THE LAST TIME YOU HAD A GREAT IDEA

All right. We're starting to see a few folks coming in here. I love the temperature is to just answer it is muggy, it is humid. I took a trip to Jamaica last month with my family and the tour guides love the attraction. They would ask us, "What temperature do you think the water is?" And no matter what we'd answer, they would say, "No, it's wet." The temperature is always wet.

The temperature is humid if you're in South Florida. We are going to go ahead and get up and running. Mark and John, if you can keep an eye on that waiting room, letting folks in. We're going to go ahead and get our day started. As you can see, the screen that I am sharing on here is the screen that identifies what we have coming up next month.

Actually, at the end of this month, is our Beyond Limitss-- I'm sorry, it's our Invent Your Future open session. We have the end of the month starts on August 25th. We'll have sessions on the 25th, 27th, and then on September 1st and 3rd. This is our flagship program. This is four virtual sessions that we will run, and I'll flash this QR code back up at the end when we're finished.

But without further ado, let's get our day up and running and started. So thank you all for being here. Thank you if you have your camera on, it's great to see you. Keep the chat open. Like always, we are going to use a lot of opportunities to share our thoughts, feelings, and ideas in the chat.

If you are brand new to Beyond Limitss, welcome. Very happy to have you. And if you've been here before, like many of you have, welcome back. But the way that we operate things at the Beyond Limitss sessions is this is a monthly discussion. We do this on the first Friday of every month, and it is designed for leaders like yourself, people who want to think differently.

We're not looking for the status quo. We don't like to have leaders show up that say, "This is the way we've always done it, and we're going to continue to." We're looking for folks that think differently about the way that they conduct business. And in doing so, we bring a new topic every week. We'll open it up for discussion, and we'll share a perspective that we have. And then the exciting part is always what comes through the chat and your comments.

It's the ideas, the commentary, the suggestions that you bring to the table. So I encourage you to take the next 56 minutes that we spend together having a discussion in the chat, being introspective, and thinking through where we get some of our very best ideas. A little bit of history on The Pacific Institute. If you recognize this gentleman, that's Lou Tice, that's the founder of The Pacific Institute. Fifty-five years ago, he said, "All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside and it works its way out," and we still operate on those exact same principles here today.

He was a high school football coach at the time, and he went to Stanford to get his master's degree. He met a gentleman named Al Bandura, who is the father of [self-efficacy and social cognitive theory], and he basically asked himself a question that started this whole journey that our organization has been on, which is if our thoughts determine our beliefs and those determine our actions, what if real, meaningful, lasting change all starts with the thoughts that we have that's running through our head? And that single question has spanned 60 different countries, 23 different languages, 10,000 plus leadership teams, and seven million human beings that have all been exposed to the types of things that we're talking about. It gives us the opportunity to see real, meaningful, lasting change for individuals, teams, and organizations across the board. And when you're looking for change, we know that the core principles are this.

We believe you're designed flawlessly to get the results that you're getting. If you've been here before, you've heard me say this before. You are built perfectly for the results you get, and if you're happy with them, keep doing what you're doing. If you're looking for more, and more is different for everybody, it's growth, it's alignment, it's energy, it's innovation, it's returns, if those things matter to you, every last one of those things that you want more of, it all starts with the thoughts that run through your heads. Simply put, we think it before we do it.

So the very first thing that we're going to do, like we always do in these meetings, is let's think about things that are positive. We're going to do my favorite portion where you open up the chat, and I want to hear something good. It's been a month since we last got together. I want to see that chat light up of all the good things that are going on in the world. This can be something big, like I just dropped off my daughter at college,

and she did wonderfully. Or this could be something small, like I left my dogs in the house for too long yesterday, and they didn't chew anything. But when we think about the things that are good in our life, it changes the tone. So let's see some answers in the chat. What are some of the things that are good that are going on with all these wonderful humans?

Randy's going to go play a round of golf. That sounds great. Six grandchildren, three in the last year. My word. So far, we've got two something greats.

What else is good that's going on in the world? Our entire team exceeded their Q2 goals. My gosh, we're going to go celebrate. Spending a bunch of time with grandsons over the last couple of weeks. This is my favorite part.

Look at all the people with their cameras on. Anybody have a frown on their face? 10-year-old just went back to school, which can be maybe something good, maybe in the opinion of the 10-year-old, maybe something not so good. I have a 15-year-old that goes back to school on Tuesday. He has a very different opinion about whether that's something good or not. Getting on top of an issue.

As always, this doesn't take long. I check the clock. We spend 90 seconds on this. By the time I'm done talking, it'll be a full two minutes. Anytime you have an opportunity to have a discussion with another human being, if you stop and take just a moment to reframe around something that's good, it changes the dynamic of the conversation.

It changes the temperature. And as somebody said that it's humidity and muggy and things that you can feel, you can feel differently about a discussion if you start with something good. So I appreciate everybody participating and sharing with me their something good. Today's topic comes from a question, and I'm going to start off with a question for you in the chat. There was a study that was done by a little company you might have heard of called IBM.

They did a study of over 1,500 global CEOs and leaders. They were asked to name the single most crucial competency for the evolving workforce. So for today's 2026 AI-enabled volatile workspace, they asked those individuals what quality, what competency is the most important? So let's see some answers in the chat. Let's see what your answers are.

Let's get some predictions. 1,500 global CEOs were asked the same question, what's the most important competency? And what do you think the answers were? Give you a chance to think through some of those for just a second. Getting some good answers. Very open-minded.

The ability to think has come through. Randy says being a strong communicator. I like that. Cindy says the ability to change. The amoeba of a person.

Adaptability, open-mindedness. Barb says the ability to pivot. Kelly got a quick thumbs up on that curiosity. A lot of really good answers are coming through here. Multiple talks about pivot.

These are all really good answers. I bet everybody here is not even going to be a little bit surprised when I tell you what the actual answer is. Out of all those different competencies with AI skills and technology and the ability to operate your cell phone and all these other skills and competency, the one that came out as number one across the board was creativity. The individual thought that was brought by those individuals. The thing that ChatGPT doesn't do for you, your ability to think through and come up with solutions, your ability to be a problem solver.

That was number one that came back on the list. Not your MBA, not your degree, not your competency, your creativity, your ability to solve a problem.

So think about that for just a second. Of all these different skills, the most valuable one is the one that absolutely everybody has and has had since were a child. So here's the question. If we know that that matters, and the most valuable thing we can do is be creative and think outside the box and have individual thought, when was the last time you had a really good thought? When was the last time you had a really good idea?

Open up the chat and think about when was the time you had a really good thought. What were you doing? Were you going on a long walk? Were you taking the dog for a walk when you had your brilliant idea? Was it in the shower?

Was it on a long drive in the car? Was it doing everybody's favorite thing, the dishes or the laundry, mowing the lawn? Put some answers in the chat. What were some of the things that really-- When was the last time you had a really good idea? We got sleeping answers.

So did you dream up the idea, or did you wake up at 3:00 a.m. just to have the thought? While talking to two different people over 18 hours. Nick says it's all the time, the gift of ADHD. My man, Nick, I love that answer. So if we do all this really good thinking in the shower, everybody here should just be really clean all the time.

Look at that. Letting a few more come into the chat there. During walks, collaborating with others. I asked this question in a group the other day, walking the dog came up a lot. So let's do a little bit of a preview.

Everybody gets their ideas in various different locations. There is something that is extraordinarily common that I'll point out later on that is true of all of these. And absolutely every answer that's gone in the chat, unless I've missed any over here on my little chat screen, has had this very same thing in common, which I'm going to mention in the future. So you get a little fortune-telling there. But here's what we're going to do today as we talk about the idea of ideas, creativity, and where we can generate more of them.

We want to talk through what's actually going on in your brain, because there's a little bit of neuroscience that's taking place when you're actually having these best moments. So when you're in the shower, when you're in the car, when you're walking the dog, there's actually a bit of neuroscience that we're going to unpack lightly. We're going to talk about what has happened to the moments during our day where we used to have those ideas, and how we've started to engineer some of those organic thinking times out of our day accidentally. We'll talk a little bit about what that's actually costing you, what that's doing to you and your productivity, to your team, to your organization, and to yourself, of course. And then we're going to give three practical tips.

Now, these are not productivity hacks. I'm not going to tell you how to use AI, and I'm not going to give you a four-step process, but there's going to be three productivity hacks that you can kind of work through that can help you make more protective moves this week to protect your creative thinking time, if you will. So here's just a little concept. Raise your hand or put a thumbs up on the screen if when you were a little kid you said the following in the same way to your parents, "I'm bored." Remember that? I used to say that all the time.

My parents used to hate it. And my father used to say to me, "How can you possibly be bored? Look at all the things you have. You've got video games, and you've got TV, and you've got other stuff." And here I am, fast-forward 30 years later, and I hear my kids say it, and I go, "How can you possibly be bored?" But when we said that, were complaining. We were complaining because we don't like to be bored.

There's part of us that just says, "I don't want to do it anymore." So to give you a reference point, there was a study that was done back in 2014 that gave human

beings the opportunity to sit in a room for 15 minutes and do nothing. No cellphone, no nothing, it was just a dark room. They did give them a chair, but you said, "Sit in the room and do nothing." In other words, sit here and contemplate for yourself. You did have a secondary option. On the wall, there was a button that you could push that would give you an electric shock.

So your options were sit and do nothing or experience physical pain. What percentage of people do you think pushed that button? Let's hear some guesses. We'll do it two ways. What percentage of men do you think pushed that button?

Put the answer, men, and your number in the chat. And what percentage of women do you think pushed that button? Tracy says, "100% of men." Here's what the studies showed. And remember, this is just sitting in a room doing nothing. Your option is no pain or pain.

That thing that human beings are predisposed to not want to experience. 67% of men pushed the button, 25% of women. That's how much we hate being bored. When faced with the option of sit and think or cause ourselves pain, two out of three of us, using the men's room, said, "I'll go with pain. That's better than boredom." Because what it breaks down to is boredom is boring. And we've been conditioned to feel this way since were very little.

We didn't want to sit around and be bored. There's a reason we used that sing-song, "I'm bored," when were kids. Because it was torture, and it was terrible. The problem is, when we engineer out the boredom, we engineer out the creative thinking that goes along with it. So there was a really interesting book and a really good TED Talk that I'll share with you, I'll put the link in the chat here in just a moment, that has to do with this exact concept.

And the idea behind this is that, I want to give credit where it's of course due. So our author here, Manoush Zomorodi, was the one who came out with this book, "Bored and Brilliant." The title says it all, how spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self. I bet you did it today if you drove to work. Did you watch the lane lines all day and read all the signs, or did you space out somewhere in your mind and start thinking through a conversation you had with a friend or a relative who has had the thought before in the car, "Holy crap, how did I end up on this road? I've been in my own mind for a while." It's where you're doing some of that deep thinking.

She did a TED Talk on that, that I'll share with you in the chat momentarily, that talks through exactly what's going on in your brain and what takes place. And what she did is a bunch of research that frames the science behind what goes on in our brain in those moments of, quote, "boredom." And the nice part about that is the work that we've been doing here at The Pacific Institute for the past 55 years takes exactly what she's been describing, and it just reframes it into action. So instead of hearing about what you should do or could do with that big brain of yours, we're going to try to take the next 40 minutes or so to try to translate that into a bit of action. So first and foremost, pseudoscience. There's a lot more in-depth science behind this.

We're just going to scratch the surface. But when we move into that moment of boredom, where you start thinking, "What am I supposed to do? I'm bored," and your mind starts to, quote, "wander," you're entering into something called the default mode network in your brain. You're moving into the pathways. You're moving into all habit.

You've moved into that point in your brain. That's why you're not paying attention to the other cars around you. You're too busy thinking through whatever you're thinking through. So what ends up taking place is when that happens, you start connecting ideas in your mind that were maybe seemingly unrelated before. You start connecting two different thoughts like, "Hey, you know what?

I could do this with this over here." This is where you start replanning what your den or living room is supposed to look like in your mind, and you start space planning. And when you do that, you start solving some problems because you're moving rapidly through these thoughts in your mind, and you start solving the

issues. You start looking for solutions for the problems that were out there. And while you do that, there's this amazing mechanism in your brain that narrates. So you start telling a story to yourself, and in that story, you're constructing a narrative about who you are, and that reshapes your identity. You start becoming the person who solves your biggest problems and has these wonderful ideas.

And when you have a story like that, that you tell for yourself, it opens up the possibility for setting different types of goals. Because you're able to take inventory about where I am, but when you're connecting these great ideas, when you're starting to solve the problem in your mind, when you're telling yourself a story about you're the person that solves these problems with your great ideas, your goals change. The possibility about what you can do changes, and what you think you can become changes. So the ability to do that big, deep thinking that allows you to take that next step all happens in these protected moments that we've unfortunately accidentally engineered out of our day. So we used to have moments in our day in the past that organically created cracks in what were doing.

And those cracks were good. We could think during them. You know what they look like. Everybody said it. Showers seem to be the number one answer.

We got a bunch of clean people that think a lot around here. The commute in the car. But guess what? How many people 100% work from home that don't have the long commute anymore? Me too.

I used to do a lot of my really good thinking in the car. Tons of it. But I don't commute anymore. I just roll out of bed, put on a clean shirt, and I go to work. Right?

The walk in between meetings. How many people the moment this meeting ends are going to go right to your next Zoom meeting? You won't get up. You won't do anything. You're just meeting to meeting.

Whereas if this was 10, 15 years ago, or heck, even six or seven years ago, you'd at least have to get up and leave the conference room and go meet with another person, which meant the walk time room to room, which gave you the thinking time room to room. But we've engineered those out of our day. The wait in line Be honest, when was the last time you waited in line at Starbucks versus calling your order in ahead of time on the mobile app so you could just walk in and pick it up? All of the time that we used to spend thinking and waiting and contemplating, we spend on our phone. My wife traveled yesterday.

She got stuck in the airport in Nashville for four hours. How do you think she spent most of those four hours? On her phone. Yeah, absolutely, like the rest of us. She had a wonderful last hour of her trip.

Phone battery died, and her charger wasn't working. So what did she do for the last hour of that trip? She went and listened to live music because there's a boatload of it in the Nashville airport, and she started planning through some things in her mind. And when she got off the plane, even though she'd been traveling for 12 hours through a series of delays, the first thing she wanted to do was start writing down the ideas that she came up with during that flight with a dead phone. Four hours of flying and an hour alone in an airport, she was able to come up with a bunch of ideas.

And that's just what happens organically with all of us when we have those moments that have unfortunately been engineered out of our day. And they're all filled, and the one common theme is the one that I kind of previewed a little bit earlier when were talking. The one common theme about all those things that we said where we get our best thinking is not one of those is one that happens with your phone in your hand. When you go back through that chat, every single one of these times when we talked about our best and most creative moments, not only did we not have a phone in our hand, were not in front of a screen. The exact thing that I'm doing right now is the problem, is looking at a screen.

Raise your hand if you have more than one computer monitor in front of you right now. Me too. Raise your hand if you have more than two. Now, if you count your cellphone and your Alexa devices and all the other things, how many people have about a dozen screens that they could look at any given time?

We didn't used to task change. Look at all you honest people. This is great. We're all cutting into the confessional here. Now, here's some data.

Let's go back into the time machine. Believe it or not, 2004 was not just a few years ago. It was 22 years ago. So just a few years ago, back in 2004, 22 years ago, there was some data that said how much time we spent on a particular task. Now, in 2004, we had the internet.

Everybody had an email address. Facebook existed. It wasn't very popular, but it was out. Even then, though, were only spending about two and a half minutes of focus time before we moved our eyes from one screen to the next. Two and a half minutes.

That's a lot of task changing every hour. But were able to do it two and a half minutes. Now we fast-forward to today, 22 years into the future. Any guesses? Let's see some guesses in the chat.

How much time in between switching screens today? Please pick a number smaller than two and a half. I saw some big smiles. I saw some very guilty-looking looks. I like Jeff's answer the best, 0.5.

Not even a full second. So the real number is, because keep in mind, believe it or not, we do actually stay on those screens for a while sometimes, because when you doom scroll, you tend to not look away, so some of the bad habits do actually increase this, but here's the data. Every 47 seconds. That means you've done it three times since I put this slide up. Oops, I just looked at that screen.

Oops, I just checked my cellphone. We reach for our phone 144 times per day on average. If you are here, do a quick exercise with me. Everybody close your eyes immediately. Just close them.

Can you locate your phone without opening your eyes? Almost every head in the room that had eyes closed is nodding along. You can open up and see each other nodding along now. We know where it is at all times, and as a result, we fill in all those gaps. I get up to go from here to over there.

I sit down at the DMV, where I know I'm going to waste three and a half hours. What does every single person do? They show you their bald spot. Here's the top of my head as I look at my phone. So the idea is, what are we going to do to engineer some of the time back in our day, partially to get off the phone, but partially to get away from the screens and partially just protect the fact that we need the time to think?

So here's the science. Here's what we're missing. Here's what we're starving ourselves out of by being completely busy all of the time. First of all, it's not free. It takes energy, and your brain is lazy.

It wants to save energy because your brain believes that there is a saber-toothed tiger that you have to run from, and your brain wants to save enough energy so you can always run away from that saber-toothed tiger. So switching tasks is expensive because your brain says, "What I'm doing right now is working. Why would I want to change to another task?" So we want to try to stay the same. Here's some science behind it. The researchers at UC Irvine said the average person, in order to get fully engrossed back into a task, takes anywhere from 17 to 23 minutes.

Now, if we're switching tasks as frequently as we're switching tasks, we're spending a lot of our time then not being fully focused, because until we can really get the wheels turning, every time we switch tasks, we're giving it, like, 60% to 70% of our best. That may still be very good, but it's not 100%. There's only 2.5% of the human population that can actually multitask. And since math is hard, I'll do it for you. 97.5%, which means most of the rest of us, which means maybe out of this group, maybe there's one person who's a true multitasker. The rest of us are just like me, doing things poorly when I claim I'm multitasking.

Because if you do anything at 50% or 60% as well as you can, you're doing it

poorly. So when we know that we're switching tasks and we think that we're being productive because we're simultaneously trying to check all of the boxes at once, and we can move from this device to that device, to my phone, to my Amazon, all it really means is we're diminishing the output. We're diminishing the quality of the work that we do. So question, where did you used to have time in your day? We've kind of answered that before, but this is a two-parter.

What's filling the time in your day right now where you used to have that free time? What's taking it away? We know where we used to have it. It was the shower, the walk, the car ride. But now put some answers in the chat.

What's stealing your attention? The two powerhouse answers right off the bat, email followed by social media. Jeff came in with the to-do list. A very honest one, phone scrolling. Social media.

Checking email. Well, those emails aren't going to check themselves, they say. Nobody said checking stocks or the hooded emails. Pretty common. Most of the ones here, for the most part, with the exception of a to-do list, involved a screen.

Although be honest, how many of you have that to-do list on your computer screen, and you have to open it up to check it? Some of us still have the old-fashioned disorganized Post-It note chaos on their desk, but a lot of us have moved that to a screen as well. So here's the part that should really stand out for us, as leaders in particular. What we should really be paying attention to that should kind of stop us in our tracks is that as leaders, we know the data, we know the research, and we know it to be true because we see it in others, that we're paid for our original thought. We're not paid for our resume.

We're paid for the things that we can bring to the table. We're paid for our ability to be an independent and unique thinker. It's no longer the days of all hands on deck means we literally just need you for the hands that you provide. You're paid to be a thought and to be a thought partner for your organization. And the original thought is built into the moments in our day that we've actually engineered out over the last 10, 15 years.

So we've done all these things to engineer filling in all these cracks in our day. But what that did is it took out the time in our day where we get to be our most creative and our most original So when IBM names this as the number one competency back in 2010, and they say, "This is the thing that matters the most," and here we are 16 years later knowing that that has only climbed higher. The part that we should just pause and think about is we said it was most important, we agreed it was most important, and then we built the conditions that removed the ability to do that organically. We engineered out the ability to have this independent thought. So the thing that we're paid for, the thing that we should take pride in, the thing that AI is not going to take away from us, we've started to minimize the amount of time that we get to do it.

In other words, our most valuable asset is our brain, and we're not giving our brain enough opportunity to spend time in the workshop. So it's not all bad. There's some solutions on the other side. But I want to start by recognizing that there's absolutely nothing wrong with you, okay? You're not less creative than you were before, and you're not less strategic than you were before, and you're not less capable than you were before.

None of those things have changed. What you are is you're cognitively depleted.

Raise your hand if you use the expression at the end of the day, "I'm tired. I'm exhausted." When people ask you in a meeting, "Hey, how are you doing?" And your first answer is, "I'm busy. I'm swamped. I got a lot going on." Or, "Thank God it's Friday. This week's been hectic." It's because we didn't have any time to start connecting those dots, and if you're never able to create the story in your mind, the only story you're left with is the one that's true.

I'm swamped. So does this match your experiences? I want to see some answers in the chat. One, does it match what you're experiencing? But what is it looking like for you?

What's the experience for you? Let's see some answers in the chat. What are you experiencing at the moment, and what does it look like for you when you're cognitively depleted? Your brain is tired. Ooh, I love the visual.

More of a treadmill than a mountaintop. And when things are moving in the wrong direction, that treadmill or that treading water feeling is so frustrating because you're exerting energy and you're actually going backwards. Some good answers in there. Some very honest answers, right? You start to feel frozen.

What a good, honest answer. You start to feel stuck. This isn't writer's block, though. There's a difference between writer's block, where you're right on the precipice of an ideand you just can't quite get it. That's not the same as this.

This is you're dry on ideas because you're not giving yourself the opportunity. And if you never sit down and give yourself the opportunity to use your most valuable asset, it's like any other muscle. It starts to get weak. Don't go for a lot of walks or hikes, runs, your legs start to get weak. Don't use your brain for creativity, your imagination gets weak.

So it's our most valuable asset, it's our most important muscle. We want to make sure that we exercise it. So the next part of this are going to be some tips. These are high level. I'll go into details on each one.

But there's three basic things that you can start doing right away. And at a high level, protect the cracks is one of them. Guard your unscheduled moments where your true insight lives, where the genius that lives inside of you has an opportunity to come out. Design some constraint into the day. So give your brain something to push against.

Give your brain some parameters to work within. And then number three, treat thinking as a leadership discipline. Protect it the same way you would a strategic issue. And I'll go into each and every one of those in just a second. So tip number one, protect the cracks.

We mentioned those before, those cracks. Time in the shower, walking the dog, relaxing, the time in between meetings, the time to not be on your phone while you're waiting at the DMV, whatever the case may be. But you don't want to fill in every single gap in the day. Show of hands or thumbs up in the chat, how many people when they look at their calendar over the course of a day and you're looking at your week and you see a day where there's a two or three-hour gap in between meetings and you start putting things in there? Because I can't have an empty calendar.

I got to put something in there. What if people saw my calendar and there was nothing in it? How would I feel about myself if there's nothing in my calendar? So we start putting all sorts of things in there instead of just recognizing that's my time to use my brain. The walk in between meetings is not wasted time.

It's good. Take the long way. Waiting in line is not such a bad thing. Yeah, you can check stocks on your phone. Yeah, you can check social media.

Yeah, or you could just stare out the window like we used to and think a little about your day.

The daydreaming is doing a lot more work than you think it is because while were told you're daydreaming when you're a child, that meant you're not paying attention in class. That's why it was used as a negative connotation. "Kevin, stop daydreaming" was I'm staring out the window when I should be paying attention in science class. But now daydreaming is future planning. You're paid to be a thinker.

Daydreaming should be organized into your day. You should protect your time to think. So a commitment that you can make to yourself is pick a transition time next week. It's a Friday, so there's not a lot of time this week, but pick a transition time next week. Something in between a pair of meetings or in between two appointments or two tasks that you have on that ever so important to-do list, and engineer 15 minutes of no phone time in there.

See what happens if you take a screen out of some of your time and see what happens. You might have to put your phone under something. Chances are you'll reach for it. I know I did. But that's tip number one, protect those cracks.

Build time into your day instead of filling it with your day. Don't be like my wife who waited for the phone battery to die before it happened organically and then did all the wonderful thinking. Do it on purpose ahead of time. So that's tip number one. Tip number two, let's build constraint into the day on purpose.

Let's engineer it there. So that means, kind of like I said last time, phone in the other room. If your phone is not in the room with you right now, raise your hand. Who are you people? Bless you, Rebecca.

If your phone is not in sight right now and you can't actually physically see it without just barely turning your head, you are absolutely the exception to the rule. Almost all of us. If I played a game and said, "How quickly can you show me your phone?" Everybody's going to do this really fast. Takes zero seconds at all. So if we put it in another room, how can I possibly see that I got a LinkedIn notification if it's in another room?

And I don't know about you, every time I get a LinkedIn notification, I have to look at it. Now I'm looking at my computer screen, that same computer screen that has my email. Now I say what you say. I have to check my emails. And all because of a notification on my phone, I gave up 15 minutes of my day.

Walking meetings. Anybody do walking meetings with people, like actually go for a walk? You live in a cold area, you have to walk inside. But moving yourself without a screen, no computer, no phone, no anything. Just me and Henry taking a walk, talking like humans.

We don't get to have an AI recording. We actually have to remember what each other said. You can turn on your recording if you really want to, Henry. We might have some good stuff. Use your day off.

One day off of the most used apps. Anybody ever done this? Anybody ever gone to their phone and said, "I'm going to take Instagram off it today. I'm going to delete from my phone today." Watch the TED Talk. I'll put it in the chat here in just a little bit.

I think I put it in there before. Watch that TED Talk. Part of that TED Talk includes voicemails from people explaining what their day was like when they went one full day without their phone. Unfiltered people describing the panic they felt without their phone. So even if you don't do the activity yourself, you can hear the visceral responses from others in that because we get so accustomed to having our phone and that app.

But if you're losing 10, 15 minutes a day to Instagram or TikTok or who knows what, what might you be thinking about in those extra 10 to 15 minutes? And then model it because if you're in the meeting and you're running the meeting and when everybody comes into the meeting, they find you in the front of the room on your phone, you're modeling that we're not here to do thought and discussion and brainstorming. You're modeling that we're here to be productive and on our phones. And be honest, how many people feel productive when you're on your phone during the day? I do.

You know how good I am at responding to emails and texts? You know how fast I am at responding to emails and texts, and if I don't check them

constantly? Note the heavy sarcasm. So putting some constraint in there on purpose, building constraint into your day on purpose. If you said for one full meeting, I'm going to put my phone in another room. One meeting I'm going to do as a walking meeting instead.

One day this week, I'll add it back tomorrow, but every day this week, I'm going to take one app off of my phone. No Duolingo today, sorry, you're going to have to use one of your street protectors. No Instagram for a day. No LinkedIn. People aren't going to know what you're going-- Just see how it goes.

When you do that, remember that you're modeling the behavior. And my James Baldwin quote that I always say: "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but have never failed to imitate them." And employees work the exact same way. Tip number three, this one's important. Treat thinking as a leadership discipline. Treat thinking and spending time to think as a discipline.

Just like going to a leadership development workshop, right? It's a discipline to exercise your body if you choose to go to the gym and get on the StairMaster. It is an exercise to build a muscle that is your brain to dedicate some time to thinking. Free thought is no different than working with free weights. It's an opportunity for you to continually move thoughts around in your mind, make those neural pathways stronger, create that story that you want to tell, and build goals for the future.

So senior leaders who are paid for that thought and need the conditions to have that thought, think about it this way: If you were a leader, would you blow off a board meeting or a team meeting or a sales meeting? Of course not. Those things are important. So why would you blow off the opportunity to have the conditions that produce your most valuable thinking? If you consider 15 to 30 minutes of alone time to think through a problem, take a walk without your phone to think through something, is just as valuable as attending a sales meeting.

It's just as valuable as attending a board meeting. It's just as valuable as attending a strategy meeting because what we're doing is organizing a plan. It's a meeting in your mind, and that's where we do our very best thinking, because we're unencumbered by the screens that are in front of us. Creating that boredom on purpose says it's not wasted time. We can be extraordinarily productive in this time, but we have to create it.

Because if every moment of what was previously referred to as our best thinking time has moved into our best I can fill it with my phone and screens and other stuff time, our number one asset is not developing. And in case I'm not making that very clear, that number one asset is your brain. So here's what this looks like with us. If you've done work with us before, you're going to see that a lot of what we've been talking about here shows up in the work that we do. We've been doing the same stuff for 55 years.

We just haven't called it a default mode network. Scientists have been, but we've been talking about it as visualization, creating that balance and growth wheel, picturing the future that you want, seeing something that you want before it actually exists, and creating that empty space for your brain to go fill in. The color by numbers that your brain creates for you. The self-image. Who am I?

Am I the person that can think through and solve these problems? Am I the catalyst? Do I believe myself to be the person that does these things that I've been thinking about in my mind? Or if you don't have any time to think about it, when do you establish that new self-image that you need to grow into? When were little, we pictured the big kids riding bicycles.

I want to do that someday. I want to become a person who rides a bike. But if we never have time to think through that,

the goals change. So with goal clarity, and we're seeing ourselves as a different person, understanding that we see ourselves as a different person in a future that hasn't happened yet, that changes the goals that we're willing to set for ourselves. The bigger the goals, the bigger the accomplishments. And with that, there's always been this thing living inside of us. We've always called it natural creativity.

And this is what's going on in that default mode network, is your brain is connecting all these dots. It's the exact same mental technology is what we call it. It's just different words for it. Visualizing what you want, seeing yourself as a person who can accomplish that, setting goals that only that person could accomplish, and then observing the world around you and letting your creativity fill in the gaps for how you can accomplish that goal for that person that you've not yet become. That's what we do in a nutshell.

So the bigger pattern is technology didn't steal your creativity. It didn't take it away. It just filled the conditions that actually produce the creativity. What we've discovered when we do our interviews, when we work with organizations, when we sit down, what we're seeing is the ones that are pulling ahead are the ones that are protecting the conditions for their own thinking. They're setting aside brainstorming meetings.

They're doing the walking meetings. They're putting the phones down when they do conversations amongst the team so they can let their best and most creative thoughts happen. And the ones that are falling behind are the ones that are outsourcing that free time. Some of it is monetarily outsourcing, and some of it is just saying, "No, I'm going to push this off to over here." So if we're trying to be individuals and teams and organizations that are pulling ahead, we want to do the things that look the same as the organizations and the individuals and the teams that are pulling ahead. So what we want to be able to do is protect those.

So we've covered a handful of different things. Got about a little over 10, 15 minutes left. What I want to do is I want to hear from you. What are some of the things that you can use? I'd love to see an answer from everybody, but let's solidify it.

Commit to yourself. What did you find most useful from what we talked about today? Some of our free tips about protecting productivity. Honest answer from Mark that it was a reality. Molly, I love that.

The value of boredom. I like the use of the word value. Some commitments to a thinking time. Building in some reflection time. Remembering to model that.

By the way, you've all fallen into the trap. I'm forcing you to think right now. If you look away from your screen, you're doing it even better. Ooh, I like that. I wasn't calling it the thinking time, but call it the pause.

I love that. Another way of thinking about that is sometimes people think, "Well, I don't want to stop. I'm going. I'm going so fast. I have so much to accomplish." I do not watch auto racing.

Raise your hand if you do, though, if you know anything about auto racing. Great. They pit, don't they? They stop and they take pit stops, and they always stop and take a pit stop,

sometimes even if they don't need to, X number of laps before the end because they need to prepare. All that is is a pause to get organized and get ready. We can pit stop the exact same way that the race car drivers do. If we pause, slow down, start doing our best creative thinking about the future, it's going to work a lot better than just going 1,000 miles an hour all the time. Part two of our question, identify one of the cracks in your day.

Find a crack in your day and declare how you're going to protect it. I love that answer. "This has allowed me to no longer feel bad when I'm spending my work time on a creative project." Yeah, think about the guilt that we sometimes feel. My gosh, I've been working on this for so long. Some other good reflections, the importance of saying no.

Here's some good ones for protecting time. The right after lunch, no screen time. Yeah. Absolutely. Raise your hand if you have in-person meetings and everybody does the same thing when the meeting ends.

They pick up their phone off the table, where if they were really polite, it was face down, and immediately start checking, what did I miss during this meeting? Happens all the time. If we maybe build in a little bit of that time to have a conversation, maybe Randy and I can have a conversation right after the meeting together without our phones and get some of that real creative thinking. Jeff with one of the more unique options, which is taking time to feed the bison. I have not seen that suggestion all that regularly, but creating that reflection time, good stuff.

I'd find Randy, we'll go golfing, but there's no screens on that either. Golfers, hikers, surfers, bikers, people that do these activities that are outside that involve no screen time. This is not, by the way, me telling you that you're going to win the next argument with your wife about you playing too much golf. You should still spend more time with your family, but golf gives you a bunch of uninterrupted, no screen time. So now that we've done a whole bunch of talk about no screens and a whole bunch of other things, let me go completely against myself and say, I would love to see you all on a virtual screen with us.

So one more opportunity. We do have a virtual session of Invent Your Future coming up at the end of this month. If you've not been through these sessions before, we do four two-hour virtual sessions on a Tuesday and Thursday over two weeks. These are the types of discussions that give you the opportunity to meet with others like this in an environment like this. But instead of putting answers in the chat, you spend time in breakouts with one another where you can share best practices, discuss what's working, what's not working, and learn how to take what we call mental technology and put it into daily actions that can hopefully make meaningful change in the way that you operate yourself, your team, and your business.

So I will go ahead and put a link in the chat that goes along with this as well that you will see. We're going to wrap up just a little bit early today, so I will stick around if anybody has any questions. We do have about 10 minutes or so left to spare. So if you do have questions, comments, anything else at all, please feel free to stick around. Otherwise, as always, I greatly appreciate your time, your attention, your willingness to share time with us on a Friday morning.

I sincerely hope that everybody puts their phone away and has a good old-fashioned conversation with somebody and protects their cracks. I will see everybody back here next month on September 2nd. By the way, this is the two-year anniversary of Beyond Limitss. We've been doing this for two full years, so if you've been around for that long, thank you for continuing to come back. See everybody next time.