Kurt Dupuis:
Welcome to the Whole Truth, where two wholesalers help financial professionals build great practices and thrive in a rapidly changing industry. We'll bring you the stories and voices from those on the front lines of this change and we'll have some fun along the way.
Steve Seid:
We're building a community of financial professionals who are growing, forward-thinking and want to get better. Thanks for listening and contributing to the discussion.
Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those of Touchstone Investments.
Steve Seid:
And welcome everybody to the Whole Truth from the Bay Area, California. I am Steve Seid.
Kurt Dupuis:
And from not Atlanta on an undisclosed mountain-
Steve Seid:
In your bunker.
Kurt Dupuis:
That may or may not be in the Smokies, I am Kurt Dupuis.
Steve Seid:
We have an incredible guest joining us today. His name is Dane Jensen. He is the CEO of a consulting company called Third Factor. He is a professor at Queens University in Canada, also the University of North Carolina. He's a contributor to a variety of different publications including Harvard Business Review. The focus of our episode today is on his book, The Power of Pressure. Super excited to have him on to talk about pressure, how it can be good, how it can be challenging, how it can raise your game. Kurt, what was some of your takeaways from what was a pretty profound discussion?
Kurt Dupuis:
I actually have five. One, is going to be this formula of what is pressure, so defining it which is importance times uncertainty, times volume. You can ratchet any of those three things up or down to feel, experience, more or less pressure. We talked about pressure versus stress. I know you love that example because the example has to do with basketball. It's the difference between being on the court and having to perform, which is pressure or being an IU basketball fan and being in the stands that is stress. Talking about the difference between those two things. Just so definitionally, we make sure we're on the same page. And I don't think this is a Dane-ism but I was reminded of this phrase that I've heard and that that pressure is a privilege. Helping people with their finances is a privilege, but part of that privilege is that there's pressure involved.
So the front half of the conversation was talking about pressure. What is it? How do we define it? Let's use some analogies to understand it better. But the whole second half was about solutions. So we all experience this thing as humans. What are some really practical, actionable tools that we can have in our toolbox to help us experience it better? And so one thing that is something that you and I have connected on for a long time which is the power of good questions. So for instance, asking yourself in any pressure packed situation, what's not at stake, right? You're not going to lose your house because of a big presentation or a client fires you, doesn't mean you're going to lose your family.
It's really important to frame what's not at stake, but just asking really powerful questions. And he gives us several of those and then breathe, I'm going to botch how he described it, but basically your physiology cannot act out of concert with your mind. So if you get your breathing, you get your biology working in your favor and lowering your heart rate and all that kind of stuff, your mind has to follow. We had psychology, we had sociology, we had some practical physiological tools, a little bit of history of sport and pressure. I mean, we had a bit of everything in this one.
Steve Seid:
I wrote down top three things and you picked already two of them. I also had the pressure equation. What I found so interesting about that equation is it gives you an ability to, as you said, tweak something or change something. Like when people think often about stress and pressure, I think it can often be paralyzing. So that was one. I also had the power of questions, what's not at stake. The other one that I had, which I found to be just a really interesting discussion was around the topic of meaning, around the topic of values, about making sure that you create that North Star, that when you're in these situations, if you don't have those values defined, if you don't have that North Star defined, you're missing something.
You're missing that rudder, that focus that guides everybody in these times of stress. And I think it's easy to be like, well, we're in a business and we're helping people retire. And to get into that and being a little bit kind of generic about it, but getting really specific about what that North Star is, I think was very compelling to me.
Kurt Dupuis:
I bought that book, it's actually a small pamphlet on Amazon now because I'm not a Harvard Business Review subscriber anymore, but he said this is the most downloaded article on HBR and so I found it in paperback form on Amazon and got it.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, it's terrific. Kurt and I will buy a bunch of copies of Dane's book, so if anybody wants a copy after listening to this, touch base with us at The Whole Truth @touchstonefunds.com or just reach out to us and we're happy to get a copy of a book in your hand. It's a great read. So with that, just want to say thanks everyone for listening. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe, write us a review. You know what we're asking for, do it. You know what I mean? Help us out a little bit. And without further ado, here is our interview with Dane Jensen.
All right, well, we are really excited to welcome Dane Jensen to the show. Dane, thank you so much for being here.
Dane Jensen:
Hey, it's my pleasure guys.
Steve Seid:
We are going to focus obviously on the topic of your book which is pressure as you say in the book, no pressure, no diamonds, which I really like. We want to talk about that topic, but most importantly, talk about the strategies explored in that book, The Power of Pressure and we want to specifically relate it to our audience, which is financial professionals. So we want to loop in scenarios from our industry throughout. So I guess what we're asking you to put back on that management consultant hat and really take an emphasis on financial professionals. So before we get into those concepts, I want to start with kind of a high level question. So when’d the book come out again, when did you release this book?
Dane Jensen:
August 2021.
Steve Seid:
August 2021. So it's been out for a little while now. What have you learned since the book's been released, talking about this topic of pressure to people?
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, it's funny. I had the privilege of working with a wonderful woman that sort of headed up the book project and she had done this 100, 200 times before and she told me right at the start of the process, she said, "Dane, there's always actually three books. People think they're writing one book, but there's three. There's the book that you intend to write. There's the book that you end up writing and then there's the book that you wish you wrote a year after you publish the book." Because you get out there and you start talking about it and you go, "Oh man, I should have said this or why didn't I put those two things together?" And so it's been the same for me for sure. As I've been out there speaking and talking to people, I think it's validated some things. So this whole idea that pressure is a universal human experience, I always talk about pressure kind of sitting alongside death and taxes.
It's one of those things that just everybody has to deal with and I think that's been true in spades. I mean, it came out in 2021, we were still sort of midway through the pandemic. So I feel like I've sort of validated…
Steve Seid:
Good timing.
Dane Jensen:
…that thought that everybody's really, pressure is sort of this universal thing that does unite us and that most people see it as a negative thing. So I think the biggest thing that people come up and talk to me about is, "I actually never really thought about pressure as something that could help me. I've always seen pressure as something that I try to minimize, I try to avoid. I didn't think of it as energy, as something that I could use." So that's been kind of interesting. I think I was so deep into it for the 10 years prior to the book, that I had sort of got there many years ago.
And for me, there were sort of other things in the book that I was really interested in leaning into. That's one that I've just been really reconnected to is just the mindset shift around pressure. But then I think the other thing that I've really learned is and we'll get into this I'm sure more as we talk, I really sort of positioned pressure in the book as there's two types of pressure. There's peak pressure, which are these concentrated little moments where you have to sell a client or close a deal. And then there is sort of long haul pressure, which is where you have to endure pressure for months or even years in some cases and that the two sets of skills required for those two types of pressure are very different. I still believe that to be true, but I actually think they're more sort of on a continuum and there's more of a tension than I realized between the things that make you really good at peak pressure versus the things that you need over the long haul.
When you look at something like uncertainty, when you are under peak pressure, like you're heading into a sales call, you got a big exam, you got to perform at the Olympics, whatever your little moment of peak pressure is, the critical thing is to eliminate uncertainty ruthlessly, just eliminate it instantly, as fast as you can. When you are going through the long haul, trying to eliminate all the uncertainty actually just creates more pressure.
Steve Seid:
Interesting.
Deane Jensen:
That's when you get into the realm of ceaseless striving, spinning your wheels, bashing your head. You actually have to be able to just accept uncertainty and roll with it. Easy to say, "Hey, use one in the peak pressure moments, use the other one in the long haul." The reality is they're more just in constant tension as we move through our days and weeks and months. So I think that's been one of my big learnings is it's not quite as sort of clear a dichotomy or sort of black and white as the book might make it seem.
Kurt Dupuis:
Can we just define pressure? You do a very eloquent job of say, what is this feeling that we all feel? But let's define it a little bit and put some thought around it.
Dane Jensen:
I think it's helpful to understand a little bit about how I explored pressure. My main sort of question for people was, what's the most pressure you've ever been under? So I had a chance to ask that question at this point I've asked it probably of 10,000 people through various forums, big speeches, small sit down conversations and inevitably, especially when I would ask that question one-on-one, the first thing people would say was, "Well, do you mean stress or pressure?" And I found that very interesting that was their first question. And so most of the time I would just say, "Well, tell me what's the difference? What do you think is different between the two?" The metaphor I use in the book is this notion of a basketball game. My wife is a big basketball fan. We live in Toronto, she loves the Toronto Raptors and if we are watching a Toronto Raptors game in the playoffs and it is close, heading into the fourth quarter, my wife has to leave the room.
She cannot be in the room with the game on because she finds it so stressful. So I am giving her updates by text message in a different room. That's stress, right? She is stressed watching this game.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, been there.
Dane Jensen:
But pressure is reserved for the people that are on the court, the people that actually have a say in the outcome of the game, that through their actions can influence the way this thing is going to turn out. And so I really think that's a critical element of pressure. Pressure implies the need to perform. And so my one sentence definition of pressure is the need to perform in important, uncertain situations. You need both, "Hey, this matters to me, this is important and I don't really know how it's going to go." That's where you find pressure and it's like I got to do something here to tilt the outcome in my favor.
Kurt Dupuis:
I'm curious how people are using the book. Are there any concepts where you've gotten pushback on people are like, "Oh, that doesn't sound right?"
Dane Jensen:
I mean, the core of the book is this idea of a pressure equation, which is, hey, if you ask 10,000 people about the most pressure they've ever been under, you are going to get very different answers. Actually, about one sixth of people talk about either childbirth or raising really young kids. So that's certainly a theme that comes up a lot…
Kurt Dupuis:
Amen.
Dean Jensen:
…especially women respond to this question. They talk about childbirth and all the pressure that goes along with that. You get work related pressures. You get people that are navigating, they're moving into a new role, but they haven't filled the other role and so they're doing two jobs and at the same time their parents get sick and then their kids are pulled out of school, all that stuff that sort of happens. You get people that talk about very classic, I had to write my CFA exam or I had to go through a really challenging job interview for a position.
Or when you talk to people in the military, it's a particular deployment. So people talk about just a vast swath of human experience when they talk about pressure. It's work, it's personal, it's long, it's short, it's all of that. And if you listen to this enough, as different as all of these experiences are, what you start to realize is that there are patterns in pressure and that's really at the heart of the book. It's like, yes, pressure is unique, we all experience it in different situations and you can actually understand pressure as a function of three things. It has to do with importance so I only feel pressure when I'm doing something that matters to me. It has to do with uncertainty. No matter how important something is to me, if I know how it's going to turn out, there's not really pressure. So I need importance, I need uncertainty.
And the third is really volume, which is just, okay, how much am I having to deal with right now? How big is my pile? How much important stuff, how much uncertain stuff? So that's kind of at the heart of the book. It's been interesting over the past couple of years as I've talked more and more about this, I think initially in 2021, early 2022, I think uncertainty was really the heavy hitter for people. So I ended up doing a lot of discussions, a lot of Q&A on how do you exist in a world where there is such fundamental uncertainty about the economy…
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
..about health, about the outcome of the pandemic, about government. Not that there's not uncertainty now, there's still plenty going on, but I have noticed that the center of gravity for people has shifted a little bit more to volume and just sort of the sheer amount, the pile. I think everybody came out of that work from home period, working two shifts. It was like, I've got eight hours of Zoom meetings during the day and then I need to get eight hours of work done at night. And so the volume component I think has ramped up over the past little bit, for sure.
Kurt Dupuis:
I think that's a great foundation for our chat today. I want to drill down a little bit more to our industry and that's how we got connected. Originally you were doing some speaking engagements with some of the large wires and then eventually I want to get to kind of your toolbox for specific application.
Dane Jensen:
Perfect.
Kurt Dupuis:
But what sort of industry takeaways or what's the industry, the financial services truths that you've found in writing this and talking about this over the last several years?
Steve Seid:
He's grinning at this so I know he's got some good answer here.
Dane Jensen:
You can see the smile. I do a lot of work in financial services. I do a lot of work in all aspects, but a lot in wealth management. So one thing that I think is maybe people who are listening to this podcast will understand, but I think is a bit of a misconception from outside of the financial services industry is when we talk about importance, the importance and pressure, the tension that I put in front of people is that in order to get the energy from pressure without the anxiety and overwhelm that can accompany pressure because that's really my goal through this book is how do you harness the energy under pressure but avoid the kind of crushing anxiety and energy sapping that can come when pressure gets overwhelming.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
I have to simultaneously see what I'm doing as important. I have to be able to connect the dots to kind of go, okay, I understand how what I am doing is contributing in some way.
It's helping me build bonds with people. It's helping me grow as a person. I have to be able to over time get in touch with why what I'm doing matters. And at the same time, I have to be able to see importance in perspective. I have to be able to zoom out and go, "Yes, this matters and it's not life and death here." And I think that the thing that is misperceived from outside is that financial services is a mercenary game in which number one, two and three are how much can I make here? And that there isn't really that connection to purpose, to importance at a deeper level. Frankly, whether it's wealth management with private clients or it's asset managers or people that are doing active management of funds or products, the number one thing that they are concerned about is the well-being of their clients…
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
…like number one with a bullet. And so I think actually that connection to why am I really doing this. Well, I'm doing this to secure the financial future for the people that have chosen to entrust their assets to me. And what I am really interested in is how can I create better outcomes for those people and do what's right for them and help them succeed. And of course in doing that, I am also going to succeed, but the primary motivator is to take care of the people who we serve.
I think that is misunderstood from outside of the industry, but I actually think that is a huge component of what creates pressure for people in the industry. I'll often put a poll up and I'll kind of say, "Okay, well what's harder for you right now? Is it seeing the meaning in the work that you're doing? Is it finding meaning and importance in what you do? Or is it seeing things in perspective? Is the key issue that it gets overwhelming with how..." And almost universally and financial services people go, "I have no problem seeing the meaning that I'm creating here…
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
…and the meaning of the work that I'm doing. What's actually tough is seeing things in perspective and not getting sucked into how important this is to all of my clients and their financial futures."
So that's certainly one that I think is interesting. The second one, because uncertainty is such a heavy hitter when it comes to pressure, I think there's a real challenge in financial services. Uncertainty is magnified. The more you compress the time scale, the more uncertainty starts to create pressure. And if you have a client that checks their performance once a year, they're going to be happy 95% of the time. If you have a client that checks their portfolio every 30 minutes, they're going to be happy 49 or 50.6% of the time. It's this sort of magnification of uncertainty. The narrower in the time scale goes, I think really disproportionately affects people in the financial services industry because as much as we like to preach long-termism and we all want to be Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and operate on 30 year time scales and 40 year time scales. The reality is you have your clients phoning you up every single day.
So that ability to do the zooming out and sort of roll with the punches that uncertainty requires, I think you have a whole bunch of forces that are working against you in terms of how performance gets measured, how your clients are reacting, all of these layers that sort of add to the little twitches of uncertainty. That's I think two, that really kind of stick out for me, if that makes sense.
Steve Seid:
It definitely makes sense.
Kurt Dupuis:
I feel I'm going to owe you some money for a therapy session. My line with our clients is the more we use “Zoom Out”, the righter I am. I don't know what's going to happen in a quarter or two, but you give me a few years to make some predictions on trends and where markets are going. I feel better about my probability of being right.
Dane Jensen:
100%. And this is where we're working against the flaws in human psychology, right –
Kurt Dupuis:
Everyday.
Dane Jensen:
Which is easy to understand, hard to do and especially as technology has made access to real-time information so much easier. There was a piece I had written originally for the book that didn't end up making it in there that talked a little bit about are we really dealing with more important things or more uncertain things than we were a 100 years ago? I think there is this sort of commonly accepted wisdom that we are in sort of unprecedented times, quote/unquote "unprecedented times."
Kurt Dupuis:
Always, yes, it's always unprecedented.
Dane Jensen:
Always unprecedented, right? And it's like, okay, well a 100 years ago we were coming out of the First World War heading into a depression. It's not clear to me that we're dealing with anything more important or more uncertain than we were a 100 years ago. I think what is really clear is that you have an entire industry, this sort of media technology industry that has a vested interest in sort of amplifying the importance and uncertainty of what we're going through. And so I get notifications pushed onto my lock screen on my phone when the market goes up or down by more than 2%. It's actively thrust into my consciousness-
Kurt Dupuis:
So it’s been active the last couple of years.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, so I just think this, even if objectively we are not dealing with more important, more uncertain situations than we were a 100, 200 years ago, I think subjectively technology, access to information has sort of hijacked the sort of circuit breakers that allowed us to keep a little bit more of an equilibrium through that because we have this importance inflation where you have a media industry that's competing for attention and eyeballs and so the one who can use the most all caps and kind of convince you that something is really important, they're likely to distract you enough to pay attention to it.
And timescales are collapsing because we have real-time access to information which is ramping up all the little peaks and valleys that in the past would've just been water under the bridge by the time you got your monthly statement or whatever. So I do think that there is this sort of exacerbation of the subjective importance and uncertainty that we're going through right now.
Steve Seid:
So on that point where everything is being amplified, Dane, when you're talking to people, coaching to people, do you do things like say turn those notifications off. We know that this is happening, one of the ways in which you can manage this equation that you described, which again, let's talk about what that equation, let's say that again, it is importance times uncertainty, times volume. Are you specifically getting into that equation and saying, "Here's where you can turn the dial down or is it like how do you respond to that equation because that equation's happening?"
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, it's both ends, for sure, Steve. So I think a big part of it is information hygiene. Are you managing your environment? And this gets at volume as well, just the sheer volume to prep for this interview. When I opened this podcast studio to make sure that I'm not going to get interrupted, I closed iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Outlook, Zoom, Teams and Outlook. So there's at least seven different ways that people can reach me at any given moment that I had to shut down in order to not be disturbed before…
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
…we come on this show. And I think as human beings, we're not really built to deal with that level of that big of a hose pipe of information that's kind of pointed in our direction, the tendency to turn to willpower, to tune out all of that noise. And I think our willpower is just not up to the task. When we try to use our willpower to ignore all of these things, it's like you are putting your willpower in a tug of war with like 20,000 incredibly highly paid software engineers that are sitting in Silicon Valley and their entire job is to think about how to distract you and monetize your time. Your willpower is not going to beat that.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's how I feel when Cheez-It's are in the house.
Dane Jensen:
You and I might have similar challenges, Kurt. The goldfish that I buy for my kid’s lunches last about 18 hours-
Kurt Dupuis:
They disappear.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, they're gone.
Kurt Dupuis:
The struggle is real.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, so maybe it's just that I have really weak willpower and I've projected that out through the book. I am a big believer in structure over willpower. And so this is a very long roundabout way to your point or your question, Steve. Yeah, the more you can create the conditions where you don't need to engage your willpower. So really good hygiene on notifications, creating space and time where you are truly disconnecting and putting yourself in kind of indistractable environments. My example of this is always planes. It's relatively easy to stay focused on a plane. You don't have to will yourself not to refresh Twitter. You don't have emails coming in, you aren't getting text messages. In those environments it doesn't require willpower to stay focused. It's relatively easy. Now, unfortunately, they are starting to put wifi on planes, but it's still slow enough and expensive enough that it requires less willpower. But yeah, I think that's a big part of the battle for sure.
Kurt Dupuis:
So let's start breaking into the toolkit, kind of practical applications or solutions for dealing with pressure. One of the great phrases you use is being pressure ambidextrous. What the heck does that mean?
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, so this goes back to this idea that pressure isn't one thing, its two things. And those two things require very different skill sets of us. So we have our peak pressure moments and to use the language of the equation, peak pressure moments are sort of violent collisions of importance and uncertainty. This is like a spike. It's like this is highly important to me, it's highly uncertain and there's going to be this defined outcome at the end. I'm going to get the job, I'm not going to get the job. I'm going to win the deal, I'm not going to win the deal. I'm going to finish first in this race, I'm going to finish last in this race. And so it's super intense and it has a defined sort of endpoint. I may feel really happy at that endpoint. I may feel completely distraught at that endpoint, but I'm no longer feeling pressure, that the pressure has changed to something else.
And then we have our sort of long haul pressure and this tends to be not sort of violent collisions of importance and uncertainty. It's more sort of a grinding volume of important, uncertain stuff that is going on over a longer period of time. So often when people talk to me about long-haul pressure, they'll talk about some combination of a really challenging year at work, while at the same time caring for a parent who's at end-of-life or going through a really challenging situation with their children. It's almost always some combination of things over a longer period of time. The skills that are needed to nail our peak pressure moments are very different than the skills that are needed to stay energized and motivated through periods of long-haul pressure. So if you go back to importance, for example, I said there is this tension and importance between finding meaning and importance in what I do versus being able to see things in perspective.
Well, when I'm going through the long-haul, number one thing I need to be able to do is connect with why does this matter to me? How do I make sure that this period doesn't just feel relentless, empty, meaningless and therefore really draining and corrosive? I got to be able to connect with the fact that, hey, this pressure is helping me grow. Or by going through this and carrying this pressure, I'm really contributing to my family, to society or this is going to bring me closer to people that I care. I got to be able to find something in there so that this doesn't just feel relentless.
When I'm in my peak pressure moments, I have the exact opposite job because usually in our peak pressure moments, we are getting crushed by importance. I've built this Olympic race up to my whole life has been to this point. Am I a failure? And what we actually have to do in those moments is be able to disconnect from importance and see things in perspective and go, "You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still going to have my health, my family, all that good stuff." So I think being pressure ambidextrous, it's this ability to toggle back and forth between being good at the long haul and then nailing my peak pressure moments.
Steve Seid:
Didn't your parents deal with athletes in Canada that were going to the Olympics and you were exposed to all this? If you could talk about that a little bit, because I find that to be so interesting.
Kurt Dupuis:
Getting into real therapy session now.
Dane Jensen:
That's right. I got to get down on the couch here and talk about my childhood.
Steve Seid:
Yes, exactly.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, no, but yeah, you're bang on. And I mean, this is how I got into the pressure game in the first place is I had the great fortune and I mean they're still around and are still great collaborators with me and with our organization, but my parents, Peter and Sandra, my dad has a PhD in sports psychology. My mom has a double masters in counseling psychology. So they were kind of coming at the inner world of performance from two related, but different dimensions. Performance psychology is all about studying people who are exceptional under pressure and trying to figure out how do they do that? What do they do? Clinical psychology of course is more looking at dysfunction and going, okay, how do people sabotage themselves and how do we help them get back to coping or functioning? And so they had paired up in the '80s and were working together, at the time they started with elite figure skaters.
It was sort of the crew of figure skaters that was going to the Calgary games in '88. And in sports like figure skating, gymnastics, I mean we're hearing more and more about this. There is both the performance psychology side, but there's also a lot of clinical psychology stuff. There's eating disorders, all points of that continuum. So they were doing a lot of really good work in the world of elite sport. And so I kind of grew up sort of surrounded by that world that there were Olympic athletes in our house pretty consistently. I was watching, my dad in particular would travel to the games. He's been to 11 Olympic games. He's the lead for mental performance for Team Canada, still very active. He's in his late-70s. He's still the mental performance lead for Canada's men’s national basketball team…
Steve seid:
Wow.
Dean Jensen:
…so he's heading down to South America next month. So I grew up in the milieu of what does it mean to perform under pressure? And kind of watched as they started to take some of this stuff out of the world of elite sport and into business which was the fundamental insight was, hey, people in financial services need this stuff too. They're performing under...
Steve Seid:
Yep.
Dane Jensen:
So that is where a lot of this stuff came from. And I think that's part of what's at my sort of foundational beliefs that, hey, yes, pressure looks different at the Olympics than it does when I'm trying to close a deal, but the physiology of pressure is still the same.
My heart rate increases, my breathing gets quicker, my muscles tense, my body produces adrenaline and cortisol. And I heard consistently as I was growing up, my dad would always say, he is like, "You just got to look. Where do more world records get set than anywhere else? They get set at the Olympics. Why? Because there's pressure." People aren't going to set world records without pressure. It's not going to happen. That added adrenaline which can be draining is also where you get your superhuman abilities to rise to the occasion to go faster, to push harder, to endure more pain. There is sort of this double-edged sword to pressure, but we can harness it. We can put it to work for us.
Kurt Dupuis:
Can you describe the pressure model?
Dane Jensen:
We’ve talked about it in bits and pieces, so I'll just kind of lay it out front to back and then we can dive into it a little bit. So the equation as we talked about is sort of importance times uncertainty, times volume. And that basically says how much pressure I'm going to feel is a function of how important is this thing, times how uncertain is the outcome, times how much stuff do I have to deal with right now. And by the way, the multiplication signs are pretty deliberate. And for people in finance, you'll appreciate the precision, I hope, but it's not importance plus uncertainty. It's importance times…
Steve Seid:
Times, yeah.
Dane Jensen:
…uncertainty. The more important something is, the less uncertainty is required to create pressure. So if I buy a lottery ticket, the uncertainty is massive, but the importance is relatively low, so it's not going to create that much pressure.
If I'm getting wheeled down a hospital corridor to a life-saving operation with a 90% success rate, the 10% uncertainty is going to create a lot of pressure. So it is that product of how important is this times how uncertain is it and then how much of it is there? How much volume am I dealing with? So the model basically tracks to those three things, the importance, the quote/unquote "solution to importance," We've already talked about, it's see meaning in what I do while at the same time, being able to see it in perspective so I don't get overwhelmed. The tension with uncertainty is really about my ability to take direct action to control what I can, while at the same time being able to embrace the uncertainty that I can't control. And so we talked a little bit about that. In peak pressure moments, it's all about act, its direct action. Over the long haul it's that ability to ride with the uncertainty and not try to react.
And then volume, the tension there is really I have to both prepare for volume. I've got to build the physical platform of sleep, nutrition, movement, because if I'm going to perform at high levels, I'm going to get volume. But it's not all about expanding the container. I have to be ruthless at prioritizing the volume that I am permitting in my life. And so that does go back to what we talked about with distractions and information hygiene…
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
…but also about pruning the amount of decisions I need to make in a day, making sure that I'm not constantly in decision land where I'm back into uncertainty all the time. So that's kind of the model. It's managing importance, uncertainty and volume.
Kurt Dupuis:
Gotcha.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. And that's a key takeaway for our audience. Just put that equation up there and start working on the individual components. I think there's a lot of really healthy decisions you can make from there. I want to circle back to something you said earlier in the interview. You talked about how for our industry, meaning is most people can find meaning in the industry and I do agree with that. But I want to touch base on something I heard you speak about in another interview and that's the concept of values. You were talking about building a company. We'll talk about Third Factor in a second, we'll definitely get there. But you said we had to make a deliberate decision about values. Are we going to do something that's where the last two to 3% really matter or do we want to get more things done really quickly where 80% matters? And I wonder if you can revisit that discussion with me and just talk about values in general and how you came to define them.
Dane Jensen:
If we kind of ladder back to this model of importance, uncertainty and volume, values are about eliminating uncertainty.
Steve Seid:
Oh, is that right? Interesting.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, right. Because values at the end of the day are about how are we going to make decisions here? At the end of the day, what are the things that we really truly believe and are enduring and important enough that they are not uncertain over time? And I think where organizations actually get into trouble is the values become things that are uncertain and people go, "Well, does that value apply right now or not?" When we truly find our values under pressure, do we stick to them or not? Really strong organizations, those values provide a hedge against uncertainty because they go, "Okay, no matter what happens, we are going to do what's in the best interest of our client." And I've watched this get tested five times, seven times, 10 times and every time we have adhered to that value, we've made the decision that is in accordance with that value.
Okay, I can trust that value. That is a beacon of certainty amidst all the craziness that's going on right now. And so I do think selecting those values, by the way, this is not just as an organization, but personally for ourselves going, "Okay, what are the things that are enduring and uncompromisable for me?" That is a great way to create some certainty in our own world. I suspect many of your listeners will have read Clay Christensen wrote a seminal HBR piece called How Will You Measure Your Life? And it's a wonderful article. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. I think it's the single most read or reprinted article in Harvard Business Review history. There's a wonderful story that Clay tells in there where he talks about one of the big values, he was a deeply religious man and one of his big values was, "I have dinner with my family on Friday and I don't work on Sunday."
And he tells two different stories. One is when he gets into management consulting and as a new kid just out of his MBA and they're like, "What do you mean you don't work Sunday? We own you. I'll tell you if you work Sunday." And he's like, "Listen, yeah, I get it. And if that's what you need, this is not going to be the right place for me."
Steve Seid:
Wow.
Dane Jensen:
And they worked around it and because that was not a value he would compromised, but the more remarkable story is he went to university in the UK and would never have been a starting center in an NCAA school, but ended up being the starting center for the basketball team in his UK university. And the national championship was on a Sunday and he didn't play.
Steve Seid:
Oh my gosh.
Dane Jensen:
And the coach said like, "Are you kidding? This is the national championship.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
You're our starting center." And he said, "You know what? What I found with principles is it's much easier to hold to your principles a 100% of the time than 99% of the time
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
Because once you deviate 1%, all of a sudden it's this slippery slope that you start to start slide down."
Steve Seid:
Wow.
Dane Jensen:
And so I got to decide, is this important to me or not? Now, most of us do not have that discipline. I think that is an aspiration for most of us. And at the same time, the more consistent we are in really deeply thinking about what is the stuff that matters most to me? What are the values that are most important to me? I think it does start to simplify decision-making and reduce uncertainty. And the one that you talked a little bit about when you were teeing up the question, one of our values, at Third Factor, is high standards.
And actually it's our first value. And we kind of talk about that as we believe that the last 5% matters. And there’s tension is still in the organization because different personalities relate to this value in more or less comfortable ways. There is a real tension between the value of high standards and the value of, "Hey, let's experiment. Let's fail fast. Let's put something out there and continuously improve it" because we don't do the stuff where we go, "Let's put it out there at 80% and then we'll kind of figure it out on the way."
And I think we probably lose some business over that because we can't move as fast as somebody wants us to. But that's something that we have made a very conscious decision about. I often will look at the dichotomy of Apple versus Facebook. Apple is the “we believe the last 2% matters. We don't need to be the first market mover. We don't need to be the first one out there with the new technology. We're happy to be third or fourth in the market and get it right.” Facebook was “move fast and break things”. And I don't think any one of those is better. It's not like one's better and one's worse. They're just different. They're different values and they lead to different decision-making under pressure.
Kurt Dupuis:
So there's a few things I want to make sure we get to and one of them is the power of questions. So one of the reasons I was drawn to Steve years ago when we live on different coasts and didn't actually know each other well, but what I found in all of our discussions at sales meetings was he was a great question asker and you talk about questions and the power of them a fair bit in the book. So because we're still kind of in that toolkit solutions conversation. How do you think about questions?
Dane Jensen:
Questions are a superpower. It's a little bit different when you're talking about questions that you're asking another person and then questions that you can ask yourself, sort of your inner dialogue and your self-talk. But the reason they are important in both cases, both as a leadership and communication skill, but also as a self-talk and inner skill, is because nothing focuses attention like a question. Questions are the ultimate attention focusing tool. If I am trying to teach my teenager how to drive, it is super irritating to them if I go "Check your mirrors, check your mirrors, check your mirrors" and they're like, "I am checking my mirrors, get off my back." If I go, "What color is the car in your right hand blind spot?" "Oh, okay, now I actually have to think, right?" It's not just, "Dad back off." It's like, "Oh, is it white or is it red?"
"Oh, I don't actually know. Oh, I better check my mirror." Right? So the question is a wonderful way of focusing attention, much more than the command. When we think about applying that tool internally, the same is true internally. Under pressure commands usually don't work, right? It's like calm down. When you tell yourself to calm down. Mostly what happens is it creates this spiral of anxiety because you're like, "I can't calm down. Oh my God, why can't I calm down? Calm down." Versus if I'm asking myself really, really good questions. Those questions serve as an attentional anchor. So throughout the book, a big part of what I try to do is give people what are the kind of questions you can ask yourself under pressure that are going to direct your attention in helpful and useful ways? So one of them is what's not at stake here, right?
That's an importance question.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Dane Jensen:
That is when I'm about to go into a big sales call or have a big conversation with a high-net-worth client or a big institutional investor or whatever your version of peak pressure is, typically what is at stake expands to fill our entire field of consciousness. We want in that moment when we're standing proverbially at the door about to walk in, to be able to zoom out and go, "Okay, what's not at stake here? What are the important things in my life that will not change regardless of the outcome?" Wonderful story in the book, there's a wonderful woman named Rosie McClennan who is a Canadian gymnast. She's a two-time Olympic gold medalist in trampoline. She just retired from competition. She's doing her MBA at Stanford. She's a brilliant woman, an incredible person. And she talks about what she does before every competition is she takes a piece of paper and she writes on that piece of paper all the things and people in her life that are most important to her.
And she tucks that piece of paper. She folds it up and she tucks it into her leotard, into her uniform that she wears when she's competing. And that paper is her way of having an answer to that question, what's not at stake here? "No matter how this competition goes for me, I got my anchors right here. They're on me and they're not going anywhere no matter how I do here." So that's one question. What's not at stake here? That I have found pretty helpful before I take the stage for a big speech or head into a big sales call. And there's a number of different questions that we can use as we go through it. The key is finding the ones that work for you. What are the ones that act as attentional anchors to direct your attention internally in a way that's productive and away from the thing that's creating anxiety or overwhelming pressure for you?
Steve Seid:
I think about a few things and I thought about this as I was reading your book, simplicity, scalability, thinking about things, what can I throw away? Because, Dane, when I think about the clients that we deal with, the financial professionals, I do think that there's an element of the volume being kind of the point that causes a lot of pressure. So maybe talk about some of those.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, I do think that when you hit a certain point in your career, success is more about sculpting than painting. And what I mean by that is the way that we paint is we add to the canvas. It's like, okay, what new colors? What new brushstroke? Sculpting is about going, okay, what do I need to remove in order to find stuff that's at the heart here? That's really important to me. And I think that, listen, there's a whole period in your life where you need to paint and that's an important part of building up your resume, building your career and then you hit a certain point where life is more about what do I need to remove so that I can really focus on the stuff that's most important to me? Those things that Rosie calls anchors or whatever we want to talk about. So I think as you get deeper into your career, one of the most important choices you are making is what are the things that I want to say no to and sort of remove from the block of marble?
And the metaphor that I use for this in the book is this idea of tidying up. And Marie Kondo, who I'm sure most people are familiar with, she has the book, the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, she has a TV show on Netflix. And her whole sort of philosophy is like, "You got to hold each belonging in your hands and go, does this bring me joy? Does this spark joy? And if it does, great, keep it. If it doesn't, you want to remove it." Her solution to tidying is not build a bigger and bigger closet. And that is what often we do proverbially when it comes to volume, usually when people are feeling pressure from volume, the tactic that they turn to is time management. And time management is building a bigger closet.
Steve Seid:
Oh, interesting.
Dane Jensen:
Time management is a trap, right? Time management is a trap.
What happens to people that get good at it, they get more volume, they get more. It's like digging a hole at the beach. It doesn't matter how big you dig that hole, there's going to be water that comes in and fills it. So listen, time management is a great productivity tool. We need productivity tools. It is not a pressure strategy because it'll just attract more volume. So instead, what we have to be able to do is we got to really line up. Marie Kondo is working with possessions, pieces of clothing. We're working with, okay, what are the things creating pressure for me right now? So let's hold each one of those things in my hand. And I'm not asking, does this bring me joy? Because frankly, a lot of things that are meaningful in our lives and create pressure, they might not bring us joy, but they might be pretty essential.
Kurt Dupuis:
Right.
Dane Jensen:
I am a big believer in sort of meaning and regret minimization. So when I think about what we can throw away and how we can simplify, the thing that I want to ask myself is, "Will eliminating this stressor lead to regret down the road?" That's one question for me. So it might not bring me joy, but if I eliminate it, what kind of regret will that create for me five years from now, 10 years from now? So that's one question that I think we have to consider when we're looking at simplification. The second thing I think we want to consider is, you go back to what creates meaning in the first place. I just had a conversation with a CEO that I coached last week on this. You asked me since I've written the book, what's really resonated? What have I changed? The one thing that I put this in the book and I was 90% sure of it when I wrote it, I'm now like 99% sure of it, having talked to people.
Is there are really only three ways that we create meaning in our lives and they are growth, connection and contribution. And I think that's the scorecard at the end of the day. Am I doing things that are helping me grow and get better? That's one way that we create meaning is I feel like I'm progressing. I'm moving to a higher level of development, I'm stretching, I'm growing. The second is contribution. What I'm doing is making the world a better place. It's making my firm a better place, it's helping my family, but I'm contributing in some way. And the third is connection, which is I'm building relationships with other people. I'm connecting in a way that creates meaning for me. And so when I am holding each of these little sources of pressure in my hand, I want to audit against those things. Is this something that is helping me grow in a way that's meaningful to me? It might be uncomfortable, but is it pushing me to get better in a way that I value?
Is this something that is helping me make a big contribution? Is this something that's helping me get closer to other people? And so I think we really want to be relatively, regularly auditing what are the things that are creating pressure in our lives against some of those criteria. Because if I've got something where I go, "At the end of the day, this isn't really helping me grow. I don't feel like I'm contributing and eliminating it won't lead to regret..."
Kurt Dupuis:
See ya.
Dane Jensen:
"Toss it out of the closet." Yeah, get rid of it. One, from my personal experience, my background was as a strategy consultant. And so when I came in and took over Third Factor from my parents about 12 years ago, I did strat planning, strategy planning as sort of a line of business and it was quite lucrative and I was paid quite well to do it. I knew how to do it from my previous work, but I finally reached a point where I was like, "You know what? It's not really helping me grow. I don't find it particularly satisfying. If I eliminate, it's not going to lead to regret. And so I cut that out of the business entirely because for me it was just like, yeah, it's a pretty lucrative line of work, but I don't love it. It's not pushing me. I don't feel like it, it didn't meet any of those criteria."
Steve Seid:
You said so many profound things there. I think one of the things I'm personally going to take away from this discussion is we do a lot of coaching with financial professionals, something that we do that's a little bit different and often we resort to that. Well, let's do some time blocking when really what you said is there's a much more fundamental way to get to the heart of why somebody could be experiencing too much pressure, be overwhelmed.
Dane Jensen:
Yep.
Kurt Dupuis:
You talk about breathing and breath and how to use that as a tool. And I think when it comes to action steps and solutions, that's something we'd be remiss to not discuss.
Dane Jensen:
Breath is important for a bunch of different reasons. First, when we're talking about uncertainty, our job is to create an island of certainty amidst the sea of uncertainty when we are in peak pressure. It's like, what can I control? And let's act to control that. And so I always want people to be looking for what are the things that are sort of permanently within our control? Because there are certain things in life that are contextual. Depending on the situation, maybe I can control it, maybe I can't control it. There are very few things in this world that are always within our control. Very few, vanishingly few. One of them is our breath, the other is our perspective. But even perspective, you go, "Okay, yes, over time, that's in my control. In the moment. Sometimes it's kind of hard."
Kurt Dupuis:
It's really tough, yeah.
Dane Jensen:
Get there with perspective. Breath, always there. And the beautiful thing about your breath is once you get your breathing under control, your body is connected to your emotions, is connected to your cognition, to your thoughts. It is physiologically impossible to have a racing mind and a calm body at the same time. It is not physically possible. And what that means is if I can get my physiology under control through my breathing, it will start to align the way I'm thinking and feeling. So I am not a world expert on breathing by any stretch of the imagination. There are wonderful books out there on breath. Breath by James Nestor is a great book.
Steve Seid:
Love that book.
Dane Jensen:
Really interesting book. For my own purposes, I simplify it down to breathe low and breathe slow. And that's kind of my breathing mantra when I'm under pressure, breathe low because under pressure our breath tends to rise from our diaphragm into our chest and breathe slow, because under pressure our respiration rate tends to increase pretty dramatically. If we can move our breath back down to our diaphragm and slow it down to about six breaths per minute, now I've created this island of certainty amidst all the uncertainty, it starts to get my physiology back in line and I at least get out of that panic or startle response that gives me better access to all the other stuff that we've talked about.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. Well, I think, believe me, there's about 15 questions we didn't get to. This is an incredibly compelling topic and you did a wonderful job and we'll look forward to having you coming out and getting you at some events and some speaking. So what are you working on next and where can people find you and engage?
Dane Jensen:
Well, thanks Steve. I appreciate the kind words. And Kurt, it's great to be here with you guys. Yeah, I mean, next, probably the thing that is rattling around my brain is sort of pressure as a team sport. The book, The Power of Pressure really is about my own individual experience of pressure. My sister's an ER doctor and she has talked to me a couple times now about how she's been using the equation with her team. So they'll put it up in the room and talk about how are they going to, as a team, relate to importance? How are they as a team going to manage uncertainty and-
Steve Seid:
Love that.
Dane Jensen:
So she's kind of got me thinking a little bit about that as the next step. So more to come on that front. In terms of where people can find me, I'm at danejensen.com, so just my name.com. I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, so you can find me if you just search Dane Jensen on LinkedIn. And then my company is Third Factor, T-H-I-R-D factor.com. So all of those are good places to start if you want to know more.
Steve Seid:
Excellent. And just on Third Factor, what does that company do just so people know? Is it when we want to improve on this, you guys will come in consult with them? Just talk a little bit about that as a conclusion.
Dane Jensen:
Yeah, so Third Factor, we are a learning and development organization. We run leadership development programs in organizations of all sizes and we really focus in three main areas. So what I talked about today, so performance under pressure, resilience under pressure. Our second practice is all about coaching as a leadership style. So what have we learned from all these exceptional coaches that we work with in sport and business? And our third area is all about collaboration. How do we work with people that are a little bit different than us and collaborate across personalities and styles? So pressure, coaching and collaboration. Those are really the three things we run workshops and programs on.
Steve Seid:
Excellent. Thank you to our guest, Dane Jensen. We're going to move on to our Costanza corner. This is the Whole Truth. Stick with us.
Kurt Dupuis:
And welcome back to our Costanza corner where we like to end the show on a high note. Steve, let's do that.
Steve Seid:
Can I give you two?
Kurt Dupuis:
I'll take three, if you got? I'll take whatever you got.
Steve Seid:
You take two. Well, I'm not that happy.
Kurt Dupuis:
I know I've met you.
Steve Seid:
I'm not that positive. First, I just want to give a very shout out, a congratulations to my colleague and friend Mindy Burgess who had a baby…
Kurt Dupuis:
Yes!
Steve Seid:
…in the last couple of months, super happy to her and her family. Daughter's name is Isabel. And anyways, I hope you are enjoying your maternity, Mindy and looking forward to seeing your little one and meeting your little one in person sometime soon.
Kurt Dupuis:
Awesome.
Steve Seid:
Congrats to them.
Kurt Dupuis:
Growing that Touchstone family.
Steve Seid:
It might've been our CEO, Blake that made the joke, like internal sales desk class of 20 years from now kind of was really funny. And then I came across an article that I thought was kind of funny, but also in this spirit of some of our themes for the Costanza corner, British company develops first tractor in the world to be completely powered by cow dung. So you like that? That's good.
Kurt Dupuis:
Tractor powered by cow dung?
Steve Seid:
Yes. New Holland is the name of the company. So basically they created this tractor. It's called the T7 and it says the T7 liquid methane fuel tractors, a genuine world first and another step towards decarbonizing the global agricultural industry. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Gets into the technology. The bottom line is it's a tractor that you can extract methane from cow dung as opposed to using diesel, fuel or those things. And how about that?
Kurt Dupuis:
Just found a new hobby for the weekends, extracting methane from cow dung and then selling it on the black market.
Steve Seid:
Kurt Dupuis cow dung business. I think there's something there.
Kurt Dupuis:
Dupuis dung.
Steve Seid:
Dupuis dung. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.
Kurt Dupuis:
See y'all. You can find the Whole Truth and subscribe for free on Apple Podcast, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps others find the show. And for more episodes of the Whole Truth, go to www.touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth. That's touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth, all one word.
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