PETERSHALLARDTranscript.doc
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The document discusses Peter Shallard's work as a strength coach for entrepreneurs. He describes how he accidentally transitioned into this role after one of his therapy clients, a small business CEO, had a positive experience. Peter notes some common challenges entrepreneurs face, like immense expectations they place on themselves. He also discusses how entrepreneurs can manage fear by channeling it into excitement. Peter believes balance is important for creativity and finding exponential solutions, not just incremental progress. He convinces high-performing clients to make time for rejuvenation to help them get further ahead in their work.
PETERSHALLARDTranscript.doc
- 1. ARI Now I am speaking with Peter Shallard, who is the strength for entrepreneurs which is honestly one of the best title anyone can have on the show, so thank you for taking the time to talk to me. PETER Thanks for having me Ari. ARI So first of all, I feel bad for you, it’s a shame for entrepreneurs, and how does that happen? PETER Don’t feel bad, it is great, it happened because I became an entrepreneur and my first business was a private therapy practice and actually by accident, I had a CEO of a kind of small but growing business coming to see me as a client, this is years ago, I think he was trying to get rid of the flying phobia or something and it’s a long story, but he had a great experience working with me, it was kind of unlike any client I've worked with before and his willingness to proactively seek change, he’s just so kin to understand this thinking and shift his performance in a positive direction, it worked out great, he referred few buddies and they referred few buddies and then one day I woke up and realize my entire week of client work was every single person was self-employed and that’s the short answer. ARI What do you see as coming out, because I have heard couple of speeches where they describe the symptoms of ADD or sycophancy and I went like, aw, this is actually the same traits of entrepreneurs you know, what are the most common things that you deal with when you're dealing with entrepreneurs? PETER I think it is a very common kind of conversation in Silicon Valley cycles I found for people to talk about some of the things like clinically diagnosable problems and say that these are entrepreneurial traits, and I think that can be the case for certain type of startup CEO or something like that, but my experience is that entrepreneurs, I work across a range of different industries, I have clients who were in technologies, who were in medicine screen and aviation, like everything in between, it's just crazy and I think that once you start looking at that quarter spectrum, you can easily so decide what ADD is in the entrepreneurial traits whatever, but that said, I think that some of the things that entrepreneurs wrestle with that other people don't, at least in my experience is that they had these massive expectations for themselves, they constantly kind of being shifted, but the buyer constantly being raised by entrepreneurs, like I like to joke with some of my clients that we they have a big win in life and business, you know
- 2. some big projects kind of comes to that critical victory moment, or maybe they exit a company or something like that, it is almost that they pop bottle of champagne and by the time the cork has fallen and hit the ground, they have already set the next goal and they kind of feel like I am going to get that done too, so there is not a lot of like celebration satisfaction because entrepreneurs are so relentlessly driven and have such huge expectations for themselves. ARI That’s really interesting, so there's a statistic that I love, that I used to refer to a lot, I think it’s from the national and it said something like 75% of young entrepreneurs came from households where the mother was overbearing and the father was either physically or emotionally absent. PETER Really! I haven’t actually seen that stuffs, that’s really interesting. ARI And I've always found that fascinating, for me my mother is a very loving Jewish mother and my father is a great entrepreneur and he was always kind of emotionally absent from me, so I think that it drives you in a unusual way. PETER Yeah, that’s definitely the case, so I am now like mentally categorizing and running through the last like 25 clients that I spoke to, I just try to analyze their thinking, is that true from a lot of them, I mean it’s funny because I think the best thing for me like that dynamic you know broadly speaking is present in my life as well, so that’s fascinating. ARI So now, one thing that you must deal with, I mean is managing fear right, because entrepreneurs are either fearless I think for they have enormous amounts of fear, it seems that there is nowhere in the middle, it feels like they are driving themselves by their fear, or there is no fear. PETER I think that everybody has an inexperience of fear, it is the way that they kind of, it's what they do with that emotional signal that I think creates that, that sort of dichotomy that you just described between people who seem to be super terrified and those who are not, in my experience some of the most successful folks that I've been lucky enough to work with, the kind of fears a bit of a compass, I was actually just talking with a client last week, he was saying one of his primary kind of mechanisms or like a litmus test for picking the highest leverage actions day-to-day intends of what he should focus on, there is a huge questions for a lot of entrepreneurs that you can literally pick what you literally do with your time is up to you to do
- 3. the most important thing, he goes after the thing that makes them most uncomfortable with them, that he's most afraid of and because of that I think objectively we can say that this guy experiences a lot of fear, but the way to the kind of, there is almost this kind of sadistic state, kind of masochistic quality to the way that he deals with it, he’s like I am afraid to do that, he’s afraid of it and he’s like bring it on, and in a weird way, I think that the entrepreneur who really get this are actually transmitting the sensation of Tara into the feeling of the sensation of excitement and the two are very kind of similar and kinesthetically similar by the way that we feel it in our body and I think that is what is going on with people who are really crushing it and people who are on their way to crushing it. ARI So I imagine since it was without work life balance issue, it's like a buzzword almost nowadays, for me it’s more about work life integration, because if you passionately about what you are doing and what you're doing, it is like a balance, how do you see people going with that a lot of times, whether they have a family or whether they don't? PETER It’s a massive challenge I mean there are certain topics that come up with most of my clients, you know they have a long enough time, I'll talk with every single person on my client roster about this type of thing and I actually built a start up around kind of reading procrastination and productivity, this is separate to my work for entrepreneurs and also helping people kind of find that balance in their life, which is so necessary for coming up with the innovative and creative thinking that really moves you forward as an entrepreneur and that certainly did a general push with my clients is the idea that, balance is important and this is so funny this is the way that I kind of dupe my super ambitious clients into pursuing balance and making it a priority, I kind of tell them that if you're not balanced, if you don't have the space in your life to kind of let your mind unravel and be able to think creatively and laterally, which is very hard to do when you're just relentlessly busy and focused on kind of linear outcomes and just checking things off your to do list, you don’t have a chance to kind of spot the actions in your one spot, the things that you could be doing that could create exponential results rather than just incremental progress and so I convinced, this is my argument with a lot of sort type A very driven people, to convince them that like actually sitting around my pool with a cocktail or whatever your definition of Rest on rejuvenation is a good idea, because in the end, it's going to help you get ahead, you know there is a reason that Richard Branson spends a huge amount of time playing around and hiding on a tropical island, because that's where sometimes the best thinking happens, so I think it is an argument to be made that at a certain level, more business, more hard work is not going to be the differentiator that makes you more successful as an entrepreneur, and that to me is the big I need to balance.
- 4. ARI So that to me is really great with what I teach and what I do, you know the whole idea of less is more, I want to actually talk about that a little bit further, so it seems like you Peter are choosing a very awkward battle by trying to get on to do less, right? PETER I mean like I said a very long time period, basically anyone who is working with me and they are whole super high performance people at the top of their respective fields you know around the world, we are going to have that conversation at some point, that’s the answer to your first question, that's like the universal thing. ARI Right of cause, so then what sort of methods are you using to try and get people to instill in their lives are habits that they just need to make them operate more efficiently, I don’t know if that sort of, you know what I mean? PETER Yeah for sure, I think that you know the best way to answer that question is to tell you little bit about what with cooked up in a committee action, which is my other company asset it is a startup and it's all about helping people become more focused, be procrastination, be more productive and also get this balance stuff taking care of and we try to dig really deep into the neuroscience of all of this and find out like you know what's the most empirical answer to these questions, we work with the professor of psychiatry copy of medical school is digging into the neuroscience of this type of human behavior change stuff and what we found is that getting people to really massively scale back the amount of priorities they have seems to be one of the biggest game changing, psychological steps you can take to move someone close to the balance and get them spending more time in the zone doing that high leverage work that I think that we are sort of talking about pushing this agenda, so we found that what doesn't work is, entrepreneurs who have a to do list, which I think everyone has at some level, but that if you're working from a to do list with like a 1001 items, you know every project or thought or idea or little thing that you've jotted down on a note on an IPad or Ever note to whatever it is and you can't wake up on one morning and look at that and think what am I going to do today, that is a total failure of prioritization and it’s going to result in constant sensation of dizziness and sort of chasing that best kind of vaguely incremental progress, so what committee action is all about, what we found is that, when we get people to radically reduce the number of priorities and focus on how soon we do three things a week, three significant picking up and moving the ball for the week and that’s what we help our clients kind of identifying and humming on, that seems to be what works and it is consistent with what we had and its totally across different industries, you know people like Peter Teal talk about nearly days of PayPal, the executive team that were all given every
- 5. individual is given a single KPI to pursuit, one priority about the other, everyone has a different one when it will kind of work together and plan that out, but it seems to be that when entrepreneurial think is that real clear priority and eliminate a lot of the noise, a huge amount of that small stuff doesn't get done, but that's okay, because we need to take action on the big things, you know doing less right. ARI Exactly so I care about you, so how is your sort of week set up and when do you do that sort of prioritization, are you working every day, like what is your sort of your schedule for life? PETER I put a lot of thought into it, but one of the things, wake up again, so on Sunday night or Monday morning little bit flexible with that one, I will go and I work through the committee action process of identifying this ritual of identifying the three number one priorities that I'm going to be ruthlessly committed to for the next week and that’s what I actually check in, this is the only time during the week, but I'll check in with my list of the thousand one different things and pick which of the top three, which of the things that I want to have done within seven days and sometimes they need to be broken down and put into something I can actually accomplish within that time period, and that’s it, that’s what I am going to do, then I'll look ahead at the calendar, I have a lot of commitments to a lot of people, I have a lot of insight a lot of commitments to other people because I work one on one in this consults right, with my clients and so what I've learned about that which I think is kind of interesting is that, if I schedule my client work which is very much to me it feels like that classic kind of urgency like it's very significant, I can’t miss it, I always show up a time no matter how kind of tired or whatever I might feel and it doesn't really drain me in the same way that doing kind of important and urgent work do and what I found is if I schedule clients and I close in the morning say like 9 AM to like 12 am or something, I'll just be completely spent, for the end of the afternoon, I won’t be able to get anything done at all, I will just be brain-dead drooling at walls, you know staring at walls and drooling and if I put them in the afternoon unable to capture like a couple of productivity in the morning, or I can do things that are important to me but not urgent to anybody you know. ARI It’s the beginning of school year actually every person I know who have kids has a little cough. PETER And I do not, I don’t know what the problem is, but what I found is kind of the syntax of the day is super important you know, I like the order that it goes on just by reversing my clients in the morning, I'll be productive, because if I wake up and spend three hours, you know working on something creative like a piece of writing that I might be putting together, I have a really popular
- 6. blog about the psychology like that kind of stuff which is demanding something kind of deeper for me I'll get it done and I will do the client work and that kind of draw from a different kind of mental gas tank, and I will write at the end of the day like 6 o'clock at night, feeling the same level of exhaustion as if I had woken up and just hit the client calls from nine in the morning till noon, which is kind of weird right, it’s like the order of things seems to work really well for me and I have tested this with a few other clients and have them do the same thing, you know save the mornings that the important the creative work where you are really accountable to yourself to get it done and then use the afternoon to be committed to working with other people who you have shown up. ARI I talk about timing too, there are better times a day, times a week, times a month to do some activities to be able to learn that, so that’s actually a good question because I have my own process, how do you help people find those best times you know because you have to be pretty specific, I can tell you for example, I don't like making phone calls before noon and I don’t know why that is and it just something I noticed by myself, am just not as effective on the phone for noon, it’s not that I am not a morning person, it’s just weird, like I don't do well on the phone before noon, so I just really try not to schedule calls before noon, so how do you and I was really child errantly, it’s a good way for people to find that timing. PETER Well I think it's just experience like its taking me years to figure it out myself and I have definitely been able to help clients, I simply just offering up my experience around the stuff and then send you know try it out, so my favorite thing when I'm working with someone on productivity and sort of habit stuff is to do like a seven-day trial, you know I don’t want to say like we are going to reinvent your whole for seven days, one I really do is try shifting all your appointments to the often afternoon and just see what happens or one of your friend calls and just kind of measure, and it’s all totally subjective in fact I go up and I found that these rules like this idea that you're talking about the afternoon being that if your friend calls, they seem to be consistently true for most people, the very few clients I've worked with have been like you know what Peter, I want to speak to people all morning, and in my afternoon and evening doing creative work in brainstorming and stuff like that, doesn't seem to work that way, so I don’t know, I appreciate this is not a very scientific approach, but it seems to be consistent. ARI I agree that sometimes you just have to like turn it upside down and see what happens.
- 7. PETER Yeah, I think that I usually get into those conversations with people who are really frustrated and you know if you are listening into this and feeling frustrated with your productivity habits, there is a huge arguments to be made for just literally doing the reverse of what you can hardly do for seven days, because it breaks you out of that cycle of kind of carrying you out of the same behavior and expecting different results, you know, I think like a radical trial like a radical reinvention of your schedule can be a lot of fun, because it'll break everything and then give you the freedom to assemble the productivity ritual, the schedule that you want to have, rub in and just following the dismissal the status quo on habit that you've built. ARI I think that makes a lot of sense, so what I like to ask in this discussion is and you are feeling so much actually already, but hopefully you can give us three different ones, so the top three personal tips for people to be more effective, any advice from anything you have done, training or anything that you think will help people be more effective. PETER It’s a good question we have this whole video training series that we do where we just teach people about the top five principles that our coaches our productivity are trained in, you know to work with coaches and we share like sort of a deconstructed simple version of that and the first three of them is: 1. The first one is SPECIFICILY, a lot of people kind of lose the race running toward the goals or whatever outcomes that they set to themselves because the entire issues, because the way that they have set their goals is not psychologically conducive progress, the unconscious mind is not like in love with a very mentally able to comprehend, that kind of naturally move it forward and so the first thing that we coach on is committee action, it is getting your goals to the right level of SPECIFICILY really thinking about how big is this going to be, how abstract can it be, this is how specific and finding that sweet spot in the middle with the breaking kind of goal, yes over the next kind of few days a week, a month, whatever, this is something that I can take action, so we get people who come to us and they are like, I want to build this business or I want to set up this whole new website or whatever and they have procrastinated it for week, after week, after week and so we help them break down something that is specific enough that they can actually go, oh yes I can see into that inside and thus I can then work towards it, that’s probably the first one. 2. The second is MEASUREMENT, it's I think that this is an old idea now, thanks to people like Tim Farris and the whole kind of quantified self-movement that's unfolded in the last two years and we are all better off for it, but the idea of it you don’t measure
- 8. something, you can’t change it is so true and so significant and so the number of entrepreneurs who have kind of an abstract goals again the SPECIFICILY could be a problem, but they have all these business goals in their lives where there is new measurement in place and they really have, because of the kind of like, weird nature of entrepreneurial goals, it's not like we have a boss telling us good job, you handed in this report, good job, you hit this KPI, you have to create your own system for tracking, you need your own goal stock shot for measuring your effectiveness all the time, because if you're not even made a measuring something like the amount of kind of how is a focus a move you are doing or whatever, then it's very hard for you to know whether or not you're making progress and even that can be a problem, you know one of the most important things from entrepreneur to be productive is to actually feel productive to have an internal measure for, today was a good day, a lot of entrepreneurs never feel that, because they just feel like there is always something left to do, we never run out of goals right, that’s why measurement is so essential, because once you start measuring something and actually accomplishing it, you positive feedback kind of loop of life, look at all these gold stars, I did this stuff, I feel good, I'm making progress and that will actually help you push through that kind of gap that you caused with most goals, most outcomes, we have to take a lot of action for number of weeks before you see an outcome, I think weight loss in the classic example right, three or four weeks of eating good, exercising before you really going to notice any change in the shape of your body or the way that you feel and a lot of people don't have what it takes, because they are not measuring anything, they then feel like two weeks and it is like this isn’t working, I'm not making any progress, so you know as it is for health, that is very much the case for entrepreneurial goals, which so wildly different from one another, we have to have some kind of a system, we have to build the way that we measure what we’re doing. 3. The third one of the productivity that we have is ACCOUNTABILITY, I think that we have five, just trying to choose them and I think ACCOUNTABILITY is the significant, you know the reason that can actually exist and probably even the reason my entrepreneurs like business exist is because entrepreneurship is a profoundly lonely path, you know it's and technology has made this even worse it’s a massive double-edged sword, we can build businesses that people can’t even imagine 10 years ago, you know online and whatnot, but the crazy thing is there is always entrepreneur as I know a lot of them are listening to this interview who are trying to build businesses literally in their PJs, in the basement of the house on the laptop and that is not an environment that the human brain you know from a historical perspective is used to being in and being totally driven in and being super productive, like this is unique in the history of our civilization, the idea of people doing these incredibly high leverage activities and leaping ahead in life in a basement, in their PJs, you know, like it just weird and our brain isn’t kind of ready for it and we can because of the vacuum of ACCOUNTABILITY because we're all alone and no one you know we are in the position where we can go down there on
- 9. Monday morning and be on Facebook for four hours and this is true of my business and you know, no one is going to tell me off, I don't get in any trouble, no one knows, my client have no idea that I spent all morning on Facebook or spin at doing something effective, so ACCOUNTABILITY is essential, finding ways to start multiple layers of ACCOUNTABILITY and some of them are cheap and free, you know free and easy like having a creating a mastermind group or you know just having a buddy on a similar path that you check in with or something like that you know, a lot of people look at the heroes of kind Silicon Valley and think how these people, how are they so superhuman in their ability to get stuff done and build these impact, but what you don't realize when you're looking at those people, is that they supported underneath them by framework of ACCOUNTABILITY, it’s like six or seven executives would direct reports who are meeting with that guy like every Monday morning and he has to make promises to them and then deliver on them, I will help you with this, I'll see you on Tuesday, you know what I mean, like that's going on and above them there's a Board of Directors and advisory committees and they're all falling into this web of ACCOUNTABILITY, so that person has to show up, they are compelled to show up and deliver on those big promises that they have made, so if you're building a business on your own in the basement somewhere, none of that is present, it's not going to find you by accident, you have to create it in some way if you want to be able to move ahead fast. ARI Those are great, those are really great to the point, I love that so, Peter thank you for those and what’s the best place for people to find out more about you? PETER There is two, if you like those three tips there, those are three of five productivity, we have a free video chat training tutorial overcommittedaction.com and if you're interested in my work I have a blog @Petershall.com just my name or if you Google search the shrinks for entrepreneurs, that’s my site that's where my kind of that’s where it all started, the beginning of my private therapy practice with entrepreneurs and you can read all about stuff there, there is a couple of days a free e-book and some cool stuff to them, but if you're into that, committedaction.com, petershallard.com we love to have you come check out a stuff. ARI Right, well Peter thank you for your time, that’s a lot of fun in there, I appreciate it. PETER Thanks Ari for having me on the show.