--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are these people here to help you do it your way, or you help them succeed? Your job is to be who they need you to be. And we teach so many tactical ways to improve the skill, but we don't teach the tactical way to improve the coaching of the skill. Let's go.
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--:-- Announcer: The Ryan Hanley Show shares the original ideas, habits, and mindsets of world-class original thinkers you can use to produce extraordinary results in your life and business. This is the way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, super excited to have you on the show. Blown away by your energy, your message. I pulled up my notes that I took in Apple Notes during your talk. The first thing you said that really caught me, and I would love for you to just dig into why you spend a lot of time on this concept, was when you said—and I think you said it two or three times in your keynote—"Don't be lazy with your words." I could tell that was meaningful to you by the way you delivered your message and by the words you used. For you to say that three times throughout a keynote tells me it's maybe a core value for you. So one, is that true? And two, why is that message so important for you to deliver to an audience?
--:-- Angus Reid: Because I think the easiest mode of communication we have is language, is verbal words. We do podcasts because we want to have verbal conversations with each other. And as much as nonverbal cues are huge in terms of body energy and body language, the most direct means of conveying a message is still language. I think a lot of us forget how important utilizing the correct words to convey the correct message is.
--:-- And let's be honest, Ryan, a lot of us don't even realize the words we're using. I think that's the number one issue. I speak a lot on coaching, and they haven't learned—you haven't taught until they've learned. The message hasn't been conveyed until they've understood. Are you choosing the appropriate words? Do you even know the words you're using to convey the message? And are they the very best words possible to convey what you are really trying to communicate? I don't think we give enough thought to that as leaders or as influencers. We're all influencers, right? We're influencing the person we're talking to. And we all want to be understood. I think that's one of the basic human needs—to be understood. Are you aware of the words you're choosing to convey the message you are trying to be understood through?
--:-- I think if we all gave a little more care to that, there would be a lot less miscommunication, a lot less lost in translation, and a lot more harmony between people, particularly on a team pursuing a similar, like-minded mission, because they really understand what we're here to do, because you've chosen your words carefully.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I took what you said. I coach a 10-year-old travel baseball team. I love coaching. I love coaching baseball. I love coaching in general. In truth, I may have missed my calling. I could wake up every day and do this and love it. I do it now for my kids, but I just love being around the game. I love coaching.
--:-- But I took what you said during that keynote and brought it back to my coaching. I started to think about some of the kids that were struggling with adapting to some of the simple principles of hitting a baseball. People think, "You just swing the bat and you hit it," and there's some truth to that, but like all sports, there are some key aspects of a baseball swing that you have to perform to get consistency. You just have to. There's no getting around it. If you look at every major leaguer, as much as they may all look different at the start throughout the process of hitting a baseball, there are only two or three different styles in which you can do it consistently, and you kind of have to find one.
--:-- All that being said, there are a few kids on the team that are athletic, that want to get better, but they're struggling to adapt to these things. After hearing your keynote, I started just asking them simply, "Did what I say make sense to you? What did you hear when I said that?" I think I took that from you as well. "What did you just hear?" Some of them would regurgitate what they thought they should say. And then some of them would be like, "I don't know." And it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I have to change the way I'm speaking about what I'm trying to get them to do, because I'm using terminology that is not connecting with them. They're getting frustrated, and I'm getting frustrated, and it's not for a lack of effort.
--:-- Since I started asking them that, I now have a slightly different language profile for almost every kid on the team, because each kid hears a little differently. Different words resonate with them. For every individual player, I know I can use this set of words with them and that set of words. I think that translates 100% to business. It translates to our family, our children, our spouse, and all these things. That was an enormous takeaway for me. I couldn't have been—for me, an amazing value from the mastermind was getting that from you.
--:-- Angus Reid: I appreciate that. And when you spoke about maybe missing your calling—look, I coach high school sports and that is my love, but I'm in business and everything else. It's all coaching anyway. All we're doing is influencing. We're trying to support the person we're communicating with to improve whatever they're on their journey towards. We're all helping each other.
--:-- A great point that you just threw back at me that I was taught by my great coach was: your job is to be who they need you to be. There you go. There is no universal "this is how I coach." Your job is to help them. So before we get into specific languages, we have to understand who they are. How do they learn? What's their comfort level? What's their understanding ability? Our job is to always adapt to them to help them grow. If you force them to adapt to you, they'll quit. They'll be confused. They'll be frustrated. They won't keep coming back because you're speaking a different language and you don't seem to care.
--:-- Number two, to your point, Ryan, you weren't missing it because you didn't care and there was effort. You just didn't have the skill base or understanding of the importance of that skill base. I'm sure you've been to coaching clinics. I've been to coaching clinics, and we teach so many tactical ways to improve the skill, but we don't teach the tactical way to improve the coaching of the skill. That's where the gap between the recipe and how to cook the meal is different. Here's everything, but how do you convey it with the right words so they understand it? Not so you understand.
--:-- You brought up a great point, bringing it back to them. "What did you hear? What did you learn?" Now we want the older players to coach the younger players and watch how they coach. Are they conveying the message in a language that they've decided makes sense? And is it seamless? Because the words themselves can change as long as the meaning is precise and it makes sense to the person that's conveying it. There's no best word. It's: are you using the words that are going to convey your message best to that person?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You see this in business all the time. When I get messages from leaders or CEOs of companies struggling with culture or a specific process, a lot of times the core issue is they believe they have a way and everyone has to fall into that way. If you are not that way, somehow you are wrong. Then they deal with constant and unending cultural issues from people. They say, "This person scored highly on this personality exam, and I can't understand why they're not performing." And I'm like, "Well, what do they want? What are they—"
--:-- I sold insurance for eight years. I was terrible at selling insurance the traditional way. Cold calling at that time—I just couldn't do it. I would have a physical reaction. I've told this story before. I would reach down to pick up the phone to make a cold call and my hand would start shaking. I just couldn't get myself to do it. But when I turned to digital—telling stories, answering questions, writing essays, describing claim scenarios—and became a storyteller of insurance, my entire career changed. That was the way for what I needed to do this job at that time.
--:-- What's funny is the leader of that agency discounted everything I wrote because I didn't bring it in the traditional way. I was told, "We're hunters here. We go out and club our food and drag it back." And I'm like, "But we're making money from these policies too." It was completely discounted. Ultimately, that was a big part of why I left.
--:-- So what is that initial unwillingness of leaders or coaches to change? Or maybe "is" is the wrong question. How do I, if I'm a leader listening to this who says, "Maybe I am that guy. Maybe I am that gal who is being a little unyielding in process to the person," how do they start to make that change? What's the first step down that path?
--:-- Angus Reid: I think it's a mindset shift to: are these people here to help you do it your way, or you help them succeed? My job as a leader—we talk about servant leadership and we throw these words around. The traditional role of a coach, and we can get into semantics—coach, leader, they might be a little bit different—but at the end of the day, you're trying to help people get somewhere where they're not. We're trying to get to a place that we're not currently at, because if they're already there, they don't need you.
--:-- A couple of things in a collective group: we have to define what that end is. What is winning? What is a win for us? So we know we can measure if we are actually getting somewhere, and we can adapt and change and move on the fly instead of just redundantly work harder, go harder, all that nonsense. And within that, what does it win for you, Ryan, within the scope of our bigger wins?
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--:-- Angus Reid: Here's the thing. I think we've missed this in culture lately. The old way was everyone's got to be the same in the military way. "We're just building robots here. You're not important. The mission is." And now the new way is everybody's journey is unique. I think we need to remind ourselves when we talk about elite culture and team culture, we have to have both. People have to realize there's something bigger than their mission that they're part of. That gives people energy. "I can't do this alone. We're all coming together to do something unbelievable," whatever that may be.
--:-- Within that, there are a whole bunch of individuals that have unique talents, wants, skills, desires, strengths, weaknesses. I think the great leaders are able to harness that human condition to want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. So what is our big mission as a company, as a team? What's this huge target that we're going to do that no one's ever done? Or what's our big win? And then the leaders understand that within that, each person is a unique individual. They all have strengths, weaknesses, different skill sets, different abilities. How can I help them have that autonomy of growth, personal growth, within the larger accomplishment of a group goal?
--:-- So many people go one way or the other with this. "Everybody's got to be free to run their own journey." But we find that people need to be something bigger than themselves. But if it's just that, then they're just a cog in a machine and they get worn out. Our job as a leader is: how do you create the vision everybody gets excited about, and then give a damn about each individual person's growth? Knowing how can you best contribute? What are your skills? What are your enjoyments? How can we support you bringing your best to become your best so we do something that none of us could do alone?
--:-- I think that is where real magic happens. Not enough leaders have that whole dichotomy of thought where it's about the mission and it's about the person. It's about achieving individual growth for each person to succeed the mission while they all become their own best in whatever they do. Which, let's be clear, is super hard. That's why leadership is super hard. Lazy leadership is "I'm the boss, you're going to do what you're told." Or, I'll be honest here, lazy leadership is "Everybody's an individual, do whatever you want here." That's lazy. If you go one of the two, you're always missing a gap in that human need. I need to become my best, but I need to be a part of something bigger than me. You harness that and you have something great, and that's got to be intentional. It's got to be thought through with your actions, but your words too.
--:-- Leaders have got to be salespeople. Let's just say they're dealers in hope. There's got to be hope that together we're going to do something you don't believe is possible, and individually you're going to be something that you only dreamed you could be. And I'm going to do everything I can to create an environment that's going to facilitate that. And then we feed something bigger. That's difficult. That's not easy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think lazy leaders mirror whatever feels like the safest path in the current societal culture. In the sixties, seventies, eighties, how to keep your job, how to protect your territory, how to make sure you keep getting the three weeks off and the bonus check and the fancy trip at the end of the year with your family was to hold everyone to this company process. Count your i's, dot your t's, make sure everyone's doing everything exactly the same. That was how you kept safe.
--:-- Then the culture shifted in the 2000s and the 2010s to this more DEI, everyone equal outcome, everyone a unique snowflake flower, everyone has these mental health issues if you push them. So what you do is you let everyone do whatever the hell they want, and that way you are safe because you're saying, "Everyone's unique. Everyone needs to be equal. Even if she's terrible, I need to make sure she's on the team. And even though he never shows up for work, that's okay, he has mental health stuff."
--:-- You get these leaders who all they're trying to do is protect their status in the organization. They wake up every day and don't make decisions that could get them fired. Don't manage in a way that is outside of the cultural norm, because that will get me fired and get me questioned. So I just have to take whatever path allows me to stay safe and keep my vice president title or whatever's important to me.
--:-- The last thing these types of leaders—and unfortunately, I feel like this tends to be more the norm—the last thing they're thinking about is, "How do I find that optimization? What's the innovative technology we can bring in? How do I get the most out of Sally or Johnny or Steve?" Because if I push Steve and Steve goes to HR and says I'm pushing him too hard, I'm going to get in trouble.
--:-- What you're describing is an advanced leadership style. I think it's why we've seen this rush to entrepreneurship. I believe some of the sexiness and the social media side of it is part of it, but that tends to be more the influencer entrepreneur. I'm talking about the real developer builder entrepreneur. I feel the reason they have gone from building innovative products out of large companies like GE or IBM to now starting these companies is because they're looking at that culture and saying, "I can't manage, lead, and grow in that environment. So I need to come here." I think that's a big impetus. For the most part, these incredible leaders that we hold up, oftentimes they're entrepreneurs. I think it's the only place that they can actually execute this advanced leadership style without fear of losing their ability to do their job. Do you think that's—
--:-- Angus Reid: I think in the last 20 years, we have moved to everything being a game of checkers. Chess is an obsolete game because it takes too long. But we all know you can't build pyramids in a week. Nothing great will ever get achieved. We just go round and round in circles trying to build the next shiny thing that falls apart two days later because the time it takes to build something great—our culture doesn't have a stomach for it. Except for those rare individuals who say, "Yeah, Amazon's losing money year after year in the 90s. But I know what I'm doing here."
--:-- This is where we have to get to a place where—you spoke earlier—let's just call it what it is. It's not even lazy leadership. It's not leadership. That's being a boss. That's protecting a title. To your point, it's fear. To me, one of the hallmarks—again, choosing our words carefully—of leadership is courage. It takes tremendous courage to say, "This is the way I believe is correct. This is what I was doing—not important. This is what I believe will work, and I will stress test this over time."
--:-- In public companies, large companies, that's not a community with time. Every quarter matters now. It's just checkers. Shareholders want answers this week. Sorry, we can't microwave a culture. We can't microwave a great company. You just can't do it. You need time. To your point, entrepreneurship—if you have sole ownership or at least a very small group that says, "This is what we're here to do, and it's going to take a long time. We're going to do it right. Let's just stick with it." You can't do that if you have a boss that has a different agenda. Let's be honest, public companies' number one driving force is shareholder value every quarter. Do you want to do something great? "We just want to make sure our numbers look good every quarter or we get in trouble." Good luck.
--:-- We spoke about this afterwards with baseball, and I coach football. How do you sit down your shareholders one day and go, "What really matters most?" But they're going to tell you, "Driving my profit. Everything else just looks nice." That's what pisses employees and people off more—where we say this, but we don't do it. That's what we talk about with parents in sports. "What matters most to your kids?" And they're going to say all the right things. Okay, then we agree. This is what we're actually going to do. It takes a really long time. It's going to be frustrating. It's going to be really hard. It's not going to look good tomorrow. We might lose a bunch of games because—to vertical jump, you got to bend. You got to dip before you jump. People hate to dip. They want to jump without bending. Everybody wants to skip what matters most to get to what looks good in the end. Hence, social media influencers faking it. We've been a sucker play to this.
--:-- Leadership—as you said, I don't call it leadership—we've played safe because we need someone to work here. Nobody's interested in the long haul. Nobody's interested in greatness. Nobody's interested in mastery. Everybody just wants to look good. You have to find a leader that can sell that. How do we sell to our society today that what greatness really is is making a decision of who you want to become as an individual person, regardless of any other influences that look cool? Where are we going to go? What's going to be amazing? And then understanding that that road is really hard. It'll be awesome because at the end of the road, you will be more than proud that you did something because you needed to. You believed it was right, not because it looks cool tomorrow. Because it's going to be really hard.
--:-- You've got to sell kids on this too. "It's going to be really hard for a long time. You're going to get laughed at. You're going to look silly because it's going to be difficult and awkward because we're pushing new ground." As a leader, that's when you cheer harder. That's when you support harder. We've got to change what we praise, because what gets praised gets repeated. Kids want to be praised. Everybody wants to be praised. That's why they're posting pictures on social media looking for likes. Are we praising growth and development? Or are we praising fake and showboating?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Everybody is terrified of the now. They're not courageous enough to go—what's that great line? "Who are you?" The greater line is "Who are you becoming?" That's all I care about. What is the work going towards? Everybody is playing an immediate checker game, and we've forgotten that the grandmasters of chess see the long game. They have patience and they have the courage to have that patience when everyone else is terrified of what the world is going to tell you right now about where you are. Where you are going is all that matters. But nobody wants to talk about that.
--:-- Every kid wants to be a star today. Everybody wants to be a millionaire before they're 19. They don't make a decision of "This is who we're becoming, and I'm going to stick through this unless we polish it and tweak it as we go." But we're not just plugging in things so everything looks good. That's the difference. Do we want to look good or do we want to become good? That's a big, big difference. We've got to sell that again. That's what America was built on. The great countries were built on people that had an idea, had a plan, and said, "This might take a long, long time. It might take forever. But we'll get there." That's what matters. We know where we're going. We're not interested in how it looks today. We know where we're going, and that's got to get rewarded again.
--:-- Angus Reid: Dude, I couldn't agree with you more. I'm going to paraphrase the quote, but George Bernard Shaw: "Only unreasonable people change the world." It's unreasonable today to say, "I'm going to give up playing golf. I'm going to give up my hobbies. And what I'm going to do is become really good at this thing that I want to be really good at, that moves me, that allows me to provide for my family." I'm going to give up these things because what society says is, "Hey, take a break. You deserve it. Angus, you worked hard this week. Go get hammered on Friday, play golf on Saturday. It's all good." It's all good, man. "Hey, this is what you do. You earned it. You deserve it." And it's like, yeah, but I'm not getting better.
--:-- It's not that we shouldn't take breaks and not that we all don't need to make sure we're taking care of ourselves. That's not what I'm saying. But I look at guys I love in the insurance industry that are still in their 30s that play golf every Friday. I'm like, "That's awesome. How much better could you be at what you do if, in your 30s, you weren't playing golf every Friday?" You're taking that day—how many work days are you losing? 25, 30 work days a year to play golf? Which is amazing, and I know it makes you happy. But are you going to be a pro? Are you becoming? Are you working at it? What is the goal of that?
--:-- You raise a good point. There's happy and there's fulfilled. Happy is that distractionary process, which we do need. You need the momentary happiness, have it sparingly. But if you build your life around being happy, all you can do is fill yourself with distractions, because fulfillment requires tremendous work. Where, down at the end of the road, you became what you chose to become. You didn't just—you weren't happy because you were eating ice cream all day and watching fun movies. If that becomes your life, you become the product of enjoying someone else's hard work. All that ice cream, all those movies were made by people that sat down and worked their butt off so someone else could have happiness. I want to create something that gives someone happiness, but my fulfillment is in the creation.
--:-- You're right, Ryan. On a personal level, we've got to redefine what success is. Your buddies—they're making a bunch of money. Are they playing golf? Is this really what they wanted to do, become insurance? Or was it just a way to make some money and do well? I think that's where midlife crisis kicks in too. You got the millions of dollars, you got the car, and you're like, "I don't even like who I am because I never sat down to go, 'What do I have the courage to want to become?' I just never told my buddies because I'd get laughed at. But I did what I'm supposed to do. I got pretty good at it. I got all the cool clothes. Now we go on trips." But there's that inner lack of fulfillment because they didn't have the courage to go, "This is what I really wanted to do." But that takes risk. Guess what else is risky? Living. You're already risking everything. You could lose at any moment.
--:-- That takes a real leader, a real parent too, to not tell people what they should become because it answers society's question of winning. "What do you want to do?" "Oh, that's crazy." Good. Good. Then let's go do it, because that's going to give you fulfillment. Are we going to get there? Even doing it, you're there. We are in the doing. We're not at the—you and I know real fulfillment is very rarely in the actual winning. Talk to any great athlete. They win the game, it's anticlimactic. They win the championship, most of them, it's anticlimactic. There's the moment of "We did it," but where was the joy? All the work. Because that's who they are. They're living it. Winning is kind of a fulfillment of a reminder of what you already know. You either want to get back to work tomorrow because it's who you are.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny. People talk about Tom Brady. He won—I can't remember which Super Bowl—wins the Super Bowl, and the next morning he's back at the facility throwing passes to the wide receivers. The story was that one of the major wide receivers on the team didn't show up, and he's throwing to rookies. They're like, "What is Tom Brady doing the day after winning the Super Bowl throwing passes to rookies?" Because he's Tom Brady. This is how we got here. It's who he is.
--:-- Angus Reid: There was a great clip. Belichick was on ESPN the other day breaking down some rookie quarterback. One of the other hosts asked him, "What was it like when Tom Brady was a rookie?" And he said, "I didn't know he would be as good as he became, but I knew he was going to be special." And then Bob questions, obviously why?
--:-- Angus Reid: And he said, because the first day that he could show up to minicamp, he was at minicamp. He had the entire offensive rookie structure organized, running plays and throwing passes without any coaches on the field. Like, before anyone's there, he's already got them all organized and doing things. No one had ever done that before. No one had ever just grabbed all the rookies and said, "Here's what we're doing," before the coaches gave him direction. And he said that never changed. That literally never changed throughout his career.
--:-- Angus Reid: You think the only Super Bowl he ever celebrated, I think, was the last one. You got the clips of him getting a little tipsy. And it's like, great. You're 44 years old. I'm glad you enjoyed one. But to get to enjoy that last one, you could tell he was savoring it. But to get there, he had all that work. And that's the part that is so hard to teach people.
--:-- Angus Reid: I'll give you one anecdote. My son loves to pitch. He's 10 years old. The number of guys I've seen in my career who threw a ton of pitches at 10, who never made it to 13s as a pitcher—dozens and dozens of kids. Once you're labeled as a pitcher, they use you up. You throw and throw and throw. Your arm is not ready for that kind of action. They're throwing as hard as they possibly can. To put that amount of stress on your arm at that age, nobody comes back from that. I think there's only been one kid who ever pitched in the Little League World Series who ever made it to the pros. It's almost child abuse. You're destroying a young person's body. Knowingly. You know what you're doing to this kid.
--:-- Angus Reid: So how I taught him—I said, "Okay, if you love pitching, that's great. We're not going to do it like other people do it." He said, "Okay." Thankfully, he's the kind of kid who will actually listen to his dad. I said, "We're going to focus on location first. Then we're going to focus on movement. And then five years from now, we're going to focus on velocity. If you have location and movement, you're Greg Maddux. If you have location, movement, and velocity, you're Nolan Ryan. So let's think through this in a positive way."
--:-- Angus Reid: He was always considered a soft tosser. He was on the A team for his squad and got tons of results, but he didn't throw hard. The head coach dropped him down to the B team because he wasn't a hard thrower. Now, a year later, nine to ten, he throws a cutter, a two-seamer, and a change-up that are almost unhittable. He still probably throws seven to eight miles an hour slower than the average top-level pitcher. He's never maxing his arm. I don't think he's ever thrown a max pitch in his entire career as a pitcher.
--:-- Angus Reid: My point is, to not think of developing ourselves for outcomes that are going to happen six months, 12 months, three years, five years, 10 years from now. To just think, "I'm going to max pressure myself in this situation for a short-term outcome that's going to get me some limited amount of praise"—I cannot wrap my head around that idea, regardless of the situation or where you are in your life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, I think you hit on a very good word there. I'm always looking for the key words and the phrase, and it's "develop." We don't develop anymore. We just live the world of attrition. Throw people in a blender and the ones that can survive it, that's our winner. They did that in the military a hundred years ago. Didn't we learn better? Let's throw 200 people in there, crush them all. Whoever's left, they're the best. They're just the ones that made it through because of luck or who knows why.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The downside is leadership is the courage to take the time that it really takes. Society is putting pressure on people to microwave everything. Microwaves never made a good tasting meal. It's the worst. Who wants a microwave brisket? You just can't do that nonsense. But we do it all the time.
--:-- Angus Reid: In the strength training world, one of my great mentors always said, "Never add load to dysfunction. Never add speed to dysfunction." So what's first? Function. Teach kids how to do things right. Then we can speed it up. Then you can throw the ball faster. Then you can add load. You can add weight to the barbell. But just start loading weight on the squats before they even know how to do it? That takes a long time to learn those patterns, to develop. People don't give the time it takes.
--:-- Angus Reid: That's why today's world, we're lacking mastery. There are not so many masters anymore. Some Steve Jobs that just say, "I am going to—I don't give a damn about anything else—I've chosen to become the greatest ever at making this one thing." We're going to isolate one thing. To people, they think that's too risky. I think it's too risky not to. Either rush everything or avoid trying anything because it's all hard. Good luck with that. Yet, as you said before, the world's okay with that. "Why are you working so hard to choose something and say, 'I am going to put everything I have into becoming the best ever, but I'm also not going to rush it. I'm going to do it correctly'?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Instead of—the danger in the sports world is high school coaches go to professional sports clinics and they plug in the San Francisco 49ers drills and offensive systems to their 12-year-olds. What are you guys doing? We look at the end and then we start with the end.
--:-- Angus Reid: This is a really, really long road. My analogy, which is maybe not good, is as a coach, I'm looking to try to make the perfect omelet without cracking all the eggs. I don't want broken eggs to have a perfect omelet. Is that impossible? I don't know. But I gotta find a way to make that perfect outcome without destroying everyone. I'm finding out who's left, and you have broken people that think they have memories of fun times when coaches beat the hell out of us all along. No, we're going to teach you how to do something really well. We'll layer it. We'll stagger it. We'll do all the great coaching information on how to build neural pathways so it's good without burning you out. So you can do it for a really long time at a really high level. That takes tremendous courage.
--:-- Angus Reid: You can transfer that to business, families. People wake up with their kids at 17. "Why did my kid never talk to me?" Did you layer that throughout your entire day since they were seven years old? Having conversations, basing easy conversations to harder conversations. So you normalize an activity. You built the foundations of function. So when it got difficult and fast and challenging, the foundations were there and you add difficulty. When it got really hard, did we start? When you're 18, you go, "We better start squatting because you've never done it." Put 400 pounds on because you've got a heavy—the function had to be built five, seven, eight, 10 years earlier. Then when life got hard and heavy, you have the stability to be able to add the stressors of life. We don't do that. We just throw them in the top end and hope to teach them all the techniques at the same time. And we wonder why it doesn't work.
--:-- Angus Reid: That takes thinking. That's what leaders have to do. What is your grand plan for your family? What is your grand plan for your business? What is your grand plan for your team? How do we start right so we can end right, instead of make it up as we go and throw things in when it's needed? What do they say? "Always be ready so you don't have to get ready." When the load's heavy, the form already better be ready. It's too late. But people do it all the time. They wait till they have to teach it and they shove it in. It's too late at that point.
--:-- Angus Reid: That takes a tremendous amount of thinking. Instead of, as you said earlier, Ryan, about the bosses that are scared, they try to be really good at the status quo. "Let's just get really good at what people are doing." What do you want to do? What's it going to take? You can't water your garden a year's worth of watering in a day. You have to do the appropriate dosage every single day, or you'll drown them or they'll dry out. You can't just take a year's worth and dump it in and go. That's the watering system we do with these off-site strategic planning meetings. We'll throw these great ideas, then no—that has to be every single day watered, and then it becomes real.
--:-- Angus Reid: Random things do these crazy boot camps. We go away and do crazy physical activities for two weeks, and then for the next six months we do nothing. It doesn't work that way. What does the daily dose look like? Not too much, not too little. We don't count a kid throwing 500 pitches a day. You're going to kill the kid. We also can't throw forever. So how do we do something that is sustainable? A great strength coach told me a long time ago, "What is the greatest lifting workout you can do for your program?" Well, what's required, but what is sustainable that you can do for decades that will keep moving you forward?
--:-- Angus Reid: The real word I always use—in the lifting world, I train a whole bunch of high school kids. We don't max out hardly ever. Once in a while. We're always nudging. Grit it to nudge. Push that comfort zone. I can't throw the world at you before you're prepared for it. And we can't do it too often. Stress is great, but daily stress kills you. The reason we only play football once a week—you can't play a game six times a week the way you're in either. There's nothing left. But we got to nudge. We're always trying to build up your 85%. Once in a while, the world's going to throw 100 at you. Game day. Craziness. You can crank it up. Then we nudge again at 85. Make that 87. Make that 84. Make that 88. Then you get periodically tested. Boom, bring it. Then we dial back again. We can't live all here.
--:-- Angus Reid: Too many Type A's—we got to be careful. We go pedal to metal every single day and we burn out. So it's about always upping our 85%, challenging it here and there, pulling back, making 85% feel like 80%. So we're nudging up our really good. And then randomly getting tested at max, pulling back, making really good better and better and better. That's hard for a competitor. I find it harder to work with competitors than people that aren't, because people that aren't, you challenge them a little bit. Competitors—I was told again by a great coach a long time ago, he said, "You have a great one. Your job as a coach is to hold them back. You don't have to motivate great ones. You got to regulate them." They're going to give 120% every day. They're going to die. My job is to teach you the greatest discipline in life when you're a super Type A is to say, "No more now." Why? Because that's the best for tomorrow. A guy goes, "I got one more rep in me." Save it for tomorrow. Bring it tomorrow. Because if you max it out, you tear something today, tomorrow might be over. That's really difficult.
--:-- Angus Reid: I live in that high achiever world. We talk about regulating more than motivating. I got to regulate because every day is game day. Can't play a game every day. You'll die. But the rest of the world, it's shocking what 2% more will do for them. For the high achievers, it's about regulating the arousal level because there's a burnout there too. A leader needs to be who they need you to be. Some people need a kick in the ass. Some people need a pat on the shoulder. Some people need to be reminded. Some people work so hard because they don't think they're enough—you got to remind them they are.
--:-- Angus Reid: Two of the greatest questions I think I can ask an employee: "Was that your very best?" Bump it on. "Was that your—" Because I don't know. "Was that your very best? Are you really, really proud of what you put out today?" Let them think on that. That beats people up inside later on that day too. At the end of the day, you can cheat the scoreboard. You can win salesman of the week. "Was that your very best?" You can think on that. Are you okay living life knowing you had to challenge yourself with that question? Are you proud of it? If you are, I think that's great. Only you know. I can grade you 10 out of 10 because you beat the test. Are you proud of it? I want someone to know I did my best in life and I'm really proud of what I did. There's no bigger win than that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I love that. I found in my own maturation as a leader that questions are more powerful than statements, 100 out of 100 times. The right question has exponential impact on the mindset, performance, attitude of a team member. Whether you're coaching or it's a business team, doesn't matter. Community organization, not-for-profit board, doesn't matter. Your family, your children. The right question moves them because they're the ones that have to answer it. When you just tell them, it's—I hate that I keep coming back to my own kid, but we're in the middle of a tournament season, so we're on the field a lot.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other day he threw nine pitches, three outs. All three of the hitters hit the ball, but got out. He came off the field and he didn't normally bounce off the field. He's got a big smile on his face. I was like, "What's up?" He's like, "I didn't have it today. My arm, whatever, I just didn't have it." I go, "Bro, you just threw nine pitches and got three outs on two soft ground balls and a pop out to second base." He kind of looked at me. I said, "Do you realize how hard it is for a 10-year-old to get three outs on nine pitches when they don't have their best?" He kind of looked at me. I go, "That's how you know you're getting better. What you did was make it work with the best you had that day. That's the goal."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How many times you look at freaking Jordan, 103 fever, incredible game. But was it his best game ever? Probably not, because he's got a freaking 103 degree fever. But it was the best he could give. If you can show up—and I know even myself, I'm a competitor, so I'm probably that person you would have to down-regulate. But getting a team member to understand—take a sales team. You'll have a week where you just don't put points on the board for whatever reason. All of a sudden they show up on Friday and their head is down or they're moody or they're not talking to anybody. You're like, "What's going on?" "I just—" "Are you giving your best in those moments on those calls?" "Yes. I'm doing the pitch. I'm working them, bro." That's the game. As the universe works, it's going to swing back around and you're going to have a week where you're absolutely going to dominate and you're not going to understand why either. Are you showing up the best version of you for that day that you have? That's it. You're going to have days where you're 110%. You're going to have days where you're 60%. But if the best you can give that day is 60% of your max, just for whatever reason, that's your best.
--:-- Angus Reid: Yeah. We talked about that at the mastermind. Nobody can stop you from bringing your best, and there is no better than your best. Your best is highly subjective to that moment, given all the variables. We spoke at the beginning about language. One of the roles of leadership is to utilize language to shape what people view as success. We can make winning anything we want if we're leading a culture through our words and then actually what we reward through body language, behavior, and response after the issue.
--:-- Angus Reid: We have targets and whatnot, but that can't be what matters above everything else. As Bill Walsh said in his great book *The Score Takes Care of Itself*, we do things the best of our ability throughout every activity we can. The numbers will be fine. It's not going to be—you can't win every single game. You lose games. That's fine. We feed what matters most through describing it, talking about it, and then actually rewarding it appropriately and reminding them of it. That'll always be fine. We'll max out what we're capable of. There's nothing we can do more than that anyway.
--:-- Angus Reid: I always say my role as a coach is to help you become the best version of yourself. We're trying to win a championship, 100%. But the end goal is to maximize you as people, that you know what you're actually capable of in this world. The probability is we're good enough players, we're probably going to compete for that championship too. That's always an external marker. It's just a marker. It's another measurable that we can use, but it's not the end goal.
--:-- Angus Reid: Leaders, parents, influencers—we have to over-message that because they're wired to think the other way. To unwire, you can't meet one with one. You got to meet one with like 10, 10-to-one discussions. You got to over-praise the stuff that they don't think matters because they're too hardwired to not think it's important. We got to triple, quadruple, five times down on that stuff. That's a leader realizing, "Be what they need." They need this because they're not getting it anywhere else. They're actually going to listen to you. If you run a company or you're a coach, they listen to you. They're waiting for you to say, "Am I good? Am I bad?" We can focus on them good. You tell somebody things enough times, guess what? They'll probably start to believe you. You tell someone they suck enough times, they're going to start to believe you. You tell someone they're getting somewhere and show them the work they're doing, they'll start to believe you. But it takes a lot of repetition because they're conditioned to think, "I'm a loser because we lost." No, you lost. It doesn't make you a loser. Those are very different statements. Be very careful lumping them together.
--:-- Angus Reid: Kids need to know that. You're a winner because of what you brought to you. We lost the game. That's fine. We'll go out tomorrow. We'll try to win the next one. It's all good. But we're going to focus on what you can control. What's in your locus of control is where your mind's at, where your focus is at, and the energy level you bring to what you've decided to do. Probably the hardest thing in today's world is focus. How do we teach people to put it away and just dive deep? Dive deep right now. We have to model that. You can't coach with your phone out. The kids see what we're doing. You can't stress something that you're not—you can't coach something you're not willing to model.
--:-- Angus Reid: There's a huge upside. There's a massive void needed for good leadership. I don't think it's hard, but it takes tremendous courage to do. Not hard in terms of complex—I don't think it's complicated. It can be. But all it means is pulling back and going, "What are we really trying to achieve?" And then walk backwards. "How do you get there?" It's going to take a long time. That's fine. Don't take shortcuts. Don't life hack culture, leadership, your big word there. You can't life hack development. You can't do it. Everybody wants the quick camp, the 20 pounds lost in five weeks so you can gain 30 pounds later. Every pull one direction is going to snap back in the other. Nudging along is able to etch it and stay, etch it and stay. So we don't slip back.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right. Yeah. I just had this conversation with both my kids the other day. We started about baseball, then it went to school, then they started talking about careers that they wanted. They said, "Well, what do you think?" I said, "I think you should pick whatever is the hardest." They kind of looked at me. I said, "Look, nothing—" I know this is cliche for this audience and adults, but for these kids, it's mind blowing. We don't talk to our children like they're real people. We talk to them like they're idiots. I literally have the same conversation I'm having you right now with my 10 and my eight-year-old. Maybe people can judge me if they want, but sometimes I curse. I talk to them like real human beings.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I said to them was, "Guys, a lesson I had to learn that wasn't taught to me when I was your age is that nothing that has any meaning in this world is easy. It will look easy to others at times who haven't put the work in that you've put in, but it will never be easy for you. You have to pick the paths where difficulty, obstacles, challenges, pain—" I try to bring things back because this is their world right now, baseball. My son is the starting shortstop and he loves playing shortstop. Sometimes on hard hit balls, he'll still kind of react out of fear.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I said, "You told me that you want to be the starting shortstop on this team. That's your goal, not mine. I don't care what you do. I'm your dad. You told me you want to be a ballerina, I drive you to fucking ballerina practice. I don't care. You're my kid. I love you." [Angus laughs] "You told me you want to be the starting shortstop. What I'm telling you is you have to accept the pain of getting hit with the ball. If you want to be a good shortstop, you need to know that regardless of how good you are, all the way up to Derek Jeter and Ozzie Smith, they got hit with baseballs. They got hit with grounders. And guess what? Even at 33, it still was painful to Derek Jeter. They come at you harder the higher you get. The only way to get better is to get in front of it and do it. Accept the pain. Choose a hard path and follow that. Because anytime anyone presents you with an easy path, it's a trap."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I could see them mulling it over. Then they asked me about the trap piece. They said, "What do you mean a trap?" I said, "When someone presents you with an easy path, a life hack, seven ways to lose 50 pounds in a month, a million dollars in a week with no sweat—they're selling you something. You are the mark. You're the thing they're selling. That is not something that's going to improve your life. There is nothing in my life, 43 years old, that I can sit here and say that I'm proud of that was easy. Literally nothing."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I said, "The two of you are the case study. Being a parent for children is the hardest frigging thing you're going to do in life. But it's the thing I'm the most proud of, is the two of you. But it's freaking hard." They mulled that over. I could tell that kind of hit them. We'll see where that comes out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Two things, and then I have one very specific question I want to ask you before we're done. One, in general, we're all way too self-oriented. It leads to ladies in leadership. It leads to shitty parenting. It leads to really all the things that we end up disliking about our life. Oftentimes, they are a result of self-orientation versus thinking about the community, my family, the company, the team. Instead of focusing on our contribution to that bigger enterprise that you described at the beginning of the podcast, we self-orient because that gets us pleasure now, and that leads to long-term ramifications. We refuse to have hard conversations. We want to gloss over things and TikTok everything, the cheeky way, or we're going to be pessimistic or sarcastic, try to downplay something because we don't want to have the hard conversation that's going to create growth.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The last thing—if we're following best practices, we will never be a master. People push back on me about this all the time. I say this in my keynotes. I'm like, "It's perfectly fine to read and know what the best practices are. But if you are running your business on best practices, guess what? Everybody knows how to beat you. Because you are not approaching each situation with an open mind and iterating and navigating through the waters that are presented to you. You're just trying to plow through with the Titanic because you think you have the answer to all things." I had to share that with you mostly because you got me all jacked up. I couldn't agree more with what you're saying and where we're going here.
--:-- Angus Reid: No, I think you touched on some major things. We haven't developed the skill of having hard conversations because kids now don't look at each other when they talk, and adults don't either. We'd rather text a breakup, text a firing, text a difficult conversation. Look people in the eye. That's a skill set that we have removed from society that we need to bring back in some form or the other. Whether it be public debates, whether it be more sports where they're actually playing face-to-face conversationally dealing with things. That's a skill set, and skills get lost if they're not worked on. They're gone. They're not inherent. They need to be trained.
--:-- Angus Reid: What I loved—I took some notes here about how selfish we are. People talk about being self-aware so much. I think we need to be a lot more people-aware. Think more about what you can bring to the people around you more than "How can I improve my life?" Improve it by doing things for people. We're a very mirror culture. We need to be more of a window culture. We love to stare at the mirror and go, "Look at me." I want to look out the window and go, "What's out there? How can I make this world better?" We want to stare at ourselves and make ourselves better. That's all egocentric stuff. You want to make yourself better? Open the window, move the mirror aside, look out the window. How can I make that better? And you become better. It's a very nice way to do it.
--:-- Angus Reid: You talked a little bit about the trap. I bring that back to "Don't chase happiness, chase fulfillment." Happiness is—don't worry about the get-quick-rich-quick. Just go eat ice cream and you'll be happier too. At least you got some enjoyment. Fulfillment is in the hard, in the difficult. It is in the growth. Nobody grows when they're happy. Nobody. And nobody improves without growth. So there you go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You want to become better than you were tomorrow, it's not going to happen when you're happy. Sorry. It just will not. Those are those micro breaks you take to just give yourself a breath to get back to the growth curve of things.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I think when you talk about following best practices—I forgive me, I can't remember who the quote was from—but it's learn, study, and understand all the rules, and then you can go break them. So don't be reckless. Know foundationally how we got to here so you can go to the next level first. Otherwise, there's a difference between just being someone that likes to cause chaos and doesn't really know it—the shit disturber—or someone that's actually gonna improve life. You should know where we got to this place with the rules and the best practices so you can understand it to a level going, "Okay, here's the next leg up then. We're gonna shake it up by going here." Otherwise, you're just reckless and you might even be going backwards without realizing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there's a case for knowing your history so you can create the next level of history instead of just mimicking it. You should know it because there's a lot to learn so you can take that and go, "All right, let's go here with it then." I think the great Morpheus said it best: there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
--:-- Angus Reid: 100%, buddy. 100%. I can tell you that ice water out there is minus 20 degrees, but I'll go out and jump in it and live it. I know what that means. A lot of people study a lot of things, right? There are professors and teachers that study things they've never done in the world. I'm not saying they can't teach it, but there is a different level. What is it? Knowledge versus wisdom, right? Knowledge versus wisdom. And confidence, I hate to say it, comes from the wisdom. Knowledge means you can parrot out a bunch of stuff you memorized, but it cracks under reality.
--:-- Angus Reid: I've talked about my kids more on this show than I ever have before. My son said to me the other day, he goes, "Dad, I think I want to go to business school." And I had this visceral reaction. "Oh, fuck that." I go, "What do you—why do you want to learn from a bunch of stodgy old guys that have never done anything?" I go, "Go start a company. If you want to start a company, I'll help you start a company right now. What do you want to do? Sell baseball cards? Start a YouTube channel? I don't care what you do. But you're not going to learn anything from them. You got to go do it. You got to go get your ass kicked."
--:-- Angus Reid: I go, "How do you get better at baseball? You strike out ten times and you start to figure it out." I go, "This is life, man. Don't—hey, if it makes perfect sense for your life, that's great. But don't make your goal having someone else preach to you about what you should be doing. Go figure it the fuck out for yourself."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, there's no better learning curve. There's no more sticky learning than the act of doing. I heard Jerry Seinfeld say that the other day. He got asked to teach a comedy class. He walked in for a second and goes, "You guys already have no chance. You're coming to school to learn to do this? Get out there in the clubs and kick your ass and get better."
--:-- Angus Reid: But I'm like, well, there's that, right? I mean, there's learning by doing. And people—I don't want to go off and say something inappropriate here—but I think there's safety in sitting in the educational mode of learning because you get to stay removed from it. You don't have to take the risk. You can study. Look, I'm a big reader. I love to read. But I take it right away and I'll stress test, try things based on information, and I'll utilize it or not. I don't want to compile a library in my head of facts that have nothing to do with my ability to do anything just to know stuff. Sorry about that. I don't need that. We have Google for that. Thank you very much. I don't need that in my own head.
--:-- Angus Reid: But I think we're at a place now where we talk to full circle—leadership, parenting. It's all the same thing, right? How do we get to a place where we can help people become their very best and achieve something they never dreamed possible? Well, it starts with us. How do we get out of our own damn head and become more than we thought possible? How do we have the courage to clear out the safe road, to clear out mimicking what we were taught without even stress testing it and thinking, "Is there anything better?" And how can we help others until we're able to be courageous enough to go, "I'm always going to be out there. I'm going to risk failure in front of my players every day because I want to find new answers. I want to get better. I don't want to sit in the groove road and just follow all the other cars."
--:-- Angus Reid: I'm okay if it doesn't work because I'm going to try. And that gives them the freedom to fail in front of me and learn, to keep failing forward, right? If we don't do it, they're going to be scared. So we have to live it with them. We got to be out there. We got to be risking right along with them. Not reckless, but just nudging those risk levels and then honestly assessing it back, polishing it, tweaking it. Let's get back out there and improve again. And improvement only happens against resistance. Improvement only happens against an unknown. Nobody improves when you're already following a road that already has an answer. That's not improvement. That's just straight mimicking. There's nothing inspiring about that. Don't we want to inspire our children? Well, then let's be something that's actually inspiring.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Angus, I'm such a huge fan, man. I'm so glad that we met, spent time together. I think the way you deliver messages, the way your mind is wired and how you approach it embodies this idea. And actually, with our mutual friend Chris Paradiso, we're writing a book called *The Civilized Savage*. I can't wait. Dude, you embody it, man. I absolutely freaking love your energy. I love your mindset. I love how you approach it because it's that masculine, aggressive, but controlled nature that we need. We need people who are willing to push and grow and get bloody and bruised and banged up, but do it in a way that fits into society and provides real value back to people. I consider you a friend, but also a huge fan. I'm so glad you're on the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Where can people get more of you, what you do? If they want to have you come keynote—guys, if you run an event and you're listening to this, I've seen Angus live. He's phenomenal. Awesome guy to have come into your event. Your audience will light you up in reviews for having Angus come to your event. Where can they learn more about you and potentially hire you to speak?
--:-- Angus Reid: Thank you for all that. The honor is mine. We always got to thank Chris Paradiso. All he does is connect good people with more good people. Forever grateful for that. My website is angusreid64.com. Simple website, but at least you can email me direct. It has some basic information. The usual social media outlets: Twitter, angusreid64. Instagram, angus_reid64. I'm on LinkedIn. I had my best-selling book out a few years ago, *Thank You Coach*. It's all about my ten years through my great football coach that taught me how to teach life through sports, how to improve people through whatever activity you're doing.
--:-- Angus Reid: Anyways, love the keynote, love to chat. Just love to be a part of people that want to get better. Just love it. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Make it look. Make it look. Make it look.
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