped into your soul that you can kind of access and say, you know what? No, I've done my piece. And so I think a lot of the emotional balance challenge today that so many people feel comes from the fact that people are so plugged in and there's so many inputs and there's so much distraction and so much noise that our mind and our hearts don't get calm enough to be able to access that emotional balance and self control that solitude affords us. And then lastly is the moral courage piece. And as we conclude on that, Martin Luther King Jr. Pope John Paul II and Winston Churchill. I mean, these are some of the most amazing, most inspiring leaders of the 20th century and how they tapped into the power of solitude in very different ways. You know, Martin Luther King Jr. Is a big extrovert, you know, but, you know, late and deep into the night, you know, where he drew that inspiration spiritually and emotionally and mentally to be able to go forward with the mission that he knew very likely was going to cost him his life. Pope John Paul ii, like, trying to, you know, take down communism, Winston Churchill, and all the criticism that he faced from so many people. And so again, that solitude, that place where you fortify your moral backbone, that's one of the things that we learn not just from those three powerful stories from history, but also from interviewing lots of contemporary leaders of yes, when I had to make a really hard decision, when I had to make an unpopular decision, that the answer was not getting a bunch of people around me to pump me up and say, go on, boss, you can make that decision. It was that deep inward look, that look in times of quiet and reflection, to know that the hard decision you're about to make is the right one. And so I think there's a lot to be said about more the cognitive aspect of solitude in clarity and creativity. But the spirit, you know, the spiritual, the emotional, the soul, you know, that is wrapped up in emotional balance and.

Moral courage is ultimately what allows us to truly lead. Right, Exactly. Yeah, I'd love to hear some of your practices, like what do you do to eliminate, reduce, eliminate some of the inputs and to create your own solitude just to give us some ideas of how we can go about structuring our lives.

Yes. I think that we think about this in terms of a couple ways. One planned and targets of opportunity. So there are targets of opportunity around us all day long. And the great thing about smartphones these days is they at least the iOS 12, they can give you an audit on your time and you can see how much time you're spending. 2 minutes here, 5 minutes here, 3 minutes there, 8 minutes there. It adds up. You know, when you see, at the end of the day when you've got your phone for hours and you're like, geez, I don't remember sitting there on my phone for that long of a period of time. And so there are some, you know, some of these ways to use technology that can really help us. And so technology, this is not like all technology bad. No, actually there's a lot of technology, like how I signed up to, you know, find a time to talk with you. Right. That's a great use of technology to schedule your calls and schedule your conversations with people. So there's a lot of great things that technology can afford us to do. And then I think for me personally, I love podcasts. I gain a lot from them, but I'm very limited. I limit myself to a handful, five or six that I listen to. I make a constant practice. So when I drive places, especially to the airport, for me it's an hour and 15 minute drive from my house to the Raleigh Durham Airport. I very often just have the radio off the entire time, you know, and so there's this again, this idea of targets, opportunity and planned, and you can be very intentional about it and put it on your calendar and your schedule and ideally, like you said, Brian, to start your day because, you know, there's a better opportunity that nothing is going to derail that time if you plan it early in the day. But there are also these targets of opportunity that emerge where, you know, we can find 5 minutes here, 10 minutes here, and sometimes that's all we need.

And those little moments add up one way or the other. Right. We're aggregating and compounding them. And. Wow, I just spent two hours on my phone. Really?

Yeah.

Yeah. That's exciting. You talk in the book about one of the big reasons why people have such a hard time planning and then finding those targets of opportunity, the fear of missing out. Talk to us about that.

Yep.

Yeah.

And so this is something I talked about with Renee Brown, you know, who was also one of my mentors, and I had the fortune of, you know, visiting with a couple times at West Point as she's researching her books, and she was the first one who told me about fomo. I'm not sure if you heard it now, but there's this movement afoot now for Jomo, you know, the joy of missing out, which is the counter move to fomo. But, yeah, it's definitely, I think, psychologically, we know that, you know, when other people are doing lots of things and whether it's what they're buying or the trips they're on or whether spending their time or whatever it might be, when you allow yourself too much input, you give yourself this psychological framework that there's all these things happening without me. And, oh, by the way, those experiences that everybody else is having are so amazing. And we know what people do typically on social media is they share the highlight reel of their life or of their day. And so we're not getting accurate look into those experiences. We're getting the highlight reel. You're not seeing all the other stuff around it. And so I think a lot of us really struggle because we look at social media, we look at what other people are doing, and we see the best aspects of that, and we feel like we're missing out. And that's the power of somehow is really flipping FOMO into Jomo and having the fact that, you know what, the fact that I'm not there, that I'm actually staying at home for the holidays and not having to go to a million different places or that I'm not going out on Black Friday like everybody else, like, taking joy and pride in that, is a psychological shift that I think some people are starting to make. And hopefully in the future, a lot more of us will be making as well.

Yeah, I love it. Jomo. That's fantastic.

Yeah.

One of the points I made in reflecting on your wisdom in the Philosopher's Note was if you want to be afraid of missing out on something, be afraid of missing out on your ultimate potential and on truly leading and actualizing what you're here to do and kind of separate the trivial from the truly meaningful and get afraid of that. Like, have a really, really healthy fear about that. And then look at those minutes that accumulate to hours, that accumulate to weeks and months and years of your life in little petty distractions that could have been used more wisely. So I found the book to be a real call and challenge to that. If you're serious about your responsibilities as a human being and a leader, then you'll choose to live differently. I mean, that's. End of the day. That's what it's all about. Which leads us to the. For me. Which leads us to the final idea. I wanted to hear your thoughts on. You talk about Churchill. You mentioned in the moral courage section and this. This idea that he had, you know, he was a romantic, as you said. He believed that you could do great things with your life, you know, and that there was a moral imperative to do so. Can you talk to us about that? Because to me, at the end of the day, that idea of living heroically in the deepest sense of the word, of having the strength for two, and being driven by that love for life and for yourself and for those you're blessed to have in your life, is what it comes down to and why I think solitude is so important.

Absolutely. Well, this is. Of all the podcast interviews I've had, that's the first time I've been asked that question. So I love it when I get a new one. So I think that that concept that you just laid out, the church will espouse, but frankly, a lot of people who have been exceptional leaders throughout history have challenged us to do the same sort of thing. It's something that has become more difficult, I think, for a lot of us in the world today, due to the noise, due to the distractions, and due to, frankly, a lot of the trivialities that just surround us. You know, when you look at the average thing on the Internet, when you look at the average television show, when you look at, as you're aware, the average American spends close to 35 hours a week watching television. We spend, teenagers say, spending six to seven hours in front of a screen every single day. That's 60 hours, 50 to 60 hours every week. You start thinking about what is the actual content that you're Consuming that you're bringing into your mind when you're on that Internet site or on your phone or watching that television show. And the reality is, most of it's not good. Most of it is not challenging you to be better, to live heroically. Most of it is just pure entertainment. And there's a huge difference between entertainment and leisure. Leisure has meaningful purpose, to restore and to rejuvenate. And entertainment is, I think, primarily there to distract us from the realities of life. So I would sum it up, I really think, by saying that solitude is that place where you can have the best conversation of your life with yourself. It's that the place you can go to consistently and especially in those big moments of life where you can really peel back and go deep for hours, if not days, of unplugging and stepping back and going in the nature or going out and doing something like a big hike or a big run. But when you do that, I think you foster the environment. You create the conditions where it's really hard to run and hide from the truth, and the truth that you know, which is that you've got more in your tank. You've got more that you can be doing to live your life better. And yes, we can be challenged by all kinds of great motivational speakers and, you know, people like you and I and people who have written books and done all these things. But at the end of the day, each individual has to move the needle for themselves, right? At the end of the day, only one person knows how you truly spend your time, and it's you. And so I think that for me, solitude is that place where it is nearly impossible to hide from the truth, from the fact that we can be doing things differently and better and more and live for two, and be heroic and all the things you laid out. I think that's the place where, if you are willing to go to that space and quiet your mind and your soul for long enough, you come to that realization of, I'm doing this and I'm doing that, and I need to stop those, and I need to do more of this. Right? And whatever it might be, again, that clarity really emerges, I think, when you give yourself that space and time to think.

Beautifully said. Amen. Let's do this. Yeah. Again, we can talk about this so much longer. I'm excited to talk more about how we can play together for now. Where can people obviously lead yourself first, Find it on Amazon, wherever you buy books, where can they find and learn more about you and connect with you and your work?

Yeah. So the other place is I'm at characterleadership Center. So that's some of the work that I do on the leadership side of positive psychology and then the positivity project. Posproject.org But I'm on social media, you know, so that's the thing you just kind of capping it all together is that, you know, the point of the book is not to say that you shouldn't be anywhere on social media or that, you know, that you should not, you know, access the Internet. Right. There are absolutely some roles and places for that. So people can access and find me on my LinkedIn and on Twitter and all that. So I'm very intentional with my use of the time there, as you might imagine. But I've definitely found it useful to be able to connect with a lot of great people out there over time in a very deliberate and intentional way through characterleadership center and through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Fantastic, Mike, thanks again.

Absolutely. Brian, thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.