Introduction
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 531 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Sebastien Page, author of the Psychology of Leadership. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Introduction to Sebastien Page
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast. Have you ever thought about how much we can learn from leadership from sports? What if being a better leader is less about always being right and more about knowing how to lose? Well, in today’s business world, it’s easy to glorify hustle, achievement and chasing the next big milestone. But what about the moments when things don’t go to plan? When performance dips, when stress builds, when uncertainty creeps? In those moments, how you respond, how you reflect, how you lead can define not only your results, but your reputation. Today I’m excited to introduce you to Sebastien Page. Sebastien has been in the world of money management for 25 years and currently serves as the Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. After rising through the ranks of this high stakes industry, Sebastien found himself grappling with stress. And that sparked a deep interest in psychology. His personal journey led to his new book, the Psychology of Leadership, which explores what we can learn from sports psychology, personality psychology, positive psychology, motivation science, and so much more to become more resilient, effective and thoughtful leaders. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for, for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and @thebrainybusiness.com 531.
The Psychology of Leadership: Learning from Loss
Melina Palmer: Now let’s jump right in. Sebastien Page, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
Sebastien Page: Melina, I’m so excited. I was just thinking about the fact that I started to listen to some of your episodes and I’m an instant fan. And I was thinking, I’m so excited we get to talk. Because I was thinking, where’s this podcast been all my life?
Melina Palmer: I’m honored and delighted. I’m so glad that you’ve been enjoying the show, and that you get to join me. I’m super excited and delighted to talk about your book and of course, psychology and leadership. I mean, come on. Some of my favorite things, to be able to talk about, for everyone who doesn’t yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
Sebastien Page: So my day job is in money management. I’m chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price. I’ve been doing money management for 25 years. It’s a rough and tumble and exciting industry. And I’ve climbed the leadership ladder and I’ve just gotten really interested in the psychology of it and most importantly, the positive psychology of around leadership. So here we are.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. Do you remember was there a, a pivotal moment that you got interested in psychology, that it all was there, like a light switch that turned on for you or something? What was that moment?
Sebastien Page: So I was stressed at work. And not only was I stressed, I was stressing about the fact that I was stressing. And m. I kept thinking beating myself up. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Why am I stressed like this? And I decided to talk to a, sports psychologist. And Melina, it was a very interesting first conversation. I met up with Dr. Daniel Zimit is here in Maryland, where I live. And not only is he a PhD sports psychologist, but also he’s an accomplished athlete. He has 44. 0 national titles and in the sport of handball. Now, let me just describe this. This is like squash, but you whack the ball with your hands. It’s kind of a sport sometimes in movies you see it’s played in prison. Dr. Sema’s not been to prison for the record, but 40 national titles. Four. Zero. So we sit down and he tells me the story of his best match ever. It’s fascinating because the. The match occurred 10 years prior, but he remembers everything about the match where the ball was at every point. And I swear he has a tear in his eye. And he said, then ball hit the back wall and then the front wall. And at some point in the story, he’s on his knees. He makes an extreme shot to win the point. And he’s walking me through this, and I can tell it’s emotional for him, a special moment in his life. But then, Melina, it’s a complete letdown because he goes sort of after the fact. Oh, and then I lost the next two points. He lost that match. And we started talking about why was that his best match ever as a sports psychologist and as an athlete, if he happened to have lost it? And for him it was about mastery and the fact that in that match he was playing a much stronger opponent. And he realized that he had achieved a new level in this sport of handball. And that’s all that mattered to him. So we started talking about this mindset. As a money manager, I know that I lose a lot of points. No one wins all the points all the time. So the mindset of learning to lose, sports psychology is fascinating. It’s not about winning at all. It’s about losing and how you learn from losing. So that was the beginning, and I started reading the research articles. I have a background in quantitative finance and economics. So it was easy for me to read the articles with scientific language, with the statistical tests, and get my head around the scientific method behind the research in positive psychology. And I just became completely passionate about this, Read, hundreds of articles. And because I wanted to be a good leader, a better leader, and because I’m addicted to writing, I just decided to learn by writing. I tell my readers early in the book, you’re reading this book for self improvement. I wrote it for the same reason.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. As so many say. Right. The best research, is me. Search kind of if you write the book that, you wish you had right then that you’re having to ask questions. I really love that story, and I loved reading it in the book, of course.
Applying Sports Psychology to Business and Life
Melina Palmer: And this idea of, like, so often, like you said, with sports, you lose, you know, often more than you win. Right. Like, there’s so much. And in baseball, you know, you’re not hitting the ball every time or even most of the time. Right. That you’re, you’re getting, you’re striking out and, and all of this, and there’s a lot of failure. And those who can’t embrace that, you know, if it’s all about perfection, then you just, you can’t succeed in that very well. And I think, you know, when it comes to business and with leadership, you know, a lot of companies maybe, or, managers will talk a little bit about, you know, failing forward and whatever, but then the, you know, push comes to shove, and we have no tolerance for the failures. So what would you say as far as where you’ve seen this kind of in a practical way, like we’re saying, you know, when there’s actual money and dollars on the line, how does this tie into then? actual application within companies?
Sebastien Page: Yeah, it sounds good on paper, but when you actually are getting a decision wrong, losing money at your company, that’s a different context. And this is where you really need to embrace the mindset and develop the mindset. I was, speaking to about 300 people at my company this afternoon, and I told them about Roger Federer. So Roger Federer went viral about a year and a half ago in a commencement address. And by the way, I described Federer as the top tennis player of all time. And then someone came to me after the press presentation, just for the record, and argued, it’s Nadal. I don’t know. For tennis fans out there, let’s just argue that. Let’s just agree that Federer is one of the best tennis players of all time. And the reason why he went viral is about this mindset. He looked at the students in the commencement address and said, Look, I’ve played 1500 matches in my career. I’ve won 80% of them. But then he asked the students, what percentage of points do you think I won? Melina, can you guess the percentage of points?
Melina Palmer: I know, I’m trying to remember because I know this was, I believe in the book as well. I think it’s like it’s right around 55 or something. Right?
Sebastien Page: It’s not 54%.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Sebastien Page: And so. And then he. And then he looked at the crowd and said, whatever game you play in life, you’re going to lose. Get used to it. And he then said, the myth of effortless excellence is just a myth. And for me, this resonates, this sports psychology mindset with investment management, because in investment management, you cannot predict the future. If you have a hit rate of 54% in a lot of bets that you make in the markets, and you can maintain that for a long period of time, you’re like the Federer of investing, and you can win 80% of the matches. So it directly applies here in the business of money management and the psychology behind it. The other application, from sports psychology to business and life and money management, is this idea that athletes, they don’t really control entirely the outcome, but they control the process. So if you’re an athlete, you don’t know what your opponent is going to do. You can’t control your opponent. You can’t control the weather, whatever sport you play, you can’t control what the referee is going to do. There’s a big random or uncertain component to your outcome as an athlete, and that is the same in business and life, especially in investing, because we always need to differentiate between luck and skill. And the best example I like to use of this is from Annie Duke, who’s a great, fantastic author. She wrote a little blurb for the Psychology of Leadership. It touched my heart because I love her books so much. She talks about poker, but the same concept that you control your process, but you don’t fully control the outcome. And therefore you need to be able to, to differentiate between luck and skill. So let’s take a super simple example. If you go out to a party and you’re having fun and you decide to drink an entire bottle of wine, you’re going to have a headache the next day. It’s a bad decision. But let’s say you compound that bad decision and decide to drive home. Now, you made a really bad decision. If you make it home safely, you actually got a good outcome. Now, should you conclude based on the outcome that you’re really awesome as at, decision making and that driving and drinking and driving is a good decision? No. And the opposite is true as well. You can hire or an Uber and the Uber gets in a crash. Right. Decision, bad outcome. So life is full of that. It’s full of that. And the job of the leader, in part is to help people think through is our process the right one? And if we’re getting the bad outcome, is it just bad luck or do we need to rethink how we make our decisions and was it the right or the wrong decision? So all these connections, Melina, between how athletes think and the psychology of sports and money management, but also just leadership in general, to me are fascinating and still quite unexplored in business.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And it’s such an important aspect to be looking at and of course have to, also shout out Annie Duke. She’s been a guest on the show, before as well, talking about her book Quit, and of course Thinking in Bets, you know, great, great content that she has there. So yay for Annie and her great stuff. I’m glad that she did a blurb for the Psychology of Leadership.
Goals, Motivation, and Goal-Induced Blindness
Melina Palmer: While you were talking about that, it got me thinking about a story you share in the book. And I know I tend, I always do this. I like, jump way to the end and then we’re all over the place. But, so when you were talking about that commencement address that Roger Federer did, it was reminding me of a story you were talking about with one of your mentors that had you come and talk to, his class and having this like, as we think about, like, goals and motivation for people and understanding kind of, ah, that underlying thing as we’re trying to like, rally the troops a little bit. Right. And knowing, you know, Harvard versus Yale has a little bit of a competition to it, that maybe there’s a way we would frame a goal, or get some people, motivated, excited, thinking about it in a little bit of a different way. So I would love if you could share a little bit about that story and anything that you want to share leading into that with content from the book for those who haven’t Reddit that you think would be helpful.
Sebastien Page: Look, I just want to start with a sort of disclaimer that measurable goals are very powerful and helpful in life and in business. And if you have measurable traditional goals, you want to make money, you want to achieve as a company a high stock price. These measurable goals are super important. They’re critical tools in leadership and, and everyone knows this. What I explore in the Psychology of Leadership goes beyond that into goal induced blindness. It turns out there’s really interesting research in psychology about how when people focus too much on their goals, especially high performers, they lose sight of anything else in their lives. They that might matter. There’s a story in the book Melina where I almost died because I was completely run down physically and mentally, basically with work in the early years of my career. That was goal induced blindness. Companies will lie and cheat to reach their goals. That is goal induced blindness. Wells Fargo opening dummy accounts just to show the investors that they have more bank accounts opened, or Volkswagen tweaking their emissions on the emission testing. There’s plenty of examples of that. And when you’re in a high performing environment, goals are, the basics. That’s what you need to get right. But if you’re already in a high performing environment where people are highly motivated, goal induced blindness is the risk. To illustrate this, I could do an experiment with you. I’ve done this with students, and this is part of the story about speaking to the students. If I give you Melina a jar of gummies and I say four of them are poisoned and they’re going to kill you, and I ask what would it take for you to eat a gummy? Would you eat a gummy for $100,000? Let me pause here and see if I get a yes, no, and, and then I can just increase the money a million. Would you do it for a billion dollars? And what was shocking to me, speaking to a large group of students, was that a lot of hands went up at a million dollars. And that is not reasonable because as long as you’re not in poverty, and there’s actually some research that, even in poverty you’re going to thrive and self describe yourself as a happy person over time based on the quality of the relationships in your life much more than any other factors, including money. So when psychologists talk about goal induced blindness, they like to talk about Everest because, hey, my example is a bit contrived. Four gummies out of 100, you have a 4% chance of dying if you want to reach the summit of Everest. And so at the end of a chapter, I go, if you take one piece of advice from this entire book, if you ever feel like climbing Everest because it’s there or some other bogus reason, please don’t.
Melina Palmer: Yeah.
Sebastien Page: So, you know, that day with the students, my mentor invited me to talk to them. I thought, okay, this was at MIT, and I thought, you know, they’re going to be successful. They’re already the top students academically, employers already calling on them. Most of them have already worked on Wall Street. This was a finance program. What am I going to tell them? And, the biggest takeaway I wanted to leave with them was, take good care of yourselves. Sleep, diet, exercise, you think it’s a secondary consideration, but everything else you want to do in life is going to go better if you sleep well, eat reasonably, and exercise regularly. And you need to do all three. And so that was not what they expected. But I thought, hey, they’ve got the career stuff lined up already.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, yeah. And I love the Everest example. Another, person I’ve had on the show, Ayelet Fishback, who works in motivation science. Ah. She opens her book, Get It Done, with an example of people climbing Everest and not making it back. But in this case, you know, talking about, like, if your goal is to make it to the top versus getting home safely, then we’re focused on the wrong thing and you may make a bad choice to hit the summit and not, yes, make it back.
Sebastien Page: The world record is someone climbed, got the summit 30 times. And you know, the top climbers, they’re really, really good. Again, a nod to Annie Duke at quitting. You know exactly when to quit. But I still think a lot of the deaths, by the way, like, this is more we have to climb over dead bodies to get to the summit. Like the. And you know, it’s there. A lot of the deaths are actually unpredictable. It’s kind of like the gummy exercise. You don’t know how your body’s going to react to the altitude. So anyways, an anecdote for you. I have a podcast coming up with an expert climber who’s a world renowned climber who’s summited all these Everest and all these summits. So I might have to tweak my examples for her.
Melina Palmer: Well, let me know. Let us know how that, how that goes. But that’s Ah, at that point where, you know, they’d say it’s kind of calculated risk and whatnot as you. But like you said, it’s so unpredictable as we think about those, you know, goals in business. Not getting too hyper focused, too myopic as we’re thinking about those which can happen, we don’t think about the bigger picture which can be, you know, neglecting ourselves, our mindset, like you said, sleep, things like that, that are important. I think it’d be interesting to survey those students that were in that room. Like, how surprised were you that this was what the talk was, that it was telling you about, eating right and sleeping and things. And hopefully they took it to heart.
Sebastien Page: A lot of them, I could tell, had circles under their eyes because they were all, you know, MIT high achieving A students that I bet you were eating junk food every day and sleeping three hours.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Sebastien Page: And you know what I mean, this is the early years of my career where I was not getting enough sleep and I just realized at some point that I could be much more productive, much more productive and higher achieving with those basics.
Melina Palmer: Yeah.
Stress and Performance: The Yerkes-Dodson Curve
Melina Palmer: And so with that in mind, then of course the goal is no stress ever under any circumstance. Or as we know from the book, maybe it’s a little bit different. Is there an ideal amount of stress people should have?
Sebastien Page: So I love that you bring the topic of stress that way because for me the realization that optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero, that stress up to a point will increase your performance because you’ll be activated, motivated, you’ll prepare better, the adrenaline will push you beyond that point. Stress we all know is bad, is going to kill you. You’re going to choke, you’re not going to perform as well. But this idea that there’s a curve, it’s called a Yerkes Dodson’s curve. And there’s like 80 years of research on this and I think it’s so underestimated how useful this concept is for business and life. That curve describes your performance as a function of your level of stress. And you have different curves for different tasks. If you’re going to run 100 meter dash, you’re going to perform optimally at a very high activation level. It’s okay to be really on adrenaline, anxious about it. You’re going to run faster and faster and faster. So the curve looks different than for example, if you’re going to do archery, which is a more complex task that requires more concentration. Optimal performance for archery is not zero stress, but is at a lower stress level. And then what’s even more important, you can change your curve. You can change your stress tolerance. In the book, I talk about Neil Armstrong because famously, the first manned moon landing went wrong in, all possible ways. The lunar module was running out of fuel, the computer stopped working, they lost communication, and they completely went off course. And Armstrong took manual control and landed it in the wrong spot. And it’s a very famous moment in human history because we all know what happened. He walked on the moon and said, it’s a small step for a man. It’s a giant leap for humankind. There’s a tidbit as I was researching this that I found fascinating. Armstrong as an astronaut, was hooked to a heart rate monitor, and his heart rate for most of the mission, except at the end when it spiked, was 75, which for a lot of people is basically a resting heart rate. So Neil Armstrong had a very different stress curve than you. And I had a very high performance level at a low stress level. But how do you get there? How do you improve your resilience? A lot of repetition. Armstrong had done a lot of repetition, flying fighter jets in combat. A lot of, mindset change. That sports psychologists encourage everyone to think is not stress. It’s activation. Reframe it in a positive way. It’s excitement, self talk towards reframing stress. And most importantly, going back to why I started talking to a sports psychologist in writing this book, stressing about stressing is not helpful. Tim Ferriss, another one of my favorite podcasters authors, wrote, embracing stress is a superpower. And so it’s a mindset as well. But yeah, optimal performance does not occur at zero stress. And by the way, zero stress doesn’t exist. Doesn’t exist. I had 300 people in a room today. I said, raise your hand if you felt overwhelmed by stress at work over the last six months. I mean, we’re in money management and markets have been volatile, but I think everyone raised their hand.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And if they didn’t, it’s like, okay, like, so maybe you’re denying it a little bit, but like, we, we know it’s. We, we feel stressed for sure, in all aspects. But so as we think about the different tasks and where we might want to be, helping people to feel some of that optimal stress. If you think about this, like, bring it back to leadership. And I know you have some examples in the book, like, what are some tasks where we want to, make maybe help. I think you talk a little bit about, like, gamification to help, lean into that stress. But for another type of role, we want to reduce the stress level. What are some thoughts on that that leaders can take for their teams?
Sebastien Page: That’s a great question. Your first sub question is how complex is the task? If it’s a relatively simple task like data entry, crank up the music, drink a big coffee, try to do as much as possible watching for errors. But it’s kind of, you can set an aggressive target. Think like just you have to dig a ditch for construction project. If it’s research and development, I am not going to go to our research and development team M and say scream at them and say innovate. I want three innovations by tomorrow morning. It’s just so complex and unpredictable and nonlinear that I’m not going to set aggressive KPIs for some research projects where I want people to not feel pressured but be really creative. So first question is how complex is the task? And then you can dial up or down the targets to crank up or down the pressure. The gamification thing is interesting because it also speaks to social comparison. We all think social comparison is not good, but making it a game or a contest can very simply improve performance. It turns out another finding from psychology that I find super interesting. Social comparison is more motivating than positive encouragement. M. So if your mom calls you and says, oh, you’re doing great at work, it’s not as motivating as if your peer seems to be doing better than you and you want to do better than your peer. So that’s just human nature, right? And there’s actually nothing wrong with it if you channel it the right way. That’s why people compete in sports, for example. So Melina, to give a concrete example, in my business, I want us to find efficiencies with artificial intelligence. And the best way to do that is for the people that do the work every day to experiment with the large language models and other aspects of artificial intelligence. It’s not for us at the top to come up with ideas. You have to be doing the work to understand how to create efficiency. So I declared to my entire division that we were starting a three month contest to find the best possible efficiency gain using artificial intelligence. And that we would nominate three winners and we’ll have it kind of gamified, but also serious. And we’ll have like finals presentations. And you know what? I bet you it’s going to move the dial on how we increase efficiency in our business in a way that is much more productive than positive Encourage or just do it, please, or, you know, or just traditional goals. So there’s something to that as well.
Melina Palmer: Definitely, yeah. And being able to have, that involvement. I was actually. I’m glad you brought that up.
Leadership and Psychology in the Age of AI
Melina Palmer: I was going to ask you about, AI and how this is coming into business. And I mean, I’ve been having a lot of people ask about having me do talks on like staying human in the age of AI, thinking about leading people through change. I’m guessing if you haven’t already, potentially that’s going to be coming up, for you as well as you think about, how leadership and psychology ties in with AI. I saw an article today that came out that was saying that, AI is going to make it so one on ones aren’t necessary anymore. It’s going to replace the need for us to meet with our teams, which I think. No, that is. Then you’re doing it wrong because like, it might replace some mundane stuff that shouldn’t be in the one on ones, but we should still be connecting with people. Like a manager’s and a leader’s role is different than what the AI can do. But what are your thoughts for people as they’re considering, you know, how they’re going to be integrating with AI? How does psychology come in with those changes, that people are going to be making as they’re leading in this like, unpredictable time where people are concerned about, you know, their jobs and what’s going to be next for them.
Sebastien Page: It’s going to be transformational for society. There are going to be really great things that will come out of it. We’re all going to have quote, unquote agents working for us and giving us more time, hopefully Melina, to connect with each other and to do deeper thinking and more creative work. But I’m sympathetic to the more dystopian sort of views that you heard and you mentioned that it could dehumanize interactions and have side effects. Just like we were talking about goal induced blindness. There might be AI induced blindness or side effects that we don’t see coming. But it’s incredibly powerful and we’re just learning. Ethan Malik has written a book titled Cointelligence where he suggests how human interaction and human creativity is going to converge with artificial intelligence. And he has a fairly optimistic view about it. But he also explains that we don’t really know. This is the fascinating thing about it. Even in the early days with IBM Watson, this was pre OpenAI and the big developments we’ve had, the developers were already Teaching personality psychology to Watson, to the AI agent. Do you give AI a personality? And there are examples where even now if you interact with ChatGPT in a certain way, it will take on a personality. If you’re being aggressive with your questions, it’s going to cater to that style and maybe push back in a similar way. So it’s a little bit scary for someone who has studied personality psychology, to make AI more and more human. So we’ll have to have guardrails. I’m leaning on the optimistic side. I think it’s going to allow for more human work and less, you know, I think jobs that are dangerous or dirty or difficult that, you know, maybe we’ll do less of those. So more of the good stuff and less of the really, you know, my, my colleague is studying mining companies and he said, you know, the, no one wants to drive these trucks where it’s super dangerous and the weather’s unbearable and, and you know, once you have self driving trucks, it’s great. No one wants to do these jobs. Right?
Melina Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing.
The Importance of Positive Psychology
Melina Palmer: So as you think about, you know, top lessons that you want leaders to be thinking about when it comes to, you know, incorporating psychology into their work, you know, what’s you think the most important thing that people, consider when it comes to incorporating psychology.
Sebastien Page: Well, first I want to give you a pitch for why leaders should pay attention to positive psychology. And I’ll use an example and then I promise I’ll give you the most important lesson. That’s actually a tough question. The most important lesson. But let’s take a small detour, if you’ll allow me, and talk about Felix Baumgartner. I like to talk about him when I introduce the concept of positive psychology. Does the name ring a bell?
Melina Palmer: No, but it feels like a name like Feelings should. Right?
Sebastien Page: Felix.
Melina Palmer: Felix. I was like feelings. What is this name?
Sebastien Page: Yeah, you might catch a little bit of my French Canadian accent sometimes. I’ve been in the, I grew up French Canadian. I’ve been in the US for half my life, about 24 years. And sometimes I still mispronounce some words. There’s a little bit of a residual accent there. So Felix Baumgartner. The reason why I ask is that no one really knows who he is, but he did something absolutely amazing in 2012. He got in a small capsule tied to a giant helium balloon and he went up 24 miles up to the edge of space. And then he walked out of the capsule and skydived 24 miles down to earth, world record. Of course. He fell for 10 minutes. Four minutes were free fall. All, ah, he was wearing was a special suit and a small like helmet.
Melina Palmer: Yeah.
Sebastien Page: As he broke the sound barrier, he went 840 miles per hour. I use that story and then I say, look, Felix Baumgartner, at every stage of his training and the day of was constantly coached by a sports psychologist. And so we think of psychology as really important clinically treating depression and anxiety. But we ought to think about the other side, the positive side of psychology, which is about three thriving high performance. Even in the case of Felix, ultra high performance. And it’s unexplored in common practice in business and leadership. And it’s a treasure trove of findings and insights to lead to high performance. Melina, if you look on Google Scholar and start digging for papers, you’ll quickly realize that about half the papers, half the research in psychology is not on the clinical side. It’s on the positive side. Anyway, sorry, that was my pitch for Positive Psychology and the Psychology of Leadership. Look, to me the most important lesson, and it was an initial title for the book, it was not titled the Psychology of Leadership. The initial title was the End in Mind.
Thinking Long-Term as a Leader
Sebastien Page: And if there’s one thread that is incredibly important as a takeaway, is for leaders, for individuals, by the way, we’re all leaders. You don’t need to manage people to be a leader. You’re a leader in your family, for example. To think longer term, Think longer term all the way to how do I want to reflect on my life at, the end of my life? This gets a bit philosophical, but putting everything in the context of longer term goals will help you think about taking care of yourself, will help you think about the meaning of what you do. We’ll guide the values around which you make day to day decisions, will make day to day setbacks much easier to handle, will help with stress and resilience, which we talked about. So it’s super hard to say one finding or one takeaway, but this is the one I would give our audience today is to think long term because we tend not to do it unless we make a conscious effort.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, definitely. And like revisiting that. Right. So we have, there’s the individual having that meaning. What about as an organization? Right. So if you want to have you know, that great internal culture, something that people can rally behind. Do you have some tips for people as they’re looking to lead an organization and wanting to find something that a team can actually Rally behind instead of something that just, you know, sits on a wall or a shelf somewhere.
Sebastien Page: Yeah, look, so many businesses do budgeting on a one year basis, maybe three year basis. Some leaders will set five year goals. I think every business, every organization maybe with some exception. But most, most businesses, most organizations should have at least a 10 year target. What do we want the company to be 10 years from now? I think I can take our business in money, management to a trillion dollars in assets under management. We’re about halfway there. It’s a gigantic money management operation. That’s a 10 year goal. So that’s one way to make this operational and meaningful. But at the same time, people aren’t engaged at work. If you do a survey and you look at the data, at least more than half the majority of people are not engaged in their work. And I think it’s because they lose sight of what the work is about and the meeting, the meaning behind the work, what is the mission? So having this 10 year goal makes it much more meaningful and frames the thinking around the mission and the meaning of the work.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Helping people to have something they can visualize and dig into and see as something that they’re excited about longer term. But then you can bring it back to the day to day so it feels like you’re you’re working towards something in this shared and collective goal.
Sebastien Page: Exactly.
Melina Palmer: Yeah.
Connecting with Sebastien Page
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Well, as we go to wrap up and you know, so if, for one, if you ever want someone to totally nerd out with you on all the psychology, to be sharing articles with, with as we find them, like we’re going to be email buddies now. I’ll send you all sorts of stuff. You said me top articles. So sorry in advance that you know, you’re my new best friend and I’m going to send you stuff.
Sebastien Page: Happy to do that. You know, it’s as I said, I’ve, I’ve become an instant fan of your podcast. So.
Melina Palmer: Oh, thank you, thank you. Well, for everyone who is now so excited to go get their copy of Psychology of Leadership and to follow you, learn more, what’s their best route to be doing so.
Sebastien Page: So psychologyofleadership.net you can order the book everywhere, on Amazon and so forth and on social media. I’m in a lot of places but the best way is on LinkedIn.
Melina Palmer: Perfect. And we will of course have links in the show notes to make it easy for everyone so that they can connect and check in and all of that. So thank you again so much. I really enjoyed the conversation and and yeah, look forward to sharing articles with you.
Sebastien Page: Thank you.
Key Takeaways and Reflections
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Sebastien Page for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, there were so many standout moments from Roger Federer’s stat about winning only 54% of points in his career to the insight that leadership, like sports, is not about perfection but about process and resilience. I especially appreciated the discussion around goal induced blindness, that idea that being overly focused on outcomes can cause us to miss the bigger picture, sometimes even at great personal cost. Sebastien’s story about speaking to the students at MIT and telling them that the most important thing they could do was take care of their sleep, diet and exercise, that really stuck with me. It’s a reminder that foundational well being is what allows us to perform and lead at our best and and it’s too often overlooked in high achieving environments. So here’s a question for you. Where might your goals be blinding you? Is there a place in your life or work where shifting from perfection to progress, where redefining what success looks like could actually open up more possibilities? Come share it with me on social media. You’ll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy as well as for my top related past episodes and books, including the Psychology of Leadership, Ways to Get in touch, and more.
It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at, the brainybusiness.com 531 and thank you again to Sebastien Page for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun. You don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit the Brainy business dot com.
