Becoming an Elite Performer

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What separates average performers from elite performers? What is the mindset of these elite performers? How do they deal with setbacks in a constantly changing business and financial landscape? Hi everyone, I'm Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Tim Kight. Tim is the founder and CEO of Focus 3, And he spent more than 3 decades studying, observing, and teaching what distinguishes elite performers from average performers. By the end of today's show, you'll understand that elite performers think and behave differently because they've adopted a system, a system that Tim calls the R-Factor. So let's get started with Tim Kight.

I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what what you call the E+R=O, which is one of your principles. What is that?

It's a framework for navigating the situations of life. And E+R=O stands for event plus response equals outcome. And it teaches a very simple but profound principle about how life works, life and work. That is, events happen, you choose a response, and it's your response that produces the outcome. And events are important, obviously, Circumstances, situations arise, things happen all the time, but it's your R, that's why we call it the R factor. It's your response to those circumstances or in pursuit of your outcomes is where all your power resides because you don't control events. Events happen. They influence you. You can influence them, but you don't control events. You do control how you choose to respond. You are not your circumstances. You are your choices. Whenever I start with an athletic team, I start with this statement: genetics shape you, circumstances influence you, your choices define you. Because I get asked all the time, you know, as a behavior performance consultant, is it nature or is it nurture, right? Is it genetics or is it situation? And I say, that's— you kind of missed the question there. Of course genetics matter. Of course circumstances matter, but your power doesn't reside in genetics. You have no choice over your genetics. And you initially have very little choice over circumstances. You do later on in life. That pushes us to this third category, choice, decisions. So E R O is this wonderful framework that I can apply to anything in my life, how I sell, how I do client service, how I navigate change, how I drive my car, how I deal with COVID-19 and all of the massive disruptions it's produced. Is event, response, outcome. And I'm going to pour all my power into the R. I always tell people this: manage your R with the O in mind, and then navigate events along the way. So make it strategic. The people who use E R O the best are strategic thinkers. What outcome do I want? What response will get me there? And what events do I have to navigate? And they're prepared for change. They don't expect the E to always be helpful. In fact, you get 3 kinds of events in life.

Helpful, neutral, painful. What I like about that framework is that it's easy for us to remember E R O. And so there are always events happening around us. Some are good, some not so good. And then we have to choose, well, what's our response going to be? Now, I know a second framework that you have here is what you call discipline over default.

And tell me, what do you mean by that? There's two ways that you can manage the R. There's two ways that you can respond to the stuff of life. Two ways you can respond to pursuing outcomes, with discipline or default. And we define discipline as choices that are intentional, purposeful, skillful. We define default as choices that are impulsive, on autopilot, or resistant. And what's interesting, Steve, about discipline over default, is discipline does not mean punishment. It was hijacked by the punishment people a long time ago. It doesn't mean punishment. It means learning how to be intentional and purposeful. That's where the skillful thing comes in. Discipline is not something someone does to you. It's something you choose to do for yourself. It's not imposed on you from the outside. It's chosen by you on the inside. A disciplined R produces a very different O than a default R. And one of the great temptations when change happens is to resort to default, right? To impulsively react to change, to react to change on autopilot, to be resistant to change. By definition, that's default. And it's not that default's always bad. That's not the point. It's just less than effective. It's not the best version of you. And the most successful people that I have studied, the most successful people, and I've documented their performance, whether it's business, or athletics or any other environment. They're discipline-driven people. They are intentional about what they do. They're purposeful about what they do and they're skillful about what they do. And so that discipline over default is a very significant part of the E R O system. And again, discipline R produces a real different outcome than a default. One last thought, you can be highly talented and on default and therefore underperform.

Discipline is one of my core values. I have a piece of paper that I print out every day, and discipline is one of the words that's on the top of it. I think of myself as a highly disciplined person. I've worked with some people who are highly disciplined. As you think about discipline, what drives someone to be disciplined?

If someone says, "I'm just not disciplined enough," what would you say to that person? Well, that's why we use this system. That's why E R O is very practical because it's not terribly complex. And it's pretty straightforward in a utilitarian way. If you want a particular outcome, you have to make a decision about what you're going to do to go pursue it. I call it the necessary R. For every outcome you want, there's an R that's required to go get it. I put it into 3 parts. If you want that outcome, work the process, you Invest the time, solve the problems. That's how you get that outcome, period. And whether you do or don't have quote unquote what goes for discipline and what motivates you, if you want the O, you want that outcome, then work the process. Don't complain about the process, go work it. Do you understand the time that's required? Don't complain about that, go invest the time. And then there are going to be problems. Of course there will be. Events will come up along the way that will cause difficulties and challenges. If you don't want the O really, then you won't commit to a discipline R. So the O could be some higher purpose. It could be some calling. It could be, you know, something very profound and greater than self, or it can be very straightforward. I want to lose X amount of pounds. I want to achieve a certain amount of income. I want to navigate this. I want to navigate that. That's very straightforward, which is why I love E R O. And I love this work the process, invest the time, solve the problems. And if you think about it, Steve, there's no goal in life where there isn't a process of work, time investment required, or problems to be navigated. And also the work, the time, and the problems scale with the size of the goal. The bigger the goal, the harder the work, the longer the time, and the bigger the problems. That's just how life works. So I've seen people who get profoundly motivated to become disciplined because of some higher calling in their life, and that's awesome. Frankly, I think that's kind of where I'm at in my life. Years ago, I made a decision about some spiritual things in my life and very profound impact in my life. But it's also real practical.

And that is certain things that I want to achieve requires discipline and default doesn't work. And one of the things you said there was, do you really want the O? And I've seen that happen often where people will say, I want this outcome and maybe it's a big outcome, and they start getting into it and they start realizing what's going to be required to get that outcome.

And then they realize, maybe I didn't want that outcome that badly. You know, it's funny you say that. I think I wrote a blog about this some years ago is your R gets tested and your commitment gets tested. And if you really, and I think you said it brilliantly and simply, if you want the O, then engage in the necessary R. It's really pretty straightforward. There's a necessary R. Here's another way to think of ERO. I do a lot of work inside schools. I love presenting this to teenagers in a high school classroom. And I put E R O up on the board. And over the O I put want, over the R I put work, and over the E I put stuff. And so the O is what you want. The R is the work you have to do to go get it. And the E is the stuff you have to navigate along the way. And so I ask the students, tell me what you want in life as you sit here as a high school junior, high school senior, what do you want? And as they tell me, I just write under the O things they want. I want to play in the NFL. I want to be a doctor. I want to, whatever they put down and this and the list of things. And some of them are profound and some are pretty simple. I want to be in a rock band or whatever. I mean, it's just, and I don't judge them. It's, that's their O. Then I'll circle one of them and say, all right, see that O right there, that want, you can have that if and only if you do the work, which is the R. And the R that you choose, you can navigate the stuff along the way because it won't be smooth. You're going to have to adjust and adapt along the way because events will pop up that will be disruptive. Some will be helpful, some will not. So the work that's required, just understand it. Then like I circled the doctor when I said that's a 10-year R. You ready for that?

The student usually goes, is there an app for that? No, there's no app for that. And I've said in the past, and I don't know if I came up with this or maybe I read it somewhere, but it's essentially, does your desire match your dream?

And if the dream is bigger than your desire to achieve, it's just not going to happen. Yeah. We say to the teams that we work with, make sure that the habits you have today are in alignment with the dreams that you have for tomorrow. Yeah.

And if they're not, then either change your dream or change your habit.

Perfect.

Now, another concept that you talk about is what you call BCD.

B-C-D, and this is so applicable as well. So tell me what that means. Yeah, it's real straightforward. It's the ultimate default attitude or mindset, and it stands for blame, complain, defend. When things don't go the way people want, there's a tendency to blame other people, complain about things, and then defend self. You see a lot of B-C-D when change happens. A lot of B-C-D happening right now, but it's the ultimate default response to things. And it just doesn't work. It's a bad investment of time and energy. The time and energy wasted on BCD could be redirected into solving, into producing. We actually help companies monetize the cost of BCD in their business. It's real simple. We ask how many people are employees or associates of your company? And then how many hours a week would you say on average people engage in BCD? What is your average hourly wage that you pay? You multiply that times the number of hours of BCD. That's a weekly BCD cost, times 4 is monthly, times 12 is annual. And for a 500-person company, the average BCD cost is something in the $14-15 million a year range, which the average 500-employee company does not have $12, $13, $14, $15 million to waste. Now an individual can do the same thing. How many hours a week do you personally engage in BCD? And if you stop doing that and redirected your response, you redirected your mindset and activity to solving, producing, you know, navigating stuff with a productive attitude. What's that worth to you? And in the world of sales and the world of being a financial advisor and the world of client service and whatever domain we all tend to compete in, you think of that. The way you respond to things is your ultimate resource. So you don't want to waste it blaming, complaining, defending.

So we've got a strict no BCD rule. And I want to explore the defend here for just a minute because I think so often defending is our default behavior. If we're challenged by someone on something, then we want to defend what we've been doing or we want to defend what we know as opposed to being open and receptive to maybe I can learn something here. Maybe they know something I don't know, or maybe I need to keep an open mind about something. How do you further think about this idea of defend and what can we do to think differently about defend so that we can be more successful leaders, we can be more successful business owners and just more successful, period?

Well, you nailed it. I mean, the human tendency is to engage in what's technically called defensive routines, which is this, when challenged with feedback, interestingly enough, particularly when we're challenged with feedback that deep inside we think there might be truth to it. It wounds the ego. And a lot of times the reason why we defend ourselves, not always, but a lot of it's protection of image. And you put your finger on the pulse of that. And that is, you know, there might be something here for me to learn. You can't learn what you think you already know. And if we don't know something, it's easy to fix it. And that is go learn it. But we waste time defending ourselves that could be invested in learning. And what's interesting is it might be the person giving the feedback is off base. But if you don't defend as you listen to it and you accept the feedback and work your way through it, it could confirm that, you know what, I think I'm okay on this, but you've respected the feedback. You listen to it. So I suggest 4 questions that people should use when they get that kind of feedback. Ask themselves 4 questions. What do I not see that I need to see? What do I see but I'm discounting? What am I pretending not to see? And how do others see this in a way that I don't? And that keeps us away from defensiveness. And if you ask those 4 questions, it humbles you. It puts you into a mindset of humility. And by the way, humility is strength properly directed. Humility does not mean weakness. It means it's strength directed properly. You know, C.S. Lewis said, humble people don't think less of themselves. They think of themselves less. Steve gives me feedback and it stings. Okay. What can I learn from this? That's what's got to pop into my head. I ask the 4 questions. And I may conclude at the end that thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I think I'm okay. Or, you know what? Great insight. Boy, there's some shifts and adjustments I need to make.

So that's how I would approach the defensiveness part of BCD. Yeah. And this idea of feedback, I was listening to a podcast a while ago and they were interviewing, I believe it was a coach from one of the top college basketball teams. And they asked the coach, you know, what's one of the key takeaways that you'd like people to remember from our conversation today? And he said something to the effect of, if you want to get better, then improve your relationship to feedback. For the most part, that's just what you were saying here is that don't get defensive. If someone's giving you feedback, don't get defensive.

You just need to improve your relationship to that. And know that you might learn something there. I may have to adopt that one. I'd really like that. That's a great way to say that. One of the things I've noticed, a defensive routine that's really popular is when someone gives you feedback and you get upset, you find a flaw in the person giving you the feedback to justify rejecting it. And keep in mind, all feedback comes from imperfect people. It's very tempting to say, again, if you give me feedback and if I know you well, the first thing I start doing is looking for flaws in you. Steve doesn't do that. What gives him the right to tell me? And I find a flaw in you. Very popular, by the way, unfortunately, in marriage. Our spouse or significant other will give us feedback and we know their flaws because we live with them. And it's easy to use that defensive routine, but improve your relationship to feedback.

I really liked that. Just one more quick thing here on feedback. I know for me personally, sometimes I don't like to get feedback because I don't want to hear what they're going to say. Because I know there's something I could improve.

And it's like, ah, if I just don't hear it, then maybe it didn't happen kind of thing. So yeah, we play these weird psychological games because the fact of the matter is people are constantly giving you feedback or talking about you and giving assessment. You're just not always involved in the conversation. Right. And let's go back to Discipline Over Default for a moment. One of the exercises we do in our workshops is we, it's actually in the R-Factor workbook, is there's a page where it's just one whole page and the top is a box that says discipline, empty. Below is a box that says default and it's empty. And we ask the participants to write down your default behaviors in the box below. When you're on default, what does it look like in your life or your work? And when you're acting with discipline, what's it look like? And they have to write down their default behaviors. They have to write down their discipline behaviors. And it's a self-evaluation. And then when people are done doing that, we have the group articulate individually some things that they've said, which I then write, or one of my consultants writes on the whiteboard or the flip chart. And we start with, how many of you wrote BCD down under default? Because everybody BCDs to some extent. And you know, people raise their hands, up on the board goes default. So on one side of the board is default behaviors, self-identified by the way. On the right side is disciplined behaviors, self-identified. And then one of the things that ends up happening is people start to feel comfortable acknowledging that they have these default behaviors. Now, one of the things that I've noticed in the workshops, there's a pattern, is when articulating default behaviors, people tend to say, well, some people, or on default, a default thing is, and I tell the group, every time you share, you have to use, I do this, I do that. You have to self-identify. This is your behavior. And then there's this moment where As we wrap that up, we say, if you want greater insight onto your discipline-default behaviors, ask the people who know you the best what your default behaviors are. Your closest colleagues at work, your closest friends, and your spouse or significant other, because they have a perspective. And when they share your default behaviors, resist the temptation to come back with them and with their default behaviors. Yeah. But it's a phenomenal exercise. And when the behaviors are up on the board, you know, it's a company, What I explained to them is what you see on the board is your actual culture. It doesn't matter what the posters say. It doesn't matter what your website says. To the extent you behave this way on default, that's the culture of your company or your team. The entire point of R-Factor training is to do less default, more discipline. Is to move behavior from the default category to the discipline category. And we say we're not about perfection, it's about progress. It's not about perfection. It's about progress. There's nobody— I'm not constantly on the discipline side. Everybody's got default stuff. And that's the task that we're after. Very important moment, by the way.

It's early in the workshop. It's a profound moment in the journey. So we've talked about E R O. We've talked about discipline over default. We've talked about BCD. Do you have any examples of any one of those three of someone who has applied one of those concepts, maybe to help make this even more concrete?

The first school that ever hired us to implement this into their school system was Hilliard City Schools here in central Ohio. And they had read about my work with Ohio State football and the 2014 national championship and how leadership culture behavior and E+R=O played a significant role in Ohio State navigating that season and overcoming lots of obstacles and difficulties and then winning the national championship. And it was a wonderful year. And people said it's a magical year. That wasn't magic. It was mechanics. It was leadership from Coach Meyer and the staff and the players. And players took ownership of the culture and they applied E R O to all kinds of things. Cardale Jones was a third-string quarterback who was thrust into an unbelievably pressure-filled situation where JT Barrett, who was our quarterback the whole year long, He had broken his ankle at the end of the third quarter in Ohio State's game against a team up north, and in comes Cardale, third-string quarterback. We win that game, but then now he's got to go to the Big Ten championship game and play Wisconsin, which had one of the top defenses in the country. But Wisconsin had a great football team, and they had the best running back in the country, actually ended up being, I think, second or third in Heisman that year. And Ohio State won that game soundly, and as a consequence of that, they were in the college football playoffs. And then Then they beat Alabama, who also had a Heisman finalist on their team. And then they beat Oregon, who had the Heisman winner, Marcus Mariota. And Cardale Jones, our third-string quarterback, led that charge. And so there was a definitive use of E+R=O. In fact, when they— at the end, someone asked Cardale, tell us about how and why this all happened. And he said, well, I trusted my teammates. I didn't want to leave my brothers down. And he held up his E+R=O wristband. It was all about how I'm choosing to respond. So Hilliard City Schools read about all that. And then they brought us in to help them install this whole system at Hilliard City Schools. And it's a big school district. And they, and I'll make this really short and tie it to today. They've been doing E R O training and culture training and leadership training ever since 2000, end of 2014, 2015, when COVID hit. And the school questions became very confusing, very challenging, very difficult. Hilliard immediately— superintendent led the charge and the principals, teachers— they immediately applied the system that they'd learned, which was the culture that they built and E R O. And adjust and adapt became obviously one of the critical principles of we've got to adjust how we respond. Clearly doing education in the COVID world is not going to be like it was in the old days. And one of the principles we teach in Adjust and Adapt is don't equate discomfort with stress. Change is by definition going to be uncomfortable. It doesn't need to be stressful. And that's a false equation. What people do is they make a big mistake when they equate discomfort with stress, because there are a lot of things in the world that are uncomfortable. So the term that we use is productive discomfort. And that's the way to view change. Embrace productive discomfort. Don't tolerate it. Don't just accept it. Embrace it. Reframe how you see change. And Hilliard did that. Like I said, work the process, invest the time, solve the problems. No BCD. So those are kind of parallel things. Ohio State 2014, Cardell Jones, Hilliard City Schools now as they're navigating these adjustments. I talked to some financial advisors not too long ago that did a podcast for a particular company, and it was pretty clear that some of the FAs were very creative in the way they were adjusting to client contact. Pretty clear that a lot of them were not very creative, that were in fact feeling the stress, didn't like the changes that were being made, didn't like the digital connections, and they were resisting it. They were default reaction to all the changes required by COVID. And I explained to them, I said, change presents an opportunity to differentiate yourself. And if you use this situation and you get creative and you get disciplined and you work the process, invest the time and solve the problems, you're going to come out of this very successful because you'll deliver an exceptional experience to your client base. And they'll see you being proactive and navigating this and serving them when they need you a great deal, as opposed to sitting back and BCDing about all this stuff as if BCD is going to change anything.

It's not. It's going to make things worse. Yeah, that's why this conversation is so important, because there is a framework and you've codified it, you've laid it out, you've described it where we can respond to change. And clearly change is going to happen. You started off the top of our conversation by calling it big change. If people can have the framework, if they can understand and digest and soak in what you're talking about here, they're going to have an ability and a way forward to navigate the change and come out the other side of it in a very positive way. I think this is a great time to mention the book by Coach Urban Meyer, Above the Line. It talks about that "magical season" when they won the national championship a few years ago. And you're all over it in terms of your philosophy, your principles are in there. And so for you listening to this, I would definitely encourage you to go and pick up that book because not only if you're a sports fan, you're going to enjoy it, but if you're just a fan of leadership and sound management, I think you're going to really appreciate how that is laid out in the book there.

Yeah, it's not even really a football book. We helped Urban write that book and it's really about life and leadership like it says on the COVID But a lot of non-athletic people, non-sports people pick up the book and love it. And yes, Ohio State plays a significant role because of that.

But I've even had, you know, Michigan fans or USC fans who don't have any particular affinity for Ohio State say, well, that was a good book. Tim, well, let's dig a little deeper here into the need to adapt to change and to adjust to change.

And so you do have a framework on that. So let's talk a little bit about when life throws us a curveball, what do we do? It's such a daily topic right now. And it was before, just because I mean, prior to COVID-19, change was a big topic for us with all of our clients. And one of the main reasons we're hired to teach E R O. But now that the COVID thing has hit, it's become just amplified. And the first thing that I would say is don't expect stability. Don't expect things to be the same today as they were yesterday. Don't expect things to be tomorrow the way they are today. If people expect certainty and stability, they're going to get in trouble. So you definitely do not want to do that. And then the other thing I'd say is don't get stuck in the comfort zone. This comfort zone is not your friend. And, you know, I mentioned earlier that about change is, you know, it's uncomfortable, but it doesn't need to be stressful. This is really interesting. Resistance to change tends to be emotional, not rational. And what people will do is they'll try to use rationality to defend while they're resisting the change. But if they stopped and looked at themselves, they would understand that the resistance to change is emotional. Change is only as stressful as you make it. Change itself is neither for you nor against you. Change is agnostic and neutral. And change is also indifferent in terms of whether you're ready for it or not. I mean, change just happens. It doesn't, not going to call you up in the morning and say, 'Hey, there's some changes that we think we're going to make in the market, but we don't want to make them until you're ready.' Change doesn't operate that way. Change just does its thing. And so the big, obviously the big discipline is how do you frame it? Now, here's an interesting part of the way R-Factor works. There's a relationship between perception and action. How you see a situation shapes how you're going to respond to it. Perception drives action. How you see and frame something drives and determines how you deal with it. All Human behavior is internal and mental first and external and behavioral second. Therefore, when change happens, you have to frame it the right way. You have to see it in a healthy, effective, clear fashion. And if you don't, if you frame it negatively, you'll feel negative and you in fact will resist it and you'll respond negatively. So step number 1, navigating change is you better frame it as an opportunity. You better frame it as a necessity. You better frame it as something you just have to deal with and don't view it as something super negative. I shared with you before this podcast started that in March when COVID was really starting to pick up steam, I got the diagnosis of stage 4 cancer in my life. That my doctor, we did all these tests and the doctor came in the office, uh, in the waiting room and called me in and said, you know, the biopsies have come back and he was very emotional about it. And my first response to it, Steve, was Awesome.

I'm prepared for this.

I've trained my whole life for this. And I told him, I know what to do mentally. You tell me what to do medically and let's go. And what first popped into my head was E R O and the changes I would have to make because I knew, I mean, when you get that kind of a diagnosis, you don't know all the details. Now I do now, by the way, because I've done chemo for the last 6 months. But even when he told me, I immediately started thinking in my mind, okay, what am I going to have to do about this? How's this going to change what I do here and change what I do there? You know, selling, service, my family life, travel, and I got COVID to boot. So I got the big 3 C's. You know, I had to navigate COVID. I got cancer. I'm doing chemo. So COVID, cancer, chemo in the last 6 months. And you know what? Awesome. Do I want any of those things? No. Do I have them? Yes. And so my response is the one thing that I control, not the other stuff. So the way I frame it mentally is everything. If I frame all that as woe is me and that's horrible and I can't stand this, no BCD. So the whole framing thing is, and the way I like to say it is, don't let the past control you or the future intimidate you. Change is the bridge to the future, your future. Get on that bridge. Don't stay on this side of it. To stay on this side in BCD, all that does is make you less competitive no matter what industry you're in. So you don't have to like the change. That's okay. I don't like having cancer. I don't like it. But you know what? I fully embrace the fact that it exists and I'm doing battle with it.

And I laugh at it, not because I like it, but because I have it and I'm not going to react negatively to it. I'm going to respond with intention, purpose, and skill. And I appreciate you sharing that you're going through cancer. And what I also want to acknowledge about that is that when you talk about these principles, you talk about these frameworks, you talk about these concepts, these are not just intellectual theories and things that you've researched and said, "This seems to make sense, so I'm going to go out and teach this," because now you have been thrust in one of the worst imaginable situations that someone could find themselves in with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. And just to hear you describe that you are responding to that in exactly the same way that you are teaching other people to respond to an event that they have in their life tells me that there is a 100% congruity between what you are teaching and the way that you are living. And I think we can all learn from that. And the closer that we can, each of us as individuals, get to that 100% congruity between what we say and what we actually do, the better result we're going to get.

So I just appreciate you sharing that. I think that's such an important lesson for all of us. Yeah. I mean, and I appreciate that. The thing for me is that all this stuff that I teach, I'm a student of it first. I'm a practitioner of it second, and I'm a teacher of it third. I purposed that in my life way back when, a long time ago. My initial interest in all this was how does that actually work in someone's life and how can I integrate it into my life? And then how can I teach it and help other people integrate into their lives? And one of the big catalytic experiences for me was reading the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And I've thought about him many, many times the last 6 months because Dr. Frankl's situation was far worse than mine. Dr. Frankl's situation, he was a Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna, at the outbreak of World War II. And his wife was pregnant and they were all incarcerated in the death camps of Nazi Germany. I mean, he got separated from his wife when they were taking him off to the concentration camps and she's pregnant. He never saw her again. She died in a camp someplace. And so did his mom and dad and the rest of his family. And in that book, he tells a story of how he navigated that and how he kept hope and vision and meaning and purpose in his life, even in the midst of the horrific Circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps. I read that in 1972 as a sophomore at UCLA. What grabbed me about it, Steve, was when I read that book, it drove me to my knees. I said, I couldn't do that. I'm not that strong of a person. How does that happen in your life? Which is what got me on the pathway to study this stuff. Because I wanted to become that kind of a person. I wanted to be able to have the kind of strength and vision and purpose and meaning in my life that would—

that should circumstances of that severity happen to me, that I'd be able to respond in a way similar to what Dr. Frankl did. That was the genesis of all this for me. And I'm glad you mentioned that book because certainly I encourage everybody to read that as well. And I know you and your son did a podcast on the book Man's Search for Meaning, and I listened to that and I thought it was just phenomenal. So I really encourage you to go back and listen to the Focus 3 podcast.

And in particular, go back and listen to that episode or episodes where you and Brian talked about that book. Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was one podcast. And as we were discussing the podcast and what to do, we both looked at each other and said, hey, what about Man's Search for Meaning? Because I had read it in 1972. He obviously wasn't born yet. Then he had read it during his college, I think, or maybe just out of college. And we'd never really talked in depth. We talked about it a little bit at times, but we never had an in-depth conversation. So that podcast was the first time that he and I had a deep conversation together about that book. And we thought it was pretty cool that we shared with our podcast audience that initial conversation, you know, rather than, you know, hey, we'll let the book and Frankl this and Frankl that.

Yeah. But an in-depth conversation, that was the first time we'd ever actually had that. Yeah. It was excellent. Very insightful. So I'm glad you did that. And we'll make sure that we link to that here in show notes. Now, one other thing, Tim, that you mentioned here is this concept of productive discomfort, and I do want to explore that a little bit further as well because I think we all have a tendency to try and avoid discomfort.

How can we use that concept in our day-to-day existence? The term productive discomfort describes what happens at a place we call the edge, and it's a term that I coined back when Urban was coaching. I'm working with Ohio State And now I use it with all of our sports teams and frankly all of our business. It's a keynote that I give. It's very specific. The edge marks the place where life gets difficult. The edge marks the place where you pretty much come to the end of your current capability. It's at the edge of your current skillset. And by definition, therefore it's uncomfortable. It's where you have to build skill that you don't have talent for. It's where you have to adjust and adapt to something that now has shifted on you. That you've never done before. And it's uncomfortable. The edge is, it marks the place between what I call between good and elite. That up to the edge, your aptitude and your talent and your experience and your expertise, relatively, I don't say easy, but you can handle it. At the edge, it gets, it just gets tough because it's a standard or a level of skill you don't currently have. It's a change you have to make.

And the reality is this, you can make the change, you can build the skill, but only if you do the work. And the work's going to be uncomfortable. Let me ask you this and get your opinion on it. So this idea of embrace the discomfort. Now I've heard some people say that if you want to be a great writer, if you want to be a great athlete, obviously you've got to work hard, you've got to do the work. And so do you get to the point where you love the hard work itself, or is it that I love the outcome that the hard work produces, but I don't necessarily like the hard work itself?

How do you think about that? Fantastic question. In almost every instance, whether it's professional, business, athletics, whatever, people fall in love with the work itself. And the discomfort, the productive discomfort actually becomes almost joyful. It's sometimes called the zone, flow state. You understand the value of it. And you quickly go through these stages where, you know, let's take a football practice, warmup, walkthrough, just getting ready. And then you start doing reps. Same thing lifting weights or it's running. You see this all the time. You get to a spot where up to that point you're in the comfort zone because you're warming up with familiar skills and you're performing at the talent level. And the skill level that you had in the past, you're reinforcing fundamental competencies, but now it's time to build new skill. Now it's time to go to the next level. Now it's time to do the work that will get you to the other side of the edge. You go from good to elite, and that's going to be uncomfortable. Now, the fact that it builds skills is what makes it productive. That's why I use the phrase productive discomfort. Not all discomfort's productive, by the way. I mean, I wish it was. I mean, if that's all it took to build skill, just go make people feel uncomfortable and they get better. No, it's focused. Productive discomfort is very intentional. It's looking at the mechanics that I need to master and doing those specific things and then keep doing them until you get skillful at them. And I love this statement. And this is so true in every domain, business and athletics. Talent is a gift. Elite is a choice. No one listening to this podcast had any say and how much or how little talent they were born with. Talent's a gift. And no one got all of it, by the way. Everyone has talent gaps. Everyone. So this productive discomfort, this edge stuff is unbelievably important. And change typically produces the opportunity to embrace productive discomfort, to get better at something that you hadn't been very good at before. One, because it's new, it's different. Like there's a way of going about selling today. There's a way of going about client service today and going forward that's going to be very different than the past. And there's changes again, like I said, coming that we don't quite know. Whoever embraces that first, whoever embraces it most effectively has an enormous competitive advantage. And I'll be very blunt, whoever resists that change is just being foolish. If you're resisting the change of interfacing with clients, the way that's changing, you're resisting that, you're just hurting yourself. It's a self-inflicted wound. Reframe how you're viewing all this that's happening today. And find the opportunity, find the competitive advantage. And then when the next wave of change happens, which it will, you will have a new competency. And that is resilience. You'll have a new competency, which is adjusting and adapting. And you'll say, I don't necessarily like this, but man, I've gotten good at this kind of change. And then you will navigate through and accelerate through the change. You will not drag your feet. You will not hesitate. You will not BCD. You'll step up and respond. As you can tell, there's some passion involved. There is, just a little. Yeah, and I love it because as I deal with these various businesses through all the Zoom calls that we're doing, it's cool to see these people embrace this stuff. And the number of people that call me up or DM me on social media or even get my email, they're so grateful for this message because for some reason they never got this message.

And a lot of people say, you know what, Tim, everything you say is common sense, it's just not common practice. Thanks for the wake-up call. Yeah. And I think it's also how you articulate it. You're very good with language and how you put the words together in a way that it's simple for people to understand and just really gets to the heart of it. So I think that's one of your real skills as well, is the ability to clarify, simplify, and put it into words and a frame that people can understand. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks. I appreciate that.

So Tim, is there anything else here as it relates to this idea of adjusting and adapting to change that we should think about before we wrap up with a final segment? Don't let your level of comfort be the reference point for what you do or don't do. Let something higher than that be the reference point, which is back to if your R isn't working to get the O that you want, Don't blame the E, choose a better R. And one of the things I love about E R O is that people, when they first are exposed to it, they start using it in their business, but they also start using it in their personal life, right? I've had so many people tell me, the first thing I did following an R-Factor keynote or an R-Factor workshop, I went home and shared this with my family. I've had, you know, 55-year-old executives say, I called up my adult children and asked them to, you know, follow you on YouTube for the 2 Minutes with TK videos, or plan up for the Focus Week podcast. And I wanted them to get access to this. That just warms my heart because that's my—

it's our goal, it's our mission is to get this into as many lives as possible, not just professionally, but personally as well.

Yeah.

And I think that's so right that these aren't just business ideas. These are life ideas. Yes. They apply to everything.

Yep.

Well, let's wrap up here with a final segment that I call You Said It. And so I've got 2 or 3 quotes here. That come from you, and I'd love to get your comment on it. The first one, and this is really right in line with what we've been talking about here, and actually, I listened to this on a podcast this morning as I was hiking this morning. You said, "Change is an event. Stress is a response." I think the context for that was change, and maybe you said this earlier today, change in and of itself is neutral.

It's what we place on the change that determines whether, oh, this is going to be stress or not. So how do you think of that concept? Yeah. The mindset that you bring to change, not the change itself, is what determines your level of stress or how you frame it. When I say frame it, I mean, how you think about it, how you see it, how you talk to yourself. Self-talk is huge in it. If I view it as a threat and I view it as something that's stressful, I'm going to feel that stress. I'm going to feel that threat. If I view it as an opportunity, frame it as an opportunity to differentiate myself and to make changes in myself, then— maybe I'll follow up with that. Don't let the change around you happen faster than the change within you. Here's a wonderful statement. I love, I ask this of myself all the time. When something happens, I say, what does this situation require of me? Not how do I feel about it? Not what's comfortable or uncomfortable? Not what I like or dislike. What does this situation require of me? Whether I'm driving, I'm flying, I'm selling, I'm servicing, something in my family life, certainly in my business life, what does this? So if change happens, the first question that a disciplined person asks is, what does this change require of me?

Not what do I not like about the change?

And those two mindsets could not be more different.. And it sounds like what you've done with your cancer diagnosis is what does this diagnosis require of me? Exactly. I got scans 2 days ago to find out what the detailed effect and impact of the chemo has done. And we'll get the results of those here any day, any moment. Then we're ready for whatever the scans say. You know, we're hoping and praying for, you know, clean scans. And if that happens, super happy. If that doesn't happen, super happy. Not about the situation. Right? But about me and about what we're going to do. You know, like one time I was flying and my wife texted me before we took off and said, did you get the upgrade? I said, yes, I'm in 23B. Which is not first class. No, no, the upgrade here. Yeah. Right. You know, yeah, I love to be, I love to be in first class. I love getting the upgrade when I fly. I love it. And I'm a Global 1K and I typically get it. If I don't get it, there's a moment of like, you know, a little BCD happens, right? But then I quickly reframe and say, listen, first class is a mindset. And I'm going to work, I'm going to read.

And yeah, is the seat in front of me closer? Am I going to get the food? No, but where's first class? It's in here. It's in here. Yeah. You're pointing to your head as you say that. That's awesome.

All right. So another quote from you, you said, average coaches have quotes, good coaches have a plan, Elite coaches have a system. Tell me more about that. Well, that's one of the main reasons Urban Meyer hired me in 2013 to work with the Buckeyes is, and that's true in leadership. I mean, change that word from coaches to leaders. The same thing in a business is that average leaders have quotes, good leaders have plans, elite leaders have a system. And when I say a system, I mean a system for leadership development, a system for building culture, and a system for behavioral discipline. That's what I mean. And tying those all together. When I say a system, I mean a clear, simple, actionable set of mechanics that teach people how to do those things. Not complex. Systems need to be simple to be applied. So we've got a simple system for leadership development. Now I say simple, I don't mean easy. I just mean clear and actionable. We have a simple system for building elite culture and have a simple system for building elite behavior. And we've talked today about the behavioral system and it is E R O. That's a system, 3 components, the event, the response, and the outcome. That's a system, self-contained, and it applies all over the place. And we talk about discipline over default and no BCD. And then there's some specific skills that we teach around it.

So when we say that, what we mean by that is that if you want to be truly great at something, you have to apply a system to it.

Excellent.

Well, Tim, this has been fantastic.

What's the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to learn more about what you're doing or work with you in some capacity? Yep, social media. I'm on Twitter @TimothyKight, and that's K-I-G-H-T and no N in that. K-I-G-H-T @TimothyKight. Same thing on LinkedIn. I do a lot on LinkedIn as well, and they can email me directly, tim@focus3.com. And our website is focus3.com. Great place to go for a lot of stuff. We just made some major shifts and changes to our website. I think you'll really like that. Last year I did something called 2 Minutes with TK, which is once a week I published a video that was no longer than 2 minutes, and that received tremendous response. I think we did it every week. So there's around 51, 52 of them or so from last year. With COVID and then my cancer stuff, we've kind of backed off a little bit this year. But I'm going to get back to it again. So that's a YouTube channel, which they can get 2 Minutes with TK, and then the Focus 3 podcast, which is on all the podcast platforms. And Urban Meyer and I do it together now. And same thing, we've kind of backed off on that because of all this stuff going on, but we're just about to relaunch a bunch of podcasts.

So those are ways people can reach us. Would love to have people connect. Yeah, well, we will definitely get that message out because there is just a wealth of knowledge and wisdom and insight and experience that you're sharing here and just making freely available in many respects. Effects to folks. So very much appreciate that. So Tim, thank you again for being on our program here today. I think this was outstanding, and I wish you all the best.

Be praying for a very positive diagnosis here with your cancer situation, and that you'll go ahead and actually overcome that and live many more healthy years. Awesome.

Thanks, Steve.

Appreciate it. I have two big takeaways from my conversation with Tim. The first is how he responded to his stage 4 cancer diagnosis. He said that the first thing that popped into his head was E R O. It's the system. And it was about how he framed it. He said, of course, I don't like having cancer, but he said he fully embraces the fact that it exists and he's not going to react negatively to it. Instead, he said he was going to respond with intention, purpose, Purpose and skill. So Tim lives what he teaches. He's following his system of the R-Factor. The second takeaway is this idea of the edge, this place where life gets difficult. And Tim said the difference between average and elite performers is how they prepare for the edges in their life. They engage in what Tim calls productive discomfort. And when you face that edge, And, you know, we all face those edges. He said it's the work that you do ahead of time, this productive discomfort that enables you to build skill that you don't have the talent for. All right. That's all for today.

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