How Much of Your Stressed‐Out Life Is Coincidental?

When I look back on my own career, I appreciate three themes. I was making more money than I ever thought possible. I was miserable. And most of my stressed‐out life was self‐inflicted or coincidental.

We're all born into families and surroundings that are the luck of the draw. Some are coincidentally born into the top 1%. The rest of us are coincidentally born into the other 99%. For me, it was a lower‐middle class family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was coincidentally the youngest of six and a twin. Our father was coincidentally an unemployable alcoholic. My mother was a stay‐at‐home mom and suffered from a walking disability caused by muscular dystrophy.

We coincidentally lived in a poor area. Growing up, I got my brother's hand‐me‐downs, including his chores, snow shoveling and paper routes. We attended public schools that were close enough to walk to. I got my first real job at Sears because it was across the street from our high school. My accounting teacher referred me because I was good at math and she knew I could use the money.

I dated the first woman to show interest in me. For eight years. Gulp. To be fair, I had zero rap. I didn't know how to speak to women. I wasn't clever or charming and had never heard of mindfulness. Just like EQ, it didn't occur to me that these were learnable skills.

I was the first person in my family to go to college. I didn't know much, but I knew I had to be a commuter and I had to keep my job at Sears. Mom started charging us rent when we turned 15, so I needed the money. Seems funny to say that now, “I had to keep my minimum wage job at Sears.” $3.65/hr. back in the day.

I studied business at Duquesne University (just below Ivy League) because they provided the best scholarship. I studied accounting because I was good at math. It wasn't a passion. Then, I took a job at Price Waterhouse in Pittsburgh because they offered $29,000 instead of the $27,000 offered by the other Big 8 audit firms. I needed the extra $2k and I had to stay in town to help with family.

Soon, I was assigned to the audit group and then to accounts I had no say in. I worked on steel, oil, and coal companies, which, coincidentally were clients of PW's Pittsburgh office at the time.

My Career Unfolded on a Similar Coincidental Path from There. Transferring where the company needed me. Tackling the big projects that needed the most help. Lucking into some amazing experiences. Tolerating some crap experiences. Step by step, it all kind of just happened. At no point did I afford myself the luxury of asking, “What's my motivation? Am I doing what I want to do with my life?” In hindsight, my thinking was probably limited to “I'll do anything to create a better life for me and my family.”

Ultimately, it all led to my first global COO role. Twelve‐to‐14 hour days. 70% travel. I ran and flew to where I was needed. And the market shifted. Coincidentally, I spent less time working with CMOs and launching new capabilities and global offices and more time working with procurement professionals. This was my first experience with “faster, cheaper” as the new norm.

Why You Work Affects How Well You Work

A lot of research has been done confirming that intrinsic motivators (self‐worth, personal growth, passion, satisfaction, fun, purpose and meaning, making a difference, and so on) are more powerful than extrinsic motivators (social status, money, power, titles, perks, winning, public recognition, and so on). This may explain why, according to Deloitte, only 13% of employees report being passionate about their work.¹

In their 2015 book, Primed to Perform, consultants Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor share research and case studies of leaders creating high‐performing cultures based on three direct motives for work.

Play: You're most likely to succeed when your motive is play; when you engage simply because you enjoy it. Mindful elements like curiosity, being open, nonjudgmental, and experimentation are at the heart of play. People intrinsically enjoy learning and adapting. Because the play motive is created by the work itself, it's the most direct and most powerful driver of high performance. Plato wrote, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Numerous studies support that play is important to our survival, vitality, cultivating empathy, collaboration, and creativity.^2–3 It's taken me years to stop being the grumpy “get back to work” guy to understand this. I still have to wrestle that guy to the ground sometimes. How much do you play at work? Do you truly know your co‐workers?

Purpose: The purpose motive happens when you do something because you value the outcome. You may or may not enjoy the kind of work you do, but you definitely value its impact. While purpose is a powerful driver for performance, it's one step removed from the work itself, which generally makes it a less powerful motive than play.

Potential: The potential motive occurs when you take part in an endeavor because it will eventually lead to something you believe is important. An example would be a stepping‐stone job to get a promotion. The potential motive is not as powerful as play or purpose—it's two steps removed from the work (play) itself.

Together, play, purpose, and potential are known as direct motives because they're most directly linked to the work itself. A culture that inspires employees to bring play, purpose, and potential to their jobs creates the opportunity for high and sustainable performance and happier work cultures.

Doshi and McGregor also cover three indirect motives, including emotional pressure (guilt or shame), economic pressure (get a reward or avoid punishment), and inertia, where employees do what they do just because they can't think of a good reason to leave. When your reasons to work are due to indirect motives, your performance tends to suffer.

In their estimation, the motivators you focus on determine which one of the four kinds of leaders you are.

1. Quid Pro Quo Leaders: This leader believes in something for something. They give rewards for good behavior and punishments or threat to try to control bad behavior. They produce high levels of indirect motives in their employees.
2. Hands‐Off Leaders: This leader uses neither direct nor indirect motivators. They get involved only when there's a problem. They generally have good intentions, believing their teams want lots of space. But they're wrong. Teams perform best when the leader is involved.
3. Enthusiast: This leader tries everything, direct and indirect, but has a tendency to cancel out the direct motives through lack of focus.
4. Fire Starter: This leader uses direct motivators and do whatever they can to eliminate the indirect motivators. They play.

Most of us fluctuate between these kinds of leaders over time and generally without specific intention. These days, I make it a practice to be a Fire Starter. I'm not great at it yet, but practicing makes every week fun.

Other authors have explored similar themes.

• In Drive, best‐selling author Daniel Pink used 50 years of research in behavioral science to argue that external motivators (or pleasure rewards) like promotions and money are not the best drivers of high performance.⁶ Instead, his research found the best motivators to be “intrinsic motivators” like the mastery of work, having a higher purpose, and autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives.
• In Why We Work, Barry Schwartz shared, “Satisfied people do their work because they feel that they are in charge. Their workday offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion. And they use that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of mastery or expertise. They learn new things developing both as workers and as people.”⁷
• In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh shared how Zappos created a corporate culture based on pleasure, passion, and higher purpose. Happy employees provide the level of service that makes for happy customers who then spend more money. Hsieh has since launched a consulting company by the same name with his co‐founder, Jenn Lim. Today, Delivering Happiness inspires passion and purpose in the workplace.⁸ I'm proud to say they are a partner of Whil's. Mindfulness and culture go hand in hand.

Don't Chase the Wrong Things

Instinctively, most of us chase after pleasure and indirect motivators. Over time, we may find that monetary rewards and promotions are not the source of sustainable happiness. What if you flipped your personal model on its head to pursue direct motivators? How would that change your motivations as a leader and how you manage teams?

Looking back, I pursued mastery and autonomy intuitively at the earliest stage in my career. Purpose, not so much. That approach delivered results for me. And a commanding style of leadership, when stressed, likely caused me to withhold the same opportunities for my direct reports to find their own direct motivators. Command and control worked for many decades in business. Now it doesn't.

Get to Know Your Team

When we think about motivation, there are two key questions to ask yourself. First, do I really have a good understanding of my own goals, plans, and motivations? You need a touchstone for success and something to measure yourself against. Second, do my co‐workers have a good understanding of what motivates me? This is equally important. As leaders, we enroll teammates into missions and we expect them to deliver. If they feel the only mission is making money, or worse, making my manager look good, then it's difficult to establish the bonds important for sustainable success.

Really Introduce Yourself. Every time you introduce yourself is an opportunity to share what motivates you as a leader. Instead, most of us use our canned 10‐second elevator pitch. For me, it might be something like, “Hi. I'm Joe Burton. I own the leading digital training platform for employee wellbeing. I started it four years ago and now we have clients around the world.” Blah, blah, blah. These short intros usually don't convey much. Too many of us treat them as opportunities to try to look good. Whenever a sales friend of mine makes an intro, he ends with “Are we done lying to each other yet?” The point is, most intros don't allow you to get to know much about the other person.

The same is true for people who you may work with for years. You spend eight hours a day in nearby cubes or offices, countless meetings, trainings, and so forth. But do you really know what drives them?

I'm reminded of my friend, John Eaton. We worked together for a year in a startup turnaround situation. I knew John as an entrepreneur and a brilliant social media strategist. I also knew he had been in the music business earlier in his career. We worked together for an entire year before I learned that he was also a Grammy Award–winning producer. Initially, I was shocked. I joked that if I had won a Grammy, I'd be wearing it around my neck on a big gold chain on top of my “Ask me about my Grammy” T‐shirt. In time, I found that John was also a great father, husband, and someone who cares deeply about others, society at large, and our planet. We had a wide array of common interests that connected us. If we knew that earlier on, managing the difficulties of a startup turnaround would have come more easily.

The same is true for any team. A small amount of openness and vulnerability goes a long way to creating the ties that bind. Since we spend more time with work colleagues than we do with our families, it makes sense to move beyond the surface‐level “I'm good at my job” chatter to find out what really inspires and motivates them. Then you can determine if the right motivations are at play to help them and your company succeed.

Be Like Inigo Montoya

When is the last time you shared what motivates you with someone else? What if that became part of your conversation with colleagues and new people who you meet regularly?

In the movie, The Princess Bride, Mandy Patinkin plays the character Inigo Montoya. As a child, the villainous “six‐fingered man” kills Inigo's father in a swordfight. The young boy dedicates his life to avenging his father's death. During the film, he keeps practicing how he will introduce himself once he finally finds the six‐fingered man. “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Near the end of the movie, he finally meets the villain. During their sword fight, he keeps repeating this mantra. It's a powerful scene. There's no doubt what motivates him. Here's someone who dedicated his life to becoming an expert swordfighter. He has a purpose and a mission. “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” I'm not suggesting that you go out and kill someone. But what if your co‐workers really know what you stand for?

The following is a short exercise you can do with anyone. In our CML Workshop, attendees find this exercise to be transformational. They move from trying to look good in surface level conversations to truly connecting. They move from concern about being judged to experiencing the power of being open and authentic. If you're married, I especially recommend doing this with your partner. The short exercise quite often ends with a hug from attendees who were complete strangers a few minutes earlier. That's the power of authentic connection.

What's Your Best Possible Future?

Most of us tend to predict futures that are consistent with our past. We manifest what we expect to happen.

We all know people who get locked into a way of being based on their past. For some, that turns into the Debbie Downer syndrome in which they feel nothing ever goes their way, they never get a break, and everything is stacked against them. Over time, this becomes part of their subconscious. We get locked into negative thoughts without realizing it. (For you folks named Debbie, my apologies. If it helps any, my name is Joe. As in the “Average Joe.” I feel your pain.) Debbie Downer folks tend to expect the worst and then the worst happens. Conversely, we all know people who look at the sunny side of life. They believe that the universe conspires in their favor and they tend to work toward the good results that they expect. What approach do you feed?

When it comes to motivation, envisioning is a powerful tool to think about the future, commit to goals, and then make them happen. One of my favorite people is Chris Bertish. I met Chris a while back on the speaking circuit. He's a high‐energy speaker and shares the story of training for the 2010 Mavericks, the top surfing competition in the world. The Mavericks are announced based on weather patterns for the most favorable waves, giving the 24 athletes who qualify only 48 hours to get there. Chris shares a powerful story of envisioning the impossible. As an unranked surfer with no sponsors, he trained and committed himself to winning the event inside of 10 years.

When the call finally came, he was trained and mentally prepared (Chris learned attention training from his father as a young performance athlete). But he wasn't ready. He was living in South Africa, had $40 to his name and 48 hours to get to the event in Half Moon Bay, California. He borrowed enough money to fly coach, got a total of six hours sleep in two days and landed with just four hours to make the event. But his equipment didn't arrive. He had to compete on borrowed equipment. Imagine Andre Agassi without his racket! Sorry, my analogies are all from the 1980s. Chris competed to the final heat, nursing a rib he feared had been broken on his first run. On the final wave of the final heat, having traveled across the world in 48 hours on six hours of sleep and on borrowed equipment, he won the Mavericks in front of 50,000 spectators. His adventure would later be showcased in Ocean Driven an award‐winning documentary and a best‐selling book, Stoked!.⁹

What's Next? In 2016, Chris set another goal for himself. He committed to raising funds for children in Africa by SUPing across the Atlantic. SUP stands for stand‐up paddle boarding. His website described it as “paddling a marathon every day for 93 days, over 4,500 miles to show the world what's possible, one stroke at a time.” Two months before his trip, Chris visited Whil to share his plans with our team. We were inspired—and concerned for his life.

He had a special craft built. The trip started on the northwest coast of Africa, in Morocco. He battled the currents, storms, sharks, exhaustion, and the loneliness of being at sea without another soul for months. He started and ended each day with breathing and focus practices. By the fourth week, his craft had flipped dozens of times, electrical systems failed, the craft sprung a leak, two great whites threatened attacks, a safety harness got trapped on a giant squid, and a storm blew him 200 miles off track. But he never lost sight of his goal. After 93 days of paddling, he arrived in Florida. Chris credits his higher purpose and ability to remain alert and focused in getting him through. Beyond breaking multiple world records, he raised over six times his goal – enough to build a school, provide one million meals, and over 1,000 life‐changing surgeries for children in Africa.

Chris's story is not unlike my own (kidding). Most of us can't relate to that kind of potential danger. However, as leaders, we can all relate to the constant challenge of feeling alone in the face of ongoing change, risk, and uncertainty.

Setting goals and envisioning the outcomes you want in your life are important tools for focus, drive, and achievement. In the absence of creating space to chase goals, we can end up chasing our own tales. The numbers and business results matter, but so do personal goals. Pick ones that make you want to jump out of bed in the morning.