Townsend Institute Podcast Series - 092 | Dr. Richard Boyatzis: Leadership That Resonates

0:00Welcome back everyone to the Townsend Institute podcast series. Gilbert and I are sitting down with quite the influencer, quite the legend, quite the researcher. I mean, really someone who it seems like has lived a thousand lives with the amount of people and knowledge and research that he has conducted over the years. We are sitting down today with Richard Boyatzis, right? Gilbert, man, what a conversation this was. Well, it's so interesting. The right turns in life. I think that's some of our listeners are going to say, you know, he was going to, he wanted to be like, you know, like a pilot. Astronaut. Astronaut. That's right. You want to go into space, but his vision wasn't good enough. But he went to MIT, he did all these things. And yet he ended up in the leadership and management coaching field. So yeah. And what a legend. He's become like you said, a bachelor's degree from MIT, a master's and a doctoral degree from Harvard, right? And as you listen in on the episode, the names he's able to draw for those of you, you've read their books. You've read their articles. They are the theorists behind much of what we study in leadership and coaching.

1:04You name it. Obviously his creation of change theories and just how to be a better leader, right? And that emotional intelligence and how important that is, right? As compared to the focus on the IQ. Yes. And you know, it connects in great with the Townsend's too. As we talk about connection in the three Cs. He gave some great advice. I'm going to use him my teenage daughter. So I hope everybody gets excited today. Let's get started. Well, welcome in everybody. We are so excited today. We have a friend here, Dr. Richard Boyatzis, who is just if you haven't read something from him, you may not check things out because he has written for so long. He's done so much great research. We're honored to have you here today, Richard. Thank you so much for joining us here on the Townsend Institute podcast series. Thank you, Gilbert. Good morning, Richard.

2:05We do. We so appreciate having you here today and just so much of your work has impacted not only us and our vocations and the work we do here at the Townsend Institute, but that of our students as well as we bring some of your ideas into our classroom. So for those of our listeners who may or may not be familiar, talk to us a little bit about the history of how you got involved in kind of the fields of leadership and change and how that's kind of blended into coaching and all the things that have helped make up your career. I grew up in a six floor apartment of a section of sunny side queens that the only trees in our neighborhood were down by the railroad tracks and they were dead. So it's kind of urban, ultra urban, working class, almost all immigrants. It was predominantly at that point in the 40s and early 50s Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, but we were one of two Goy families, as they say.

3:06But anyway, I grew up reading a lot because there wasn't much to do outside other than playing the street and get hurt, which sometimes people would do to me. But I read a lot and somewhere in the early 50s, my father bought one of these early TVs with the small round tube and I started watching on Saturday mornings, the old flash Gordon and Buster Crab kind of cereals and I got fascinated with space. So I wanted to be in the space. I wanted to go into space, just being the space program. And unfortunately during my kindergarten first, third grade and fourth grade, the PS150 tried to leave me back as they thought I was cognitively slow. It started with kindergarten because I spoke, we'd come back from five months in Greece and I had a little Greek accent.

4:06I could read Greek letters but I couldn't read English and they thought that was a sign of cognitive impairment. And then I won't go into the problems with the others but it had to do with schools. So finally, Sputnik goes up in 57, they test every kid in the US and it turns out that I'm really good in math and physics. So all of a sudden in sixth grade, my father worked as a waiter. He immigrated to the US in 38, got drafted because legally and took out papers and before he knew it, he was right after Pearl Harbor, he was in the jungles of Panama and then later landed on Normandy and went through France. But so he gets out of the army and instead of continuing with college which he had started in Greece, he did what every Greek relative I had on this side of the Atlantic did in New York, which just went into restaurants. So he was a waiter and eventually a captain. And worked seven days a week, three in the afternoon to three in the morning.

5:10So my mother would always have to go to these various school things and defend me and then keep me out of school and bring me up to date and then send me back in. But when the sixth grade teacher asked to meet her or them but she showed, she rolled her eyes and told me later, she thought it was the same thing again but it wasn't. They said I was really good and they put me in this experimental program or skipped me two grades. She knew that I was probably a bit geeky and not socially as mature as I could be so she picked the option of junior high school, high school and two years of college all in six years. It was the beginning of what we now call the AP program. And because these working class community in Esart County, at the county jail, the county hospital, the county reformatory, the county park, national county park and half of Mitchell Air Force Base, we had phenomenal teachers. So before I knew it, I was in advanced calculus and advanced physics and I got accepted to

6:19the school of my dreams at MIT and I got my first degree in aeronautics and nationalics. The Air Force Academy had tried to recruit me in 63 to go there but I asked one question, can I get in the astronaut program and they said no. Yeah, that's a perfect natural vision in those days. But while I was at MIT while I was trying to finish, I ran out of money. I was putting myself through using stuff I'd saved from all of my music gigs and working and all this kind of stuff and some scholarships. But so they got us a job in MIT in the aeronautics and nationalics department because my specialty was control systems amid the planetary vehicles. So they got me a job working in the experimental research unit department at Northrop, North Island, California, those days. Two of my fraternity brothers and one other guy in our class all got jobs.

7:20They were the rest of us at Northrop, one of JPL. And we lived in an apartment on the Esplanade, on Enredondo Beach, but right on the water. It was perfect for 19 year olds or 20 year olds. I was going to say quite a move from the six-hole apartment building in Queens to Waterfront. Not yet. Well, and 1966 and let's just say, I don't remember exactly what the drinking age issue was, but it wasn't a problem in Southern California for us. Anyway. So here I was in one of two research departments. And we were all, every one of us were, sorry, it sounds arrogant to say, but we were either really smart or scary smart, but it was like two departments of sheldon's. I'm concluding the managers. So everybody was weird. There was one normal guy that I thought was reasonably normal. I ran into him almost 15 years later when I was doing some consulting from a tell in

8:24the Mattel cafeteria. He'd left Northrop designing boosters and rocket ships and was now designing planes and boats that were toys. I'm betting right. So what two things, and a whole bunch of things I learned during that time, one was I'd saved enough to be able to finish and a much too compulsive not to, which I did, my degree. But I learned that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life because if you don't, if you're not a test pilot or an astronaut, it means you're sitting in a cubicle programming and programming. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do. And it dawns in me that the managers we had were so bad. I mean, they got so little out of us what they could have gotten.

9:24So I took some management courses at MIT thinking, well, that whole thing's got to be easy. I mean, Northrop offered his job. So it wasn't like they didn't want us back. They did. But I just didn't want to do that kind of job. And the first management course I took at MIT, they had the professors stand and do like a 10 to 15 minute description of their course. And then you could try to run and get in. And the first one was by a young fellow who was finishing his PhD at the time, David Cole, if you ever used experiential learning theory or experiential learning, you know, his work and his test. He described his course in organizational psychology. And to me, honestly, it sounded like kind of crap, but he said two words that may be run to the basement in his classroom. And I got in the two words were no tests. So the entire arc of my career, that would get a student's attention for sure.

10:27I was going to say, yeah, I can see a lot of guys right in there. Yeah. I turned out later when I was in my clinical training in my PhD program at Harvard that I had to up realizing I'm test phobic. I always have been. And but anyway, and it was well, there won't be a test today. There's no test at the end of this. Right. You're welcome to give a lot of tests. Life is a test. But during this one break, we're talking about he and I are talking about what I should do my term paper on. I said, I want to do my term paper on how managers don't help their support. Because I just spent five and a half months living with that. And I immediately was focused without thinking about it on the motivational aspect of the manager. And he said, well, I've got some real data on our MBA students, the 20 to 30 year olds, on how much they're helping or not each other.

11:27Would you like to work on that real data instead of hypotheticals? Different. You don't have the manager relationship. I said, sure. I worked on it, worked my ass off. And he liked what I did. Offered me a summer job. I had to take some courses because I was still making up time from taking the time off. But he ended up getting me into for the following two semesters, six PhD seminars. And all of a sudden, I'm in PhD seminars with people who were giants in the field, but I didn't know because I wasn't in the field. So I did two semesters with Ed Shine, who became a personal mentor. Yeah. Two semesters with Everett Hagen, who started the psychoanalytic historical society with Eric Erickson in Boston. A semester with Dave McClellan, who was on sabbatical, and he was teaching a course on loan from Harvard. And several two semesters with Carl Swanson and the J. Farster group on systems dynamics. So I was blown away by it all.

12:30We ended up by the way, publishing two papers based on that initial data set. We actually wrote a few more, but those two got published. So it was really my interest in change started in the spring of 67. And it was really, how do you help people change? And it was a puzzle. I made a group of immigrant neighborhoods and some immigrants thrived under the opportunities that America offered and still offers. And other immigrants didn't. And that always puzzled me. I was dealing with relatives who all of the men had fought in the war. And most of them came back okay, but a few didn't. And trying to figure that out. And then trying to figure out why there were people in parts of, as you wandered around Manhattan and New York City, it's nothing like today.

13:32But still occasionally you'd see a drunk. Or what we used to call those days hobos. But there weren't many. I mean, we used to spend Sundays in Central Park and they weren't, they didn't hang around Central Park, but you'd see them around. So again, the question was, how does that happen? How does that happen to people? So they, Dave Colp and Ed Schein and a few others basically convinced me to go to graduate school, which I hadn't been planning on. They explained that because I didn't know, as I was the first in my family on this side of the Atlantic to go to college, they explained that, well, you usually get a master's in a doctorate, but in psychology you go right for the doctorate and get a master's along the way. You know, once you pass your exams, they give it to you. And they helped me get into two doctoral programs and I went to Harvard. So. And I mentioned that.

14:33That's a pretty good recommendation letter. So right, I would imagine from those, those people that probably helped you get in there a little quicker. Not, not all of them were that, I mean, there weren't any negative ones, a couple more neutral, but positive ones were positive. Yeah. And, you know, I did have a degree in aerospace from, from MIT. So the issue of the thing that was funny as years later, the faculty told me they admitted me conditionally. And then when I said I didn't need any money, because they said, I said, what does conditional acceptance mean? They said, well, we'd like you, but we can't give you any money. I said, all my life, I've found ways to make money legally. Let me, and they'll do it. I mean, I put myself through working my ass off graduates. Yeah. Anyway, what, what became very clear during that time was that, although they, they, they were interested in me for my math ability, and they thought I could help to transform

15:33by mathematical modeling, psychology, I was interested in the clinical parts. How do you work with people? So I was doing research on change, as well as the whole issue of how do you help somebody change? And then I was at Harvard, my thesis advisor, you know, main mentor was David McCullough, and Fried-Bales also, that's where I learned all about how to manage small groups and teams. But I was also looking at change in teams and change in organizations. And the theory that I now call intentional change theory began in Dave Colbs office in the spring of 67, as we were saying, how do we make sense of these results we're seeing? And then I continued working on it. When I finished my PhD, I really wanted to do research and therapy.

16:33And I had since 1970, I developed a therapy program for alcoholics and drug addicts. I was working the VA system. Then also the feds picked it up and had me, it was the beginning of the drunk driver programs and what was happening is they were identifying people who were problem drinkers. They may or may not have been alcoholics, but problem drinkers all over the place and know what to do with them. So they had AA and they had medical treatment. What else? Well, my program worked on the results of what Dave McCullough had been studying on power motivation and how do you help people develop socially responsible ways to feel more powerful rather than just drink or pick drugs or gamble or have a lot of sex or whatever. And so that's what I really wanted to do. I got offered a position at Yale and turned it down because it was a one year rotating position. And at that point, I knew enough about myself that I was a troublemaker.

17:37I mean, my mind, I was an innovator, but I knew that it was a pain. I was often a pain in the ass. Plus my interpersonal style wasn't always as smooth as one might hope. So I ended up in Dave McCullough, I just got this big research grant from an IEEE to study the effect of alcohol and aggression and continue the work on the power. So he said, look, why don't you take it? He said, I got it, but I don't really want to do it. He said, you do it. You take it. And so I, that's what I did. And I went to work for this small consulting company that he had founded with a couple of the faculty. And I was doing that part time going through graduate schools, well, there's other kind of consulting. But the whole idea was how do you help people change? And I actually started the competency movement.

18:37I mean, I've seen once one of the five people who started the whole competency movement in HR. Because I did the first competency study against performance in 1970. And by 73, when McCullough's article came out, American psychologist, that most people credit the beginning of that, although really started earlier. By then we were off on a roll and it led to my 1980s book was the first study of competencies of managers assessed against performance, not value wise, but actual measuring performance. And then looking at their behavior and looking at the patterns for supervisory mid-level and executives in public and private sector organizations. Did you get a lot of pushback? As you were doing that, everyone, I can't. Or rend us. Yeah. Right through the, I mean, my book came out in 82 and that helped. But right through, I'd say the mid to late 80s, people kept saying, hey, it's all knowledge

19:37skills and abilities. You don't need competencies. And we kept saying, you're missing the ability to do it. The underlying, the unconscious driver of these things. And if you contemplate them not as knowledge skills and abilities, but as competencies, first, it's inductively driven because the designs always started with performance. And you looked at what were the top performers versus the not so good. That and because we were using qualitative methods as well as qualitative, but mostly qualitative, it meant that in every country of the world, it was culture. It was really valid. So because we weren't used in questionnaires throughout the 70s and into the 80s, we're using critical incident interviews. So in the 140 countries of the world we were doing it in, it was valid in a way that questionnaire attempts might not be run off the normal. That's really interesting. Well, just to go back, Richard, just to clarify, if our listeners or viewers, of course, you're 1982, you know, monumental book we're talking about is competent manager, right?

20:41A model for effective performance. But like you said, it was really one of those two that could span industries too, having had research and experience working, whether it's in the restaurant industry or an aeronautics or higher education. Well, our clients were all over the place. All over. I mean, by 1979, the American Management Association at higher dusted created an MBA program that was based on people's ability to do management well, not the knowledge, which we did. And it got certified in California and I think New York. But at the same time, in 1974, the Navy brought us in to help change the way they developed and promoted leaders because they were wrestling with problems around women in the Navy and conflicts and race. And we did an amazing number of competency studies in the Navy and Marine Corps, which

21:41then led to over 550,000 officers and senior enlisted getting trained by teams of our company and Navy personnel. But the crucial issue about the switch, because you'd asked me about the switch all along, regardless of what the ostensible theme was, it was all about change. And it was all about sustained desire change. So it's not any change. I've only focused on desire change. I mean, there are plenty of people who want to be depressed and study the lack of change. I want to study people who actually do change. And so give us a key. And give it that desire change, Richard, why don't you go ahead and give us an example for our listeners out there. Like, what would you, what constitutes desire change? People engineer becoming emotionally intelligent and being able to make eye contact and have a good conversation with people. Somebody who was possibly a surgeon, being able to talk to their patient and not see them

22:45as just a massive blob of protoplasm. Somebody who could motivate others to want to improve. And was that a big, was that, that seems like there'd be a little resistance there from some doctors, right? They're like, no, we're just. In every field, every field worked in, every field, because look, through the 50s and into the 60s and 70s and even into the early 80s, people still thought it was knowledge. All craft. And in fact, we showed empirically that knowledge got you to mediocre, but knowledge never got you to better. Never. Yeah. By 1978 or nine, I was, you know, I've been averaging 18 days of group therapy a month. I was kind of emotionally getting to be quite of a mess by 75 or 76. So I just needed to get out of that arena.

23:47Plus it was so hard to get money to do the projects. And that's when it dawned on me that a multi-dimensional complex phenomena that required a lot of different ways of looking at it was management leadership. And because the needs were so great, you didn't have to spend three months writing proposals to get a $15,000 grant. So that's why I shifted to leadership and management. I mean, not ostensibly. I didn't really care one way or another. But I wanted a phenomena that was very complex in today's terms that was multi level. And required not just thinking about individuals, but thinking about groups and organization cultures and all of that stuff. So that's how I got into leadership and management. And the idea of how to develop it. The application of the early version of intentional change theory to our processes.

24:53Yeah. So you mentioned intentional change theory, right? So what's the biggest maybe misconception that leaders have about how people change? Sure. And let me talk about two of them, Gilbert. Okay. First, goals. Specific goals don't motivate people to change. A person might adapt or cope a little bit, but then they revert, which is why so little desired change occurs that lasts. Goals, it turns out our research and has shown activate parts of the neural network, a neural network that closes you down to new ideas. It helps you focus and get something done, but it closes you to new ideas. And believe me when a person wants to change, they have to be open and adapt on a regular basis. Secondly, that specific goal setting activates the sympathetic nervous system, which again, it helps you get stuff done.

25:58But is harmful. It's called stress and it leads to cognitive impairment and emotional impairment. The only antidote lowering your stress level is not an antidote. It just means you're mildly impaired. The only antidote is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. And we started showing that decades ago and then nailed it with the number of studies that the key was ending up being able to activate this other syndrome, which I call the positive emotional attractor. Now it turns out that goals don't do that. They're useful, but only when you've exhausted what has to be done and you don't need to adapt because goals are disastrous if you need to adapt. But the vision, the big picture your dream is the context that allows you the flexibility to explore and adapt and is in activates the default mode network.

26:59And you're logically and the parasympathetic nervous system. So it activates the very parts of the mind body that you need. And I now have even shown in my latest book how it works the same in teams or groups or families that works the same in organizations and communities and countries that when you activate these things in people, they open up. And that is so counterintuitive. And let me again point out that when people see the organization has really a financial instrument, they're automatically in what I call the negative emotional attractor because they're automatically activating the test positive network and the sympathetic nervous system. So what happens is if you start a meeting, I've said this since the 80s and CEOs really pissed off, you know, when they hire me through my agent, pay my outrageous fees and all of a sudden I get up on stage to say, show me, you start somebody who starts a meeting with financials, I'll show you an ineffective leader.

28:10So, but it's because if you do that, you're getting everybody aroused in the negative emotional attractor. So the first thing is the real driver of innovation change and engagement is vision purpose, the dream, not goals. Second, you're not a leader of a plan, you don't lead a strategic plan, you don't lead a budget, you lead people. And too many people in leadership positions think that the goals, the plan, the budget is what they're doing. It's not. Yeah. You know, and especially the higher up you are in an organization, you lead or manage people who manage people, who manage people, who manage people and maybe six levels down, there's somebody who actually does the work. So what does that mean? You're that far from the actual work from the customers, from the innovation, from the whatever.

29:14So your only leverage is how much you're inspiring other people and you don't do that because you say, hey, here's another bonus. That doesn't last. That has a limited impact on people. What really drives people is this sense of a dream and this purpose and the quality of relationships. Now we started studying in 2007, the specific qualities and I, you know, I've been studying relationships since my PhD thesis, so on affiliation. But I've decided in 2007 to focus on those qualities and relationships that activate this positive emotional attractor. And it turns out that we now have over 60 studies, two thirds of which have been published showing that the degree of shared vision, not goals vision, the degree of shared compassion or caring and the degree of shared energy predicts leadership effectiveness, predicts engagement of subordinates, predicts organizational citizenship of subordinates, predicts product and process innovation in the high tech industry and Silicon Valley Valley.

30:28So yeah, those are the two things vision and quality of relationships vision and quality of relationships. Well, this is great. I'm taking notes. Tears, I rethink some of the meetings I have coming up on my calendar here might have to restructure how we go there. But I want to ask Richard because I understand and the idea of the vision and the dream and I know I've read a lot of research that talks about extrinsic versus intrinsic reward systems and all of that. But I also want to know at some point, don't you have to get to the goals and the bottom line of what you're going to and what does that switch happen? How is a leader? Do you know when to make that switch? First of all, you have to we just had a article that came out in organizational dynamics literally a month ago. And it was it came out of chapter eight of our 2019 book helping people change Ellen Van Oston and Melvin Smith and myself, but we wrote this article with Scott Taylor and Kimner, Vangel, a pass early was a part of it and and Diane, but we basically contend that organizations every organization has a motivation crisis right now.

31:40That's what the engagement numbers are telling us and COVID you know, amped up the disengagement, but basically it's still miserable. So why do people not care? We think it's because and this is what we're saying in the article organizations have to develop a culture of development to complement the culture of performance. Not servant. Not overlap. They can't because they're based on antagonistic human systems, the neurological networks and the hormonal systems that feed each of these things are antagonistic. They suppress each other. So that means that if you want an organization where you were hitting your performance targets and people were feeling excited and motivated and developing, you have to have both cultures and you have to somehow paradoxically have them work, but that's why we're saying and when I first got into this field 67 people were saying, oh, well, let's teach people how to do people and tasks at the same time, you know, the old managerial grid nine, nine thing.

32:51It's crazy because as soon as you do that, you lose the developmental impact. So I'm not, of course you have to do performance. Of course you have to hit the financials. Just don't think of it as something that motivates people. It doesn't. Yeah, but do you need it for the organizations of survive? Of course you do. Now even in change, a goal can help a person change, but it's like 80% down the cycle. It's at the point that you've exhausted all the possible reasons why you might want to change. And you're anchored in the commitment to the thing. So then it works. So I'm not saying goal setting isn't useful. It's just as a part of the change process. It's not useful to toward the end. Same thing with feedback. I mean feedback is another one. I talked about this chapter six. I think my recent book, Science of Change feedback is almost always useless.

33:55The people who give feedback, regardless of the intention, are basically doing it for revenge or they want to vomit on the other person or they think they're trying to help them. They aren't. Because first of all, almost nobody wants feedback. I mean, you think about the last time, well, you're an academia. So we don't really have bosses. But if you're working a real type job, you know, you have a manager doing a review that last clear to the discussion where they say, well, let's talk about what you'll do differently next year. And you're sitting there saying, oh, yes, thank you. That's very useful. Or if that doesn't help you think about your teenage kids. So yeah, feedback is hardly ever useful. And yet we still keep doing it all the time. Now feedback is useful when a person genuinely asks for it. So I got to ask, so this is good. I got a couple teenagers. So I need to try and help them ask for it more often. I take it to the feedback.

34:56Yeah, but that's the interesting thing. The more that you're trying to get them to ask for it, guess what? They feel that. They know it. They're savvy. Oh, yeah, dad's doing that again. He's trying to manipulate us into asking him. So the question is, you have to flip a Gilbert in your head. Okay. Okay. Yeah, because even yesterday with my daughter and her, she's trying to work this job. And there's a little miscommunication. I was trying to give her advice on how to talk to her boss. And did you know that with some advice on that? Probably not as much. No. So here's the key. If she didn't come to you and say, I'm having trouble on the voice. Can you help me out? Then she didn't want the feedback. But what you might ask her is, why is she doing the job? Tell me about it. Why are you doing it? And they get her to talk about that. Yeah.

35:58And if she explains, well, the job's instrumental to something else, then you find it. Tell me about that. Something else. Why do you want that? So see if you can get to the vision picture. And at that point, as she's talking about it, at some point, you could say, and how's it going? Yeah. Yeah. Because then it's not fitting into her ridiculous boss's issue. It's an issue of what she wants. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's the good point. I should have had this, we should have had this conversation yesterday. But yeah, with you. So, but that's, that's okay. Now I know. I know. It's a therapeutic rate. So it's okay. Yeah. I love it. So, well, so one thing we talk about is the positive, you've talked about this, the positive emotional tractor and a negative emotional tractor. Right.

36:59How, how do you, when you use this, I was just kind of shift conversations for, for leaders and managers. I mean, if, if you think about that, how does it do it? A very, a very resonant leader in healthcare, Tom Strauss took a one hospital summit, healthcare, sum a healthcare and turned it into a, I think, nine full hospitals and seven outpatient clinics by the time he retired. And the first thing he did when he went in is he had them do focus groups to find out what people think of it. And they came up with this magnificent vision statement. But after a while, all of the well-intended, but ineffective leaders on their board got them to drop that vision and go to a white bread and baloney vision. Which didn't inspire anybody. And what he did at that time, which I haven't know because he is one of his coaches was a student of mine who talked about it openly. So, and I had permission to tell the story.

38:08And he would have a one hour meeting in his office of the heads of each of the hospitals now patient clinics once a week, 60 minutes. And as they were leaving the meeting, he would pick two of them different to each time and say, can you bring a story and of a patient that's helped during this coming week at your facility. And then they come back the next week. He would give up the first six to eight minutes of his 60 minutes, having two of these heads of units describe an incident where a patient was helped. Wow. Right. That's it Ashley. So all of a sudden, they're sitting there not saying, oh, how do we make budget? How do we get 80% occupancy? They're sitting there saying, you know, we're healers. And we can do it well. Yeah. That's the positive emotional attractor. It's a psychophysiological state. It's a certain neural networks, certain hormonal systems and affect.

39:12And that state is one where you literally are open. Now, you also often feel lifted. Yeah. The negative emotional attractor is one where you're in the stress response. You're thinking about analytic issues. You know, financial abstract goals, what problems, all of those things activate these defensive modes, but you're basically in a defensive mode. Now, the key is we need the negative emotional attractor to accomplish things. Yeah. It's useful. You wouldn't get anything done if you weren't in it. You wouldn't have woken up today if you didn't activate it. You won't be able to decide what to have to dinner if you don't activate it. But you can't solve a problem or, you know, as academics write a paper, unless you activate the negative emotional attractor. The problem is, as soon as you do, you're starting to defensively shrink.

40:13Closing got it. That's right. You're cognitively, emotionally and perceptually impaired. One study showed, give people a shot of epinephrine in their nose, which is the stress and one of the stress endocrines. And their peripheral vision goes from, sorry, you can't see this easily, this is the screen, but goes from 180 degrees down to 30. I just see. And then you give them a shot of oxytocin later, it goes back. So the crucial issue is, um, a lot of things are important. And you have to do the negative emotional attractor to accomplish anything to survive. But if you stay in that, you're diminished. Yeah. So, and we started to show this in a study, a series of studies we published a few years ago, that it's more important for you to introduce the positive emotional attractor for 10 to 15 minutes, six times throughout the day, then to have an hour and a half at lunch. Why? Because you're dosing yourself with the PEA as a way to break

41:22the negative parts of the NEA. The same thing in the Tom Strauss example, he would open the meeting with a strong PEA. And then he could get into the budgets and the performance issues. But periodically he'd use his style, he'd use humor as well as purpose to even during a one hour meeting a few times come back into something that reminds people brings them back to the PEA. Yeah, that's really interesting, Richard. I love hearing that. And my background coming from communication when you talk about things like public speaking and how important story telling is and how you start a speech, right, is definitely geared towards that PEA. You're pulling people in before you maybe get to some of that. This is so interesting can again really apply to so many. I open with music. I mean, ever when I when I gave up writing the consulting companies, I was still doing a speech a week. But once I became an academic and I was brought in to case with tenure, I said, OK, let me try to experiment now and be more effective. I'm not worried all the time.

42:31In 1991, I started opening with music and getting people standing up and dancing a bit. So, we now have the data then it was just my intuition. But we now have the neurological data that says when you play music, not listen to it, just play music or dance, you activate the default mode at work and the parasympathetic nervous system, the PEA. So, I start that not just because I want to break set, you know, so people get see this kind of old fat professor get on stage and they're ready to be snoozed. And I shake them up with that. But it's also if I hope they're going to remember anything from the next hour or two that I'm with them, I want to at least start in that. But in my sessions, I go in and out of exercises and my exercises always get people to look inside and talk about feelings. And I also use humor a lot.

43:34Yeah. And I because I enjoy it, but the I know that if I don't, people just aren't going to remember stuff. Yeah. That's really important. Okay, I have a question Richard, as you were talking, you know, so much about the work that you've done. I mean, from decades ago that talked about qualitative research and interviews, you talked about your early career experiences working in the cubicle. How has the advent of technology and the way in which work is done now influence some of your research and how leaders lead win for many of us. There's now a screen in front of us. How has that maybe impacted some of what you found? Well, how has interacting with other people over zoom versus face to face affected you as an academic. I mean, it's changed, right? It's changed aspect of pedagogy. And, you know, I think in some ways, don't analyze it. Tell me how it feels different.

44:40Please. How does it feel different? Just just not walking around, right? Not being able to work a room, so to speak engagement, the lack of being able to have an individual conversation versus a small group conversation versus a large classroom conversation. It doesn't you don't flip the switches easily when there's a screen in front of you. So now let me abstract from that. Yeah. When we're interacting remotely, I don't know how tall you are. Now, that's a code for the fact that I'm not seeing your whole body. Right. And even though in a classroom, you know, you may be sitting at a table, but I can see whether or not you're twitching or reading your email or whether or not the look in your eyes says you just made a connection. I can't see it on this screen, no matter how good my resolution is. So first, in communication terms, there are a lot more channels of communication open to you when you're face to face, including pharaohs, including the smell of it.

45:45Second, when you're in a group with a large group, the boxes get smaller and smaller. When I'm doing a talk to 100 to 1000 people, you know, on these screens, I can't tell if they're laughing at my jokes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And they aren't if I can't tell them they can't tell with each other. So we're losing the benefit of positive emotional contagion, which when I'm live, we're in a classroom, it works. So part of it's the relationships. Yeah. And it doesn't. I remember saying to my closest colleagues at case. When we went remote because of COVID that what I missed was the hallway conversations as you just said, Ashley, the walking around. It was the short, the 22nd check ins. Yeah. That's what I missed. I mean, we have a dozen zoom for 20 seconds. We don't exactly. That's true. Well, Richard, this has been great.

46:46This has been really fascinating. And as I think about the town's and Institute, one of the things we talked about is connection, right? You've talked about that and quality relationships. But as we end all of our episodes, here's what we think about. What is a takeaway tip you'd want for our listeners after hearing this today? First, you owe it to yourself to be excited about your life. And there are many reasons for that. One of them is more spiritual. This is a very special gift of God. It's not a dress rehearsal. I mean, unless you believe in reincarnation, but that's another issue. There's another reason why neurologically, we infect everybody around us with our inner thoughts. I mean, according to Joseph Ledusworth, I mean, it suggests that these connections are hitting each other in eight to 40,000s of a second, deeply unconscious.

47:51And it doesn't matter what you think you're showing on your face. It's direct brain to brain. And unless you're on the spectrum, you're picking this stuff up. Now, when you pick it up, the people around you, whether it's your family or your subordinates or your students or your colleagues or your patients, do you want them to be picking up your feeling? This is a pain in the ass. I can't wait to get through this. I can get to my real work. Where do you want them to pick up? Wow, you're really interested in what I'm saying. You care about me. So fundamentally, you want to be living toward the dream of your life to feel excited because this is a special thing of life. But you also, because we're in the influence business, we're professional helpers. We owe it to our clients, students, patients, family, to be infecting them with these positive possibilities.

48:53I love that. Not the negative obligations. Well said, Richard. Wow. That was, that is a wonderful takeaway tip for our listeners here today. We have got to have you back on because again, your decades of research and experiences, we could just sit and listen to your stories and examples all day long. So we'll definitely have to have you back in the future. We thank you so much for the time that you spent today. There might be a season two. I think there's a season two. It's coming. It's coming. So well, thank you, Richard. We appreciate it and we'll be in touch soon. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you. If you enjoy the Townsend Institute podcast series, head to our website at cui.edu slash Townsend to find out more about the certificates, bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees offer through Concordia University, Irvine. With programs in mental health counseling, executive coaching and consulting, and organizational leadership, we have a variety of faith-based programs dedicated to helping you fulfill your academic and professional goals, all the while furthering your competence, character, and connection.

50:05Again, that's cui.edu slash Townsend.