Back to Basics: Why Busy Leaders Stay Stuck: The Belief Underneath

All right. We are going to go ahead and get our day up and started. So good morning and welcome to another session of Beyond Limits. If you have the ability to turn your camera on, we love to be able to see your smiling faces. Certainly, if you can stay on mute.

We open our sessions the same way every time. We want to put your location in the chat. We want to know where you're joining us from. Always nice to see how much reach we have. We also have a short pre-session survey.

I can see those responses are flying in now. Thank you so much to those of you that have completed that. It's just four short questions to get us started. Go ahead and open that up. If you have not been to a Beyond Limits before, welcome.

Thank you for joining us. What we do for these sessions is we want to try to get a group of individuals together like yourselves, who are individuals that think differently. Leaders who want to think about the work that they're doing, the goals that they have, the things they're trying to build in a different way. And the goal is for this to be an honest conversation about the things that are actually driving performance inside of teams and cultures and individuals presently. So, the way this works is we'll bring a topic, we're going to bring a perspective, and we're going to open it up for discussion.

So have that chat ready to go. We're going to have a lot of opportunities to put your answers to a few questions in the chat. The absolute best thing that comes out of these sessions is absolutely what comes from the group. Your insights, your comments, your reflections are the very best parts. So, we encourage you to spend the next 56 minutes with us this morning, this afternoon, depending on your location, participating in that chat.

If you're brand new to The Pacific Institute, thank you for joining us. Welcome. We are a 55-year-old organization built on the principles of cognitive psychology. We help people unlock their ability to think differently, to act differently, and create the type of future that they want with intention. So on purpose, by design, not by default.

If you go back all the way to our origins back in 1971, our founder, Lou Tice, said, "All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside, and it works its way out." And that's exactly what we do with individuals, with teams, and organizations. We start with you. And what we have a belief is that you, your team, your organization, every single one of you, you're all perfectly designed for the results that you're getting right now. Everything that you're doing is a flawlessly designed machine to get you exactly where you are. You've followed the recipe for today's results perfectly.

And if you're really, really happy with today's results, then I would encourage you to continue to keep following that same recipe. Heck, you can even share it with the rest of us. But if you're looking for more, and many of us are, and more can mean a lot of things, right? That can mean growth, that can mean alignment for team, for organization, for self. Energy.

I mean, raise your hand if you'd like to have just a little bit more energy. Anybody who didn't raise your hand, it's probably because you're short on energy. Innovation, ideas, right? We want to have more ideas, more creativity, get in that flow state whenever we can. And returns, because most of us have some sort of a return that's attached to our name, some sort of a result.

But it all starts with the way that we think. And we have a mantra here that says that beliefs drive behavior, and behavior drives results. So the first thing that we have to do is make sure that we focus on the

beliefs before we can focus on the behavior and then get the results. So that means there's that conversation that's going on between your ears. We call that self-talk. And what I'd like for everybody to do is control that self-talk for just a moment with a session that we call Tell Me Something Good. Tell me something good.

And the way that this works is you're going to put something in the chat. Every single one of you that has a keyboard, type something good in the chat. That could be absolutely anything at all, big or small. Let's see something good, because we are going to turn on our awareness to all the good things that are going on right now. Who's going to be the first person?

A new couch is the first one on there. Congratulations. That is very exciting. Last month, I got a new refrigerator. It was the most exciting day of the entire year.

Starting a new job. 4.0 GPA. The sun is shining. Celebrating a wedding anniversary. Heading to a lake. I can't keep up with all of this.

It's so good. There's a lot of good things that are going on. Keep flooding that chat. I absolutely love it. Buying a home, starting a job, AI agent doing a bunch of work.

Chat's moving so fast, I can't even keep up with it. This is my favorite part of this session. And the reason that we do this is because it is an opportunity for us to take the thoughts that we have and use them to guide ourselves through the rest of the day. This is something that I encourage you to do at the beginning of your own meetings with your teams, with your families. Nobody is in a worse mood than they were 90 seconds ago when we first started this.

So what we're going to try to do is use this positivity, use these good vibes, use this good feeling, and take it throughout the balance of our session today. And right now, what I want to know from each and every one of you is, how's your week going? Let's see some answers in the chat. How would you describe your week so far? Let's see how these weeks are going.

Lot of busy, productive, and steady. Lot of scattered, lot of organized, busy, sporadic.

Ah, starting to see some unforeseen challenges for someSo as we move forward, I want to explain a little concept for us here. There is a bit of an addiction that goes on in the world that we have started to celebrate. It's a common one that we come across. We see it all over the place, and it's the addiction called busyness. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about when we talk about the addiction of busyness.

If you could describe what busy is, write your answer in the chat. How would you describe what being busy is for you? What does that mean? Let's see the definitions of busy. Give everybody just a little bit of time to type those in there.

Some good ones in here. I like Bobby's answer, "Scheduling too tightly to even have a breathing break." Ah, some common answers. Henry, we're going to talk about that one in just a second. Real good, honest answers going in here. Can't pick their heads up because they're working on things, putting out fires.

So what we're going to focus on today is busy. I think everybody here has a good understanding of exactly what we mean when we say the word busy. There's some darn good examples in here, and hopefully those of you that feel like you put your answers of busy, hectic, overwhelmed, maybe have a little solace in knowing that you're not alone.

Anybody ever read the book, "The One Thing" by Gary Keller? There's a podcast that goes along with that. His partner, Jay Papasan, dedicated an entire episode of their podcast called "The One Thing," and it was called "Addicted to Busyness." And what we're going to talk about today is there's a couple tips that are in there that I want to share with you, and we're going to add a little bit of Pacific Institute jet fuel on top of those to try to make them just a little bit stronger. And there was a few key things that showed up in there that I want to bring to your attention. The first one is high achievers are the ones that are at the most risk.

So yep, I'm absolutely talking to each and every one of you. The people that are the ones that are the high achievers, the ones that set big goals for themselves, those BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals, you're the ones who are at the most risk for falling victim to being addicted to busyness. Your brain is wired, okay? There's science here. The brain is wired to keep this cycle going on an ongoing basis, and the fix is not a better calendar.

So my answer is not going to be to tell you how to time block or what app you need to use or what AI efficiency is going to be there. The fix is going to be something that happens with the way that you think. There's going to be four solid practices that Jay shared from "The One Thing" podcast that are going to help this cycle. But we want to make sure that we put a little bit of our flavor into that to make sure that those work as well as they possibly can. So there's a little bit of data that goes behind this.

So you all put your definitions of data, but there's been some real bright minds that have put some thought in the very same area. 94% of professionals work 50 plus hours per week. Let that sit in for just a second, because we were all raised by Dolly Parton to believe that 9 to 5 was as bad as it got, and there's some extra days or extra hours or extra something in there that Dolly wasn't singing about because according to Harvard, almost all of us do more than that. 60% of smartphone users, which is basically everybody, stays connected for over 13 hours a day. 13 hours a day of work. That's a very different song. 12% of the people that we look up to on Twitter, those famous people, those busy ones, the ones that are on the social medias bragging about how good and great and wonderful they are, 12% of them are using their celebrity humble brags to talk about being too busy to create this air of that's what we're supposed to be, that this is what you need to be in order to be successful and famous and have 10 million followers like me.

And 77% of Americans report burnout in their current career. Imagine looking at these screens and knowing that three out of four of us are burnt out. Yuck. This has become a status symbol in America. How many people, when they say that they're busy, are saying it with just a little bit of a brag in their voice?

"Oh, I can't, I'm too busy." Now everybody knows that I'm really, really

busy, really, really successful, just like the influencers on Instagram. But it's not Instagram's fault. This has been around forever. But here's a thought to just let sit in for a second. If busyness is your drug, then rest will feel like stress.

Let's put some thoughts in the chat. I got a lot of smiles, a few nodding heads, even a couple of dirty looks. But what are your thoughts about that? How does that resonate? If busyness is your drug, then rest is going to feel like stress.

I like that. Busy is good. We're making money, but it can also be not providing our clients the work and productivity they deserve. Good stuff. Love that answer, Lolly.

Back-to-back meetings with no time to do real work. I had eight meetings today. Didn't do any of my actual job, but I had eight meetings today. Yeah, can always find something to do. Like having better focus on priorities.

Ah, comfort zones. Good. Stacy, you're reading the show notes. Looking for the next dopamine hit. That's a preview of what we're about to talk about.

Yeah, constantly thinking about what's next. Short, prompt, lots of answers. This one clearly hit home. But then you get the Cheryl Hicks answer, carpe diem. All right.

So as we're moving along, this is something that we all understand, and as I just mentioned a moment ago, we want to blame this on current times. We want to blame this on how things are right now. But this isn't a new concept. So let's go in the time machine real quick. We're going all the way back to 1922.

You've heard of him. His name is Albert Einstein, and he was about to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1922, he wasn't there at the ceremony to receive his Nobel Prize in Physics. Why? He was too busy.

He was double-booked. He had too much going on. So instead of accepting his Nobel Prize in person, he was over in Tokyo giving a presentation. And while he was at that presentation, he had this bellhop come up to him, served him, did whatever he did in his room, dropped off his bags. And when he reached into his pockets, he realized he didn't have any money to tip the bellhop.

So instead of providing him with a tip, he took out a piece of paper, and he scribbled a piece of paper. He scribbled him a little note, and he handed it to him, and he said, "Maybe if you're lucky, these notes will be worth more than a tip someday." And the notes that he wrote on that paper still resonate pretty well today.

He said, "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness." And if you're looking for a dollar amount, in 1996, that letter sold for $1.7 million, so it did turn out to be worth quite a bit more than a regular tip. But I think the key takeaway here is that even over 100 years ago, from someone that we all consider to be pretty darn smart, there was advice that was out there that was saying, it's better to set more modest and comfortable goals for happiness than it is to be constantly on the hamster wheel. He said this while not attending receiving his Nobel Prize. So this is not something that is new. This is not something that we invented in our generations.

We can't blame it on the millennials. This has been around forever, and what it is, is it's something that's going on in our brain. Because we know what we're supposed to do, and then we know what we actually do, and there's a gap that exists in our brain. And here's what leaders know. We know for sure what Einstein wrote over 100 years ago is true.

We know that a calm and modest life brings more happiness combined with constant restlessness. We know this to be true, but if you look at your calendar today, raise your hand if immediately after this meeting, you go right to another one. Raise your other hand if you go right to another one. We're running out of hands if you go to one after that. So we are all guilty of exactly this.

I know we got people putting feet and arms and legs in the air. It's crazy. But what we end up doing is we go right back to those packed calendars. We go right back to the pattern that we've been in of chasing busyness and making sure that we keep those calendars full. So that gap between what we actually know, the knowledge that we know, the professor that lives in our brain that says, "Yeah, that's the right thing to do," just like Einstein said that was the right thing to do.

But it doesn't make us dumb that we're not doing it any more than it made a genius dumb that he didn't do it. But what we're actually doing is following this, and because it's an addiction, let's talk about the symptoms, so we know what we're looking for. So if we're going to think about the symptoms of this addiction of busyness, let's start with the first one, the yes problem. We're all going to jump into the confessional here. This is where we say yes to things before we've evaluated whether or not they deserve your time.

If you believe that you have the yes problem, go ahead and write the word yes in the chat. It should come pretty naturally to you. Doesn't feel so bad now that you see that a lot of other folks do that. But not everything that we're asked to do is of equal value.Our brain sort of thinks so. Our brain likes to make those little to-do lists.

We love checking things off the to-do list.

So lots and lots of times we have the yes problems. Best case scenario, a couple of you said the sometimes problems. So the sometimes saying yes problem. The other one, the busy badge of honor. You wear your packed schedule as proof that you are valuable and needed.

If they can see that my schedule is busy, if my clients know that it's hard to find my time, you wear your packed schedule. Go ahead and say badge of honor, or write the word badge or honor in the chat if you think you do that. If you think that you might wear the busy badge of honor, write badge or honor or badge of honor or a typo'd version of something like that in the chat. Ooh, just sometimes. Yeah, we know what it's like.

How about guilt? This is a big one. How many people here, put guilt in the chat if you feel like this is true. When you stop, it feels like something has gone wrong. When you see your calendar has a great big opening in it, the first message from your brain is, "Uh-oh, something is wrong.

I'm guilty. I should be busy." The silence starts to feel irresponsible. Lot of guilt. And the final one, motion mistaken for productivity. Symptoms of this look like you get to the end of the day, you are exhausted, you've put in 13 hours, and you look down at what you did, you haven't made any progress.

You can't actually track what happened. Put the word motion in the chat if you think this might be the case. It's a good quote, Jim. I like that. It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.

But motion mistaken for productivity, and I think this is one that a lot of us can relate to, because you get to the end of your day and you worked so hard. You did so much. You went to so many meetings. But then you try to measure how much further you made it from point A to point B in progress of your goals, and you realize you tread water, held still. So which one of these ones hits home the most?

Which one of these ones hits home the most? Let's put an answer in the chat. I'll play music again for just a second. I really want to see which one do you think hits home the absolute most? There's some good honest answers going in there.

The yes problem for not one but two reasons, excited about the activity, but should delegate, and who else is also a people pleaser? The self-talk that goes with that sounds like, "What would they say if I said no?" So we know what's happening. We can identify the symptoms. We have all probably checked off each and every one of these at one point in time, but some of them probably rise to the surface a little bit more than others. So let's look into why it actually happens.

So the reason that this happens goes into that silly little thing inside of our ears called our brain, and there's something called the Zeigarnik effect, and the way that the Zeigarnik effect works is, is it says our brain treats the unfinished tasks in our mind differently than it treats the finished ones. There's a little bit more priority for an unclosed loop than there is for a closed one. This is true if you've ever been a waiter or a waitress, you're really good at remembering the order until you've put the food down. You can memorize exactly all the things that everybody ordered, but as soon as you complete the order and you walk away, if they said, "What did everybody order at that table?" you probably remember food, because our brain has the tendency to close the loop and say we can move on to the next thing. So an open loop, it ends up taking more mental bandwidth than the things that you've closed.

And that open loop is that unfinished project. Who's got one right now? Who's halfway through a project at home that is the first thing you're going to do the second you walk through the door? It permeates your mind. It's constantly there.

It's that unchecked box on the to-do list that's driving you crazy, and your brain doesn't want to let go of it. It's like getting a song stuck in your head. It's just going to stay on it, and stay on it, stay on it till you can remember the rest of the words and play the rest of the song. Your brain is wired to hold on to what is unfinished. So when we start opening up all these multitasking loops, we are giving our brain a ton of stuff to hold onto.

We are giving it the addiction that it wants. We're feeding the addiction, if you will. What we end up doing is we create a dopamine loop with these closed loops that make ourselves feel good that maybe don't accomplish what we want to accomplish. So what ends up happening is every small completion gives our brain a little bit of reward, like that little bite of candy that I can't resist when I walk by the candy jar. And it feels good, but it doesn't get me closer to any of the health goals that I have.

It just feels good in the moment. So what happens is your brain can't really tell the difference between clearing your email inbox and actually solving a strategic problem. How many people here set the daily goal of always clearing that inbox, but would probably still make it through your goals if you didn't at the end of the day? Or how many people have put aside other work because they need to make sure they get that inbox down to zero? Because we can't leave those unread.

There's two unread text messages. There's two Slack messages I haven't gotten to yet. But our brain can't tell the difference. So when there's an important task that needs to be closed, like I've got this project at work, and another one over here like I need to respond to this text message or my email inbox. While one of them is way more important than the other, our brain checks off the box and feels just as good on either one.

So we've created an addiction for ourself that doesn't actually serve us beneficially. It's the same reward, but we're not actually moving towards the goal with one of those options. So you end up doing more of what feels rewarding because it feels good. Who's already done Wordle today? It's really early in the day.

I've already done Wordle. It feels really good. Now, that wasn't productive. It didn't move towards my goal, but now I can check off that I got it in three. That's right, I'm bragging.

I got it in three. But that didn't get me any closer to my goals, but it felt just as good as getting to the next thing on my to-do list, because our brain is wired for that. The insight here is these keep us in a constant state of motion without making any progress. And just like the hamster actually does enjoy the wheel. When they do the studies, and they do all the things, and they hook the hamsters up, they are actually happy on the wheel.

So are we. We're doing the exact same thing. We feel good about the motion, and then we beat ourselves up later about the progress, or better stated, the lack of progress. How many people here sometimes feel like they're on that hamster loop? Wave your hand or put the word "yes" in the chat if you're not on camera.

So what ends up happening here is there is a belief that exists underneath here. There's a belief based on our

experiences, off of what we've seen in others being successful, how we were raised, who we've been around, what we've done in the past, what's been our recipe of success in the past. Those are all loops that we want to get into, and when we check those boxes, we feel really, really good. So here's some tactical fixes. Block your calendar. No problem.

Just block your calendar. Batch your emails. Just say no more often. Problem solved, right? Has anybody read a book that tells them how to block their calendar, and then you don't block your calendar?

Has anybody gone to a seminar about how to batch your emails, and you still handle them the exact same way? Who's actually read books like the one that Jim recommended about how to say no more often, only to turn around and say yes more frequently? Because tactical solutions don't solve our problems if we don't change the belief behind them. If we don't change our belief that blocking the calendar will work, or that batching the email is the right thing to do, or that I really can say no more often. Those are solutions that we jokingly around here say are dental floss.

Great strategy if you use it, but it doesn't do you any good sitting in the drawer. Just like blocking your calendar, or saying you're going to batch an email, or reading the book about saying no more often doesn't do any good until you change the belief behind it. So what belief about yourself might make it feel... What do you have about your belief, or what do you believe about yourself that might make it feel unsafe to stop being busy all the time? Is it that worth equals output?

Because some leaders, they do believe that their value is measured by how much they produce. Put a thumbs up on the screen, or put a yes, or I confess. Put something in the chat if you think that this is sometimes true of you. Not all the time, but that worth equals output. I am the numbers.

I'm in charge of the sales department here at The Pacific Institute. Every time we've ever missed a number, it has been my fault. Worth equals output. Lots of folks feel that exact same way. Fear of falling behind.

Work FOMO. Some leaders believe that slowing down means they are falling behind. If I slow the pace down, even though I've read the book, "Slow Down to Speed Up," I've heard the expression, I've heard people tell me that, but if you have a fear of falling behind, put the word fear in the chat. That just falling behind, even slowing down would mean that perhaps you're falling behind others.Never mind the fact that the fastest thing that I can think of is a Formula One race car driver, driving a race car, and they stop and take pit stops all the time, and they slow down before every turn. So we should be the same and not have fear of slowing down.

How about indispensability? Some leaders believe that if they're not in the middle of everything, it's going to fall apart without them. We call this the my mother syndrome. If you don't take care of everything, it will fall apart. But these are not schedule problems.

There's belief underneath these. Because if you change the belief about your worth and your output being directly tied, if you change the belief about what slowing down really means, if you change the belief about whether or not

you need to be absolutely in the middle of everything, then the behavior can change with it. Stacy, you're absolutely right. FOMO, fear of missing out, is absolutely on there. But for all of you, if you were to stop being busy tomorrow, you wake up tomorrow, you're not busy, what are you worried might happen? What could potentially take place?

Great answer, Laurie. "I might actually sleep in." "What are you afraid would happen?" Rest. "More time with family and kids." "Worry I wouldn't get things done." If you've already written a fear, consider if this is like a fear of when you said there's monsters under the bed, that maybe just saying it out loud made you not quite so afraid of it. Maybe just labeling it helps a little. Good, honest answers.

Thank you all for sharing. Let's talk about a couple of tips. So I led with talking about the podcast that I watched that had some real solid tips. There's going to be some tactical fixes that I'm going to put up on the screen here for you. First one, this comes directly from the podcast.

This came directly from Jay. This is his advice. He calls it Goals Before Phones. What he means by that is start your day with what matters before you let the world start telling you what's urgent. Now, your definition of phones is your definition of phones.

For some people, that means social media. For other people, that means work social media, AKA LinkedIn. For other people, that means not checking their inbox just yet. For you, it's going to be something different. But what is the priority?

What is your version of Goals Before Phones? What are the things that matter in your day that you absolutely want to get to first before you let somebody else tell you what's important? The fire that has to be put out. I put big air quotes around "has to be put out." Goals before phones. There's some good answers going into chat.

Some people lean to religion, some people lean to exercise, some people lean to reading, some people do certain types of work.

But Goals Before Phones is a real solid action, tactical solution that you can take. Number two, Clear the Decks. I like this one just because it sounds cool. Give yourself a defined window for reactive work. Set aside time during your day and then protect everything outside of that window.

If you know that part of your job absolutely is putting out fires because you are, in fact, the firefighter in your office, it doesn't mean that you have to be every minute of every day. Clear the decks means give yourself a designated window to do that reactive work where you can run around like a chicken with your head cut off, doing the things that you're great at doing, but protect the rest of the time in your day so that when you get to the end of that very busy day, you still made progress towards your goals. Clear the decks, protect the time that matters, protect the time outside that. Suggestion number three, milestone thinking. Take the big, hairy, audacious goals, the big stuff that needs to happen, and break it down into what needs to happen this week, not this quarter.

Start thinking about what are the little steps that can happen. Anybody here use EOS within their organization? You know exactly what we're talking about, doing everything on a weekly basis, making sure we're making progress towards that. It becomes a problem if we don't address it. Getting to that versus every month gives you a heck of a lot more opportunities to see what's going on, but it also gives you an opportunity to determine whether or not you're making progress towards the real goals.

When I say real goals, I mean the organizational ones and the ones that move you towards the things that you want, not the checkbox on emails, things like that. Fourth suggestion, accountability. Don't do it in a vacuum. Tell somebody else what you're doing. Announce it to another person, because people who commit to their goals are significantly more likely to take action on them.Depending on what study you read, it's anywhere from 5 to 1 million times more likely that you accomplish your goals, depending on the study that you read.

But one thing that I've seen consistent on every study I've ever read is telling other people about your goals and writing them down unequivocally makes them more likely to accomplish. But our rules still apply. All of these are technical fixes that only work if you change the belief behind them first. How many people here are golfers? Cheryl's going to raise her hand first.

If you're a golfer, you know exactly what I'm talking about because if you're a golfer, if you don't now, you probably did at one point in time in your golfing life, have a club you didn't trust. So you went out and you bought another one. I can't hit a six iron, so I'll go buy another one. But if your belief never changes, you just end up leaving those tools in the bag and you don't use them. And if your belief don't change around tools like this, they're just as worthless as the six iron that sits in your golf bag and doesn't get used.

Because if you don't believe it's going to work, you're never going to use it. So these are wonderful tools and I stand behind them. I think they work great, but they're only going to work if your belief goes along with it. If you still believe that your worth is tied to output, then you're going to fill every space on your calendar. Just like if you believe you can't hit your six iron straight, you might as well just go put the ball in the water ahead of time.

So the tools aren't the problem. Most of the time, it's how we use them. Better stated, our belief in whether or not we're even going to use them. It's our operating system. It's the beliefs behind the system.

It's the man behind the curtain, the woman behind the curtain, the human behind the

curtain. So if you were to look at these different things, what's one thing you might be able to do differently? This is a two-part question. Which one of these four do you think you could apply right away, this week or next? And the second part of the question is, what would you need to believe in order for it to actually work, in order for it to take effect?

What is one thing you're going to do differently? Jim's going to tell somebody. Accountability. Take time to enjoy the sunshine. I love it.

Beth's going to write down some goals. Randy's going to clear the deck. I love it. Grace is going to clear the deck. Welcome, Richard.

Ah, Goals Before Phones. I like it. What are we going to need to believe in order to use these tools? Lot of clear the deck. I like this.

Lot of good answers coming in here. Lot of accountability. I love seeing some of the beliefs that are coming on to back up these new actions. So let's circle back to our good friend, Albert Einstein, who gave us really good advice over 100 years ago. Remember, he told us that, "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness." Translation.

Here's what he really wrote. Let's bring this up to speed. He didn't write a productivity app, right? He didn't write Clear the Decks. He didn't write accountability, right?

He didn't write Goals Before Phones. I don't even know if they had phones. He wrote a belief on a piece of paper. He wrote a belief, and beliefs are absolutely changeable. That's exactly what we do.

The work that we do at The Pacific Institute is not teaching people how to manage their time better. It's not giving you a productivity hack. It's not giving you a new six iron. We teach people how to manage your time better. We help individuals, we help teams, we help organizations learn how to change what they actually believe is possible.

When you change what you believe is actually possible, then you start changing your actions, you start changing the results. Remember, beliefs drive behavior, behavior drives results. This is a really good strategy, like the one that Albert Einstein wrote. It's a really good strategy. So is Goals Before Phones.

So is Clear the Decks. They're really, really good strategies, but they require a behavior. And in order for you to get the results that you want out of that behavior, we know that that belief has to change first, because if we don't believe that Goals Before Phones makes a difference, we're not going to do it. If we don't believe that telling somebody else about my goals creates accountability that makes me more likely to accomplish them, I'm not going to do it. So it starts with the conversation that lives between right ear and left called beliefs.

If we do that at scale, we call that culture. When more than one of us is doing that same thing and we have the right beliefs to drive the right behavior, so in other words, the beliefs and behavioral norms of how we do things around here, that becomes our

culture. And when you change the way you think, AKA your beliefs, the behavior ends up following. And when the behavior change, the results end up taking care of themselves. That's when you start becoming in a state of flow, moving towards your goal, and you start becoming a person who can actually say, "I'm accomplishing my goals, not just checking off my to-do list."Because goals should be for things that you've never done before, and a to-do list should be all the things that you already know how to do. And we should feel really good when we make progress towards our goals, not when we've just been a taskmaster.

So the challenge is to try to find the bigger things that we can do, not just the little tasks, check off the email inbox, make sure I respond to all the things. What are the actual steps towards meaningful things that are going to move us towards our goals? So my challenge is for everybody to use this group for accountability and to put in the chat, first and foremost, what did you find most useful today? The University of Waterloo did a study that said 66% of newly acquired information is forgotten in the first 48 hours if we don't commit to using it within those first 48 hours. Which means if you heard something that you like today, there is a two out of three chance that you're going to forget it by Monday if you don't use it.

So what did you find most useful today? Let's lock it into memory, commit to others. What did you find most useful? Was it a tip? Was it a strange Kevin analogy?

Was it clearing the decks? Goals before phones. Everybody a chance to put some answers in there. All right. Albert Einstein's quote from 104 years ago resonating.

Good job, Albert. And some accountability. I like Bill's answer, the importance of belief. That is very much reading between the lines. I like the answer from Thomas, the notion that motion can be misinterpreted as productivity.

Remember, race cars take pit stops all the time, and they go really, really, really fast. Part two of this exact same question. How can you apply that as early as today? You know what you found most useful. What action can you take?

How can you apply this? And Richard, of course, yes. I like Richard's answer. "I'm not going to check my email until I get this deliverable out the door." Wait, you're going to stop and do work instead of checking an email? Thomas says, "No phones until I get to the office." I love it.

Em's going to define current beliefs. Write out a new replacement belief. I love that. Randy setting aside time to clear the deck. So from here, we want to give an opportunity for folks to take future opportunities with us.

When we talk about shifting beliefs, we talk a lot in these sessions about how we want you to go ahead and change your belief, and we talk about that like it's easy. It's not. It takes time. It takes practice. We don't shift our beliefs about important things lightly.

We don't change our beliefs about small things lightly. But there is a process that we follow that helps individuals work through the steps that it takes to get past the things that they find themselves to be committed to by accident. And one of the ways that we help folks through that is through one of our flagship programs, which is called Invent Your Future. And Invent Your Future is a program that we host virtually. It is four 2-hour sessions delivered over two weeks.

It's an opportunity to dig into topics like this with groups of anywhere from about 12 to 16 other professionals. And it allows us to share what we call mental technology with our audience and hopefully be able to go into more depth with these types of tools and techniques from the technical side of things, but with the fuel of a positive belief and a belief that they're actually going to work. So when you come out of our workshops, the goal is not to come out, to use my golfing analogy, with a brand new set of clubs. It's to come out with a belief that you already have all the clubs that you need to play the round of golf that you want. And if you're not a golfer, then you have all the ingredients that you need to be able to create whatever you want, going back to the initial recipe analogy.

In addition, we have a special guest host next month. Yours truly will be out of town on the first Friday of June, so Richard Resnick is going to be hosting our Beyond Limits session. Highly recommend that you attend. He's going to be doing a Back to Basics session, going all the way back to the origins of The Pacific Institute and how to create a balance and growth wheel for greater success. So while I will not be there live, I hope you all will.

We're going to stick around for a few extra minutes with additional questions today. We're finishing up just a little bit early today, so thank you all for being here, for your time, for your attention, for your reflections in the chat. If anybody would like to be in contact with me, I'm going to be dropping some information in the chat so that you can do so, and we'll stick around here for just a little bit longer. But have a great rest of your Friday, a great weekend, and I guess it's now the month of May, so have a good May.