When Being Stuck on Performance Misses the Mark

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 Relise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program. Thinks you shoot again this week. It's great to have you. I have been hosting this show since February of twenty fifteen. It is a labor of love. I'm your host, Doctor releasecore Test. If we haven't met before and you don't know me, I'm a management consultant, organizational local therapist, a speaker and author. My team and I at ELAE Corre Test and Associates help companies to enliven and ported by their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to

1:30 a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, grow up to their floor potential, and are committed to stay and dynamic to deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and now we can work together at a lascore test dot com. Getting into today's program, we have us with us. Eduardo Presenno. He is a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world's leading companies and developing cultures of learning and high performance. Earlier in his career, he was the co founder and CEO of Mindset Works, the first company to offer growth mindset development services. He's the author of The Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of mindset into Action and joys Today from San Jose, California at d Watervill Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you, Lise. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, so good to have you on. As I mentioned whore we got on air, I thoroughly enjoyed your book and devoured it. So I want to start with sort of maybe a common denominator here. I have been greatly affected by doctor Carrol Duex's work on the growth mindset, but you have more been deeply and transformed by her work. So can we start with the story of how you met her and how knowing her work and work together has changed your life. Absolutely, it has changed my life in so many dimensions, and the lives of so many other people. But I met her when I was in grad school. I was looking to pivot in my career and actually try to find purpose that was and developed purpose. That was a big reason why I went to grad school. And I was exploring different social entrepreneurship ideas and I got a I studied business and education, and she was

3:00 looking for somebody with a business background that I had, and so we were introduced to because she was interested in bringing the idea of growth mindset out into the world, in particular to schools, to help schools develop cultures of learning, cultures of growth mindset, cultures that assumed that people can change and develop rather than just kind of perform all the time and show how good they are. It's more about kind of instead of proving improving. And so when I learned, we were introduced and I learned about her work, and I read her book, and we started talking every two weeks, and I realized in learning about her work that my beliefs had gotten in the way of my goals. I had gotten in you know, in my own way, in fixed mindset beliefs that I had in different areas of my life. And we can talk about what that is, but that was the first way that that her work changed my life, is just to increase my self awareness and realize how some of the ways I was thinking about myself and my abilities and also the abilities of other people were just really creating problems. Then, you know, I co founded Mindset Works with her, and she's been my mentor for sixteen years. So that's been life changing in and of itself. Actually had lunch with her, I mean dinner with her two days ago. So it's been amazing to be on this journey with her as a supporter and mentor. Such a testament to the power of who we can attract and recruit into our lives to transform our lives. It's so amazing. I don't remember when it was I got exposed to her work at the viol but I remember reading her book on the growth mindset, and I have, of course embraced that work for years. I've met so many people though, who don't know about this work

4:30 though, So maybe let's start with if you could contrast or distinguish fixed versus growth mindset as she talks about. Absolutely, Yeah, a lot of people don't know about her work, and then a lot of people also know about growth mindset, but also have an understanding that's different from what it actually is. So when we ask people what a growth mindset is, we often hear it's about working hard, or it's about persevering or having high expectations, and a growth mindset is none of those things. A growth mindset is a perspective about the nature of human beings. Is the belief that we can change, the belief that our abilities or qualities are malleable and we can develop them, as opposed to a fixed mindset, which is when we think of our abilities and qualities as things that are static. So, for example, if we think that intelligence is something that people either have or don't have, or have aout a particular level, that will be a fixed mindset about intelligence, versus anybody can become smarter, that would be a growth mindset about intelligence. Or if we think people are great leaders because they're natural leaders, that would be an indication of a fixed mindset we think that they either have it or they don't have it, Or if we think that kind of introversion and extroversion are things that don't change in people. So we can think about any quality or ability as you know, things that we develop or things that are fixed or somewhere in between, and our beliefs can can shift too. It's not it's not like somebody is a growth mindset person and another is a fixed mindset person.

5:54 We all have fixed mindset beliefs about certain things, and those things change based on our circumstances. And so you know, there's there's always fruitful work in working on our own self awareness and thinking about how these beliefs are affecting us, because what research shows is that when we believe that we can't change, what we then start to do is trying to prove ourselves, to prove that we are naturals and we are smart and we are talented, and so we do the things that we already know how to do well and perfectly and without mistakes and quickly, and if we make mistakes, we try to hide them. We might kind of react defensively to feedback. We don't we give up when we when we encounter challenges. So there's there's a lot of consequences to it being in a fixed mindset. And that's that's why, you know, I had gotten into trouble with my career and how learning about growth mindset really helped me become more self aware and more effective. Mm hmm, very very powerful way to distinguish that. Think about a lot of One of the things that I really wanted to make sure we talked about, because I know this is a very common thing that's walking around in people's minds, is the idea of just the way to improve is simply to work hard and you just spell that myth quite handling the book, and you talk a little bit more about why it's not just about working hard to help us improve. Yeah, that was another issue with that I run into is I just figured that I just had to work hard, and if you just work hard, you'll get better and that's the key to success. And what I've realized and what I've learned, is that there's actually two different types of hard work. There's hard

7:28 work to perform or execute, and there's hard work to improve or learn. And I call those the performance zone and the learning zone. So we tend to kind of walk around thinking that the way somebody becomes great at something, it's just by doing that activity for many, many hours and then they become great. But that's not true. So if you look at research, for example, if you look at a great athlete when they are playing a tournament match that is a high stakes match, they're focused on performing, so they focus on what they already know well, they're trying to minimize mistakes. If they're having trouble with a particular move, they're going to avoid that move during that match because their goals to win points. And we only see that we only see them performing. We think that the way they became so great great was just to playing a lot of matches, but actually what they do after the match is how they improve. After the match, they'll say, you know this move that I was avoiding during the match, that's what I want to practice now because that's my opportunity for improvement. So it's when we're focused on beyond what we can do, doing things that we don't know how to do well, taking risks and going beyond the known. That's what is called the learning zone, and that is what enables us to improve. And so we need to embed both the performance z on the learning zone are both really critical, but we need to We tend to most of us tend to get stuck in chronic performance and just just trying to get things done as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, and that works well. We're

8:58 novices. If we don't know how to do something, we will get better just by trying to do it. But then we'll stagnate. Even though we're working really hard, and so we're putting a lot of effort, we're not getting better and we conclude we can't get better. Right, So that's a fixed mindset. But the realities that we're not using the right strategies, we're only in we're stuck in chronic performance. There are people who also like over index on the learning zone side. When they learn about this distinction, they realize, well, I'm spending too much time on the learning zone. I'm not performing and so I'm not getting results and I'm not contributing contributing. So we do need both of these zones and figure out how do we foster kind of habits and systems to engage in both both of these zones as individuals and as teams and organizations. So much great stuff on all of that at war, But now one of the things I also wanted to have you address what we talked about just briefly. We got on error together, and it's just the notion of developing and implementing habits and strategies that support growth. So whatever those might be. As I told you, one of my habits and one of my strategies is that I host a show every week for eight and a half years, and I read the book cover to cover. That is a habit and a strategy that I used to support my growth. Can you say a bit more about how people can develop those habits and strategies. Absolutely, yeah, that is such a kind of conscious and deliberate habit that enables you both to learn and perform, right, because the conversations that you have with your guests are so much richer because you've read the books and you've gone deep into their work, and so it allows you to grow and it also allows you to perform at a high level at the same time. And so, yes, most of our behavior is driven by our habits. You know, what is our default, the things that we do every day every week,

10:33 and so we need to think about how do we embed those systems and habits so that they support performance but also so that they perform they support learning, and often we our systems and habits are just supporting performance. So for example, in LinkedIn, you know, they they have a weekly meeting with the top one hundred leaders, And in most weekly meetings in most companies, they're all about performance, right, They're about what needs to be done by when, how do we keep ourselves accountable? All those things are really important, but we haven't kind of put in the systems for learning. And so one thing they did, as among many things is they put a section of the weekly agenda that was only to share what people have learned recently in the prior week and what they're going what people can do differently as a result of that insight. So that's a really easy way to change the conversations, just to change the agenda. And it's it just it creates a habit, a system to both perform and learn at the same time. Just like for you, you know, you make it a habit to continue to learn, to read the books of your guests, and that en share your growth and your performance.

11:41 Yeah, and I studied them like as I mentioned too, and again then I use that as that's my ongoing research. When I'm also outwriting articles or speaking, I can actually cite these sources. So and then it contributes to my performance. As you're saying, now you have a habit of getting up every single day, and then you have something that you say to yourself before you open your laptop. Tell us what that is. Again, well, I do several things that my morning habit is my most treasured habit, is my most important habit. It starts with gratitude. That puts things in perspective and it helps me see the good in the world about what's most important. So I do several things, but one of the things that I do that is really important to me is to remind myself every morning of what I'm working to improve in myself, you know, so that improvement is not just a reactionary thing where when I make mistakes, that's important too, but I'm driving my own evolution. My default is to continue to change every day and to work toward that in a proactive way. I love that I'm driving my own evolution. Can I steal that? Absolutely? Okay, as long as I give you credit? Okay, great, all right. So one of the other things that I found so compelling about what you've written here, and I want to see this happen in many more organizations, whether I get to consult with them or not, is you talk about in your book. In my work, I found that people feel uplifted as they find new ways of working that are more effective and enriching and joyful, and they discover more ways to let gow fear and pursue creativity, exploration, experimentation. Instead of being

13:11 guarded with their colleagues, they're they're reveling and getting feedback and they're growing from that. That's the world that I want to live in, and that's that's the organizations, those are the destination workplaces that I'm trying to help create. Can you say a bit more about why this is important and how can organizations achieve this? Yeah, So when when we see ourselves as work in progress, as we understand that everybody can continue to improve, it reduces our anxiety because, you know, and nobody's perfect, right and we're all we're not going to do anything perfectly. There's always going to be room for improvement. And so when we make mistakes or when we don't do something flawlessly, it doesn't you know, we don't get anxious. We are not ashamed of ourselves.

13:54 We don't try to hide those things from other people, especially if we're in a community. That's that's that's that's that has that common understanding and so but it's also more joyful. Right, We're exploring more, we're discovering more, we're being more curious about each other, so we're asking more questions, listening better. That means that we are developing trust, forming deeper bonds with each other, which allows us to collaborate better. Both for learning and for performing and to have more fun together, like knowing each other better. And so when we embed the learning zone the performance zone together, it changes not only the performance, not only the outcomes, which is important, but also the process. Right that the experience of living and working is richer because we are we're learning every day and we're learning together. So when we think about purpose, you know, we can think about the purpose of our work, like you know, if I work at a pharmaceutical company that's helping people get heal from disease, that's an important purpose. But also we can think of purpose of the purpose of growing together, right, purpose of learning together, the purpose of the process. That what we can gain from the way that we work, not only in the outcomes. Mm hmm. That's just beautiful.

15:09 That's I want to see more organizations do that, especially as the need for upskilling, constant continually learning is just so so important. So if we can create that kind of environment, much better chance. So let's let our listeners and viewers think about what we've been saying so far as the sort of the foundation here give them a quick break. I'm your host, doctor e Lei's Cortez. We've been on your Eduardo Berssenno. He's a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world's leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance. He's the author of The Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of mindset into Action. We've been talking about some of the basics in his book, The Foundations after the recording. To get more into the nitty gritty of the concepts, stay with this will be right back. 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.

16:22 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 A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to helping create a world where people realize their potential at work. They're like by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that betters the world. I too, continue to write my own books. My latest book is called The Great Revitalization, Activating Meeting and Purpose canoratically in liven your business, and it was written to help leaders understand what today's workforce really wants and how to meet them there and offering and then offers twenty two best projects to help you get there. You can learn more about my books and how to get a hold of them at a Leicecoortes dot com or on Amazon if you are just joining me today. My guest is Eduard dober Signo. He's the author of The Performance Paradox Turned into the Power of Mindset into Action. So I know you've already mentioned this a little bit here atward, but I want to dig a little bit deeper here, and that is from the Tournament and the range chapter here. As you can probably see from the notes side center I'd like to try to pull out something from each of your chapters just because I love to be able to bring them alive.

17:53 So what I thought was really interesting about that particular chapter was you illus you make mention of Brooks and study that illustrates practice doesn't make better if we practice by simply do the things we know we already know, which you already have said before. But then it goes on more interestingly, you say, true effective practice looks very different. It involves folks on specific sub skills trying something challenging. I'm suring there are feedback loops to identify opportunities for improvement, making adjustments, and trying again. And it's really about paying attention to what you haven't mastered yet, grappling with something we don't yet understand or do. Well. That's what it is to be in the learning zone. As I said to you those notes, I think that is one of the most powerful distinctions from common understanding of practicing that I've ever heard. Well, thank you, I you know it's it's we use that word practice sometimes in different ways.

18:45 Right, Yeah, literally, I'm going to go practice X right, I'm going to practice soccer, and then we just play soccer. We just we and that's not effective. It's not an effect the way to practice. Or we might say this doctor has been practicing for ten years, they've been practicing medicine for ten years. Well, they really have been performing medicine, it's what we mean. They've been seeing patients and treating patients. But like you say, practice to improve, you know, means we need to be deliberate about improvement and we need to identify what specific subskill am I going to work on, how am I going to go about it? It means, you know, going beyond what I can do and figuring out what I'm doing wrong, So getting feedback from what I'm doing, making adjustments, ideally with the guidance of a coach or a teacher. And there's different learning strategies that we can use to practice different skills. But it means being deliberate about improvement, not just doing the activity beautiful. And then we go onto the next chapter which kind of speaks to what you were saying there, and that's integrating the learning zone and a performance zone. And I thought that what's interesting about that chapter there is you say, we don't learn by doing, learn while doing, and you see, most of us will find our greatest opportunities not in dedicating blocks of times only to the learning zone, but in changing the way we work so we regularly leap beyond the known while getting things done. That is really powerful, I think. For I can't even imagine what organizations would look like if they could, if more of them create cultures that are injured

20:18 in that kind of space. Yeah, you know, because if you think about an athlete, you know, or a violinist or a ballerina, they do a very specific thing. And what the top, the top in the world block large blocks of time to dedicate themselves to doing deliberate practice on very specific sub skills. And by the way, you know, it's not like ten or twelve hours a day. It's like, depending on the field, is between two and five hours a day for the top world class performers. And they don't do it for more than you know, an hour and a half, sometimes no more than a half hour at a time because it requires deep concentration. You need a lot of rest. But for most of us, you know, we have a lot of skills involved in our jobs, and we have a lot of things to do, and so the biggest opportunity for most of us is not to block long, long blocks of time to work on specific sub skills, although that can be helpful, but it's more like about how we work, right, It's about taking on challenges that are going to that we don't know how to do, you know, going into the unknown. There's this outcome that we're trying to achieve that is ambitious and we are not sure. We don't know all the answers that we will need, but we know that we can figure them out along the way, and we know the process right. We know whether it's soliciting, feedback or experimenting right, we know that if we go through these processes, we're going to figure out the answers along the way and be able to achieve this ambitious goal.

21:51 It's just for me, I find that incredibly compelling and very exciting and encouraging and inspiring all those things right to me, that's so elevating and a great example of what is low like an action we have. You have to share this story that you share in the book about your keynote Boston consulting. You delivered without power. So that's the whole stage. I won't give the rest of it away. But I mean I've been in you know, difficult spots, but not that, So can you share that story? Yeah, that was pretty challenging, you know. I was because we want to be engaging in the learning zone proactively or every day, but sometimes we're forced into it, and that was the situation. So I had I had an important kind of high stakes kind of virtual keynote that I was doing for Boston Consulting Group, the most senior partners all over the world, and they are very busy people. They only came together once a year for for an event for for their most senior partners, and so I had we had kind of and I had worked with them in several offices before and they really liked my work, so they wanted to introduced it to other senior partners, and we collaborated in the learning zone to prepare this session together right to make sure it was going to land, it was going to be aligned to their strategy. There were two different hosts for their two sessions for two different time zones, so we practiced with the hosts and so we spent a good amount of time in the learning zone in this case, and then I was ready to get into the performance Zone, and one of the sessions was at like one p thirty

23:22 in the morning. I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the time, and I woke up at around you know, twelve thirty or twelve fifteen. I woke up a little bit earlier than my alarm was set for. And I this is at midnight, in the middle of the night, because it was it was for people in a different part of the world. And I walked into my bathroom and I turned on the lights and nothing happened. And I turned on the other light and nothing happens. And I look outside the window and the whole neighborhood is dark. And I realized, Wow, there's no power. What do I do? I need to do a virtual keynote this in the middle of COVID And so I started brushing my teeth and thinking what are my options? And I thought maybe I could drive into town and try to find some Wi Fi somewhere, Maybe somebody, you know, there's a restaurant that has a generator or Starbucks or something. But I Santa Fe only has eighty four thousand people, and it doesn't have a lot of things open at night. And so you know, I thought that I might I might just kind of be driving around and not finding a place.

24:26 And so but then and so I sent them an email saying, hey, like I'm without power, I'm trying to find solutions just to you know, a situation. And then I realized, okay, well maybe you know, if I if I drive the car to a parking lot that where the place the restaurant might be closed, but I might be able to access their Wi Fi and I can kind of light my face with my car lighting, and okay, that that could possibly work. You know, I might be able to find a Wi Fi. But it's going to be awkward, and it's going to be my face is going to be relatively dark. And then I gave me the idea, the idea of using the car internal lights to light my face. Gave me the idea that maybe I could use the car headlights to light myself if I just got that. I moved my desk outside.

25:12 This is why I ended up doing. I moved the desk outside in front of my garage. It was like a dirt driveway, and I put both of our cars in front of me with the headlights, uh, just just lighting me up. I used my phone as a as a hotspot, you know, which was luckily charged and I had an external charger, and I didn't know if it was going to work because I didn't know if if if the internet was going to be good enough. This is in Santa Fe where there's like bears and mountain lions. I didn't know, like in the middle of the night, if something was going to happen, like be attracted to the lights. And then there were the neighbors too. I didn't know if somebody was really going to come complain that I was doing a keynote outside in the middle of the night. So I was taking some risk, right, I had to leap into the one and say, hey, you know, this may or may not work, but I don't have another option. My best idea to perform and to do the job here and to add value is going to be to take a risk do something I haven't done before. And that means that I'm going to be learning while doing, you know, And it's not the best I like, it's not the ideal situation in that case, Like if I if I had like learned this lesson before, then I wouldn't be needing to take those risks. Right, So now I have, for example, two internet service providers, so if something like this happened, you know, I would have more options and I have like some some kind of backup power that I could use. But it was a lesson that I learned and by the way it worked, so like and it worked, and it also like they loved it right because they it was a story that exemplified a growth mindset. It exemplified taking risk when you need to in order to

26:45 get the job done. And it helped them kind of with their goals of promoting a growth mindset, of promoting mote more sensible risk taking. And I told them, you know, it's like if this doesn't work, then you know it's okay, Like we're going to be okay, but we're going to put our best foot forward and and and so sometimes we have to we're forced to leap into into learning while doing, But most of the time we want to choose learning while doing. We want to be taking risks in reasonable ways that are going to lead to learning and higher performance and just be mindful about doing those experiments in a way that is not ideally you know, we don't want to take risks in ways that are going to bring us down, that are high stakes where that mistakes are going to hurt people, and so we want to just be mindful about in what ways do we want to engage in the learning zone when, but just make sure that we're always doing it.

27:33 I think it's such a powerful example of one you know as a log of therapists. Of course a traffic and meaning, but it's it also really is it really showcases that you know the power of an activated human spirit, you know, to find a solution and to know that you and to trust in yourself that you you know that you know know. I'm sure your nerves are probably bothering you, but I didn't hear that you were undone by this. So I'm listen. I'm thinking about you know, the leaders listening to this. If you have a guy like this your team or a gal like this and your team, boy, I hope that you are appreciating them, recognizing them, and showcasing them as a fantastic example to help others do the same. I can imagine somebody else would have said, well, I guess you know, there's no power. I'm not delivering the talk, no options, You've found all kinds of options. I just I think it's a it's a fantastic illustration of a growth mindset and action. Imagine that. Okay, So next you have a whole chapter on which contains six essential learning zone strategies.

28:33 And this is really about developing different competencies for different learning zone strategies. And so you're talking about reflecting on various ways. So could you maybe just share one or two of them that you just really think maybe make sense for this conversation. Absolutely so. One example is kind of developing what I call our air sense, which is our integrated knowledge and skills. And sometimes in the era of the Internet and artificial intelligence, we might think we don't need to learn things because we can always search for the information. But really there's a lot of value to like you do when you read your books and in other ways, right for us to continue to build our understanding of the world, or understanding of humans, or understanding of what we can do as leaders.

29:18 If we have that knowledge and that wisdom inside of us, then we can call upon it whenever we need it. And and so, but just like when you said that you were reading books, you weren't just reading books. You're reading books to in a deliberate ways and using strategies to really put those things into your long term knowledge and be able to retrieve it when you want it. And that is not just reading passively. You know, you are deliberately building your integrated knowledge and skills, which is which is an important thing to do in life. M H spot on. Okay at this, judge, let's go ahead and grab our last break. Here. I am your host. Doctor. Early scots were on the edward Robe Senno. He's a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world's leading companies and developing cultures of learning and high performance. He's the author of The Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of mindset into Action, which we have been talking about.

30:11 After break, we're going to learn a little bit more as to why mistakes are a good thing. Stay with this will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez 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.

31:07 To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease a l I se at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes. As I mentioned in the last break, my last book, The Rate of Vitization is out. What I did for you is I created a three page assessment. I put it on my website for you, and it will help you ascertained extent to which your culture meets the standards of today's workforce. It's at a leasecore test dot com and it's on the tab how what we do to help If you are just joining us today, my guest, I said, Dad a little bit pressinno. He is the author of the Performance Paradox, turning the power of mindset into action. And as I mentioned just before the break, I think this next bit we're going to talk about is really really compelling here about mistakes and specifically the neurobiology that is behind that. So you have this is in the Unleash in the Power of Mistakes chapter. But I think it's interesting that you talk about You know that many of us understand that we can learn from our mistakes, that they can make us stronger, but you say the reality is even more compelling. You say that even at a biological level, mistakes are crucial when it comes to changing our brains and developing our abilities. You go on to talk about a podcaster that deals with this, Andrew Couperman. But what I thought was really really interesting here is you go on to say errors prompt our brain to sit up and pay attention to something new is happening here. Since nobody wants to actively pursue tragedies, and because

32:39 it's hard to proactively elicit surprises, the most effective way to drive our own neuroplasticity is to engage in challenging activities we can't do flawlessly and learn from the errors we make along the way. Wow, that sounds amazing. Yeah, you know it's something that I didn't know how our full mistakes where before when I started reading this book. I learned it as I was as I was writing the book. But when we think about the mechanisms that drive neuroplasticity, and neuroplasticity is the change, the change in the kind of how our neurons in our brain are connected, and when when a particular network of neurons fires together, that that's what creates a thought. Right, So if we want to become smarter or change the way we think, we need to change the way our neurons are wired together. And that's what neuroplasticity is. And the way the main way mechanism that we have to change that once we are adults is by making mistakes. Is by the brain making a prediction that turns out to be wrong. And then there's the chemicals that make the brain rewire if we stay with it, right, if we say, if we figure out what what did I do wrong? What you know? Let me try again or let me see what might be right? When we start making progress, then our brain starts rewiring, right if we Because we don't learn just from making mistakes. We learn from reflecting on mistakes and figuring out what kind of learn from this mistake, And and that's how we become smarter, and that's that's it's just incredibly powerful. M I think that could be its own book

34:14 in and of itself, really really powerful. I really really jammed on that. Okay, So then perhaps related this. Another chapter you have is on common misconceptions about learning, and you'll list several of them. There's two that I want to talk about in particular for the purposes of this program. The first one is the misconception that you either have a growth mindset or you don't. What's the actual reality to that. Yeah, a lot of people kind of learn about growth mindset and get excited, and then they label themselves as I'm a growth mindset person, right, and they kind of think of themselves as I'm always in a growth mindset, and that blinds us from from seeing, you know, abilities that we might see as fixed, or qualities that we might see as fixed that we might say, oh, well, of course that's fixed. Well you know, that's a that's a fixed mindset.

34:59 If we think it's fixed, it might be right, it might be wrong. But we need to identify those fixed mindsets so we all see certain qualities and abilities as fixed. Some of those assumptions might sometimes be more right. But most of the time that we see something as fixed, it turns out to be kind of based on flawed assumptions, and we're making we're creating a self fulfilling prophecy by thinking that it's fixed. Then we're not doing what's necessary in order to change and to improve. But also these mindsets are fluid, so sometimes we're often we're just confused or we're in the middle. We're not sure how we feel about the malleabilities of our an ability or quality. And these also shift, Like we might see somebody who is a fantastic performer and they look like a natural because we haven't seen the process, and that might put us into a fixed mindset thinking, oh, you know, I'm not capable. You know, I'm not able to become as good as this person.

35:55 So in different situations, we might be more in a fixed mindset or more in a growth I said. And the more that we can train ourselves to see that to become aware of what is when am I in a fixed mindset, then we can see what's happening and then be able to change herself talk to what we want it to be, so that we can act in the ways that we want to act. That happened to me, by the way, in reading your book at AUTEU, so thank you for that. I have been touting myself as I'm a growth mindset person, I'm about broth. But then I was able to identify there are there are aspects in my life that I that I employ or rely on a fixed mindset, and just recognizing that just really open something for me. So wonderful that. Yeah, thank you. Like I said, every time I tell a lot of my guests, you know, thank you for embarrassing me in public, because invariably I read some part of the book when I'm out public, either I'm the airplane or I'm on the bike the gym, and I'm like, yeah, that's it, that's exactly right. People look at me like she's at it again, the weird lady's at it again. But the other you know, what you remind me at least is sometimes people think of embarrassing themselves in a different way, which is some people might think that in saying something like what you said that you know, there's a part of my life when I when I'm in a fixed mindset, some people might feel embarrassed by acknowledging that, right, But that's what we need to do. In order to develop learning communities. We need to be able to share with each other what we're learning and our insights and also that you know, we can all improve and so

37:29 that way we can better support each other and normalize the fact that we all works in progress. Mm hmm. Thank you for that, Waldo. And you know, and for me in my case, I never want to apologize by being delighted by learning something. I will never apologize for that, right yeah. So yeah, so this has happened on many occasions. People are like, what are you reading. I'm like, oh, you got to read this, okay. So the other misconception about learning that would love for your address, and it talks it really addresses what we were talking about before about the mistakes. But the other misconception in that chapter that I wanted you to address is growth. Mindset is all about responding to setbacks and mistakes, right, I mean, how we respond to setback some mistakes is really important.

38:10 We want to respond by thinking about what can I learn, what can I change going forward, But we also want to drive our growth proactively, so that means, you know, we need to ideally, you know, if somebody asks you, or anybody what are you working on? What are you working to improve? We should all have an answer to that, right, and we should all be mindful of what that is on a daily basis. That will that will get us to much higher levels in our skills and performance if we're always mindful about what we're working to improve. Yeah. Both those really heavy. Okay, So the next part that I want to come to and fro. In my view, this is kind of I think this is like your your crown prints of your of your book. It's that growth propeller concept, and so this is in yours. It's there's a whole chapter to be dedicated to this. But I really find that this whole idea, what you're talking to in that chapter is to become a master learner and performer, work on developing your identity, beliefs, purpose beliefs, habits, and community. These alments work together like a propeller, equipping you to move confidently towards your boldest ambitions. And the way that I love how you use models in your book too, that's extremely effective for me anyway visually. So could you speak a bit about this growth propeller. I think it's this concept brings it all all together for me absolutely, and for me I see this as a central model too. Yes, And the growth propeller is what we can work on in ourselves to really become the people we want to become and be able to achieve what we want to achieve. And so it's a propeller with

39:43 three blades. The three blades one of them is a beliefs, the other one's habits, and the third one is community. And then the middle of the propeller, which is the access, has two things in it identity and purpose. And I think at least you're an identity researcher my podcast you are, and your podcast is if we're working on purpose. So I think these are like I feel kinship with you in in kind of how important identity and purpose are. So identity and purpose. Sometimes we think of our identity or our purpose or things that are fixed right or the things that we find rather than things that we develop. And these are all things that we can shape and continue to evolve throughout our lives. And they really drive how we perceive things, how we perceive ourselves, our behaviors, and so and they give us energy and they give us direction for where we're going. And so when we think about identity in particular, I'll offer that we want to see ourselves as a learner, as a work in progress, as someone who's always continued to evolve. And there might be other parts of our identity that shift over time, like you know, I might be become a mother and that's a new identity for me. And then I might become, you know, an executive, and there's a new identity or a mentor. And so we want kind of our identity to be shifting throughout life. But the more that we lean into being a learner and always a work in progress, that that's going to work toward us. And then you know, your podcast is all about

41:13 working on purpose, and purpose gives us direction, it gives us meaning, it gives us a greater experience of life. And then in terms of believes, habits, and community, there's a lot of beliefs like growth mindset is an example where you know, if we're in a growth mindset, thinking that abilities can be developed, that has lots of consequences versus a fixed mindset. We can think about our beliefs about transparency, how much I share how transparently I share with others and is that a strength? Often when we share what we're thinking, what we're feeling, that helps other people support us, that builds relationships, that helps us both learn and collaborate together. So habits drive our behavior. So what are our proactive habits? Are our responsive habits?

41:53 And then what kind of community are we are we developing? Who are the people around us, what do they value? What what do we talk about? And how do we collaborate together on a daily basis? And so we when we work on these five components, we're really crafting our lives and crafting ourselves to be the people that we want to become. Incredibly compelling at LAD I think that that just it's so tight and cogent the way you put that together, and thus it's very accessible. So I just really thought that was the crown gem of what you really created there. If we move on to you later, as a book progresses, you go through leadership, go onto learning organizations, et cetera. And I definitely want to talk and I aligned with this because I did talk about this and I think my second leadership book, but you talk about the importance of ditching performance only evaluation systems. Amen.

42:44 Brother, Amen, could you say a little bit more about why you think that's important to ditch Well. When companies think about performance management and the systems to manage performance, often their only focused on performance and not learning right, and so that gets everybody focused on only performing. And when we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. That's the performance paradox. And so in order to elevate our performance and our results, we have to engage in performing but also engage in learning. So and we can manage the process so that make sure that people are doing that. So part of our performance management systems can be where people identify not only their performance goals what they want to achieve, but also the learning goals. What do they want to learn or improve? How are they going to go about it? You know who, what resources and people might help them get there? Looking back, like what did I focus on in the last period in terms of my learning and did it work? Did I get better? So that we're keeping each other accountable not only to performing but also to learning and actual improvement. And me, if we're not improving, then how do we change what we're doing so that we do it differently? So we can you know, stay accountable to improvement and to higher performance the other thing around those sort of things that I thought was complaining that aligns with that too for me at DOORAVO, is you talk you really are not a fan of forced ranking because it creates a competitive zone versus more of a collaborative learning zone, And I absolutely agree with that.

44:16 I think it's also very demoralizing for people. But can you say a bit more about why that you don't see that as being providing the value that people think it does. Sure, so, force ranking first comes with an assumption that talent is fixed, right, is something that you have to find and kind of kind of figure out who has the talent and who doesn't, and let's get rid of the people who don't, rather than focusing on developing talent and the idea that everybody can grow and everybody can become successful. So that's one problem. The other problem is that it gets people to compete with each other inside of the organization. They start with holding inform for example, uh, and you need people to share information to both learn and perform and collaborate.

45:07 And so when you want people to be in the same team working towards the same purpose and when they're competing because you have forced rankings, that just creates a lot of problems. Mm hmm. I absolutely agree with that. Uh and that was the best articulation of why I don't I don't align with an agree with that that I can possibly imagine. I'm glad we've got this on tape. Thank you very much. Okay, so what you have a You have some a chapter here on hiring for for a growth mindset, which I think is great. We don't a lot of time to address that, but I just want to be able to put forth what you have a whole chapter on some of the questions that leaders can engage candidates and that will help them understand if they or at least gear it or could be more interested in learning or versus the fixed mindset. Could you just say a little bit about, you know, how would they structure those questions, how would they start to discern who they are in front of Yeah, so we want to take the opportunity to look for people who have a lot of competence in terms of the technical skills that are needed for the job, but also a lot of competence as learners, right, so that they're they're hitting the ground running at a higher level in their dispositions, not only in their technical skills, and so we can we can ask things like, you know, what what have you What did you work on in the last year, how did you go about it? You know, what mistakes did you make and what did you learn from those mistakes? Who have you learned a lot from and how did you learn from them? And what did you learn from them? What?

46:34 What do you think is going to be important for you to work on this next step in this new role, and what might be obstacles, what might be challenges for you? What might you do in those situations? Sometimes you can do you can you can give them if you don't want like those specific direct questions, you could give them a situation right and then say like, what would you do in this situation and think about would they be kind of looking to prove themselves and to kind of hide their deficiencies or would they be transparent about what they're struggling with so that they can learn more from other people. You can ask these questions to reference checks. You can have them do perform, like you know, projects and figure out whether they act as learners in those projects. But you yeah, you want to be assessing them.

47:17 They do. They embody the values that you have as an organization for everybody to be a learner. What I really loved about that started my human capital who are I guess twenty five twenty seven years ago in recruiting. So if you start those whole process of creating a learning organization on the front end of talent acquisition, that just made a lot of sense to me. So I would like thinking also about your your employer brand, like sending the message of what you stand for, so that people are also self selecting, right, and so that the people who are afraid of feedback stay away, the people who love feedback, you know, come toward. You absolutely agree with that. Lado. Here we are. We managed to go right through this here it goes by so fast I wanted to. I want to give you a chance to close the cars as you like, Believer, our listens what you like. But I also want you to include, if you will, I like what you talk about about this whole notion of you know, this whole journey of learning. It's not a destination, it's about the journey. And there's so much promise in your book. That last chapter especially what would you like to liberal listerners with and say about thirty seconds, I'll say, you know, the big idea is if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. That's what we tend to be doing in some aspects of our work and life. And so if we want to increase performance, we have to also embed learning into our work and life. And like you say, it doesn't only increase performance, but also increases the process. And we have big challenges in our society. Sometimes we're two performance oriented to tackle those challenges.

48:42 So we have to figure out how we include the learning zone so that we can tackle these ambitious challenges that we have in front of us, especially in today's ever changing, dynamic world. Eduardo, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful wisdom and your heart with our working on purpose listeners across the globe. Thanks for being on the Fun Show. It's great, great to have you. Thank you for having you. Lisa is great listeners and viewers. You'll learn more about Eduardo Presigno, his keynote or facilitation work, or his new book, The Performance Paradox. Start by visiting his site. It's Presigno dot com. Let me spell that for you. B r i ce n o dot com, Persinno dot com. Last week of missed the live show you Know It's Get to Be recorded podcast. We were on the air with Sandeep Nath, who is first an internal wellness coach helping the professionals, senior executives and business owners achieve optimal health, happiness and harmony through his transformative principles of Renewalism. We talked about this on the show. He is really out to be able to generate the renewalism movement across the planet. It's pretty pretty powerful what he's up to. Next week will be on the air with hortense Le Gentille talking about her new book, The Unlaunched Leader. There to free your own voice, lead with empathy, and shine your light in the world.

49:52 She will teach us how to be much more human, authentic leaders for better business results and to inspire people to realize their potential in the process. You there, remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing their potential and making the impact we crave. So 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.