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Lead The People is your guide to unlocking your true potential as an authentic leader. Hosted by Dr. Matt Poepsel—The Godfather of Talent Optimization—this podcast dives deep into the art and science of what it takes to lead at the next level. With insightful conversations and practical strategies, each episode equips executives, strategic HR pros, and aspiring leaders with the tools it takes to boost performance, inspire teams, and drive meaningful impact. Whether exploring the latest workplace trends or tackling real-world leadership challenges, Lead The People offers an enlightened approach to leadership. Embark on a rewarding journey to become the leader your people deserve—the leader you were meant to be.
Jay Abbasi (00:00):
I was overworked. I was overwhelmed. I had no tools of how to deal with the pressures and the constant change that was happening within my work and outside of my work too, in my personal life. So I was 40 pounds overweight. My marriage was falling apart, and I didn't wake up to this reality until I had experienced a sudden loss in my life. It was my father, he passed away unexpectedly. It really then woke me up to some of these bigger questions around, wait, is this the only way to do this? Do I have to sacrifice joy and happiness for achievement?
Matt Poepsel (00:45):
Hello leaders. Welcome to today's show. I'm so glad that you're here. I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation that I just had with Jay. Jay talks all about performance versus happiness, why we tend to treat these things separately. It's either one or the other, how really they're more integrated than it might seem and how we can use them to fuel one another. Also, we talked about the difference between sympathy and empathy and the right way to approach leadership, even when it's not easy. And finally, Jay started telling me about his formula and a way that we can approach how to create this notion of being happy high performers and making sure that people around us are in that same situation. So I really hope that you enjoy today's episode.
(01:29):
Most leadership advice asks you to pick a side and you want to protect your team's wellbeing and watch the numbers slide or you want to chase results and burn everybody out, starting with yourself. My guest today has a different take. Happy and high performing don't have to fight each other. Jay Abbasi turns these into a formula and we're getting into what actually breaks outdated patterns of thinking. He's the CEO and founder of The Conscious Professional. He spent years leading Tesla's national training program before building a coaching practice that now includes leaders at Google, Amazon, and Wells Fargo. Jay, welcome to the show.
Jay Abbasi (01:59):
Matt, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Matt Poepsel (02:08):
I can't wait to chat because I tell you, I was one of those people raised in a generation where we talked a lot about performance. We didn't talk much about happiness.
Jay Abbasi (02:02):
Oh man. Growing up for me, it was the same thing. It was all about getting more work done, being gritty, getting after it, and it was always at the sacrifice of.
Matt Poepsel (02:22):
Yeah, that's why your book project that you're working on now built around this phrase, happy high performer that stopped me in my tracks. I thought, yes, please, let's have that. But before we get into it, let's talk about the gap a little bit. What is it that makes high performers unhappy in the first place?
Jay Abbasi (02:38):
Well, I do think there's some binary thinking that's going on often, and we may not even be aware of it. I mean, I could take you back even me personally, when I was working in finance years ago out of college and I'm just telling myself, all right, this is a season where I got to work really hard. I got to perform so that I can get promoted. And that's the most important thing. And it means sacrificing a lot in order to get there because we fall into comparison, Matt, right? It's like I see other people doing this. I have to be better than them. I have to work harder than them. And what was happening, Matt, was for me, I was overworked. I was overwhelmed. I had no tools of how to deal with the pressures and the constant change that was happening within my work and outside of my work too, in my personal life.
(03:25):
So I was 40 pounds overweight, my marriage was falling apart, and I didn't wake up to this reality until I had experienced a sudden loss in my life. It was my father, he passed away unexpectedly. It really then woke me up to some of these bigger questions around, wait, is this the only way to do this? Do I have to sacrifice joy and happiness for achievement? And that's what started me on the journey of understanding really how can we as individuals who are ambitious and driven, and I know your audience is very much like this, very ambitious people. How can we also be able to enjoy the ride? And that's what led me down the journey and many years later to do the work that I do now.
Matt Poepsel (04:11):
Yeah. I talked to a lot of high performers and a lot of them fall into the same trap I did, which it sounds like you certainly can relate to. And I call it the, I'll be happy when. I'll be happy when I get promoted. I'll be happy when I make a certain amount of money. And I've lived that way for a long, long time, but Jay, I'm 55 now. There's not as much when as there used to be when I was 25. And so it's like, wait a second, hold on. I'm doing the math on this. I'm like, I'll be happy when. Can I be happy now and when?
Jay Abbasi (04:36):
Yeah. And Matt, the difference too that I've shifted in my own thinking is that I would say I'll be happy when, and thinking that, okay, all this work is so I can be happy and then I achieve. When I now shifted this thought this completely, which is I am happy now, which is the fuel for my future success and achievement. So it's really backwards in how we naturally think about this. It's all right, I see joy at the top of that mountain and I have to climb it arduously to get to joy or joy is the fuel behind every step that I take up the mountain and sure, the top of the mountain, there's an achievement that's something I was after, that's great. Joy can be there too, but joy is what fueled the journey.
Matt Poepsel (05:35):
Yeah. And before we get to the point where both cylinders perhaps are firing, tell me a little bit about the other extreme where somebody's happy but they're not exactly a high performer. A lot of times I see, especially early career leaders struggle to have the tough conversation about performance with someone because they don't want to burn a relationship perhaps. And some people might say, isn't it better to have happy employees because then they're going to be happy and stick around even if they may not be performing. So what does that extreme look like?
Jay Abbasi (06:03):
I think that for the leader who is working with someone who is falling into that pattern, there is that common pattern of being too empathetic that we can fall into. You ever watch the Chappelle’s Show years ago? Did you ever watch that show? Oh yeah. All right. So there's a bit, it was When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong. And in the skits, it would be like someone who is keeping it real, takes it too far and then they get themselves in trouble. So I kind of think of it as when empathy goes wrong. When we go too far with empathy, it becomes this problematic situation where we don't mean it, but we're enabling someone to kind of fall into the state of being a victim. So here's an analogy I often use, Matt. Okay. We as leaders, we say, okay, we want our people to be happy, but we also need the performance.
(07:00):
So imagine if someone has fallen into a hole in the ground, let's say you're walking through the jungle and you see this hole in the ground and there is someone deep within that hole. You're the leader in this analogy and that person is the person you're trying to help perform better. Now the person in that hole is screaming for your help. If you stand above the hole and you just yell, oh, that stinks, sorry. Hopefully you get out and you walk away, that's obviously ineffective and that's sympathy or that's pity. We don't want that as leaders. Now here's the second approach. The second approach is the leader that jumps into the hole and sits in the hole with the person and says, Hey, I feel what you're feeling and this is hard and I want you to be happy. I want you to be better.
(06:55):
The problem with that is that you're now both in this hole and you haven't achieved anything. You're not out of it, therefore you're not driving performance. That's not what we want either. The third approach, the appropriate approach that a leader needs to take is you take a rope and you tie it around your waist. The other side of it, you tie it to a tree trunk nearby and then you take yourselves down the hole gradually. You get to the person in the hole say, Hey, I hear you. I want what's best for you. I want you to be happy and here's my hand. I want you to grab hold of it so that we can get out of this hole and we can continue moving forward and drive results. Now, if that person grabs your hand, great, you are now able to move them out of this and hopefully get them to balance out their happiness with performance.
(08:30):
But if they choose not to, then this is a more difficult conversation that needs to be had around performance because like you said at the very beginning, we want to have the balance of both. Yes, we want our employees to be happy and satisfied. We also need to drive performance.
Matt Poepsel (08:39):
To build on that analogy, sometimes people don't realize they're in a hole or that you're falling behind the pace or whatever it might be, and that can be its own challenge. And that's where it also comes into the point that it's not kind to let people flounder or to not let them know that they're floundering. And it might be more comfortable for you as the leader to not say something or not offer the correction, even though it's a challenge. But I think that we sometimes conflate comfort with the right thing to do almost.
Jay Abbasi (09:08):
Yeah. Matt, I love that you said that because the word that comes to my mind whenever these conversations come up is honesty and alignment. Honesty is kindness the way you described it, which is having a direct real conversation if someone's performance is not where it needs to be. And it's dishonest, even though we don't like to admit this, but it's dishonest to say, well, I don't want to have that difficult conversation. It's too uncomfortable. Or hopefully they'll fix it on their own. You're not being really honest. And then the alignment piece is, okay, well, if you say that you are an honest person and you say that you're a leader and you say that those values matter to you, well, then you need to act in accordance with those values. And I totally get that it's not easy. I totally understand that those difficult conversations take courage.
(09:58):
You have to get out of your comfort zone. I've had to do it over and over and over again. It stinks every time. It's never absolutely 100% comfortable to have those difficult conversations. And I still choose to have them even with my own team because I think about, I want to be true to myself. I want to align with my values. I want to live that kind of truth. And that is such an important component of how I choose to live. And I think that every person who wants to be a leader needs to step into that type of mindset.
Matt Poepsel (10:31):
I think it makes total sense. And the other thing that popped into my mind is that a lot of times we have reorgs or we may switch jobs within a company or we may go to a different company and you get exposed to different types of leaders. I could think back over the course of my career, I had lots of different types of leaders and they each had a different relationship between performance and happiness. And so what they wanted, how they expected it, how they tried to create it, what they did when one or both were absent. And so all of a sudden it leaves you kind of like whipsawed a little bit. Go from a leader who's primarily focused on your happiness and then you go to one that's like, no, we're all about performance. Your happiness is optional. You're like, whoa, that was a big change.
(11:08):
And sometimes you don't know until you're actually working in that environment.
Jay Abbasi (11:12):
It's true. It's true. You can do your best to gather such information from others who've worked with that leader. Let's say if you know you're joining a new team and you could do some of that discovery and ask what that leader is like, but you're not going to know until you really experience the leader. And I think it's important, Matt. I think that everybody who is in a situation where you're going to be reporting to a leader within the hierarchy, that you do have a leader that does align with this idea of they see you as a human being and they want to drive performance. Because here's the thing, it's obvious to everyone that, hey, you definitely don't want that leader who only cares about performance and doesn't see you as a human and therefore doesn't care about your happiness, of course. But honestly, Matt, I don't want the other way either.
(11:54):
I don't want to work for someone who only cares about me being happy and doesn't care about performance because you know what's going to happen? I'm not going to be challenged.
Matt Poepsel (12:03):
I think it's especially true early in your career when you really need to develop, that's the worst time to work with somebody who's just going to make sure that you're going to be happy and comfortable. I hate to say it, but early in your career especially, that's probably not true in this day and age, but let's just say that I'm with you 100%. You want to work for a leader who's going to push you and drive you and help you, yes, to be reasonably happy, but also to make sure the performance is there because otherwise you will get left behind. You're not growing, you're not experiencing that comfortable discomfort that can make the psychology of discomfort comfortable in some way. If we don't have a focus on performance, either from within ourselves or from the people that we work for, that can really set us back.
Jay Abbasi (12:45):
It's so interesting we're talking about this. I was on a plane recently and I was speaking to somebody and he said to me that his friend always says that, he's a leader, that he will never be friends with his employees. And he said that's his way of operating. He'll never be friends with his employees. And he was asking me if I agree because I was telling him about my background and I absolutely disagreed. And then how I now think of it as, because after I give it some though, you don't want to be best friends with your employee, right? Okay, I get that. My best friend in the world, Matt, I'm going to share a lot about me personally. I'm going to be open about all aspects of my life with my best friend. I'll go out and have fun and do all these things.
(13:29):
Sure. But to say I don't want to be friends with my employees suggests that I see everything as transactional and that's wrong. Instead, you want to have the relationship, you want them to like you and trust you, and you want to maintain that sense of accountability. That's possible to do with a friend. We can't think it's binary. Either I'm friendly or I'm not. Either there's all work or totally personal. It's not like that. You want to know what's going on in their lives. You want to understand who they are as a human being. You want to be curious about their lives to a level, to not get to the point where you're overly attached where you can't even have those difficult conversations anymore.
Matt Poepsel (14:11):
Yeah. If you can't have a interpersonal relationship with your employees at an appropriate way, you either think very little of them, which is not a great quality for a leader, or you don't trust yourself, and that's not a great quality for a leader either. I cringe whenever I see email distribution list that says family, and that's going to be how they address the whole company. And you're like, we're not family. Okay, I understand that. But to not be friends, that seems very extreme. And I think we put a lot of words on labels. The reality is I may not refer to even my colleagues, my professional colleagues as friends, but they are. They're friendly relationships. They're people I call when I'm in need. They're people I call when I'm having a rough day.That's what friends are.
Jay Abbasi (14:52):
Yeah. People you care about, right, Matt? What you're saying is so true. It's like you care about them as a human being, right? Right. Why would we say we're going to shut ourselves off from that? I mean, it sounds crazy to me when I heard this on the plane. I was a little upset with this person. I wanted to tell them, don't listen to your friend. Your friend is giving you terrible advice to suggest that you should not care about your employees enough to think of them as friends is wild to me.
Matt Poepsel (15:17):
Well, the other part that scares me to death about that is, especially at a certain stage of our careers when we're in a high work kind of season, who's got time for friends? The reality is, even if you're single, your ability to align your schedules with friends in the traditional way, you work with your work colleagues and being able to talk about non-work things with them is a tremendously important human connection to have. If you're like, "No, I'm very robotic at work because that's how it is." And then you find out that you're not having friendships, period. Oh my gosh, that's where isolation, loneliness, that's where a lot of bad things set in. So it's like, no, let's lighten up little seatmate there on the airplane. Fine, don't call them friends, but at least have a warm relationship and talk about non-work stuff with your people.
(16:01):
I mean, come on now.
Jay Abbasi (16:02):
I really appreciate the perspective you just gave, which is there's two benefits from it. It's the benefit of the employee, of course, who now sees you as someone who cares about them, but also the benefit that you get. Because if you feel that connection to the employee, then you're going to lead them better. You're going to set a better example.
Matt Poepsel (16:21):
Well, and I think that those attitudes are absolutely being challenged in an increasingly mechanized world where AI is taking over more stuff, the human bits are what's left. And all of a sudden, if you took a very robotic approach in the past and you find the robots are taking over all that stuff, oh no, you didn't keep yourself sharp when it came to actually having warmth and empathy, relationships, getting people to see your vision, to commit their discretionary energy, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we got to get better at this human part for sure.
Jay Abbasi (16:49):
Yeah. And Matt, I'm glad you brought that up. I just did a workshop with leaders at RBC in Toronto, and we really went into some of the research on what are the skills that are going to be needed in the year 2030? What are going to be more important then than they are now? And what the research shows is outside of the obvious of knowing AI and being tech savvy, which are definitely always going to be important, all the rest on the list were how to motivate people, active listening, empathy, leadership, coaching, giving feedback. All the human elements that you were just alluding to are the things that are going to be the most important core skills for leaders in 2030. So that means right now is the best time to invest in really strengthening those skills.
Matt Poepsel (17:44):
Yeah, 100%. And I think that if we go back, this is why I love your term so much, happy high performers. If you don't stay up on the tech skills, if you're like, that AI stuff, I could take it or leave it, good luck with high performance in 2030, first of all. But the happiness part's not going to come from those things. So I know you have a formula you were telling me about, and I absolutely love the components of it. We think about energy and these things. Can you tell us, just for the audience listening in, what's the nature of how does your formula work? Let's get it started because I know it has a very specific order that's a little counterintuitive.
Jay Abbasi (18:12):
Yeah, and the order is sequential and meant to be prioritized one, two, and three. And so I call it the resilience formula. When I say resilience, I don't mean I just keep going even when it's hard. That's not how I think of resilience. I think of resilience as what is sustainable resilience where one can be adaptable, recognize when it's time to perform and recognize when it's time to rest so that it's sustainable and you can keep going through the constant change you're going to be facing, the chaos and the uncertainty. So the first part of the formula is energy, then it goes to space, then it's choice. So it's energy plus space plus choice. So energy, how are you protecting your energy? Are you committing to energy producing activities? What I love about how this is formatted is it's not a one size fits all.
(19:01):
I've worked with enough people, Matt, to know that everybody has their unique ways of producing energy. I would say that some people, it's much more about their physical fitness and the kind of foods they eat, and others it's much more about the connections they have with other human beings. And for others, it's more about how they fuel their mind. Maybe it's reading books and listening to podcasts. Everyone's different. What I know for sure is that you need to have consistency with protecting your energy. So energy is first. The second part is space. So with space, I know you're a huge advocate on things like mindfulness, that's a big part of it. What I also put into this formula is what I call mind freeness. So mind freeness is intentionally freeing your mind to explore new ideas, consider other possibilities, to be able to not always be doing.
(19:54):
Mindfulness, that's I create space to observe. It's kind of like I think about the person who's walking the dog on the beach. The dog can kind of go a little farther, but you kind of pull the dog back so that it stays aligned with where you're walking on the edge of the beach. That's mindfulness. Your thoughts go somewhere, you come back, right? You know this. Mind freeness is I let the dog off the leash and I'm letting it go wild because you need that. You need to just be able to explore ideas and create space for yourself. That's the second part of my formula. And then the third part, Matt, is choice. It's not thinking about difficult circumstances in the idea of I have to control things because we don't have much control over anything. I mean, control is an illusion. What I think we do have though is the power of choice.
(20:40):
How are you choosing to respond? How are you choosing to see the things that are happening to you? How are you choosing to interpret them? And when you step into the power of choice and you take an intentional action following this formula, you are now adaptive and you are now being resilient through change, chaos, and uncertainty.
Matt Poepsel (20:59):
You have an order to them, but they're so interrelated as well. It's unbelievable to me. If we start with energy as an example, I don't think enough of us appreciate, and I know I came to this realization much, much later in my career, is that we're all in the energy business really. Whether it's our own energy, whether it's the energy we're asking others to commit to achieve a collective goal, energy is all there really is. So when you find things that drain you, if you're around people that drain you, if there's certain activities that drain you, the listeners of this show have been in the game a little bit, so they've been promoted a few times in my mind. And so you have a little bit more ability to delegate. When you hold onto things that energy drain you and you have the ability to give it to a team member, boy, get that stuff off your doggone plate because that energy's just so precious.
Jay Abbasi (21:48):
There's a bit of trust that one needs to establish in the people of whom you would delegate it to be able to let go of those things. And I also think it's oftentimes subconscious. I used to do this training years ago when I worked at Tesla, and the way it worked was we'd have people get into teams and the goal would be to build this Lego house. So the way it worked was we'd take one leader, we'd put them outside of the room, and we'd hand them the card with the directions of how to build the Lego house. So they're holding this card, Matt. Okay? The rule was you can have meetings, so you can call someone over from your team and explain the directions. The person from the team, there's two rules. They couldn't write down what they read on the card, nor could they take a picture of what they saw on the card.
(22:32):
And so we would kind of guide people through these exercises. They would try to build the Lego house within 15 minutes or something, and of course they'd fail because it'd be so difficult. The leaders outside the room trying to communicate how you build the Lego house, you've got to put this one and this one. It would always fail. Now at the end of the training, we would do a recap and I'd always ask the leader this one question and it always made them freeze. I'd ask the leader, "Why didn't you hand over the card? You could have handed the card over. You could have given the directions over to the employee. You chose not to. Why?" Well, you told me, "No, I said you couldn't have them write it down or take a photo of it, but it didn't even occur to you to hand the card over to the employee, which is what you're saying, which is just to let go of that responsibility, delegate.
(23:13):
It was so valuable because it made everyone realize we are doing that often. We're holding onto everything. There's a sense of control and sometimes ego, right? I want it to come through me, but when a leader realizes that the best thing to do is to let these things go and empower others, you are now preserving your energy.
Matt Poepsel (23:29):
And I don't know many leaders that intentionally hire incompetent people, and I don't think that there's many leaders that make their people incompetent after they show up for day one, but I know many leaders who hold onto that card for reasons that either they don't trust or they don't see like," Well, this is what I've always done. If I give this away, what do I do? What value do I create? "Because they haven't risen to the leadership part, they're still doing the management part, or they think the team's already overwhelmed. "Ah, I'll just absorb all of this." So all that energy gets frittered away and what the team actually needs from you, you can't give because you're doing the stuff you should have handed off or should have said isn't a priority. That's okay too. Energy, everywhere energy. I see 100%, Jay, why you started with energy.
Jay Abbasi (24:14):
Yeah. And Matt, the other thing with energy too, it's like we think to ourselves, "All right, when I'm in a high demand season, I got a lot going on, then I don't have the time to be able to really take care of myself. This is the thing that many people say, right? But the reason why that's so crazy that we do that, that would be like saying," When I use my cell phone more, when I have the navigation on, I got the hotspot, I'm watching YouTube, I'm filming things that I don't have time to charge my phone. "Wait, what? You got to charge the phone more because you're using more of the battery. It's so obvious, right? But with ourselves, we never think of it that way.
Matt Poepsel (24:50):
That's so true. And then it spills over into space. And when I first heard you talk about the formula, when I think space, I love what you said with the dog on the beach and having freedom to explore things. It can be re-energizing, which is huge. But also I think about calendars. I think about the doggone calendars. We have seen a tremendous explosion in meetings. I don't know what we're doing in all these meetings across all of corporate America compared to what it used to be like. It's just totally meeting, meeting, wall to wall for a lot of companies. I don't know when it happened. Am I thinking about that right? Is that also a type of space? Is the space to be able to actually do the work and not just be in meetings all the time?
Jay Abbasi (25:25):
Absolutely. I think that there's this tendency to just go with the default of when you are using whatever you're using, Outlook or Gmail, whatever, that it defaults either 30 minutes or an hour. And so okay, every meeting needs to be 30 minutes or an hour. Does it? I have a team. There isn't a single meeting. Maybe there's one meeting a month that's 30 minutes. The rest of all of our meetings are 15, all of them. Literally every single meeting is 15 minutes. We get everything done in 15 minutes because if you give somebody the space for 15 minutes, that's all they're going to know is available. Therefore, we're going to get it done in 15 minutes. Now, if it's something where you know it's going to be longer, you can extend it. But the point is I've set myself up and I encourage listeners to do the same to where I give myself those breaks in between.
(26:14):
And during those times of 15 minutes, and then let's say I have a 15 minute break, I may do different things. Maybe I do have some email I need to catch up on, or maybe I just then get away from my screen for a bit. I just go for a walk. I just get out of here. I just get away from this computer and allow myself to process. I think that you're right, too often we're just setting meeting after meeting after meeting and it's draining our energy and it gives us no space. So what happens too is we're in what's called a task positive network in our brain. So that's the area of the brain where you are doing something, you're always, always doing something. What we are lacking in our society is accessing the default mode network of our brain. The default mode network is when you're just kind of in an autopilot mode and you're just not really having to use your energy towards a task.
(27:04):
When that's activated, that's where all of your creative solutions come from. That's why when you're in the shower, Matt, I'm sure great ideas come to you, right? So many people tell us the shower is where those answers come. Well, that's because the default mode network is activated. We need to essentially get bored. That's what we have to do. We have to get more bored.
Matt Poepsel (27:21):
And it feels so unnatural. I should be doing something. I should be doing something. Why? And I think that the thing that people don't realize too when it comes to choice is we make thousands of choices every day about work. It doesn't even seem like it, but we do. The point is that if you are tired, if you are clouded because you haven't made the space that you're teaching us about Jay, you can't make good choices and it's going to compound. So I feel like when you have good energy, when you have the openness of the space, you're going to make better choices. So that's how these box cars, the way you've line them up, I love it so much when we start with energy and we give ourselves the space and we have to create that space. You've never said once on this podcast, this is going to be easy by the way, because psychologically you go through it and you're like, it feels unnatural.
(28:09):
Yeah, I get it, but guess what? It's so worth it.
Jay Abbasi (28:10):
It's so worth it. And also you have to remember too that the thought about something is so different than the something. Here's what I mean. We think to ourselves, oh, reaching for my phone and looking at it is going to make me happy. Okay? What all the research shows, Arthur Brooks, who's the Harvard professor and researcher, he wrote The Meaning of Your Life. He puts it really bluntly. He says, "The more time you spend on your phone, the more depressed, anxious, and lonely you become." It's that simple. Literally the more time you spend on your phone, the less happy you are, right? But we think it's going to make us happy. And the opposite is true, which is we think boredom, we think that space is going to make us really uncomfortable and unhappy, but it ends up being what makes us happy. It ends up being where we feel so much better when we have that space.
(27:59):
So I guess what I'd say to every listener is our thoughts about something are oftentimes wrong, and you have to just trust that the actual experience is not going to be as bad as your mind makes it out to be.
Matt Poepsel (29:12):
It seems counterintuitive, but when we follow the path of least resistance, don't be surprised when it lands us in a place we don't want to be. You let your calendar get away from you and I do this, Jay, doggone it. I do it at least once a month. I look and I'm like, why did I do this again? I've defeated my own systems. It's a constant battle, but making sure that you're understanding your energy, checking in with yourself, where am I today? Am I high energy, low energy? What's draining it? What's restoring it? And the space bit too. Have you created enough space? And I talk to so many leaders and say, I don't have time to figure out AI because I'm so busy doing work. I'm like, you're doing the old work. You've got to find a way to make room to automate pieces of this and to compliment it so you can get some of your time back.
(29:51):
Otherwise, you're going to continuously fall behind.
Jay Abbasi (29:53):
And the other thing too, Matt, is unless you are a surgeon with a patient who is about to bleed out, nothing is life or death. Anyone who says, "Well, I just have too... I can't. I can't." Okay. Is it where someone will actually die if you don't keep doing this work? And if that's the case, like a doctor, okay, that's a different conversation. But 99.9% of the time, that is actually not the case. And there is no one that's going to die. And the urgency that we are perceiving is completely subjective. It's a story that we're telling ourselves. And so we have to get out of that spiral and really look at things objectively, not through the lenses of the story we've been telling ourselves, and then be able to say, "Well, okay, if I'm going to take a step back, I'm going to look at this.
(30:43):
I want to be able to now make some changes to how I'm spending my time to more align with a formula like this where it's going to lead me to be a happy, high performer."
Matt Poepsel (30:54):
100%. And I love the fact that the formula is logical, straightforward. It's going to pull up a ton of emotions as you go through this, but it's doable. I see so many complex frameworks and so many of these things. I really appreciate yours because it evokes terms that we don't always hear all that often, like space and energy. And it puts it in a very specific order that you've laid out. You put a lot of thought into this, and it takes a lot more work to take something complex and make it simple, which I appreciate. So yeah, kudos to you. I've enjoyed this conversation. I'd go for another hour if we had the time.
Jay Abbasi (31:27):
Yeah, me too, Matt. Thank you for saying that. And with anything, it's not something that I feel like I created. It was more of something that presented itself to me, right? Because all the experience I've had, all the thousands of people I've worked with, it's become clearer and clearer that these are the steps. So I appreciate you saying that and I appreciate the conversation.
Matt Poepsel (31:46):
Well, you pulled together something very useful. I pulled together something completely useless and that's a trivia game. That's what we're going to do now. It's called Are We Smarter Than AI? You and I are a team. We're going to have AI ask a question. And I saw on a podcast once you were asked if you could have breakfast with anybody, who would it be? You mentioned Sam Harris, he's host of the Making Sense podcast. It's not going to be a question about Sam. It's not even going to be a question about making sense. I'm going to give us a question about breakfast. So what classic breakfast food is made from a batter and cooked between two hot metal plates to give it a signature grid pattern? Is it A, pancakes, B waffles, or C, crepes?
Jay Abbasi (32:19):
I would say that's waffles. Yeah. It’s got to be waffles. Although I do like a nice crepe.
(32:24):
I think crepes are made differently though.
Matt Poepsel (32:26):
They're definitely made differently and they definitely have a grid. But if I had the choice, I probably would've picked it, but it is. The answer is absolutely waffles, totally crushed it just like I knew we could. See, we're well rested. We have plenty of spaciousness and we got the waffle question. We made the right there, Jay. It's right there. Well, I got a much better question for you, Jay. Where can my listeners go to learn more about you and all the great work that you're doing?
Jay Abbasi (32:46):
Of course, our podcast, which is Unstuck with Jay Abbasi, and also my website, jay@jayabbasi.me, where people could learn a little bit more about the work that I do. Plus we have the blog there and the weekly SOS newsletter, which we send out every week, including a story, an observation and a strategy intended to help you really make the most out of each week.
Matt Poepsel (33:05):
I love it. Listeners, I'm going to have those links for you in the show notes. You're only one click away from getting connected with Jay and all of his great work. Jay, thanks so much for being with us today. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Jay Abbasi (33:13):
Likewise, Matt. Thanks for having me.