 and interactive hour for us. So I'm going to share my screen with you. Got a little presentation for everyone here. Great. I wanted to share a little bit about me. Kirstie, thanks so much for having me and for the introduction. And I'll just go through this briefly because Kirstie kind of told you a little bit about me but I spent my early career working in New York City government and large public service government agencies. I studied leadership management, conflict resolution at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I founded and led a charter school in the South Bronx in New York City. And I am currently an executive coach working with tech startups, small businesses and leaders at large organizations. I'm also a psychotherapist with training in psychoanalysis, trauma and energy psychology. Studied Buddhism and meditation in Vietnam. Was there for about two years and got to do some deep study with some of the monks there and got to study at Thich Nhat Hanh who's kind of one of the people who brought mindfulness to the West. Got to study at the monastery where he trained as a young monk. And last but not least, I have three kids and live in Oakland, California. So that's a little bit about me. So I'll tell you a little bit about my new book The Peak Performance Formula and tell you a little bit about what's in it and sort of just give you a kind of broad overview and then I want to get into a little bit of the content. So really what the book is, what I intended it to be was a leadership guide to being your best. And one of the ways I define peak performance is not being the best, but being your best. Really focused on self-improvement, focused on being better than you were yesterday, developing your own skills and your own sense of fulfillment not necessarily competing with others to be sort of the best, which is great. If any of us have the opportunity to be the best at something, awesome, amazing. But what I'm more focused on is really being your best, living up to your potential. And the sort of way that I go about unpacking that is first with an understanding of something that I call the performance paradox. And this is basically how we work against our own success and fulfillment. In many ways, we are designed to survive. That is sort of the, that is our top goal as organisms is to survive. And that can come into conflict with achieving more transcending goals, feelings of fulfillment and accomplishment. And so I really unpack this paradox, this notion that while many of us have things we want to achieve, have goals that we want to attain, we are often our own worst enemies in achieving those goals. And there's a lot of stuff going on in our self-conscious minds. There's stuff going on in our self-conscious minds, which is around kind of what other people think of us, our fear of other people's opinions, fear of failure, our negativity bias that neuroscientists have coined the term negativity bias, ways in which we can really amplify threat and be overly concerned with negative things that are happening as opposed to all the great things that are happening in our lives. And a number of other of these performance paradoxes. So really unpacking how we get in our own way. And then once we understand that, learning a formula, the performance formula for overcoming these obstacles and sort of just in a nutshell, the formula is our purpose, our values and our vision. Being able to have clarity of these three things can take us much of the way to achieving our own potential of performance. And again, that means success and fulfillment. And so learning that formula, understanding deep diving more into purpose, more into values, more into vision, what these things mean, where they come from, how to use them in your own life. And then I get into using the tools and tactics that elite performers use when it comes to managing energy. That's sort of our own ability to be productive without burning out, sort of in athletics. It's like training without overtraining and hurting ourselves or fatiguing ourselves, overly fatiguing ourselves. So how do we manage our energy to perform sustainably day in, day out at our highest levels? Training technique, this is, no matter what we are aspiring to do, there is probably some skill involved. And so what is the best way, the smartest way to train that technique and get better in the things that you need to get better in to attain the goals that you want to attain? So how do we really train technique using tools and tactics of top performers? And then last but certainly not least, training our minds. And so so much of what we do is mental, so much of performance is mental. And so how do we train our minds to again counter many of these performance paradoxes to be able to be focused, to be able to pay attention, to be able to drown out the noise and really focus on what's most important to stay calm, to stay positive. So really how do we train our minds again using the tools and tactics of elite performers? Then I zero in on the most common challenges that I see. This much of this is from my own client base as an executive coach, as well as my work as a psychotherapist, as well as interviewing tons of high performers and sort of reading all the literature I can get my hands on. And these are the things that seem to come up the most. When I'm working with leaders, fear of failure, imposter syndrome, managing the day-to-day stress and anxiety, building one success team and performing in a crisis. So I really zero in on those and kind of give specifics around how do you apply the this formula to these specific kind of challenges. And then we focus the formula on where you spend most of your life. That's parenting, leadership and organizations. And so parenting, there's been a lot in the last bunch of years around, you see these elite athletes who are now having children and continuing to be elite in their sport, which is great and fine and good. They used to retire and then have kids. Tennis is an example, it's a sport that I play and I follow closely. More and more athletes in tennis are having children and continuing to play at high levels. And that's good, but I'm talking about something a little bit different. How do we actually bring the tools and tactics of high performance to our role as parents? How do we become peak performing parents? How do we have peak performing families by applying purpose values and vision? And so there's a chapter specifically on peak performance parenting. There's a chapter on leadership. This is, you know, we're all leaders, we're all in organizations trying to influence those organizations trying to achieve goals. And so how do we really apply these tools and techniques to our leadership endeavors? And then organizations, how do we ultimately, you know, build organizations that are high performing, that are peak performing organizations? There's a chapter on that. And then the book kind of ends with a 30 day peak performance challenge, where I walk you through in 30 days how to apply the peak performance formula. And that is really to show you how to apply what's in the book in your life. Because I know many of these books have a lot of great ideas and then you put them down and you're like, well, I don't really know how to do this. And so I wanted to give you a guide that you will pick a challenge, something that you wanna make breakthrough performance in over 30 days, and it walks you through the steps of how to do that. And hopefully it also not only teaches you how to apply the what's in the book, but it also helps you build the habits of mine. You know, we do anything for, you know, a month and we begin to develop some habits there. So that's sort of just a sort of, you know, sort of summary or overview of what's in the book. I wanna jump in a little bit, dig in a little bit to these leadership challenges, these challenges that many of us in leadership positions face. And really the challenges that leaders most commonly face. And, you know, there are others, but these are the ones that sort of again, kind of come up again and again, that I wanna just lay out and see, you know, hopefully these resonate and feel familiar to you. The first one is really understanding yourself as a leader. And again, this goes back to what's your purpose, what are your values that guide your leadership, choices and decisions and what's your vision? What's your vision for yourself and your own career? What's your vision for the team you lead or the organization that you run? What are your strengths and maybe more importantly and maybe a little harder to look at, what are your flaws? So strengths, obviously these are the things that we're really good at that we should be doubling down on. We should really be leaving from a place of our strengths. But we also need to know our flaws. We need to know the areas where we can really improve and the places where we wanna be careful if we are in a leadership position that we don't project them into our organizations or our teams. And I write a little bit about this notion of projecting our flaws as leaders into organizations. Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz talks about this projecting your flaws into the companies that you work in, teams you lead, companies you run. And you know, his example is he would always, he loved to get into deep conversation. And so none of his meetings had agendas and they would all run over time and he needed to put in place some safeguards, making sure there were agendas, making sure that there was a timekeeper and people stopping the meeting that would help him to manage his flaw of just kind of loving endless debate. How we delegate, give feedback and make decisions. So obviously, we all know in leadership positions these are key aspects of leadership. We're not individual contributors anymore. We're now leaders, we're managers, we need to delegate. We need to give feedback to help people improve. Sometimes that's hard feedback to give. And how do we make decisions and how are we explicit in our decision making process? Do we know how we make decisions or are we just kind of winging it? And then last but not least here is how do you mobilize and inspire others? Obviously a core to leading a team or an organization is your ability to mobilize and inspire people. And so how do you do that? What's your secret sauce of mobilizing and inspiring others and being clear about how to do that and continuing to refine and develop it? Okay. Second major challenge, energy management, which I spoke a little bit about in the previous slide. This is again about productivity, how productive we are, how well we use our time. And this is again going back to sort of an athletic analogy. This is this notion of how much we train versus how much we recover. And in athletics, you spend a lot of time training, you spend a little time competing and you spend a lot of time recovering. And in the world of work, we have it backwards. We spend all of our time competing, working. We spend very little time training, that's like professional development stuff or taking a course. And we spend almost no time recovering. And athletes sort of, especially over the last decade, have really figured out that it's all in the recovery. Sustainable day in, day out, high performance is about how well we recover. And so a lot of the book talks about this notion of recovery and how we can recover so that we can continue to work at our sort of highest levels day in, day out. So there's this question that always comes up of work-life balance, is it possible? Is it achievable? Is there such thing as work-life balance? And I believe that there is and there's, and there's, I like to think of it as work-life integration or harmony, but there are ways in which we can manage our time, manage our energy so that we can have a more fulfilling work-life and a more fulfilling personal life. The book gets into some of that. And then really burnout avoidance. And this is the ultimate sort of failure of energy management is to be burned out. And many of us have been running on fumes over the last year and a half. And we really need to do some stuff to take care of ourselves to ensure that we are not burned out. And the practices in the pre-performance formula really help you to re-engage with what is most meaningful and exciting to you, as well as some of these energy management practices that help make sure you still have gas in the tank. Because it's very hard, no matter how much you care about something, when you are sort of running on empty, it's very hard to continue to do that thing and bring the same levels of passion to it that you would want to. Okay, self-limiting beliefs is this next challenge that I see leaders most commonly face. And this is, I just read a great quote yesterday from Muhammad Ali, where he said, my only fault is that I don't realize how great I really am. This is coming from Muhammad Ali, best boxer of all time. And I love that it really sums up this notion of self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs that we have, many of which are against subconscious or implicit, that really constrain us from being all that we can be, having all that we can have, enjoying all that we can enjoy. And some of these beliefs fall into these categories of being a perfectionist, believing everything has to be perfect. And if it's not perfect, then it might as well be thrown in the garbage. The controller, the sort of controlling self-limiting belief, I need to be in control of everything. If I'm not in control of everything, it's gonna go to heck in a hand basket. So I really need to, I have to control everything. I can't delegate anything. I can't let anyone else do any of it. I have to be involved in everything. The pleaser, which is that we've all been there. We wanna be liked, we wanna be loved. Many of us have grown up this way of needing to please others in order to feel valuable or lovable. We have to be people pleasers and the costs that come with that, can be then very hard to make tough decisions and to give hard feedback. And the last one and the one that I feel like I deal with most commonly is imposter syndrome. And this is that feeling, despite good evidence otherwise that we are phonies and that we don't belong. And this can get triggered in situations where maybe we don't have the same credentials as others. Maybe we're younger. Maybe we're in an out group. We're not in the inner circle. Maybe we're in some kind of competition. We're applying for a fellowship or we're applying for a job and there's chance of rejection. We're pitching something. We're pitching a company. We're trying to get investment dollars for our venture. Any time when we can get rejected and our ideas can really be questioned as good ones, the imposter can creep out. And so we really need to be able to manage and shift and transform these self-limiting beliefs. Stress, anxiety and almost constant feel of failure. So this is another one I see quite a lot is, especially working with founders, working with those in startups where they are trying to do something that has never been done before. They are often months, if not weeks, away from running out of money. There are competitors biting at their heels and there's this daily stress, anxiety and fear of failure. And there can often also be this fear of, well, if I fail at what I do, then that makes me a failure on this identification with failing at something, meaning that we are failures. And then ultimately it is about how do we design organizations that get the outcomes we want, organizations or teams to get the outcomes that we're looking for. And this is around sourcing, hiring, training and retaining top talent. And it's also about creating a strong, positive culture with clear policies, norms, rituals and cues. And to be able to do this in a sort of methodical way that really again is designed to get the types of outcomes that it is we're looking for. So these are the challenges that leaders that I see most commonly face and that I wrote the book really with these challenges in mind to really help anyone who is dealing with any of these challenges to have some tools and framework to deal with them to manage them, to overcome them. So I wanted to share with you the first peak performance pillar. I wanted to do a little bit of a deeper dive with you all today and share with you this first pillar of peak performance, which is purpose. And purpose goes a long way in dealing with a lot of the challenges that I just shared with you. And I wanna sort of show you the power of purpose. You've probably been hearing about a lot about purpose. I know, I don't know if it's just me because I follow this stuff, but it seems like purpose is sort of popping up everywhere. People are talking about your purpose, find your purpose, live a purposeful life, reconnect with your purpose. And it really seems like purpose has sort of, the time has come with this concept of purpose. And I've been working with studying, practicing ways of really articulating and enacting purpose for many years now. And so I wanna share with you some of what I find and what's in the book. So purpose is the first pillar of peak performance. And purpose is the expression of what's most deeply meaningful to you, who you are at your essence. That's how I define purpose. It helps us clarify what really matters and points us to what we should be using our skills and talents for. And it gives us courage to act in conditions of uncertainty and difficulty. So there's this notion when we're clear on our purpose, it helps us be courageous. It helps us say, it's an uncertain time. It's a difficult time. This is a big challenge, but because I'm clear on my purpose, I know what I need to do and I have the courage to do it. It functions to both ground us and help us move forward. So it's a grounding when we're clear on our purpose, it's grounding it like strengthens our legs underneath us. It sort of gives us this feeling of like, I can sort of handle the situation here wherever I am, but it also helps move us forward. It also helps to propel us in this way of being a North Star. It sort of gives us in the dark of night when we're in that canoe by ourselves and it gives us that we see that North Star, we know the direction that we need to have. We may not know exactly where we're going, but we know the direction is right. And so we can move forward. We can start paddling in that direction. So it really helps us to move forward. It gives us, again, that sort of that courage to move forward and helps us kind of clarify what really matters to us where we should be using our strengths and our talents. Okay, I'll talk a little bit about the benefits of purpose because there's been some interesting research that has come out recently on purpose. It's been, the benefits have been known very well in religion for centuries. Business and science have started to come around more recently and again, there have been some interesting studies that have been done that have shown that people with a strong sense of purpose live longer than those that do not. I think the study found that on average seven years of longevity were found for people who indicated that they were living strong purposeful lives. They had a strong sense of purpose. Purpose lowers rates of depression and anxiety and increases levels of life satisfaction. At work, employees with purpose miss less work, outperform their peers in productivity and tenure and are more likely to be in leadership positions. So you begin to see some of the benefits of having a strong sense of purpose. Moreover, people want purpose. This is not just something that's good to have, but people really want it. And in one study, employees said that they would give up nearly a quarter of their lifetime earnings for work that was meaningful to them. So that's profound. They're choosing meaning over money. They want more meaningful work and experiences. It's not just about the money. It's about the meaning of the work that they're doing. Nearly 90% of millennials reported higher work satisfaction when provided with opportunities to make a positive impact on social justice issues. So again, connecting meaning to the work that people are doing gave higher work satisfaction. Somewhat recently, a third of employees at the company base camp quit after the company banned political and societal discussions. Now, I'm not arguing whether that was right or wrong, but I think one of the things that you see here is that people wanna be able to connect and again, have these sort of conversations of what matters to them at work. They wanna be able to have work be a place where what they care about is in play, is able to be discussed and talked about. And McKinsey has even gotten on the purpose train. In 2020, they released a study called Igniting Individual Purpose in Times of Crisis, all about how leaders and companies could use people's individual purpose, could use their employees' individual purpose in times of crisis, COVID, to really boost employee engagement and employee productivity. So when the smart guy, the geniuses at McKinsey, start producing reports about this stuff, we know we gotta listen. Okay, so I wanna define a little bit more what purpose is. Again, purpose is what's most deeply meaningful to you, who you are at your essence. And let's go a little bit deeper. It isn't a title or a role. Your purpose is not to be the leader of this company or the CEO of that company or the executive director of that organization. It's not a title, it's not a role. It goes deeper than that, it goes below that. And actually one of the things you see is often people who are so identified with their roles when they leave their role, either they retire or they're burned out and they step out of it or they get fired or whatever it is, they often face the sort of lack of identity, this crisis in who am I? Because they often don't have a strong sense of their purpose. When we have a strong sense of our purpose, a title or a role is just one expression, one way we're expressing our deeper purpose. It's not the be all end all. And so this is one way that purpose can be really helpful, having a strong sense of purpose, is that it frees us from overly identifying with the title or the role that we're currently in and just shows us that that's one way we're expressing our purpose, not the only way. Purpose is always true. So it's not like, my purpose is only true at work or my purpose is only true when I'm hanging out with my friends. Purpose is universal because it's who you are at your essence. And that's always who you are at your essence, whether it's in a job or whether it's with your friends and family or your volunteer life or your weekend warrior sporting life. It's who you are at your essence and what's most deeply meaningful to you. So it's always got to be true. Purpose is about impact. So it is about what you are bringing to the world, the expression. And so there is a component to purpose that is about impact. It is about putting out there something into the world that we want to have an impact. We want to be impactful in the world. And so there is a sense of it's not just a sort of personal thing that I kind of keep quiet, I keep to myself, you know, only for me. It does, there is this aspect of it that has an impact and kind of connects with the outside world. Again, it provides guidance and direction. So if your purpose is not helping you, helping guide you in your life is not helping you make tough decisions and choices about what you should be doing and not doing, then you may not have nailed it. You may not have gotten, you know, sort of an effective purpose, you know, articulated. And it stretches us beyond our current limits. So there is this aspect that, you know, purpose is not this sort of comfortable, you know, easy thing, you know, nobody's purpose is to sort of sit home and watch, you know, Netflix all night. Purpose is about aspiring to sort of put the best that we can out into the world and to achieve impact. It's stretching us. It's constantly sort of pushing us forward, you know, trying to pull us to our final destination. And so there is an element where it should be encouraging us to stretch beyond our current limit, to stretch and grow. Okay, so there is no right or wrong purpose. It's what is uniquely meaningful to you. And so we can't sort of share and we can't sort of take somebody else's purpose. And so I like that purpose, I'm gonna take that. And there's no, and it's nice. There's no wrong right or wrong purpose. It's Fred in there, sorry. It's totally unique, you know, kind of like a fingerprint. It's unique to you. I mean, obviously people can have sort of similar or overlapping purposes, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what anybody else's purpose is. It's again, what is meaningful to you. Okay, so I wanna look at a little bit. I wanna take just a little time without going kind of geeking out on it too much as what is meaningful to us and how do things become meaningful to us? Cause I think this is an important ground and I know that a lot of our purpose actually, it's not some woo, you know, woo woo sort of new age thing that we get from like a Ouija board. It's actually quite neuroscientific. It comes, it has its basis in our biology and our physiology. And so, you know, we have to understand a little bit about how our brains work. And really novelty and reward are the sort of core drivers of meaning. It all starts with the excitement and reward mechanisms in the brain. So the more stimulating and activity is, which is the novelty part and the bigger the potential payoff, which is the reward part, the more likely we are to want to do that thing because it's giving us excitement. It's giving us that stimulation that we crave that our brains crave and it's tapping the reward centers of our brain. So, you know, thank you, dopamine and serotonin for that. So our amygdala, which is the almond shaped piece of the brain in our mid brain or limbic system. What our amygdala does is it assigns significance to new stimuli. So whenever we have new stimuli, the amygdala is constantly assessing. It's assessing, does this matter? Is this important? Should I be afraid of this? Should I like this? Is this important enough to kind of wake me up to go on alert that I need to pay attention to this? So we have the amygdala doing that. And then we have the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, for longterm memory. It reviews all of these past experiences that we have to determine if what is happening now is significant to us or not. So it's like, okay, this thing is like, wake me up. This is, I gotta pay some attention to this. Oh, and as after reviewing it, this is something that actually has some meaning to me. This is something I really find meaningful to do. So every time I step onto a tennis court and a ball's coming at me, stimulation goes up. My hippocampus says, your dad taught you to play tennis when you were six years old and it was our family sport. And I've had a lot of experience in fun times with tennis. This is a meaningful thing to me. So in a nutshell, something registered in your brain is new and interesting. The reward centers of your brain got activated and that compelled you to repeat the experience again and again until it became central to who you are. So that's how in a nutshell, things become meaningful to us. So I'm gonna go through some of the main sources of purpose, the main places that purpose comes from. And in the book, I do a number of case studies. I interview a number of people who are high performers, living very purpose-grounded lives, very grounded in values, very much with a central vision. And so these are some of the people that I interview in the book and some of the themes that came out of that as the sources of purpose. So survival. So I interviewed Ethan Zahn. He's the winner of Survivor Africa and a cancer survivor. Survival has been a big theme for him in his life. And he has really sort of taken, you know, one survivor, he used the money to establish a organization called Brad Shrew Soccer that does AIDS education and health education in Africa. And was then diagnosed with cancer and decided to make his cancer battle very public and posted, you know, on social media and was very public about what he was going through and is a big advocate now in the cancer research community. And that has really, you know, become one of his kind of central drivers of purpose is really surviving and helping other people survive. A cause or principle can be a strong driver of purpose. I interview Leydon Petong, who is a Tibetan freedom activist was at the time was the president of Students for Free Tibet in New York City. And she's got this deep connection to fighting for just social justice and freedom of in this case of her people, of the Tibetan people. Love and service to others. So I interviewed Dick Hoyt, who some of you may know, we actually just lost him this past year. Dick Hoyt was an endurance athlete who would participate in endurance events with his son who was born of paraplegic in a wheelchair. And he would participate with him in these races, these Ironman races. He would swim with a boat tied around his waist. He would run pushing him in a wheelchair. He would bike with him on a sort of homemade contraption where he could ride on the bike. And he would do that so that his son could have the normal experiences that somebody that was not disabled could have. And he said, I'm just the body, my son is the heart. My son is the reason that I'm doing this. Loss and heartbreak. So this is not sometimes our deepest pain or deepest loss or deepest heartbreak becomes the source of our purpose. So I interviewed Nancy Baker whose daughter was tragically lost to a preventable hot tub accident. Something faulty in the drainage system. And she got her hair stuck on the bottom of the drain and so every parent's worst nightmare. And Nancy Baker who was this sort of introverted painter became this advocate for hot tub safety and became a crusader was on Larry King Live, went in front of Congress, lobbied Congress and ultimately was able to get a bill passed that required certain changes to be made to make sure that this accident that was killing hundreds of children every year would never happen again. And it gave her the courage to act. And she said, when I was on Larry King Live, I wasn't nervous at all. I thought I would be, but it was really the knowledge that I could get my message out was really what drove me forward and gave me courage. Identity, our sense of identity of who we are often can be a source of our purpose. So I interviewed Saraya Sadeed who's the head of a nonprofit organization supporting women and girls in Afghanistan. Now they've been around for 20 plus years. And we know Afghanistan is back in the news again and there's a huge, huge need and kind of humanitarian crisis happening there now. But Saraya Sadeed was a successful business woman in the United States, had some things happen in her life that caused her to question whether that was really what was important to her. And she went back to thinking about her roots in Afghanistan and went back raised a bunch of money under a lot of threat to her own safety, her own personal safety, brought money in and established a bunch of schools for girls and helped the cause of education for girls in Afghanistan because of that commitment, that sense of identity connection to identity. Okay, so I wanna switch gears here now that you know you have the definition of purpose, you understand sort of the benefits of purpose, you understand some of the sources of purpose. I actually wanna give you an opportunity to come up with your own draft purpose statement. And so this is in the book, a lot of the book that each chapter ends with a kind of your turn activity where I guide you through how to be able to articulate your own purpose statement, how to come up with your own set of core values and determine whether you are living those values in sufficiently or if there are some gaps there, how to do some visioning so that you can actually really paint a clear picture of your future vision for yourself when you meet yourself 20 years from now in the future. So that and a bunch of other activities that accompany each chapter and I wanna share with you the purpose activity. So if you have a pen and a piece of paper and you can grab that, that would be awesome. You don't have to share these, this is just for you. So don't worry about sort of being on the spot to share. Okay, so these are, I'm gonna give you a few prompts that will help you to extract the key elements of your purpose. So the first one is like you to think of a time when you felt most alive, most fulfilled, most impactful, what were the key aspects of what made it so meaningful? So think of that time, really try and get to that place, get yourself to that place. It could be a specific moment or it could be a period of time in your life and it could be recent past or it could be a long time ago. Just when you felt most alive, most fulfilled like most you were really making the impact and just write down what made it so meaningful. Okay, second prompt. So imagine that you're starting a nonprofit organization to make an impact on a cause that matters deeply to you. Just take a moment and jot down what does the organization do? Okay, number three. If you were to ask the people who know you best, what would they say your superpowers are? So these are the people who know you the best. What would they say your superpowers are? This is, these are attributes that come so naturally that you do them just without thinking. Okay, and the last one. So imagine that you have one post on social media that has been guaranteed to go viral. So millions of people will see it and repost it. What does it say? And it doesn't have to be the exact wording. It could be just, you know, the idea. So don't worry too much about like having to get the wording right. And if some of my clients don't like social media, imagine it's a billboard. Imagine you have an opportunity to put, put a short thing up on a billboard that lots of people are gonna see. You know, it's in the middle of Times Square in New York. What would it say? Okay. So now what we're gonna do is I want you to take a look at all the words and phrases you generated and circle the ones that feel most important to you. Circle the ones that have the most kind of energy and power in them for you. And after you've done that, I want you to use those words and phrases that you circled to come up with a statement that captures the essence of who you are and the impact you want to make as a result. Again, it should be universally true, meaning that it applies to all aspects of your life. It's not just only true in, you know, certain situations. And using this format, you can change this format later, but this is a good starter format. I am blank and that blank is the essence of being who blank and that blank is the impact you have on the world. I am blank. The essence of being who blank impact on the world. I'll give you some examples. So I am my best. That's the essence of being is my best. Who helps others be their best? That's the impact I have on the world. That one is mine. Just to, in all transparency, if I want to be a little bit more poetic about it, a little bit more metaphorical about it, I say I am the vital spark who fires up potential. Then a couple of other examples from clients. I am the learner who challenges myself and others to grow. I am a leader who transforms camps into kendoos. And then one which I love because it's very indicative of the purpose statement. I simplify complexity. So just take a couple of minutes and using this format, using kind of the ideas from these examples to see if you can just get a draft statement. Again, it's a first draft. Okay. So you can keep working on that after we're done, but I want to give you just a couple of tips for using purpose, how you go about using, okay, you have this draft purpose statement now. What do you do with it? So first thing is connect with your purpose daily. Look at it, recite it, really be in contact with it because that's, you know, this is all about having access to it, understanding your purpose, being able to call it up quickly as a sports psychologist. Michael Gervais works with the Seattle Seahawk says, you know, you should be able to recite your purpose in a dark alley. You know, if somebody says, what's your purpose? You should be able to, so it should be short. It should be something that you have, you know, kind of top of mind. So connect with your purpose daily. Use it when you need to increase your motivation and engagement. You know, it's like, oh, here's this thing, like I really need a little bit more, you know, gas in the tank for this. You know, it could be, you know, the last mile you're running in a marathon, it could be, you know, you got this presentation that you have to get done, you're tired and it's late, and you know, you just need that sort of final push, you know, going back to your purpose, going back to, you know, again, what is the most deeply meaningful to you, the essence of who you are and the impact that you want to have. Use it to help make choices about what you say yes and no to. So this is, you know, purpose is a very good. Is this on purpose or not on purpose? You know, is this new job that I'm taking or that I have the opportunity to take or interview for, is this aligned with my purpose or not aligned with my purpose? Helps you, it helps you make these kinds of choices. Use it as a guide when navigating difficult decisions in times of uncertainty. So again, when there's a lot of chaos and uncertainty, like there has been in the last couple of years and like it seems like there will continue to be, our purpose is really there to help us provide directionality, right? Okay, you know, so next time you have a difficult decision or you need to make a decision where you don't have all of the, you know, all the data, all the facts, use your purpose and see if that helps you. And use it when you need the courage to move forward, you feel scared or stuck and sort of invoke your purpose and see how that helps. Okay, so again, this is all from my new book, The Peak Performance Formula, Achieving Breakthrough Results in Life and Work. You know, the book came out two weeks ago and it was lucky enough to be a number one new release in business health and stress. Eric Schmidt blurbed the book. He said, we all need tools and tactics to achieve at the highest levels, both at work and in life. This book gives you the framework. Thank you, Eric. The book's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and IndieBound. If you wanna support your local independent bookstores, you can buy it on IndieBound. So, you know, if you found today, you know, useful, interesting, wanna know a little bit more what's in there, wanna get a little bit deeper into the Peak Performance Formula. You know, I'd appreciate it. Love it if you would pick up a copy of the book. Thank you. If you wanna reach me, follow me on Instagram at Bob, underscore Lesser, my website, BobLesser.com. You can also contact me through my website. So, thank you guys very much. I'll stop here, and I think we have some time for some questions. Thank you, Bob. That was a great presentation. Yes, I've been reading your book, and I love your book. So, just FYI, people who are here, please note the library does have copies of this book. There is a waiting list right now, but you can add yourself to the waiting list. But like Bob said, you can also purchase this book at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other places. There are a few questions, so I'm gonna read some of them. Oh, before I ask you the question, someone wanted you to please repeat them. Muhammad Ali, quote. Yes, yeah. My only fault is that I don't realize how great I really am. Thank you. Okay, so I just see a couple of questions. The first is if one third of employees don't quit unless they can have political and societal discussions at work. And a different one third of employees don't like political and societal discussions at work. What do you recommend the manager to do? Yeah, I mean, I think every company needs to sort of grapple with this. I really just use that data to show that I think people want to be able to bring their full selves to their work. They wanna be able to do work that's meaningful, that's connected to the issues that matter to them. They wanna be able to talk about those things. So I don't think there's any easy answer. The reason that these companies have banned political and societal speeches is because they want people to focus on the work. They don't want it to become a distraction. So I mean, one recommendation would be that just that they create forums for employees to be able to have these discussions that don't interfere with the work day. So they can come up with some policies and protocols that make sure that people are focused on the work, doing the work, committed to the work and delivering the outcomes that they have to deliver, but also have an opportunity to be who they are, talk about what they care about. But the point was that people and especially millennials really care about meaning in work and they're gonna leave places, they're not gonna work in places that say, hey, you can't talk about things that matter to you here. So that was really the major point of that data. Thank you. Another question is, what is the connection between being designed for survival and working against our own success? Yeah, so the connection there is that it really goes back to our nervous systems. Our nervous systems were really designed with the stress response and they haven't, nervous systems haven't evolved over the last thousand years. We are still looking for the Sabre II Tiger and trying to keep ourselves safe from the Sabre II Tiger, right? So this is our stress response system. Many of you are familiar with it, fight, fight, freeze and appease. It's what happens, our amygdala gets activated and we go into stress response. And they've done brain scans that show that social threat, so being excluded, having negative feedback being given to us, being judged unfairly, triggers the same, activates the same part of our brains as when we are under physical threat. So we are just, in many ways, we are just trying to survive and that stress response and sort of not being in charge of our emotions, but really having our emotions be in charge of us is a huge impediment to performance. It's a huge, and we need to be able to keep ourselves calm, relaxed. We need to be in command of our nervous systems in order to perform at our best. So that's one of the ways. Another one of the ways is, again, this negativity bias is what neuroscientists have dubbed the negativity bias. We are much more likely to focus on and amplify negative things in our life. So the example there is we're walking in the forest and we're on the lookout for the twig that may be a snake. And we're gonna pay much more attention to the threats out there than we are to the flowers, the beautiful flower that we can stop and smell and admire and enjoy. And so in the same ways, we amplify negative. We amplify the things that are not going right for us. We amplify our flaws. We amplify the ways in which we are not living up to our own expectations. And we're not able to be as fulfilled as a result, as happy with the accomplishments that we have, with the things that we have really achieved. And so that gets in the way of a lot of our own fulfillment as well as our own day-to-day performance. A lot of people won't even do things because they're scared that they're gonna fail at them. And so a lot of this stuff is hardwired into us as opposed to, we have to find some ways to manage that. So we can do really hard things that we may fail at that may feel a little bit scary or dangerous to us because these are the challenges that ultimately lead to our kind of breakthrough achievements. You're on mute, Kirstie. Okay, thank you. Sorry, Bob. Does anyone have any questions? We ran through all the questions in the chat. All right, well, if no one has any questions, I'll thank you, Bob, for doing this author talk with us. I'm so glad that you shared your book with us. Again, I'm almost done with it. I love all the food for thought and all the exercises. I think about this stuff all the time, since I started reading it this weekend. So I really appreciate it. And it's a great book. I highly recommend it to everyone who's here. So thank you, just no last question. All right. Oh yeah, someone's copying for you in the chat. Thank you. Thank you all. I want to say it's a book that I think you can kind of come back to over time. There may be parts of the book that are more or less relevant to you right now. But I do think it is kind of a guide for leadership, for leading in tough conditions, for consistently improving yourself and moving forward in your life and your career. And so I do hope that it's something that sort of is a reference, a little bit of a reference resource for people to say, oh yeah, that part on, I'm not experiencing imposter syndrome right now, but next year I take this new job where I'm junior and I've less experienced than everyone and I'm experiencing it, what do I do? Oh yeah, there's that piece on imposter syndrome and how to deal with it and how to transform it. Let me read that piece and do some of that work. Absolutely, yes. I think it's something that we can just keep reading and refer to when you need to. So congratulations on the book and the excellent reviews that you've been getting. And again, thank you for sharing your time with us. Someone wrote in the chat. Thank you Bob, very inspiring, looking forward to reading this book. Oh yeah, thank you Peter, appreciate that. Yeah, thank you everyone. Thanks again for joining and taking the time and I hope you're reading and find a ton of use from it. So thank you all. Thank you Bob. Thank you everyone for joining us. I have a great afternoon. Bye.