Ep: 106: George Mumford: Psychologist, elite performance coach, and mindfulness guru

George Mumford is a psychologist, elite performance expert, and author of The Mindful Athlete.  He has worked with worldclass athletes including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal. He has also consulted with college and Olympic athletes, corporate executives, and inmates, and is a sought-after public speaker at both business and athletic conferences nationally and internationally.  His latest booked is title: Unlocked: Embrace your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Unlocked is releasing the masterpiece within. It’s embracing your inner greatness.
  • Being authentic is a core part of being unlocked. “We remove the extraneous, the layering of our conditioning and defenses, and the ways that we have been untrue to who we really are until we find what is authentic within us – an authenticity that is always there, waiting to be revealed.”
  • Kobe Bryant once said of George Mumford: “George helped me to be neither distracted or focused, rigid or flexible, passive or aggressive. I learned to just be.”
  • George’s big break was coming on the heels of the Lakers’ third NBA championship in a row when coach Phil Jackson asked George to help the team deal with the stress and pressure brought on by their success.
  • 90% of long term happiness is dependent upon how the brain interprets our experience.
  • One of the distinguishing characteristics of the best athletes in the world is they’re very coachable. They are lifelong learners, always looking to get an edge.
  • If you want to be in flow, you have to have a fully integrated self. Your body, your mind, your heart, and your soul have to be in unison and harmony.

 

Notes:

George Mumford website

Book: Unlocked: Embrace Your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success

Book: The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance

 

Ep: 105: BJ Miller: Palliative medicine physician and educator on life and death and everything in between

Dr. BJ Miller is a longtime hospice and palliative medicine physician and educator. He currently sees patients and families via telehealth through Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the practical, emotional and existential issues that come with serious illness and disability. Led by his own experiences as a patient, BJ advocates for the roles of our senses, community and presence in designing a better ending. His interests are in working across disciplines to affect broad-based culture change, cultivating a civic model for aging and dying and furthering the message that suffering, illness, and dying are fundamental and intrinsic aspects of life. His career has been dedicated to moving healthcare towards a human centered approach, on a policy as well as a personal level.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • “I had a basic hunger and curiosity to understand the world in which I was living and to understand myself”.
  • Early on, as he was recovering from the accident with three less limbs, he forced himself to reframe his situation. That life wasn’t going to be extra difficult going forward but just uniquely difficult. And that suffering is something we all deal with in our own way.  Eventually his emotions would catch up with his mind whereby he truly felt that way.
  • Studying art history in college taught him perspective. It taught him how he was in control as to how he perceived his life and how he framed his life experience.
  • In palliative care, you don’t just treat the pain, you treat the suffering.
  • “If you don’t know the depths of sorrow, you aren’t going to know the peaks of joy.”
  • As dying patients reflect back upon their lives, it’s not so much regret over what decisions they made but how they imbued whatever decisions they made. Did they do it with love, did they infuse their spirit into whatever they were doing. That’s what matters most.

 

Notes:

The Center for Dying and Living

Book: A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death

TED Talk: What Really Matters at the End of Life

Ep: 102: Daniel Goleman: How to use Emotional Intelligence to Achieve an Optimal State Every Day

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, former science journalist for the New York Times, and the author of 13 books including the #1 bestseller Emotional Intelligence.  He has worked with organizations around the globe, examining the way social and emotional competencies impact the bottom-line. Ranked one of the 10 most influential business thinkers by the Wall Street Journal, Daniel has won several awards including the HBR McKinsey Award for the best article of the year and the Centennial Medallion awarded to him by Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  His latest book which is titled: Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day shows how emotional intelligence can help us have rewarding and productive days every day.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • There are four parts to emotional intelligence: Self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship management. The latter builds on the first three parts.
  • There are three kinds of empathy – cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.
  • When you’re in an optimal state, you’re highly productive, highly engaged, you care about others, you feel connected to your work, and connected to others.
  • The ability to focus is one of the pathways into the optimal state.
  • People who have a sense of purpose and feel inspired in their work, do it better.
  • It’s never too late to increase your level of emotional intelligence.
  • In emotionally intelligent organizations, it’s not just about hitting your targets but how you went about it. Did you get them by inspiring people to give their best or was it by fear and pressure?
  • Team EI is how people on a team relate to one another. And teams with highest team EI are often the most productive.

 

Notes:

Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day

Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ

Daniel Goleman website

Emotional Intelligence Courses

Ep: 100: Amy Edmondson: Harvard Business School Professor and Leadership Guru on the Art of Failing Well

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson’s TED Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. Her latest book is titled: The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • A good failure is an undesired outcome that brings you new knowledge that could have not been gained any other way. It should be just big enough to get new information without wasting unnecessary time.
  • Most of us have shifted from curiosity and learning in our childhood to defensiveness and self-protection in our adulthood because of the belief that we had to be right or successful to be worthy.
  • Psychological safety Is a belief that one can take interpersonal risks without the fear of punishment or rejection.
  • You need psychological safety in order to cultivate a culture of intelligent failure.
  • Reframing is one of the techniques we can use to learn from failure. It’s the ability to challenge the automatic thinking and come up with a healthier, more productive way to think about the same situation.
  • A culture of accountability and high-performance standards can coexist with a culture of psychological safety and embracing failure.
  • “The easiest way to not fail at all is to not take risks at all.”
  • “Excellence is doing as well as you can in your chosen field and making a positive difference.”

 

Notes:

Books:

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Websites:

Amy Edmondson personal page

Harvard Business School bio

Ep: 99: Chris Voss: Former top FBI hostage negotiator and CEO of The Black Swan Group

Chris Voss is one of the preeminent practitioners and professors of negotiation skills in the world. He was formerly the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group.  He is the founder of The Black Swan Group, a consulting firm that provides training and advises Fortune 500 companies through complex negotiations.  He has taught business negotiation in MBA programs at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. He also taught business negotiation at Harvard and guest lectured at other leading universities including the MIT Sloan School of Management and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  His book is titled: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Working the crisis hotline was where Chris first learned the power of empathy. Showing someone that they feel heard is often enough to get them to change their behavior.
  • Empathy is about the transmission of information whereas compassion is about the reaction to that transmission.
  • Any time you relax into stress, you’ll handle it far better. The act of relaxation increases your body’s ability to handle its stress demands.
  • Labeling is a verbal observation of an emotion or a dynamic. It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re listening and understanding the other side.
  • Meeting someone halfway (i.e. splitting the difference) rarely works since it never feels like it’s really halfway. You feel the transaction was unfair.  Reason being, based on the economist Daniel Kahneman, people tend to fear a loss twice as much as they are likely to welcome an equivalent gain.
  • “Excellence is a delight with learning and growing. It is not the pursuit of perfection which is a fool’s errand.”

 

Notes:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on It

Black Swan Group

Fireside Black Swan Group Coaching Program

Ep: 88: Marshall Goldsmith: The Father of Executive Coaching

Marshall Goldsmith has been recognized as the world’s leading executive coach and has advised more than 200 major CEOs and their management teams. He is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Mojo, and Triggers. His latest book is titled: The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Basing success strictly on results is a fool’s game. The Buddhist term for this is The Hungry Ghost – always eating but never full.
  • Success should be defined as: Are you doing something that is connected to your higher aspirations, are you doing that’s meaningful, and do you enjoy the process.
  • He pioneered the 360 feedback process which includes taking personal references away from the office to truly understand someone’s character.
  • What separate the great from the exceptional leaders are courage, humility, and discipline.
  • “We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome.”
  • To have a good life, we need to align our aspirations, our ambitions and our actions. Most executives you coach get stuck on the ambition phase.
  • “Excellence is focusing on achievement that’s consistent with something that’s meaningful to you and something you enjoy.”

 

Notes:

The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment

What Got You Here Won’t Get Your There: How successful people become even more successful

Marshall Goldsmith website

100 Coaches

Ep 44: Jerry Colonna: VC-turned executive leadership coach

Jerry Colonna is the founder and CEO of Reboot.IO, an executive coaching and leadership development firm whose coaches are committed to the notion that better humans make better leaders. Previously he was a successful venture capitalist with JPMorgan Partners and Flatiron Partners focused on technology startups. His new book is titled Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Growing up in a chaotic environment with an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother drove his associating money with safety.
  • There was a dissonance between the way he felt internally and the way he was perceived in the world which led to a deep depression.
  • You can’t be a better leader without being a better human and you can’t be a better human without going through radical self-inquiry.
  • Radical self-inquiry is the process by which self-deception becomes so skillfully and compassionately exposed that no mask can hide us anymore.
  • We all have psychological baggage – our inner demons – which hold us back as leaders and we must confront those demons in order to grow.
  • It is a fallacy to think that leadership is all about having all the answers and not having any fear or any doubt. Authentic leadership is about accepting your imperfections.
  • Learn about the important difference between grit and stubbornness.
  • “We have to be willing to accept life as it is, not as we wish it might become. To live in the reality of what is today, not what might be in the future.”

 

Links:

Book: Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

Reboot Website: www.reboot.io

Jerry Colonna Bio: www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna

Ep 35: Beth Comstock: Disrupter, Innovator, Change Agent: The Former Vice Chair at GE

Beth Comstock spent over 25 years at GE where she was a vice chair, CEO of Business Innovations and Chief Marketing Officer among other roles. She has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune and Fast Company and has been named to the Fortune and Forbes lists of the world’s most powerful women.  Her new book is titled Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Risk taking is a skill that can be learned.
  • “Most of us fear losing what we have more than we desire winning something we don’t have.”
  • Due to her risk taking mentality, Jeff promoted her to Chief Marketing Officer, a role that hadn’t existed at GE for over two decades.
  • She had to overcome a lack of self-confidence along with her introversion in order to speak up, challenge others and be effective in her role.
  • Success correlates as closely with confidence as it does with competence.
  • Much of the success of Hulu was attributed to hiring an entrepreneur from the outside and keeping him independent vs hiring someone from the inside.
  • She led GE’s disruptive green initiative called Ecomagination which pushed an aggressive clean energy agenda throughout GE’s multiple business lines.
  • GE executives often struggled to see parallels from developments happening in other industries due to a common cognitive bias called Functional Fixedness.
  • She pioneered a new program at GE called Fastworks which leveraged the lean methodology to experiment with new product ideas, increase innovation and accelerate time to market.
  • “Excellence is a never ending journey of learning and trying to get better.”