Harry 0:01

When a boss perceives the bozo bit has flipped with you, the most likely course of action is you're either gonna get fired, demoted, or shoved into some kind of corner office, right? You are no longer gonna be mission critical.

Narrator 0:16

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:27

Hey Jorge. Good to see you again.

Jorge 0:29

Hey Harry. It's always brilliant seeing you, my friend.

Harry 0:32

I am excited to share a little story with you and then a reading from a book that I think just came out. And per our original plan, I'll do the reading and then I'll share with you the title of the book. But let me start with a little story. It's something that I've shared with people a couple of times and I had a bunch of feedback that it's just a, great story and seems to really point in the direction of the reading. A while ago, I wrapped up this consulting gig in Austin, Texas. So, I wrap up the gig. I'm stuffed in the middle seat, window seat guy is already checked out. Got one of those masks on and earbuds in. And then this 400 pound dude with a monobrow sits down in the seat next to me, blocking me in, right? So I'm in the middle seat. 400 pound dude with monobrow. Looks like a Hell's Angel just out of prison. And I figure I've got about an hour to make friends with this guy before I'm gonna have to get up, given all the coffee that I've had, and I'm gonna have to either wake him up or it piss him off. I have no idea. So I figure I'll ask this guy like, improbably, what do you do for work? And I figure he is a motorcycle mechanic or maybe a machine shop dude. I mean, we're talking, piercings and tattoos and black leather and everything you can imagine. And he slowly twists in his seat and just stares at me and gruffly says if I told you... and you know what he's gonna say next. And I didn't laugh 'cause the guy was a little on the scary side. Looked to me like he could disassemble me like an erector set. And so I just took a breath and said, "So what can you tell me?" I asked. And long story short, this guy flies satellites for some three letter government agency. Seriously, the guy flies satellites for the government. And he says it's like a top secret video game with a billion dollar piece of hardware. And he says, "My job boils down to something that we call time over target," right? Basically, given mission parameters, you calculate the trajectory and make some other adjustments, and then, when it gets wherever it's supposed to be, I pull the trigger and move on to the next job. "Screwing up is a career cul-de-sac," he says. And just about that point, like the conversation's over kind of the plane hits the runway, bumps hard in San Jose. And we get to the gate and the guy turns around, with his monobrow and serious look and hands me a business card and then goes to shake my hand. And I reach out and he shakes my hand like a 14-year-old ballerina, like the softest touch. And I'm like, ugh. But it was just this incredible experience, learning what it means to fly satellites. And I wanna do a bit of a reading that I just found and it's... did you ever read a book and you're like, "Dammit, I wish I wrote that book."?

Jorge 3:50

Many times, yes.

Harry 3:51

God, it pisses me off. Well, here's one of them. So this is gonna be a set of maybe disconnected paragraphs throughout the book, but I think it fits together. So we'll start with, "More often, it's our brains creating problems because none exist. Since perception follows belief, we perceive the problems we look to find and if we can't find them, our brain skews the data to fit the brief. If you believe your partner is constantly criticizing you, innocent comments transform into attacks. If you believe your boss doesn't value you, any feedback becomes proof of your perceived inadequacy. This cycle becomes dangerous when it reinforces our negative beliefs, locking us into a belief-driven feedback loop that distorts reality and quietly builds a prison of our own making." So it goes on. The author's journey with this practice has led him to a startling conclusion, and he asserts that, "The quality of any relationship depends far more on the beliefs about that relationship than on the other's behavior." And he goes on. "When I change what I believe about someone, I literally change what I'm capable of seeing in them. And when I see them differently, I act differently toward them, which often transforms how they respond to me. By taking responsibility for our beliefs and our attention, we reclaim our power to transform our relationships without waiting for others to change. Whether we're dealing with minor irritations, such as perceived criticism from a parent or a major challenge, like a betrayal or abuse, the turnaround offers a path to freedom by addressing the root cause of much relationship suffering, the unquestioned belief in the thoughts that aren't true." So, the judgment trap, he asserts, "once you form beliefs about someone, you automatically filter for confirming evidence while misleading, contradictory information." Classic confirmation bias, right? "The longer you've known someone," and I think this is really interesting, "the longer you've known someone, the more you interact with your mental image of them rather than who they actually are, and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your beliefs shape what you see, which influence how you act, which affect how others respond, which can affirm your initial belief." And then picking this up a little bit further, "When we procrastinate, putting off exercise, difficult conversations, or challenging work, we're not failing at finding motivation, we're avoiding anticipating discomfort. Our brain predicts that the work will hurt, the conversation will feel awkward, or the mental effort will strain us, and this anticipation creates an immediate urge to disengage from the activity. And unfortunately, our predictions are often wrong. We tend to overestimate how long unpleasant situations will last. The more intense the anticipated discomfort, the less likely we are to engage even when the actual experience proves far less unpleasant than expected." And then bringing it home, "Negative beliefs are contagious. We may think these limiting beliefs stop us, but they don't. They move outwards sweeping through groups and communities like wildfire. When others show signs of distress, especially people with whom we identify, our brains often mirror those signals with similar physiological responses. We anticipate what's happening to others. Could happen to us and our bodies react accordingly."

Jorge 8:03

Mmm. The first thing I'll say, I think that you've brought the story of your airline seatmate in one of our previous episodes. So thought I knew where you were going with this.

Harry 8:14

Yeah.

Jorge 8:16

Which I find interesting because what you read ended up being about us having a story playing in our minds, about where we thought things were going with things. I would love to hear what the name of the book is and the author, but I'll just say this, the phrase that came to mind was a quotation that I think is attributed to Anais Nïn, who said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

Harry 8:44

Right.

Jorge 8:45

That feels like it encapsulates the reading, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Harry 8:50

Yeah, I think that's probably the tightest encapsulation of it. I love how this is unpacked, though especially the comment about The longer we know somebody, the more we're likely to be interacting with an image of that person rather than the actual person. The title of this book is called Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal, and the subtitle is Change Your Mind. Change Your Life. The Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. I just read this and just irritated me 'cause I wish I'd written it. It was so good. It reminded me of Dave Gray's fabulous book, Liminal Thinking. It's definitely gonna be a book that goes on my bookshelf. I'll probably give many copies of it away. I can anticipate that happening, but I think he did a masterful job of expanding on some of these ideas and making them real for people in a way that allows you to look at how you're implicated in the world that you're creating on a moment by moment basis. And I think that 's really powerful because it's not so much about how to get traction, but how to prevent yourself from slowing yourself down.

Jorge 10:05

As with many, many other conversations we've had for this podcast, it boils down to seeing clearly. Seeing what is actually there as opposed to the story that's playing out in your head. And, you brought up Dave Gray, his book, Liminal Thinking, has that model where, belief was one of the foundational layers, right? Like we have these beliefs that inform how we see things.

Harry 10:34

The ladder of inference?

Jorge 10:36

I don't remember what it's called in the book.

Harry 10:38

Yeah, that's okay.

Jorge 10:38

It's been a while. How does knowing this help someone gain traction? Is it pronounced Eyal, the author of the book, do they, offer means, exercises perhaps to, see beyond your beliefs?

Harry 10:58

There's definitely enough you can take away from the book to practice things to change the direction that you're headed and to get more traction and to prevent yourself from impeding... from slowing yourself down. Oftentimes understanding things isn't as helpful as having a practice. Because having the knowledge in your head doesn't necessarily immediately translate to new ways of activating in the world. But he spells out and illustrates the vicious cycles. And you can reverse those. And all you have to do is, when you do understand how these vicious cycles function, and it's not just the pithy version of you don't see people as they are, you see them as you are, that's hard to operationalize, to turn it around. But when you see the vicious cycle of, I've known this person a long time, I'm interacting with an image of them. I have expectations about what they're gonna do and how they're gonna act, those expectations are gonna con, cause me to activate the confirmation bias, i'm then gonna be sorting in certain things and out other things, it becomes a vicious cycle. So how would I turn that around? What are the intervention points so that I can change the nature of the relationship and so that I can open up the aperture and take in data that I might otherwise be discounting or discount data that I might otherwise be distorting. And so I think the book provides a very healthy intellectual map for getting real with yourself about where these beliefs and the uncritically held beliefs that you hold as assumptions can create invisible walls that prevent you from getting where you want to go and make it very difficult to get around them.

Jorge 13:15

If I'm hearing correctly, the vicious cycle lies in the fact that if you are perceiving the other person's actions or words or what have you through this lens that is distorting them, the distorted signals you're receiving feed that lens, further distorting your understanding is that where the vicious cycle lies?

Harry 13:43

Effectively that. You know, as you engage with a set of expectations, what the distortions or critical information that you might delete, or more nuanced information that you might generalize that might have given you a richer, more valuable appreciation for what's actually going on, would give you greater degrees of freedom if you had that information at your disposal. But the fact that it's been dismissed and unconsciously dismissed sets you on a path to interacting with people in a way that's likely to cause them to interact with you in a way that you expect, right? It's not just your perceptions that become problematic, it's how your perceptions set expectations with other people and then tend to, reinforce things that they might be doing that become problematic in the relationship. This happens all the time in management. Just last week, I was in a meeting where I talked to a senior director who told me that his boss had flipped the bozo bit on him. I don't know if you've heard the bozo bit.

Jorge 15:01

I have not. Can you unpack that? What does that mean?

Harry 15:06

Being a Silicon Valley guy and thinking about bits and bytes in computers, right? I'm embarrassed to say I don't know what the origin of the bozo bit is, and now I'm sheepishly gonna try to muddle my way through that. But the gist of it is when that bit gets flipped, you go from... you go to bozo mode, right? And the last thing your boss wants to do is have a bozo working for them.

Jorge 15:31

Flipping the bozo bit means all of a sudden the person has... you're thinking of them as like a bozo, right?

Harry 15:38

That's right. And there's no recovery from that. that.

Jorge 15:40

Yeah. Once as a bozo, it's like everything that they say or do is gonna come through in that light, right?

Harry 15:47

That's right. And you've heard the trite expression, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. I will tell you, I don't know of anybody that's ever had an opportunity to recover from having a bozo bit flipped. Because when a boss perceives the bozo bit has flipped with you, the most likely course of action is you're either gonna get fired, demoted, or shoved into some kind of corner office, right? You are no longer gonna be mission critical. And the most likely thing is that despite all of your best efforts, everything going forward is either going to confirm or support their newfound bozo perception of you is gonna remain relatively intact. And it's a little like trust, right? It takes a lot to build trust and doesn't take much to erase it. And a good, healthy bozo bit slip-up will ruin somebody's ongoing generative perception of you and make it very difficult to have that relationship go forward in a productive way without a lot of investment in rebuilding that confidence in your capability, in your judgment, whether it's a level of caring, your... hopefully it's not integrity, but it boils down to trust.

Jorge 17:10

Yeah, that makes sense. It might be worthwhile then, in the last few minutes that we have here, to slap the snow chains on this thing. It sounds like there's two angles we could take. One is, what can we do to work on our own, judgment systems, filters so that we try to, I don't even know if this is a fair way to state it, but so that we try to see things more clearly and we don't prematurely flip the bit. And the other might be, how do we ourselves keep from flipping other people's bits, right? Like we don't wanna be labeled a bozo and then have subsequent interactions, go south, right?

Harry 17:58

Yeah. And it's not just the bozo bit, right? It can be... you can be in a relationship where the perception that that relationship is antagonistic, right? That somebody is "attacking you" or constantly putting you down. Whatever it is, it's probably worth challenging that. So to back to your point, what can you do? I think the first thing is to get back to the sensory evidence and to pay attention to what's actually being said, what you're actually reading, what you're actually hearing, and dial down the stories you're telling yourself about what you think you might have heard or you might have read, or you might have seen. And then, calibrate that or corroborate it to determine to what extent were those things real or perhaps just perceptions. Because when people accept their perceptions as facts, rather than accept their perceptions as perceptions, They've lost the ability to discern the possibility that there is something else going on, and they are much more likely to fall prey to assumptions and hidden unconscious beliefs about those people. And apparently, at least according to the author, the longer you've known somebody, the more likely you're gonna be interacting with an image of them rather than the person themself. That is to say, some kind of latent residual image. And I'm calling the Matrix forward right now, the movie where they talk about the latent residual image of somebody. So I think, if you find yourself in a situation where you, especially in a long-term relationship, where there's been a breach, and you think that's nuts, that person is an idiot or they're a bozo or... that might be a place to slow down and ask yourself what might have happened or are you missing data or is there a piece of the story or the context that is not readily apparent or accessible to you. And on the other side of it, to your question about having it happen to you, boy, that's a tough one. I think hopefully the more self-aware of us know when we feel like we've been written off or dismissed. The key leading indicator of that is somebody stops attending to you. They stop paying as much attention and time, they stop making you a priority. They don't meet with you as often. They're not as proactive with you. They tend to be more terse in response. They tend to reduce the how flexible they are with requests that you make. If you notice that kind of stuff, rather than draw back into the assumptions and the stories and the perhaps uncomfortable feelings that you might then, however, deal with, it might be worth exploring what possibly could have led to that. And then, see if there's a way to work your way back such that it can become a conversation to reanimate the reality of who you are and disassemble the image that somebody's interacting with you.

Jorge 21:31

I've brought up in at least one other one of our conversations, which I've found that this is a good use case for AI, for LLMs, right? It's one of the use cases I put them to, basically help jog me out of my own biases, misperceptions, or help me see things through someone else's eyes. It could be a good way of jogging that. With the caveat here that as you were describing that I was thinking, "Oh my gosh, there's a kind of paranoid take on this, which is, you can start thinking, it's 'oh, my boss is not returning my emails. I must be... I must have flipped the bozo bit.'" When in reality it's no, they're just busy or what have you. So it feels like one of those things that requires care and awareness.

Harry 22:28

Yes. And I'm really glad you brought that up. And I know we don't have a lot of time left. In an entirely different conversation, with an entirely different senior level person, and in this case, it happened to be a design lead for a small, very interesting company, doing transportation management software. This particular design lead was worried that the CEO had basically dismissed him because of a mistake that he'd made. And I said, "Look, the probability that this one mistake has caused your CEO to effectively dismiss you in their mind is very low. I know from conversations just how much they think of you and the quality of your work. "I said, "This is a place where you want to act as if everything's fine and just move forward and start calibrating what happens over time, because their concern set and everything going on in their life and what their job has is so demanding that there's a good chance you're reading into this wrong." And of course, that turned out to be true in this particular case.

Jorge 23:41

There's that saying, and I'm gonna mangle this, but, people often worry about what other people are thinking about them, when in reality people aren't thinking about them at all.

Harry 23:52

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, and that wasn't the case here. The mistake that this person had made was on that leader's mind, but when I went to that CEO and talk to them about it, he's like, "No, it's just not a good time to talk to them. We've got too many other things going on. I'll talk to 'em about it later and then they'll know that I care 'cause I bring it up. But right now I gotta deal with this other stuff." And so, I got calibrated and was able to see the perspective. But I think in many cases, you're a hundred percent right: like, they're not thinking about you at all. And that's just over-invoking causality is one definition of paranoia.

Jorge 24:28

We are gonna have to do a show on ego and what we can do about restraining our egos. Because it feels to me like so many of the things we talk about boil down to getting ourselves out of our own way in some ways.

Harry 24:46

It's not a hidden message, is it?

Jorge 24:48

I might be issuing kinda like a note-to-self here.

Harry 24:52

And I'm saying like, you're not trying to tell me something secret here, are you?

Jorge 24:57

It's like, "Blink twice, Harry." No, I'm just saying, so many of these conversations boil down to, try to get as clear a read on the situation as possible. And oftentimes, you are the biggest disturbance or obfuscator of clarity, right? Like, your own misperceptions of the situation are what's getting in the way.

Harry 25:29

Totally. And I think that's a really good point. And I have been thinking about bringing... there's a book that I just love, called Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me).

Jorge 25:38

You've mentioned it before, yeah.

Harry 25:40

Yeah. I don't know if we've done a reading from that, but it's one of my favorite books, because it really is about how you're implicated in the world that you're creating. And, I think there's a lot there. I'll think about that. Maybe we can pick that up on another call.

Jorge 25:57

When you mentioned that book before I put it in my reading list, I think I even bought it, so it's in my queue. We may have to revisit that one. Anyway, as always, brilliant talking with you.

Harry 26:07

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Narrator 26:11

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.