Stop Trying to Do Better -- It’s Not Working

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes.

1:05 Welcome back to Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you. Mostly are sitting on untapped human energy, and I helped them unleash it. I'm an organizational psychologist, local therapist, workforce advisor and the founder of the Gusto Now movement. But my favorite title that I traffic in is simply that I traffic and energy, not the surface level motivation or another engagement initiative, but the deeper force what I call Gusto, the life force of performance that drives commitment, perseverance, and genuine ownership of a shared mission and the clients we serve. You can learn more about us on how we can work together at Gusto dashnow dot com or my personal site at least coortes dot com. Getting in today's program, we have with us doctor Ryan Godfredson. He is a cutting edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant.

1:51 He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders, primarily through a focus on mindsets to elevate the organization and culture. He is the author of the Elevated Leader, Leveling Up Your Leadership through Vertical Leader Vertical Development, which we talked about last time he was on air today we're diving into another of his books, Becoming Better, the groundbreaking science of Personal Transformation. We will be talking about the difference between vertical and horizontal development, and also the difference between the being and doing side of ourselves, and we'll talk about some of the things that people can do to start the process of vertically developing on their own. He joins us again from Orange County, California, Doctor Ryan govertson a hearty welcome back to Working on Purpose. Hey, thanks for having me back. We must have done something right last time.

2:34 I think so. I told you before we got on air, I might. Be a fan. Well, I just love having these conversations, so yeah, let's geek out. Well if we must, But look at this beautiful thing that you brought into the world, and first time we also just celebrate you, Ryan one. You know, you're very, very real and personable and vulnerable in this book, and I really appreciate that it helps us all realize that we're on this journe need together. Right, We're all in this development thing. We're never done. And you know, sometimes it gets a little sticky and ooh and GOOHI in there. Yeah it does, But I love I mean I loved your intro. I'm sitting there and listen to your intro, and you know you you love focusing on energy and helping them people harness that energy and provide that productively.

3:22 And I think a lot of what we're going to talk about is how do we unlock ourselves so that we can put forth that energy. I've just learned that each of us and myself included, we have, like I am almost a vision And remember those old cartoons where people have, like, you know, a chain around their ankle and there's this big ball, right, a weighted ball. Yes, I just think that we all have those that are holding us down and holding us back. The question is are we aware of what they are? And do we know how to unlock it? And I've just discovered that not many people are in touch with those and most people don't know how to unlock it. But if we can do that, it's unlimited potential. So I'm excited to dig in.

4:12 I love how we've situated this already. Let's go Okay, so first we want we want to first invite our listeners and viewers into this realm that we're going to be only discussing, which is vertical development. But before we do that, let's have you do this once again, distinguish horizontal and vertical development. Yeah, horizontal development is a formative. So the two different types of development there are, they are completely different developmental strategies and pathways. Okay, and we are all familiar with horizontal development. Horizontal development is most development. It's improving our talent, our knowledge, and our skills. This is our education systems, our athletic programs, and our organizational develop development efforts almost slowly focused on here's what you need to know and here's what you need to do. And then the name of the game with horizontal development is in a way, you've got to work hard and you've got to push hard. Okay, that's what we are accustomed to. But it is not the only developmental pathway. Now. It is a good developmental pathway, but it is limited. In fact, I would dare say that when we engage in horizontal development, our potential is only incremental improvement. Now there's a different developmental path and strategy.

5:32 And that's vertical development. Vertical development isn't adding knowledge and skills to what we have, it's upgrading our internal operating system. So you might say horizontal development is putting tools in our tool belt. We love tools, that's great, But vertical development is all about upgrading the person wearing the tool belt. And so this when we engage in vertical development, it can be transformational and something that's unique. And we'll dive into this is vertical development really isn't about pushing harder, working harder. It's actually more about letting go, particularly from those weights that might be holding us back.

6:20 I really love that whole analogy of the tool belt and a person wearing the tool belt. I think that really really brings it home. Okay, now we need We did say listeners and viewers that we were going to geeg out. So this is really going to help you learn so much if you listen to what we're talking about today and take it to heart. Ooh, it's just great stuff. So now that you've done vertical and horizontal, and now we got to hit the being and doing sides of ourselves. If you could distinguish those. Yeah, and it's just a different terminology. So what I've learned is that we have two different sides of ourselves. One side of ourselves is our doing side, that's our talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities, and we need that. And I'm going to give you an example. I'll use somebody who's been in the news lately if you follow sports, and it's Tiger Woods.

7:06 Tiger Woods has been in the news. We know Tiger Woods because he is incredible along his doing side. Throughout his past, he's been an incredibly skilled, skilled golfer, right he has. He's really far out on the doing side if you think about an X access. But he's also been in the news lately because he has some issues, some personal issues, maybe some substance abuse issues. And when we look at those issues that Tiger Woods has, they don't have anything to do with his doing side. His talent, his knowledge and skills has something to do with another side of himself, which is his being side, and our being side is the quality and sophistication of our internal operating system. And when somebody has issues, and we've all had issues, so I'm not trying to judge Tiger, which I mean, we all have issues. It's just are we aware of what issues we have? And if we've got issues that are holding us back in our lives, it generally has a lot more to do with our being side than our doing side, and so to kind of merge this terminology together. Horizontal development is improving along our doing side, Vertical development is improving along our being side.

8:26 And so what I've just recognized is that almost all of us are in we're We're almost all familiar with our doing side. We know how much skills we have, how much knowledge we have, how much abilities that we have. But what I found is that not many people really know the true quality of their being side. And so this just by making this distinction doing side and being side, it opens up a new and possibly different way to evaluate ourselves. Awesome. Okay, now we've laid some really important groundwork that has helped distinguish some key terms that you use throughout your book. Okay, so then what I would love to do to bring it back down to the ground because you and I can get really theoretical and very geeky here.

9:17 You talk about I love how you share the multiple examples of how you work with people, but you talk about how personal transformation always involves an upgrade and an elevation to this being site. And you go on to say that when you coach people, they become more emotionally in control and regulated in many different ways. So to help us help our listeners and viewers understand and think about how they can start to try this on what ways do you start to notice that they're more emotionally in control and regulated? Good when? And then this is just a pretty cursory gauge of our being side altitude, And that's by asking the question how reactive are you? So? For example, if you get cut off on the freeway, how prone are you to react? I'm a parent and I have kids who play sports. When my child doesn't do something, well, how much do I react as a parent when I get feedback? How quick am I to get defensive? When when a problem happens at work? How quick am I to put out the fire? Right? And so our being side. One way to gauge our being side is how reactive is our body's internal operating system? Right?

10:33 We just know some people fly, you know, just in these uncomfortable situations. Their body's internal operating system is flying to let me control, let me make sure there's no problems, let me just ease my emotional burden, whereas other people have a wider window of tolerance where they can sit in some of these uncomfortable situations, and not that they love sitting there, but by having the capacity to sit with the discomfort, it gives them a greater ability to choose their response to the situation as opposed to knee jerk react to the.

11:14 Situation beautifully articulated. Okay, now, let's if we can with the with the utmost love and respect scare our listeners and viewers just dismedge. And that is by situating that we have so much of our response is automatic and non conscious until we do this work. So you think about this, that means that we are kind of puppets to our operating system here and we don't even know that we're being controlled. And that's so so important. So if you could speak to this notion of how much of this response you're talking about until we work on it is automatic and non conscious reaction. Yeah, this is super fascinating, right because we all think that, oh, yeah, we are we are in the driver's seat of our lives.

11:57 And the statistic really causes us to question that, which is psychologists and neuroscientists that found that ninety five percent of our thinking, feeling, judging, and acting is driven by our non conscious automatic processing and that that's on average. I don't think that's everybody. But what if, for example, what if we could have only ninety percent of our thinking, feeling, judging, and processing be driven by our non conscious automatic processing. Now, the reason for this is because our brain is our biggest calorie user within our body, and so our body has to operate in a way that saves energy. We just can't do everything consciously, so our brain is really efficient at putting things at a non conscious level. And so one of the ways that I think about this, and this is one of the things that we've learned, is that how we are wired and programmed to survive our childhood is not the same wiring and programming that we need to thrive as adults, as parents, as spouses, as leaders, as employees, as fill in the blank. And so we have all adopted automatic programming based upon our past, our life's experience, and then we should come to a point in time in our adulthood where we ask the question,

13:31 is my wiring really optimize for my purpose for the impact that I want to have in my life? And generally, if we ask that question, we'll find that not every aspect about our wiring is aligned with the best version of ourselves. Yeah, and then there's the notion of the stuff that I think many people are starting to recognize how important it is to unlearn things, to let go of things and no longer serve us. But that takes an awareness process, and I want to bring home to as we continue on this first segment to talk about the promise the opportunity of this vertical development here you mentioned earlier is getting a less reactive. Part of the opportunity is to learn how to be less reactive. But I absolutely love the way that you put forth this very elegant definition of vertical development. You say, a clearer way to define it is elevating our internal operating system's ability to interpret, process and respond to our world in value creating ways as opposed to self protective ways. Let's unpeel that a little bit.

14:33 Yeah, Well, let's take the example I brought it up earlier of receiving feedback or constructive criticism. Right, how would you say that most people respond to receiving constructive criticism, They get defensive defensive? Right, That's again that's usually a need jerk reaction. And what's going on is they're putting up a shield, right, And why would we put up a shield is because our body automatically and not unconsciously, is interpreting this constructive criticism as an attack. Now, it could be an attack, but my experience is is it's generally not a true attack. Right. We really aren't in any danger, but our body is prone to respond as though it is. But that's not the best way and that's not the most sophisticated way for us to make meaning of our world. It is a self protective way.

15:29 Is protecting our emotions in the short term, but it's also holding us back from learning, growth and development in the long term. So on one side, the more reactive is generally self protective in the short term, but then being wired for value creation on the other side is where we have this capacity to sit in short term discomfort in pursuit of long term growth and development. And so we just kind of painted this continuum being wired for self protection versus value creation. And there's different ways that we can investigate this, but just to simplify this, where we fall along that continuum is effectively our being side altitude.

16:19 So beautiful love, how you talk? Okay, let's let our listeners and viewers just chew on what we were presented so far. I think it was a fair amount here, so let's let them marinate a sma as while we take our first break. I'm your host, doctor Earles Cortez. But we've been in the air with doctor Ryan Godferdson, who's a cutting edge leadership development author, researcher and consultant. He helps organizations divertically develop their leaders, primarily through a focus on mindsets to elevate the organization and the culture. We've been talking about the opportunity the promise of doing this vertical development work. After the break, we're going to start really geeking out and talk and take a more of a deeper dive into what is that being sided. We'll be right back.

17:11 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise alisee at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

18:03 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to help them create a world where organizations thrive because they're people thrive. They're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books, so one of my latest came out called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically in liven your business. And I order to help leaders understand today's discerning workforce. What do they want to need from you to give you their best and want to stick around? And then I provide you twenty two best practices to equip you to provide it for them for your leadership and your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site at least Coortes dot com. If you are just now joining us.

18:45 My guest is doctor Ryan Godferdson. He's the author of Becoming Better, the groundbreaking science of personal transformation. So the first place I want to start here, which I think is really hopelessly alluring and helps us understand so much Ryan, is talk about how how much the central nervous system is is our body's command center. Let's start with kind of a little bit of an orientation around that. Yeah, So we defined our being side as the quality and sophistication of our internal operating system, right, which is our internal operating system is really responsible for our as we've talked about our character, our mindsets, our psyche, our emotional regulation abilities. And so when we say internal operating system, what bodily system are we really talking about, Well, that's our body's nervous system, right. Our nervous system is, as you mentioned, our body's command center. Because our nervous system is the interaction serves as the interactor between the world around us and us. Right, how do we interact with our world? It's through our senses, our psie, our touch, our smell, our hearing, right, and so we have our senses that are picking up on signals in the world around us, and then the nervous system is sending those signals through our senses and through our body to the

20:17 back of our brain. And there at the back of our brain, our body's nervous system there right there, there's a gateway and they the because we can't process all information that comes into our body, so our body's nervous system has to decide which information is going to get filtered in and which isn't. So information is coming in, it goes to our brain, then it's okay, does it go in or does it not go in for anything that is allowed in. The second kind of job there at the brain that our nervous system has to engage in is interpret the information that comes in. So, for example, we might experis failure, and of course that's going to come in through our senses. We're going to feel that that's going to go to our brain, and the brain's going to say, all right, this is important, let's filter it in. And then there's an automatic assignment to failure.

21:15 Or we could go back to that example of constructive criticism, right, and there's an automatic assignment. That's why we say ninety five percent of our thinking feeling, judging, and acting is driven by our non conscious automatic processing. Because information goes in, it gets automatically interpreted, and then based on the interpretation, there's an automatic activation of a response. And all of that, again is automatic. And so you know, in some ways, like I love geeking out and getting into the weeds, and this is getting really into the weeds, but I hopefully in a clear way, just to help us to see that this vertical development path that we're talking about is very different than what we're used to. We're not adding things right, knowledge and skills, we're refining how our bodies literally, our body's nervous system works well.

22:10 And I would say in many ways, Ryan, what you're doing through your work and through your books is you're helping us all understand better how we have been wired internally. We're not used to looking like that. We look at the outsiders, my makeup, all Kade does, my mask, garret running, you know, this is my suit match, my shoes. We're not used to taking a deep dive inside of ourselves. And your work really helps us understand how our brains work. And you know what's really important to know about that, which is this notion of how it's always directing us from pain and toward pleasure. And when you start thinking about that, gosh, and if you interpret something as pain like Ryan's about to say, how I did in that presentation, I'm going to brace myself because it's going to be painful.

22:51 I'm not going to like it. Versus this guy knows what he's doing. What if I listen with an open mind, in an open ear, might I just learned something here that can actually improve how much money I make in a year? Yeah? Well so yeah, let me give you just a personal example for me. I mean, here's one of the things that I've come to learn is I don't know how familiar you are with attachment theory, but attacked. Yeah. Well, I read your book of course cover to cover, as I'm prone to do, and I've read it for other Yes, so it's fascinating and I love how you talk about that in your book. Yeah. So, attachment theory is a theory that suggests that our bonds with our primary caregivers as children shapes how our body becomes wired. So when people have a good and what they call secure relationship with their primary caregiver, then their body's nervous system is more regulated. Okay, Now, unfortunately, there's a lot of people who don't have great relationships with their primary caregivers and they develop what are either anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment styles. So one of the things that I've learned, is I've tried to kind of investigate my programming, is I learned that I didn't have a close bond with my primary caregivers my parents at a very early age.

24:14 I didn't have this close bond, and I developed what is called an anxious sorry, an avoidant attachment style. So for an avoidant attachment style, we become wired to see that connection to another person is actually harmful for us. And here's why that makes sense for me, is because while my parents are always there for me physically, they were rarely there for me emotionally. Yes, so I experienced during my upbringing emotional neglect, and so a way for me to protect myself from the pain of emotional neglect, my body learned to not develop connections with other people.

24:56 And so it was a self protective safety mechanism that my body adopted as a way to protect myself. And so, of course this is a part of my wiring where my body wants to keep others at an arms distance because it helps me feel more safe and more secure. Right. In other words, I don't like when I feel a close connection. It makes me feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. And so this is something that guided was a part of all of my interactions with other people throughout my life, and I had no clue that this was going on.

25:36 And then, of course I get married, I have kids, and my relationship just wasn't what I envisioned it to be. And I was very quick at that time to kind of point my finger at my partner, my spouse, be like, here's all the things that you're doing that's impacting me in a negative way. And what I didn't realize that I always had this figurative arm up towards my life and it was a part of just my programming. And I've had to learn to kind of deconstruct that to develop more optimal programming that allows me right and my nervous system to be okay with letting somebody else in.

26:20 And that's been a big part of my vertical development journey. And I just use myself as an example to hopefully bring the ideas to life, but too to also just normalize, like most people do, did not have a secure attachment with their primary caregivers and deal with some sort of attachment related issues. And if we don't awaken to that, and if we don't address that, we're just going to in a way be living in third class when our opportunity is first class. Hmm and who Okay, So I think you just hooked an awful lot of our listeners and viewers right there. Okay, Now, let's talk about a few things that kind of well, just that will bring more and more to life what this whole operating system is about. And the fact that you know, our programming between self protection or value creation is on a continuum where everybody's on this continuum somewhere.

27:21 I also want to call out, especially since I'm all about meaning and purpose, that this internal operating system is a meaning making system. That's what it does. And so I also want to call out how important this is going to be so important for listeners and viewers to get. How you talk to us in your book about how this operating system always makes us feel right and good about how we're interpreting these things and respond to them. This is the right way to do it for us. Can you speak a little bit of that, because this is where people get held in they get held hostage. It is yes, And I'll give you another personal example. So I grew up. You know, I've talked a little bit about my parents. My parents were maybe the most frugal people that I had ever met. There was a reason for that they had, you know, I won't go into all of the background there, but I grew up my dad. Right before I was born, he lost his business.

28:14 He was an entrepreneur, lost his business and that's a pretty dramatic thing for most individuals, and he went on to take a he was a civil engineer, a stable civic job. And I grew up with my dad kind of preaching to me that you never want to be an entrepreneur and you never want to go into debt because being an entrepreneur and debt are risky. These are things that could put you and your family in harm's way. And he had learned that given his life experience, and so I grew up with that mentality. I never want to be an entrepreneur and I never want to grow into debt. And what I didn't realize at the time was what this was this is wiring that was more pro to helping me stay safe than it was having an impact on the world. And I got to a point in my career where I kind of reached this you know, fork in the road where I had to I had to make a choice. Do I continue playing it safe or do I become willing to take risk in order to have the impact or live out the purpose that I feel like I was born to fulfill.

29:30 Understand that question, yes. And and this is and you know at the time, this is really tricky for me to navigate. But by help by awakening to this idea that I have got some wiring that's saying to me, play it safe, play it safe, play it safe. And that feels right to me, because who likes to, you know, step into muddy, difficult situations. So while that felt right to me, I also had to recognize it was holding me back for my goals and my dreams. That I couldn't simultaneously be safe and play it safe and reach my goals and dreams. I needed to. I needed to make a choice on which one I valued more and that as as I awakened that, it helped me realize is I needed to have a mindset shift and that I was never going to reach my goals and dreams unless I changed my mindset about how I thought about and saw risk. And it's only by changing my mindset from being playing it safe to achieve in my purpose. It's only by shifting that mindset that then I was like, Okay, I'm going to do big and bold things. I'm going to write books, I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to You know, we wouldn't be having this conversation unless I had previously made that shift.

30:58 I totally get this, and I'm alone with your brother. I got you. Okay, I want to just situate before we go on to our next break here. One of the things that you talk about in your book pretty extensively is there's three big factors that impact are being able to elevate at our altitude that most people really are not hardly at all aware of. And so the three factors are that really help us develop this self protective wiring and constrain our being side development our traumatic life experiences which most most of us have had, probably one of living in unhealthy cultures, which is where both you and I are certainly trying to help elevate and improve that game and our neurological functionality. So we don't have time to go into that, but I just wanted to situate for our listeners and viewers that you treat that in your book and that I want to put that out there as a possibility for what they want to probably start looking at as possibility for themselves. But quickly comment on that before going to break.

31:52 Yeah, no, great summary. So, yeah, how do we develop the wiring that we have. It's our life's experience, it's our current culture. And those are two things that I'm going to say are nurture related, but there are some nature elements that we need to consider, such as neurodivergency. So most commonly, at least what I see in my line of work is ADHD. So one of the things that we've learned and we could tap into the you know, at the neuroscience level, ADHD actually is some brain wiring deficiencies that does cause one to be more wired for self protection as opposed to value creation. And the good news is that for all of these things life experience, current culture, and even most neurodivergencies, we could do something about all of those to change our wiring. Now there might be some limitations for some neurodivergencies, at least, you know, some of those things might put a cap for example, if somebody's autistic. We just don't know how to take somebody from being autistic to not being autistic. But that doesn't mean there can't be being sided within whatever spectrum they might be.

33:03 On, which we will dive into after the break. So I just wanted to situate that before we go in to the next piece. So I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortez. We've run the uar of doctor Ryan Godfredson. He's a cutting edge leadership development, author, researcher and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leadership, primarily through a focus on mindsets and to elevate the organizations and the culture. In this segment, we've been really helping you get much more clarity about understanding what makes for your being site, what's under there, what's running it. And now hopefully we've situated and got you interested enough that after the break we're going to talk about some ways that you can actually start to elevate it for yourself. We'll be right back, doctor Release Cortez, is a management consultant special and Meaning and Purpose, an inspirational speaker and author.

34:03 She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise alisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

34:49 Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes. As you know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. I mentioned that my last book came out recently, The Great Revitalization, which has those twenty two best practices to be able to elevate your culture and your leadership. What I did for you is I created a very simple three page assessment it's free. You can pull it off my website at gustodeshnow dot com and will help you to understand extent to which your organization is meeting the discerning standards of today's workforce. If you are just now joining us. My guest is doctor Ryan Godfordson. He's the author of Becoming Better, the groundbreaking science of Personal Transformation. So before we get into the actual some of the ways that you share with us in your book about starting to elevate ourselves vertically, I want to do the numbers if you will. And you mentioned in the very first segment that very few people really do a lot of work on themselves, So if you could you want.

35:44 Of course I love your work on mind one point zero, two point zero, three point zero, but you have done research that helps us understand adult development levels across the general population as well as the executive population. Can you help us understand what percentage population is comprised in which of those areas. Yeah, So when we talk about vertical development and really doing this being side work, well, of course we want to ask are there any frameworks that are out there that can help us evaluate our altitude? And there is. It comes from the field of adult developmental psychology. Now, adult developmental psychology has found that adults can develop. There are three primary stages of adult development. But what's interesting is they find that while adults can develop, most don't.

36:35 And so what the research has found is when we look across all adults, we've got these three stages and this kind of represents low on our being side altitude too high on our being side altitude. Sixty four percent operate in level one, thirty five percent are in level two, and only one percent get to level three. So most people again don't really vertical develop in their adult lives. And I don't think it's because they can't. I think it's because they don't know how to and they don't even know to focus on it. Right, That's where we started today, is we're opening up a different developmental pathway than what most people are familiar with. Now, to your point, these percentages differ if we look at leaders. So if we look at executives and organizations, we find that seven percent are at the base level, most of them have gotten to the second level, eighty five percent operate there, and only eight percent at that third level. So, yeah, in our last conversation, We went into a lot of depth on some of the distinguishing factors of those different levels, but it just kind of anyways. Just understanding those percentages, I think gives us a gauge for where we might be, which is likely either level one or level two, which suggests there's a higher ordered version of ourselves that we should be striving for.

38:03 And what I would like to champion is is that possibility. Since so much of the work both of us are doing is helping people realize more of their potential, that ought to help you see there is so much more for you to grow into, and you know we're here to help, and there is so much you can do to help elevate that, which is where we're going to go next. So one of the things that you offer here in terms of helping to awaken the quality and sophistication of your internal operating system is just working to deepen your self awareness. And of course you talk about in your book how everybody thinks they're very self aware. Most of us would great ourselves. Oh, yes, we're very self aware, but you have research in your book this is otherwise. Yeah, I tap into the research done by Tasha Erit.

38:46 She's a great researcher in the self awareness space, and I, yeah, I think you'll find these percentages interesting. So she went in our research. She went and asked people, are you self aware? Right? And so what percentage of people said, Oh, yeah, I think I'm self aware. What she found is that ninety five percent of people say that they're self aware. But then she went in and threw a pretty rigorous process evaluated what percentage of people are actually self aware, and what she said is ten to fifteen percent are actually self aware. And she's famous for saying this line. That means that at least eighty percent of us are lying to ourselves about ourselves, which I think is kind of a comical way of thinking about this. But I think that what we've talked about helps us make sense of this data that she's found, which is I think that most of us think that we're self aware because we know about our doing side. But if we are truly going to be self aware, we've got to be deeply in touch with our being side. And I'm just my experience is that very few people have gotten there.

39:56 But hopefully by having conversations like this we can help more people. A couple at least will show we'll come to the party with us. Yeah, okay, So I certainly am a fan of Stephen Rcovey and I have had his son Stephen Mr. Covey and Cynthia Covey on my podcast. But of course you reference his seven have us of highly effective people, and that is where I think it's interesting people are like, yeah, self awareness, what's that? His definition that you provide in the book is the ability to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies. I think when you, now, if I were to pose that question to the audience, how aware are you of those things? I wonder if the answer would change.

40:38 Yeah. No, I think that's a great point, right, because when you talk about our scripts, our habits, our tendencies, those are the things that are driven by our non conscious automatic processing of the wiring that is baked in to our body. And so if we are not in touch with that wiring and how we are programmed, then it's really hard to be self aware. M H. And of course, you know we would be remiss if we didn't have you on the podcast talking about understanding the quality and kind of our mindsets. And I do want you to kind of walk us through because you've got I think four chapters on the different mindsets. But you know, people think well mindset. I think a lot of people have heard of growth and fixed today, which I know you address as well, but there are so many others and so helping people to understand what the heck is a mindset? So let's talk about that first, what's a mindset? And then thinking about how can we become more aware of them besides taking your assessment of course, yeah.

41:36 No, great question, and if it's okay, I'm going to step back for a second and set and set it up so I think it'll lend well for further in our conversation. So we kind of started this segment asking the question, well, how do we go about developing along our being side? And to your point, self awareness is critical, but I'm going to paint it in three different layers that we could think of about doing being side development work. So I'm going to call them surface level, deeper level, and deepest level. Okay, and at the surface level, well, first of all, any activity, regardless of depth has to be something that helps us better regulate and upgrade our nervous system. Okay, so surface level activities are the starter level activities that anybody can engage in that help with our emotional and nervous system regulation. These are things like meditation, yoga, gratitude journaling, even cold plunging are some examples of some surface level and these are good and there's good starter things because they help us to better be able to regulate ourselves over time. So those are starter level strategies. Now, when you start to talk about mindsets, we start to get into this deeper level. So at this deeper level, we want to identify what are the specific aspects of our bodies. Programming and mindsets is one of the best lenses for us to investigate that. Right, you brought up

43:08 fixed and growth. We can investigate do I have more of a fixed mindset? Do I have more of a growth mindset? But there's more mindsets out there than just fixed and growth. There's things like closed and open prevention and promotion inward and outward, and all of these exist on this continuum that we talked about earlier, from self protection to value creation and what I've learned and I've got a free mindset assessment if anybody wants to take it on my website. And what I've learned is that most people are generally kind of more value creating with one or two mindset sets and more self protective with three or four two or three mindset sets. And so what that suggests is that the more that we can investigate our mindsets in these different nuanced ways, the grit and the more clear picture we can get about our bodies wiring. And then when we find any wiring that isn't aligned with our kind of goals and aspirations, then we could do the work of shifting or upgrading that wiring.

44:17 And so that's the deeper level. I do want to talk a little bit about the deepest level, but let me pause there and see if you want to add anything. I love that. Thank you, no, because I want to get so much out of you as I possibly can't keep going. Okay, yeah, just the deepest level. Is what I've learned is you don't want to start at the deepest level. You generally do proceed down through these different levels, and the deepest level we generally need some sort of professional support. So this usually comes in some form of therapy. So trauma therapy, neurofeedback therapy, psychedelic assisted therapy. These are all research backed ways that make the most movement in up grading our internal operating system. They just generally aren't the places to start. But the more we dive into this work, the more we see. Ah, I probably need some of that, m H.

45:15 And you have so much you could say more about about mindset, but I want to just do two more things before I let you go today. One is, I just want to situate that one of what you do in organizations is you also help them understand their collective mindset, and that helps you understand oftentimes the fears that are driving the organization. I just want to say how powerful that is. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that, but because I want to go back to staying actionable here for this segment, a few other things that you also talked about that I thought were interesting to the accountability mirror. Can you see just a bit more about that? Well, so, yeah, this is I brought this up because I love trying to find people who have vertically developed and I you know, and so I could use them for examples. And I think one of the most transformational and almost dramatic examples of somebody who has vertically developed.

46:07 And I don't think they're done vertically developing. I don't think anybody is. But is David Goggins. So, David Goggins has written two books. His first book, oh no, it's facially his first book. What's his first book? Never finishes the second book. I'm mixing up Jim Collins's book. But David Goggins is this really unique person who grew up with rather severe childhood trauma, kind of struggled through his upbringing, goes into the Air Force early into his adult life, washes out balloons up to over three hundred pounds, becomes a night exterminator, and then he goes through this wild transformation where he loses weight, dramatically, tries out to be a Navy seal, makes it through Hell Week on the third time, third and last time, becomes a Navy seal, and then ultimately an ultra endurance athlete. Like the transformation is just incredible, And so I've kind of used him as an example to kind of study, well, what did he do? Like, what was what was his inflection points that helped him get there? And one of the things he comes back to again and again again is this idea of an accountability miner, which is he needed to get raw and honest with himself in front of himself, and so he used the daily habit of shaving his face and shaving his head. He's kind of got a bald look to him, and he used that as his

47:37 time to get raw and honest with himself every day. And it's not that we all need to do that, but I want to point out a couple of things that I think are really. Partul Go Faster because running out of time. It is a daily habit of activating the value creating mindset neuro connections. And that's this is a surface level strategy where every day he is activating more positive and value creating mindset neural connections. And of course we're never going to become strong by doing it once. We only become strong by doing it again and again and again and again. And that's one of the hallmarks of vertical development efforts. It's a less about pushing hard, it's more about small little things repeated over time.

48:27 I want to thank you again for coming back on working on a purpose. I so appreciate that you come into my life. I learn from you, I'm inspired by you, and now I get to share with my listeners and viewers. Thank you for coming back on again. Oh thanks for having me. It's been lovely. Listeners and viewers. You're going to want to learn more about doctor Ryan Godferson, the work he does helping leaders vertically develop in his books Becoming Better and the Elevated Leaders. You can start by going to his website. There are all kinds of resources there. His website is Ryan Godfredson. His name let me spell that for you, Ryan R. Y A N. God Fritson is g O T T FR ed so on Ryan Goodfordson dot com. That's where you can find a couple of free assessments and many other resources as well. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always get to be a recorded podcast.

49:13 We were on air with Justin High, a serial entrepreneur, product designer, an innovator whose career spans health, wellness, biotechnology, and consumer products. He serves as the president of CEO and CEO of Rebounds Health, where his interest in hormone health, especially the overlooked role of cortisol, began with the desire to understand how modern stress impacts the body. We talked about his latest book, Stress Nation, Escape the Technology Trap, Eliminate stress and reclaim rest, and he shared how the blue light in our favorite technology hijacks our cortisol levels close to sleep time and how we can wean ourselves away from it at night to get the RESTful sleep we need. Next week, we'll be on the air with Alexandra Levitt talking about her work and overhauling the education system to prepare you for work today, while diving into her new book, Solving the American and Youth Employment Crisis through work based Learning. So you then un Let's continue leaning into discovering how to elevate your operating system as a leader and create destination workplaces where legendary business takes place.

50:16 Let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, Leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on purpose,