Failure to Finisher - How to Master Habit Change and Personal Transformation in 2022 | Flow Research Collective Radio

the brain gets all excited and it releases all the dopamine that we would normally get when we actually went after our goals. Now, dopamine is the reward chemicals, the feel-good motivating chemical that gives us the energy to go after our goals. Talking about your goals out loud actually gives you that dopamine. So you get the reward without having to do the work.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then Somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and today's episode is a fun one. This is a recording from a Crowdcast that myself and Steven did on goals, on how to take the goals that you set, the New Year's resolutions that you may have set coming into 2022, and how to come back to them with consistency and actually execute against those goals with the consistency that you know you need to be able to achieve them because we have hundreds of clients for whom one of the major struggles is how do I actually follow up and maintain consistent action against a goal or an overarching intention we have. So, we really dive deep into goals, into grit, and into long-term behavioral change and persistence. You're going to really enjoy this one. Steven and I had a blast. It was a fun one. We went all over the place, but in good ways. So enjoy today's episode with myself and Stephen and let us know what you think on social. And until next time, all the best. Welcome to today's Crowdcast with Mr. Stephen Kotler, myself. First off, I actually want to say happy 2022. That is the theme of this. It is January 31st, Lots of our clients, lots of folks within the collective were redoing their goals, reflecting on 2021, setting things up and intending on building new habits, achieving new goals and planning 2022. And people were saying that they got out the gate really well, first 2 weeks of 2022, lots of momentum, and then there's a bit of a dip-off that tends to happen. So what we wanted to do today was to give you something that was exactly a month into the new year so that we can all use this as an opportunity to dial back into the goals that we've set for 2022. And so that we can talk through goal setting, how to do it effectively and in a way that's going to maximize flow and then grit, which is what's required to make sure that you don't do the very commonly done thing and set well-intended New Year's resolutions that end up flaking off after A couple of days. So, that's what we're going to be talking about today.

The point is we set New Year's resolutions and we're supposed to forget about them like 3 days later, right?

That's what you did.

That's not how this works. Sorry, my bad.

Exactly, exactly. That's what we're trying to mitigate. Stephen, to kick us off, since this is a Crowdcast about habit change, goals, and resolutions, and about how people can build the grit they need to bounce back from failures, I wanted to start off by asking you about something that people love hearing you talk about that you hate talking about because it's always fun to do and it relates to your personal experience with a few of these topics right now. So, I wanted to actually start by asking you, Steven, if there's any behaviors that you're trying to change or failures you've recently experienced. And if so, what some of the key lessons are from your own process that have been insightful or that may be useful to people with respect to your own goals or habits or behaviors.

So, goal 1 for this year is to talk less.

How's that going?

That's the one that was gone 3 days in. Listen more, talk less.

By lunchtime.

By lunchtime. Every year I set that goal. Every year I fail on that goal. No, I actually, I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been working on very big environmental projects over the past 6 to 9 months. I've been doing a lot of work around forest health and preventing catastrophic wildfire in the American West. And this is sort of 30 years of trying to work on animal rights issues or environmental issues. And there's a little bit more momentum this time around, but it's heartbreaking. It's always heartbreaking. And it's heartbreaking at a level where you feel like the planet is at stake and there's a lot of angst that goes with it. And what I keep thinking is, wow, is the voice in my head loud. Wow, is the monkey mind loud. Wow, can one piece of even slightly negative to neutral information quickly become a catastrophe? And if I'm not careful, 5 minutes in, my brain is problem-solving for a catastrophe that is nonexistent, but that's just where my brain is going to go. And I think that's sort of always one of the lessons you get. It's definitely thought control is one of the core grit skills. And I'm just reminded once again of how easy, if you're not sort of really paying attention all the time, it is for that to get away. I know theoretically with 30,000 hours of meditation, it's supposed to go away permanently, and the voice in my head is supposed to stay silent. I've been meditating on and off for 30 years at this point. I don't know if I'm close, but it hasn't happened yet for me. So I'm once again reminded of the level of challenge that that is.

What are some of the things, Stephen, that have helped with that?

What has helped actually is a slightly different approach to mindfulness that I've taken over the years. I go back and forth with how I approach mindfulness. When I first came in, I came in through— I think a lot of people who are interested in science and interested in meditation came in through Tibetan Buddhism, possibly because that was the Dalai Lama got so interested in science that a lot of the research on mindfulness was done with Tibetan Buddhists and a lot of their meditative ideas have been well translated. But, one of the ideas that I picked up recently that I had not heard that I find much more interesting is instead of trying to spend 25 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day in meditation, instead break it up into 31-minute moments. Now, in the Tibetan tradition, they're going for a certain kind of awareness of awareness. They want you to try to get behind perception and be aware that perception is taking place kind of thing. And that's been interesting. So, I have always blocked meditation as a one thing, and I tend to do it when I recover. So, I tend at the end of my day, I like I have a sauna practice. I tend to meditate in the sauna, and that's what I've done for years. So instead, I've been sporadically putting those 1-minute chunks throughout my day and practicing that way, which is just very different. And it's interesting. I don't know if it's getting me farther. I don't know if there's farther to go on this one. I just find it interesting to stop and try to pull back. It's usually about couple of times an hour, basically, if I'm awake during 12 hours, pull back a couple of times an hour to just sort of watch my mind at work. And I find that useful, and I find it useful for the exact thing I spoke about earlier, which is I've got a great problem-solving brain. It's tremendous. It's a superpower. Except one of the things a problem-solving brain likes to do is it'll take something that's small, and if I'm not paying attention, it's going to turn it into something big and start puzzling out worst-case scenarios. And it's been interesting to watched that and been interesting to sort of force myself to continuously say, is this true? Is my brain telling me the truth about this particular situation? And I found myself asking that fairly frequently, and I don't know where it's leading. I sort of feel like this is a little bit of an adventure that I'm having on in 2022, but that's some of the stuff I've been thinking about and playing with personally.

That's interesting. Yeah, I've seen research, and I don't know how conclusive it is, that has shown that shorter, more frequent, sporadic use of mindfulness increases dispositional trait-based mindfulness more than less frequent blocks of mindfulness like the conventional 20 minutes a day. That aligns with what you're saying.

Yeah, that's interesting. And it would make sense that you've seen research on it since there's so much good research on the Dzogchen Tibetan tradition. That makes sense that this would be something we know a little bit about. I've definitely found it it's a pattern interrupter is what I've found. And I found it to be a useful pattern interrupter. They often talk about in early mindfulness practices, you get to a point very early on where they talk about the "waterfall effect," which is you start paying attention to your thoughts and then you suddenly realize you have no control over them and there's a waterfall of thought happening all the time. It's a very common experience as people kind of walk a path into mindfulness and meditation. And, I think by changing my ways from a block of 25, 30 minutes, 40 minutes in the sauna to 25 1-minute sessions, I'm noticing the waterfall effect. It's like I've gotten control of my brain when I'm formal and I'm sitting down to meditate. I've got ironclad control because I've been doing it for 30 years. But during the day, now I'm like, oh, wow. Well, this is beginner's mind. All over again where I feel like, wow, I have zero experience with this stuff and I'm getting my butt kicked. And it's kind of amusing sometimes.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

In some ways it's an easier habit to develop as well, dropping into a quick little bit of mindfulness between calls or when you're in a queue or a line versus trying to do the 20-minute block first thing in the morning. So definitely something worth worth checking out for people. Just to stick on the personal topic for another couple of minutes, even that, before we jumped on here, you and I were actually talking about injury, and you and I have actually both been injured for a while this year, or last year leading into this year, which has reduced both of our ability actually to exercise, and that's usually our number one thing, or one of the number one things for peak performance as an ongoing habit. I'm curious how you have dealt with being able to exercise less, what impact that has had, and if there's any takeaways or lessons that you've got for people on that topic.

It's an easy one. When you use exercise to reset your physiology, and I love exercise as a way to reset my nervous system, I always say the things that I like best in peak performance are things that work like ice, right? Ice works 100% of the time. You put it on, leg gets cold, inflammation goes down. Now, you can have an argument about whether or not ice is the the right treatment. And there's that camp in the biohacking crowd, but let's ignore that for a second. I just like things that are that reliable. So, I have found that because I've been injured and I've been healing and I keep— one of the things that I love about the injury and I hate about the injury is, yes, I have to exercise. Yes. One of the reasons I've been doubling down on meditation and mindfulness is because I'm getting less physical exercise, which means I have less control of my nervous system. So, I have to double down on other tools. I have also part of my exercise, normally I'll hike every day. I've still been walking outside because I still want the exposure to nature because that is normally really calming for your nervous system as well. So, I'm making sure that the things that come to me with exercise being outside often, I'm still doing. It's obviously forced me to double down on other ways of regulating my nervous system and Where I've sort of used it as peak performance training is patience has always been one of my great weaknesses. I have one speed. I like to go a million miles an hour. And, one of the main reasons I'm probably still injured is I keep getting myself almost to the edge of healed, getting impatient and getting after it again and sort of re-hurting myself. And this is not a new cycle, this is a pretty old cycle. So, I'm using it as a way to sort of train myself into more patience than I've normally had. What about you?

Well, just on that point, yeah, that makes me think of the go slow to go fast piece. I do the exact same thing and it's maddening, which is, yeah, as soon as I'm almost better, the instinct is so intense to go back to a 10 out of 10 level of exertion that it resets you again backwards. And in the grand scheme of things, you end up further behind. So, go slow to fast, I think is an important point on that. What I've found most helpful is trying to, as you said, do things— I like the point around do things that are like ice, do things that are guaranteed to create some shift in your physiology. For me, what I find very, very useful is breathwork. I find it more reliable in terms of a shift than meditation. I've been doing a lot of foam rolling and myofascial release, which kind of makes my body feel like it's exercised, even if I haven't. So I found that helpful, and massage as well. And then hot and cold exposure as well, I find really useful. They don't quite get you the same anandamide dump that exercise does, but useful as well and helpful to accelerate recovery. So I want to switch for a second here to goal setting. And one of the big things that, you know, people really want to hear about is how to not flake on new intentions for the new year. And I'm going to just read out a quick passage from The Art of Impossible here about keeping your word to yourself. So you said, most importantly, this rule always applies to goal setting. If you consistently break your word to yourself, once you set a goal, your brain immediately starts hunting for an easy way out. Meaning if you don't keep your word to yourself, your brain moves into 'I quit' mode long before you've even gotten into the game. So I'm curious what your advice is to folks around keeping their word to themselves and how that impacts behavior change and goal attainment over the longer term.

Some of it's about self-confidence, right? If you start with the idea that flow states have triggers and the challenge-skills balance is flow's most important trigger, meaning we pay the most attention to the present moment when the challenge at hand slightly exceeds our skill set, right? So you want to stretch but not snap. When we're paying that kind of focus, tends to Dopamine tends to drive us into flow. Now, the question is, well, what creates challenge and skills? Like, how do we set that level and how does the brain do it? Because it happens at a very unconscious level. One of the keys is self-confidence. In fact, Susan Jackson, I believe the study is in Flow in Sports, the book she wrote with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Susan Jackson is a sports psychologist who did a lot of early work on flow at the University of Chicago and is now in Australia still doing great work on flow. And she, in her work, they found among athletes, 81% of what could be meant by how great is this challenge and what are my skills, 81% was actually about self-confidence and less than 19% was actually the skills you're bringing to the challenge. So, in certain scenarios, confidence plays a huge role. What creates confidence? One of the things that happens is in goal setting, as you pointed out, if you always break your goals, if you never keep your word to yourself, you have no confidence in yourself, right? This is why your brain starts looking for an easy way out. If you never break your word to yourself, meaning that you never create a goal for yourself that you don't put everything into, don't go after with everything, never back off, don't stop until it's done. Then your brain, even if you set an impossibly hard challenging goal, your brain just keeps problem-solving. If it thinks, "Oh, wow, you never quit, quitting is not an option," it will keep problem-solving your way towards that solution, which is one of the things you're probably going to need to get to any high hard goals. So, that's first and foremost. And what I mean by keeping your word to yourself, I don't set a goal, meaning I don't write it down in a notebook, in a goal-setting notebook, or say it out loud to anybody else if I do not intend to accomplish it. And what do I mean by that? In my mind, everybody's a little different, but when I set a goal, it usually means I'm going to work on it for an hour a day until the problem is solved. Like, I will just keep going and I just keep going. Now, obviously, there are certain times when you want to back off and you want to say, okay, this is a bad idea. I'm going towards something that it turns out I shouldn't be going towards, or it's not going to work that way and I need to regroup. There are those situations. But as a general rule, if I say it out loud, if I call it a goal, I don't stop until it's done. So, if it goes onto my clear goals list, my daily clear goals list for the day, I don't stop working for the day until everything on that list is done, et cetera, et cetera. High hard goals are or massively transformative purposes. I just think of it that way. And I'm very cautious to not talk about my goals out loud. I talk about this in Art of Impossible. I've talked about this a lot loud and in public, and I think it's really important, especially Gen X is a little different. But when you get into the millennial generation and younger, I see this happening very frequently. People sort of lead with their goals. Hi, I'm Jack. I'm here to save the world or whatever it is. And it turns out that when we talk about our goals, the brain gets all excited and it releases all the dopamine that we would normally get when we actually went after our goals. Now, dopamine is the reward chemicals, the feel-good motivating chemical that gives us the energy to go after our goals. Talking about your goals out loud actually gives you that dopamine. So, you get the reward without having to do the work. And then, trying to get up for the hard fight of, oh, I got to go after this goal, Now, it's twice as hard. You're still as far away from the goal as you were, and all the kind of motivating neurochemical boost that you could use to get towards that goal has already been exploded. And worse, since dopamine is such a big driver of flow, you're now going to have a harder time getting into flow along the way. So, there's a lot of penalties for talking about your goals out loud rather than putting them on a list, and keeping them to yourself and just working on them until they're done. And that also means I try to set goals that I can accomplish. You know what I mean? I do set impossible goals. I have massively transformative purposes, but those are more about process goals. Like, how am I going to do this today? What am I going to do tomorrow? I don't tend to set huge impossible outcome goals very often. Because I won't quit until it's done kind of thing. Does that make any sense?

Makes total sense. Yeah. W there summarized it as avoiding premature dopamine release. I mean, it's interesting. It makes me think about one of the major problems that cocaine addicts end up running into, which is that they end up getting the physiological feeling of winning or of accomplishment without actually doing anything that justifies the winning. And you simulate that obviously to a much more minor degree by yabbering on about your goals.

Yes, there's an inverse. I know we're on goal setting and we're going to get to grit, but there's a grit point here that's sort of just the same, which is one of the secrets to becoming gritty, to really developing that trait is you want to link your dopamine with the act of being persistent you want to get the reward for being persistent. Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about this a little bit too. You want to periodicize rewards. So if you're in a classroom and you're a teacher and you're teaching class, you don't always want to say, oh, great job, Ryan. That was a fantastic answer. Sometimes you want to do that. Most of the time you don't, and you want to make it random. And the reason is if you constantly link the dopamine to the feeling of, oh, I did something right and I accomplished something, it doesn't end up underpinning the persistence, which is what you want that reward to be linked to. The secret to developing grit is to link your dopamine reward to the act of persistence, right? The victory is that you leaned in and you did the hard work. It's not what you accomplish. That's why I said earlier, you want to focus on process goals, not outcome goals. This is the reason.

Phil summed it up there. Hilariously said, premature congratulation. Thank you, Phil. So that's the summative takeaway for folks. Avoid premature congratulation. Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level, while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Steven, I just wanted to ask you if there's any books you recommend on that topic, The Molecule of More, The Motivation Myth. I know there's a lot of books you've read that sort of circle that topic. So, I'm curious if there's any. Yeah.

So, it's interesting because there's— it's been a long time since I've read this book and there are probably some factual errors by now because it was written a very long time ago, or 15 years ago. But Dr. Greg Burns, who is a brilliant neuroscientist and a super nice guy who has gotten very famous over the past 15 years for neuroimaging work on dogs. So he's the one who figured out that if you think your dog loves you and people who are wondering, does my dog really love you? So he did all the brain imaging work on dogs to figure out that the exact same human love circuits light up in dogs when they look at their humans. And blah, blah, blah. That's what he's been doing for 15 years. Before that, he worked on dopamine and he worked on satisfaction and he wrote a phenomenal book called Satisfaction. And, it's really about he was part of the team, him, Reid Montague, a handful of others who figured out that dopamine is not a motivational chemical, it's actually a chemical that underpins sort of risk-taking and shows up when we exert the effort, take the risk to get the reward, not when we get the reward. This sort of overturned most of what we believed through the latter half of the 20th century. And he wrote a great book on it. And one of the reasons I'm recommending it so much is Greg was also, and this book is an example, one of the handful of neuroscientists. When I was first starting out working on flow, there weren't very many neuroscientists. There weren't very many psychologists you could talk to about the neuroscience of flow. Greg was one of them. So he was working on this topic as well. He writes about it in Satisfaction. I've always really sort of liked that book. That's a very popular sort of friendly, easy-to-read book, and I like it. A lot of people like that, The Molecule of More, right? That book is sort of making the rounds these days. But on dopamine, Robert Sapolsky's Behave remains one of the— it's a thick book, it's dense, it's not a quick read, but it's pretty thorough on a lot of these topics.

Super. That's great, Stephen. So, Greg asked, is the key to keep the goal private and celebrate your win in private? And I just want to clarify that what Stephen is saying is keep the goal private, but celebrating your win post actually achieving the goal publicly is okay. Is that correct, Stephen?

It is okay. The additional point is it is okay, but what you want to sort of try to avoid is attaching. You don't want to ride the wind too high. Really. This is sort of an overall, I think, peak performance tip in general. All those big wins are neurochemically expensive. So, if you ride it up too high, you're going to deplete a lot of the neurochemicals you're going to need to feel that again. And if motivation is about little win after little win after little win after little win and you want a little bit of that pleasure, but you don't want to ride it too much because riding that pleasure out, literally exhausting your dopamine supplies. So classic example, I talk about this a lot, James Bond movies. If you've ever seen a James Bond movie, so every time something blows up on the screen, Hollywood is saying, give us your dopamine and give us your norepinephrine. Those are your big focusing chemicals, among other things. If you've seen a James Bond movie, a very common experience is very exciting for the first 20 minutes, and then like an hour in, you're totally bored and it's really hard to pay attention. The reason is the movie's stolen all your dopamine and your norepinephrine, your reward chemicals, your focusing chemicals. Now they're gone and sort of you're left exhausted sort of watching this thing play out. That's a fairly common experience. You can do the same thing by over-celebrating your wins. It's the same process. And what it ends up doing is reinforcing sort of the wrong— you want to celebrate your wins. And I'm terrible. My friends often have to remind me to celebrate my wins. My best friend, Michael, who's been my editor for 30 years, so he's usually on the phone with me when I get the good news, whatever the good news is, he's often on the phone with me when I get it. And I'll sort of mention it in passing and he'll stop me and be like, dude, it's one thing to not celebrate the wins. It's another thing to pretend that they didn't happen at all. And can we pause to acknowledge what just— right? So I have taken it the other extreme with that. And you can sort of, you can sort of go both ways. Somebody wants to know the, it's Molecule of More, right?

That's the Molecule of More. And then the subtitle is How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Michael E. Long and Daniel Lieberman. The other one we mentioned was The Motivation Myth By Jeff Haden. And then, yeah, the new James Bond movie, by the way, Stephen, No Time to Die, is a real test to what you were saying. It's incredible, but it definitely— you can feel your brain being sapped of dopamine scene to scene. Although I definitely recommend it to people. I just want to quickly clarify something on the grit topic, and then let's talk through the 3 types of goals, and we'll talk through kind of how people can look at each type of goal and come back to their— each type for their goals for 2022. Someone was recommending Grit by Angela Duckworth, and we've actually had Dr. Duckworth on the podcast before. Stephen, you've got an interesting take on grit that is a little bit distinct from how Angela talks about it in that book, and I'm curious if you could break that down for folks.

Angela's done phenomenal work on grit. Really, really interesting work. When she looks under the hood of grit, her definition of grit is the intersection of passion and perseverance. And my point has been that she's accurate. She's right. But the truth of the matter is passion is a motivator and grit is what you want when the motivator runs out. So, passion is a subset of a particular kind of perseverance that is useful, but there's more to the story in the perseverance story if you talk to peak performers. And this is sort of what I noticed over the years, and this is research I talk about in The Art of Impossible. We talk to actual performers. When you talk about perseverance, they will talk about 6 different kinds of grit, 6 different kinds of perseverance. Especially in the beginning, as you're getting better at these, they need to be trained independently. They're overlapping in the end and they start coming together. But as skill sets, they need to be trained individually and developed individually because they all are trained slightly differently. So that's the main difference. We can break down the 6 different kinds of grit next if that's useful.

Actually, just before we do that, I just want to go into the 3 different kinds of goals. If you could just give a quick breakdown on those just so people have context there, and then we'll shift into the 6 different kinds of grit, and then we'll talk about how to apply both for 2022.

When scientists talk about motivation, right, motivation is a catch-all term. It means extrinsic motivation, stuff we'll work hard to get for in the real world— money, sex, fame. Intrinsic motivation, and we talk a lot about the big 5 intrinsic motivators, which are curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery. And then there's goal setting and grit. These 4 components make up what psychologists talk about as motivation. When we talk about goal setting, there's a lot of information out there, but what it sort of boils down to is the human brain functions best with 3 tiers of goals. At the top of the pyramid, We need sort of mission-level goals for our lives. Or if you're familiar with the books I've written with Peter Diamandis, Abundance or Bold or Future's Fashion, anything, we talk about a massively transformative purpose. It's actually Salim Ismail's phrase. He was the first person to coin that phrase. We talk about having a massively transformative purpose to put at the top of your life. So, this is the top of your goal-setting pyramid, and you can have a couple of them. And they shouldn't be super general, right? I'd like to feed the world is a super general. It's a little too general to be useful for a massively transformative purpose. You want to be a little more specific, but it's not that, you know, on my own level, when it comes to massively transformative purposes, I tend to think that I want to advance flow science and research. I want to write books that have a deep impact, and I want to make the world a better place for plants, animals, and ecosystems, right? Those tend to be my 3 mission-level goals. 3 is probably the maximum. I don't necessarily know if you're going to want to have more than that at the top of your stack, but this is like the central focusing point. This is your purpose. I personally couldn't come up with one single purpose. I came up with 3. And, you know, after working individually on these individual purposes for, you know, 20, 30 years now, they do start to overlap and come together finally. But it took a while for that to happen. So, that's at the top of the stack. Then you need high-hard goals. That's the middle of the stack. So, if my mission-level goal is to write books that have a giant impact on the world, high-hard goals, the next level down, are I want to write a book on intuition, or I'd like to write a book on flow, or I'd like to write a column for The New Yorker, whatever it is that advances my high-hard goal, but it's a chunk down, usually 1 to 5 years. Mission levels are overarching themes for your lives. Think 10, 20, 30 years. High-hard goals are usually of the 1 to 5-year level, and they should feed directly into your mission-level goals. The idea is to get all your goals pointed in the exact same direction. And earlier when I said my mission-level goals are process goals, you notice that my mission-level goal is to write books that have a large impact in the world. It's not to win a Nobel Prize in literature. That's an outcome goal and outside of my control. I can't control my attempt to do that. I do have way more control over trying to write books that have a deep impact in the world. That's something I know how to do. And if I lean in hard enough, I can do that. Underneath your high-hard goals, you need daily to-do lists. And we in Flow Research, we don't talk about daily to-do lists. We instead talk about clear goals lists. And the reason is flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. Clear goals are one of the most important flow triggers, and clear goals are a very specific kind of daily to-do list. When you set a clear goals list, often the problem, and this is more Western than Eastern, but especially in Western countries, when we say clear goals, people hear goals and they ignore the clear. And the problem is that goals, the idea of goals pulls your attention off the present. Clear goals are one of the reasons they're a flow trigger is they help keep our attention focused on the present moment. Clear goals tell your brain what to focus on now and what to focus on next, especially if you've got a clear goals list of your daily goals. Does that make sense so far?

That makes total sense. And I actually just want to really quickly answer a question that Anna Richards has that relates to clear goals. She said, can you help an 80-year-old who is still procrastinating? I've tried so many ways, but I've not been able to follow through. I've got at least 25 more years. I love of that, and I want them to be productive in sharing my learnings. And just my quick advice to her based on what Steven is saying here is to use clear goals as a way to minimize procrastination. What you want to do as a general rule, what our clients find useful, is to make the goal clearer and clearer and clearer and clearer, all the way to the point that the resistance that is causing the procrastination disappears. And you feel able to begin the task. So, we want to go to often very crazy levels of clarity and detail as Steven is emphasizing there. And, that helps enormously with procrastination. Usually, procrastination is because you're lacking an entry point into the task.

Yeah. So, procrastination, I always think of writer's block is sort of procrastination writ large. And, one of the most common causes of writer's block is you don't know your starts or your endings. So whatever you're writing, you don't know where you're beginning and you don't know where you're going. Your brain is a pattern recognition. It's a goal-directed machine and it does that by, through pattern recognition. If you know where you're starting, you know where you're ending, right? You have established a clear goal, very, very clear. Your brain will figure out how to do the rest. It does that as long as you give it with enough clarity. And the other thing about clear goals, so we've been talking about clear goals as a flow trigger, and I've been talking about flow's impact on attention and clear goals helping us keep attention on the present moment. The other thing they do, this is another, so when you want to maximize attention to trigger flow, you can either do it by driving dopamine and norepinephrine into the brain. These are focusing chemicals or lowering cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. So, when you write a clear goals list, and I recommend writing by hand in a notebook because of the relationship between handwriting and memory. So, when you literally take the time to write, I have a calendar, I have electronic calendar that I share with everybody in the company and my assistant and everybody else. But every morning, as soon as I wake up, the first thing I do is I write out my calendar along with my clear goals list. On a piece of paper because it exports it out of my brain. It lowers cognitive load. This liberates more energy that my brain will then repurpose for paying attention. So this is great in helping you achieve your clear goals as well. You're lowering cognitive loads, you're lowering stress levels, you're liberating more energy to pay attention. So greater attention, greater performance, more chances of getting it flow. So, Clear Goals is what I like to talk about as a multi-tool solution. It's one tool that solves a tremendous amount of problems at once. And the other thing I want to stress here is we see this again and again is a lot of the most potent flow triggers are these sort of psychological behavioral interventions, and they're incredibly potent, but they just don't sound really sexy out loud. So, people hear them and they're looking for something whiz-bang, a cool technology or some neat gimmick. And instead, it's this very simple, practical, easy-to-use tool, and it produces such extraordinary results, as you pointed out a second ago. And yet, people often skip over it because it's just not sexy enough or cool enough, and yet, it's deadly effective.

Anna, you're more than welcome as well for the answer there. So, Stephen, another question which came from Vitor Hugo, and Bill's on this, this. He says, how many goals do you think it is possible for someone to focus on at a time in parallel? So, you know, assuming the three levels, how many goals?

Yeah, let me talk— let me, let me, let me— sorry to cut you off. Let me— before I answer that question, so hold on to it for half a second, let me say one more thing that's worth mentioning about how do you figure out how many clear goals to have in a day, right? There's one final component here I don't we talked about, which is my personal belief, and I think this is a general belief among, among most of the peak performers we have the opportunity to work with. You don't want to do something if you can't be great at it. Everything you're going to try to do during the day, you want to be great at. So that's how many items go on a clear goals list for the day. Run an experiment for the next 2 weeks. Vary the number because everybody's day— your days are all going to be a little bit different. I have found for me, 8 to 9 clear goals in a day are the maximum number I can be great at. Now, you have to understand that the first clear goal on every list I write is my morning writing session. That session lasts usually 3 to 4 hours long. So, it's a big chunk of focus and energy and work and time, and it limits what else I can do during the day. So, I've learned with that block in place. About 9 clear goals in a day is what goes on my list. And what I always like to tell people is if it's going to require energy, it's got to go on your clear goals list. So, like, walking my dog goes on my clear goals list, first of all, because exercise lowers stress. Being in nature lowers stress, but it's going to take energy, and it's going to take energy away from the bottom line of the day. It's got to go on the clear goals list even though walking my dog doesn't exactly feed into my high hard goals or anything else. Does make the world a little bit better place for animals. My dog at least is happier, but it goes on the list because it's going to take energy. And that's how I think about it. So, it's useful and I think our clients have found this useful also to run 2-week to 3-week experiment in their own life, set different numbers of clear goals per day, and see, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, just sort of look back, rate your day. How much ass did you kick in attacking those goals? And you'll pretty soon come up with a number of how many goals to go on your day. The question that you were asked was how many high-hard goals should you set? I don't know. One, I have not seen great data on this particular question. So, I don't know if it's been well studied. I have found for myself, I have 6 ongoing categories of sort of goals that I'm willing to set kind of thing. I don't tend to usually set goals in all those categories at once, but 6 is probably 6 or 7 or 8, like in and around there is sort of the maximum. And what I mean by that is at any given point, writing-wise, I'm usually editing a book. I'm usually researching another, and I'm usually writing a third in some level, way, shape, or form. So, I have 3 ongoing book projects at different levels. In terms of animal projects, I've always got 2. Usually, I have the work my wife and I do in Rancho Ditro and the Buddy Sue Project, our dog sanctuary work. And then there's 1 or 2 larger environmental projects I'm working on in the real world at once. Are those full-time? No, but I'm working on them. And then advancing flow science or research. The good news on that particular one is we have 100 people at the Flow Research Collective who are helping me advance flow science and research these days. So I can be a little more ambitious in my goal setting because I've got a great team around me to advance those goals. If I didn't, I would usually set same thing, 1 or 2 or 3 at once. I would rather set fewer goals and accomplish them than set more goals and not accomplish them. I tend to not set— I very rarely set goals that I don't think I can accomplish through hard work. I'll stress it. Stretch goals. I'll stretch goals that will stretch me to the edge of my ability, but I tend to want goals that are incredibly painful. I got to climb Mount Everest to get there. But I can climb, you know what I mean? It's a mountain I actually think I can climb or I need 10% to 15% of luck to get at the top but not more than that kind of thing.

I'll just quickly comment on that question as well. Anecdotally, what we see with a lot of our clients is that the vast majority of them are going a mile wide and an inch deep when it comes to their goals. And usually, it's a matter of just honing them in stripping them back as Stephen's been emphasizing and building more of a singular focus, even if you have multiple goals, tightening it up and bringing it into more of a singular focus and then figuring out what the sequencing should be if you do have multiple goals that you want to accomplish. Usually it's just a matter of figuring out the sequencing over the long term and getting that right so that you don't end up going a mile wide and an inch deep. Keep on a dozen things and not actually moving forward on any of them. To close on goals here, I just want to leave people with an action they can do from this. What is the best way for folks who don't have these 3 levels of goals set up and mapped out? Is there an exercise you recommend people do to really set these up? Should they literally do a writing session with a pen and paper afterwards?

No. Goal level thing. What I tend to do is, to me, what you're looking for is a Christmas tree effect. So, once you have your massively transformative goals, you then want to break that down. What are the 5 steps that will get me to each or the 4 steps or the 6 steps or however many it is? That's how you think about your high-hard goals. And your daily goals are your daily action plans that feed into those high-hard goals. And that tends to be how I think about it. But I think you definitely want to start with the passion recipe. You want to start at the mission level because once that's in place, I think the other stuff starts to fall into place. Super.

Thanks, Steve, for that breakdown. I just want to comment here. Betsy, Bonnie, and Eva are just emphasizing the desire for diverse voices. And I would recommend checking out our podcast, Flow Research Collective. Of radio where we have a whole wide array of diverse voices on peak performance and peak performance topics as well. I'll throw the link in the chat for folks too. So Steven, I just want to transition into grit and let's do a breakdown on the 6 types of grit. I can, if it's useful, run through them and then we can pick where to focus specifically. There's the grit to persevere, the grit to control your thoughts, the grit to master fear, the grit to be your best when you're at your worst, the grit to train your weaknesses, and the grit to recover. Assuming you are someone who has big goals for 2022 and beyond, what is the best starting point with respect to those 6 levels of grit to get the highest impact immediately?

Whatever my personal opinions are here, or, you know, I think everybody's going to be a little different on this, but I think what has been very, very true for our clients and the people we're lucky enough to get to work with is that the grit to recover really matters. And I know I'm sort of starting at the back end of the list, but the way I think about it, so peak performance in general is difficult. Being gritty in general is difficult, and burnout is an ever-present problem, and lack of flow is an ever-present problem. And I find, especially with peak performance, this may not be true for everybody listening, but for hard-charging Type A types, who are really committed to peak performance, nobody likes to slow down. One of the reasons nobody likes to calm down and recover and over and over and over and over again, an active recovery practice and having the grit to lean into that active recovery practice on a daily basis. And this can mean everything from kind of long walks, Epsom salt baths, restorative yoga, sauna, and a good night's sleep, of course, plus proper food, hydration, nutrition. That stuff really, really tends to matter. And those are grit skills. Those are hard things to do, especially if you've worked a long day and expended a lot of grit to go jump into a sauna. It may be a luxury, but maybe you don't have one in your house. You have to go someplace to get into a sauna. All those things take extra effort, and it's hard to remember to do that on a regular basis. So I think you want to sort of emphasize the grit to recover as a key grit skill, also as a key flow hack skill. Somebody mentioned earlier that cortisol was an ongoing issue. I saw that pop up in the chat. And without an active recovery protocol, I don't think you're going to win that cortisol battle over time either. So, I think the grit to recover is a great place to start and it leads nicely from something we were just talking about because one of the other reasons clear goals and clear goals lists are so important, meaning I have a daily to-do list is I've got 9 items on my list or whatever you have. You know, when that 9th item gets checked off, oh wow, I'm done. I can now recover permission to turn off. And if that becomes your pattern, I've got a clear goals list. I'm going to get everything done. And then I have the grit to recover. First of all, it will get you very far. Towards your goals for the year, right? Because you're not only accomplishing everything on your day, you're recharging the batteries for the next day. And so just as a place to start, if you're working, the first level of grit is perseverance, right? I always think the easiest way to train perseverance is this: create a daily to-do list, a daily clear goals list, and practice getting all things done and then practice recovering. And I think that two-step And we started talking about you want to link dopamine, the pleasure chemical, to the perseverance. This is what you want to link your dopamine to is, oh, wow, I've accomplished everything on my clear goals list and I went and actively shut it down afterwards. Because again, if you actively accomplish everything on your clear goals list and then you go out and get drunk and don't sleep well to celebrate, you're not going to be able to sustain that momentum. And what you're really after is momentum. And momentum is sort of accomplishing everything on your clear goals list day after day after day. I always like to say that peak performance is nothing more or less than a checklist. It's doing everything on your checklist today, doing it again tomorrow, doing it again tomorrow, repeat. It's not particularly sexy, but it's also not particularly overwhelming. This is accessible to anybody. Think about what we're really talking about here is not that difficult. The difficulty is in the repetition and understanding that all of these things work like compound interest. So, a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit the next day, a little bit the next day, and the real results get magnified over time.

That's really helpful, Stephen. Thanks for that breakdown. I just want to answer Arna Mayer's question there. Is there a way to declare cortisol bankruptcy. As the mom of two young kids, it feels close to impossible to prioritize restoration. And to build on that question, Stephen, I'm curious if you could just describe your concept of multi-tool solutions and how that may be useful to add recovery to things that are now— may be already doing so that it doesn't actually—

yeah, first of all, shout out to moms because peak performance with kids is especially difficult. There's no way around it. Kids can be an incredibly joyful, flowy part of our lives, but there's a lot to juggle and certainly difficult. So, first of all, it's worth acknowledging that. And what Rin was talking about is I like to look for— because peak performers in general are very, very busy. So, I like to stack protocols. So, look for ways to do a couple things together. I gave an example that's very early on when I said I like— when I do my active recovery protocol at the end of my days, I like to go into a sauna and I like to do breathwork inside the sauna. So, saunas themselves or Epsom salt bath, for example, sweating, sauna is a particularly good, automatically lower cortisol levels. So, you don't have to do any work. You add in breathwork, you take it even farther. So, this is a way to stack protocols so you're doing 2 or 3 things at once, which is very, very useful. The other thing I'd like to talk about, Anna, for half a second is where we started the micro meditations, the 1-minute meditations throughout a day. I have been having a lot of conversation with moms. Actually recently about— I don't think there's a way peak performance for mothers is so difficult. I don't think there are— there's anything hard and fast, but it's been an ongoing conversation. One of the things that has come up lately in these conversations that I've had is these kind of micro mindfulness moments of 1 minute of clarity and non-reactivity, the micro recoveries built in throughout the day if you can't get one big macro recovery. And a multi-tool solution is a single tool that solves multiple problems at once. Mindfulness is a classic example. I think that's one of the examples I give in The Art of Impossible because it trains up focus, which amplifies flow, and it trains up emotional regulation at the same time, which keeps you more even keel, et cetera, et cetera. So, it's one problem that solves a couple of problems at once. I look for solutions like that. So, I'll give you another example from my own life even though this is purely anecdotal, but it gives you a way to think about this. For example, I have a dog, right? I have to hike my dog every day. I try to combine hiking uphill because that's exercise and I'm working leg strength and all that other stuff with a hike in nature, which lowers cortisol levels and provides a 20-minute walk in the woods, essentially provides the same benefits as most of the SSRIs on the market and kind of increasing serotonin levels, increasing calm. And in flow, you need a release activity, right? There's a flow cycle, and the second stage of the flow cycle is release. And usually a low-grade physical exercise works great for that. So the way I stack my morning, I have a big writing session followed by a dog hike. The dog hike is going to be my release session. So if I was stuck in flow, I was stuck while writing, this will be released and maybe it'll kick me into flow for my next writing session. It will also, the walk in nature will calm me down and I'll get some exercise. It's a very personal example, but it's a multi-tool solution for my own life. And I got to hike my dog anyways. So I'm doing something I automatically have to do and I get to layer 3 other things that would normally be separate items on my to-do list on top of one thing. So that's a multi-tool solution. So, when you have children, when you have a crazy busy schedule, when you're doing a million things at once, I always want to look ways for stacking protocols, multitool solutions, and especially if you're dealing with a very hectic life, these short pauses and momentary resets can sometimes really matter.

Thanks, Dean. That's a great breakdown. Alicia asked if you can define burnout so that the definition definition of burnout that we use in Zero to Dangerous, which is from the World Health Organization, is that burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. And the key part of this definition is that it's defined across 3 dimensions, the first of which is exhaustion, the second of which is cynicism and detachment, and then the third of which is low self-efficacy, which is a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. And then Amina made a great point about bore-out, which is occurring more and more and had occurred through the pandemic. Adam Grant wrote an article about flow and languishing where he referenced that. That is a great article for people to check out. Bore-out is likely seeing one of those dimensions of burnout happening, such as the overwhelming exhaustion. Without the full picture kicking into gear. And, that definitely can happen with the amount of online work that the people are engaging with.

There's been a bunch of questions on breathwork and cortisol levels. I know you've looked at this. I'll talk about it really quickly. There are a lot of sort of really excellent people on this topic. Dr. Andrew Huberman is particularly good on breathwork, I think, and his stuff is really worth listening to. Some really simple things with breathwork. So, interestingly, flow, if you're interested in flow, flow does not just mean all the cortisol out of your system. Cortisol underpins the sympathetic nervous system, your fight and flight response. And there's your parasympathetic, which is rest and relax mode. And in flow, we actually see both systems active at once. So, you have a little bit of cortisol in your system, and a little bit of the rest and relax chemicals. And usually, when this happens, when you get two systems active at once, this is actually fairly common in biology and neuroscience, it's precision tuning. So, it's like on a hi-fi and a stereo, when you have a bass and a treble, it's easier to tune your stereo than if you just have one knob, right? So, same thing if you have activity in the parasympathetic and the sympathetic at the same time. If you want to balance parasympathetic and sympathetic activity. It's really easy. 5-second inhale, 10-second exhale, or 5-second inhale, 5-second exhale. That will balance it. I tend to like using my inhale. You want to obviously breathe in diaphragmatically, so starting deep into the belly and then filling up the lungs, going up to the top of the lungs that way. And that's one simple thing. Dr. Huberman also recommends this is one of the fastest ways to sort of drop cortisol levels and norepinephrine levels is you do a long inhale and then you do a second inhale on top of it. So, take in the first inhale. I'll do it for you. So, you take in as much air as you possibly can and then you suck in more air. And, what that essentially does is it forces you into rest and relax mode. And then, once you've taken that air and you let it out, often a lot of people like to do it out loud. So, a loud exhale with their mouth. I like to do it with my nose and exhale long and slow that way. But, I can usually start calming myself down within 2 breaths using that technique and 10 to 15 breaths will really get me back. So, if you're looking for fast ways to calm down through breathwork, Those are the ones I want to mention before we go into the grit story. And Ryan, do you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, I'll just set up the context. So Steve, myself, and you were in— we actually, we both always mix up the city. It was either Helsinki or Stockholm, one of the two. We had two trips within a short period of time. I believe this was in Helsinki. And you were opening for Obama. In front of almost 8,000 European CEOs. So a huge percentage of CEOs of big European companies were there in this enormous stadium. There's photos of it, I think, on our website. And you were opening for Obama. And yeah, things got a little bit mixed up with respect to the time allocation.

Oh yeah, this was about— Yeah, this is one of the levels of grit we like to talk about is the grit to be your best when you're at your worst. And the example I like to give with this one is when I write a new speech, whenever I give a speech, I'll write it, I'll run it a couple times. I usually do it in front of a friend or two. And then I don't consider a speech locked and done and loaded unless— what I like to do is I find a day when I didn't get enough sleep the night before, so I didn't get an active recovery. Recession and I didn't recover well. I guess if I've worked all day and then I'll go to the gym, work out really hard, I'll come home, I'll grab my dogs and we'll go up one. I live in the mountains, so we'll go up one of the mountains behind my house and I'll give the speech then. And if I can give the speech on no sleep after working a full day while exhausted, while heading up a mountain, I feel like I can give the speech under any circumstances. And you're giving this example, right? I think it was— yeah, I can't remember where we were. I think it was Finland, but I cannot actually remember. I remember it was like 25,000 people in the auditorium and another like 50,000 people on the live feed. It was that huge room. They had been very persnickety because I was opening for Obama. The timing was very critical and they had asked me specifically to write a speech that was, I think, 27 minutes 30 seconds long. And right before I was supposed to go on stage, the event organizer was backstage with me and he was about to let me on stage. He was super nervous. He was really scared. It was a big event for him. And as Ryan pointed out, there were all these CEOs in the audience. And I looked at him, I was like, you can calm down, take a deep breath. I got this. I worked with your people. Don't worry. It's 27 minutes and 30 seconds on the nose. I got you. And his eyes pop and he looks at me, he goes, oh my God, they didn't tell you we need it to be 23 minutes and 16 seconds. And by the way, you're on in 5, 4, 3. And he put me on stage and it was a speech from my book Bold too, which was of all my books, Bold is the hardest book to talk about quickly because the ideas are really, really big and they don't summarize very quickly. And so I had to give a bold speech and I had to cut, I think, 5 minutes and 15 seconds off of it in real time on stage out of a speech that's hard to make sense out of even at normal length. And I was opening for Obama. I did it. It actually worked incredibly well. But one of the reasons you want the grit to be your best when you're at your worst is when those situations arise, when you actually have trained yourself to be gritty in those situations, you can actually— I actually, I remember when I was walking on stage at that point, because when I was backstage, there was, you know, I was nervous to begin with because it was a big room and it was the president. And I remember he, you know, there was a moment of absolute panic when he said that to me. And as I walked on stage, there was this familiarity of, oh, wait, yes, there's a lot of people, but I've been here before. I've done this before, and I've had to cut time out of a speech before live. And okay, let's figure this out. And it actually turned out to be a lot of fun. But it's one of the reasons I think it's so important to kind of train to be your best when you're at your worst, because oftentimes when those situations arise, they're big moments, right? The only time in my career I've opened for a president. I don't know if that's going to happen again. You know, it was a big moment. You want to get it right.

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great example of us. I'm going to take a few questions here, Stephen, from people who have been submitting them. AJ says, what if the goal is to develop a habit or personality trait which requires continuous effort? And I'm assuming what he means there is how do you think about setting a goal like that? Maybe it's the same as the breakdown you already gave.

It's a great question. The one thing that I want to emphasize here, a little counterintuitive, but any kind of habit formation, it's learning. This is a learning process, right? And learning, like habit formation, requires recovery, requires gaps in between. The research shows, by the way, do an intense learning session or try to lay in your new habit. And then a short yoga nidra session, sort of an alpha wave meditation afterwards is fantastic for cementing learning. Also a good night's sleep because most of that takes place in deep delta waves sleep. So my point in all this is from the sounds of the question, sounds like you're going after something hard and chewy that's going to take a lot of work. And when I hear questions like this, and please correct me in the chat if I'm wrong or if I'm overstating or I'm being presumptuous, but when I hear questions like that, I think you're— I'm worried you're going a little too hard and not realizing you're not going to get there overnight. Habit formation is slow, it's steady, and it's a little bit every day or a little bit at a time, not in all-in all the time. I think that ends up ending up being demotivating. You go really hard for a while and then you're just totally burned out and you go away. I'd rather go a little bit at a time and be slow and steady, sort of bring these new habits into my life that way. I tend to think about things in 5-year chunks. How will my life be different if I learn this thing now or start working on this thing now, even if it takes me 5 years? Because some stuff does. And I just, I'm a slow learner and I want to give myself time. Maybe I'll get there quicker, but I try to be that way. And by the way, people have been asking which books of mine to start with, what to do. I don't really have a primer for you, but I can tell you that West of Jesus looks at the neuroscience of mystical experience and kind of the overlay between flow and spirituality. This idea gets continued in Stealing Fire, a book I wrote with Jamie Wheal. The core flow text, the core peak performance text, Rise of Superman and Art of Impossible. If you're interested in the work I've sort of done around flow and business and disruptive technology, Abundance, Bold, Futures Faster Than You Think. And then, there's some books on humans and animals and some novels in there, but we won't confuse things.

Stephen, I got another question here from Scott Roskos. He says, "Do you think it's possible to undermine our brain's trust or confidence in our decisions or goals? I ask as someone who frequently worked to the point of burnout and sickness, and now I have almost a PTSD that's related to goals.

I don't think you're alone here. We hear this a lot in people we get to work with because we work with a lot of peak performers and we work with a lot of executives. And I would say that some significant portion of our clientele are C-suite executives, men and women, by the way. And usually just so you guys know, I think, I don't know what the breakdown is. I think more than 50% of the people we work with tend to be women. So gender-wise, it's an equal ratio, but everybody comes in. And one of the most common complaints is simply this is like, Wow, I have, I've been so gritty and have worked so hard towards my goals that I'm now a little phobic setting them because I end up driving myself straight into burnout. And for this, I would, you know, to sort of talk about this, I think, you know, I want to emphasize a couple of things that are important in Burnout Protocols. And I think this is really important in grit and goal setting. So, so one of the things that we talk about a lot when we talk about preventing burnout or other things is there's an order with peak performance should be trained. I'm hesitant to use a word like should, but what I mean by this is I've maintained for a very long time that peak performance is nothing more or nothing less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. And in The Art of Impossible, there's an order. I start with intrinsic motivation, then I move into goal setting, then I move into grit. What happens when you do this out of order? What happens if you just try to be gritty all the time is you end up burned out. And one of the things that I emphasize a lot is we all have what's known as a primary flow activity. This is whatever you've done since you were a little kid that 80%, 90% of the time it drops you into flow. For me, it's skiing. For some people, it's dancing salsa. For my wife, it's walking in the mountains with our dogs. For some people, it's gardening. For some people, it's playing with their children. It's on and on and on. But what tends to happen as we get more responsible in life is We set aside childish things. We stop skiing. We stop hiking in the mountains. We stop doing our primary flow activity and double down on our grit, our goals, and things we want to accomplish. And I always tend to say that grit without flow is burnout. You'll end up just having what we heard about from AJ, which is like goal-related PTSD. And one of the reasons that your primary flow activity is so important, especially in this conversation, is when we drop into flow, a couple of things happen. There's been an ongoing conversation in the chat about cortisol levels. So, as we move into flow, stress hormones, predominantly cortisol, get flushed out of our system and they get replaced by positive feel-good neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, and anandamine, and so forth. And we're resetting our nervous system back to zero. So, you're calming back down, first thing. Second thing, flow is a focusing skill. It's just as mindfulness is a focusing skill. Flow is a different kind of focus. And the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So, if I go skiing on Monday and I go to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, skiing and getting into flow on Monday is going to help me get into flow Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because I'm training my brain on the focus. I've also sort of reset my nervous system and recharge my battery. And flow, because it's the source code of intrinsic motivation, it feels amazing. It sort of pays off the grit, right? Getting to be in flow is one of the reasons all that grit is so worthwhile. So this may not be the answer that AJ was looking for. That's what sort of came to mind when he asked the question. Super.

That's great.

Thanks.

Matthew says, when we talk about goal setting, most of the orientation is towards our professional career or life? How does goal setting differ for personal projects or even fuzzier areas like relationships or spirituality?

I don't tend to set as many professional goals as I think most people. There tends not to be a lot. For example, writing to me is a spiritual practice. Whatever we mean by spirituality, that connection to something greater than myself, one of the ways in for me into that is writing. So, I have a really hard time separating out those things. And so, I don't tend to think about professional goals versus personal goals versus spiritual goals because in the way I tend to do things, they end up laying on top of each other. What I would like to sort of point out about especially personal goals, and I'm not 100% certain what you mean by spiritual goals, but let me take a swing at both. I think what's easier with professional goals is we have a really clear-cut answer. Did I reach them? Did I not? Right? One of my ongoing personal goals is I'd like to figure, I'd like to find a way to constantly be a better husband than I was last year. Right? My wife and I have been together, I think it's 17 years and I still feel like I'm figuring out how to be married, how to be a good husband, how to be all those things. That is an amorphous sort of personal goal and how to benchmark progress on that is a little trickier. And one of the things that I tend to think of with sort of spiritual goals and personal goals and those things is exactly this question. How do you benchmark progress? And one of the reasons they're harder is we don't have So, Ryan emphasized at the start of this podcast, if you're making clear goals lists, make them clear, make them clear, make them clear, make them clear until they're so written out that your brain just knows exactly what to do at all times. You might want to try that with your spiritual goals and your personal goals is really chunk them down. I'll give you an example. I would like to be a better husband. For example, that's a very amorphous kind of personal goal. I would like to find 5 things my wife does every day to try to celebrate. By the way, if I tried to celebrate 5 things about my wife every day, she would start throwing pots and pans at me. It would be too much overload. She'd be like, what have you done with my husband? But that's the kind of thing where you want to take the personal or behavioral goal and chunk it into things that you can actually sort of measure. I hope that's helpful. And I may not be the best guy in the world to ask about spiritual goals. I try to stay in my lane, and my lane tends to be science-driven peak performance. I don't necessarily think I'm anybody but another guy with just an opinion about questions around spirituality. So, I would like to point that out also.

Well, I think it's a great and important point, Stephen, that when you access flow, very significantly through your professional pursuits, they start to blur into spiritual pursuits because of the fact that there are, you know, key characteristics of flow that people report as being spiritual experiences. So it all starts to become one thing. Julia, this relates to some of the topics that we've touched on before. So Julie Greenwald says, Stephen, you've mentioned both the autonomic nervous system and your challenges with patience, I was wondering, do you think there is a direct correlation between losing your patience and getting frustrated by a situation and the sympathetic nervous system? Yes.

I mean, for me, yes. I have a particularly bad reaction to powerlessness. No matter what I do, I can't change this. This thing. And that tends to be sort of when I lose my patience. And mind you, the context, I've been working on big sort of environmental challenges and big environmental challenges in my experience, they require nothing more than patience and tolerance for sort of going 1 inch at a time. And I think what ends up happening for me when I ultimately lose it the overwhelm that rises up, the frustration that rises up, that's a fight or flight response. It's a, I'm overwhelmed. I can no longer juggle all these things. I can no longer hold this all in my head. And I can no longer, once I'm overwhelmed, right? One of the things that's helpful to understand here is that the brain will panic. The brain will trigger a fight or flight response. A strong sympathetic response if it feels like you don't have the resources to meet the challenge. It doesn't matter if the challenge is sort of small. Your brain is going to turn a small work problem into a catastrophe if you don't have the resources to meet the challenge. This is sort of what essentially happens in burnout because you're tired all the time. Your fear levels are really jacked up. Right? When you're tired all the time, you don't have enough energy to meet the day's challenges. So, anything that's a little bit frustrating can easily be overwhelming and you can get that fast sympathetic response.

Thank you all so much. Have a phenomenal 2022.

Thanks, everyone. Great questions and comments. I hope we were useful and have an amazing 2022. And, we'll catch you a little later in the year.

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