 Welcome to the show, Ashley, Maryam. To get started, I would just like to ask, what had caught you interested in this topic? And, you know, it is unique because we were just talking before this that you are an only child, and I would think somebody who grew up in a large family would take particular interest in this topic. The science of competition, I think it's just, it's everywhere. And what was interesting, I mean, someone that, you know, when we were talking about what should we be writing for a book, we wanted to write about the best science. And the things that people weren't talking about, and Steve Garcia, a researcher at the University of Michigan, who was studying how the more people who take a test in the same room at the same time, changes their score. So the bigger the room, the worse everyone's score, which was just insane, but we interviewed him, we talked about it, and we're like, oh yeah, actually you could see this pattern. And I think there's, you know, I mean, I've worked in politics, I'm a lawyer. I know a lot about a competition. I work with people who are working in politics and lawyers. They would tell me, oh, I'm not very competitive. You're a litigator. What are you talking about? So there were these real tensions for people individually in terms of, you know, like, oh, well, they're very competitive. You know, that's a good thing for an Olympian, not so much for your friend. So there were just, it seemed to be something that was, you know, a constant society, constant, I mean, it's Darwinian, but on the other hand, we weren't really handling it all that well. So that's really what sent us on this journey of the science of competition. Well, what I would like for our audience to get out of this interview today is to understand this competitive research and to coach themselves. And a good coach puts his team in a place to win. And so if we're gonna be coaching ourselves, if we're gonna be navigating the world around us, we should understand these dynamics so that we can put ourselves in a place to win and make sure that we can navigate anything that would keep us from being at our best. I think that's the premise of the book. You know, the idea of Top Dog is not that there's this one category of people who are successful and everybody else are also around. It's that if you understand the science of competition, you can actually use it for your advantage. And some people have different types of competition that they're gonna be better at. You know, some people long-term, slow burn, you know, just figuring things out in a more conscious way. And some people really enjoy that in the moment, just mono a mono right then in your face competition. And settings, environments impact how you perform in competition. So once you start understanding how those different things are affecting your performance, then you can build the setting and the environment and the competition that's gonna be the best for you. There's so much conventional wisdom and tropes that are thrown around in competition. And I think a lot of those myths actually hold us back from reaching that next level of success. So I'd love to start with some of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to competition and common myths that people or traps that they fall into when they think about how they compete, how they stack up and how to be that top dog. I think the first one is again, I'm a good competitor or I'm not. And that's not true. Again, everyone is competitive. It's just about when do we choose to be competitive or not? And I think another thing is, you know, the competition is to be competitive means you have a lack of character. And actually great competitors, I would argue, have some of the best sense of character because to be a great competitor means you respect the competition, you respect the rules of the road and you understand you don't have to win every single time. The maladaptive competitor is the person who competes for a job promotion with the same ferocity as getting a parking space at a shopping mall on Christmas. And you should not be at the same level for those two things, right? You need to pick and choose where you're going to be. The great competitor respects the competition and will say, hey, you did better than I did today. I'm gonna learn from you. The focus is not about taking people out but using competition to find your best skills and to prove yourself and to develop and really is where you're missing things. So I think that's where a lot of the competition is. You know, when I do some consulting for pro athletes, I say, you know, it's not about the result. It's not about the win, loss at the end. And they get really upset with me, Gowah. We're not gonna be able to. Oh yeah. Yeah, they're like, we can't tell management. It's not about the W. And I was like, yeah. I see that, but competition, if it's only about the W, sometimes you win not because you're great, but because the other people broke down in the car on the way. Sometimes it's because they had a bad day and you can't count on them having a bad day to be your competitive strategy for success, right? So we have to be willing to take apart the wins just as much as we take apart the losses to make sure it's really about what we're doing. So the benefit of competition, I think this may be the biggest myth of all, the benefit of competition isn't winning. The benefit of competition is improving. I can't, I mean, everybody wishes that I could just say, oh, well, 10 minutes with me and I promise you're never gonna lose again. No, because the more you compete, the better your competition's gonna be. The more elite your performance is going to be. So yeah, you're actually gonna keep losing, but you're going to learn from that experience you're gonna get skills, you're going to psychologically be able to handle this pressure increasing over time. So I can promise you in a competition you're going to improve, maybe not in that moment, but afterwards when we're talking about it and thinking about it moving on, I can't promise the win, I can't promise improvement. So that's really the benefit of competition. I think that's a good place to start of defining maladaptive and adaptive competitiveness. For Agen, we've been teaching value and how people get and give value. And there's four value behaviors that we discuss on the show. One is begging for value. One is being aggressive to get value. And then a competitive nature to compete for value. And then our high value model, which is cooperative behavior to give value in order to get value. And anytime that we get to competitiveness, there's always a group of people who's begin yelling at us about competitiveness is great, you need it. And we're like, we understand and there is a difference between healthy competitiveness and the people who see life and everything that they do as a competition. And if that is somebody that you are, if you see everything as a competition, you're going to exhaust people from wanting to deal with you because they find themselves in this competition all the time. So if you could help us on separating those two behaviors for us. Adaptive competition includes respecting the competitor, respecting the rules. Maladaptive competitors don't respect the competition, don't respect the rules. Well, if you really understood my greatness, you would just give me the award, the medal, the promotion. All of this competing nonsense, the job interview, the presentation you want me to do, this is just ridiculous, a waste of my time. Just let me do this. And if that's your attitude that you're entitled to the win, then you absolutely don't respect the rules, you don't respect the competition and that gives you permission to break the rules. That gives you permission to say, well, I'm entitled to win. If I'm entitled to win and I was gonna win anyway, then it doesn't matter how I get here, does it? That then gives you this approval that you can actually really hurt people and be unethical. And right again, that may win on the day, but over time your reputation is that you're not trustworthy, that you're not respectful, that you're gonna cheat and no one wants to work with that person. So the maladaptive competitor is going to succeed by finding new pools of competition because they can't stay in the one they've got because nobody wants to deal with them after the first one or two. So I think that's really important. And again, you're absolutely right. The adaptive competitor picks and chooses when they're gonna compete, realizes they can let something go that's not important. They enjoy it, it's fun for them as opposed to the maladaptive competitor. And I don't think they enjoy competition because again, it's a blood sport and they have to win every time, it's do or die. And again, you can't learn from that. Looking at research with a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. A growth mindset's focusing on improvement over time. A fixed mindset is I'm this good, period. If you're a maladaptive competitor with a fixed mindset, you can't learn from experience. You can't learn from growth. You can't learn from anything else because every time you lose, you've proven to the other people and yourself that you're not as good as you thought you were. So the stakes are just untenable. Human beings need to be human growings. We have to be able to give ourselves that room to improve that the maladaptive competitor just can't do. Combining all of these thoughts in terms of the myth idea and the maladaptive and the adaptive, we only say, you know, it's not if you won or lost. It's how you played the game to the person who lost, right? We only care about, loss is character building. Winning is never character building. That's wrong. It should be character building because again, you should be focusing on what did you do right? What did you do wrong? What was dumb luck? So I think that, you know, all of that fits together and maybe this is something the next time those people are freaking out about competition is good. I think it's a false choice between competition and cooperation. And the reason is because competition, we're thinking that again, one-on-one, mono-a-mono, but I can have a team compete together, collaboratively to beat the other team. Even as I was saying, you know, I kept saying in terms of the good competitor is following the rules of the road. So that means that in some ways I'm competing against, I'm collaborating with my direct competitor because we both agreed what the appropriate behaviors here are. So I think that people put them as these dichotomies and they're not really dichotomies. It's more about that unhealthy blood sport versus playing in a level playing field. We all agree and we all wanna do the best for each other. And what we're doing is really focusing on my improvement rather than taking you out. And actually the difference between those two things actually changes brain function because when you're thinking about how I wanna do something, that's about the parts of the brain that are thinking about self-image. When you're thinking about taking somebody out, that's about fear and other aggression elements that aren't in that self-image moment. What I think is sort of a misconception or difficult for people to realize is that the maladaptive competitor actually has a really strong fear of failure, which is why they will flout the rules, they will compete on things that aren't agreed upon, they will try to force everything into a competition so they can reach a win at some point because they're afraid of a future loss or something else where they won't be able to be that winner in their mind. And I think that's sort of hard for a lot of our clients to wrap their head around who are used to being really competitive. And let's be honest, in a lot of our lives, competition is rewarded. We get trophies, we get medals, we get promotions, we get raises and it's very easy to fall into that maladaptive side when you feel like others might be winning or getting more than you. And it's difficult to see, well, where does cooperation come into this equation when I feel that I'm on the losing end? I think that that's absolutely true. There's actually some interesting research on the fear of failure, where the fear of failure is fear of letting people down, fear of embarrassment, fear of people not talking to you anymore because you made a mistake so they're just gonna write you off completely. And that's connected to fear of not living up to your own self-image. And when I read that research, I said, okay, I'm not gonna sleep tonight because each one of those, I was like, whoa, that's a little scary. I don't wanna let people down. I don't wanna realize that I'm not as good as I think I am. Oh, yeah, no, that was all really scary. That benefit of competition comes from testing yourself. That is the point of competition is am I as good as I think I am? Especially during the pandemic, I can work out in my apartment, I can do jumping jacks, I can run up and down my room and think, wow, I'm really fit. It's not until I go onto a track or into a gym that I actually realize I'm a complete and income poop and it isn't any better. But then competition becomes a public test because there's at least your competitor watching against you. And there may even be an audience and that immediately changes the stakes to be very scary. So it's not just I'm afraid of failure, I'm not, I'm making mistakes, but I'm making mistakes publicly. So one of those parts about fear of failure and having an audience. And I've shared the story of my journey and getting better at golf. When I go to the driving range, I just throw my headphones in and I'm just swinging balls and I can hit the ball straight. Then I have some fun with my friends out on the course and my game drops off a little bit for forever reason. When there's like strangers in my foresum that I've never played with before, it becomes incredibly more difficult for me to hit the ball straight, to concentrate, to have this performance that I feel so comfortable with when I'm on my own. So part of that fear of failure of having that audience, I'd love to hear the antidote to that and how we can overcome that roadblock. And it's not just you, there's actual science. One of my favorite experiments, they had college students playing video games. As you can imagine, they're crushing it. You know, it's just some racing car game and the grad student confederate of the professor would walk in in the middle and go, wow, that's a really high score. Boom, immediately they crash and burn. And the reason they're doing that is because the second they hear someone watching them, they've stopped paying attention to the car game. Instead, they're watching the person who's watching them. And so now your attention is split. So you're literally using half of the ability and focus that you just had five seconds ago because the other part is about the person watching you. So one of the things you need to do is, again, focus on the benefit of competition. What am I trying to do? I'm trying to learn from this. I'm trying to improve. I'm not trying to prove that I am the next Andre Agassi when your friends are coming by and you're just hitting balls. You're like, no, I'm just hitting balls. So it's about setting the goal. And one of the things that I love the most, especially, and this really actually has helped from Olympians to random kids taking a quiz for school, is asking yourself what your goal is. And I know that sounds really obvious, but the research and one of the most fascinating things we found in the science of competition was the difference between a challenge and a threat. And in a challenge, it's not clear. It's not guaranteed you're gonna win, but you think all things considered, you've got a shot. A threat, you have no shot. And the only question is, how badly is this gonna go? The difference between those two mindsets is enormous. It changes your biochemistry. In a challenge state, you have a boost of adrenaline. You have testosterone boosts. You have better circulation in your lungs and your blood flow. In a threat state, the question is, how badly is this gonna go? Your blood vessels actually contract. I mean, this is evolutionary. This is when you were trying to run away from a tiger that the tiger bit you, you weren't gonna bleed out. So the goal was get back to the cave alive. It wasn't turn around and turn the tiger into dinner. It was, I need to make it to the cave without bleeding out. So your blood vessels literally contract. And if you think about, I always think of a football game, blow out at result. The third or fourth quarter, one team is winning and those guys are jumping up and down and they're screaming and they're cheerleading and they're like, oh, do we still have to play? And then they go, they throw another 40 yard touchdown and then they go right back to screaming and cheering. And the losing team, they're holding their legs. They look like they're gonna pass out. The problem is not physical conditioning. Last week, that team was winning and crushing it with someone else. It was in the moment, they're physically feeling like they're dying because their body is actually changing that core and trying to set itself for reservation. The question then is it as a challenge or threat? So what is a challenge? It's something you think you can succeed at but we can break it apart. Do you have the skills, knowledge, resources and ability to succeed? I use this as a checklist. When I start getting nervous about something, I think, okay, why am I nervous? Do I have the skills to do this? Do I have the knowledge? Do I have the talent? Do I have the ability? And if I'm actually going, actually no, I don't have the knowledge, I forgot to read this. I don't know, this meeting is gonna go really badly. Okay, but then I have a cure, right? I can read the memo, right? If you identify what of those pieces that you're missing, you can go back to that challenge state because that's what you wanna do is you wanna focus, it doesn't have to be a guarantee of a win. If you think you're absolutely guaranteed to win, you may actually underperform, right? That's when we skate, that's kind of like, oh yeah, okay, whatever. So a little bit of that excitement and butterflies is actually good because it's gonna keep you going forward but you don't wanna be overwhelmed. And then if you think, okay, no, I don't even have the knowledge, skills and resources and ability. You know, I don't have my lucky socks. I forgot them and I forgot them when I, and I realized this, I'm on a plane traveling somewhere. There's nothing I can do about the socks, right? So that's when you go back and change the goal. Change the goal to something that you do think you can succeed at. Sometimes the goal may be, I need to start this meeting without throwing up. And that may be hard for someone who's really scared, right? But again, so now we're going back to the benefit of competition is improvement because even when I fall on my face, I'm gonna learn something from it. So that's why that goal setting is so important because you wanna move the goal to be something, again, slightly so that you gotta reach but not so much that you think you're gonna give up. Cause again, if you're totally outclassed, if you're like, wow, I'm a rookie, I've never done this before and everybody here is a world-class expert than me, you're not gonna learn for them, you're just gonna shut down. So again, it's focusing on the skills, knowledge, resources and ability to improve. And then that gives you the tool of a thing you can actually attack rather than just being stuck with this fear of failure. I love this checklist because this is incredibly important, especially for somebody who has performance anxiety to get to the driver of what that is. I know for myself, when I was younger, I'd been playing music my whole life and playing on stage in front of people was completely debilitating until I got used to it. And then I began to want to be in front of people all the time, regardless of how shows may go. I've played clonkers, I played great ones, but it's always more fun with an audience. And granted, I like to play good shows when there are people watching but that adds to the whole experience. However, for me, it was having multiple opportunities and reps to get comfortable with that. I just recently had a client reach out and said that he was having trouble in his residency and operating on folks and that every time that he had to go to do it and he says, I know this stuff very well, I'm tops in my class, but I'm having performance anxiety and I need to get to the root of it. And I mean, there have actually been studies even looking at surgical students going in with a challenge focus versus a threat focus actually changed what they were paying attention to. So a threat focus, they were doing like practicing laparoscopic surgery. And if they had a threat intention, how catastrophic is it for me to screw up? I'm going to kill my imaginary patient or I'm going to be kicked out of med school or whatever it was or embarrassed in front of my class made them look, there were actual eye tracking studies, looked at, they were looking at the instruments more than the patient. And the challenge students, the students who were like, I think I've got this, we're paying attention to the patient. So if you're focused on the process and not again obsessed on this sort of win loss, right? I know how to do this, go back to him and say, okay, let's do that checklist, knowledge, skills, ability. Say, okay, well, I have the knowledge, I don't actually have the skills, I don't think I've practiced this enough. Okay, easy fix. Go practice for another 20 minutes, go practice for another two hours, put that a procedure off. Or you can say, well, do you really not have the skills and then actually make them tell you what had they done to prepare? What I've always told people in that position of working through that and getting accustomed to it. I've always said it's never going to happen as quickly as you would like it to, but it's never going to last as long as you think it's going to. So get working on it. Because if they're somewhere in between those two, it will work itself out with enough reps. Absolutely. And what I think part of it, especially for someone who's working in surgery or what you're saying, the number of reps. The idea that this is my one shot and I don't actually have another opportunity to get this done. I think that would scare everybody. That would scare me. The idea that no, actually, if I screw up, well, I can do something again in two hours or tomorrow. So I think making sure that we don't think that this is the one shot because that automatically is going to put you in the threat state. Because now it's do or die. And if it's do or die, then I've got a problem. So again, changing the goal to something you think you can succeed at and looking for that improvement over time rather than the miracle one time everything. I think that's really important. Everyone who's ever been in sales understands that, right? If they have tons of calls, they're more relaxed, they're selling, they're doing much better. If they know I'm not making, I'm not eating this week unless I make this sale. Oh no, now the pressure's on. And of course it's that much more difficult. And I have actually the flip side to your story about performing on stage. When I was a kid, I was in theater companies and I loved to sing. And singing is so important to me that I just start shaking like a leaf. I get terrible stage fright. And as a kid, I decided, well, then I'm only gonna audition for the things I really care about because it's just too painful and experience and too scary. And what I've now decades too late having read the science that I should have done is even as a six-year-old girl gone out for the 50-year-old weightlifting male just to have the practice of falling on my face and that it wasn't the big deal and I wouldn't live through it. And yeah, so the reps and the opportunity to have that is really important. With all the conversational tools that we espouse on the show, we want people to be practicing them and setting up opportunities every week so that they get better at this. To go to a networking event and see the person that they've been dying to meet who is the one guy that can help their business and now they're gonna finally use this, the technique or the strategy that they have heard us talk about. Well, they're putting all that pressure on themselves. Of course that's not going to go well. They're going to be tripping all over the words because yes, they put so much value on this person. And that avoidance of failure is the real issue here because if you haven't experienced any failure then you're gonna allow that survival instinct mode to contract your vessels and turn everything into do or die. But if you've actually practiced failing and taking the lessons from that failure then you're not gonna experience it in that way. And even in the work that we do with athletes, so you take Olympians, well there's world championships every year. There's tons of practice that leads up and there's practice alone and there's practice with competition. I think it's very easy for us to look at professional athletes and be like, well, every game is do or die. No, professional athletes are in a certain mode during the regular season. How are they facing adversity? How are they playing with different teammates in different situations to prepare them for the playoffs? And then in the playoffs, they have multiple games, multiple opportunities to advance to the next level. And when they take that growth mindset of improvement and how am I facing and overcoming this adversity, even if I didn't get the win at the end of the day, those are the athletes that are actually most successful. There's so much, and what both of you just said right then, it's just, it's so exciting. My favorite is don't think about pink elephants, right? Everyone, we're immediately, that's all we're thinking is pink elephants, right? If you walk up to that person who you've been wanting to meet to network with for months, you're like, okay, now the most important thing I need you to do is not say whatever, you know? Don't tell them that your last company just failed or don't tell them you're gonna lead with that. Whatever it is that you're telling yourself not to do, you're going to lead with that. So when you're focusing on avoiding mistakes, you can actually, that's all your brain's doing, you can actually do the mistake that you were trying not to do, because that's what you're thinking about. You're not thinking about what to do on the other side. Then what you were talking about with the little Olympians and having more opportunities, you know, when I first started doing this, I was like, elite and Olympian were synonyms. I still think they're sort of synonyms, but when you talk to elite coaches and Olympians, they actually talk about your practice Olympics, right? And I'm like, your practice Olympics? I'm like, oh, yeah, I am. Your practice Olympics are when you're 16 or 17, you barely made it in, we did not expect you to win. We just wanted you to know what it was like to have a billion people watching your hurtling or your diving or whatever it was you were doing. And it's because that learning from the experience and the environment is so important. And then also, again, measuring your expectations and realizing this isn't actually your one time at the Olympics, you're gonna come back. So learn from this experience, get as much as you can. If you can come home with a truckload of gold, yay. But if not, and you came home and you learn from it, you're gonna do great the next time. And there are actual studies about champions you've said exactly what you said when they said, what was the thing that catapulted your world championship success? It was the previous loss because that really taught them what they cared about. I'd love to talk a little bit about those in the audience that don't feel compelled to compete because in the past, they've either performed well or they've avoided it. And the book sort of starts off with that typical bell curve, where you have those who collapse in competition, those in the middle who actually healthy competition can get them to achieve more, and those at the very top where that competition really doesn't motivate them one way or another. They perform because of it. So for those who are in the lower bell curve who maybe due to standardized testing or other competitions in their life have failed and because of that, they now have anxiety around competition. They avoid it at all costs. How can we use science to address that to get them back to the middle and moving towards that top dog status in their life? Pick what you care about. Unless you're like practicing a skill where you're actually trying to learn it. And I guess in some ways, because if someone's really afraid of competition, then maybe they should just sign up for a whole bunch of things they don't even care about. Sign up for a checkers tournament, sign up for a golf tournament. You don't know how to play either one of them. That's fine. You're just actually gonna go through and see what other people are doing. If it's more a sort of like I was talking about it was too important for me to risk the competition, then again, resetting the goals, finding some small opportunities and organizations like Toastmasters does the everybody has to speak all the time. You guys have regular, we're going to have a speech and a thing and it's not a one shot. So giving people that. And then just like I used the challenge as a checklist be very specific about what is the goal you're gonna get out of this competition. And then you find out afterwards, this, did I get it? What was the goal? And that I think in terms of what's effective, again, thinking about outcome, novices don't want competition. If you're just learning something just now, I'm just trying to find out the rules here. I don't even know if I like this. So don't put me in a competitive environment. The elite performers, their competition is really themselves, right? You know, your Olympian has already who's already had six or seven gold medals is saying, well, yeah, but this is for my place in history. This is me beating my own world record. I don't care about anybody else. I'm focused on what can I do? They're useful that reference points on how I'm doing in the moment, but my goal is really pushing myself to a new level. And it's those intermediate people who aren't sure of their ability and aren't sure that's where competition, things like trophies and medals become that really important because that's when they're really trying to figure out, am I good at this? What can I do? So I think figuring out where you are in your skill level is important. And then what's the most effective also matters. So for a novice, did you live through this? Cool, yay, go team. That may be what you're looking for. A novice, the most effective feedback is positive feedback pointing out what you did, right? You actually are to end improvement. Velocity feedback is the scientific term of art and it's the rate of improvement. You still sucked. You still are at the very bottom. You did not win, but you're still 200% better than you were last week. Right? So velocity feedback is really important. Your elite performer, don't tell an Olympian velocity feedback because they may be taking four years to shave off a half a millisecond off of their time. And velocity feedback, how they improve from one day to the next may be crushing to them. So for them, they actually do wanna know how did I plays? Was I better than everybody else? Was I better than I was the last time? So there's not one perfect thing. It's going to change depending on where you are. But look for, especially the people who load competition, look for something that's fun, that you just genuinely enjoy. And maybe the answer is not an individual competition. Maybe it's joining a team for who can raise money for a charity, for a 5K race. It's not about competing for myself. It's not about showing up anybody else. I'm actually trying to do the best for someone else and for a greater cause than myself. I think that's actually particularly appropriate for women because women tend to be more concerned about a reputation of being competitive and it's easier for them to say that they'll fight for someone else. And oh, I can't do that for me. Oh, I could do that for them. So having shifting the focus of competition off of yourself and to another organization or a team member may also be something that helps you express the competitive fire in a way you wouldn't have necessarily wanted to do it for yourself. I'd love to touch more on the gender differences around competition and the role that you highlight in the book around estrogen because we do work with women in our programs, although fewer, mostly men, and the women who do join our programs tend to be in very male dominant environments. So they feel like they have to adapt by taking on male traits and qualities and they come to us to learn what are those male traits and qualities that'll get me ahead in this environment. And what's been funny over the years, so in our all male programs, we find just naturally the guys, even though we're not trying to set up a competition with the exercises we put them on, they will naturally gravitate towards competition. So one of our exercises is a real world, live first impression feedback. And we always say the goal is to get 50 people, strangers, to give you three words to describe you upon meeting them for the first time, as a goal to shoot for. And inevitably inside the class, after an hour and a half, the guys come back and they're tallying who's got the high score, they wanna know. Who's got the best attitude, who's got the best descriptors? Then we did this with an all women's program and there was no discussion of the number of signatures, there was no competition at all, there was more curiosity of, well, what did you get? And what were the words that you got to describe you? And they actually avoided any sort of competitive side. And Johnny and I were always fascinated by this. Then of course, when it's a mixed group, we did see the women get a little bit more competitive and wanna see how their score matched up. So what role does gender play in all of this? And I'd love to unpack Estrogen's role as a hormone in this as well. I love all of that. Joyce Menenson should probably write a scholarship paper about what you just did. That's fantastic. And my first thing is a disclaimer, which is when I was writing this book, did not wanna write about gender differences in composition. My co-author, Poe Bronson, is a male and he said, Ashley, should we talk about gender? And I said, no. And the reason is I didn't want to hear, oh, well, Poe and Ashley say that women can't compete because I knew that was wrong. And I knew that was wrong. That was not gonna happen. But we kept looking at the research and the conversation really changed when we found research from a Stanford researcher, Muriel Niederla, who gave people a math test. And she said, now, before you do this, you got a choice. I can pay you for every right answer or I can put you in this little pool of like three or four other people and the best score will win all of the money. It's only like five bucks, but yeah, it's a competition. And the women, nope, pay me per answer. And the guys were, I'm all in. And this wasn't some, you know, 50-50 split with a statistical error and you're not really sure. 73% of the men said I'm in for the competition and only 30-something percent of the women did it. This was an enormous difference. And we said, oh, well, that's a problem. But what we realized is in the studies that end people have said women can't compete, it wasn't about their performance. It wasn't about how many numbers and scores they got correct on that math test. It was the decision to compete or not. And it turns out that guys will turn anything into a competition because it's fun and it's a new way to improve their status and women will only compete when they know they're gonna win. And they're very, very concerned about that decision. And if they think they're not gonna win, they're just not gonna play. Nope, I'm good, it's fine. And Joyce Benson, a researcher in Boston has looked at that sort of developmental, well, where did this come from? And what she found is that women grow up in pairs. Little girls have their very best friend and boys are running around in groups and packs just tearing up the playground and girls are sitting there playing patty cake or doing nice things together. And a group is self-policing, right? A group of kids on a basketball court, hey, throw me the ball. And then you throw it to them and then they miss. So they don't throw it to you again, right? Or someone else is actually on the corner doing everybody else's homework, right? Everybody has different roles in this basketball game. And if two kids start arguing, someone's gonna say, hey, we're not here so that you guys can work out some sort of social stupid problem you've got. We're here to play ball. Shut up and throw the ball, right? So you have these other people who are mediating focusing on the task and the top task is keep the game going. But the girls, there's two of them are playing together. They have to self-police. There's no external moderator unless it gets violent and then mom or somebody comes gonna cry, right? So they have to self-police and they have to decide how they're going to keep the game going. And the way to do that is to make things even. I don't wanna tell you what my score is because my score might be better than your score. And then they game. So what was your score? And then they wait to see what everybody else's scores go and then go, oh, okay, that works. And they negotiate to make sure they're not gonna show up their best friend. Because you realize that if I'm playing and I win, I may lose my best friend. And now winning has this huge cost. So now I really do only compete when I know I'm gonna win and when I care about it. Otherwise, I'm going to preserve that social relationship. And research has shown that this persists not just those little kids on the playground, but college educated successful women never talk about their accomplishments until they know the person they're speaking to is equally or more accomplished than they are. Well, that's a problem in a job interview, isn't it? Yeah, big time. It's a problem in networking because I don't know who that person is. So I'm trying to minimize my accomplishments and help them boost up and be afraid. And so one of the things I tell women all the time is just facts are not bragging. You can tell them what you did. You don't have to say, I'm the best ever. You can just say, this was my grade or this was my sales numbers and that's okay. And but it's really tough for women because they feel like the person who's supposed to say no is themselves. So I was just listening to your recession toolkit and you were talking about the man that you were working with who had applied for a hundred or a thousand jobs and he said to you, I wasn't even qualified, but I wanted to and I just went for it. And I started laughing because that is so guy. I mean, there is actual studies that only guys will do this. And there are actual studies that women will only go for the job they know they're gonna win. They're self-policing. They look at that list of different credentials and say, I don't have all of them, I'm not gonna try. And I will never forget this. I was giving a speech in Houston for a women's business organization. And I was talking about, it's not your job to say no. It's your job to say, here's my skills, here's my interests, does this work for you? Stop the self-policing, it's not your job to take yourself out of the competition before it even starts. It's somebody else's job. And really that human resources person or the interviewer or the person who's looking at your sales quota, I joke that it's their job to say no, but it's not their job to say no. It's their job to say yes to the right person. But it's certainly not your job to say no to yourself. So I finished the speech, I'm sitting in a table afterwards and this woman comes up and she's in her, I'm guessing mid to late 50s. And we're in Houston, so I immediately just think, oh, oil money, because she's just perfectly coiffed. She's got this elegant suit and she's just put together in ways I will never be able to approach. And I'm in awe of her just as she's walking up. And she says, so there was this job I really wanted last week. And I only had seven of the 10 qualifications so I didn't apply. Should I have applied? And I said, yes, you should apply. And I said, first of all, you're assuming that everyone else who does apply has eight, nine or 10 qualifications. You don't know that everybody else who's applying might have zero qualifications like the guy you were talking to, right? Or maybe they have four or five. So you're assuming everybody has more qualifications than you do and you don't know that. And even if that were the case, maybe there's something in your background that they didn't even know to ask about. But once they see it, they go, oh, well, actually those three qualifications you were missing don't matter because it's the qualifications you're bringing to the table. And obviously we didn't know those were important because we were missing them. But now that we see you, you're a fit that we didn't ever expect. So it was a heart wrenching. And to this day, I pray that that woman tried to go back and to apply that for that job. But it was this idea of taking yourself out of the competition, self-pleasing, even before you can. And two, it's not bragging. It's not your job to say no. It's your job to identify your skills and opportunities and your interests and let other people think if there's a fit or not. Oh my God. I feel like I cannot wait for my wife to listen to this because we were literally just talking about this morning. So she wants to just do consulting freelance. She wants to break, we just got married and she just wants to break from a full-time role. And this company reached out to her through a network and they're looking to hire someone full-time. They've talked to a number of candidates. They have not settled on any of them. She brought up that she wants to do freelance. She's not interested in full-time and she thought that that pulled her out of the running. And I had this exact argument with her that she needs to send them a proposal for her freelance work, detailing exactly what she would deliver and let them say no. And she's like, they already said no. They're looking for a full-time person. And I said, they haven't found that full-time person and they would gladly take you for three months with these deliverables at a lower cost than giving you equity, paying your benefits, your payroll taxes. And if you even throw in, hey, you'll help them hire the next person, which she's really good at doing, they'll probably say yes. And she's going back and forth him and in high and I'm trying to coach her through this exact thing. And then I pointed out to her that the last three people she's been involved in hiring for her last company did not have all of the qualifications that they were looking for. And they were men and they got hired and she came home from work frustrated saying, how are we hiring these people who are unqualified and then I have to train them up. So I've witnessed this in my own marriage, how she will self-police even though she has more than the qualifications and the direct experience that they're really looking for. And that's the key, these qualifications they use to filter, but the experience in these roles is far more important to that company. Can you get these results than any sort of certifications or qualifications that they'll put on the screening process? And here's an irony just to build on to that. So the studies show that women, like women who are politicians or considering running for office wait until they have multiple master's degrees, multiple tours of responsibility and different offices before they'll even run. And the guys are like, you know, I think I should run. If I don't, you know, if I don't, I'll build my contact list. Maybe I'll have a little war chest. You know, we'll learn from exposure. Doesn't matter if I'm in a win or not. And the women are like, no, no, no. So the research shows that women who actually do run are more qualified and do really well. But if we put this back for your wife being frustrated, the irony is if everyone who applied and was hired for that job had all of the qualifications, my guess is they wouldn't have been hired because they were overqualified. You would look and say, oh, well, that person has every single thing we need, but, you know, are they really gonna stay more than a couple months? They're looking for a promotion, right? So you actually, so the company may be looking at it in terms of who are people who are gonna learn on the job. They can, they'll hit a floor and they're gonna have room to grow into the position because, you know, well, we're gonna train them to do our specific way we handle that anyway. So it doesn't really matter if they haven't done that. Whereas the person who's got the sync one on everything is like, oh, well, that person's really not interested in learning how we do things. They're looking, you know, the second they get this job, they're gonna be angling for my job as a promotion. So it may actually, I definitely tell women who are worried about competing, focus on the improvement, you don't have to be perfect, but I fully admit, I myself will have that same issue. I know, like, oh, that's really hard. I don't have all of those qualifications for that meeting or that speech or whatever. And then I think, oh my God, there have been times when I actually, literally at one point, true story, I was in a hotel and I was gonna give a speech to another women's group and I was, and I'd written out, not your job to say no. And I got an email, are you interested in doing this consulting thing? And I looked and I was like, oh, I don't have all of the qualifications. I don't think I should apply. And I was like, I can't give this speech unless I send yes. And that was the only reason I did it because I could not go to those women and say, just go for it. If an hour later, I couldn't have done it myself. So it is hard, but it's useful. Well, we had that exact same conversation where we put out a job position and we saw someone over qualified and we're like, well, we can't even afford them, we're not gonna interview them. They had everything we were looking for, but then we start thinking as small business owners, like they're gonna ask for too much and they're probably gonna wanna leave right away and can we afford to invest in them? So that's the other side of the conversation that's happening. So not only are women wrestling with themselves if they should apply, but then business owners are having a different conversation and all we're seeing is those qualifications. Now, as a former cancer biologist, I love how the biochemistry plays a role in all of this. So let's talk a little bit about estrogen when it comes to competition. So estrogen and testosterone, I always wanna talk about both of them because people think that women have estrogen and men have testosterone and that explains these differences in competition. And actually that's not true. Testosterone is not the he-man. Aggression need meat hormone that it's built up to be. Testosterone is a hormone relating to social relationships and social status. And it wants you to do something that is powerful and gets you social approval. Now, a football player might say, I get cheers from the locker room if I go to break people's bones. Okay. And another team may say, I get cheers from the locker room and the coach says I'm doing a great job. If I show up for practice on time, remember is all my plays and remember to thank the support staff for helping me. I can get a testosterone boost from both of those things. It's what I know I'm gonna get social approval for. And so women have somewhere depending on the study, one seventh to one 10th of the testosterone that men do. But in the moment, it's the change in testosterone. It's the response in hormones to the setting that actually is that thing. It's not that estrogen is then the girl version of testosterone. Estrogen is doing a different set of biochemical things because you guys have estrogen too. I just have more, right? So we all have both of these things. You know, an oxytocin is another one of the hormones that we don't, you know, I'm actually wearing the audio listeners can't see it, but you guys can see it. I'm wearing an ox, this is an oxytocin necklace. Because it's the art of charm. So I thought I would wear, I thought I would wear a love, the blob molecule. That's what it's called. So oxytocin is also about social connectedness, right? Testosterone is about social status. Oxytocin is about social connectedness. And so originally people were talking about it in terms of, you know, mom's breastfeeding or giving people a hug. And there's evidence about the breastfeeding. You can't see oxytocin from a hug. It's just too fast to test. Doesn't work. But the idea is that comfort level and then say, okay, well, again, oxytocin, the love hormone, that's definitely not about competition. Really? Have you been to a bar? There's competition when it comes to relationships, right? Really? You were talking, you know, competition, there's nothing that was like, who were you talking to? Who was that? Why aren't you talking to me? There's a lot of actually competition and status concerns even in a romantic relationship, certainly in a business relationship, but even in a romantic one. But then there's also that protection, right? Being close to me means I'm going to be more competitive with someone who I think is threatening that external relationship. So that's another one of those reframing competition, is it, it's not about you and your success, it's about protecting your teammate or protecting your friend or the person you care about or performing at a new level is another way to get that hormonal engagement and the physiological excitement of competition that you otherwise would be missing. Now, we'd be remiss to not discuss the introvert, extrovert view of competition. So as you can imagine, we work with a lot of introverts and I think that's part of why we see an inordinate number of clients who in that group environment shy away from the competition, but then on that one-on-one challenge where they get first impressions on their own, they throw themselves in and some of the quietest, shyest, most introverted people end up coming back with the most signatures in that exercise, but if we get them to work together in a group setting and compete, it falls apart for them. So what's going on with this introvert, extrovert performance in competition? Well, I think one of the things that's sort of interesting, if you look at introverts and extroverts that one of the brain, going back more to the brain chemistry, there's some research that shows that introverts have a higher level of dopamine, sort of as their baseline. And people having conversations with you is another level of dopamine and that's too much. It's like flooding a car with gas. Too much dopamine. And you hear introverts and I'll say it, okay, I had this big speech or I went to a cocktail party, now I have to go take a nap. My brain is just, I have to recover because what I need to do is I need to have my dopamine reset back to that lower baseline. And there is some research that actually, so there's evidence and then extroverts have a slightly below optimal baseline for dopamine and they actually then need people. You hear that expression about someone feeds off of being with people. Extroverts actually need the positive or even negative interaction from other people to get that dopamine level to be up to the optimal performance. And there is some kind of interesting research that looks at the genetics and they're not exactly a twinning between introvert and extrovert. Although I know this has got to be a Venn diagram at a certain point, but everyone talks about the warriors and the warriors. And warriors are people who have a high level of baseline dopamine and will function terrifically on a day-to-day level. They're the ones who can manage every detail. They know every single thing going on, but then you put them in the, okay, you've been preparing for this presentation for two weeks. Now you're gonna give the presentation and they're now they're just, they've literally forgotten their name. They have completely blanked. And then there's up and you're like, you were really great. Now you're a puddle on the floor. What happened? And then you have these other people who weren't really engaged and were just kind of sitting there back in the meetings and all of a sudden they shine in the presentation. This is just the most fun. You're like, okay, we didn't even think you were paying attention. Who did, where did this guy come from? And that actually is this warrior warrior paradigm. So the warriors have high levels of dopamine on a day-to-day. So a moment of stress floods their brains with too much. And the warrior actually has too little dopamine on an average day. So they need the stress of competition. They need that last minute deadline to actually kick their dopamine to give them optimal functioning. And there's, and this actually, it's not exactly a bell curve, but genetically about a fourth of the population is warriors, fourth is warriors. And then there's this split in between. And then actually women, because women already have variations in hormones and dopamine tied to their menstrual cycles can be like warrior pluses or warrior pluses depending on what's going on there. So if you hear yourself going, ooh, I'm a warrior, I'm an extrovert. I'm one of these people. Then again, we're going back to the challenge and threat. Come up with something that you think is doable. Have it be a smaller thing that you can actually do. You don't have to dazzle every client, get the home run. Like I'd said before, your goal is to not throw up in the first five minutes. All right, good start. Some of this might really be hard, right? So going back to that sort of challenge and then on the flip side for the warrior who's disengaged on the average day, they need to find ways to kick it up. They need to sign up for maybe it's competition. Get your Fitbit or your Apple Watch and be competing with someone on your steps, competing on your sales calls for the day or some kind of thing to sort of amp up that competition a little bit so that you feel you're engaged. In both cases, you got to do this with some moderation because you don't want to end up burning people out and freaking out the whole time. But being aware of those things and preparing for them in advance, if you are an introvert and you know this is hard, don't pretend everything's fine. Come up with a strategy beforehand to help you. One of my all-time favorite studies, they had British infantry where they were asked to do a one-day paratrooping. So they had never jumped out of a plane and by the end of the day, they were gonna be jumping out of a plane, free fall. And so this was a true volunteer experiment because they didn't want to do it in the military. There's an expression, voluntold. These were real volunteers and they were all high school and they'd all had been athletes in school. And at the end of the experiment, at the end of it, when they made it through their jump, the experimenter said, what were your coping strategies for the idea that you're going through the, you know, jumping out of a building for, I mean, jumping out of an airplane the first time. One of the most common strategies, got any ideas, you wanna guess? This will be so much better when it's over. Right. That was the coping strategy was, it was not how am I gonna get throughout the plane, it's that if I don't go splat, it'll be good in an hour. Yep, well, it's on the ground. But the problem with that denial element is they were so focused on, it's gonna be over soon. It's gonna be over soon. They missed paying attention to the safety briefing because they were literally thinking, oh my God, this is gonna be over soon. Oh my God, I can do this. And the people who were actually telling them how to succeed, all they were hearing was, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. So if you know that it's a period of stress, whether you're a warrior or a warrior, introvert, extrovert, but you plan it and give yourself that extra time to be stressed, to figure out when's go time. Go time is not the start of your presentation. Go time is when you got to that building or when you got there in the morning, it depends on the thing, but giving yourself that time to actually be in the rhythm rather than, and this is especially important for the people who are worried about stressing out, that denial until the very last minute may actually be really hurting you. And you need to start saying, no, go time is earlier, go time is the morning when I'm getting dressed. Oh, okay, well, if go time, and then if you think about it, then you realize sometimes the person who's stressed, go time was that they forgot that lucky sock, right? So if they realize when this competition really started and the performance started much earlier, then they can better plan and then they can have the pieces in place. So the actual, so it becomes more gradual as opposed to I'm off and I'm on, right? When you're on stage, when you're singing, that's hard because it's an off and on. So you have to do things on backstage, you know, I bounce up and down, I'm humming, I'm hoping no one here can hear me singing, but when I'm singing, I always think I'm not singing and then I'm gonna sing and part of my brain goes, no sound will come out because it's this idea that I'm having to suddenly switch on and that's scary. But if I'd been humming along and there's just singing with the introduction or something and then I just kept getting louder and I'm like, oh, well, that's not so bad, I could do that. Yeah, even in our work with athletes, they have rituals, right? For that go time and that go time will start before they even get to the arena. And, you know, you'll see it in LeBron James with his little powder display on the sidelines, but that go time has started way before he's laced up his sneakers and he's doing that display on the court. And again, this is all happening for elite performers. They might not be sharing it, they might not be telling anyone publicly that they've flipped that switch before they got to the arena. But if you wait till that last moment jumping out the plane and you're in total denial, you've tuned out everything and you won't be able to handle that stress that comes up. And you have to figure out what's best for you if you're a warrior. If you're a warrior, you have to figure out what the strategy is. It's not just, oh, well, this one person did something and that's what I have to do. The mentally tough have a whole repertoire of different techniques and we'll be learning them just like you guys teach them new techniques over time. It's not like, okay, here's one thing, now you're good to go. And so you're learning different strategies over time. But yes, what you were saying, there have been some studies that have looked at athletes' performance and stress is something between 13 and 27% of an athlete's performance in a given day, right? They already have the skills. It's what happens in the moment and academic studies, some people have found that 50% of a test score, 50% is stress, not knowledge. There really are people who walk in and go to that exam and walk out and go, I totally blanked. They're not kidding. They absolutely wiped out. But so recognizing how you physically respond to stress, what are the cues that actually will make you more or less stressed is really important because then you can not denial but actually start planning how to manage it isn't crucial, absolutely crucial. Yeah, that self-awareness is such a key component of competing at a high level. The most common thing, surveys have done this, Alison Wood Brooks, a researcher at Harvard does this all the time in studies and asks people, what advice would you give to someone who is freaking out? And the most common response is calm down. And calm down is the worst possible advice. It never works. And now I can be stressed, not only that I'm stressed but now I can be stressed over the fact that I'm not calming down. So note, so, and even when you're telling yourself, don't calm down, it's more about thinking, okay, this is a challenge state. What are those knowledge, skills, resources and ability that I'm missing so that I can start feeling like I'm in control of the situation? And if you were like, no, everything is just completely out of control, then remind yourself, I chose to be here. And if you chose to be here, then you are in control because you made a decision. And then you can say, I am actually in control. Okay, at least I own this part of it. I may not be able to fix that outcome, but the willingness to compete and be here was something that I own. So that, even in that way, you can sort of help ameliorate the stress a little bit and start rethinking about it. That decision aspect is so important. We've seen it in so many cases where a lot of our clients, they feel anxious because they haven't made a decision of a path that they're going to follow through. And when they put a deadline on that decision and there's no clear right or wrong answer that allows them to feel good, that anxiety only increases. And for myself, I have a pet peeve within decision because it drives me crazy. And a rule that I applied to myself is sometimes when there is no wrong or right decisions, there's only decisions that you make right. So if no clear path lights up, you have to choose one and then put all of your efforts into making that the best decision that you could have made in that situation. And I've noticed in my own life that once that path is chosen, that anxiety, anxiousness, it completely dissipates because now the focus is in the right place. It is making sure that we're doing the right things and make in that decision. And I wanna add one thing to the calm down feedback because we don't do this with any of our clients in the coaching and even the coaches that we train to work with them because if you actually verbalize to someone, calm down, not only are you making them more aware, but you're adding that extra layer of, oh my God, other people can see me as not calm, right? And now you've added that audience element that creates even more of the yips and even more of that psychological stress. And calm isn't necessarily something you really want, right? Confident, engaged, excited, that's fun. Calm can come off as boring and like I don't care. So, I mean, I tell people who are concerned about something, like when you're scared and like, well, that means it was important to you because you can only be scared about things you care about. If you don't care, then it is boring and you're never stressed about something you genuinely don't care about, you're annoyed that you have to do it maybe, but you're not stressed. So then you just have to say, okay, well, you care about this. So now we need to focus on that possibility of success and growth rather than you care so much, you just think now you're doomed for failure and flipping it to that way, yeah. And just to add what you were saying, Johnny, you know, I love the way you talk about decisions, you know, and I loved everything you were saying and also if you're waiting to make the decision, sometimes the decision is made for you, right? Because you just missed the opportunity and then somebody else made the decision and, yeah. Which is a place I never want to be in. I want to make those directions. Talk about Johnny's pet peeve. Yeah, yeah. When no decision can be made. And the regret studies, you know, show that the thing we regret the most is the decision we didn't take. And you know, so actually for most people, I didn't go to school, I didn't get an extra degree and they think that the decision to get the extra degree would have brought more opportunities for decisions. So not making one decision foreclosed all of these other decisions that they missed out on. So taking the decision and going for it, it's not that it's easy, but it's essential. Yeah, absolutely. All right, what is your X factor, Ashley? I love to learn. I'm a total geek and I love to learn. The idea of just sitting down and reading a thousand or 5,000 pages of scientific articles, you know, and learning about science that I didn't even know existed and then being able to see how that actually can help people, that is just the most exciting thing to me to know that, and the science is out there, you know, the information that you guys share all of the time every day, it does help people. So to me, that's, I love to learn. That's it, that's all I'm... It definitely shined through in your book. Johnny and I read a ton of books for our guests. Yes. And it was so fun to have the history and all of the various elements, not only to go along with the science, but to really give you that fuller picture. So we really enjoyed Top Dog and I'm sure our audience will get a lot out of, especially those who love being Top Dog as many of our competitive clients. Thank you, Ashley. Oh, thank you so much, it was so fun.