Episode Transcript
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J.B. (00:05):
This is Unserious.
A recurring theme on this showis that of the rapidly changing
world, one that is alwayschanging but lately seems to be
extra relentless.
For some, adapting to a new erabrings a fresh energy, new
(00:29):
problems to solve, new things tolearn, but for others it
catches them off guard and someof us just get left behind.
But in those moments ofdiscomfort, in that struggle to
adapt to shifting conditions,real growth and magic can happen
.
I'm JB Skelton.
Molly McMahon is off this week.
Our guest today is Chris Major,founder of the Human Potential
(00:51):
Project.
For over 20 years, chris andhis team have transformed places
like Nike, Intel, at&t, allianz, microsoft and Capital One.
Right now you're probablythinking oh, I get it.
He runs a successful consultingbusiness, but not so fast.
Chris has spent decadesconstructing the elements of
human performance across themind, body and spirit.
(01:14):
This has taken him to the endsof the earth studying philosophy
and martial arts with teachersranging from Zen masters to
Tibetan monks.
He's taught hand-to-hand combatto the Marines and performance
techniques to Olympians, andhe's the author of the
bestselling book the Power toTransform.
Your New Future Awaits, andwe're very happy to have him
with us today.
(01:34):
Welcome to Unserious, chris.
Thank you very much.
Glad to be here, great to haveyou.
I feel like every five yearsover my life there are these
conversations where it feelslike we're in an unprecedented
time of change.
We had this in the in the late80s, the early and mid 90s.
We had it certainly throughoutthe aughts and we're having it
(01:56):
again Now.
The pace is picking up againand it's picking up a lot and
you don't even have to be theold coworker anymore to feel out
of touch.
Is it me or is the paceincreasing?
Chris (02:10):
Oh, no, it's definitely
you.
Let's look at that for a minute.
You know it's kind of funnybecause I haven't been around
long enough.
Now Everybody says that all thetime.
That's right.
The 60s, oh my God, the pace ofchange.
We got cordless phones now, youknow.
But if you go back pretty muchthe last 150 years back in the
(02:35):
early, think of the early yearsof the 1900s, you know we went
from horses to cars, to trains,to planes.
Whoa, where did all that stuffcome from we had?
We went from telegraphs totelephones.
You know, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah, and a very short
amount of time.
Now we're doing it more in theelectronic world.
(02:55):
But that was a period ofphenomenal change.
Ours is, it's just, it's justdisorienting because it's us
right, right and we're in themiddle of it, right.
So we take it all personally,like somehow we're unique.
Well, no, but we've got adifferent set of things that we
have to contend with.
So for us it's well, okay.
(03:17):
So the pace of change ispicking up.
So what?
It's overwhelming.
If you think you need to be ontop of everything, sure, that's
not possible.
So there's a phenomenon here ofyou know, part of what makes it
feel so overwhelming iseverybody's telling you.
It's overwhelming all the time,daily life, and you don't
(03:47):
listen to social media or TV fora few days, you're not
necessarily feeling overwhelmedor out of touch or anything.
It's this background narrativethat keeps being drummed into us
all the time.
J.B. (03:57):
So how would you describe
this new world that we find
ourselves in currently?
Is it post-pandemic?
Is it the era of AI?
Chris (04:06):
I don't have a phrase for
it.
In a business sense, wetransitioned from the industrial
era into what we call thecoordination era, and most
nobody's paid attention to it.
So what is the coordination era?
Funny, you should ask.
Let's go back in time.
So what we think of as modernmanagement practices the way
(04:26):
that we quote do everything.
Those fundamental practices wereinvented by guys who were born
in the 1800s.
They were designed to beeffective for Henry Ford and his
peers as they were ushering inthe industrial era.
Now, the problem they weretrying to solve then was how do
we take unskilled,unsophisticated, uneducated farm
(04:47):
workers and day laborers andturn them into productive
factory workers?
Okay, and the solution theycame up with made sense at the
time Simple, de-skill the work.
So you may have been awonderful craftsman who made
wood panels for carriages.
Now we want you to put fivebolts on Model T wheels all day,
(05:07):
every day, and if you don'twant to do that, that's fine.
We've got 100 people who wouldbe happy to do that.
Now flash forward 100 and someyears.
So what we have now is aworkforce that is educated, is
sophisticated and, on top ofeverything else, is educated and
is mobile.
The value that they contributeis not by making things.
(05:29):
The industrial sector of oureconomy is now maybe 15% to 20%.
They generate value by theireffective coordination with each
other to produce customersatisfaction, be the customer
internal or external.
So the skills that are requiredof today are much more about
coordination, mobilization,integration, as opposed to the
(05:50):
old.
Follow the rules, follow theprocess, do this, do that that
everybody's grown up with orbeen schooled in.
Does that make sense?
J.B. (05:58):
It does.
But what does this all mean forpeople who are working today?
How do they survive and thrivenow in this era of coordination,
versus how they would three tofive years ago?
Chris (06:11):
Well, the coordination
has been on us for a little
longer than that, but the pointis, your question is crucial.
So there's a set of practicesthat we teach that have to do
I'm not going to do a seminarhere but that have to do with
how you effectively coordinateactions with other people, right
?
How do we get things done?
How do we get things doneconsistently, effectively, over
(06:34):
time and at pace?
That's what you want to focuson.
So I mean, let's face it.
You know, with technology todayI don't mean this to be
disparaging, but we can gettrained monkeys to run
spreadsheets.
There's nothing hard about that.
That used to be the big skillset we have to check the numbers
, check the numbers.
So that's simple.
Nowadays, instead, it's reallymore about the thing that we
(06:58):
keep saying all the time oh,people are our most important
asset, and so we get scared, andthen we got to get rid of them.
No, that's not how it works.
All right, so it's thoseinteractions amongst people that
matter, right?
It's, how do you manage themood in an organization?
Mood is everything, it's not theonly thing, but it's everything
(07:18):
, because if you don't get thatright, nothing else you do is
going to matter.
You know, and they don't teachabout mood management in
business school.
They teach about accounting andmarketing practices and so
forth, but if you don't have amood of ambition and confidence
and trust and the spree in anorganization, you're not going
anywhere.
So you know, you've been around, so I'm sure you've been
(07:43):
involved or been in a startup,been around startup companies in
the past.
I have yeah, yeah.
What's the best thing aboutthem?
J.B. (07:50):
The culture.
Chris (07:51):
Yeah the mood.
Everybody's ambitious.
They're confident we're goingto take on the world.
Nobody starts a company in theEeyore mood, right Resignation.
J.B. (08:05):
Oh yeah, this probably
won't work, but let's try it.
Chris (08:09):
It's the optimism.
Yeah, those guys.
Oh, that's not what we'relooking for.
So you, whoever you are as amanager, as a leader, your
number one job is to be managerof the mood.
We can get anybody to donumerical analysis.
I need you to actually knowwhat it is to move the people
and how to do it.
J.B. (08:27):
I was talking with a
marketing leader the other day
who and this is at a companythat is a leading edge AI
company and, as a marketingleader, she's trying to get her
marketers to use AI and leaninto this, and they're resisting
.
They're not using it enough.
There's a couple of things thatcould be going on here.
(08:49):
One they could be worried thatthe more they lean into this,
(09:14):
the more they might be makingtheir own careers obsolete and
losing their own identities.
Chris (09:17):
What is your advice for
people?
To sort of lean into this sortof unknown spaces and embrace
new?
When we discovered that wecould make oil that burned and
came out of petroleum we didn'thave to go out on the ocean and
kill whales they were very upset.
The buggy manufacturersparticularly all the people
around with horses and all thatgear, were profoundly upset.
(09:38):
When we introduced automobiles,right.
So it's no different.
You know, with AI In thiscountry people are very slow to
adopt to using computers.
You know it's just a adaptationcycle.
But to your point, what wefound is the people who dive in
and really learn first becomethe leaders in the field, and
(10:00):
you're much better off beingearly on and up on that curve
than the laggards andtroglodytes who don't ever want
to get with the program.
So it's about that commitment.
What am I committed to andwhat's the story that I live in?
About life?
And every once in a whileyou've got to change your story.
You don't have to like it.
I didn't say you're going tolike it, but you know.
J.B. (10:22):
Yeah, how do you change
your own story?
Chris (10:25):
Well, you know, on the
one hand it's simple, but it's
simple to explain and not sosimple to do.
You're up against your owninertia, my historical way of
doing things, and you just haveto really get to the point.
We call it the Popeye point.
Remember Popeye the Sailor?
J.B. (10:44):
of course I do okay, so
what was he famous for?
Chris (10:47):
eating spinach when would
he do that?
To fight Brutus right, becausehe just got pounded down?
Yeah, well, there was a littlesomething he said before he ate
the spinach.
You remember that?
J.B. (11:00):
you're testing me here
you're testing the limits of my
Popeye knowledge.
You got to.
Okay, give me a bone here.
I've done really well so far.
You're dead.
Chris (11:09):
You can go to the world
star, all right.
So he's been beat down byBrutus and he's laying there in
a heap, and then he finally saysthat's all I can stands,
because I can't stands no more.
J.B. (11:20):
I would never have gotten
there.
Chris (11:23):
But that's the Popeye
point.
That's all I can stand, becauseI can't stand the more you got
to get to the Popeye point.
I can't stand this currentcondition that I'm living in.
I can't stand the way I'mfeeling.
I can't stand the money andwhatever it is, I can't stand it
anymore.
And then you change.
J.B. (11:41):
What is your advice for
people who want to stay ahead of
emerging shifts in work in theeconomy, versus merely keeping
up?
Chris (11:51):
Now there's a whole
different question that one's
actually more fun.
This is a practice that werefer to as reading the world,
and you literally have to read,have to read, right?
So if the world you're in istechnology, then there's a
certain set of publicationsyou're probably going to want to
stay current with.
Okay, if you're a geologist, aphysicist, whatever, you stay
(12:13):
current with the literature andthen look to where are the
publications, where are thethought processes, what are the
institutes that are futurecasting?
Get their newsletters, figureout what they're doing.
Get some McKinsey's reports,harvard Business Review, what's
going?
on out there that I can look atand go hmm, there's something.
That's where this is going.
(12:34):
Now you might be a little bitoff, but you're going to have a
way higher probability than theguy who's sitting around waiting
for the future to happen to him.
So we're reading the world Well, reading the world.
And then most people tend well,they fall into two buckets.
There's the hip shooters who,oh, that looks good.
It's like, oh, look a pony.
And then there's the guys whowait too long.
(12:55):
And in the middle are thepeople who, hmm, there's a lot
of ponies out there, I'll takethat one.
But then you got to move.
That's the hard part.
You actually have to make amove.
You can't contemplate itforever, or the moment passes
you by and it's really hard toassess where you are in that
cycle.
But the advice is you're betteroff making a move than sitting
(13:16):
still, because, if nothing else,that move will take you to a
new spot where you can observethe world and it looks different
.
From there.
You can go oh, that didn'tproduce the result I wanted, so
let's make another move.
But what doesn't work is youjust kind of sit here and you
know wow, look at all this stuffgoing by me.
Yeah, if, if we're just kind oftreading water, that's, that's
(13:40):
nice.
But the rest of the world isswimming by, and you said this
kind of in the introduction Onceyou get far enough behind in
today's world, it's really hardto catch up, because things are
moving at a rapid pace.
J.B. (14:00):
So on Unserious, we play a
little game that we call Hire,
fire, boss.
We're going to give you ahypothetical task and some
fictional candidates Well,they're real, but they're
fictional on a team.
To accomplish that task, youhave to hire one, you have to
fire one, and then one of themis going to be your boss.
(14:21):
So the task at hand?
Your company is launching a newsmartwatch that integrates
health monitoring, mobilepayments and an AI personal
assistant features.
There is competition, but thespace is ready for disruption.
The team is famousWashingtonians.
We're going to start with BruceLee, who went to UW and
(14:44):
embraced technology and fitness.
The second is Rainn Wilson, whoplayed Dwight on the Office,
and the third one is Jean Smartfrom Designing Women and now the
star of Hacks, who playsDeborah Vance.
Chris (15:01):
So I'd have to fire Bruce
.
Why do you fire Bruce?
Well, we're talking aboutlaunching a smartwatch.
He has no competence in any ofthose things and, besides, he's
dead.
J.B. (15:11):
Well, I mean, okay, all
right, all right, all right, all
right.
Chris (15:17):
If we're trying to be
serious here, Gene seems to have
.
I mean, now we've got twoactors, so we're talking about
characters that they play, asopposed to them.
J.B. (15:25):
You can take it however
you want.
Chris (15:27):
Okay, well then I would
still fire Bruce.
I love him and everything, butI don't see what he brings to
this particular party.
So I would make Gene the bossand hire Rain.
I agree with Gene.
I would fire Rain.
I mean Rain is brilliant.
J.B. (15:40):
I agree with Gene.
I would fire Rain.
I mean, rain is brilliant.
He's very funny.
His character obviously is afire.
But, bruce Lee, I think thatyou're making a mistake there,
not because of his lack of aheartbeat, but because he has
(16:01):
such like, he's such a fitnessguru.
But I think that thatexperience would lend itself
well to a smartwatch business.
Chris (16:11):
Maybe as an advisor, but
I was around the UW when Bruce
was right Early days back inearly days.
J.B. (16:24):
One of the themes that
comes up often in your book is
this concept of the enemies oflearning ways in which we
hijacked ourselves from realgrowth, and years ago our
producer, micah, was one of yourstudents and mentioned some
interesting practices, likemaking funny faces and lip
syncing contests, that go on inthe workshops that you hold.
(16:47):
What's going on here, and whatis the relationship between
unseriousness and personaltransformation?
Chris (16:54):
Well, let's take that
apart a little bit.
So we're talking about change,changing world, and the theme
that we use or basically we seeeverybody expresses everybody's
all in favor of change, as longas it doesn't mean me and it
doesn't mean now.
Other than that it's a greatidea.
Everybody should go for it.
Change and learn are synonyms.
(17:17):
You can't change if you don'tlearn and you can't learn if you
don't change.
Then the question then becomesokay, well, how do we learn?
And this is where we as humansget in trouble, because we have
been sold a bill of goods aboutthe phenomenon of learning,
where you go to school andinformation gets poured into you
and you memorize it andtherefore you've learned it.
(17:38):
And that might work in school,where the object is to pass
tests, but it's not very helpfulanyplace outside of that.
So what we figured out workingwith athletes and soldiers,
people who are under constantpressure to perform, is that
learning has got to be seen asthe development of new
competence, a new capacity foraction, right Action that you
(18:00):
couldn't take prior to thelearning experience.
So what we traffic in our quoteproduct is embodied competence.
Embodied means you can take thenew action without having to
stop.
Think about it, look it up insome book and competence is
simply the capacity toconsistently produce the desired
result.
Ok, great.
So one of the enemies oflearning that you refer to
(18:22):
there's a gaggle of them, butlet's just focus on this one and
where we tend to get people'seggs scrambled is while your
mind understands andunderstanding can, in fact,
occur in an instant in the end,it's your body that learns, and
the body only learns one way,and that's through practice.
No amount of understanding everproduced competence.
(18:43):
Only practice does Right.
So now let's look at okay, sohow does learning work?
We've been told that there'sthis learning curve.
No, it doesn't work that way.
Works like a set of steps, andthe difficult part is no,
learning occurs in the comfortzone, right, and humans like to
be comfortable, okay.
(19:05):
So the first step is you got towake up.
Now we have a fancy chart,which we don't really have a
capacity to show you, but itstarts with a simple step called
B-I-T-C-S.
B-i-t-c-s, which is not a badspelling of a bad word.
It's the bull in the china shop.
So the bull in the china shopis the person who's thrashing
around making messes in somedomain they don't even
(19:27):
understand and they're blind towhat's going on.
Now, if you're lucky, somebodywho cares enough about you will
take you aside and say you know,let me explain to you about
china shops, and then you'llhave this dawning of awareness.
Oh, and it usually is announcedwith a two-word declaration oh,
s-h-i-t, you know?
(19:47):
Aha, I'm awake Now, at thatmoment, this is critical.
You've got three choices.
You can be what we callself-declared ignorant, which is
to say, wow, there's so much toknow in the world today.
I can't know it all.
So I recognize there's thiswhole domain of action and I'm
not going to.
Where we get in trouble is tendto be a pretender.
(20:09):
Oh, I heard about that, so thatmeans I know something about it
.
Right, these are the guys whoare really obnoxious at parties
and so forth and so on.
Or you can actually become alearner, and now we get to the
meat of this.
So to be a learner, the firststep on that ladder, is the most
difficult one for adults andwhy most adults don't learn
anything, and that you've got tobe willing to be a beginner.
And the beginner is the personwho makes all three of these
(20:32):
declarations.
I see there is some domain inwhich I am not competent and I'm
committed to learn.
I'm not going to pretendanything else.
I'm committed to learn.
And since I'm committed tolearn, I'm going to get a coach,
somebody who knows this domainbetter than I do, and I'm going
to listen to his or her advice,direction, whatever.
And the third one is and this isthe hard one for grownups is
(20:52):
I'm going to be at peace withbeing a beginner, because it's
in the realm of being a beginnerwhere you make all the stupid
mistakes.
I'm a beginner tennis player.
My serve looks more like abaseball home run.
There it goes, it's up and overthe 400 foot fence.
Beginner skiers, you cross yourtips all the time.
You spend all day on your faceor your butt, it doesn't matter.
Beginner is to be the personwho's making some of those dorky
(21:14):
moves, and most adults don'twant to do that because they're
too invested in being cool, andthat's why we don't learn
anything, being a beginner also,you open yourself up to that
sense of wonder.
J.B. (21:27):
I just this summer started
watercoloring.
I've never watercolored before.
I've never.
I like I've sketched a littlebit in the past, but I just
started sitting down andpainting.
I did a couple of YouTubetutorials.
Very like, I am not good.
There's some serendipity inthere that surprises you and you
(21:50):
actually put some paint onpaper that looks good every one
in 30 times that you do it, andthat, to me, is such a motivator
.
It's like growth hurts, growthis painful, and when you get to
the other side of that is whenyou gain the most wisdom.
(22:11):
Other side of that is when you,when you gain the most wisdom.
How do you?
Chris (22:16):
stay in that area of
positive growth.
Well, let's, let's look at thisin a couple directions.
So let's take you for yourexample.
So you, you chose to learnabout painting, right?
Nobody, nobody made you, nobodysaid if you don't do this,
you're fired.
No, you, this is something youopted to do, so you had a
motivation that took you intothis process.
You want to do it?
(22:37):
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So that's one way that we launchonto a learning process.
Oftentimes we find ourselveskind of thrown into it, whether
we like it or not, and that'sthe harder part.
But the easy path is and I likethe word you use there wonder.
We approach it with a mood thatwe call moods, a mood of wonder
(22:59):
, and the best example of thisis little kids, right?
Little kids live in a mood ofwonder.
Everything is new and excitingand dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, da,
da, da.
And they couldn't care lessabout how they look.
You know, the classic example isthe is the toddler learning to
walk.
So they get up, they're hopeful, themselves up on a chair or
(23:22):
something, and you see the lookin their eyes when they first
stand up.
Their eyes are big as saucers,like whoa.
This is the coolest thing everWhoa.
And then they let go of thechair and fall over.
Now they think that's hilarious.
They laugh and pull themselvesback up.
If we had to learn to walk withthe way that we approach the
(23:44):
world now, we'd never walk Mostadults.
You crawl, you pull yourself up, you go whoa, that's pretty
cool.
You fall over and go.
Oh God, I hope nobody saw that.
That was really embarrassing.
I'm not going to do that again.
We'd all be crawling around.
So that mood of wonder is reallyimportant, and how you maintain
it over time frankly is achallenge, because as we get
(24:08):
older and older, we tend moreand more towards cynicism and
that's a killer for learning inparticular, or anything in
general, and so it's a constantfight.
And the real determinant factorthere is the whole phenomenon
of commitment.
What are you committed to do?
(24:29):
If you're committed to learn topaint, then you keep taking the
lessons or watching theYouTubes or whatever it is you
set out and you just keep going.
And the hard part for adults isor for people, not just adults
is we let our feelings trump ourcommitment?
I don't feel like it today.
I don't want to.
It's too hard.
(24:49):
Our little inner whiner getsgoing and you let him or her
take over, and then you're introuble.
J.B. (24:56):
So you've got to let your
commitment to whatever it is
you're learning trump whateverit is you're feeling in any
given moment in time you areworking with some of the biggest
(25:24):
and most important companies inthe world, and with all this
change comes burnout and alsotons of self-reflection about
work and about life.
Are people more engaged or lessengaged than they were before?
What are you seeing?
Chris (25:44):
Well, I think we have to
start with one of the premises
that you made there I'm not sureI want to take that which is
that with change comes burnout.
Not necessarily.
It isn't change that causesburnout.
It's how we cope or not with itthat causes burnout.
Change is change.
It isn't water that causesdrowning, it's that you can't
(26:07):
swim.
The issue is not that you don'thave enough time, it's that you
are what we call over-involvedand under-committed.
You're over-involved andunder-committed.
You've got your fingers in toomany things but you haven't
really jumped into any of them,and that's where trouble, that's
(26:28):
where burnout comes from tryingto do too many things.
You've got to draw someboundaries for yourself.
Say, okay, here's where trouble, that's where burnout comes
from.
Trying to do too many things.
You got to draw some boundariesfor yourself, right, and say,
okay, here's where I'm going tofocus my energies.
I tell people look in your lifeyou've got maybe four or five
things that you can literally becommitted to because you have a
human body.
Your body can only do so manythings.
Everybody thinks, oh, I canmultitask.
(26:49):
No, you can't.
J.B. (26:52):
Yeah, that's right,
absolutely true.
Chris (26:55):
I'm going to figure out
what's important to me and
what's not, and the stuff thatisn't.
You just got to let it go.
So it's just a prioritization,it's a prioritization back to
what are you really committed to?
Well, I don't know what I'mcommitted to.
I said yes, I can tell youexactly what you're committed to
.
Look what you've created.
Look at your life.
That's exactly what you'recommitted to.
Oh, no, I'm committed togetting fit.
(27:15):
No, you're not.
You're committed to talkingabout it.
Go do some different things.
You haven't taken any actionsconsistently to produce that
result.
J.B. (27:25):
So what should people
think about when trying to lead
their own efforts to changeright now?
Chris (27:31):
Well, it depends, of
course, on what it is you want
to change.
All right, but start with whatis it you're committed to and
why?
What's your, why your personal,why?
Why am I doing this?
And too often it's becausesomebody else has got
expectations of you as opposedto.
I choose this.
So get really clear what do youchoose to be committed?
(27:53):
How do you want to spend yourlife?
What do you want to developcompetence at?
What do you want your financial?
Boom, boom, boom.
There's four or five domains oflife that you really want to
get clear about and then let goof everything else.
I mean, it's hard because we'reinundated in the everything
else all the time, but that'swhat it's going to take and
(28:15):
we're going to have to come toterms with.
Okay, this whole social mediathing is making everybody nuts
and at some moment it's a hazardfor kids and even adults,
because our brains tend towardsbeing addicted.
So if you would just stopsocial media for a week, you'd
be shocked at what happens toyourself.
And I don't mean don't listento podcasts, don't take that
(28:37):
wrong.
J.B. (28:39):
Well, Chris, where can
people keep up with you and
connect with you and your work?
Chris (28:44):
Well, the easiest place,
of course, is on the web
humanpotentialprojectcom.
We've got a YouTube channel.
We've got LinkedIn stuff.
You know all the usual stuff,all these stuff.
You can get my book on Amazon.
I can get it to you, but,frankly, they get it to you
faster.
J.B. (29:00):
The book is the Power to
Transform your New Future Awaits
, as Chris says, it's availableon Amazon and we will link to it
in the show notes.
And that's the show.
Thank you, chris, again, forbeing on Unserious with us.
If you like this episode,please share it with your
(29:22):
friends and drop us a rating andreview it while you're at it.
Keep up with us on LinkedIn.
Our Instagram handle is atunseriousfun and our website is
unseriouscom, where you can findall of our previous episodes
and show notes.
This podcast is brought to youby the Unserious Group.
We are a communications andstrategic consulting practice
(29:42):
that helps companies and leadersnavigate the rapidly changing
workplace by lowering the stakesand working more efficiently,
playfully and creatively.
At Unserious, we make work play.
Chris (29:56):
Hey, that's close.
Our motto is we make work, work.
J.B. (30:05):
You're testing me here.
You're testing the limits of myPopeye knowledge.