The Four Buckets Of Performance With Dr. Carla Fowler

 

Performance is not just about outcomes but about the factors that influence how we show up and thrive in demanding environments. Adam Markel sits down with Dr. Carla Fowler, an elite executive coach who has been a secret weapon for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and senior leaders. She reveals the four critical “buckets” that fuel high performance, showing how they empower you to not just survive but thrive in today’s demanding world. Drawing from her experiences as a digital nomad and navigating the challenges of a demanding career, Dr. Carla offers practical advice and actionable strategies for achieving peak performance in all areas of life.

 

Show Notes:

• 01:29 – Digital Nomad Life: Embracing Change & Performance
• 10:48 – Letting Go Of Preferences And Control
• 17:37 – The Journey To Coaching And Performance Improvement
• 30:29 – Releasing Control To Unlock Greater Resilience
• 37:26 – Coaching For Peak Performance Without Trying Harder
• 47:27 – Favorite Physiology Practices For Better Performance
• 51:47 – Leadership Strategies For Overcoming Workplace Challenges

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The Four Buckets Of Performance With Dr. Carla Fowler

I am in a remote location. Those of you who might be checking me out and consuming the show on YouTube will see that the location has changed. It’ll be interesting, given my guest, because I’ve got somebody on the show who’s going to be talking about, at least a little bit anyway, being a digital nomad. My wife and I decided to do a little digital nomading for the next couple of months ourselves. We’re out in the desert. I’ll share more about that a little later.

The guest that I’ve got is truly an amazing person. She has done so many things in her life. She’s a real high achiever. She’s got amazing insights and such a down-to-earth way of communicating that you’re going to find her depth and her perspective on things to be unique and very special. Let me tell you a little about her and then we’ll dive right in.

Dr. Carla Fowler is an MD PhD and an Elite Executive Coach. She has been a secret weapon for scores of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other senior leaders. Carla’s unique approach combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their top goals. We get into the science performance in this conversation. You’re going to love it. Sit back and enjoy my discussion with Dr. Carla Fowler.

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Digital Nomad Life: Embracing Change & Performance

Carla, I would imagine that when you get to hear people read your bio, share an introduction of you, and all that kind of thing, it’s always a funny moment for us when we hear other people talk about our history, achievements, accolades, or whatever you want to call them. My question to you at the outset is, what’s something that’s not a part of that bio or not a part of a standard introduction of you that you would love people to know about you at the outset?

One of the first obvious things that come to mind is that my husband and I have been digital nomading around for the past few years. We’ve been living in different places in the United States. I’m running my coaching practice. It’s life as usual. This isn’t like vacationing in lots of spots, although that’s fun too, but getting to be in different places, see different landscapes and ecosystems, and get to do the sports that are good to do in that place.

I’m in Tucson, Arizona, and this is a total road cycle heaven. We tried mountain biking. We hit a couple of cacti and then were like, “We might not be mountain bikers here but we can ride on the roads.” That’s a fun and interesting experience. With Zoom, we don’t know where anyone is. That’s my experience over the past few years and it’s been super interesting.

I love that. What was the inspiration? I’m sure there are some people tuning in to this going, “Digital nomad, I’ve heard of that,” or, “I’ve thought of that,” or maybe they’ve never even been acquainted with that term or the idea behind it. Give us the origin story, if you could, around how you became digital nomads.

This is a great story. It’s interesting. When you partner with someone for life, part of what happens is there’s a merging of dreams. I didn’t know that I had a dream about doing lots of travel or living in lots of places. My husband had a little more of that bug. In my background, I had almost what feels like a career path of being in medicine, which, with a few exceptions, is a very location-dependent career. You need to see people in person. Ultimately, a couple of years ago, I pivoted into something that I started as a location-dependent thing. I started a coaching practice. I met with people in person. I very much enjoyed that.

One of the interesting things about moving into that realm was it suddenly opened up the possibility that I might not need to be in one place all the time. My husband was an entrepreneur. He already had location freedom. The origin is that we started to talk about it and that it would be interesting. What a wild adventure that technology enables. It was on our, “How could we get there?” list and thinking about what were the steps we’d have to take.

You can fast forward to the pandemic in 2020. We were living in a high-rise building in Seattle, which was one of the ground zeros where we first had a big cohort of patients. We were like, “This is not fun.” We were in quarantine and staying in our apartment. We were far from a lot of the stuff we love, like the wilderness. We also were like, “This is the moment. This sucks, everything that is happening.” Also, it was a time that suddenly, what was normalized was a remote interaction.

We took the opportunity when it came and did a trial in Taos. We said, “Let’s try it. We’ll  get a short-term rental.” We did it for a couple of months. We were like, “We’ll see how we feel about it.” We did that trial. We hiked all the peaks around and did our work like normal. We found it was a total kick, an adventure, and a dose of novelty, so we came back to Seattle, packed up our apartment, sold a bunch of stuff, and we were off.

We moved 14 times in 18 months in the first round. We went to Big Sky. We went to the Mammoth Lakes area. We went to Driggs, Idaho. We went to a lot of stuff in the West that was mountain town-y. We realized that the ratio of moving to staying was a lot of packing for the benefit, so we’ve settled down into it. We’re four, five, or six months in a place and then a move. We get to settle down and experience something before we go somewhere else. That’s the story.

Are there other benefits to your psyche from the fact that you’ve had to not only be so agile and adaptable, I suppose, to these different environments but also had to simplify? I would imagine. In fact, I have a very similar experience that my wife and I have been in, which I’ll share in a moment. You have to simplify quite a bit to do that, too. You can’t carry around a house on your back

Both those things are true. You brought up agility or adaptiveness. One of the things, and this is very related to probably some of the topics we’ll touch on, is, particularly high-performing people, we love to have control as human beings.

Can I interject, “You think?” or maybe insert a, “Duh.”

I’m the queen of obvious statements. It’s so important. I relish saying obvious things.

When you say to people, “Aren’t we a little bit like control freaks,” people look at you like, “What are you talking about? Not me.”

We love that sense of control. If you are even half good at things, then what that means is you can go through your environment, start optimizing things, and say, “I have whatever my special this,” or, “Here’s how we always do dinner,” or, “Here’s how I like to do my workout,” or, “Here’s how I like my meeting schedule.” There are all these things that we start to optimize, and that is a piece of performance.

It could also be like, “This is my favorite pillow.”

It could be like, “This is my favorite pen.” For everyone reading, I’m holding up a G-2 pilot pen. We get things like this. We’re like, “This is my favorite notebook.”

We’re like, “It has nice and even ink flow.” I’m a lefty, so pens mean a lot to me because most of them suck from a lefty’s perspective. I’ll drag my hand across the page, so I always have ink on my palm or something like that. A pen that doesn’t leak all over you.

We get these preferences. Having preferences is one of the joys in life. It also can start to narrow our worlds. One of the interesting experiences for me is that, for the past couple of years, I have been building my coaching practice. If you figure, a few years ago, we took the show on the road. There were all sorts of things you had to sort. One of the interesting things is when we’re thinking about performance, we have to know and trust in ourselves about how we’re going to perform when the conditions are not ideal. We’ve all gotten a crash course in this, and many people would say much longer than the past few years if you include some recessions and different things like operating in unideal conditions.

It forced me to say, “What are you going to do if the Internet is patchy? You now have an entirely Zoom-based business. You might be in Driggs, Idaho and there’s a big snowstorm.” In Tucson, for example, we get monsoons in the summer that can knock out the power. In the past, the power went out for probably 36 hours or something.

You suddenly have to ask yourself, “I want to perform at a high level but also, how am I going to deal with these hiccups?” Some of that is the grace with which you approach it. Some of it is execution, like, what’s your backup? Some of it is philosophically or strategically understanding, “What is most important about what I’m doing? Can I still deliver that as opposed to getting so far down into the weeds of tweaking and optimizing every little thing?”

This is an interesting, perhaps general commentary on how one can create experiences in one’s life that help you practice being adaptable or practice being resilient where you don’t have control over everything. That’s my story or my experience of this. It’s everything from, “That snowplow outside is loud. We don’t have that in Seattle.”

We can create experiences in our lives that help us practice being adaptable or resilient where we don't have control over everything. Share on X

Letting Go Of Preferences And Control

Do you find that there’s a practice in letting go of things as well? As I was listening to you, I was thinking, “We have so many preferences.” In many ways, we’re attached to control or safety, in other words, to what is familiar, what is secure, what is known, and all that kind of thing. We go through a pandemic and we realize there’s so much that we lack any control over.

There should be another, “Insert duh,” right here because these things are so obvious, and yet when you look at the way we live or look at other people, as you and I both do in on the research side and we spend a lot of time working with leaders and teams in organizations, we get embedded in there to look at how people behave, what their habits are, and whatnot.

We lean into control, but we are also very attached to our preferences. You say, “My favorite pen.” I say, “My favorite pillow, the quiet,” or any number of things. This digital nomadic existence has helped you to let go of some of those preferences and the weight of all of that stuff that we want to take with us mentally, not just the physical stuff but the mental stuff as well.

Yeah. It has been three things. This is great because we are getting into performance science. I run a coaching practice. We focus on performance science as a way, methodology, or framework for how you approach the challenges you’re facing in your work or in your life. What are ways to think about it where it’s not like, “I have to do better or somehow work harder,” which often isn’t super useful?

We can talk more formally about how I break this down, but there are often different buckets we can go to to say, “What’s a way I could approach this challenge?” You brought up the challenge of like, “I’m moving all over the place. Things don’t always work the way I think they will.” You might be about to log on with someone who you want to do a great job for and you’re like, “The internet is super patchy.” How do you deal with that? You brought up this point of letting go. That is one of the pieces of what mindsets we can have. One bucket of performance is about what is our psychology about it. What are some mindsets that help us have the grace to roll with the punches, for example? Flip away from letting it go.

Another bucket that I think a lot about with performance is what we are focused on or what our strategy is. Simply put, a lot of strategy is saying, “Have you clearly defined what you’re aiming at? Do you know what’s important that you’re going to focus your resources towards?” This can be money, time, attention, or where your team is focused. That, in a nutshell, is what a strategy is. What are all the stuff you’re not going to do? What are all those things? There will be way more of those.

One way you could think about this experience of having to be resilient and not having things all set up the way you want is that it helps you start to think about, “What was most important for the coaching experience?” If I want to have an impact and help a great leader who is dealing with some challenges, what is most important? There are lots of things one builds to optimize a practice. Yet, if you simplified it and said, “What is the core of how we could have a dialogue that is of value to them?” It’s like, “A phone will do that. You can do that on the phone.”

Some of this was also focusing on getting back to the core of what matters most. You might layer on some extra when you have the option of doing that but in performance, it’s often important for us to define, “Do we know the core of what matters most? Our time and our bandwidth is limited. How many anxious cycles do I have to worry about X, Y, or Z? Do I have that energy to give to something?” You might not, and that might be okay because it might not be related to what’s most important for what you’re trying to do. That’s a different way to think about it. There’s letting go but there’s also a refocusing on, “What mattered most? Am I able to deliver that?”

 

The last piece, and this is another bucket of performance, is around practices and execution, like building capabilities. Part of adaptability and resilience is do you know how to manage the awkward moment when something doesn’t go to plan? Are you practiced at that? Do you have some backup plans like, “Here’s what we’re going to do instead,” or, “This would be a learning moment for us.” That’s another piece of that resiliency.

I learned how you reconnect your backup hotspot and how you get on the phone quickly. You have everyone’s phone number so you switch seamlessly to a different experience. Some of these are practical execution pieces that also help us be resilient. I love this as a microcosm. We’ve gotten through three of the buckets that I think about with performance. There is one more, and we can get to that. This is why it was such a powerful exercise for me.

I’m feeling it as well when I’m listening to you speak about it. We like to say that you practice resilience before you need it. You develop resilience before you need it. Even in the book Change Proof, I talk about the idea of performing resilience. You perform it before it’s needed. It allows you to operate in the world as it is. There’s the world in our heads, and then there’s the world in reality. Sometimes, they’re similar but often, the world is a lot less perfect, a lot less ordered, and a lot less neat and clean than the world’s inside of our sometimes well-organized, well-intentioned, and very goal-oriented minds.

The Journey To Coaching And Performance Improvement

Every time something is not optimal in the environment, it can easily distract you at a minimum. It can throw a lot of people off. It can get in the way of performance. I know this is your real expertise, so I’d love to go back before we get to that fourth one. Share a little bit of the backstory and how you became more than just infatuated with performance and why you work with people that way, coaching them, etc.

I’m so glad you asked because sometimes, there are stories that aren’t clear when you try to connect the dots on paper. I will often get asked, “How did you start a career in academic medicine and you got an MD and a PhD and then had a big pivot out of your residency program into starting a coaching practice that was focused around performance science?” It’s like, “Connect those dots.”

If we go back far, and I’m talking fifth grade, this is the first time I can remember having a thought that I would categorize as a performance-based thought. Fifth grade is the first time I can remember asking a question of, “I want X, Y, or Z and I see other people getting X, Y, or Z. I would like to understand why that is.” In its simplest form, it could be like, “There’s a track meet and I’d like to perform well at that track meet.”

It also bled into other realms. You start to see the social structures getting set up in middle school. Who’s friends with who? Where is the influence? This plays out every day in the politics of our workplaces. This is not about just middle school social dynamics. This is a fundamental thing about us as human beings. I was curious and wondering about these things.

At some point, probably around middle school, I figured out that one of the best ways I could learn was to subject myself or put myself into arenas or situations in which I would be forced to be challenged and have to figure it out. It would create enough pressure for the scenario that I’d be motivated. We can argue whether that was a clean, intrinsic motivation or if it was more fear, but regardless, it was effective.

Fast forward a little bit, as you’re growing up, there are lots of arenas in which one can be challenged. You’ve got academics. Where do you go to college? Where are you going to study? There were sports for me. I was a runner. I ran cross country and track. I headed off to college and was like, “I want to keep playing sports but I don’t think I can run here.”

I walked onto the crew team. Brown, which was my college, has a nationally ranked crew team but they took walk-ons. It was like, “Do you want to start at 0 and row with people who have been rowing already for probably at least 4 years?” I was so excited. This is a chance of a lifetime. When can you join something like this?

I’m smiling ear to ear. I’m going to interrupt your flow for one second because this is one of those uncanny things. I got to walk on a crew team as well. I was a swimmer in water polo in college. I got to this experience was when I went to England and I got to study at the University of York. They had this well-regarded crew team and this beautiful river, the River Ouse that’s there, etc.

I don’t even know how it happened, but I went out for that walk-on crew team. I want to know what your experience was like. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my entire life and one of the most difficult and challenging physically but also on a lot of psychological levels as well. You and I had that same experience.

I am so glad you interrupted.

It’s uncanny, actually.

For me, it encapsulates a characteristic of experiences I appreciate, which is where you show up and it isn’t entirely based on where precisely have you been before and what precise experiences have you had but is much more about what capabilities you have. Whenever I’m coaching someone who is transitioning, this question comes up a lot. In work or in careers, sometimes, we may want to make a pivot or may want to do something different but that doesn’t mean we’re starting at zero.

In this crew experience, what I loved was they wanted walk-ons. They had recruited athletes who would go on to the Olympics and did, but they needed to fill boats. They understood that they could teach athletic, hardworking people. In your experience, you were athletic and, I’m assuming, hardworking, given your background. They were like, “We can teach you how to row very well. In some ways, we’d love to get to be the ones to teach you so that you don’t develop a bunch of bad habits. We welcome you. They never said this out loud. It was all coachy stuff like, “Get in the locker room. Do this.”

There was a value, and you knew it because they welcomed you, took the time to teach you, and started at the basics. A crew stroke can be broken down into about four parts and they started part by part. I’m guessing you might echo this by being a sweep 8+ going full speed and in flow, there’s nothing like it. People got a little bit of that when The Boys in the Boat book and movie came out to try and encapsulate it. I haven’t rowed since college. This is such a unique experience, not just the rowing part of it but how you show up for stuff with all your capabilities and learn to do a new thing that you don’t have.

We’re so adaptable. We have far greater capacity than most people give themselves credit for, especially in that work context where people think, “I’ve got so much invested in this one area.” It’s that sunk cost fallacy. They’ve sunk so much time into something that it would be foolish from a career or development standpoint. It’s like, “I don’t want to start at the beginning. I don’t want to suck at something again.”

I don’t know how the rowing experience was for you at the beginning. I know for me, it was challenging in the sense that my hands were so soft. I was a swimmer. I played water polo. They’re wrecked to the point the blisters are so intense that you can barely hold onto the oar. It’s stuff like that. You’ve got to feather that oar and be in sync.

In the end, it works out. In my experience, it was ridiculous. It was so amazing. We did well and all that kind of thing. It was the willingness to suck for some period of time. I don’t know that we are as adept at accepting that in us or dealing with that emotion as we can be. Otherwise, if you don’t have the humility to be a neophyte at something and have to be taught from the start, like how you hold the thing and the basics, then you won’t allow yourself that opportunity to go, “I would never have known I could do this.”

I didn’t make a career out of it but it became one of the best experiences of my college life. I still talk about it. You and I are talking about it. I use the word humility. Do you have a better word for that? What’s that mindset in a performer, in someone that you’re looking to help to perform better? Are they in their own way because they lack that humility at times? What’s been your experience?

Well said because we can all get in our own way when that is rising up within us. Interestingly,  this relates quite a bit to resiliency and how we deal with uncertainty. One of the things uncertainty often puts in front of us is it highlights a gap between what we think might be necessary and where we feel like we are. It highlights a learning gap. Often, when we’re learning something, we’re at zero or at least we are not where we need to be.

Uncertainty often highlights a gap between what we think might be necessary and where we feel like we are. Share on X

This comes into performance. I’ve accomplished a lot but not without things coming that are challenging or places where I failed or I’m like, “I didn’t do that great at that,” whether you want to call it failure or not. Using the crew example, I had a very bright start in that. I learned quickly. I was tall but smaller. I competed in some lightweight competitions and did very well.

I got so caught up in my own head about wanting to do well that I had great form when I started but after a year or two in, my form got all off. The whole point was that I was trying to control it so much that I was gripping the oar too hard. This was the challenge I dealt with at the end of that experience. It still was this amazing experience but it taught me some of the ways we as high-performers get in our own way.

I like the image of you gripping too hard. You could use this as an analogy for trying to control things too much, creating a lot of friction for yourself as you’re optimizing down to the nth degree versus saying, “Do I understand the core of what’s most important here? Can I deal with a little bit of mess?” or as other people have put it, having some fires that continue to burn. It’s like, “Everything’s not going to be sorted perfectly all the time but if I have a sense of what’s important and what we need to be invested in, we can keep going and be quite successful.”

That was something I learned from that crew experience and I took it into medical school fairly well. There were a lot of things I wanted during this ten-year period where I was getting a PhD and an MD. It was like a job. It was a scholarship program because I was also going to do a PhD. That’s another half decade of your life. They would pay for everything. You did not have a big salary but a graduate student salary, and you had no loans. I was like, “This is incredible. It’s furthering my dream of wanting to be in a field where I felt like I was helping people and where I could connect my work to an impact on someone.”

While I was in medical school, I did an analysis. This is a place where you could spend all of your waking hours studying every last detail. I looked at the whole thing and said, “I need to get good enough grades. I need to pass this test, but there’s a lot of other stuff I want to do in life.” I learn best by reading. I didn’t learn that well in class, so I made trade-offs. I was not your ideal med student. Grades-wise, I did great but I’m not a model. I skipped class and did a number of other challenging things while I was in the program. I took up a new sport. I took up ultimate Frisbee and played it at an elite level. I went to national championships and won a world championship.

Instead of saying, “How do I control everything?” I tried to embrace, “How do I make sure I do what’s important in each of these channels or buckets of my life so that I can have the life that I want but also be an ambitious person?” This goes back to this thought we had about performance. What resiliency is there to be had or what performance comes from being clear where you’re getting most of your impact from and then being able to say, “It’s probably not going to look optimal but I might be able to have a lot of the impacts I want, even a bigger impact than if I’m trying to optimize everything to the smallest degree.” That was an interesting follow-on experience to undergrad, which was to say, “How do I focus on what matters most where it’s going to be a little messy but still emerge with what I’m interested in?” It’s in contrast.

Releasing Control To Unlock Greater Resilience

I love that. I had a question that I wanted to insert here for our folks who are reading. What are you holding onto or what are you holding too tightly? That’s a valuable question for all of us to ask. Back to the story about holding onto the oar and its gripping piece, it’s a great analogy. I feel like there’s probably some value that anybody reading could get in simply answering that question for themselves, whether in this moment or sitting with it and coming back to it. Noodle on it for a while and take a walk. Make some time to meditate on that. “What am I holding on too tightly?”

It’s interesting. A big part of how we move through situations and develop mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resiliency is through managing our energy, which is a big word. For a lot of people, you could substitute that word for willpower. When you’re talking about gripping something too tightly like that oar and you want to control that situation to the point where it has messed up your form, it was the result of exercising that willpower.

In certain activities in life, if you want to put a nail through a board, then some willpower is going to work well. The harder you hit that nail with that hammer or whatever it is, the faster it’s going to go through the board. In a lot of other areas in life, especially the ones that are mental or things that involve creativity or are much more nuanced, willpower can be not the right energy to meet the moment when it comes to performing. Would you agree with that?

I agree with that. I often find with performance that we’re not looking at the extremes. There are cases where we are looking at the extreme. The idea of, “I need to max out my willpower to achieve what I want to achieve,” has challenges. I gave a great example of what happened for me in crew, and yet it’s a tool.

There is a useful saying that things can be tools, not identities. A great example is some people may have as a piece of their identity, “I am a willpower machine. I will do it. I don’t care how crappy it feels. I am going to show up day in and day out.” I’ll use a personal example because this is important. I’ve coached countless people who have come up against this in their own lives. What happens when you decide you don’t want to do that thing anymore? It’s the same with, “I’m not a quitter.” It’s this idea of identity around whether or not you see something all the way through, whatever that means or however you’ve defined that.

For example, let’s fast forward. I finished med school. I finished my PhD. I’m a general surgery resident at Stanford. I loved surgery. It was a very high-performing and challenging residency program. I loved all those things about it. I loved that it has a physical and a mental decision-making piece of it. It was my first choice, so I’m at the top of the world. I got there and about four months in, I was like, “I’m miserable.” There are a variety of reasons for this. I’m like, “I can’t see how I’m fitting this into my future going forward year after year.” I’m looking at the attendings and I’m like, “I don’t know that I want the life that they have.” It’s not a judgment on them. We all have to make our own personal decisions about this.

I’m a person who has often gritted stuff out. I have a ton of willpower and self-discipline. You reach this moment and it can be difficult. You’ve committed to this thing. Does that mean you need to see it through for the next 40 years? Is willpower a tool for you? Is there room for you to make a change? Is there room for you to say, “I imagined this would be different and I probably could have done more research on that point but also, I got to try it.” I’ve proved to myself that I could do it, but I don’t know if I want to. Where is the room for me to say, “You could willpower your way through this but what are you missing out on? What is the cost of that if you start to multiply that over the years? What could you be doing differently?”

The cost-benefit analysis does make so much sense at that moment to be asking that. Finish a point because I want to come back to something earlier that I wrote down. I want to come back to that.

This analysis of it occurred later or this summary of it. One can say, “I have a lot of willpower. That’s a tool I have. I can use it when I need it.” I did use that tool. I finished the whole year. I let them know with some advanced notice that I wouldn’t return for a second year. I finished the year, and that took tons of willpower.” It’s a tool. We can start to say, “Willpower is a tool but it doesn’t have to be my identity. I can pull it out of the kit when I need it.”

 

There are other moments where more willpower isn’t the solution where, for example, what might be the solution is you need to express some creativity and vision in defining, “If I were not a surgeon, what would I do?” I had to do that as well to say, “How would I take all of these skills I’ve been trained with and turn them into something that I can imagine doing for 40 more years?” That’s another tool. Always being in the visioning of the creativity space, that’s an identity for some people as well. Yet sometimes, we need to be not in that space. We need to be executing.

I like this idea of freeing ourselves up to be more than one thing to not get too stuck in identity but instead say, “I can have a lot of pieces of myself that I can access and then I can pick and select, “Is a hammer the right tool for this? Do we need to pound a nail right now? A hammer’s a great thing for that.” Maybe we need to cut a board. A hammer’s not a great tool for that. I want to hear what you are thinking. We can go from there.

Coaching For Peak Performance Without Trying Harder

I love where you’re going with that. I wrote down the question, “If not willpower, then what?” To use your analogy, that’s a tool that they go back to again and again. They’re like, “A screwdriver would be a better tool here but we’ll still pick up the hammer.” It’s like, “If I can’t screw that thing in, I’ll bang it in. Somehow, some way, I’m going to use that tool for that.”

Ultimately, when we think about what gets in the way of resiliency and how it is that people do end up burned out, which you and I probably see quite a bit of in our work, you go, “How did that happen when people are so resourceful?” They have all these capabilities and all these tools that are, theoretically speaking, available to them, and yet they keep picking up the hammer, to use your point.

Ultimately, that becomes depleting for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it’s ineffective. You could swing that hammer a whole heck of a lot more times and get worn out doing it than pick up a different tool that would allow you to more elegantly create what you’re looking for. It’s less of an outer game and more of an inner game is where I was going and wanted to get a sense from you.

In many ways, willpower is a physical thing to me. I know it’s not that. It doesn’t have to be defined as physical. Yet, a lot of that energy when people define it when they’re looking for it and they want to deploy it is a physical, “I’m tired but I’ll muscle through. I’ll sleep when I die,” or, “I’ll sleep over the weekend, I’ll do without for now,” or, “I don’t need to focus on the better choice for myself from a food intake standpoint or hydrate myself. I need to muscle through this now.” A lot of people do that.

The language that we use around willpower is very physical. I always say words have power. You can often listen to how someone talks about something or how you yourself are talking about something and get some clues around, “How am I thinking about that thing?” I love it. You’re like, “We got to muscle it out. We got to grit it out.”

What I want to understand from your standpoint is if it’s not willpower, then what is it? If it’s not physically muscling through something and enduring it, that endurance of, “I’m not going to quit in the middle of the year. I’m going to finish this year no matter what it takes. I will get to that point where I’ve completed at least that much and I’ll move on,” then on the mental side or the emotional side from a performance standpoint, how would you coach someone or help them to perform at a higher level without trying harder?

This is where I love performance science because it gives us different options for how to tackle this. What’s great is you can talk these through with another person. It’s not just me and my coaching performance and science-operating system making a judgment. Although sometimes, I have an inkling of, I suspect, given what I’ve heard, that this might be the root.” This is where I love thinking through these four buckets of performance. We can start to say, “What’s going to be helpful here?”

For example, if someone is like, “I am so burned out. I’m leaning fully on willpower. I’m trying to find a way out of this,” sometimes, someone has way too much work to do. They’re trying to do it all. This is the mistake that’s happening. In fact, they might be able to reach some of their goals but they’re not going to do everything they see everyone else doing. What we need to do is focus them.

One route is that first bucket of performance. It’s like, “Could we look at what is giving you impact?” and start to say, “Rather than trying to muscle through doing it all, can we make your portfolio of activities and time usage more potent?” That is one of the things we can look at, making some changes in how time is being used.

The second bucket is often around execution. It’s both about your capabilities, processes, and systems. Sometimes, we want to look at what people are doing, and this is particularly true in business leadership. Is there work on your business that might be useful or with your team? Is part of this that you’re reinventing the wheel all the time as opposed to having some repeatable processes? Are you trying to do everything, but you have this whole team who could help you if you let go and delegate some things? That’s a route through the second bucket, which is this execution of how we are operating the things we thought were most important.

The third piece that we’ve talked a little bit about is the mindset piece. This is getting a little more if someone’s like, “I’m used to pulling out the hammer,” we can talk a little bit about, “What feels good about the hammer?” We can then dig a little bit into what might be some ongoing beliefs that one has about why a hammer is a good thing to do. Sometimes, it comes from our childhood. My family was very much a family where we were trained to be responsible. It’s like, “In fact, don’t just be responsible for yourself but be responsible for the stuff that goes wrong for other people as well.” You can see how this goes wrong when you put it into a workplace.

For example, we can explore that mindset or even the thought of, “My team is working so hard if I’m not in the trenches right there with them,” as opposed to your team needing you to be thinking strategically and preparing for the future. Also, don’t take away their wins. We could create a whole new mindset that isn’t, for example, one needs to be responsible and in the trenches all the time but instead, as a leader, your role might be different. Create a new mindset about the value you’re bringing that doesn’t require you to pick up the hammer. That’s the mindset bucket.

There’s a fourth bucket that we didn’t talk about. Let’s introduce the fourth bucket, and that is physiology. At a base level, everything that’s happening in our brains and our bodies is a bunch of chemicals. We are bags of chemicals. We will save the debate for what else is there for other folks. We have to care for the bag of chemicals. We know there are great things we can be doing that shift whether or not we’re in fight or flight all the time where we’re sitting in terms of whether we are relaxed and calm or whether we are out of our gourd stressed.

Stress is a fine thing to have. Stress is not bad for us. In fact, I love what the author Kelly McGonigal said about stress, which is that stress tells us there’s something that we care about that is at stake and it is good for us to have things we care about in our lives. If you have something you care about in your life, you will have stress because that’s how it works.

One of the things we can think about when we’re feeling burnt out and we’re trying to go back to that willpower hammer is to say, “Where is my physiology at? Do I need to be carrying and investing both long-term and short in-the-moment things to ramp myself down?” It’s okay to be stressed. We don’t want to be chronically stressed all the time. Also, we want to know that it’s okay to have some stress. When there’s uncertainty, there will always be some stress with that but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The way you might explore that bucket is by looking at practices like exercise, getting enough sleep and diet, and whether you have had a hug or have you had time with people you care about. There’s meditation or even mindfulness and breathing practices. There are a lot of things that care for ourselves as a physiological being. That is the fourth bucket that matters and impacts all the other buckets. These are ways that I think about. You can look to see where people are leaning in. You can also look at where the biggest opportunity to impact them is. It gives us a lot of options. As a coach, I love saying, “If that didn’t work, we have many more options. We will keep trying things.”

I love it. As we wrap things up, I would love for you to summarize those four buckets once again. We’ve done them over the course of the last 30-ish minutes. Would you do that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

There are four buckets. The first one is focus or strategy. What’s most important? What are you aiming at? The second bucket is about execution. The things you’ve decided are important. What are the best ways to do those things or to help your team organize to do those things? The third bucket is mindset and psychology. This is everything from how you keep yourself motivated to how to motivate your team. What makes you feel confident and not? How are you thinking about things? The fourth bucket is physiology, the hormones and chemicals that are meant to help us rise to the challenge but also, we have to make sure they have time to ramp down as well. There are practices to help with that.

Favorite Physiology Practices For Better Performance

On the physiology side, do you have some favorite rituals? Everybody has their own individual ones. We talk a lot about the rituals not only on the show but in our work as well because it impacts everything else. The ripple effect of whether you’re a bit sleep deprived, a little hangry, or any of the other ways that our physiology intersects with everything else that’s going on in our world is a lot more prevalent than we might even say all the time. I’m curious. Do you have some favorite practices?

Absolutely. I’m a planner and I have some habits. This is going back to digital nomading. When we move places, it’s a wonderful moment to rethink a habit and say, “Is this still a habit? Do I need to change it?” A total tangent but something I forgot to mention at the start is it’s good to have habits but sometimes, our habits need to evolve. That’s an interesting role that moving locations sometimes play.

It's good to have habits, but sometimes our habits need to evolve. Share on X

My favorite habits are, number one, I love exercising outside. I do some weightlifting in a gym as well but most of the days of the week, I want to like biking, walking, rucking, or running outside. I do that in the morning when possible. The science would show that you get an endorphin burst from that that goes throughout your day but for me, it’s more important that I feel happy when I do it. That’s how I feel.

I sleep a lot. I sleep 8 or 9 hours a night. I know that some people get by on less. It helps my brain rewire and process a lot of the learning. It gives me a good capacity to be present with people all day. Sleep is an important one for me. A third one is one of the greatest joys in my life, which is the time to talk with my husband. We have planned times that are happening every week. It’s like, “What’s the activity we’re doing together? Are we going for a hike on Saturday for four hours to geek out on whatever we want to talk about?” Those are three things that are important to me. If one looked at my calendar, someone would probably be able to deduce that from looking at my calendar.

For me as well in the sense that if it’s important to me, it’s on my calendar whereas in the past years, my calendar wasn’t a reflection of what was important to me. I’ve learned. Maybe this is wisdom, experience, or something but things that are calendared happen typically in my life and things that aren’t calendared don’t typically happen.

Those walks and the time that you spend, for us in resilience language, we call it recovery periods. Toggling the interval training from my swimming days back and forth between your exertion stage and your rest and recovery stage, the alternation between those two things is what leads to growth in so many respects. You’ve got to schedule that.

When we often work with leaders, we’re helping them to understand that even though they’ve got tremendous pressure on them to always perform, the way for them to be more effective leaders is not to drive their teams harder to perform better. Ultimately, it’s to help them to recognize this value in that alternation between phases and stages of exertion and those same ritualized recovery periods.

Greater innovation, ingenuity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and performance are bolstered when we’re better, depleted, and burned out, which is what we’re hearing a lot about for a good reason. Anxiety levels are at levels that psychologists and psychiatrists have never seen before. You go, “Something’s not right. Something’s off.”

Leadership Strategies For Overcoming Workplace Challenges

I would love to get your last word on this. Given that that is the landscape that we’re hearing a lot about, do you have a best recommendation? You’re brought into an organization and they have engagement challenges or they have turnover. You’ve heard that anxiety is on the rise there and burnout is a word that’s being used. What’s your philosophy? This is perhaps too broad a question, but if you’re going to focus on or target something with a senior-level leader given that context, what’s your method?

What’s my go-to? How do I approach that?

A little bit. I know that’s broad, but maybe a piece.

It’s okay. You are allowed to ask those questions. You’ve got to work through a stepwise process but I’m going to tell you the first thing I start with. It comes back to that first bucket of like performance. It’s important to have clarity as a leader of, “What are we trying to do?” That waterfalls down to the leaders under you.

 

One of the most stressful things for a team or a company can be that we’re being evaluated. Also, as human beings, we like to contribute. We like to win. If it’s not clear what we’re trying to accomplish as a company and what we think are the most important priorities for that, which then has to be translated down through teams and different roles, like what’s their part of it, that is one of the first things that is important to get clarity on.

If there’s a toxic culture,  that’s a whole nother bag of worms. There are many workplaces that are not toxic but there might not be clarity. That can create all sorts of stress and anxiety on the individual level about, “How do I help my team win today? What will be valued if I contribute it? If I’m going to learn or grow, what would be the directions to learn and grow so that I can contribute more and be recognized and seen for that?”

There are a number of root causes that come from this focus and strategy bucket. Can you be clear to everyone about, “Here’s where we’re aiming. Here’s what we think is most important. Here’s how we think we could win at that,” and then have leaders start to say, “What does that mean for my team? How do I help my team members know their part and how they’re contributing so that I can both recognize them for it?” We can figure out how to do that well together as a team. This is a dramatic oversimplification.

I love it though.

You have to work through some other things. People have to execute. You do have to think about culture, how people are interacting together, and what’s the general vibe of a place. You can have a great culture but if people don’t know how to win, you’ll have other issues. There will be anxiety even though everyone is nice to each other and respectful and it’s not toxic.

I love what you said earlier. If I were answering that question, I would go back to something you said earlier, which is choosing the right tool. We had a good in-depth discussion about the hammer. It is knowing the tools that your team is using. This means the tools that you’re giving them or suggesting.

Also, what’s their default? Their identity is so tied up in some of that stuff. It comes back to childhood and to so many other influences in their lives. It could be the fact that they’re using the wrong tool. If you’re not paying attention because you are so in the weeds as a leader, everybody’s rowing so hard that you’re not in that position to be the coxswain. Back to our rowing days, that person is the person who sits on the end of the boat and is yelling at everybody often to keep the cadence to get everybody in a flow.

Without that objective look at how people are using the tools, you could be missing a lot. The converse is true that you could find a lot, you could learn a lot, and you could be able to help your team in more ways by thinking about it the way you suggested, which is, “Are we using the right tool?” Also, it can be a tool and not an identity. Where is it possible to step outside of that default? I could talk to you all day. I loved it. I loved the conversation. I appreciate your time. You were amazing.

Thank you so much. This was fun. I love where we went with the conversation. That’s why these are fun.

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I hope you were as impressed with Dr. Fowler’s ideas and her way of communicating as I was. She is remarkable. We had so much in common. From a personal standpoint, I vibed with that conversation. I loved how many synergies there were. There were more synergies than even we got to discuss. One of them is the fact that she is a digital nomad and has been doing that for four years or so. My wife and I didn’t give up our home or anything but we decided that we were in a position to take the show on the road, if you will, and experience what it would be like.

With kids out of the house and us having done that job as parents, this is more of a time when we could be intentional about how we want to experience our relationship with each other, our relationship with work, our relationship in proximity to other people, and, geographically speaking, where it is that we live, reside, play, work, etc. Carla, me, her husband, and my beloved have that in common. It’s cool.

We also have in common our love and passion for helping leaders in organizations and teams perform better and looking at it in a holistic way mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Carla gave us a different framework, but for specific areas, nonetheless, she summarizes quite well, and we got to get into the weeds as well.

I love that conversation. I thought there was so much to be gained from thinking at a deeper level about what Carla was sharing. I added a few questions in there, including the one that I’m going to repeat, which is, “What are you holding too tightly? Is there something that you’re holding too tightly? If so, what is that? Where is it that you are potentially using willpower as a go-to or as a tool over and over again?

In Carla’s analogy, she called that a hammer. Where is it that you are using that willpower tool perhaps to the exclusion of other tools? By reason of it being a default, potentially, you’re wearing yourself thinner and maybe creating even more anxiety, more burnout, or more exhaustion because there are other tools that are not being utilized possibly because you identify with that tool, whether it’s the willpower tool, the grit tool, or the taking-on-everything tool. There’s also the, “I’m responsible,” tool, the “I’m not a quitter,” tool, and the “I’m a yes person, the person who doesn’t say no to things and doesn’t create boundaries or have those carve-outs to other people’s expectations and agendas.”

There’s lots to consider there when it comes to how it is that you will develop greater performance in your world and be able to elevate your performance. I know that’s what you want to do. I know it’s what I want to do. It’s what we all want to do. Also, how it is that you lead others and help them to perform better, potentially not by perpetuating that cycle of trying to wheel your way through it, grit your way through it, or muscle your way through it more than is needed and maybe more than is optimal.

There’s lots that we got to noodle on. We’d love to get your thoughts on the show. As always, if you could leave a rating on the platform that you consume the show, five stars would always be great. That’s helping the algorithm to help us, and for that, we are incredibly grateful. Whatever rating and whatever feedback you have is valuable. To take those few moments to do it, we appreciate your time and commitment to do that. Thank you if you will. If not, then we thank you as well for being a part of the community, tuning in, and sharing this episode if it’s something valuable that you think other people could benefit from. We appreciate that, too. Ciao for now. Thank you again and have a beautiful rest of your day.

 

Important Links

• Thaxa
• Adam Markel on YouTube
• Change Proof
• The Boys in the Boat
• Dr. Carla Fowler on Twitter
• Dr. Carla Fowler on LinkedIn

 

About Carla Fowler

Dr. Carla Fowler is an MD PhD and elite executive coach. For the last decade, she has been a secret weapon for scores of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other senior leaders. Carla’s unique approach combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their goals.

Carla graduated from Brown University magna cum laude, earned her MD and PhD at the University of Washington, and completed her internship in general surgery at Stanford University.