The Coaching Business Flywheel, with Robbie Swale

Welcome to Building your Leader Brand. This week on the show, Bob is. Speaking with Robby Swale. Whenever we're feeling contraction or stress, the best tool to use is curiosity. What's really going on here? And as we do that, we gradually grow our ability to skillfully move past the things we find most difficult in our work or life. And if we. If we don't use curiosity in those times, then we aren't growing in. In that kind of way. But when we. It's not necessarily easy or fun, but more of our potential becomes available. Hi there and welcome back to Building your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, first of all, you're awesome. You're in the right place. You will not regret this. Secondly, take a second to subscribe or follow whichever platform you're on. It's always different. So this week, I am delighted to welcome my friend Robbie Swale back to the show. Robbie, welcome. Thanks, Bob. Great to be here again. So, for me, Robbie is the coach's coach. He really is the archetype of an intelligent, suave, insightful, challenging coach. And I really enjoy knowing you. And you've written. You put me to shame. I'm embarrassed by this, but you've written a whole bunch of books. I don't even know how many. There's five now. Five. I'm sure you would know the answer. Yeah. I'm stumbling over my introductions again. For the listener who's meeting for the first time, who is Robbie Swale? What does he do? Where is he? Yeah. So the way I think about that at the moment, it'd be fun. I've been on the show twice before. I didn't go back and listen to those before this show. It'd be fun to go back and listen and see how. Whether I introduce myself in slightly different ways each time. I'm sure I do. The way I think about it at the moment, I think there's a strong argument this is the hardest time in the history of humanity to lead a group of people or an organisation. The speed of change of everything, technology, communication, mental health crises, all these kinds of things make it really hard. And mostly I think about my work as how do you help people who are trying to do that, grow the skills and capacities that help them do it skillfully without losing themselves in the madness, the whirlwinds that we all deal with and how I actually do that is through one to one leadership and executive coaching, through the books that I've written and we can talk about those and through various other programmes, including some work for coaches, which is part of what you were referencing there. So I have a. One of my podcasts is the Coach's Journey, which is a podcast for coaches which people can, if you happen to be a coach, you can cheque out. And there's. There's various pieces of work that go alongside that. And I think we talked about that in more detail on this the last time I was on the show, last year sometime or the year before. So your new book is called the Power to Choose Finding Calm and Connexion in a Complex World. Why this book? What's it about? Who is it for? I think like all of my books, you know, the real underneath why is about me. So this is a. This is a book that I need as much as everybody. This is like, this book is the kind of the storey of me trying to wrestle rumble with the complexity of the world. And it's quite personal book. It's more personal book than the other ones, really. There's lots of storeys from my work and my life in there, as well as storeys from clients and that kind of thing. And what it's about really underneath is what I think is if we think about how difficult it can be to be in the complexity of the modern world, it's about what I think is one of the biggest shifts we can make that helps us deal with and navigate the complexity of the world more skillfully. And that shift is about realising how we initially see the world and how we think about the world isn't how we have to see it and have to think about it. And in some ways more than that, the thoughts we think aren't the truth. They're just thoughts we can think and we can get separate from those thoughts and assumptions and beliefs. And when we do, more choices available to us. And so it's for, you know, underneath, it's for anyone who's wrestling with those things. But often the people who will get the most out of it are people who are in these kinds of roles where the complexity is very obvious to them. And often it feels like. One of the thinkers that I. I love the metaphor of, there's a guy called Bob Keegan from Harvard and he does psychological development research and he talks about us being in over our heads. So if you feel in your life like you're in over your head, Struggling to stay afloat. My hope is that this book, like it has been for me and still is for me, will be some help for that. I think reflecting on that, the word perspective keeps coming to mind and what you described there as the way that you see things doesn't have to be the way that you see things. I don't think those are the words you used. Use much more elegant phrasing. I was actually going to write down your words because maybe that's how I should describe it from now on. So yeah, I wouldn't. But we all have our default lens that we see situations through. And I think there are very narrow minded people who just default to this is the lens, not a lens. And then there are much more broad minded people who understand that there are many lenses to see things through. Sometimes that can be quite paralysing because how do I use discrimination, how do I use discernment? And one of the things I like about your book is it does offer a guide to that complexity of the ways that you can see things. For somebody who is more naturally caught up in turmoil, I think those are the kinds of people who are more likely to be overwhelmed or feel like they're in over their head. How do you help shape these other lenses that people can see things through? Yeah, well, first of all, I think it's probably important to say, I think the stage where you. Perspectives is a great word to use for this. In a way what we're talking about, and I mentioned this a bit in the book, you know, underlying what's in the book, it's not front and centre because other people have written more about that is some theories from psychology that really show that as we develop and grow we gain the ability to hold more perspectives about a situation. So being somebody who holds really tightly to one, we all have to go through that phase and then at some point something happens which forces or encourages us to see. Hang on, there could be another way of looking at this. So I think it's a really astute point. And you know, in the book I think what the my idea with the book or the way I look at it now and looked at it as it was being written is that in there are a set of ways to look at the world. A set of slightly alternative perspectives that most people don't hold, which you can choose to try on through reading the book or through listening to this show. I'm sure we'll talk about some of them. And then when you do that you can test out is this actually maybe this way of looking at the world captures the nuances a little bit more. Or maybe it just helps me a little bit more to not feel like I'm overwhelmed or to create more connexion or to be more skilful in my interactions with people, or to make better choices and discern better. So in a very practical day to day, and I know you address this in the book and I don't want to reprise the whole book in a podcast interview. So in many respects I'm going to be leaning on you to suggest ways for the conversation to go in order that the point of the book comes through this conversation, because I think the point of the book is important. But people find themselves in challenging situations. Most books, there is a framework running through the book. Is this a book where you would say there is a clear framework running through the book? And how might people take the sort of thousand foot view of that? Yeah, absolutely it is. And it's trying to and in the book a little bit less punctually than say my 12 minute method series, which was what we talked about the first time we met, I think, which was on the show. And obviously we know each other way better now. It's a little bit less tight than that because it's trying to tackle a bigger challenge and a broader challenge. But yeah, the crucial idea in there, the crucial framework is there are three key ideas in part one, and they are, first of all, the one we've been talking about. You know, you can choose how you look at the world and you can choose far more than you think. And it can, it has far, far more far reaching impacts than you think. It has impacts on the relationships you have and it has impacts on how you feel when you've, when you have a cold, right, as you can have physical. It can make a physical difference or feel like it makes a physical difference to what's going on. So that's the kind of crucial idea on which everything else is built. And then in part one, I also talk about key ways to choose that I've seen make a huge difference. And there's lots of explanation of why in there. One with other people, which is we can shift into coming from this point of view that we could choose to look at other people as though they are people doing their best in the situation that they are in, given the circumstance. And when we do that, usually every difficult conversation gets a little bit easier, every conflict dissipates at least slightly and our kind of resentment and struggle with the world gets less. That would be kind of the second part of the framework and the third would be, over the long term, whenever we're feeling contraction or stress, the best tool to use is curiosity. What's really going on here? And as we do that, we gradually grow our ability to skillfully move past the things we find most difficult in our work or life. And if we. If we don't use curiosity in those times, then we aren't growing in that kind of way. But when we do, it's not necessarily easy or fun, but more of our potential becomes available. And then in a way, the rest of the book and those chapters is full of my attempt to pull in practical ideas of ways to do that. And then at the end of each chapter, the structure of the book is really at the end of each chapter. I'm trying to boil it down to make it super practical. Here are the 10 questions and thought experiments or mental models that I've offered in this chapter. Here is the further reading that if you want to take this bit further, you can do. Because sometimes when I'm running workshops, I say, and I feel like this with the book in the workshop, I'll say, look, I hope it's an entertaining workshop, I hope you enjoy yourself, but I'd sacrifice all of that if in exchange for it, you will do something differently as a result of the time we've got together. And I feel the same about this podcast. Hopefully it will be entertaining and interesting for people, but actually more important than that for me is that people take something from it and actually make their life easier or their impact bigger. I think one of the things I like about your writing and when you look at this book on the COVID and you read the description, it's very easy to think this is probably quite a cerebral book, actually, and I was speaking about this earlier today on another interview, that most people these days find it difficult to sit down with an actual book and read it. They have a tendency to fast listen to an audiobook in order to consume information. I think this is a book that you should buy a physical copy of because it's almost a workbook. It's really, really, really pragmatic and practical, as you described as all your books are. The idea of, I think you describe it as a positivity bias, that when people are experiencing difficulty, that instead of thinking they're being difficult or they're just being challenging, we think we try and find a positive lens to see their behaviour through, that there must be a good reason they're doing this or they're behaving like this or I'm experiencing this with this person. I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently and the change in energy is quite astonishing. Energy is what happens between people and it's what drives your feelings and that ultimately is what's going to create what happens next. And it's not natural. We have a negativity bias, it's ferocious. And this intentionality for something so simple as how can I find a positive way to stand and interpret this behaviour could be world changing just as a simple idea. I totally agree. As you were talking then, I was just remembering when I was first playing with that idea. I lived in London and so I would get on the underground. Actually, I don't think this was the underground. This was just a really busy London commuter train station. And I would spend my whole time frustrated and annoyed with the people around me, jostling me, cutting in front or walking slowly, like, don't you know it's London rush hour, like, get a move on. And when I was kind of encountering this idea for the first time, maybe like 12 years ago or something, like you say, the energetic shift was suddenly like it was substantial and straight away. And it meant that I, instead of having this pent up frustration, I kind of enjoyed getting through the crowd. And suddenly, you know, this is a little, well, I don't know what we'd call it, but it's like it did feel like I was just able to connect. So it's why the book is called Finding Connexion. Right? I was just able to connect with these people going around me in a completely different way straight away. And you can have these shifts mid conversation. One of my kind of mentors, mostly from afar, sometimes up close, is a woman called Jennifer Garvey Berger. And in her work she talks about how, you know, everyone is the hero of their own storey and everyone has a good reason to be doing the things that are annoying you or frustrating you or causing difficulty for you in your life. Now, they may not be as conscious as that, but we have this habit, like you say, of assuming malice where it may be that none exists. And there's a nice frame. And I think I heard from Tim Ferriss in the book, which is first of all, I heard from Tim Ferriss, which is never assume malice, where you can assume incompetence or busyness. I had a manager, this is a storey in the book. I had a manager years ago and I found working with her incredibly difficult and she kind of ignored my emails. It made life really hard. I assumed she was like Essentially, I was assuming malice. I was assuming she thought my work wasn't very important, that she was kind of deliberately making my life hard. Which seems absurd looking back, because one of my other colleagues came in one day and said, have you seen. Have you seen her inbox ever? I just looked over her shoulder and I can't remember. She had like 5,000 unread emails. And it was like, well, if she's got 5,000 unread emails, things are a little out of control. I mean, it's okay to have unread emails, but 5,000. Maybe she's not ignoring me because she thinks my work is pointless, but just because she's got her inboxes out of control because she's not very well organised and suddenly, like, the whole relationship changes. It's a lot easier to have a good relationship with someone who's just. Whose inbox is out of control. And someone who you assume based on very little really thinks that your work is worthless. I think this is a really interesting topic. I experience this frequently when I'm talking about sales, that when people ghost us, for example, we create a psychological vacuum that there's no information, there's nothing coming back. And so subconsciously we fill that vacuum with our assumptions and then we continue that relationship based on this assumed reality. And that reality is very rarely the case. This is a bit of an aside, a bit of a segue. It's nothing to do with the conversation. Kind of is. But when people ghost us in a sales conversation or when these things are happening by email or social media, we assume it's because they don't want it. Well, I found in about 60% of cases, it's actually because they see this as important and they don't feel equipped to deal with it right now. And if we were to treat all our sales approaches as they need it and they want it, rather than how can I sell it to them? The energy we bring to. That's quite different. The assumptions we bring to it are quite different. And this comes into almost every relationship, really, that there is always a vacuum between two people and we can choose to fill it with something positive, or we can choose to fill it with something negative. One of the things that you speak about in the book is noticing our emotions. And I think there are people. And you've kind of described this as. As we develop, we go from having one fixed perspective to being able to hold multiple perspectives. And I've been challenged on this at times in my life because I can hold multiple perspectives as equally valid and true. And I got challenged that, Bob, you just should have an opinion. But there are people for whom one truth is the truth. And we all know where that leads. Your book is obviously for people who are a little bit more emotionally and psychologically mature. But have you discovered any ways for helping people move from this fixed perspective to being able to experience having a little bit of insight around. There are multiple perspectives and I think this is a rambling question, but it goes hand in hand with this noticing emotions. I think there are people who think emotions happen to them and then there are people who understand that emotions happen around them. Yeah, it's a great kind of inquiry. And yes, absolutely. Yeah, the book, like you say, I would say there's two groups of people who. For whom the book is in this way we're talking now for whom the book is perfect. So it's either for people who, like you say, already have that emotional psychological maturity and you want a whole set of new ideas for different ways to look at things so that you can kind of get more and more skilful really fast. But it's also a great introduction if you've just had the whisper so that. So that the whisper that maybe I am not my emotions. There's these people talking about how I'm not my thoughts. But you're still kind of quite in that old way of seeing things because it's a book about my journey from that to somewhere with greater perspective. So, yeah, I think it's good to point to that. And yeah, look, there are many ways to. And the book, in a way, is a collection of ways to invite people into that shift. Emotions are a great example. You know, it's like, yeah, can we get a little bit of separation from them? Like, oh, what's. You know. And often it's like the curiosity move. It's like, oh, I'm really feeling this, like, what's going on here? Another way to do this is. Yeah. To just really. It is mostly those inquiries is to. Is to really start saying, okay, what if there could be another way to look at this thing? You don't have to agree with it. You don't have to change. It can be really valuable and important to have some solid things. Like you say, I'm a little like. It sounds like, like you are. Like, life can get pretty tough if you question and doubt everything. I really mean this. It's like my toughest moments are always when I'm kind of losing a sense of like, what do I actually think here? What is actually grounding Me, because I'm seeing things from too many perspectives. And you know, of course that's why I have to write a book about remembering the power to choose. Right. Because I need to some. Sometimes you have to choose something and follow it through. But we can invite people to make these little changes, these little inquiries. What if there's another way to look at this? In the book I use a really old, what you call it, optical illusion that some people will have seen. I think it's, I think it's actually called My wife and my mother in law, but I just knew it as the, the old woman and the young woman. And it's basically a picture. You can, people can Google this if you want to see it, you know, where one way you look at it. And usually when people first see it, they'll see just one. But most people in the UK, I think have probably seen it by the time they're an adult. So. But see, at some point when you're a child or an adolescent and you see a young woman or you see an old woman and you can't understand what people are talking about until someone points out, oh no, look, this bit that is the. I can't remember exactly, I haven't got it in front of me. That's the nose of the old woman is actually the curve of the neck of the young woman. Yeah. Suddenly she's looking over her shoulder. Oh, right. And suddenly you can see both. And then you get, this is what life is like. Right? It's in the books, it's a metaphor. We have one fixed way of seeing it. We can only see the old woman. And that might be perfect. Right. It might just be the truth. It might be a picture of an old woman that you're looking at in your life. Or it's possible that there's a whole other way of looking it, which is in this case equally true. And then of course the question with the optical illusion is, is it a picture of an old woman or a young woman or neither or both. And actually like, I don't really know, I guess both and neither at the same time. And that's weird to think about, but actually lots of things in life are like that, you know, two people looking at the same situation and seeing it completely different. Well, which is it? I think what I like about this, the book is called the Power to Choose. And I think a lot of people, when they have fixed perspectives, they don't have the power to choose. They're being dictated to by a singular perspective. Yeah, it's Weird. This is a crazy thing to think about, but whenever we're certain about something, we're kind of a victim of that viewpoint. We can't do anything about something we have certainty about. It's just the way things are. Like we're, you know, we're subject to it. It's just happening to us. And that's a weird thing to think. I think there's nothing wrong with certainty. But did you choose that certainty? And I think the image that's emerged as you were speaking about the various exercises is this is a gym for shaping and training the ability to apply discernment and to take charge of the process a little bit so that you are being able to approach. As you said at the beginning of the book, the description calm and connexion in a complex world and the complexity of this world can't be overstated, especially if you're in a leadership role. You've got so much certainty that's conflicting, being broadcasted at you from so many different directions that if you don't have a method for navigating that you are, and I see this all the time, you're going to be fractured. You're going to find it very difficult to find a centre. And this book offers exercises and a gym for being able to own your own space and navigate other people's perspectives in a way that you feel good about, that you can move with confidence, not necessarily certainty, but you chose it. And I think that's in a personal level, a family level, organisational and political and global. It's everything from the micro all the way through to the macro. Yeah. This was why at the start of this conversation, I said, this shift that this book is about is one of the big shifts that it can be incredibly powerful to go through. Now, if people aren't running into trouble where they're feeling it over their head sometimes, or the stress is rising or whatever it might be, then that's okay. You don't need to, you know, you don't need to read the book. But if you're finding those times when it feels like you're firefighting all the time, where things feel like they're out of control, it's possible that there are some different ways of looking at the situation that will help you discern and move through it more. And usually the truth is, you know, when people come to do work with me, the thing that is encouraging them to make the shift we were talking about in the. In the last question or two is that the world is showing them that it's Actually impossible for them to be certain in the way that they were before anymore. Right. It's just that worldview, their way, their perspective, their certainty is kind of breaking because of all the conflicting stuff that's coming their way and their role or whatever it might be. And then the coaching work, for example, tends to be, okay, how do we find the new perspectives and create the little shifts so that the situation doesn't go away? And it's not going to get super easy or anything like that, but the way to navigate it becomes clear and the way to navigate it more skillfully becomes clear. And that's what the book's about, really. An image that's also emerged as you were speaking again, is polarisation, I think, is the overarching motif of the last decade. It's interesting, Bob, by the way, I don't think you know this, but you talked about politics, you talked about polarisation. When I. The penultimate draught of this book had 20,000 extra words about politics. And I decided. I decided it kind of. It weakened the message of the book and diluted it too much, and that to make the book work better as a book, it needed to come out. But at some point, I'll publish those words because it's one of the places, if we think about the times when people feel. And especially because this book was written over nine years, which included, you know, started in kind of 2016, so it included the aftermath of Brexit in the UK and all the stuff going on in the US. And so, you know, that if we think about the times when we feel stress, when we feel triggered or contracted, those political conversations, they're significant. And that polarisation, again, we become a kind of victim of it. It's absolutely perfect to really back one political organisation. But let's cheque that you're really choosing it for the reasons you think, not that your psychology is running away. And unfortunately, what happens is, across all parts of our lives, you know, is that we see the. Let's say we see the optical illusion. We see it's an old woman, and then we ignore all evidence that it's a young woman, and we accept only evidence into our worldview that it is what we thought it was. And this happens everywhere. So if we think we're rationally choosing our political viewpoint, our polarised position, whether it's in politics, in our marriage, in our relationship with our business partner, we think we're choosing, but in fact we've just taken our first assumption, then our brain shows us all the evidence for that assumption and Gives us reasons to ignore all the evidence against. And we just want to. We just. If we're running into trouble, say, in a relationship with our business partner, because we're at loggerheads about something, then we just want to double cheque our certainty about that. We want to see it from a different point of view or two, so that we can open things up a little and probably create more connexion in the relationship, but also probably see things more clearly. I think if we take the politics angle, one of the things that I am aware of is that there are aspects of the right that I think, yeah, fair enough. There are aspects of the. Both the extreme left and the extreme right I can say yes to. The problem is that's not also centre ground or passivity, but it's. And anybody listening will think, bob, extreme right wing. No, that's not what I'm talking about. Yeah. What I am talking about is being able to understand the validity of certain aspects of different things people say. But that not being polarised can almost lead to invalidity at the moment. I guess where I'm getting with this is what I see in the themes through the book is. Is perhaps the polarisation that we're experiencing at the moment offers an opportunity and a catalyst for bringing a bit more systematisation to what, for some people is quite natural, which is being able to understand and embrace different perspectives and find common ground. Well, if that's not common, we need to work on it. We really need to work on it and you offer a roadmap for how we can approach this. Again, it's not a political book and I don't think it needs to be, because I don't see this as a political thing. This is a human thing. It happens everywhere. Definitely happens in politics. There's this lovely. I think there's a video on YouTube that I reference in the book because it's such a great visualisation of it. It's this Argentinian consultant called Fred Kaufman, you know, and he puts up a. He puts up his. He's doing a workshop and he puts up his hand against this woman that he's doing the demo with. And he just says, just what. What do you naturally want to do if I do this? And then he just pushes on her hand a little bit and straight away she's like, I want to push back. And that's what happens certainly in politics. You know, when you've got this little polarised thing, somebody's pushing you, it's pushing your buttons, you just. You naturally want to push back. And I think almost everyone listening to this will recognise that impulse, even if they've got more control to choose over it, power to choose over it, than they, than they used to. But this happens in all our conversations, happens in like disagreements with someone in a shop and it certainly happens in kind of business meetings that we have, especially colleagues. It also dovetails naturally with what I know you best for, which is productivity. Because the power to choose is not just to choose how you react to relationships, but how you choose what you're going to take action on. Because a lot of people will choose to work on the things that are seemingly urgent rather than the necessarily important. And being able to choose is really, really the thing that's going to change your life. If you are a solopreneur small business owner, it's what's going to change the DNA of your organisation. If you are the leader and number one, it's a recipe for self leadership, but number two, it's also a recipe for understanding the practical choices you make and how you spend your time, I. E. Your energy. And if you are leading an organisation that trickles the whole way down the organisation, Was that intentional, that, that sort of natural progression? Yeah, I mean, look, is important. It's really important and I guess there's kind of a couple of things to say here. So one is, yeah, one of the things, if we go back to the. For some reason, this is what I'm thinking about from the book today, the. The Old Woman, Young Woman Optical Illusion, we've got this kind of assumption often that the thing I should be working on, this is what happens to people a lot when it comes to productivity. The thing I should be working on is the thing that is loudest and in a simpler time, that was probably a reasonable assumption. You know, if you're running a grocer's shop or a Blacksmith's, you know, 500 years ago, like if you've got a customer there who's like desperate for their horseshoe to be fixed, fix the horseshoe. That's like a good business decision we can't make. We can't decide in that way anymore. Well, we can. And if it's working fine for you, perfect. But if you think you could go to another level of success, it's worth examining and choosing, for example, a very simple basis. How do I choose which tasks I work on today? And like you say, like a great, you know, I was lucky enough to be taught this when I was like 20, I think, or 21. This idea of urgent versus important, you know, so that means that ever since I was taught that that's a different way. So I can assume that I just do the most urgent thing. As soon as someone shows that idea of the dichotomy between those two things, I look at my tasks and my productivity different from then on. Right. Suddenly there's a different lens. I can see that I could look at the it as an old young woman instead. And actually life works out better for me if I do. And therefore I'm going to do that everywhere I go from then on. And yeah, like you say, there are lots of ways we can do that and it really does affect our productivity. And, you know, another body of work that I have created in the last couple of years is what I call the me. Well, we worked together on it when you were coaching me, in fact, is what I call the Meaningful Productivity Blueprint. And people might even notice echoes of your. Of your blueprint roadmap in there if they look at it. Because I use that as a starting point. But the ideas in there, yeah. Are about. Again, they're about how do we think about productivity in a way that is fit for the complexity of the 21st century. And they link together especially neatly. This is a weird back because we started talking about the book first. This is kind of a weird thing to say, but there's actually two parts of the, I think of the power to choose. So the Meaningful Productivity blueprint has. It's got this distinction between time management, which we think is what we need to do, and the things which actually help us, which is the six pillars of Meaningful productivity. And you can get this for free@robbieswale.com and there's a. There's a PDF and things. It. The power to choose is really the. What would we say? It's. It is the. Yeah, the super guidebook for two of those pillars. How do we change our attitudes to make us more productive? And how do we change our relationships to make us more productive? But that. That key idea, you can choose that first part of it. You can choose how you look at things. That's the, you know, in a way, that's the. What do they say? That's the whole ball game, really. Yeah. I think for me, this power to choose is so important. I was having a conversation with somebody and I remember. So we were talking about goals for this coming year and he gave me a number for what he was hoping to achieve and I said that and I gave another number and I. And that number was a monetary value, just so the listener understands And. But I'm not going to say what it was, because that would be crass. But I put a limit on that number for no reason. There was a reason. It was an emotional reaction and that was something that was happening outside of me. And when I said it, and I saw this little emotional rain cloud appearing and thought, why did I say that? Why is that rain cloud there? And understanding that I put this emotional limit on something didn't need to be there, was so important. And we all do this all the time, but we don't understand that we do it, we don't notice we've done it, so we don't have the power to choose. That's been done to us by our own limiting beliefs at the end of the day. And this is why I think going to the gym with a book like this is really important. Yeah. I can't remember if it's in the book actually much, but, yeah, there's this idea of that. I heard from a woman called Carolyn Coughlin about complexity fitness. She uses that. That metaphor as well because it's so good. Like, can you. Can you essentially go to the gym so that you're fitter for dealing with the kind of complexity that. That the world throws at you? And. And look. Yeah, the emotion that Storey you just gave is a. Is a great example. So that's that third idea that I talked about towards the start of the. The conversation that when we feel a kind of contraction or maybe just a strong emotional reaction, it's good to use curiosity on that, because sometimes when you do that, you know, like, what's really going like. Like just like you did. What's going on? Why is this rain cloud here? And what. And, oh, what's it doing? Well, what it's doing is actually creating a lower number. So, I mean, maybe the lower number is. Right, but let's get some power to choose on it. Right? What's really going on with that emotion? What's that really about? And there's this storey, I like to tell it might be apocryphal, I don't know, of somebody being in a restaurant. It's in the book. This being in a restaurant is a small restaurant. They're having dinner and there's this elderly couple on the other side of the restaurant, just across the room. It becomes more and more apparent they're having a really tense dinner until everything goes quiet. Just as the woman says to the guy, it's not about the chicken, Harry. It's about the last 20 years. Right. And the reason that Everyone laughs at that. It's impossible not to. It's like a fantastic storey because we just know the truth of that. We know in our relationships, but it's in ourselves. Right. That kind of reaction, you know, what's it about? It's not about something as simple as naming a goal. It's about what that means for you. Or it's about the, like you say, the limiting belief that you have from somewhere about money or goals or whatever it is. And as soon as we create a little bit more perspective, going back to that word about this emotion, we get this little bit of space between us and it. Which is the space where you can. You can choose. And yeah, it's. It, you know, in a way, it's. Again, it's. It's the work that I've been doing for 10 years now with people. You know, they come in. Here's the challenge, here's the stuckness. And we just need to see things in some new way, create some new perspectives so that the stuckness kind of just goes away and the way forward becomes clear. And, yeah, it's. It's powerful. It's powerful inquiry to do, you know, when we feel those emotions or when we notice something like that happening. So I think we need to move into part two of our conversation and I honestly need to cheque before I start recording, if people are prepared for this. Did you see the guest primer that suggested that you might want to have three things? Yeah, you know, I. Well, like, because I listen to the show every now and again, and so I actually know that you do this now, but I only remembered it, like, just before this call. So let's see. But, yeah, let's do it. I've got some things. We got plenty of stuff, I think, from the conversation we've had. So these are three things that the listener can just go and do. Sometimes it's a podcast. People can listen to a mental model, a book that you think is awesome. It can be literally anything that you think is going to add value to somebody's day. So amplifier number one. Yeah, look, we started with it in a way when we started talking about the book. The mental model to try is this. Is this. What if this person is just doing their best? What if everyone is just doing their best just because you talked about it? I talked about it. The energetic shift can be so big that if every listener here. This would be just a great. Like, I would love this. This would be. Made me so happy if. If somebody wrote in and told me I heard that and then I did this. And this is what happened, you know, like, because, yeah, if you go out and instead of getting annoyed with the barista for serving somebody else when they should have served you, you just assume that they're a person doing their best. See what happens. Your business partner, who you're always getting annoyed with their emails. What if you're just like, okay, what if this is actually somebody writing an email with good intentions here? So that would be the mental model to try. I echo this. I think for me, this is almost habit. But I also have a tube storey, so whenever I go to London, I'm the bumbling hick from the country. And I delight in that, specifically on the Tube. And I will not go to the Tube station without randomly chatting to somebody that I should know better than randomly chatting to. And the delight in people's face. They're startled initially, why is this guy talking to me? And then they just melt almost every time. And for me, this just says so. Much about human beings and so much about the world we live in. You know, I've got a client of mine and we often talk about how people, you know, because his work is about creating connexion. And I often. We took. People are. Whenever he's doubting it, I'm like, people are desperate for it. They're in the desert. And more connexion is what they want. We all want it. We all want to have a lovely conversation with the person in the shop, like the weird hick from the country on the Tube, you know, like, we really want it, but there's all these kind of things and ways and reasons that we don't do that. So. Yeah, I'm glad you do that. I think this deserves reinforcement that the title of the book is Not Just the Power to choose, and we've focused on the calm and complex Connexion is really what this book is about. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as you've been told, you've really brought this out more than I have in this conversation. It's, you know, it's about connexion with others, but it's also about connexion with yourself, to understand yourself so that you can make wise choices and discern wherever you go. So amplifier number two. Yeah, again, we touched on it. And because we haven't talked about this on the show before, like, at the moment, I did a big piece of work at the end of last year on Meaningful Productivity, so there's this, and I'm really proud of that work. So you can get this. This is called the Meaningful Productivity Blueprint. I mentioned it already. You can get it on robbieswale.com and there'll be a meaningful productivity button there. And it's a, It's a workbook you can work through. It's a. It's like a set of ideas that if, if firefighting is a challenge for you, if you find yourself always never getting through everything, never making. Feeling like you're making a meaningful dent in what you're working on, then it's a, It's a set of ideas that will help with that, with some tools. And there's. And there's plenty more where that came from. And, yeah, it's available for free. And it's just my way of, of kind of giving something for those people who are in that, you know, again, either they want to take their productivity to a new level or they're feeling the pressure and stress of being, you know, especially a leader. But really, anyone in the 21st century with a job, you know, it's like the complexities of these roles are really tough. And the ideas in there are very complementary to what's in the book, but they're also, some of them are separate and different and they give a different lens to look at, particularly productivity challenges. 3. It is really good. You should go and download that. And Amplifier number three. Yeah, it's a, It's a good question. I mean, because you did say book recommendations as well. Which is, which is, which is tempting me in all kinds of directions. Yeah, but, but I think, I think where I'm at, because, because obviously this will come out later in the year, but we're in this kind of goal setting, early January moment that we're in. So I think that the tool that I'm thinking that I'm using at the moment, which I use every year, is this idea from Warren Buffett, which I read about in the James Clear blog years ago. And I've been using it for my goal setting every year, which is you make a list of 25 things, all the things you want to achieve in the year. You can go up to 25. And then the storey is Buffett did this with his, like the pilot of his private jet or something like that. And then the guy comes back next time he says, okay, I. I've done it. Except they do it for the rest of his career. But we're doing it. I do it for a year, and I usually do it twice a year. January and January and September. And so you make the list of 25, then you circle the top five, and then the punchline is Buffett Says to the guy, okay, when are you going to work on the top five? And he says, well, I'm going to start straight away. When are you going to work on the rest of them? And the guy says, well, you know, they're important, but they're not as important as the top five. So I'll, I'll squeeze them in when I get the chance. I'll do them here and there. And Buffett says, no, they have to become your avoid at all costs list. Because for most people, for most people, again, it's not the, it's not choosing between power to choose. It's not choosing between the stuff that's really important and the stuff that's obviously not important. Like, that's not a problem. No one, I mean most, almost no one is wasting their time doing completely pointless things. The things that stopped you doing the most important things are the quite important things. And if you want to get more done, like if you want to. And the great thing about this is, for those of us who find it hard to choose, it sneaks up on you as you do the exercise, even when you know the punchline. So that I, I'm, I'm in that at the moment for this year. And it's such a good. It's been very impactful for me in, especially in actually the perception of how productive I am because I say no to a lot of things I didn't used to say no to. And I still notice all the things I say yes to, all the hours spent watching TV that I don't have to watch, all the, you know, meetings that I go to, goodness, because I feel like I should or I want to do someone a favour, not because it's deeply productive, but certainly in terms of visible outputs. The reason there's five books and two podcasts and all that kind of thing is because of all the things I didn't do. So this has been a conversation about perspective shifts and productivity. And you have ended with a mic drop to end all mic drops. You probably don't even realise it from a productivity perspective. If I look at things like notion, for example, notion is a great way to put things that you think are a good idea to do, but the problem is they, once they're in there, they're a thing that needs to get done. It's like any to do list. Once something's on a to do list, it's on the to do list until you delete it. And people don't delete things from to do lists. And for me, this is why almost every productivity system over time caves in on top of me and it becomes an overwhelming mess. That avoid at all costs list is so powerful, my eyes actually watered. I was going to cry when you said that. I gotta tell you what, when you first do it, if you never did it before, what I noticed with like 6 to 25. So these are the avoid all cost list. There are some things on there that you're like, yes, I can say no to this thing. I've now got an excuse, I don't have to do this anymore. Then there are some things that it is really painful and hard to say no to. And I got to say, the first couple of years that I did this, I didn't manage it. You know, like I didn't manage to say no to enough things or I didn't include. I did things that weren't on the list and didn't achieve the top five. And then over time and practise and took years. I've got pretty good now. Like the reason the Power to Shoes came out. It was pretty painful and it came out. It ended up I messed up a bit last year. Didn't think it through. It came out. It came out pretty much exactly the same time as I was running this series of workshops about meaningful productivity. But at the same time it was. It came out because I said no to a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm doing this exercise this afternoon. It's almost instinctive, but to have absolute clarity on these are all the things I think are good idea. And I can think of 25. Almost visualise the list. Yeah, I gotta say I'm looking for it now. I don't think I've got it handy. One from last year. I actually, I actually now use a to do list template which forces me to put anything I want to do in a week into a box for one of the top five things or a tiny little box at the bottom for others so that I really know if I'm getting too off. Well, like off message. There's just so many places to go with this. Robby, you have been awesome. If people want to get closer to you, if they want to find out more about you, what's the best place everything starts? Everything starts@robbieswale.com. there's links to the books and the meaningful productivity blueprint is there. And social media. I am on LinkedIn. Sorry, I'm on Facebook and Instagram. But the place that I'm active is LinkedIn and there's a weekly blog. People can get which is always written in 12 minutes, which you have to go back to our first conversation on this show to to hear why. And like I said, there are podcasts in all the podcast places. There's a 12 minute method podcast which is a one series piece but it's got loads of ideas and insights about productivity and procrastination in it. And then there's the Coach's journey which is long form, sprawling kind of interviews about growing businesses with purpose. Well, that does bring us to the end of another conversation. I have really, really enjoyed this and I hope you at home have too. If you have, then you'll probably love the personal brand business roadmap. 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale or fix your expert business. 100 free as a gift from me. If you have enjoyed this podcast again, I would invite you to leave a five star review. You heard right, five. Not four, three, two or one one review wherever you listen to podcasts. And that's it. Robbie, you've been awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, thanks Bob.