 Welcome to the show, Chuck. It's great to have you. Thank you for inviting me. Good to be here. We're excited to talk about your upcoming book, The Art of Conscious Conversations, and we'd love to just hear a little bit about your background and interest in human dynamics as we kick things off here. Okay, let's see how I can make a long story short. I've actually, since I was fairly young, I've had a pretty big interest in spiritual and philosophical issues, so that sort of led me to teachers, etc. But I went to school for architecture, practiced in Boston for a bit, and through an unfortunate situation with one of the partners who was an alcoholic, we had to hire in some help. That person that came in was amazingly skilled at sort of reading the situation, giving us feedback, helping us through it. And I was like, how did she do that? That was like magic. And so I got interested, and we became friends, and I started learning from her. Through four years, I did mediation training, and then I did a program called the Ontology of Language, and that just sort of kept, you know, and also worked really nicely with my philosophical and spiritual interests. And then four years later, I said, okay, time for a new career. And here we are. And here we are, yeah. Now, we'd love to start with, what do you mean by conscious conversation, and what are the four conversations that you help us unpack in the book? So the idea of conscious conversations isn't meant to be judgmental, but it's rather, we are in conversation, we are in language from, you know, the moment we are birthed, basically we have eye contact and physical contact. And then we start learning language and learning words. And a lot of it is so automatic. And a lot of it we adopt from our family and our cultures, and don't even question. It's a lovely thing that we have our stories and we have our beliefs that helps us navigate complex life. But then when things don't go our way, it's like, wait a minute, that's not how it's supposed to happen. Or we get, you know, in these conflicts and conversations. So to become more aware, more conscious of how conversations work, and what we bring to them, like our own stories, etc. That's what I mean by conscious conversations. And there are four conversations that you walk us through in the book. I'd love to start there. At a high level, the first conversation is stories. The storytelling conversation. It's actually the predominant conversation that's most important, and that's why I lead with it. Because our, as I said, we adopt cultural norms and social patterns from our families and our education. And we adopt stories about ourselves and about the world and about other people to navigate the complexity. I mean, there's a lot happening. And that's beautiful. It helps us through life and stories are a beautiful thing. However, they are also a trap because we tell ourselves stories and we have plenty of stories slash judgments about other people that get in the way of having good conversations. So this conversation really is about stepping back and going, what stories do I have about myself that are serving me? What stories do I have that aren't serving me? And what stories and judgments do I have on other people that get in the way of my conversations? Does that make sense? Yeah. And we're definitely going to unpack that one a little bit later. Just very quickly, the other three. So our audience has some context. Okay. So the second one is collaborative conversations. And that one, these build on one another. I can go into a conversation stuck on my story. And my ability to collaborate, my ability to listen, is greatly diminished because I haven't done my own work. Because I haven't looked at myself to go, wait a minute, what am I bringing it at? What role am I playing? What personality am I bringing to do our work? Then we go, the really good collaborative conversation is our ability to advocate in an open way and inquire and learn from other people. And you get this synchronicity that minds start coming together. And there's plenty of neuroscience to back that up. And then ideas start bubbling up. And that sort of leads to the third conversation was the creative conversation. So the three of us are in a really robust collaborative conversation. I'm going, oh, wow, I never thought of it that way. Or geez, the way you're thinking about it is completely different than how I'm thinking about it. And we start chewing on something like that. All of a sudden, ideas start bubbling up. And I can go, whoa, whoa, we thought solution was A, but we never even considered BC and D. And so that's part of the creative conversation. The other part of the creative conversation is learning to trust our intuition. Relaxing a bit from the gotta get it done, gotta get it done, and giving some space in our mind so we can allow ideas to bubble up. Einstein is one of the most famous. They said, my ideas don't come when I'm sitting in the lab. They come when I'm out walking my dog. And then the last conversation, all of this conversation is about sort of opening our mind and getting more open and engaging with people in a good way. And then the last conversation, the commitment conversation, is like a collapse because that's where we go, okay, all these great ideas, all these great possibilities, but what are we gonna do? And so the commitment conversation is the action conversation. It's like, bang, let's, okay, we've chewed on this. We have ideas, which one are we gonna choose? And that determines who does what by when. And that's a huge conversation that we live in every day mostly unconsciously. We make promises, we make sloppy promises. Someone says, hey, can you do that report? Say, sure, no problem. And time is missing and what good looks like is missing. What I do in the book is try to take that, deconstruct that conversation so we can see actually how that dance works so we can do it better. Absolutely. And what I love about the book is there's examples both in business, which obviously listening to those four conversations sort of jump out at you, collaboration, but also just socially and romantically. All of our conversations follow this through line whether we realize it or not. So being great in conversation in one of those domains pays off in all these other domains where we are soaking and immersed in conversation constantly. Yeah. And when we have some more awareness about them, you actually have a leg up in a conversation because if the conversation is going downhill or going awry, you can say, whoa, let me ask a few questions here. Let me really understand how you're thinking. That one person can change that dynamic, but you have to understand what's going on and you have to be able to read the signals so that you have the capacity to be that person to change the channel. I like that analogy of changing the channel. And it's a large part of the work that we do with our clients, too, is to lay out the frameworks of conversation so that you have a clear understanding of where you are and potential paths you can lead and take that conversation if you want to. And it also gives you the ability to decide. Not everyone is worth that conversation. Not everyone is worth the commitment, right? Not everyone is worth collaboration. So once you understand all of these principles, then it's a lot more fun to do the dance to play with the art of conversation. Yeah, and what you mentioned about not all people or all conversation deserve our attention, right? That has a lot to do with one of the core principles I talk about in the book is the idea of power and authority. We actually are constantly in a power thing with our friends and our siblings and our partners and our bosses and our direct reports because there's just an inherent hierarchy in all of that that is really important to understand. I think that that hierarchy is due to recent events is also becoming more and more unstable. And because that hierarchy is becoming more and more unstable, that puts on more anxiety to the person who's trying to navigate their way through the world. We just had the CDC come out and say, well, we looked at how we handled COVID over the last two years and we have determined that we fell miserably. And we're like, and everyone's standing around is like, well, yeah. But then we're like, well, wait a minute, this is who we had given authority to to tell us how to handle this global crisis. And now you're telling me that you guys failed and that's one institution and hierarchical structure there. And when I was reading your book, I was laughing because I can't watch football anymore. I can't watch pro football anymore because of this stuck out in reading your book was due to the people that we had given authority to make sure that we play a fair game that we can trust in the officials. And when they can't agree on what a catch is from week to week, well, how am I supposed to give those folks my attention for the three hours that it demands to watch the game? So again, as more of these institutions and start giving away to incompetency, I think it goes in one and two ways. And one, it empowers us because we're like, oh, well, everyone that we that we put all this authority and respect are just regular people who get it wrong all the time as well. So now I'm on an equal playing field. But that's as empowering as that is for some people. That's also scary for a lot of people because if I'm supposed to be listening to what I'm supposed to be doing and I need some rules and guidance on crisis that is coming up in my life and I'm questioning that authority, that anxiety comes down to me. Right, right. Exactly. I wrote an article about that maybe a year ago because ultimately one of the components of our conversations, our opinions rather, is not only authority, but standards. And we adopt standards from our families when we're in a situation like that where there is authority and we are left to say, okay, how do I want to play this? You know, how do I want to play the cards that I'm given? How do I trust and what decisions do I want to make? Because I have a range of friends who, you know, some friends wouldn't even come for dinner and eat out of our plates or our food, where others were like, okay, we're a little circle here, we're all safe, you know. So everybody gets to make their own decisions. But this idea of the standards we live by is pretty blind for us in general, you know. Every judgment we make, every decision we make, should I believe them or not believe them, is based on our internal standards that the best way to deal with that is to just become more aware of them and not have them be unconscious, right? The only thing I'd say about the folks that just admit the CDC, right? At least they're admitting that they were shooting in the dark. Yeah, I mean, give credit where credit is due. Some would say a little bit late on that, as we all realize the mistakes that they had made. And we, for some folks, feel that they're catching up with what everyone else had thought. But to not admit those mistakes is what erodes trust, right? So when we can't believe with our own two eyes what's happening in the world around us and that person and authority or power is telling us otherwise, then that erodes the trust. That erodes our ability to even get beyond the storytelling conversation. What I think is so important, because when people hear storytelling, we often think, okay, this is what I'm communicating to others. And what you point out in the book is there's actually two conversations going on here. There's the conversation going on internally. The stories you're telling yourself and many of us are completely unaware to these unconscious stories and narratives that we've built up, as you said, through family, through faith, through our experiences and the world around us. And of course, our mind is always grasping for meaning. It's always looking for that story. It does not like uncertainty. And it's much easier for your mind to come up with a story to say, oh, well, I'm always terrible at talking with people or I hate small talk because it's always boring. And we create these internal labels on ourselves and then we also get into trouble when that story passes judgment on others and oftentimes in error. Yeah, and oftentimes passing it unconsciously. We have our internal dialogue going, oh, God, he is so full of shit or I can't believe how she's behaving or whatever. And that tension between our public persona or voice and our private is a major driver of stress, stress for ourselves and stress in conversation. Right, and leads to that miscommunication, that again, we can't get to the collaborative phase because we're distrusting of one another. So when this internal dialogue and this internal story comes up, what's that first step for us to realize some of these stories? Because I know I've had some seminal moments in my life, but many in our audience might not be at that point or not even be aware of some of these stories that they're abiding by that aren't serving them. So do you have a practice or an exercise that we can use to start to unravel some of these stories that are holding us back internally? So there's two parts to that. One is what are the stories I have internally about myself that I adopted that aren't serving me well? I mean, we might have positive stories like I'm confident and I can do this and I can do that and I'm a good football player, I'm a great dancer or whatever. But we also have stories that are limiting. And I tell the story in the book where I grew up being told I wasn't man enough. My sisters could cry, I couldn't. I didn't like skinning the deer in the basement and got sick and I was told, you're not man enough, be a bigger man. I adopted that story. So I had an internal story, the ontology of language, it's often called the master stories, master stories about ourselves. So the only way to do that is to really, the stories that cause you angst is to really write them down and say, I can't do this. I can't speak in public, right? And then we have to tear that apart and go what are there facts that counter that? Are there things that this is keep holding me back from doing? And you literally have to deconstruct the story and you come out the other end. When I deconstructed my story, it's like, wait a minute, I'm 30 years old, I'm an architect. I have two kids, I'm successful. I have a beautiful wife, I'm six foot tall. What's this about big enough man shit? You know, so, you know, that in that way, I busted my own story. So there's that. And then the other piece is the internal dialogue we have in conversation with others, which is the judgment and the private commerce, which I call the private conversation. The only way around that is to literally, the practice there is to take a conversation, do the exercise I write in the book on the right side. I said, what do you think about the project? She said, it's too soon to tell, you know, and you write down that and then you go to the left hand side and you go, while that conversation was going on, what was I thinking and feeling when every person was talking? I've done this with hundreds of people. And it's never, never has it happened that people aren't surprised when they write down their private thoughts because they're negative. They have plenty of swear words. Plenty of judgments, right? So it's all there, but we're so used to it. We're so used to do that voice being there that when we pay attention to it and shine a light on it, it's like, oh my gosh, I can change that. I think there's certainly conversations that you're having internally that you're conscious of and conversations that you're having internally that you're not, that are in your subconscious. And until you begin writing them down, first you're choosing the words that you're going to describe these experiences and these stories about yourself and the world around you. But on the other side of that is when you're writing them down, I think pieces of those unconscious, those subconscious stories start to come out and then you have an opportunity then to see those and start fleshing them out. The writing them down literally, we're using different neural networks in our brain. Instead of just being mush in our head, it becomes concrete on paper and that sort of changes how our mind thinks about things or how our brain operates. When we do discover them and we discover the negative curse word judgment, then we have to deconstruct that. And that's when I introduced in the book those four core elements of authority, standards, concerns and desires because in each of our judgments, we have an honest concern. We have an honest desire to what we want to have happen. And we can benefit by being less blind to the power issues. And so those four things are just a little shortcut to help us cut through some of the tension and stress and negativity. Now that initial story, Not Man Enough, a lot of these stories that we tell ourselves that are internal influence our behavior, especially in situations around people who don't know us or we're just meeting. So you may find yourself telling that story and then in the way you're appearing and behaving is you're actually trying to show off that you're manly and you're trying to prove your masculinity in ways that are actually off-putting of others that don't create that authenticity that we're looking for when we're connecting with people in real life. So these narratives are so impactful and it's literally the first step we do with all of our clients in the X-Factor Accelerator is get a better understanding of what is going on internally and what are these beliefs you have about yourself and the world around you. And until you realize that some of these beliefs aren't based in reality, oftentimes they're colored by one or two past experiences or emotions that we remember vividly of those past experiences that guide us off-course and they also then shape our future behavior because we hold on to them too closely and we want to fight back to prove that I'm not this way or don't view me in that way or don't see me in this light. And in all of those ways, all those behaviors, you're inauthentic and that inauthenticity keeps people at bay. The second piece that I wanted to unpack there is the exercise of actually writing down all the various things that you're thinking in those moments. Oftentimes we don't even realize that while other people are talking, we're so focused on that internal dialogue. And that exercise, that left-hand column exercise, makes it really vivid of like, wow, I actually wasn't really listening to what the other person said and reacting to it. I was reacting to my own story and my own narrative internally. Yeah, yeah. And that's the reason that listening has been talked about forever. Be a better listener, be a skillful listener, be an active listener. You can read all the books you want, but if you don't quiet down your inner dialogue or judgments, it can be a good listener, right? It's only until... And I'm not asking people to give up their opinions. I'm only asking them to hold them lightly because what happens when our ego gets attached to our opinion, we enter a conversation with our opinions as a fist. And so if three of us enter a conversation, we all say, no, this is what I think should happen around COVID. No, I think this is what happened. No, I think this is what happened. And we're all entering because we're attached to that, right? We just end up banging heads on each other and the collaboration never happens. All I'm saying is you don't have to give up your opinion, but have it with an open hand. Here's why I'm concerned. Here's what I think... What I want to have happen. Here's what I think the authority issues are. And here are the standards by which I make a call. What are my standards? Would I say what's safe and what's not safe? That ability to say, here's my thinking. Here's my worries. That invites other people to do the same thing and unclench. And then we can start having a dialogue. And I want to... Johnny, I want to mention to you a great podcast by Michael Lewis because I think his second season is called Against the Rules. And he just goes deeply into all the ways that are in our society, the people that we give authority to make calls in sports, in art, in all these fields and how screwed up that whole thing is. I could go down the list. I'm 48. And so there's enough experience that I have had with these institutions where they've come up empty or if they've disappointed me, where I then have turned my attention... Or as AJ mentioned, I've turned the channel. I just don't... I don't give them any attention anymore. And I have just surrendered to you, one of your terms, resonated to certain aspects of life that have always been there for me and have always enhanced the life. You are a musician. I'm a musician. Music has been one of those things that has never lied to me, always been there for me and always has enhanced life for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the examples I use in the book are like how do we listen like a musician, like a jazz musician? You're not there playing your own little story. You're there to listen and sync up with and create stuff together. There is a part of listening that I have used from collaborating and jamming with other people for years. At 48, I've been playing in bands since I was 17 years old. And to go in a room and just have a free-for-all where everyone's taking a section and doing their thing and listening to that and accenting that and working with that to create something is quite beautiful. And in fact, there is times where I am listening to somebody and I'm not only listening to the words that they're saying, what I'm on coaching calls and things like that, I'm listening for rhythm because I don't want to be cutting them off. I want them to be able to fully articulate themselves but also for myself to be able to hear everything that they are saying before I respond. And if we're not syncing up rhythmically, I let them talk for a while so that I can pick up that rhythm, which will allow me to listen much fuller and deeper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people pick up on that when we have that kind of synchronicity. I'd love to unpack this balance of advocacy and inquiry because in this conversation that we're having, we're expressing opinions. We're also asking a little bit more, hey, Chuck, share what's going on behind this opinion. What is your viewpoint? And I feel like this is also an art that a lot of times we hear in conversation frustrates people where they don't have an opportunity to share openly or they're afraid to share openly because the person on the other end is in hard advocacy and is unwilling to be open about their opinion and let other viewpoints into the conversation. So first, just unpack this balance and then let's talk about what we can do in those moments where we're facing someone who isn't necessarily open to new opinions, who isn't open to hearing what you have to share. The difficulty of the balance is basically our social norms, our social training, our education. We are trained to raise our hands in school to have the answer. We rarely get a gold star for raising our hands and saying, I don't know. From an early age, you get the gold star for having the answer. Then we go to school, college, same thing. We're trained as an expert then we go to work and we're really rewarded well for finding the answers and being the smart guy or gal in the room. So that's sort of embedded unconsciously in how we operate when we're in a group of people, whether it's education or business. So we sort of unconsciously lean into being advocates because we want to have the answer. We're often addicted to our answer. Our ego is attached to our answer. I'm not casting judgment. I'm just saying that's a pattern. I love to think about these things as patterns which you guys probably picked up on because it's a little less judgmental. The idea of, oh, I have a pattern that does that is a little less judgmental because it's not, I didn't consciously choose that story or I didn't consciously choose that opinion. Wow, I adopted that and let me have a fresh look. So if we can sort of start paying attention to that pattern of how we advocate, then we can bring the stepchild inquiry into the equation, you know, and we can go, wait a minute, there's a whole nother part of the equation which is if I come with my advocacy, not with a fist but with an open hand, then I'm also often I have to default. Many people, leaders especially, have to default to inquire because it's so not their pattern and finding that balance it takes a lot of self-investigation, right, to go, wait a minute, I'm, you know, at one extreme, I'm being arrogant and I'm being a jerk and I have the answer and my team won't talk to me because I always have the right answer. At the other extreme, there are people that don't trust their voice and never speak up but somewhere in the middle, there's that balance of inquiry and advocacy where we really do sync up. Yeah, and I feel the questions that we enjoy the most have that balance, have that opportunity for you to advocate your thoughts, opinions, and beliefs and then also that openness to get someone else to share. When we default to one behavior or the other, we're actually doing a disservice to a great conversation. We see this a lot in our clients romantically where they'll come into a situation and they'll think, well, I have to impress the other person in order to impress the other person, I actually have to advocate very hard for myself because it's a very competitive landscape. This other person has lots of different options in their dating life, so I need to advocate for myself when in actuality, the connection happens in that balance of advocacy of them learning a little bit about you but also you then inquiring about them and giving them that space to advocate as well. And when you find that balance, you actually find great conversation. So again, upon self-reflection, which is why I love this writing down, the journaling exercise, the left-hand column, you can start to recognize these patterns in your own communication. And I know for a lot of our clients, it's also environmental. So in some settings, they're happy to advocate because they've been celebrated for it and maybe in work, they've been promoted, they've been told, hey, you're doing a great job advocating so they double down on that. And then they find themselves in a leadership role where solely advocating is not actually effective in a leadership capacity. You want the team participating, you want collaboration, and that requires inquiry. But we're not often trained on how to be better inquirers, how to actually use this tool in communication. Right. We are not trained. And then on top of not being... In fact, we're trained to disprove the other person. Like, it's an inquisitory, you know? And so we're trained to sort of... Still, we're still advocating, but we're asking a question, right? So to learn that is one thing. And then on top of that comes the whole authority hierarchy thing. So if we're in business and you have a leadership position, if you're not aware of the power of your voice, I tell leaders at senior levels, your voice is the power of 10. If you go into a meeting and you stayed in an opinion, like this was a wrong thing to do and three people in the room are the ones that executed that, they go home thinking they're going to get fired. A lot of leaders don't realize the power of their voice. And there are two things. Because of their power of the voice, they have to back up and make emotional safety, make psychological safety. So the team will give them other opinions and will sort of get into a dialogue and maybe even disagree with them. But if they put their advocacy out first without asking what other people think, that's a very tough space to navigate because that hierarchy people are afraid to speak up. Yeah, you give a great example in the book of the big wheel little wheel and how we often don't realize just the impact of even just an offhanded comment when we're in a leadership role. So that authority power balance that you're talking about, we, when we are in that position, we don't realize the weight of our words even outside of meetings. So can you talk about this great example because I think it's a really powerful illustration? Yeah, so that was, that's a real story from like 20 years ago. It was ahead of a division. They were, I think I named the car, the Riata. And they were just walking down the hallway and the leader just, they were going to lunch and the leader just said, hey, I wonder what a pink Riata would look like. And everybody cracks up laughing. Oh, wow, that'd be Mary Kay and blah, blah, blah. And that was the end of it. And Dave didn't even think twice about it. He went on his way. Well, all car companies have confidential secret rooms where they review designs. And years ago it was just models and even pre-computers. They would do clay models and stuff like that. Well, months later, Dave shows up in the design room and literally was shocked because there is a pink Riata, pink white walls, pink steering wheel, pink leather. And it was like, I mean, it was like, he was shocked. Then he would come to courses that I was teaching and he'd call it the big wheel little wheel because he said, he just went like, he went, oh, I wonder what. And then the wheels under him start turning faster and the wheels under them start turning faster and then there's down people down the trenches like making pink leather for Christ's sake. So the lesson there, that's another inquiry thing that the lesson there is nobody asked Dave a question. Nobody said, would you like to see a picture? Would you like us to build a little model? Are you really joking, Dave? Do you, are you serious? Not one question was asked. And that's because his voice was the power of 10. Yeah, and that dynamic were often put in situations where there's embarrassment or shame tied to inquiry. Right, as you're saying earlier, not knowing the answer might signal to the room that you weren't listening. You weren't paying attention. You're unintellectual. You shouldn't be in this role. All of these stories we then tell ourselves around having a question versus having the answer. Because as you said, the answer was always the gold star. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And actually with people that I've worked with, when they can make the shift to inquiry, and they do it, I call it open inquiry and has to be sincere. But when they do it, what they're really doing is saying, hey, let's take this a little deeper. Let's explore this a little deeper. I don't understand why are we thinking about this way? Could we think about a different way? They're actually doing leaders a favor and they're doing their colleagues a favor. Say, let's not jump to conclusions here. Let's explore. Let's be a little free here and take a risk and think out of the box and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and often through verbalizing your advocacy, you might find holes in that argument. You might find things that are illogical that might not actually make sense. So even asking someone to verbalize the advocacy as we keep talking about, we have this conversation going on our head and we don't always realize that there are holes in this conversation. It's not fully formed. Our brain is just grasping at narratives to try to make sense of all the signals and inputs that are going on. And when you actually verbalize even in your advocacy, you might find and illuminate some flaws in the thinking, some realizations that never would have been aired if you just focused on advocacy with zero opportunity for inquiry. Yeah, and you're one position. I have a leader right now, the very senior leader, great leader. They tend to be my best clients. They're great leaders and they want to be better. The guys that have to pull teeth to make them better is more painful, but he has very high standards. For him, he realized that not everybody has been taught to have the same standards, whether it's engineering or IT work or whatever. He has very high standards. So he realized that what he needed to do was do a masterclass in his standards, not to criticize their work, because he could criticize, he could coach them until he's blue in the face, but what they can't see, they can't see. So he actually had to shift from coach mode to teach mode to say, look it, here's how I think about it because my standards are X. That notion of standards plays out all the time in many, many of our conversations. Hell, my wife and I have different standards about what the kitchen should look like before we go to bed. No. Well, you bring up these four questions in the book as a way to unpack what's going on in these conversations. So I'd love to walk through them. The first one is desires. If you think about a difficult conversation or a strong opinion you have, stop and ask yourself, what am I looking for? What do I want here? Because we have desires that are so, again, so automatic for us or so embedded in our thinking that we forget to surface them. So desires can be great, goals can be great because they inspire us to do things and get things done. But we also have desires that are unrealistic that don't line up with reality. By just asking ourselves, what do I want? If we can say, oh, I want, what I want is X, but Y is happening. And so that tension between reality, Y is what's happening. X is what I want. You're never going to get X out of this because Y already happens. So you're in a battle with reality and that's a good definition of insanity. Desires are a good thing, but they're also a trap. I want that person to be different. I want my spouse to do it my way, not her way. Or I want my leader to behave this way and not that way. And you might find yourself in a position where you don't like, you have a standard or you don't like what your leader is doing or what his goals are. But you don't have authority. One of the other questions is, you don't have the authority to change him. He gets to make the call. Like it or not, the reality is, he makes the call. And so desires are tricky things. It was in Buddhism that our desires are where our suffering comes from. The flip side of that is then also looking at the position of authority and saying, well, what are their desires? And how can I better align the two? Because oftentimes we're acting from an internal desire. And as you said, it's subconscious. It's hardwired into a lot of our behavior patterns. And because of that, we will often ascribe similar desires on others because it feels so strongly internally in our own. But if you actually take a beat, take a step back and go, well, what are the authority's desires? Was the desire to really build the pink car? Or was the desire to have a joke in a light moment with the group? Have a laugh. And if we're not thinking through our own desires and in tune with our own desires, it then becomes even more difficult to tune into the desires of others around us. And when we're thinking about where do we want to end up if it's in desires and certainly with a lot of our clients, when they're talking about being that much better socially, they tend to think about the most social person they know. And start desiring those outcomes, which they're not familiar with the steps that took to get to that outcome. So this, and so we have this compare and contrast issue. And a lot of times when we break that down, we begin to find out that, okay, well, that's a great desire. That's a great goal. And we can start working there. The last time you went out, how many people did you speak to? And they're like, wow, I didn't speak to anybody. Okay, well, we're going to start with one and we're going to start working our way up. By asking those questions, get a little bit more clarity on that. You're like, oh, perhaps those desires aren't so realistic. Yeah, yeah. And it is that it's the realistic piece that reality happens and then our desires are counter. If we can't accept facts, if we can't accept reality, ultimately we end up in resentment. Life isn't fair. Life shouldn't be this way. And that's the trap. The second of the four elements is concerns. And it's very much aligned with desires, but it's actually much more future oriented. It's like saying, I'm going to bed and I'm worrying at two in the morning because I'm worried about something. A, I can't control. B, hasn't happened. Right? But I don't want tomorrow to look like today or I don't want that to happen. So concerns can serve us well where we go, okay, there's something to learn here because I don't want to make the same mistake I made today, tomorrow. Or I don't want the way this project failed to happen in another week and we can learn lessons from it. But there's also concerns that we have no control over that create a whole lot of worry and angst and keep us up at night. And there's plenty, I mean, I have two sons that have, I certainly didn't raise nine to fivers and they've put in my wife and I through some hell when we get the two o'clock in the morning call like, hey, dad, I just X, Y, Z, you know. And so I, you know, that's a legitimate worry, but it's my kids and my heart is attached to them. But concerns are a really cool thing in a conversation because they're, you own them. No one can take them away from you. So if we have a conflictual conversation or a difficult conversation, sometimes we aren't even, again, subconsciously we have these concerns where they aren't on the surface of our thinking. But if we could surface them and go, hey, you know, here's my concern, here's why I'm pushing so hard for X, Y, and Z to happen. That, no one can take that away from me. And also it's a, there's a touch of humility there, like saying, I don't have the answer, but here's my concern for tomorrow. Here's my concern if we don't go down this path or here's my concern if we do go down this path. And that's sort of like an opening. It's like, oh, okay. And then the other people might go, well, yeah, I have that concern too, but here's my, I think of it differently. But anyway, concerns can be a good way to shift, begin to shift a conversation because they're, they have a bit of humility and they're honest and who can tell you you're wrong. And it allows the other person to feel fully heard, right? So when you think about concerns, if you were to actually ask your spouse, like, what is the concern here? Like why is cleaning the kitchen right now so important? The concern might be, oh, well, I was actually talking to my friend earlier and she might pop by, right? So it's like, you don't know that. You didn't have that clarity of the concern internally and your significant other, your spouse, your partner could be worried about this concern. It could be really pressing on them. And since it was never aired, it could leave to that disagreement that argument. So if you find yourself in these patterns of miscommunication, just taking a minute to think about, well, what are my concerns here? And then asking, well, what are your concerns in this situation can lead to deeper communication? Absolutely, it can take a conversation deeper very quickly and it pairs up with desires, you know? Here's what I want. Here's my concerns if we don't go down a path. So they're both very powerful and we just forget because they're hidden in the back of our mind. The third one which we talked a bit about is authority. And it's everywhere. I mean, it's with my kids, it's with my spouses, with my friends. You know, one, some friend can say, you look like hell today, right? And I'll just laugh. Someone else might say that and I might give their voice more authority. You go, oh, maybe I need to lose weight or something. You know? So we're always unconsciously ascribing authority to voices. It doesn't matter whether in business in social setting at home. It's just embedded in our conversations. So how we're a father has a lot to do with the kind of authority we want to have. Do we want to be authoritative? Do we want to be a teacher? Do we want to be, you know, a friend? And in business, it just gets exasperated through like the Riyadh story. It gets exasperated by 10 because there are these layers and the layers inherently say, yeah, this guy has more stripes. He gets to make the call. It's a lot clearer in the hierarchy around work. But as you said, there are oftentimes where an opinion from a friend you might hold completely dear, like, oh my God, that guy is a style expert. And I look like crap today. I got to change my wardrobe. Or someone else could just be joking around with you and teasing you and you would not ascribe that level of authority to their opinion in that manner. Being aware of it, of the authority thing, means I can choose to say, you know what, Jim, go away. You're so full of crap, you know, or say to another person, you know, thanks, help me out. Help me out here. How can I do it better? Right? We can make that call if we're aware of the issue. And this fourth one is related to authority. Yeah, the fourth one is when we have authority and we make decisions and we make calls on what voices we give power to. We're doing that based on standards that we hold. And I claim that 90% of the standards we have, we didn't even choose. We grow up and we adopt our families, or we choose not to adopt our families because someone else influenced us, right? But we adopt these standards, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, good father, bad father, rich, poor, whatever. I mean, take any of those extremes. And we have a standard that then is underneath every opinion and judgment we make. So when we say that was a really stupid decision, what we can do is, I mean, that's a pretty negative, hard-hitting thing. But if we take the time to go, wait a minute, what's the standard underneath that I'm basing that judgment on? A lot of times, I mean, in work and not in relationships, that doesn't get discussed. So couples will argue about arguing, arguing, arguing, arguing, but they don't realize that they're actually operating on different standards. Sometimes I worked with some women groups and I would ask them, how many of you, when you left this morning, when you leave in the morning would feel bad if the beds aren't made? 80% of the hands in the room go up. And I say, so tell me about that. And like, where did that come from? And sure enough, my mother taught me that's how my grandmother did it. My father gave my mother a hard time if the beds weren't made. There's some story there about where that standard came from. The funny thing about standards that I realized and Johnny and I fall into the same trap around the standard is, just because it's a standard and it's been passed to you doesn't make it right. And sometimes we hold these a little truer than the others. So Johnny and I both fall into this trap of being hardworking, because our families coming from blue collar background were always just like, outwork everyone. You have to show that you're the hardest worker and we'll often fall into this trap and now we actually hire consultants and coaches to help us out. And they'll often point out like much easier paths that don't involve nearly the level of work. And we're sitting here bashing our head at this problem over and over again because we think we're just going to outwork it. And if we just work harder, it's going to go away. And there's a path B, a lot less work, a lot less blood, sweat and tears that gets you there quicker that we've avoided because our standard is, well, we have to be working harder. We have to be putting in the hours. We have to be sweating here or it's not proving ourselves. So I find that the trap around standards oftentimes will lead you blindly to a place where, again, maybe you're not making the bed correctly, maybe in my wife's opinion, I'm not cleaning the kitchen to high enough standard. And we don't often verbalize these standards. And it wasn't till I started getting coaching and outside perspectives around these standards that I realized like, oh, okay, I'm judging myself harshly and this standard is also impeding me from building other quality relationships around me. And I don't even realize that it's invisible to me. Yeah. Johnny, do you agree? Absolutely. And it's funny because you bring up the bed situation and I'm one of those people. I have to make it before I go to do anything else. That bed has to be made before. And I leave the house to go to the gym first thing in the morning, but that bed gets made before I leave the house. And we're dealing with culture in this aspect. I wish culture was an easier thing to put together, but there's so much that comes into play that creates a culture. As much as I would like it to be a much simpler thing to discuss, its complexity is what makes it so wondrous and amazing to explore. Something such as making your bed that says many different things in many different cultures. And I can give you a scientific argument for why you shouldn't make your bed in the morning. I've read the research that was surrounding the idea of making sure the mites and everything else can get out or whatever. I can't even remember all of it, what it was, because my standards was I make the bed. I don't care what the science says. For my personal happiness to make it through the morning, that bed gets made. Yeah, and that's a good point because we aren't here to judge standards. We're here to become aware of them. And then there's some that can serve us, but then there are some that are driving our negative judgments of other people, which in fact then drives behavior, which in fact then affects our conversations. And so it's really the awareness. Exactly, that's the conclusion we want to avoid. Once it gets to a place where it's affecting our communication and our ability to build relationships negatively, that's when the standards are getting in the way. And the other thing that we found in working with some of our clients is their self-standards around how they're viewed, often impede them from even taking action in the first place. So it's like this perfectionism comes out of these standards. Well, it's like, well, if I can't do it perfect, I'm not going to do it at all. Why even try? Like, I can't get this result. It's a standard that's not serving you. That's right, yeah, yeah. And it's perfectionism, there's fear of failure. There's all these different ways that our standards limit us and hold us back. And actually, I keep us contracted rather than expansive. Now, you bring up this interesting phenomenon, the conversational bypass. I'd love for you to just share this with us and talk a little bit about how it impacts our communication. So this is one of my favorites. So we talked about the four conversations, stories, collaboration, creativity, and commitments. We love our stories. And pretty much we're attached to them. Our ego gets involved. We find ourselves defensive more than not, right? Because we like our stories. And we're trained to advocate and tell our stories. So that's good. Let's pretend we're in a meeting and a bunch of people start telling stories about Project A. Well, we tried it that way 10 years ago. Well, here's what we're trying to do now. Stories are telling. And then because everyone is in a hurry and we got to get the work done, what happens is the next thing that comes out of the boss's mouth is, well, what are we going to do? And then someone says, okay, I'll take on this part. I'll take on this part. Okay, we're going to meet in a week. You guys go at it. And we made a commitment and we're going into action. It feels really great. However, we missed the two most juiciest conversations, the collaborative one where we can learn from each other and disagree and wrestle with an issue. And the creative part, we go, wait a minute, there's more than one way to solve this problem. Let's just dream up 10 and see what happens. But we do the conversational bypasses and we go, okay, here's the story of the boss or here's the story of the person in the room with the loudest voice or the most aggressive or the most assertive. And then we go, okay, next decision made. What are we going to do? Or here's what we're going to do. That's what I call the bypass. And people often say to me, wait a minute, we don't have time. We are in a hurry. We are trying to get things done. We have competition. And my response is you don't have time not to do this because how many decisions have you made that you had to retract or you go, gosh, we only had thought about this. We would have taken a different track. We would have made a different decision. So I'm not talking about days of people getting in a room and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking because that happens too. But just say, you know what? Let's bang on this for a half an hour. Let's chew on this. And I often tell leaders like, oh, you have boring meetings. I know why you have boring meetings, but first things first, give them some hot thing, hot topic that you're struggling with and give them a half hour just to wrestle with it. That meeting will come alive if they feel safe. If they feel safe. That's an important caveat. And that's a clear sign that there's not that emotional and psychological safety in that work environment or culture if it doesn't. What is interesting about that as well, at least in my experience as a leader is every time I've defaulted to this, the team's willingness to go above and beyond to deliver on the outcome that we agreed on to do it with a level of attention to detail, all of that suffers when you bypass those two phases because it just becomes a directive. And when people don't have clarity, and we talked about this on a past episode, Johnny is a wonderer. So Johnny needs that creativity and that collaboration moment. If I just tell Johnny, hey, we're going in this direction now, and it's due by then, it's going to set him off course. So everyone, when you understand the four conversations and how they sync up to create this fantastic opportunity for the team to feel heard and validated and connected, the output of it always is far greater. They'll go above and beyond. They'll be excited to participate. They'll recognize mistakes and errors because they didn't feel that they was just directed in an authoritarian way. So I completely agree with you. If you are in a leadership role and you feel the need to bypass those two conversations or eliminate them from meetings, eliminate that opportunity to really collaborate and create together, well, you're doing yourself, your team, the culture, and the end task, the outcome you're looking for, a disservice. Yeah. And ultimately, you will make a wiser decision because there's more information, there's more perspectives. There's that learning curve that happens around collaboration and creativity. So the wiser decisions are the result. If you recoil at thinking about having these meetings due to what's about the transpire, perhaps you need to be looking at your own desires and concerns and look at your own stories. Yeah, absolutely. Some of my hardest and best clients were engineers that are so, they're so trained logically and rationally. Right? That's our clients, yes. The left brain is like, you know? But when they A, they realize that there's a whole creative side to them that they can experiment, they can think outside the box. And when they put their judgments aside by doing the exercises in the book, they fall mightily, they fall hard. You know, they go, oh my God, I had no idea A, I was so judgmental, B, I was so stuck in my thinking, right? And I thought it had to be a certain way. Right. Huge blind spots are completely there when you're focused in this very logical manner. And it's why, with our X Factor Accelerator Program, all of our really logical, technical oriented clients, they are so intimidated by the improv humor implementation sessions we bring into the course. But at the end of that, it opens up a new opportunity for creativity that they haven't found in their career that's really inspiring. So even if you feel that you're in this really technical role and you don't create a lot of space in your life for that creativity, when you do in other areas of your life, picking up a guitar, music, improv, that creates an opportunity for you to be a more well-rounded leader, a better communicator, stronger relationship builder. And it's just such a powerful side of your brain that you want to tap into. You don't want to avoid. Everyone has a creative streak. It may not be somebody else's that they're comparing themselves to, but there is that creativity there. And giving them that opportunity to, wow, I didn't know I could be witty. I didn't know I could just be so present and go with the flow. An improv class demands that you shut your brain off and just be present and move forward. That is incredibly difficult for somebody who is wearing their logical hat and looking for broken things, weak points, or projecting the way things need to be. That all needs to be shut down and used the other side of your brain. And if you don't practice it, if you don't give yourself that opportunity, well, you're not going to know what you have. Right, right. Well, you can't discover it. Sometimes I just say to people, okay, you're not comfortable doing an improv class. Like, I go to my garden. I have too much garden for a man my age, but I love gardening. But I go to my garden without a plan, but it's all purposeful. I just go out and go, something's going to happen. Someone's going to call to me. You know, weeds will call to me or a tree will call to me or a tool will call to me. And then it just starts unfolding. So that's a practice. Just try trusting life a little bit to unfold instead of having to figure out every minute by minute, hour by hour, what's next. When you're stuck, I call them hats. If you're wearing your engineering hat, you're going to be stuck using what works when you're in doing that task and you're not going to be practicing anything else. That's right. That's right. Take the hat off, man. We love asking each of our guests what their X factor is. What do you think is that X factor that makes you unique and extraordinary, Chuck? Because of my family situation growing up, there was a lot of tension in some fighting. I think I inherently learned how to be a mediator and learned to see that there's multiple players, multiple sides to a story. And that wasn't purposeful on my part. It was just I was doing it to get through the pain myself. But ultimately, when I did become a mediator, I realized I had some inherent qualities that allowed me to non-judgmentally listen and hear different parts of conflict. And that's a powerful skill set, and unfortunately, that it came through trauma. But on the flip side, to be able to bring that into future communication, relationships, and writing this book, it's been very profound. So thank you for sharing. Oh, thank you. Thank you guys very much for your time. It was great having you, Chuck.