Eduardo Briceño: The Performance Paradox - Maximizing Results through the Learning Zone

You want to know what separates the contenders from the pretenders? It's simple. The fourth quarter. Finishing strong when the pressure's on. In business, if you want to win Q4, you need HubSpot Sales Hub. It has everything your sales team needs to end the year strong. From a new prospecting workspace, to deal management tools, to smart sequences, all in one place. Spend this Q4 closing more deals than ever and crushing your team's target with Sales Hub. Try it for yourself at HubSpot.com slash sales. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us.

Now, today's conversation is with Eduardo Briseño. Now, Eduardo co-founded Mindset Works with the world-renowned Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck and is the author of The Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of Mindset into Action, and his TED Talks have been viewed more than 9 million times. And this was a really interesting conversation around mindset. And I started with a deep dive into the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset. And we talked a lot about nature and nurture as it relates to this, but how important it was to move into the growth mindset if we ever want to evolve as human beings, but how so many people are stuck in a fixed mindset and doing what they're supposed to do.

So we got into the details of that and then we talked about how to get out of it, right? How to build better habits, the value of structure, the importance of goals, and also the difference of performance goals versus learning goals, which I thought was really interesting. And then we dove deep into the performance paradox and what it was in the learning zone and reinvigorating curiosity and everything in between. So I thought this was a really cool conversation that more than a few people need to hear to try to change that mindset to go out there and be a lot more effective and fulfilled with what they do with the growth mindset. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen.

Eduardo, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? Doing great. Thanks for having me here, John. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I was doing some prep and looking through some of your TED Talks and reading some of the highlights of your book that you got out there. And so I think there's a lot to unpack here. But before we get into what we're going to go over, the performance paradox and a few other things about belief systems and everything else that we all have, Eduardo, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background of where you're coming from and what you're up to these days? Sounds good. It's a long story. I'll try to make it short.

But I grew up in Venezuela, ended up finishing high school in Oklahoma and working in investment banking in New York City and then venture capital in Silicon Valley. And I, throughout my schooling and my early adulthood, I just didn't have anything, any better idea of what to do. So I just did whatever people expected of me, like whether it is to work, to get good grades or to try to get into a good university, to try to get a high paying job. And I wasn't really passionate or interested about anything in particular. Um, and I was working really hard to perform and to do what people expected. And eventually my body broke down. Um, I got a repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain syndrome.

Um, and I started losing the ability to use my hands. I met other people who had the same condition, who couldn't use their hands for more than 10 minutes a day when I was 27 years old. So I was freaked out, uh, you know, just, just, if I got to the point where I couldn't use my hands, well, what was I going to do? How was I going to survive? And I realized that I needed to make lots of changes, including like, you know, figuring out what I had, how to heal, like just health-wise. But also it gave me kind of a sense of mortality, not that I was going to die, but that, you know, I couldn't take my ability to do things for granted. And so I, it made me question, how am I spending my time on earth?

You know, am I being a good steward of my life? And I realized I, I wanted to start doing something that felt more meaningful to me. So I went to grad school, uh, to figure out what that would be. And over there I was introduced to a professor named, uh, Carol Dweck. She's a Stanford professor, psychologist. She wrote, uh, a seminal book called mindset, um, and she coined the term growth mindset, which has become, uh, you know, part of a vernacular. And I, I, I had her as my mentor. I still have her as a mentor for the last 16 years that we co-founded an organization together called mindset works. And so I became passionate learning about her work gave me lots of insights about how I had gotten in the way of myself in my career and in my life.

And, um, and so became passionate about becoming a better learner and performer myself, but then helping other people do the same. And that's the work I do now. And right now I, I, uh, I'm a public speaker. I, uh, do keynotes and workshops for organizations that want to foster a culture of learning and high performance. Well, uh, I mean, I think that, that I want to start there with, uh, the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. You know, one of the things that's struck me when I was watching some of the stuff that you had put out there, that it's an either, or like you're either a growth mindset or, or a fixed mindset. And most of us, you know, a lot of kids are fixed mindsets where they, they go towards being rewarded for the hard work that they put in and everything else.

But it's interesting. You had said something that piqued my interest, which was that most people don't think they're in a growth mindset, but I don't understand that because as a child, you're, you're always growing, you're always learning. So you're always getting better. You're growing just inherently as a child. So why do you think that we have, like a lot of people have a fixed mindset, even though it's staring them right in the face that that's not the case? Yeah. So, um, at fixed, so for people who are not familiar, uh, my mindset, when we ask people, what is a growth mindset? A lot of people might answer it's working hard or it's persevering or it's having high expectations and a growth mindset is none of those things.

So I want to be clear about what it means because a growth mindset is a perspective about the nature of human beings, specifically is the belief that we can change, that our abilities or our qualities are malleable, that we can develop them over time. And so as I agree with you, as, as young children, before we get to school, I think most of us are great learners. We are tinkering, you know, when we're learning to walk, we are trying to get up and we're falling and trying again and falling again and trying something different. And where it's being so attentive at the environment around us. We are, uh, we, we are learning all the time, but then there are lots of things in the, in the systems and our society, the way we, the beliefs that we learn in our childhood and early adulthood that put us in some ways seem to a fixed mindset.

And so, for example, there's research that shows that, um, when parents, uh, speak with their kids, the way they speak to their kids, uh, has a big impact on the children's mindset. Yeah. For example, um, if, if a parent, um, praises their child for being smart when they do something well, quickly, without mistakes, without effort. They say, you're so smart, you're so talented. We do that with our best intentions, because we think that's gonna, you know, increase the confidence of the child. But what lots of research shows is that it actually, the child might feel good about themselves at that moment. You know, but they want to be, continue getting that praise of being told that they're smart.

And so what they do is they shy away from challenges, from things that are really hard, where they're really gonna learn, uh, they start doing the things that they're comfortable with. They're trying to do things quickly and perfectly. When they make mistakes, they try to hide them. This is me. Like I, you know, I would make mistakes. I would, I would, I would hide them. I would like deny them, or I would rationalize them. When I would receive feedback, I would rationalize it. Um, I wouldn't kind of take responsibility. Um, and that's, that's an example. Another example is, you know, if, if parents are uncomfortable with failure, they say failure, if they see failure and mistakes as a sign of weakness, something that you tried, you need to try to avoid, then children tend to end up fostering more of a fixed mindset versus seeing failure and mistakes as something that we can learn from.

So we can, we want to take on challenges, do things we don't know how to do, which means we're going to be making mistakes along the way and learning from those mistakes. That's how we learn. If parent, if that's what parents want from their kids, rather than getting straight A's or winning every game, then, uh, then it's fosters kind of more of a growth mindset versus sick mindset. So we can talk about parenting and kind of the beliefs that we all have that are part of that, like water and the air in society. Uh, but the same thing is in schools, right? There's issues in kind of the way that we grade everything in school, um, or every school is so performance oriented rather than learning oriented.

So lots of reasons, but all of us are a mixture of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. It's not like one of us is like all growth mindset and somebody else is all fixed mindset, but we might see different abilities. first in a spectrum, somewhere in the middle or toward one area or the other. And also, uh, these things change, right? So if we, our situation changes, our mindset changes, and we might also think about ourselves as a learner and other people label other people in fixed ways. So these things are complex. Uh, and as you say, kind of reflecting on it, increasing our self-awareness is, is the, uh, the first step in the process. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, you had mentioned something that you, I mean, it took up until your graduate where you, where you stopped doing what you were supposed to do.

Right. I wrote a blog post a long time ago called stop doing what you're supposed to do. Right. I mean, you're supposed to, you know, get a job. You're supposed to get married. You're supposed to buy a house. You're supposed to have a kid. And there's all these societal norms that are thrown at us. And, and, you know, when you wake up and you realize, wait a minute, I, I don't have to do this stuff that now the challenge with that, that I find is, is that it was interesting. And I'd love your perspective on this. I was going to write this really well thought out, like, Hey, stop doing it. Like, let's break the norms here. Right. And then I saw this tweet from, uh, and this was a year or so back where this millennial said, Hey, uh, jet Xers and everybody above, like you, you keep telling us that, you know, you can do whatever you want to do and all that other stuff.

But when you were kids, there was a certain structure to what people were expected and there's comfort in structure in the sense that, Oh, okay, cool. I got an A great. Um, I got married that check that box. Right. Now that the norms are kind of broken, right. In the sense that literally, if you really wanted to, anybody can do what you want to do, but now it's almost like there's too much freedom. There's too much like, and, and so now it's this indecisiveness or what do I do? Because there are no guidelines anymore. So as much as that's great that anybody can do what they want, the, the millennial is actually saying, actually you had it easier because you knew what to do and everybody accepted that.

So how do we balance those two, right? With, with the, with, because I do think it's rather confusing for kids right now on, wait a minute, I can be whatever I want to be. We all get told whatever you can do, whatever you want to do. But now it's literally like, you don't have to go to college. If you don't want to, you don't need that degree. You don't have to get married. You don't have to have kids. Nobody cares. So how do you balance those two? Because I think a lot of people are struggling with that quite a bit. Yeah. I think it's really insightful. And I think it does put more onus on the person to create structure and to create our coherence, our coherence in the way we think, our coherence in our relationships and our structures, um, in our habits so that, um, we, we are kind of building habits and, and the structures and people and, and, and, and tools that re that, that work well with those habits to pursue our goals.

Right. And so, um, to the, so we can, where we do it as an individual or whether we do it as a leader, like we can create that structure within our companies. Right. So that when somebody comes into our team, uh, it's, they, it's not all up to them to figure out anything that, I mean, yeah, we want to give them freedom, but here are some structures that we use here, some habits and tools that we use that will make it easy for you to behave in the ways that we value and that are going to lead to learning and high performance. So I think we can create those structures. And to the, to the extent that people are lost initially, then I think they can search for more structure. Like if somebody, um, if somebody doesn't know what they want to do with their life, they can, yeah, and they're, you know, they, they can tinker and experiment and, and, you know, go to meetup.com, see if there's a group of people that are doing something cool that they might join to explore, but also they might benefit from more structure.

So they might benefit, okay, maybe I, I can benefit more from a college degree. Versus somebody who is very clear about, Hey, I'm passionate about this. Like maybe I don't need a college degree. I'm going to pursue this and seek mentors in this area and create my structure more. Um, and then other people who might then choose the college route might then do that later. You know, once they have more clarity around what's important to them and what they want like, Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving to close.

It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. Yeah. I think the most glaring example is, uh, at least here in the States that I notice is the military, right? Is it, you have some kids who in high school and grade school, they're just complete fuck alls.

You know what I mean? They're, they're degenerates. They do, you know, whatever. And then all of a sudden they go in the military and I mean, talk about structure, right? Like they're not even allowed to eat at times that they're not allowed to eat. And it was funny. One of my colleagues, James, you know, his, um, his son went to the military and after I think nine months of basic training and bootcamp came back and it was the first time when James saw him, you know, he addressed him as sir. He was like, you know, sir. And James like literally almost fell out of his, like, you just fell apart. Cause he was like, not once in my entire child's life has, has they addressed me as sir. And now I put basically this total bag of crap into, into the military and they came back with this really very, and I think a lot of people need that structure and need somebody else to tell them what to do.

But I guess, how do you identify in yourself? Cause I'll tell you right now, for me, I'm the exact opposite. You tell me what to do and I will almost immediately do whatever you tell me, you know, the exact opposite of what you tell me to do. I'm going to break whatever structure you put on me because I just don't like it. And I, and I thankfully figured out relatively early that I, I wanted to do it my way. And I will say I had a few help because it was forced on me a couple of times, you know, like I got fired one time, not expecting to ever get fired, even though I knew it was a horrible situation for me to be in. I was not the right fit for that role, but I kept fighting and working hard and they woke me up and it was like, Oh my God, how dare you fire me?

Like in a huge crisis of conscience. But then I woke up, I was like, Oh my God, thank God they just fired me. That just was a weight off. And then same thing, like I was engaged to a woman for seven years, well, I was with her for seven years and then engaged. I knew the relationship wasn't right, but I was going to keep going and doing what I was supposed to do. You're supposed to get married, you're supposed to have a kid. And she broke it up with me and again, devastated for two or three days. And then I woke up and I was like, Oh, thank God. And those two examples really highlighted to me, John, stop it. Like pick your head out of your ass. Stop doing what everybody else is telling you what to do.

Go for it. Right. But I think there are some people on that spectrum of, I need structure. I need the military. Cause if I don't, I'm just a hot mess and there's other people on the total. So how do you go about identifying where are you on the spectrum of, of fixed growth set versus, you know, um, growth or fixed mindset versus growth mindset and what to do about it? Sure. And before I answer that, John, do you feel that you have built, like while you're saying you have complete freedom, do you feel that you have built your own structures that work for you? Yes. Uh, yeah. So, so I've still, I mean, obviously stole from some other people and just learning and what works and what doesn't work, but I've definitely built my own structure.

You know, I have my own routines. I try to, you know, get myself to do, I kind of understand how my brain works these days. And I'm like, all right, you know, put these things in place so you don't do certain things and others. So I've definitely adapted and adopted a structure to it. Great. Um, yeah, I, I feel also that I have built my own structures over time. I continue to build them and, you know, tinker with them. And I, I feel like habits are so critical. So, you know, people haven't, haven't read about habits, like, you know, tiny habits, uh, atomic habits, the, the power of habits. Those are some great books on habits and, and how do we build kind of the, this is the performance systems and the learning systems that are going to keep us learning all the time and performing all the time.

And so that we don't have to figure out every day, everything that we need to do rather. So that's, I think that's something that I see from people, for example, that you described it, go to the military, they will benefit a lot from that structure, but then part of what they benefit from is from seeing the value of structure. So then, you know, afterwards they can continue molding their own structures and continuing down their own path. You know, even if they're going to be changing the structures to something that might be different than what, what's in the military. Um, but I think if people kind of feel lost and feel like they're not being productive, they're not, um, they're not making progress, progress toward their goals in ways they would want to, I would, I guess that would be a sign that, um, maybe like working on habits and learning about habits and tinkering with what habits can I build on my life.

Um, uh, and I, I do know, I know people who are kind of resistant to building habits and structure, but, um, I think kind of seeing how those habits and structure, when we build them ourselves can, can help us achieve any goal is helpful. Uh, you, you also asked kind of how, how can people assess their mindset, whether kind of they view more abilities, more in a fixed way or in a malleable way. Um, and, and that is really important. So, um, any, any ability or quality you can reflect on, do I tend to think of this as something that people develop or not? So for example, um, if, if you sometimes say things like this person is such a natural leader, that might be an indication that you see leadership as something that's fixed in people, that you're either a natural at it and you're have a, that's what makes people a great leader is because they have it in them, not something that they developed or you're a natural athlete, or if you see introversion or extroversion as things that are fixed in people that you can continue to develop.

And so how do we surface those things is through reflection. You can also think about, uh, first, what do you want to do in your life? Like, and do you, with the abilities that are involved in that, do you see those abilities as things that you can develop or as things that you assume are, are innate and, and you're trying to find what you're good at rather than develop yourself and continue to improve. And then the, the other thing that really helps foster a growth mindset is to learn how to improve. You know, what are the effective strategies in order to get better at something? Because, um, too, too, too often we think that the way to get better at something is just to work hard. And that's not how improvement works.

That's not how effective learning works. And so the more that we learn how great, how fantastic people, very skilled people at a particular thing become so good, and we emulate those behaviors. We think with them, we reflect on how well they're working with us. And that helps us build a growth mindset, you know, accelerate our improvement, accelerate our results. Love it. Question that just popped into my head. I'm curious in the work that you do, because you talk a lot about goals, right? And, and you said earlier, like, if you're not achieving your goals, um, you have to kind of reassess where, where you are on that and everything. How many people do you come across who actually have goals?

And I know that sounds like a weird, cause you know, somebody like me, like you got goals, right? But I just have this, this feeling that, that, that so many people are just going through the, like, just literally just going through life. You know what I mean? And, and my thing is always saying, if you don't have goals in life and, and like caught, like ones that you have written down and you're going for it, then you're just along for the ride and somebody else is dictating your path. But if you have goals, then you can dictate your own path. So, you know, I don't know whether it's a percentage breakdown or anything like that, but from your perspective, like how many people actually have goals that they're working towards versus are just going through the motions and trying to figure things out as they go?

Well, I think you see something there that was key for me, which is how many people actually are conscious about them and write them down. Cause I think everybody has goals. Like we, as human beings, we have goals. It might be to get accepted into a group of people, or it might be to be well-regarded, or it might be to survive. You know, those are goals that a lot of people have, but we might not be conscious of those goals and like write them down. So I agree. I mean, probably a lot of people could benefit from being more, um, more mindful. And I, I didn't have clarity on my life goals and even what I cared about, what my values were until I went through this health crisis. And it led me to realize that I gotta re, I gotta get clear about what I care about.

Cause if I don't, not clear about what, what I value, what I want my life to be, then I'm just gonna like continue being a zombie. And that's what I was, that was how I was living. Um, what I would say that when we think about goals, uh, I would encourage people to think about two different types of goals. One is performance goals, what we want to achieve, but the other is learning goals. What do we want to get better at? Um, and how do we pursue both of those things? It's really important. Sometimes we just set performance goals and don't get clear enough around how, what am I going to work on in order to achieve those, that performance. Yeah. I think that's right. I think I always say like, if you learn something today, like no matter how rough your day goes, but if you can genuinely say, I learned something today, then you're getting better.

Right. And, and, and learning could be what not to do. Right. If you figured out something, okay, that didn't work. Okay, cool. Well, I learned that that didn't work tomorrow. I'm going to figure out something that does work hopefully. And the more that you do that, the more you start to figure out stuff that works. So let's, let's, um, move to the, to the title of your book, um, the performance paradox. Could you explain what the performance paradox is and why it gets in the way of us being successful? Yeah, sure. The performance paradox is the counterintuitive reality that if we are always trying to perform, our performance suffers, our results go down, if we are only focused on achieving results.

And so a way to understand this is to get out of our kind of everyday context and think about people who are really, really skilled at what they do, like world-class, you know, objectively fantastic performers. How do they become so good? So for example, a world-class athlete, we see them when they're performing, when they're playing a game, trying the best they know how to do, trying to minimize mistakes. That's what I call the performance zone. And what we sometimes are confused about is that we tend to think that the reason they're so good at what they do is that they spend a lot of time doing that thing that we are seeing them do. But actually the reason they become so good is because they do something very different from what we see.

So after the game, so say they're playing a game, they're having trouble with a particular move. They're going to avoid that move during that match. But then after the match, they'll go to the coach and say, coach, I have to work on this particular move. So that's a very, very different activity and area of attention than when we do what we do during when we're performing. And it is when we engage in what I call the learning zone, which is when we're working on improvement, that enables us to build our skills and to raise our performance. And so in our lives, in our work, in our lives, we often get stuck in chronic performance, just trying to all the time, just care about getting things done as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes.

And that maximizes the immediate performance. So if you're in the last week of a quarter and you're trying to make quota, you're close to quota, and you just want to sell, the way to maximize performance that week is to just make as many sales calls as possible to try to do the best you know how, try to just focus on performance. But then if we do that every week, we stagnate, right? We need to experiment. Like you said, we need to try different things. We need to solicit feedback, whether it's from clients, from colleagues. We need to listen to podcasts like this one to figure out what are strategies that I could change. And those are different than just focusing on performing. So, so it's about incorporating the learning zone into our work and lives as individuals, teams, and organizations is key in order to improve and to raise higher, raise our performance over time.

So is this, is this in line with, you know, let's talk about strengths and weaknesses here for a second, because I've always, you know, shied away from working on my weaknesses, because my weaknesses, my weaknesses for a reason, right? I, I always, from a management standpoint, I always lean into somebody's strengths. It's like, whatever you're good at, I want to lean into that. So you go, but you know, you talk about, um, people like icons, like Beyonce, Foo Fighters, and Tom Brady. Talk to me about that, that paradox there of, of like the focusing on your strengths, what makes you great versus avoiding or working on your weaknesses. Because to a certain degree, what you just mentioned there is me, I got to like, great, during performance time, I'm focusing all my strengths because that's what I'm great at.

But during my non-performance time, I got to figure out my weaknesses and, and try to work on those. So what's the balance there of, of leaning into what you're great at versus trying to address what you're not? Sure. Well, in the learning zone, we can choose to work on our strengths or our weaknesses. So, but if we're working on our strengths, we need to be working on the next level of mastery and challenge in our strengths. We might be really, really good at something, but we, in the learning zone, we work to get even better at that thing. So we need to first, like the assessment of what are my strengths and weaknesses is helpful. So we can help us, you know, reflect and, and then we can get feedback, right?

From mentors, from colleagues, from clients, like, and then we can make decisions about, do I want to continue working on certain strengths or do I want to also work on some weaknesses? And that involves judgment. If you look at people like, you know, Beyonce, Tom Brady and the Foo Fighters, they work not only on their strengths, they also work on their weaknesses. Right. But it might be that in team situations, you can divide and conquer. And so like, there might be, I might have a weakness that somebody else is great at and together we can work awesome. And then if we both work on our strengths, we might become, you know, we might accelerate improvement the most and achieve the most. But if I'm like weak at listening, you know, chances are that, that working on listening is going to be really helpful to me and to our team.

Right. So I think there are, there are things that are really important to work on whether, you know, where, where their strengths or weaknesses and often, you know, the best performers often work on both the strengths and their weaknesses. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that's the other part of it is I think I find a lot of people, you know, really focus on their weaknesses, but there are a lot of times those weaknesses are, there's nothing that they can do about them in this. I mean, there is, but only to a certain degree. So it'll get you marginally less bad versus focusing on the really good stuff. That's going to get you exponentially better. Right. Now I use a dumb example, like in basketball, right?

Like I'm a six foot one white dude, right? Like I could have worked on dunking, you know, I suck at dunking the basketball, right? Like I could barely touch the rim. And so I could work on dunking the ball and getting better at that. But my three point shot was pretty legit. So, you know, if I had focused all my effort on learning how to jump higher and where my physical makeup is just not really set for that. So, so I guess which ones are the, how do you identify the weaknesses that are truly getting in your way and will exponentially help you get to that next level versus the ones that are just weaknesses. And you should probably learn to either delegate or, or partner up with somebody who can help you address those.

Yeah. So a lot like reflection and conversations like this one. So basketball is a team sport, right? So if it, and dunking involves height and, um, and so if, if you're very far from being able to dunk and you think about it and you say, uh, you know, chances are, if I work really hard at this, I, I'm not going to become great at it. And I'm part of a team and I could become really good at this. And together we could be a better team. If I focus on this other thing that makes, that makes a lot of sense. So, uh, often, so the, the belief that I can't significantly improve at dunking, that would be an example of a fixed mindset. Is this the definition? And that's not bad or good. Sometimes people say, like, think of fixed mindset as being bad and growth mindset being good.

That's not the case. It's just, it's just what it is. Like, you know, like my height, you know, I see it as relatively fixed. That's a fixed mindset. That's okay. And maybe like the belief that I cannot become a great dunker as more of a fixed mindset. That's okay. That, that enables us to say, okay, if I want to become a great basketball player, what should I work on? And if I believe that I can become a great dunker, if that's true, you know, we, we can never be sure if it's true, but if it's true, then it's helpful. Cause then we can work on other things. Um, now, most of the time when we're in a, for, for most people, because we haven't reflected on these things very much, most of the things we see as fixed tend to be based on incorrect assumptions.

Like we, most of the things we tend to see as skills that we can't change. Um, we just haven't learned how to develop those things. And it doesn't mean that we have to develop those things. That's the other thing. It's like, when I said that the great performers work on both their strengths and their weaknesses, I don't mean that they work on everything. Like that's just not effective. You know, they're, they're strategic. They think about, I'm going to work on this one thing or these two or three things. Um, and, and, and rather than try to like work at everything, but those things might be strengths or weaknesses. Uh, so I think it's through conversations with your teammates, conversations, uh, with mentors or colleagues, reflection, and trying to figure out what is important in what I'm trying to achieve.

Um, and are those things that are important, something that I need to develop myself? Or can I delegate? Can I, can I collaborate with others? I think it actually, what you mentioned is it, it does, it kind of goes back to those goals and the focus of where you're trying to go. Because if, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with those priorities, because if, if whatever that weakness is, is preventing you from getting to wherever you're trying to go to, then you have to work on it. Right. But if it's, if it's not, if it's kind of one of those that you can either delegate somebody else to, then okay, fine. Let somebody else do it and focus on the other stuff that's going to help you get there faster.

So cool. Um, there's one thing that you put on here. What's the, uh, learn by doing versus learning while doing. Could you explain that? Cause I, I think I understand, but this is one of those things where, you know, learn through osmosis, right? There's, there's a lot of, there's a lot to be said for that, where you just do it and you're just going to pick up through basic, just experience alone. I forget what is it Gladwell or whatever, 10,000 hours, right? And after you put 10,000 hours in, you're kind of an expert, but that's a little bit of a false, you know, uh, approach because just by doing it for 10,000 hours, doesn't mean you're going to be a great at you. You'll, you'll, you'll get the components of it, but you're not gonna be great at it.

So how do you talk, how do you shift your mindset from the osmosis? Um, I'm just going to do this and pick it up along the way versus I'm learning as I'm doing this. Yeah. So, um, I, I love Malcolm Gladwell's books and have learned so much from them, including outliers, which is the book that you talk about 10,000 hours. And I learned a lot from that book. Um, but you know, Malcolm Gladwell recognized that he was really busy when he was writing that book and he could have done a little more research and being a little clearer. So one, uh, one of the, the, the, the key kind of researcher, and this is to, to answer your question. Um, the key researcher that, that he quoted in that book was Anders Ericsson, who was a, um, uh, Florida state university professor and coined term deliberate practice.

And, and so one of the examples that Malcolm Gladwell uses in outliers is the Beatles. And he makes the argument that the, the reason the Beatles became so good at what they do is that, uh, they spent 10,000 hours, uh, playing in bars in, I think it was Hamburg in Germany. And, and so he was one of the examples that he uses. And so Anders Ericsson wrote afterwards that, you know, he disagrees, um, that the, the Beatles didn't get great because they played a lot of songs. Cause that's, that's not how you, by doing something like playing a song, that's, that's not what the research shows you get better. So Ericsson was saying, look, the Beatles, the, the, the, what's amazing about the Beatles is the, the composing of the songs, like how they created the songs.

The songs are so good. It's not the technical playing of the songs that is so good. And so if you wanted to, uh, to study why the Beatles created such great songs, you would need to study how they created those songs, how they wrote those songs. Uh, so that was his argument. But, um, so what the research shows is that if you are performing, like you're just playing songs in a bar, uh, that doesn't lead, that leads to improvement at the very beginning. Like if you're just grabbing a guitar and starting to play a song, like if you do that every day for a week, you'll get better. You do that every day for a month, you'll get better, but then you, you'll stagnate. You'll, you stop getting better.

And that's how I used to play the guitar when I was growing up. It was just like, I would just play the songs I liked and I sucked. I was so bad at the guitar because I would just play the songs that I liked. And so what the research shows is if you want to get great at the guitar, you need to engage in deliberate practice, which is you, you, you, you look at a very specific part of the song and, and, and a very specific technique with your hand and you work on improving that technique. So you do that very little thing and you hear how it sounds. And then you, you make an adjustment based on the feedback and then you try it again and you do repetitions with feedback in the middle in terms of how it's sounding.

And that very, very specific kind of you're, you're identifying a very specific skill at a next level of challenge beyond what you can do through repetition and feedback, ideally with some guidance from a teacher or coach, that's what deliberate practice is. And so, um, you can then look at somebody like, uh, Nandi Bushell, who's a, like, was a 10 year old drummer who had no experience. She was 10 years old. She had never played in a, you know, in a, in any arena before. And by the time she was 11 or 12, she played with a Foo Fighters, like at the LA forum. So she had, at that point, she had very, very little experience, but she had great expertise. And when she, when you hear her in terms of how she practices, it's not about playing songs.

It's about doing things slowly, deliberately, and then increasing over time. Um, and so when we, when we say learn by osmosis or learning by doing, that can be confusing because it can mean that if we just do, we will learn that we will get better. And that only works until we become proficient to become really great at something, to become really, really good at something. We have to be deliberate about experimenting, about soliciting feedback, about reflecting and having conversations about looking at mistakes and discussing kind of what, what can we learn from these mistakes? What can we do differently going forward? And so that's why I, I don't like to use the term learning by doing, because it's not just doing, we have to do other things, but we can learn while doing.

And so we can get things done while we improve over time. Uh, but that's different than just working at getting things done. Yeah. It's, I think that that's the problem is like, I think a lot of people just do and, and they're not even curious enough to figure out why, or, you know, what it means. So why, or how do we get the curiosity back in the, in, in, because I think if you watch the, the, you know, I don't know, bell curve or whatever of curiosity, it's not a bell curve. It starts really high as children, right? That's why, you know, I think at like four or five years old, it's the why, why, why, why, why, why, why you're too, it's just the question that you kids keep asking. Right. But then later on, we, we kind of get it beaten out of us.

And, and I, you know, in sales, I think a superpower is being curious, like genuinely curious. And so how do we reinvigorate the curiosity in us so that we can start to self-reflect that start to identify these things? Are there some, some tools or some things that you've seen that have allowed people to become curious? Cause I've, I've, I've went on this podcast. I asked quite a bit, um, to, to specifically sales professionals. Like, do you think we're born with curiosity? Like, is somebody genuinely curious born or is it, or can you teach it? I do believe that there is a component of curiosity that you are born with, right? You are just a naturally born curious person, but I also think you can, you can teach people to be curious, but I'm searching for how, so how can you, how can we reverse engineer this maybe a little bit and, and get people to be more curious about themselves, about, uh, about the world around them, any of that?

So first, I think that in any quality, like curiosity, I agree with you. I think there's a kind of nature component and a nurture component. And I think we tend to overestimate the nature component and underestimate the, the nurture, but both they're both there. Um, I do think, like you said, when we're really young kids, we tend to be really, really, really curious. And to your point, like there's research that shows that kids ask so many questions until they get to school age. You know, when they get to school, they sit on a chair, people talk at them and talk about things that they're not interesting. Um, and so we, we, we lose that curiosity and I think largely in school, which I think is tragic.

Um, so how do we reignite that in ourselves? Uh, first it's like seeing that because when we're curious and you know this, John, like life is better. Like, I mean, we are, we're exploring, we're asking questions where I'm learning more about if I'm, if I'm having a relationship with you as a friend or, or any other relationship, and I'm asking more questions, I'm uncovering more of you, right. And, and of, of your thoughts, of your emotions, of how I'm coming across, what I do that's helpful, what I do that I could do better. And, and that is an amazing like process of discovery that deepens our relationship and brings us closer together. So when, when we're, when we're doing that, it makes life better.

And so the question is like, how can we, for people who have gotten that beat out of them, you know, early on, I think, you know, how can we reconnect with that? And so part of it is becoming aware of these dynamics and kind of remembering a little bit, like how we used to be so playful and, and, um, and tinkering and, and curious as young children. Um, thinking also learning about how the lack of curiosity is harming our performance. So if we want to be a great salesperson, if that's a goal, then how, how engaging in more curiosity is going to help me achieve that goal better. And being able to see that can, can motivate us to take on the behaviors. And then the, the more we engage in the behaviors, even if they feel like, I'm not sure about this right now, but I'll give it a try.

Then we engage in the behaviors. We see value from them. And then that helps us kind of change our mental models and, and our associations, emotional associations, associations to it over time. So very practical things people can do is one. Think about every morning, reminding yourself of what it is, one thing that you want to work on. So if you want to ask more questions, like just, you know, build that morning habit to remind yourself of what you want to be doing differently each day and, and, and work at it because that takes effort. But then once you do it every day, then it'll become easier and easier and easier. And one thing, one specific behavior that I would encourage people to think about is just soliciting feedback from your clients, from your colleagues, from anybody.

When we solicit feedback frequently, we uncover so much valuable stuff that we just like, we see the value of just asking for feedback all the time. And that starts getting us more curious because when, when one thing I've learned through feedback is that I used to just be wrong and I still am wrong so often about what people's intentions are or what they're thinking about me or what their goals are. And so when I get curious and I ask questions and I uncover those things and I realize how my preconceptions were wrong, like that just makes me want to do it more and to uncover more of what's in other people's minds. Yeah. Yeah. I always joke with reps when it comes to questions, right? Like you always, you know, from a technique standpoint, you always want to do the clarification, right?

Like, so when you ask me a question, unless the answer is blatantly obvious, you want to clarify, like, what do you mean by like, could you get an example of, right? And, uh, and the reason I say this, unless it, again, it's blatantly obvious is there's plenty of times where I've done this, where somebody has asked me a question and I thought, oh, okay, I got this. And I've given you an answer that I thought was brilliant, right? And I've gone on it for like a minute, two minutes, three minutes with this beautiful answer only to, at the end of that answer, have the person be like, well, what I, what I meant to say was right. And then they give you, and then you're like, oh, damn it. And so it's like a constant reminder of like, yeah, idiot.

Like stop it. Like just stop assuming what they're asking because a lot of times people, you know, won't ask the right question. They'll ask a surface level question or whatever, or they'll give you a surface level answer and digging deep and being curious about that shows that you care. And, and a lot of times by, by being like, hey, make sure it also slows you down so you can actually listen. So you went back, you know, going back to active listening at the beginning of like, if that's a problem of yours, then actively work on, you know, introducing clarification questions into your, into your process. So, um, I agree and, and I would add like a connection to sales specifically. I, as I was doing interviews, um, for this book, I interviewed lots of great performers and learners and some of them were in sales and, and a theme that I, one of the themes that I saw consistently is there, there are several organizations where originally they, they went through the transformation and at the beginning they would do what they described as, you know, spray and pray, right.

Of just speaking about all the benefits of the product or the solution and pray that one of the things they said resonated with the other person as opposed to, and then what they became a lot more successful once they switched to much more consultative sale, but just more like asking lots of questions and listening at the beginning. So you understand, you know, what the, the other person thinks, what they need, uh, and you can connect to those things. And so that's an example of how being curious can help, can help you become a more, more effective salesperson. Love it. Last question, uh, before we wrap things up, what, through all the research that you've done on for the book and, and a couple of books that you've written, was there any, what was the one piece of data that really stood out to you that was different than you expected?

Was there, was there something that as you kind of did these interviews and so that you kind of had a go, let's go back to having a certain perception of, oh, this is probably the answer. And then the data showed, holy shit, it's way like I was, I couldn't have been more wrong. Is there something that popped out for you? Well, I'll give you, well, I'll give you two. One is, um, less on data, but I came to the book with an assumption that, and I still to a large extent believe this, but, but I, I, I realized how I was wrong too, where I believe strongly and, and people in my field believe strongly that as leaders, we need to model the behaviors that we want to see in other people. And so we, if we want to build a learning organization where people ask questions and solicit feedback all the time and disagree with each other, right.

And, and Hey, you know, here's, here's how I see it. So we can engage in an honest conversation. Um, then we as leaders need to behave like learners too. And, and what I realized through the interviews is that there are situations where the leader doesn't actually need to quite take exactly the same behaviors that they want to see in others. And so that's when we're first building culture, um, if we want people to disagree with us, right. To, to, to give different ideas than the ones we're proposing, then we can't lead by disagreeing with other people as leaders because because of our status that comes across differently. So then people start thinking, Oh, you know, is whatever this person thinks that's, what's going to go.

So I'm going to stay quiet, you know, because our behavior is taken differently than other people's behavior. Yeah. And so we, we need to engage in what I realized I called like asymmetrical modeling at the beginning where, you know, we are, we are taking like encouraging other people to speak up, you know, you know, praising them and rewarding them afterwards when they do, when they disagree with us, staying quiet and speaking later, those are not exactly the behaviors we want other people to, uh, to engage in so we can coach them to, to act more in a learning oriented way. So that's one. Uh, the other that, so that's one where I kind of learned something that was different from the way I was thinking.

Um, the other was one where like just the data was so clear about the, the main thesis of the book. And that was in several situations that the data showed that, that people who engage more in the learning zone were higher performers. So for example, uh, at New York life, like the, the insurance agents have an optional structure, again, structure is called study groups. They can, they can form, they can join a study group and they meet about once a month just to support each other. It turns out that the people who, who engage in these study groups more often are just much more effective salespeople or Clear Choice Dental. Similarly, they use videos, the salespeople use videos to, when the patients consent to it, to record their interactions.

And the people who, the, the professionals who review the videos most are those who are most successful. And so the, we tend to think that we're too busy to engage in the learning zone. Uh, we have too much to perform, too much to do. But what the data consistently shows is that the people who engage in the, in the learning zone more actually achieve higher performance. Interesting. Yeah, I could see that, you know, but I think, you know, it's the conscious thing. I think that's where the unconscious person that does that inherently, as they grow, they learn as they're doing when, while they're doing versus the person that just does, and then has to reflect back on what did they learn about.

Uh, I think that's a, that's a conscious, uh, it's almost like something you have to remind yourself, right? I, I, I always have to have sticky notes all over the place as far as, you know, and, and one of the things I always told reps, if, you know, if you could go back and ask myself, like, what would I do differently as a, as a, you know, young sales professional or something like that, it was actually pay attention more because all the experiences that I was going through, I was just going through them. You know what I mean? But if I had taken a step back to, to experience what I was going through and think about it as a learning experience, as opposed to trying to reflect back on it, I probably would have developed a lot faster because there's stuff that happens around us all the time that, that we don't really notice that is probably going to have a huge impact on us in the future.

But if we proactively kind of identify it, it's going to be a lot more beneficial to us. So. I agree. That resonates with me too. And also something else that I would do differently when I, in my careers, I would have been more deliberate about surrounding myself from, with people that I could learn from people who, and, and then just be more deliberate about learning from those people, asking them more questions, asking them for more feedback, um, that would have accelerated my growth. Yeah. I think that's, that's definitely something I wish I, you know, if I could go back, there's probably at least a handful of people like, oh man, I can't, I was, I was right there with that person. And all I had to do was ask them all these questions and they would have probably given me so many better answers that I have right now.

Awesome. Awesome. Eduardo. Well, this has been great. I think we could keep going on this conversation for a while, but in the interest of time here and also leaving some stuff for the book, uh, talk to people a little bit about, about where they can get connected with you and, and what, you know, the book and all that other stuff where they can find out more resources. Absolutely. Sure. I, I'm active on LinkedIn. Uh, so connect there. My website is briseño.com, mylastname.com. And the book is called the performance paradox. Uh, it's, uh, it was selected as a must read by the next big idea club, which I'm really honored about and excited about. And it's available wherever books are sold. Love it.

Awesome. Eduardo. Well, hopefully everybody goes, picks out that book. And I, you know, I think that, that growth mindset piece is something we all need to adopt more of right now, especially because things are moving so fast right now. If you are in a fixed mindset right now, you're going to get run over pretty damn fast with, with how fast things are moving, especially with AI and everything else. So I think this is what critical thing for people to pay attention to. So I appreciate you coming on here. It was great to be here and thank you for all you do, John. Absolutely. And everybody else, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did here. And, uh, look, as I always say it at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today.

Cause no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going, you make somebody smile today and you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now, and I can't thank you enough. Now to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also check out my new website at www.johnm.barrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage.

There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day, just like you are. And I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.