Host: We're here today once again, actually, with best
selling author, professor and leadership expert Ryan
Gottfredson, Ryan, good to see you.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, great to be back on. I was looking at the
notes and my notes, and I think the last time I was on was over
five years ago.
Host: Yes. So episode 317 back in January of 2020. Is what we
last had you on. And boy, did things change abruptly right
after that.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah. So that was January, and fast forward a
couple months, and I was with my publisher in Nashville for my
first book, success mindsets in March, and we're there second
week of March. I think it was like a Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday. We're doing this red carpet event. I get an email,
you know, essentially, schools are shutting down, and I'm in
Nashville, I'm thinking, oh my goodness, what is happening? Am
I even going to get a flight back home? And that was the
weekend that, of course, the world essentially shut down. And
then fast forward, two months later, is when my book actually
hit the shelves. And so it was, in some ways, I think there were
some good things with that, with the book coming out of that time
and other things, it just made things really difficult. So I
think in some ways it was good because a lot of people were
maybe spending a little bit more time reading. But on the other
hand, is I do a lot of consulting work with
organizations, and that completely shut down. So I think
there were some good things and that helped it hit the Wall
Street Journal and USA Today bestseller list. But then my
business slowed down for a little bit, like many others
did. But that's okay, it picked back up. And you know, we are
where we are now, which is a different type of crazy.
Host: Just a little refresher for our audience, we talk a lot
on the Action Catalyst, about growth mindset, fixed mindset,
about mindset general for you, there's actually four. It's not
growth and fixed. Do you mind just kind of walking our
audience through that just as part of our table setting for
the conversation today?
Ryan Gottfredson: One of the things that I've learned is
mindsets is a term that is thrown out, I feel like rather
loosely, right? A lot of people talk about maybe leader mindset
or entrepreneurial mindset, and oftentimes, when people talk
about mindsets, they talk about mindsets as our attitude towards
something. But actually at a scientific level, even a
neuroscientific level, our mindsets are much deeper than
our attitude towards something. They're actually the mental
lenses that we wear that shape how we view the world around us.
And so what that means is our mindsets are the part of
ourselves that automatically interprets information in
certain ways. So for example, this is what explains why some
people can see failure as something to avoid, but other
people see failure as an opportunity to learn and grow
and in our mindsets, they really are the most foundational part
of who we are. And for most of us, we're not conscious of our
mindsets, nor do we know the quality of our mindsets. So the
quality of our mindsets exist along along a continuum from
being more wired for self protection to be more wired for
value creation and whether we have a self protective mindset
or a value creating mindset, both feel right to us, but one
helps us stay safe in the short term, but holds us back in the
long term. That's the self protective mindset and the value
creating mindsets allow us to step into short term discomfort
for long term value creation. So I coach my son's basketball
team. My son is 10 years old. That means that he and his
teammates are not very good, so it's my job as a coach to help
them to develop. And so one of the things that I'm trying to
help them develop at this age is, is they're all right handed,
and I want to help them learn how to shoot a layup with their
left hand when they're on the left side of the hoop. So this
is a pretty important skill for a basketball player, and so I'll
instruct them. When we do, we call them lay up lines. They
land up on the left side, and they take turns to shoot a
layup. And I'll ask them, all, right, try to shoot this with
your left hand. And I get three different responses. The first
response that I get is I get some players that don't even try
to shoot with their left hand. Well, why wouldn't they try to
shoot with their left hand? Well, it feels uncomfortable.
They're going to look awkward, and they're probably going to
miss their shot. You. So there's some justifiable reasons for
them to not try that. The second response that I get is I get
some players that are willing to try and practice, but they're
not willing to try in games. Well, why aren't we willing to
try in games? Well, it's because now my my parents are recording
me for the rest of posterity to see, right? And of course, I
don't want to let my team down. I want to win the game. There's
a lot more pressure in that moment. So that's the second
response that I get. But then the third response that again, I
only have a couple of players that are willing to do this, but
they're willing to try in practice and in the games. Well,
why are they willing to do this? Well, they're they've developed
this capacity to be able to feel uncomfortable, look
uncomfortable, and miss the shot, which may even mean
letting their team down in that moment or even in that game. But
for what benefit, it's because they will actually improve their
development of that skill so that they could be a greater
value creator for themselves and for their future teams down the
road. So there's some responses that are more self protective in
that moment, and others that are more value creating meaning.
They're willing to step into discomfort in that moment to
become a better value creator over the long term. Are these
responses by my players? Are they intentional, thought out
responses, or instinctual knee jerk reactions, and that's the
role that our mindsets play. Right? It's our it's my players
mindsets that are dictating when I invite them, do they move
towards self protection, or do they move towards value
creation? And that's the mindsets. And if, then, if I
also ask these players, do you have good mindsets? I think that
all of them say yes, because they could justify it. Well, one
the one that's more self protective, well, it helps me
feel more safe and more comfortable in that moment, and
the one that has the more value creating mindset is, oh yeah,
I've got a better mindset, because it's gonna help me
become a better basketball player for the future, right? So
that's the inherent challenge that we as people face, is we
generally think that our mindsets are good, but we
generally don't know the quality of our mindsets. And so the
reason why I bring this up is it's really helpful to have a
mindset framework to help us to start to investigate the true
quality of our mindsets, and that's what I put together. Is
what you said, is these four different sets of mindsets.
Host: If they're something that's so foundational to us and
kind of ingrained and shape the way we approach and view
everything else, how can we influence or adjust our mindset?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, great question, and it all starts with
awareness, and that's where the framework is so powerful,
because if I don't have labels for mindsets, if I don't have
descriptions for mindsets, then I can never investigate them.
They're going to continue to reside below the level of my
consciousness. But if I could put labels on it and
descriptions now I could start to develop greater level of
consciousness about my mindsets, and that's been part of my
personal journey. Is when I first learned about these
different sets of mindsets, I quickly learned that I had self
protective mindsets, which is normal. Most of us have self
protective mindsets, and I just didn't know what better mindsets
to have. So the first thing I needed to do is to deepen my
awareness, and then once I deepen my awareness, then I
could come up with plans and strategies and interventions to
be able to elevate my mindset.
Host: Shifting from mindset to growth. The science really
points to there being two main types of growth, those
incremental, transformational I think people think they know
what each of those means. But could you define those for us?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, for sure. And it's really helpful
for us to understand that there's two different sides of
ourselves. So I'm going to give you some characters that you
probably recognize who they are, and I want you to tell me what
you think they have in common? Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods,
Ellen DeGeneres, uh, Bill Clinton, Gordon, Ramsay Shia,
LaBeouf. What do they have in common? They got multiple things
in common. I think so. I think most simply, they're all famous
and well known. They have all been incredibly successful
within their within their industry. I mean that they may
be at the peak. I mean, we've got the king of pop in there for
goodness sakes, right? So, so all incredibly successful
people. But the other thing that they have in common is they all
have some controversy. And so the reason why I've kind of
cherry picked these examples is to demonstrate this idea that we
have two different sides of ourselves. One side of ourselves
is what I call our doing side. It's our talent, our knowledge,
our skills and our abilities. And all of these individuals are
incredibly talented, knowledgeable and skillful
individuals, and it's their talent, knowledge and skills
that has allowed them to reach the success that they've
experienced, or at least their popularity. Priority. But then
their controversy doesn't really have anything to do with their
talent, knowledge, skills and abilities. Their controversy has
to do with a different side of themselves, and that's what I
call our being side. And our being side is the quality of our
character, our mindsets, our psyche, the quality of our
emotional regulation abilities. I call it as a whole our
internal operating system, how our bodies are wired to operate.
So each of these individuals were incredibly talented,
knowledgeable and skillful, but they lack some emotional
regulation abilities that caused them to misstep at different
points of time in their life and and so the reason why I bring
this up is coming back to your question is there's a difference
between incremental growth and transformational growth. And
what I've learned is that when we improve along our doing side,
it is helpful, but I find that it is only incrementally
helpful, and if we really want to transformationally grow and
improve, we've got to focus on our being side. We've got to
we've actually got to focus on our internal operating system,
our mindsets, our emotional regulation abilities, and when
we could elevate along our being side, we transformationally
become better people and better leaders. And what's interesting
about this is that when we think about development efforts in
general, is almost all development efforts focus on our
doing side. Think about our education systems, our athletic
programs and our organizational development efforts, they almost
all focus on gaining knowledge and skills. Yet it's only
incrementally helpful. And so my new book, becoming better is all
about helping people learn that they have a being side, learn
what it is, help them connect with it and evaluate their
altitude along their being side. And then how do they elevate
along their being side, so that they can transformationally
become better
Host: When it comes to the doing side, most of the time, we know
what we don't know, right? We know what we need to improve on,
what we need to do to get better. How do we assess our
being side so we know where to go from there?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, and what's interesting, and there's
a variety of different ways that we can do this, right? So I'm
going to step into a few different ways. One way is to
look at our mindsets. Our mindsets are intimately
connected to this, to our being side, because they're about how
our bodies are wired to operate more self protective or more
value creating. So if you're listening to this, I've
developed a mindset assessment on my website called the
personal mindset assessment. It's free. Anybody could take
it, and it will help them to evaluate the quality of their
mindset. So that's a helpful tool, but not everybody has
access to that. I mean, it's free. Now you've heard about it,
but not everybody knows about it. But beyond that, another way
to kind of gage This is window of tolerance. The window of
tolerance was popularized by a psychologist called his name is
Daniel Siegel. He's written a great book called Mindsight, and
he dives into this concept there, as well as in other
places. But window of tolerance is effectively, how easily
triggered are we to difference, to stress, pressure, complexity,
uncertainty, etc. So we have a window that when, when the
stress is low in our lives. It's a it's a window in which our
body's nervous system is regulated. And so when you know
when challenges come our way, when we're in this regulated
state, we can navigate those challenges rather effectively.
We are in cognitive and emotional control, but the more
stress that we experience, or if you're anything like me, if you
get hangry, then you kind of sense that you're moving closer
to the edge of your window of tolerance, where you're losing
cognitive and emotional control. And there's even times where we
get we'll call it triggered, and we actually go outside of our
window of tolerance, and we've lost almost all cognitive and
emotional control. And so when we when we move closer to the
edge of our window of tolerance, or even beyond it, we become
more reactive, as opposed to intentionally responsive. So one
of the things that we need to recognize is all of us, the
width of our window of tolerance differs just as we differ in
height or weight. And so the wider our window of tolerance,
our greater capacity to stay in cognitive and emotional control
across difficult situations. And our window tolerance is also
something that we could widen. We can expand. In fact, as we
elevate along our being side, that's what happens. So people
with a wider window of tolerance are at a higher altitude along
their being side. People with a narrower window of tolerance
more reactive individuals, for example, then they're going to
be low. That's a. Find that they're lower on their being
side. So that's another, I think, a helpful way to kind of
gage our altitude along that being side. The field of
developmental psychology is the field that has actually done the
most research along our being side. Now, developmental
psychology has historically focused on child development. We
know that children go through different developmental stages.
They go from infancy to adulthood, but a narrow kind of
area of focus for developmental psychologists is adult
development, and what they've found is that just as children
go through different development stages, adults can go through
different adult development stages. In fact, what they found
is that there's three primary adult development stages or
levels. And what's interesting about this is that while adults
can develop what they've found is that most adults don't
develop in adulthood along their being side. So if there's three
levels along our being side, let's just call them for now,
level one, level two, level 360. 4% of adults operate in level
one and never get to level 230, 5% get to level two, and only 1%
gets to level three. So there's not many that operate there. And
so one of the things that I've learned as I've kind of
understand this, is the reality is, is that most of us, and most
of the people that we know, operate at this base level,
which is a rather self protective way to operate,
right? So for example, if I were to say to you, how do most
people respond to constructive criticism? Criticism, you would
say they get defensive, right? And that's a self protective
strategy in that moment, but it's one that probably is
something that holds them back from learning, growing and
developing. So that's a self protective reaction, as opposed
to a value creating response. So most of us and most of the
people we associate with, are people that operate at this
lower being side level. So this kind of becomes the norm, but it
doesn't necessarily mean that it's very cognitively and
emotionally sophisticated. And so when we understand this
framework, that's another way to gage it. And in fact, I've got
another free assessment on my website that will allow you to
kind of gage what level you tend to operate at. It's called a
vertical development assessment.
Host: Very literally, once we've assessed that, once we know
where we're at, what is this trick to leveling up?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, at its core, what we've got to
recognize is, is our being side is connected to our internal
operating system, which really is our nervous system. So we've
got to engage in efforts to better regulate and upgrade our
body's nervous system. And I think that there's three
different levels that we could think about doing work on our
nervous system. So I'm going to say that there's surface level
approaches, there's deeper level approaches, and there's deepest
level approaches. So at the surface level are things that I
think are fairly common and they're being increasingly
promoted. These are things like meditation, uh, journaling,
gratitude journaling, engaging in self talk, doing like we see,
cold plunges. These are all actually activities that help us
better regulate our body's nervous system. And so I think
that there's surface level in that they holistically help us
better regulate ourselves to get into the deeper level. I think
that's where mindsets reside, if, because, again, most people
aren't conscious of our mindsets, and so if we could
help them to become conscious of our mindsets, we are getting
directly at one of the primary jobs of our internal operating
system, which is how our body makes meaning of our world. And
if we can awaken to how we make meaning of our world, or how
we're prone to make meaning of our world, then we could do the
work of adjusting and improving how we make meaning of our
world. So for me, and that's where this is the space that I
primarily play, in terms of the coaching and the consulting that
I do, is I help do some of this deeper level ver it's called
vertical development work, as opposed to horizontal
development work. So that's a deeper the deeper level
strategy. At the deepest level, this is where we find things
like therapy, like psychological therapy, trauma healing therapy,
and even if people have neuro divergence, then we like ADHD,
for example, is something that impacts our being side that
there's what's called neuro feedback therapy, and that could
help us, help us rewire our brain. And then one of the
things that I've kind of got my ear to the ground on is some of
the latest research coming out with psychedelic assisted
therapy. So all of the initial research that seems to be coming
out now is suggesting that it's one of the most effective ways
of rewiring our body's nervous system. And so those are I don't
play at that level, because I don't have the training for
either any of those things, but I've participated, for example,
in trauma healing therapy that's been a part of my own personal
development journey. And I would say, I'm currently not engaging
with my therapist, but I started that process that's about four
years ago, and I spent two years working with a trauma therapist
to heal from some stuff in my past, right? So, and I would say
five years ago, when I was on the podcast, if you would have
asked me if I had trauma in my past, I would have said no, I
had great parents. They stayed married, they went to every
basketball game I ever played. But what I've come to realize is
that while my parents were always there for me physically,
they were rarely there for me emotionally. So I've got some
emotional neglect in my background, and I didn't know
that five years ago, and I've come to awaken to that and
engage with the trauma therapist to help me kind of heal my body
from that experience. I guess one of the things that I've
learned is how we are wired to survive our childhood is not the
wiring that we need to be successful as adults and as
leaders. And that's ultimately what we're talking about, is,
how do we rewire ourselves? And what I've learned just engaging
in this deepest level strategy of engaging with a trauma
therapist is doing that healing work has done. I have, I have
grown and developed more as a person in that two years than I
had the prior 16 years of my adult life. And I think at the
end of the day, that's why doing you know, coming on this
podcast, sharing these ideas, is meaningful to me, because at the
end of the day, if we want to elevate along our being side at
a foundational level, it's about healing our minds, our bodies
and our hearts. And if we want to become transformationally
better, that's what it requires. It requires healing. And I've
just come to learn that most of us need some healing.
Host: The first time you joined the program, we discussed your
book, which was just about to release, Success Mindsets. We've
touched today on a lot of the material that's in Becoming
Better your latest book, but in the meantime, you've also put
out another great book, The Elevated Leader. We don't want
to overlook that.
Ryan Gottfredson: For sure. And thank you for bringing it up.
And in fact, we have talked about it. So when I talked about
those three adult development levels, level one, level two,
level three, that's what the elevated leader is all about,
getting to know those three levels and allowing us to use
that framework to introspect about the at the time, I wasn't
calling it this, but the I was calling it the quality of our
internal operating system. But now the terminology we've used
here is that plus elevating along our being side.
Host: You mentioned a number of assessments available on your
website today that people can go and start taking action on what
they've heard about today, lay that website on us one more time
and talk about what some of those assessments are and any
other free tools.
Ryan Gottfredson: For sure. So there's the two on my website.
RyanGottfredson.com, there's a free personal mindset
assessment, a free vertical development assessment, again,
both of those are help us to awaken to the quality along our
being side. And then, if you wanted to do deeper work for
yourself, you know, I help, I do engage in coaching to help
people to upgrade themselves. Or when I work with organizations,
what I'll generally do is I'll have groups or teams or even the
entire organization, take these assessments, and then I could
aggregate those results up to a collective level, and we could
look at the collective mindsets of an organization, of a group
of leaders or of a team. So if anybody wants to do some of that
deeper work beyond just taking a couple of assessments, would
love to have some conversations with folks. What I've
experienced, because I've worked with hundreds of organizations
and 1000s of leaders, is for every group that I've worked
with, this is an incredibly eye opening experience and which
allows for transformation to occur. And I just feel blessed
to kind of be playing in a, in a spot, and in a in a place where
I could help people to awaken to the deeper sense of themselves,
so that they can elevate themselves at this foundational level.
Host: Well, Ryan, thank you so much for taking some time to
join us in the program today and for helping us become better.
Ryan Gottfredson: Thanks for having me, and thanks for
creating this platform. I know having a podcast is not an easy
thing to do, and it's actually a very generous thing to do, so
appreciate your willingness to do that so that people like me
can share our ideas.