How To Stop Your Brain From Micromanaging You w/ Kevin Gazzara

We talk with leadership coach and professor Kevin Gizarra about how mental patterns shape performance, then turn that insight into simple ways to build focus and avoid burnout. We connect positive intelligence, flow, and task balance so you can design a workday that supports engagement and creativity instead of constant strain.
• Kevin’s path from corporate leadership at Intel to coaching and leadership development
• The difference strong systems make in big companies and what startups often miss
• Why most people want to do good work when the environment supports them
• Holding “creative tension” between competing priorities without polarising the team
• Positive intelligence as an operating system for mental fitness
• Common saboteurs that hijack leaders and the “sage” powers that counter them
• Practical ways to build awareness and quiet unhelpful mental patterns
• Flow as challenge and skill alignment and why it boosts creativity
• How leaders and individuals can create conditions for flow at work
• The three task types and why the wrong mix creates disengagement
• Cadence, feedback loops, and structuring the day for sustainable energy
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Transcript

Kevin’s Leadership Background

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Good to have you back. I'm your host, Nate Shear, and this is Mind Force, the podcast sponsored by the three L's Love, Life, and Learning. Today's episode lives at the intersection of performance and psychology. We're talking about positive intelligence and how our mental patterns either sabotage or strengthen us. We're exploring flow, the state where focus sharpens and time disappears. And we're unpacking how to balance tasks for maximum engagement instead of constant burnout. This conversation is about working smarter internally, not just externally. Kevin, welcome to the show. Before we dive in, let's take a moment to say hello to all that are listening. Hi, and Nate, thanks so much for sharing me with your audience. I appreciate that. Absolutely. Thanks for coming out. For those of us meeting you for the first time, who are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:19

See, Kevin Gizarra. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I originally from Philadelphia. Went to school there, did all of my undergrad and graduate work there, and then uh went off and did my doctoral work in organizational leadership and management. So I've spent 30 years in corporations. The last 18 years were with Intel. I spent the last 10 of those years managing Intel's management, leadership development, and Intel University. And I had a goal to retire at 50. I left the corporate world in 2007 to start up Magna Leadership Solutions with two of my colleagues and good friends from Intel to go and offer management leadership programs to companies that didn't have$10 million budgets. So that's what we've been doing for the last almost 20 years now. And in addition to that, I get to dabble around with being a professor at six different universities. So life keeps stays pretty busy.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Wow, six. Yeah, that's awesome. My master's is actually in industrial and organizational psychology, and no one else ever says that. So that's awesome to hear someone else is also going through. I hear a lot of MBAs and you know, business admin and whatnot. It's nice to hear some similar vertibage. Kevin, what are you focused on right now?

Big Company Systems Vs Startups

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Well, I'm spending most of my time. We have a program called our Leading Forward Academy. It's a six-month program we deliver all around the world. Uh, and it's really helping leaders, primarily targeted at mid small to mid-size organizations. It's really helping leaders or managers to become leaders. And it's a complete system, it's not a one-and-done type of thing. So uh so we deliver those, and then what has kind of evolved out of that neat has been that there's been a lot of requests for executive coaching. So between the leading forward academy and my executive coaching, that keeps me pretty busy, and that's kind of what I'm working on.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Awesome. Is there something you see that's exactly the same? And then one thing that's completely different between those$10 million companies and then the little guys.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, I'd say that the biggest difference is, and I've coached a lot of people who have come out of school and are are looking for a kind of more of an entrepreneurial environment. And the one thing I would say is you know, big companies have a breadth of opportunities for you so you can move around. You know, I move from marketing to engineering to product management to learning and development to leadership to lots and lots of different places. And I think the one thing that the big companies offer is that breath. But if you were to talk about the leaders, I think the biggest difference is, you know, the bigger companies have systems and programs and kind of sets of values and practices that are ingrained that have established the culture. And many of the smaller companies, particularly startups from, you know, with entrepreneurs, uh, don't really have that. And they've really gone deep into the product, you know, and just getting sales and and the ideas out there, and they haven't really spent the time to develop uh a good system yet. And we try to help them with that because the biggest challenges, which most companies don't recognize, is you know, a good portion of your profits are going out the door by the people that are leaving with the intellectual property, as well as all of the additional costs that it costs them to retrain them. So I think the biggest difference is big companies have really good systems, some a little more bureaucratic than others. The little companies have really good people, but haven't spent the time to to focus on doing the integration of them other than just through hard work.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

What's something that's exactly the same no matter where you go?

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Boy, I I think the thing that I found, whether it's a large company or small company, is that everyone has this desire to really contribute and do well. There's very few people I've ever talked to in any size organization that have come in and said, you know, today I'm really gonna come in here and screw up or you know, slough off and and not do not do my work. You know, I found that most people really want to do a good job. You just have to give them the right, the right things to hopefully incentivize them. And I'm not talking about money, but really create that environment that's different. And I think we're gonna talk about that today, particularly in the flow session.

A Bad Boss That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, that's that's powerful. I think that's important. We think of lots of money and not enough money and all these different things, but I think at our core, you know, we're social creatures and we generally want to do a good job. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Well, I'm curious what led you into the world of leadership psychology and performance science?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Well, I've always kind of been fascinated by that, you know, by, you know, I'm a, I would say a systems thinker. And anybody that's read Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline, I was fortunate enough to get trained, get trained with Peter at MIT and get certified to teach systems thinking. And I've always kind of I never knew what it was called until I got certified to do it back in 1996 at Intel. And what I found was that I always kind of look at things and I see patterns and and so forth. So it's that ability to kind of see patterns, you know, and that's and what I recognized from the pattern observation is that there were lots of great teams. There were a lot of great teams doing great stuff, and then there were a lot of great teams that were doing not so great stuff. And what I noticed is it appeared to me that there was a one common thread, and the thread was the manager or the leader of the organization. You could have the same type of people, the same experiences, you know, almost identical. And you can have one that is thriving and incredibly creative, and you have the other ones that are just dying on the vine, and people are desperate to get out. And fortunately for me, I was in one of those second groups, which I had an awesome team, and I was I had this terrible, terrible manager. He was the ultimate micromanager. And no matter what I did, I could not I could not influence change with him. And this is prior to me going to Intel. And it drove me out, right? It's basically after 10 years and being going, graduating up through the company and having a great job and so forth. Ultimately, I came home one night and just said to my wife, I just can't do, I can't work for this guy anymore. And she says, Okay, go find another job. And fortunately, there was an ad for Intel. That's back when you used to get your your jobs through ads in the newspaper, right? And and so so he kind of drove me out. And I've always kept been curious to to really want to understand what makes leaders different. And that drove me kind of to do my MBA. I did my undergraduate in engineering and business. So a dual degree from Drexel. And then when I was working at Intel, fortunately, Intel, I would say, is a learning company, learning organization. And they encouraged me to go back and I did all my doctoral work while I was there, you know, looking at, you know, human motivation and engagement and really trying to figure out, you know, what are the man what do managers do differently? And there's some amazing stuff that if you spend enough time and, you know, write enough papers that you you can find out what that is.

Leading Through Creative Tension

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Yeah, it's super cool, like inspiration. I mean, we see posters and different stuff, but there's something that's very deep and you know, I think it's science-based, but it's almost an art in itself, you know, and you can grow it and you know, craft it and things like that, but it's super cool, like you're saying, you just find these minimal, you know, things that people are doing, and completely the same company and whatnot could go a completely different direction. It's really cool. I think it's like born into you too. Like myself, I'm a hospital administrator, and so when I see a process that's broken, it just drives me nuts. But yeah, I think it's kind of like built into us as people sometimes because some people like, oh, it's just the way we've always done it, and they're just okay with it. I'm like, no, like if it doesn't work, like let's fix this and make it better, make things even a little bit better. If everyone did a little bit better, we'd be doing amazing things. Yeah, I think that's kind of deep rooted in us. Well, before we get too much farther, I wanted to see if you had a question for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

You know, I think the only only question for you would be is, you know, as a hospital administrator, what's what's your what's your leadership, your biggest leadership challenge? I'll try to weave that through our kind of discussion today.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Oh, biggest leadership challenge. I think my biggest challenge right now, so I'm active duty Air Force. We're going through a restructure, even though it's been going on for many years, but we're transitioning to this new defense health agency. So we have kind of a new boss, and there's this constant struggle between readiness and the delivery of healthcare. And so they're kind of at odds, and it's always been a challenge that we've had because readiness costs money. It costs money to have shelves of medicine and things ready to go. And so we've kind of applied a for-profit business model from the civilian sector and tried to lay it over the military, but we don't make money. We're net zero. We don't have any profit. We actually cost money, if anything. And so we've kind of laid a business model that doesn't quite work. And so it's been really difficult with uh people and their motivation because they feel like they're kind of getting burnt by two separate bosses that want two separate things. So the delivery of that health care to all of our people, and then going out and doing uh readiness stuff out in the field and exercises and things like that. So it's probably kind of a complex thing, but I don't know if that makes sense. Two bosses, maybe morale. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

So, so if you read Senge's book, he talks about that as creative tension. It's holding two opposing concepts in balance. And, you know, the the leaders that can do that well are the ones that real that really shine. Where they get polarized in one direction or the other, that's where you're going to find more more difficulties in the organization. So so my my tips would be is identify the two ends of the of the spectrum here that you that you've talked about, right? And get those, get the individuals to figure out what does that balance point mean. And it doesn't mean 50-50 one way or the other. It just means that you get those two in agreement so that the people underneath don't have to spend most of their time trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. So so that that way if I was if I was asked to be a coach, that's kind of what I would come in from a consulting or a coaching hat, right? And it's getting those two individuals that have that control of that the two variables to have ongoing regular discussions that change in real time depending on the environment. Too often I find, Nate, that many of the organizations that are building, uh kind of building their their cultures spend a lot of time off-site doing strategic planning and they put something in place and that's that's it. And they don't modify that or they do it once a year. And, you know, a really good strategic plan is much more of a compass than a roadmap, right? And it points you in the right direction, and you have to recognize that. And what I find is the people that are just strictly managers, that they're just managing tasks, what they do is they think that the compass is the is the roadmap and they don't devi they won't deviate from it. And what you really need is you need both the compass and the roadmap working together to to make sure that you can you can do that. And and it and it's a constant, reiterative, continuous improvement project. So if you can do that, you're you're gonna be in better shape.

Positive Intelligence And Saboteurs

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Yeah, I think we do that a lot with people too. We want like one size fits all, like, oh, take care of this. And just people are vastly different and completely upbringing and experience and a long list of difference. But I think that's interesting. Like, I just want to make it so I can fix this person and fix that person. It's like that's not that's not how it works. Well, we'll transition into your first pillar, which is positive intelligence. For someone hearing the term for the first time, what is positive intelligence?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

So positive intelligence comes from there's a book called Positive Intelligence written by a gentleman by the name of Shirzad Shamin. And what Shrizad has done is he's he's taken the concept of emotional intelligence. It's probably a lot of people are familiar with a lot of the work uh that was originally done back in the in the 90s by Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence. And it's really kind of understanding, you know, the five different elements, you know, with regard to self-awareness and control and awareness of others and control and motivation. And and what Shirzad has done, which I thought was really brilliant, and I had gotten certified to teach positive intelligence about five years ago, put about 200 people through it uh so far, is that is he's taken that foundational concept. He's added lots of other things like work that was done by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania on positive psychology, some work around like David Rock on uh neuroscience, and he's kind of put this together in a in what I would call an operating, an operating system. And what positive intelligence, what Shrizad says, is there's there's really you have you have your sage brain and you have your saboteur brain. And in the saboteur brain, these are the things that are kind of holding you back. And each one of us has a different balance of the ten saboteurs. There's actually nine saboteurs, and there's this overriding saboteur, which he calls the judge, right? So, which is uh when you're thinking about something or looking at something, uh usually the judge comes in and they pull from these what they call compost saboteurs. And the saboteurs are controller, hyper-achiever, restless, uh stickler, pleaser, hyper-vigilant, avoider, victim, and hyper-rational. And once you understand which saboteurs are kind of holding you back, then you can turn on what he calls your sage brain. And your sage brain is has what he calls five powers. And there's five powers: there's kind of the power of empathy, the power of exploring, power of innovating, power of navigating, and the power of activating. And if you can turn on your sage brain and keep your saboteur brain's uh elements calm, right? We don't want to turn them off, right? It's kind of like putting your hand on a hot stove. You want you want your hand to be able to feel the heat, but once you know that it's hot, you don't want to keep it. You don't want to keep it there. So a lot of approaches from different psychologists and scientists is to get rid of the things that are causing the problem. And his perspective is no, you need those kind of as the early warning system, the canary and the coal coal mine or whatever you want to call it. And if you can do that, then you can turn on your sage brain rather than spending most of your time, which most of us do, and particularly when I'm working with different people, executives when when consulting or coaching them, is most of the time they're spending their time, you know, kind of combating the saboteurs. And that's really not the not the intention. So and and for the or for anybody listening, you can go and take your p I'll give you a link, uh, you can put it in the show notes, or if you just go to pq trainingandcoaching.com, there there's a link there that'll walk you through how to take the take the assessment. Anybody listening can take the PQ, the positive intelligence assessment for free, and they'll get an idea of you know which which ones are causing the most challenge and what's the degree of strength of that of them. So so for for you know, I boy, it's a long, long-winded way to talk about that. But really what it is, it's it's really understanding, you know, your saboteurs or your things that are holding you back and how to to really activate kind of the creative side of your brain, because that's really where the you know the true value lies.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

That's good. Yeah, that's a good foundation. So you said that people kind of combat it and kind of get wrapped up in, you know, that effort. So in relation to this positive intelligence, how can someone start strengthening their mental fitness in practical ways daily?

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Well, if you go to the site and you take your take your assessment, it'll give you uh great ideas. It'll it'll give you a report. It'll tell you what what are your your what how the nine rate with each other, and particularly it'll focus on the top three, and it'll give you recommend, it'll give you all the recommendations in there. You can get it through the book. There's a six-week class or program that that we deliver uh in a cohort style, so people can work with other executives to do that. Always glad to talk about that, but there's a good portion of it is uh really you can find on the web or just get the book. I think it's 15 bucks on Amazon. It'll give you all of the details. So, for example, like my top, you know, as a kind of an engineering brain, my top saboteur is the hyper rational. I like number I like everything that's it's quantitative. So that's usually where I land. And and before I had taken the program and have been working on getting my saboteurs quieted, uh, that mine was right up around an eight, eight out of ten. So it was pretty pretty strong. And then using all the techniques, mindfulness, meditation, breathing, there's lots and lots of different things that you can do, uh pausing, uh reflecting, turning on your sage brain elements, whether it's empathizing or exploring, innovating, any of those. By doing that, the last time I had taken the assessment, which was several years after I took the original on, you know, my my numbers were down to like five and six, right? So once again, you're not gonna get your goal's not to get rid of them. It's just to keep them quiet so that they're not taking over your, they're not hijacking your brain.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

And I think a lot of that's awareness. I mean, I guess that's oversimplifying it, but I've noticed in the show a lot of times it's just being aware of the thing, the the positive, the weakness, you know, whatever it is, a lot of times it's just knowing. At a previous episode, we were just talking about identifying calories that you eat or things that go out of your money and budget, just being aware of the money that's leaving sometimes is enough to, oh, I'm, you know, I'm sure we all eat out too much and there's too much Starbucks in the bank account and things like that. And I think we know it's there, but when you're actually like face to face, I think it's a good reminder, like we're built how we're built, so that's fine. But just being aware of it, like you said, and from the eight down to the six, I mean, not gone, but you're just aware of how it works and how you can work that in to kind of work towards your benefit. Well, that's good.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Yeah, that's that's a great summary. And and Sherzad talks a lot about that in the book about really being aware, and and that's probably the foundational pieces, is we're trying to raise your awareness of the things that you do well, the things that hold you back. And also once you're aware of them, you have to have the tools to be able to, you know, to keep them at bay or energize them. And I think that's one of the things, you know, when Daniel Goldman, I, you know, I used, did a lot of emotional intelligence stuff when I was doing my doctoral research. That's one of the things that Goldman did back in the in the 90s is he's came he came up with a model and it it was very descriptive of of how you can uh you know improve it or kind of move forward. But what Shad has done is he's moved from a descriptive model to a prescriptive model. And it's not like one way you have to do it. It's here's options, use the option that works best for you.

Flow And Challenge Skill Balance

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dr. Gazara, let's uh transition into your second pillar, which is flow. So, how do you define flow in the context of leadership and product? Activity.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yeah, so so I am I'm not gonna define it myself. I'm gonna use if anyone has read the book or they haven't read the book, this is of my top five books of all time to read. This is probably number one. And and the concept of flow was developed by a gentleman by the name of Dr. Mihai Chixing Mihai. I'm not gonna try to spell that to the to the group. And what Dr. Chixing Mihai did, and he was the department chair at the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, so very prestigious position. And what he he recognized through his research, where he came up with this concept of flow, was that we all have this zone that we get into where you have the right balance of challenge and skill. When your skill meets the challenge, you get into the what he calls the flow zone. And back in the 90s, uh that was returned as being in the zone. So a lot of people know, like, oh, I'm in the zone. You talk about Olympic athletes, you know, we're in a in in the Olympics at the moment. It's like being in the zone. The best Olympic athletes are in flow. And that and that's where the level of challenge and the level of skill completely matches it. You can imagine if you want to use like a skiing scenario, if you put a new skier on black diamonds, that's gonna put that the level of challenge and the level of skill are not gonna be matched in there. That's gonna push them into what they call anxiety, or he calls anxiety. And of course, if you put the Olympic skier on the bunny slope, right, where the skill is extreme and the challenge is low, that's gonna put them in an area of boredom. And the key is to find out where is that where is that meeting point where the challenge and skill, so that you can just push yourself just a little bit outside of the flow zone so that you're continually learning, right, and and growing. And Olympic athletes operate at you know tens and tens if you use a 10-point scale, 10 on challenge and 10 on skill. That's that's really where they where they operate. You know, it's getting, it's usually getting to like that eight and eight point takes about 20% of the time. And then there's that that extra 20%, you know, just to get that level of perfection where you're you know the most amazing at what you do in in the world. That's the other 80%, 80% of the work. And a lot, most people, you know, particularly if you look at companies, we talk about this in a business perspective. Most companies are really happy to get people to the 80%, you know, and they can certainly, there's some that are going to excel up into the 10 out of 10 out of 10 where they get to that 100%. But if you can get people that's to stay in the flow where you can continually look at the work that they hate they do and balance that on a continual basis, one, you get some things that are amazing. You know, flow doesn't guarantee performance. Generally, people that are in flow will be performing better, but it is much more from the perspective of they're so engaged in the work. But one of the things that does happen in flow is creativity just explodes. That's where you get the most creative. And and I would say if anybody, everybody's experienced flow, like if you're working on something and you look up at the clock and it's 12 o'clock and you swear it's nine o'clock, oh, the clock must be broken. That can't be right. Where where you've lost these three hours, that's flow. And what you really want to do, the best managers and leaders, and this is what we teach, and this is how I coach the leaders I work with, is really find out where the people are on the flow diagram. You know, are they in boredom and the anxiety? Are they in flow? And get them closer. The more you can do to get given them projects and activities that get them closer to flow, uh, the better off that you're going to be with regard to engagement. And you're going to get lots and lots of that creativity that you're looking for.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

So that's I think that's perfect too, watching the winter Olympics. I love the Olympics. Yeah, my dad always loved him. I ended up losing my dad. But one thing that, you know, he always loved was like people being able to come together and challenge each other and you know, have a little bit of peace. There's some things that happen from time to time, but for the most part, we're sportsman-like and whatnot. But yeah, I think that's so cool watching this week that you touched on the skill and challenge. It's interesting. I was watching, I forget the exact event. I think it was big air for ski or maybe it was half pipe for snowboarding. But it's so interesting where somebody goes down and puts down a really great run. And then after that, other people are able to do things like multiple times. The commentators mentioned they've never done that in competition before, but they saw someone else do it. The challenge was there. They had the skill, like you're saying. So challenge match skill, and they were able to perform things they hadn't done all year. Or maybe there's a couple times they've never done, but they saw someone else say, Hey, this is it. I gotta step myself myself up and step that game up. So that's a it's a perfect uh analogy, being able to connect the skill and challenge some things you never thought were possible.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah. And I I think the one thing I would say to the listeners, Nate, is don't don't wait for your boss to do this. You know, you could you can do this yourself, right? Figure out what's motivating, what's demotivating for you. You can go to our site or I'll give you a contact if you want to talk about this. I'm always overly excited to be able to talk about people because you know I've helped so many people be able to find their flow, how to get into the flow. And and the other thing is, is once you're there and you experience it, you just don't want to do anything else. And and the thing is, it doesn't cost anything. It's a little bit of time. It's it's once again, we go back to the concept of awareness. It's it's being aware, it's being aware and being able to inf influence change. You know, and we've done, we've worked with organizations, you know, the senior executive levels of multi-billion dollar companies where we've gotten them to understand this all the way down to we work with a a group of uh people that worked in a nursing home in the kitchen, in a nursing home, you know, and uh don't you don't have to have a PhD in something, you know, you don't even have to have a high school degree. The concept is so simple that everybody gets it. And you know, once once you can work with the different groups and get them to understand, you know, this can be applied for for anyone, whether you, whether you're a parent, whether you're a manager, whether you're executive, whether you're in the kitchen, you know, flipping hamburgers for for a nursing home. It it's it's all it's all the same.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

So I thought I saw a staggering statistic that said like 60% of people don't enjoy their jobs. So if someone doesn't even like their job, can they still accomplish flow?

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Absolutely. Yep. What we found is that when we've got and we and we did this with a large organization uh in Washington, D.C. several years ago that did a lot of healthcare work. Actually, they were doing analysis and and the and their turnover rate was significantly higher. And it would take like 18 months to get these people trained, and people are leaving at three to six months. So they could never get people trained, and the work was was going up and people were unhappy, and it was it was just a terrible, terrible environment. And what we found was is as long as long as you can make people understand that kind of they're empowered and they have the ability to influence what they do and have that conversation with their manager, that they can change it, right? That anybody can get and anybody can get into it. Now, if you're a line worker, you know, feeding a machine, you know, to make, you know, uh plastic bottles or or something, and that's that's your job, what we found was you probably have a little bit less influence of being able to get in the flow. But what we did find was is that most of those jobs can be automated or you can put a system in place that can help reduce some of that monotonous routine kind of work. And if you can do that, where you're coming up with new ideas, uh maybe like for example, we did this with we do work a lot with manufacturing, is is get them to do some batching, right? So rather than walking over, you know, picking up the elements, bringing it in one by one, you create an automated system where ten of the items come over automatically on on their own to fill you out, right? So that's something that's that reduces some of the some of some monotony. And, you know, you can get the people involved to get that creative piece turned on of because they're working the line of like you tell me kind of what do you see? What do you see? How could we do something different? Right. So which which will kind of lead into the I think our third pillar, which is around tasks. So we could talk about that as as well.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, transition. So the final one is balancing tasks for maximum engagement. So why do so many people that are capable feel disengaged even when they're actually busy?

Task Types And The Right Cadence

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Yeah, and this is where all my doctoral work went. So so when I did my my dissertation, I wanted to look at the relationship of task balance. And there are three types of tasks that we do. This was done by some research by a gentleman of William Daniels. And what Bill found out was that there's three types of tasks that everyone does. You know, pretty much you can put them into categories. And there's routine tasks, there's troubleshooting or problem-solving tasks, and there's project tasks. And if you look at it, each one of us has a unique balance of those. There's 496 different mixtures of those tasks. And what my, you know, when I was working, when I was managing, I had a team of about 20 people at Intel I was managing, and I noticed something. This is right before I went into the doctoral program. One of the things I noticed was they're all master's level students, new hires, right out of college, uh, similar level of experience, similar behaviors. You know, I'd walk into the office with the first first employee, and they'd say, Boy, you know, Kevin, I really love doing A, but or I hate or like love doing A and B, but I hate doing C. Okay, okay, okay, that's that's interesting. And same exact kind of work. This is when I was working in HR. The person B would say, I love doing B, but I hate A and C. And the third person would say, you know, I love doing C, but I hate A and B. And I thought, what the heck is going on here? Why is that? You know, similar backgrounds, same school, whatever, similar personality styles. So my hypothesis was that each one of us has a different balance of task types that we like to do. And we have one of those 496 different balances. And if you can put someone in a job where they're getting the balance, their ideal balance of routine troubleshooting project work on a regular basis, you could raise their level. What I proved is you can raise their level of job satisfaction, of motivation, engagement, and uh empowerment, where they really feel much more empowered. I had hoped that it would actually create flow. So when I did my dissertation, I invited Dr. Chick Sing Mi Hai to be on my my committee to help me develop an assessment tool for this. And I was very fortunate that he he was on my, he helped me develop an assessment tool, which we ultimately called the task quotient assessment, which for those that last to the end of this long talk I'm giving podcast, I'll give you a link. And they can take that assessment. We normally charge for it, but I'll I'm gonna give I've got a link, Nate, for you specifically for them. So once once you figure out your ideal task, and I'll give you a mixture, and I'll give you mine. Mine is I like about 50% project work, I like about 30% uh troubleshooting work, and about 20% routine kind of work. So I try to structure my days, uh, and I have a different cadence. That's the other thing we work on is your cadence. Everybody has a different cadence. I can do project work for about two hours, troubleshooting an hour to an hour and a half, and routine work right about 30 to 40, 45 minutes. So I structure my days in in the different work blocks. Because what I used to do, I don't know about you, but I know when I went to school, is I would say, okay, Friday, I'm locking myself in the dorm room, I'm gonna write that paper, I'm gonna sit down, and nothing's gonna distract me. Sure enough, like two hours later, I'm up, I'm gonna get something to drink or make a phone call or go talk to someone or whatever. And and the reason is is because when you're when you're doing that one type of task, that our brain needs a different level of feedback that shows accomplishment. And routine work, you can get lots of feedback quickly, very low intensity, but as a high frequency. Troubleshooting is about medium, and then project work, once you get that paper done or that book written or that whatever you're working on, you know, you have a very, very high intensity level of feedback, but it's but just it's just one time kind of and understanding that if you can really place yourself in an environment where you're able to do the structure, it's the same amount of work for the week or or the day. The difference is it's just chunking it up in ways. And too often what happens is people try to do, uh they try to get a variety of the types of things they're working on, but not the task types that they're working on. So they might go from trouble problem solving, problem solving, problem problem. At the end of the day, they're exhausted and they really don't feel like they want to do that again. And what we found was in you need to have a little bit of routine. Well, depending on what your your assessment says, is you need some of each of the three. It's very rare that anybody has only two of that, where somebody has a zero tolerance for for one of them. It's usually you have some small tolerance, but it's very rare to see. And we've never seen anyone, we've done more than 10,000 of the assessments. We've never seen anyone that has just a project or just a routine or just a troubleshooting. But we have had a like a handful of people out of the 10,000 that and what my business partner, he had only has tolerance for troubleshooting and project work. You give him anything routine, he can do it completely de-energizing for him. So we don't give him a lot of routine kind of work.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

That's interesting. That's pretty mind-blowing. I never knew that it was broken out like that. Because I've noticed, like as you were talking, when I get in, I try to do my email and work on, I guess, project-related things, the stuff that's in my to-do list when I got the most energy, and then I transition into trying to solve problems, and that's kind of back to the notebook. But I end every day in some of the admin functions I have to do, like updating records of training and different stuff for my team, and that's all like routine. And so at the end, I'm usually more tired. I don't have as much, but I don't mind doing the routine at the end because I'm just kind of want to wrap the day up. I don't feel as much. And so it's interesting. Like as you were explaining it, I think I fall into those different buckets, and I'm like, yeah, I want to close this day out by just clicking and I don't really have to think about much. I've done the thinking, I've done the troubleshooting, and now I'm gonna close out this day, feel good, kind of getting some wins, I guess, but it's like completely monotonous. That's interesting. Huh? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

So so what you're experiencing is that you've probably had uh, like I said, the differences is the degree of feedback that you got, right? You're gonna need a high the routine work again, high frequency of feedback, low intensity, right? You know, like, oh, I got rid of those 10 emails. Bam, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. Oh, I answered that question. You know, can we do this for this next project? Yes, go see this person. Also routine, right? So you get, you know, you get your inbox to go from 30 to zero. That feels pr pretty good. You get high frequent high frequency, but but there's nothing of incredible substance there. If you're working on that project and you make that breakthrough, you get that first chapter done of the book and you get it, get it approved. Okay, that's you only got one thing done in the same amount of time, you get 30 things done here. But the difference is is the the intensity is is significantly different. And once you know what your brain needs, structuring your day so you get that throughout the day is is important. And and the last thing I'll mention about it is people asking, well, how do I know when, you know, when I need to change? And it's when your brain starts processing other stuff than when you're in the moment of of where you are. Like you're working on that book chapter. Hey, and if you're if you're in there for two or three or four hours or whatever, and and you are in the zone and you're flow, do not stop that. Right. But at some point in time, you're gonna you're gonna start thinking about, oh, I need to go pick up the kids at school or I need to do that email, or that out invoice is still outstanding. That that just says, time out, I need to switch task types. And if you're working on a project, go work on troubleshooting or routine and and vice versa. And if you can do that on a regular basis, at the end of the day, you will feel not only really fulfilled, but you'll also be energized and want to come back and do the same system again.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

That's that's powerful. Yeah, I'm gonna have to come back and listen through all that again. Well, Kevin, it was awesome. You had three wonderful pillars today. I always like to try to bring it all together at the end. So, how do positive intelligence, flow, and intentional task balance work together to help someone perform at a high level without burning out?

SPEAKER_01 40:51

So I'd say get understand your emotional or positive intelligence is really the foundational piece. And once you can get your brain to slow down or calm the saboteurs and accelerate the sage portion of your brain, that allows you to create a structure called the task quotient structure, the the balance. And once you get that balance, now you've created the structure to be able to get that flow channel happening on a on a regular basis. And once once you've kind of understand under you've raised that awareness, not only you've raised your awareness of your emotional intelligence, you've raised your awareness of what's motivating and demotivating, and you know what task types. So when you're looking at, hey, I want to start a new project or whatever, whatever, if if you have a need for 50% project work and you're already at 70, it's probably not a good idea to add more project work so forth. It may feel right at the moment, but it it's always going to make you feel uh drained at the end. And and Nate, if anybody who's listened this far wants to understand that balance of task relationship, they can go to magnaleader.co.com, M-A-G-N-Aleader.co forward slash, and in all caps, G I F T gift. If they do that, anyone listening can take that, including yourself, can take your task quotient assessment and it'll tell you what your ideal balance is so that you can help structure your day and you know we can make the world a little bit better.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Yeah, that's uh important information. The when you have more information, like we talked about, being aware is just so, so powerful. When you know what to do, you can actually get after it, but you have to know. So I'm glad you've developed some tools. Well, this has been insightful and practical. Thank you for sharing your expertise. Before we wrap up, where can listeners connect? A little bit more about you. Uh, you mentioned the website. Uh, is there any other ways to follow you?

unknown 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

So if anyone wants to have a chat about any of the topics, all of these, hopefully you can tell I have a passion for all of these, they can reach me at kevin at magnaleadership.com, M-E-G-N-Aleadership.com, all in word, and I'd be glad delighted to talk to you. The promise I have to any of the listeners is I won't give you there's no sales pitch. You're not gonna get a sales pitch of like, oh, you need to hire me, or I'm gonna no, no, no. I if I if I can help you and you I can help you be a better leader and help your team, I'm delighted to do that. I mean, a lot of people ultimately have said, hey, I'd like to work with you longer term. Great, but but you're not going to get a pitch from me. I I really do want to be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

That's awesome. Well, thank you for taking time. I feel like time is the most precious commodity. Awesome. You're out here trying to help others. To everyone listening, thank you for investing in your growth. If this helped you, please pass it along to someone else. I love you all. See ya.