Back to Basics: Building Habits, Trust, and Thriving Teams

What are the foundational elements that drive personal and professional success: effective habit formation, cultivating trust, and building cohesive teams? Discover practical strategies to develop habits that stick, foster trust in both remote and in-person environments, and enhance team collaboration for the future of work.

Key Takeaways:

• Habit Formation: Learn why habits are crucial and how to establish ones that lead to sustained success.
• Building Trust: Understand the role of trust in team dynamics and methods to strengthen it.
• Team Collaboration: Explore techniques to create and maintain thriving teams in evolving work settings.

Tune in to gain actionable insights that can transform your approach to work and collaboration. Don't forget to subscribe for more episodes that empower your professional journey.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Back to Basics
• 0:31 Education Without Execution
• 2:24 Habits: The Secret Sauce
• 6:23 Lessons from the Military
• 10:23 Three Strategies for Habits That Stick
• 18:03 Stimulus Control: Environment Is Everything
• 29:36 Trust: The Key to Remote Work
• 36:24 What Really Makes Us Happy
• 41:14 The Power of Flow
• 46:12 Teamwork: Human Connection Matters
• 53:09 The Future Looks Familiar
• 55:06 One Takeaway to Apply Today

Transcript

0:04

Today I want to talk about the topic back to basics. The last few years have been have been pretty difficult for all of us, and, I've been asked a lot in the last few years. What does the future look like? And I, I think it's important to talk about, what what will work like what will work look like in the future. So that's our topic for today. So I start out almost every one of my, every one of my talks with this quote from a guy named Tim Sanders. And he said, education without execution is just entertainment. I love that quote because he essentially, you know, I'm in the business of of teaching adult teaching grown ups like you about how to improve their lives, how to get better performance. And what I know is that 90% of what I tell you today, you will forget in 90 days. So 90 and 90, that's that's a pretty good, reminder of how much you forget of what I say. But what Tim Sanders has crystallized in this sentence is that if you execute on just one thing today, and you and you pick one idea from what I talk about today and put it into practice before the end of the day, you are far more likely to have success in your life. So education without execution is just entertainment. So I hope I have more than one good idea to tell you today, but if you just will do me the great favor of taking one idea and executing it today, I'll feel successful because then you'll actually get something out of this. So, People always talk when they hire consultants like me. Consultants always talk about the big things. And and if we look at how great organizations are made, I think vision is very important. Don't get me wrong. Vision is important. Mission is important, and values are important. But the most important thing are habits. Habits are the secret sauce that make every organized action great. So yes, every organization has to have a vision. It has to have a mission. It has to have values. However, the habits of the organization are what make the organization great. That's the secret sauce. So I want to tell you a story about habit formation that comes from my life. So I'm 58 now and this happened when I was 33. I tell you how old I was at the time, because at the time I was a grown up and, I was going in to get my teeth clean. So this was a long time ago. And, just to on behalf of my dentist, this hygienist no longer works, for him and hasn't for years. My new eye genus is wonderful. My dentist is fantastic. But I went in there, and there I am laying in the chair. She's. I've got this lavender bib on, you know, the kind with the the metal, the metal cord and the alligator clips. And she's she's got her finger in the corner of my mouth and she's just finished, you know, sucking my mouth out and might feel great. And then she takes her finger out of my mouth and she puts her hands on her hips and she says, you know, I can tell by the plaque build up on your teeth that you're a scrubber. And I said, yeah, yeah, I know, you know, back and forth, back and forth. And she goes, yes, you need to do circles because you don't want to go to the periodontist. You need to get up under the gum line because you don't want to lose your teeth. And, and so you need to brush your little circles. And I said get on. I'm totally on it. You got it. I've got a bad habit. Circles. I seared in my memory, and I'm absolutely convinced that dental hygienist take a course in school called, shame and humiliation. And she. This particular hygienist must have took the advanced course, advanced shame and humiliation. And so what she did next. This is what I'm telling you. I was a grown up at the time. She goes, wait a second. And she turns around to the cabinet and she pulls out of the cabinet, this giant set of teeth with a giant toothbrush. It's under her arm and she's. And she's showing me, watch this, watch this. And she's she's she says, look, I'll do circles. And I said, wow, that is seared in my memory. I am never forgetting this. I no circles. Got it? And she goes, now you try. So I've got a giant set of teeth under my arm with a giant tooth brush. You know, I like cartoon size. And I'm. I'm doing circles. And she says, see, I knew you could do it. So being properly shamed and humiliated, I go back to my house at night, I. I'm getting ready for bed. So there I am. Circle, circle circle spit circle circle circle spit. Smile. Go to sleep. Next morning I wake up. Circle, circle, circle spit. My whole family scrub. Now what happened is she used guilt and humiliation and shame to get me to do the right thing. How long did that last? Ending the last 24 hours. Now, just for those of you with a dental hygiene background, I now do circles. I'm really good at circles, so? So you don't have to worry about my periodontal health. But what we very often do is we think we can create habits by guilting people into the habits. And that doesn't work. Now, if we look at organizations, in our world that are great at habit formation, one of those organizations is the military. And so this is about in the year 2000. So I was talking to a guy and his wife, and he was a Vietnam era vet. And, He, he was he had been out of the field since 1975. So, so it had been 25 years since he was in Vietnam. And he, he had served three combat, combat tours in Vietnam. And I just asked him I said, you know, that's really unusual to do three combat tours. You know, really glad you're alive. Must have been really hard work. I said, what was your service weapon? And he said was an M-16, which was a common, rifle at the time. And I said, so I'm just curious. I said, do you think you could field strip that today? And he looked at me straight on. No, no hesitation. He says, oh, absolutely. I could do it. Hanging upside down, blindfolded, wearing mittens. To which his wife said, Oh, no, you couldn't. And he goes, oh yes, I could. I thought, I have to start some marital therapy at that point. And so I asked him, so why, why is it that you think you could do that? And he said, well, it was a new it was a new rifle platform at the time. And the way, the the way it worked is once the bullet fired, it uses the gas from, from the explosion to push the bolt back. And so you've got this dirty gas full of, of of, smoke and debris and that smoke and debris can tend to clog it up. And if you don't field strip your weapon, in this hot, humid environment, you're what you're going to get is, is you're going to get, you're going to get it to jam. This is what you want your rifle to do in combat is to pull the trigger and have it go bang, not pull the trigger and have it go click. And he said, so in that in that humid environment, in that hot, humid environment, we spent a lot of time, he said. Sometimes I would field strip my, my, my rifle a dozen times a day. So if you do the math dozen times a day, times three, three combat tours, which was about four and a half years, he he had field stripped his weapon over 10,000 times, probably about 12, 12,000 times. And and so this guy could take it apart. And the reason he thought he could do it 25 years later is not that he had rehearsed it to the point where he was good at it. He had created a habit where he had rehearsed it and then over rehearsed it. And and the the key to excellence in anything is not just rehearsal or to the point of performance, but the rehearsal to over rehearsal to, to more than mastery so that it becomes almost second nature. And now most of us don't have combat experience, most of us don't field strip rifles. But many of you in the audience have taken piano lessons. And if you ever took a piano lesson, did your piano teacher tell you, you know, once you get the the piece right for the for the recital, does she ever tell you that's good enough that you know, good job? You got it the first time. This time, I think we're ready for the recital. No, your piano teacher never did that. What she said is. Now go home and practice it, you know, eight times. Ten times, and come back and do it again and do it again and do it again. Because she knows that under stress. And we all have stress in our lives and in our workplaces, and whenever we're going to perform, our performance degrades. And so you don't just need you just don't need practice to the point of being able to do it once. You need practice to the point where you can do it without thinking about it. And so great organizations, they do have missions, they do have visions, they do have values. But they more importantly create a set of habits. So how do you create these these good habits. And I'm going to teach you three ways to form habits. They're called novel reminders irritating reminders and then stimulus control. So the first is a novel reminder. So let me let me give you a story. So I worked with a woman once, and this was years ago when I did clinical work. And she was mad at her husband. Her husband was an idiot. And she spent she spent, you know, an hour, week after week, telling me what a numskull her husband was. And, she had a three year old son and, I, you know, her, her big complaint is, you know, he's always on the road. His work takes him everywhere. I never get to see him. You know, here I am, raising this child alone. And, I said, okay. And she said she she made this comment right toward the end of one of our meetings. And she said, you know, my son is just fascinated with airplanes. Every time there's an airplane up in the sky, he points and says, look, mommy, there's an airplane. And I said, oh, interesting. And I said, next time your son sees an airplane, I want you to turn to him and say, son, that's the kind of airplane daddy flies in so that he can work and earn us the money for the things that we need. And she goes, why would I want to do that? I said, just just try it and see what happens. And then she came back two months later and I said, how are things going? And she goes, man, you know, my husband is not nearly the jerk he used to be. I don't know what happened, but he's he's like a completely different man. And I said, really what's changed? And she goes, I don't know. It's just we seem to be getting along better for the last two months. And, and he seems to be more responsive and I don't know what it is. And I said, I'm just curious, did you, did you do that little experiment I did with your son? And she goes, yeah, you know, he I mean, pretty much every day he sees an airplane. And I tell him, son, that's the kind of airplane daddy flies into or earn the money to get us the things that that our family needs because he loves us like, okay, let's all do you see what happened? She had developed a pattern of thinking about her husband that was embittered and what this novel reminder and a novel reminder is something in your environment that there is a stimulus, a sound, a noise, an airplane flying overhead, whatever it is that you associate with a different pattern of behavior or a different pattern of thinking. So a light, a noise, an airplane flying overhead, any of those can be a reminder. Now, it can't be under your control. The reason it can't be under your control is because if if you control when the the light, noise or sound comes on, then you know it's coming and you won't do it. One example is, you know, many of you use the reminders on your phones with when an alarm comes up and every day I have reminders come up on my phone that remind me of a few things that I want to think about. You know, what's my life motto? What's my word for the year? You know what? What's what's a way for me to change my thinking? And when those alarms come up and they come up every day, not in my control, I look at it and I go, oh, yes, you know, that's that's my word for the year. Okay? That's my life motto. I rehearse it, all of those novel reminders get me to change my pattern of thinking. So if you want to have a different pattern of thinking first, set up novel reminders so you can choose a light, a noise, an airplane flying overhead, whatever it is. Or you can set an alarm in your phone, all of which will will cause you to change your thinking and over time can change your attitude from bitterness to gratitude. The next is irritating reminders now, irritating reminders are things that you do that irritate you. So. So back to my dentist. My dentist and I have an open secret I hate to floss. I don't like to put those little floss things, or I don't like to put floss around my fingers because it turns the ends of my fingers purple and it's slimy. I just don't like it. And so I'm really bad at flossing and and how do I solve this? Well, how I solve this is I buy this the bag full of these these philosophers. And I put one in my pocket. Now some of you go, and that's gross. When my pockets are clean and it's my mouth, so you don't have to worry about it. And you know, only my wife has to kiss me. So, so none of you have to worry about it. So this little flosser is in my pocket. Now, if you look at the picture of this flosser, what do you notice? Well, there's a pointy thing on it, so it's point. It's poking into my leg. And at some point in the day, if I put that flosser in my pocket, what am I going to do? I'm going to take it out because it's bothering me and I'm doing a floss. And so so you can set up things in your environment and you don't have to do this for dental, dental hygiene, but you can do lots of things to irritate yourself. You can you can put things in your pocket to remind you of the right thing to do. One of one of my favorites was a person told me that every morning they put ten pennies in their right pocket, and every day when they put their hand in their pocket, they they, they think of one thing that they're thankful for. And then they put the penny in the left pocket, and those pennies act as an irritating reminder. And by the end of the day, they've got to transfer the ten things from the ten pennies from the right pocket to to the left pocket. Now you can use whatever you want. You know, you can use whatever, whatever coin you want, but but you can transfer from one pocket to the other. And so, so all of those become irritating reminders to transform your thinking or to transform your behavior. In in the military, there's a thing called a challenge coin. And the challenge coin is it's a large coin that you keep in your pocket. And if somebody you know who also has a challenge coin presents the challenge coin and you don't have yours, you have to buy everybody drinks. So there's a motivation to to keep the challenge coin with you. And that challenge coin when it's in your pocket, it reminds you of something that's important to you. So whatever that challenge coin came from, that's a that's a that's an irritating reminder. And so if there are ways that you can do this with your students to remind them, you know, put it, put a coin in the pocket, move it from the right pocket to the left pocket, all of which will help students remember and help you to change your pattern of thinking. The last the the last of these habit formations is, is stimulus control. And and I've been very much affected by a quote by a guy named Amartya Etzioni. And his quote is, people aren't so easy to change, after all. And back in the 1970s, when there was an energy crisis, they were trying to figure out how to get people to change their use of lights in universities. And so what they did is, is they put all these stickers on the light switch that said kilowatt, you know, turn off the lights because they were trying to save energy. How long did those work? Like two days. Like, you know, this, that, that if you if you use a post-it and you posted that, how long does that last? That last. The effective life of a post-it is 48 hours. After that, it's just a piece of trash stuck on your on your computer. And so what they found is that these things didn't do anything to change energy use. What they decided to do is go in and change the environment so that you can't help but do the right thing. And in the 1970s, what that meant was they unscrewed half of the light bulbs and so that whether people turn it on or off the lights, it was they were going to use half the electricity from the lights. Now, now we have, you know, now we have all sorts of stimulus control, all sorts of mechanical, and optical devices that if you, if you walk into the bathroom, the lights automatically come on, otherwise they turn off, all of which is designed so they, it's engineered so that you don't even think about it. So, like, you know, I was walking I was walking down the, the freezer aisle at the grocery store. And as I'm walking, there's motion detection on the freezer lights, and they come on as I walk past, all of which is stimulus control, all of which designed to save energy. Now, how does this how does this apply to you? Well, how it applies to you is that you need to help your students change the study environment so that it's easier to do the right thing. Now, when I was in graduate school, I worked my way for a couple of years through graduate school by teaching a course on study skills, and this was a course that was largely populated by students who should have not ever been at the university. Where I went to school at Ohio State at the time, had to open admission. So if you graduated from high school in the state of Ohio and you had a pulse, you could be accepted to Ohio State. And that meant there were lots and lots of students who probably had no business being in college. And many of those students ended up in my class. And so we were teaching them how to study. And so we were talking about the study environment. And I had one student, she was getting DS, and I said, what's what's your study temptation? What's the temptation that you have that that keeps you from studying? And she said, it's it's soap operas. And I know soap operas are not as nearly as popular now as they were back then, but she said, I love soap operas. And I said, okay. And she says, I'll come home from class. I'll turn on the soap opera and I'll watch for like four hours. I said, okay, so describe for me your room. And so what I expected her to say was, that, you know, in her room was the TV. And I thought, okay, we're going to move our TV to another room or we're going to, put a little suitcase lock, through the little hole on, on on the plug. And then she's going to give the key to somebody else. And I had all these great ideas to make it harder for her to, to watch TV. And I said, so describe your room. And she says, well, there's my bed. And at the end of my bed is a dresser. And then there's the door and then I've got another dresser on the other wall, and then there's the closet and the window. And then right here is my desk, and I, I said, well, well, where's the TV? And I expected her to say so in one of the dressers. And she says, well, it's on my desk. And I said, well, well, how big is your desk? And she said, you know, it's a normal student desk, like three feet by two feet. And they said, and how big is your TV? She says, it's 27 inch. And this was in the time when there the big cathode ray tube TV. So the 27 inch TV then occupies almost all of the surface area of her desk. And they said, and in our study space, do you she goes, I don't know about, you know, eight inches. And I go, and where's the on button? She goes right there. And so, so the temptation was wherever she had her book or her piece of paper, the on button was, was literally two inches away. And so it was very easy to do. And I said, so here's what I want you to do. I want you and this is a stimulus control. I want you to move your TV to the dresser. And she says, yeah, but then I'll get a trick in my head if I'm, you know, if I'm laying on my bed and, you know, it'll be bad for my neck if I said, you're getting D's, you're about to get us out of college. Give it a try for a couple weeks. So she did. She moved it from her desk to the dresser, and by the end of the grading term, she'd moved from D's to B's. And. And what I know is that it's easier to, to get a sustained change in people if you change their environment so that they can't help but do the right thing. And so, so part of your job, as teachers and advisors of young people who want to have peak performance is how do they set up novel reminders? How do they set up irritating reminders? And then how do they set up stimulus control so that they can't help but do the right thing? That's those are the ways that you develop habits, guilt, shame, embarrassment, all of that. We'll get compliance for about a day. And then nobody likes to feel guilty. Nobody wants to to have somebody treat them like that. So so I would strongly encourage you to, to figure out and this is where you need to be creative and tactical with each of your students. How do I set up stimulus control? How do I set up novel reminders? How do I set up irritating reminders to help my students do the best that they can? My my favorite example of this is Jenny Craig. Jenny Craig is a weight loss program and they're successful. Do you know why they're successful? Is because part of their program is to take all of your food out of your house and replace all of the food in your house with Jenny Craig food. Okay. What happens is when you're tempted to eat, there's nothing to eat except the food you've bought from Jenny Craig. And so they set external limits on the food that you can eat in your house. And as long as you keep buying their food and get rid of every other type of food, you will lose weight because they've set it up so that you can't help but do the right thing in your home. So part of your task is to help your students, set up learning environments so in class so that they can't help but succeed. So how do we how do we build organizational habits in the future? Individual habits. Individual habits with your students? Are good. But how do you build up organizational habits? And I'm getting a little bit of feedback here. I hope I hope you're not getting it there. I love the job of a futurist. I wish I could get paid as a futurist because predicting what will happen in the future. You don't have to be right. You just have to have really creative, interesting ideas that people will, will listen to. And so I compiled a list of futurists past predictions about what would happen by 2020. So in 1900, the Smithsonian argued that there will be no letter C, X, or Q in the alphabet. Again, being a futurist, you don't have to be right. It just has to be interesting. And so people are always telling us what what the future will hold. So how well has that prediction turned out? Not so good. In 1911, the Royal College of Surgeons in England, the director of that, Richard Clement Lucas, said humans by 2020 would only have one toe. So in 109 years, he figured we would we would lose 4 or 5 toes. We'd be like horses. For most of us, that hasn't turned out. Thomas Edison in 1911 said all furniture, wood will be steel. Now, some of that was right. But, you know, a lot of us like to, like, sit on things that are made of wood, and we like fabric and we like cushions. But, somehow Edison thought everything would be steel. In 1937, Nikola Tesla believed that coffee and tea will be outlawed. Still could happen. It's 2022. Hadn't happened yet, but it might. And again, brilliant people. Edison, Tesla. They can be wildly wrong in their predictions. This is the one that kind of creeps me out the most. Which in 1950, Popular Mechanics predicted that old rayon underwear would be converted chemically into candy. The something that I that's just that that one just completely creeps me out. Fortunately, they're wrong. 1994, which wasn't that long ago. The Rand Corporation said those homes that don't already have robots will have trained apes to clean our houses. I don't have a trained ape in my house, and I don't have a robot. Lots of you have roombas. I think none of you have a trained ape. But that really hasn't turned out. And then 2005, this this, this century, Ray Kurzweil, who's a futurist, who's still making futurist predictions, believe that eating would be obsolete by now, that none of us would be eating and we'll be fed by nanobots, that these these tiny little nanobots would feed us. And the most recent one is, Michael O'Farrell. I believe that by now this is in 2014. Eight years ago, he believed that telepathy and teleportation would be, it would be possible by now. I haven't heard about it. I don't know about it, but here's my prediction of the future. My prediction of the future is based on human behavior. In the past, everything old is new again. And I believe Amadi Etzioni when he said human beings are not very easy to change after all, human beings are remarkably resistant to change. I'm in the human change business. I'm in the performance consulting business, and human beings, and habit formation is really, really hard. So my predictions of what's going to happen are based not on, you know, some, you know, bit. We're all going to have one toe and, trained, trained apes to clean our homes. But my prediction is based on how humans have behaved for the last 10,000 years and probably will behave for the next 20 to 30 years. So I'm not going to tell you anything different than the way we have always been. So the biggest thing that's happened in the last two years has been working remotely versus working together. I'm remote right now. I'm I'm thankful for the technology that allows us to do that. But I will tell you what I think will happen in the future. Is working remotely works when you have one thing and that's trust. And how does trust get developed? Well, here's what I believe has happened. Is that the reason that remote working has worked is because there was trust before we trusted each other, because of our face to face interactions and because of that trust, we were able to essentially make withdrawals from that trust account. And so in trust and people intensive jobs, trust is the key to building success. I'll take a tiny little sidelight here. If you know the, the Walter Michel experiment on, the delay of gratification where he gave kids a marshmallow and told them, if you wait for 15 minutes, I'll give you two. And and it was a predictor of life success. They were trying to figure out how to mess that up, and the way they could get every kid to eat the marshmallow right away, rather than the 10 to 20%. It would wait for 15 minutes. How could they get those 10 to 20%? Who would wait for the second marshmallow? How could they get them to eat it right now? All they needed to do was have the experimenter lie to them in the few in the past. So if the experimenter was untrustworthy in the past, every kid took the marshmallow right away. Which means that if you don't trust your environment, you're going to immediately go to immediate gratification rather than delayed gratification. And what we know is the delayed gratification is the best predictor of lifetime success. So if you want to be successful in your life, you need to learn how to delayed gratification. But what we've learned from this is that trust in your environment and in the people around you is the primary criteria for, the delay of gratification. If you want success, you have to have delayed gratification. If you want delayed gratification, you have to have trust in the people you work with and in your environment. So trust is harder to build when there's less information. What we as humans do is we watch other people's behavior and gather information to determine, do I want to build trust with them? Why do people in business go golfing together? You know? But besides, just to blow off a Friday afternoon, they go golfing together because golfing provides a 3 to 4 hour window of time where you can observe the behavior of another person to determine whether or not you want to trust them or not. And it's it's watching people behaving in that situation for for people who are observant, it tells lots about the person. So you're gathering information during that game of golf? I'm not a golfer, but I understand how that works. So trust based occupations have been continuing remotely because they've been making withdrawals from their trust account. Well, you can't make indefinite withdrawals from the trust account. So what will the new normal look like? Well, I mean, we've all heard this, you know. Well, the new normal, you know, frankly, here's my prediction. The new normal is going to look a lot like the old normal. Again, people are remarkably resistant to change. We return to how we've always been. Now there will be some societal changes because of technology. You know, I'm. I'm two time zones away from you right now. So we can still interact, but it's different than if I was there. But human beings, you and I, as people, are fundamentally not going to change because of this. It's biology. Human beings are pack animals. We like to be together. So what is so good about working together? Well, the first of all is we are created for relationships. There was a study, that started in the 1940s in Harvard. And, it's a study of men. And so it's just men. It doesn't study women. So there are limitations there. But it's the biggest and longest lasting study of human beings, in modern history, in all history, because it's a longitudinal study that has gone on from the 1940s and is still going on today. For the few of those guys who are left alive. And what they did was they said, we're going to take, Harvard men and we're going to compare them to other Boston men who didn't go to college. And at the time they thought, you know, we're going to show how smart these Harvard, these Harvard men are and how much better their lives are than these, these these poor saps who live in Boston on the other side of town. So they've tracked these men, their physical health, their their IQ, their, their family history, their relationships. They measure these guys constantly every five years from 1940 up to today. And one of the guys who was the the head of this is a guy named George, Vaillant. And he wrote a book called The Triumphs of Experience. And he said there are two conclusions that people who had the people in their study, who had the greatest life satisfaction, and the people who were the happiest of this group. It wasn't the Harvard men. It wasn't necessarily the Boston men. Your success in getting into an elite college doesn't really make a difference. It's what they are or the amount of money that you made. What they found is that the enjoyment of work predicts happiness better than money. So there were people who were plenty rich and plenty miserable, but the people who really loved the content of their work were happier. And then the second big takeaway is that the most important part of happiness and meaning was those primary love relationships. If you had a primary love relationship in your life, a life partner of some sort, that was of high quality and mutually enjoyable, that love is what made people happy. So in other words, we as humans are built to get our major life satisfactions from work and love. And so, so it's important to realize that half of our waking time. So if we have 168 hours a week and let's say we sleep for about 55 of those hours, that leaves about 100. Let's say about 110. You guys are better in math than me, but 110, hours. And if you're working 50 to 55 hours a week, half of your waking time is at work. So it's very important that you enjoy that. And then then the other half of your waking time is spent with your loved ones. So it's important that those those two areas be of high quality. And human beings are built for relationship. I don't know if there are any chemists in the room, but this chemical structure is a chemical called oxytocin. Now, that's not OxyContin, which is an opioid which has been widely abused. But this is oxytocin, which is a hormone that's released when a mother gives birth. She gets a huge release of oxytocin. And oxytocin is the bonding chemical. So every time we so, so like if you're if you're in the labor and delivery room, mom gives birth and they put the baby on her stomach skin to skin. And they'll do this with dads as well. They'll put the baby on the dad and they'll hold the baby skin to skin. And what we know is that skin to skin contact is good for the baby, but that skin to skin contact releases oxytocin in both the mother and the father. And so they feel bonded to that child. So every time we shake someone's hand, every time we pat them on the shoulder, all of those things help give us a little shot of oxytocin. So if so, it it helps us feel connected to other people. And so part of human we human beings are chemical creatures. We're biological creatures. And part of our biology is built for physical touch and human proximity. We like to be around one another and we're built as pack or herd animals. We will group together. If you know anything about history, there's a history, in Western civilization. Where in, in early church history, there were these guys who were hermits. And so because they wanted to get to know God better, they go out into the desert and be by themselves. They're called the Desert Fathers. And so these, these hermits and this is where we get the term hermit. It came from that era where these guys would go out into the desert and live by themselves and get in touch with God. Did you know there were hermit communities? In other words, all these guys who went out to get to know God better in the desert by themselves. They kept settling around other hermits, and then they get together and have hermit conventions. And so even people who are seeking isolation do it together. I mean, human beings are just so funny to me. And I am a human. So I think I'm, you know, you know, my behavior, I think, is amusing because it's so ironic that someone seeking isolation would do it in a group. It's kind of like an introvert convention. So why is work so important? So, so this is it is. And he passed away in the last year. And I'm really sorry to see that his name is me high chick sent me high and he coined the term flow. And what flow is quickly speaking is, is that state of deep conscious concentration where you're solving a challenging problem and you lose yourself in that problem and all time disappears and it feels really good. And you've all experienced this where, where you're, you're you're concentrating on something and you lose yourself into it and chick's in me. I said, that experience of flow is one of the ingredients of happiness. And where do you find it? You don't find it going to the amusement park. You don't usually find it at the movies. You don't usually find it in recreation, though all of those things are good. You usually find flow being in the zone at work. When you're when you're cognitively engaged in creation or the solution of a problem that you find to be challenging. And I encourage you to get on Wikipedia. Look up. Chick sent me. Hi. If you just type in his first name image. Al, why? Your search engine will auto complete it. And you can find this this, this chart. And what you see is that you've got skill level on, on the x axis and challenge level on the y axis. So if you have, if you have low skill and low challenge, you're apathetic. If you've got, low challenge and high skill, you've got relaxation. So very often if you're good at something, you find it relaxing. So knitting, crocheting, all of those, all of those sorts of activities that once you learn it, it becomes kind of a meditative activity. So that's good. Low skill. Well with high challenge creates anxiety. So for me, I have low skill level in plumbing. Any time I'm facing a plumbing problem, I have anxiety because the challenge level is high and my skill level is low. But if we look over in this upper right hand corner, that's where flow is, where you have high challenge and high and high skill level. And so we want to get people in a flow state at work because it feels good. So what does this have to do with with groups of people. We'll get to that in just a second. But what I want you to see is this there's been study, and it's summarized in a book called the Art of Impossible, where you see all of these different body chemicals, and the men that and, the minute you see it. Right. Endorphins, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, all of these are really when you're in the flow state. So there are these six neurotransmitters and hormones that get released when you experience this concentrated state. So what does this have to do with people? I love this this quote from Louis Armstrong, all music is folk music. I never heard of force singer song. And what he's getting at is this next point, which is human beings are unique in all the species in that we are unified by music and a beat. So how many of you know the song we Will Rock you? Can you guys do this with me? It starts off. Can you do this? Are you doing this? I can't really tell. Okay? If you're doing this like Freddie Mercury and Brian May. Okay, so if you're doing this together, are you doing it together? Can I get it? Is that is that actually happening with this distance? This is called entrainment. And human beings are the only species that can be entrained, which is the synchronization of human beings to an external rhythm, like music or dance. If we play music to any of the other primates, they don't dance. We do know that the cockatoos dance, and sometimes you'll see horses do that. But as a group, human beings are the only species that acts in concert. And there's some there's some competitive advantage to entrainment. And we see this when people are marching, when drums are beating. You see this in athletic events when, when an entire when an entire, crowd will sing the same song or, or beat out the same rhythm, all of that's in treatment. And what it does is it makes us feel connected to the people around us. It's a type of team flow. And we see this and I use music as an example, is we see this with musicians in bands. They start to move together and work together, and so they're experiencing a real sense of team flow or entrainment. And what we know is that that collective action facilitates the activity of all six of those neurotransmitters, all of which are pleasant. So dopamine is the pleasure one, serotonin is well-being. One norepinephrine is the energy one. So, so oxytocin is is is the is the connectedness one. So when we are working together, that creates a better feeling for all of us. Human beings were built to be in proximity with each other and working together. One other example is in comedy. So in improv comedy, there are comedy rules. There are rules for how this works. The number one rule, you know, is trust. There's support, work as an ensemble, speak the truth. Failure is essential and listen. But the number one thing is trust the people around you. So here's the question how do you build trust? Well, the way you build trust is not having deep, meaningful conversations. It's not it's not, you know, having, you know, a crying session in a group hug. Trust is built on nickel and dime conversations. And there's a researcher named John Gottman who studied this, and he blew up his his area of discipline was marital communication. He blew up 30 to 40 years of research, most of which showed nothing. On my internship, I was part of three research projects, to study marital communication, all of which showed nothing, which was kind of the stand for marital communication research until Gottman. And what Gottman found was that good relationships aren't built on these these deep conversations and group hugs. What he observed is that there's what he calls a beard and then a turn. And let me let me demonstrate the beard in the turn. The beard is a request. He calls it the bid for intimacy, which is essentially a small talk conversation starter. And so the beard is, hey, how was your day? That's it. That's how you start it. Or, you know, how are you feeling today or or or what's happening in your house? All of those are small talk conversation starters. And then there are three turns. There are there are three turns. And this is the response to that small talk conversation starter. So if I start out with the bid how's it going today. And you respond it's going pretty well. Thanks for asking. That's a turning toward conversation. Now, what we know is a turning toward conversation is not oh, thank you for caring about my feelings. I feel touched because that's kind of creepy. You know, every time somebody says, hey, how are you doing? It's all these small talk thing. So the two essential components of turning toward are it's mildly or completely positive, and it's on topic. The second is turning against. So if I start out with a bid, hey, how was your day? And you say, well, it's really none of your business. That's kind of negative actually it is negative. But turning against is, negative and on topic and the third is a turning away and turning away is, I say, hey, how was your day? And you say, wait a minute, I let me, I, I, I got a text. Oh. I'm sorry. What were you saying. That's turning away now. Turning away is neutral, but it's off topic. It's kind of being distracted by something else. And what Gottman did is he set up the study of of couples. They came into this bed and breakfast overlooking the lake in, in the state of Washington, near Seattle. And, his deal was. Hey, kids, newlyweds. Come on in here. You can stay for the weekend for free. The place is yours. Except we're going to videotape and audiotape. You in every room of the house except for the bedroom in the bathroom. And you got to wear a heart rate monitor and a blood pressure cuff. Besides that, kids, the place is yours. I would have never gone, but people actually did it. And so he watched these newlyweds, and then he tracked them for 17 years, and he was able to predict whether a couple would stay married or get divorced by the relative frequency of turning toward, against and away. So what what he found was that he could predict the success or failure of a marriage by the relative, by the by the relative frequency of toward, against. In a way. Now, most of us think that marital or relationship poison is turning against it, and it's not good. But what he found is that turning away, ignoring the other person, being distracted, that's relationship poison. And he also said there's a relationship between positive and negative. And there's been lots and lots of research. Some went down kind of a wrong path with a mathematical model called the Losada ratio. And so, even though the Lacerda ratio is widely, debunked in the literature, there's other evidence that there is a proportion of positive turning toward, to turning against or turning away and what the proportions are, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 3 to 1 to 5 to 1 to 7 to 1, one person is as high as 12 to 1. In other words, for every turning away interaction you have with the person where you kind of get distracted, you kind of ignore them. You need to have somewhere between 3 and 12 turning toward, hey, how are you doing? What's going on? Would you like a cup of coffee? All small things you want to build trust. You have to build them. In really lots and lots of small interactions. Which is why when we work together, when we're in proximity with each other, we can see and observe hundreds of small interactions with each other every day. When we're working remotely, when we're working far away from people, what happens is we see the turning against, we see the turning away, and we don't have enough opportunity to build back enough turning toward because we need somewhere between 3 and 12 times as many of those. So we need lots and lots of these nickel and dime conversations. So if you want to build trust, it isn't about having a group hug. And it isn't bad going on a field trip. It's about when somebody goes to get coffee. You say, hey, I'm going to get coffee. Would you like one? Or when somebody asks you about your day or when somebody tells you about the day, their day, you listen to them. I worked with a man who transformed his effectiveness as a, as a, as a manager by asking people, their kids names and, and what they were doing. He was about, about the most ineffective person I had worked with. But when we trained him to just ask small talk questions, which he thought was ridiculous, his his ratings by his employees, by his peers, by his colleagues went up in every area. So human beings are dependent on these tiny little interactions face to face sometimes including, you know, a pat on the arm, pat on the back, because all of that makes us feel connected to one another. So my conclusion is humans will genuinely go back to working together. Human beings like to be with each other. Again, I'm not I'm distant from you. Now. I would prefer to be there. But human beings will go back to working together. So how do you get prepare? Well, your students need you to be as attentive to that emotional state as well as giving instruction. If they get primarily guilt, shame, embarrassment that will turn off their motivation, that will turn off their ability to learn if they get these small positive turning toward because guilt shame that's turning against. But if they get small positive things from you. Hey, how's it going? Tiny little questions, tiny little bits of interest in their life that will help them change their habits and give them great outcomes. So here's what I want you to do on our final second, which is, our final seconds is figure out what's the one thing that you're going to apply from this today. I want you to write it down. That's all I want you to do. I want you to write down what's the one thing you're going to apply today? And I'm going to give you 10s to do that. All right. Now I want you to do something which we know helps solidify your commitment to it, which is sign your name as soon as you sign your name, that will commit you to it. So I want you to sign it. So what's the one thing you're going to do today? And now sign it. Okay. You can all sign your name. So here's my conclusion. My conclusion is it isn't it isn't. You know, human beings in the last two years have not fundamentally changed. We like to be together. We do better working together as human beings, as teams. We can become and trained together and like a great musical group or like a great improv comedy team, we can riff off each other and do better. And all of that makes us feel better. So. So if you want to create great habits, if you want to have a great organization, it really is about how do you set up those novel reminders, irritating reminders, stimulus control and work together to create a positive environment?