The Psychology of Leadership: Turn Stress into Peak Performance, with Sebastien Page,  a $500 billion fund manager

Sebastien Price 00:04
What sports psychologists found is that the optimal performance is actually not at zero stress. And when I started reading about that, I thought, Okay, why am I beating myself up for being stressed? Then sports psychology also adds the concept of reframing. The stress can be reframed as energy, more engagement. And I hope we’ll talk about engagement, because I know you talk about that on your show. And so reframing and channeling the stress, rather than constantly walking around in life trying to go to zero stress, which is, anyways, an unattainable state.

Blake Schofield 00:49
Real leadership. Real life. Real impact. No more choosing between your career and your life. Here you’ll find honest conversations, science-backed strategies, and inspiring stories to help you thrive at work and truly enjoy your life outside of it. I’m your host, Blake, and I’m honored to help you create more Impact with Ease.

Blake Schofield 01:22
This week, I’m interviewing Sebastian Page. He’s the Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price and the author of The Psychology of Leadership. He has more than two decades of leadership experience and has conducted extensive research on positive, sports, and personality psychology. He currently oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over 500 billion in assets under management. I’m excited for Sebastian to share with you his insights from his own personal journey, which led him to really begin to explore and understand how we could apply knowledge from these other areas into business and into our lives to improve them. Sebastian, welcome to Impact with Ease. I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Sebastien Price 02:15
Blake, thank you. I am psyched. I told you before we started, I’ve been listening to your podcast, and I’m a new fan. I love it.

Blake Schofield 02:25
Thank you so much. One of the first things I really love to do is dive in and learn a little bit more about you and your background, and allow the audience to know a little bit about you. So can you just give a brief background, a little bit about who you are and what your journey has been, and how did you end up doing what you do today?

Sebastien Price 02:43
So I grew up French Canadian and always been interested in business and money management. I’m now in a 25-year career in the rough and tumble world of money management, high stress, high pressure. That’s why I’m a new fan of your show, because you give a lot of tips on how to deal with that. And about four years ago, I was stressed at work, which is kind of part of the job, but also I was stressing about stressing. I kept telling myself, Why do I feel that way? I’ve been doing this for 25 years. This should be easy for me. And I ended up talking to a sport psychologist, and I discovered the mindset behind sports and positive psychology, and just became absolutely fascinated with the research behind those fields, and ultimately, personality psychology as well. So maintaining my day job as Chief Investment Officer of T. Roper, I say $1.7 trillion money management firm. I also decided to write a book that became The Psychology of Leadership that I just published, and that’s been such an exciting project. That’s why I’m doing podcasts. It’s so fun to talk about, and that’s why what I talk about ends up very much overlapping with what you talk about in your podcasts, especially around resilience. And learning from the mindset of pro athletes is really fascinating. And then the research that’s done behind sports psychology is also very fascinating and, by the way, super underrated in business and leadership. We’re only scratching the surface of how wonderful research in sports and positive psychology can be for the practice of leadership.

Blake Schofield 04:33
I completely agree. As somebody at 10, I realized that people were my passion. My journey to get to where I am today went through a lot of challenges, turns, and uncertainty of, you know, is this really the thing I want to be doing for the rest of my life? But for me, what you’re saying I know to fundamentally be true, that we’ve operated business in a silo, and haven’t really understood the power of optimizing people and helping individuals really lean into and understand how they’re naturally wired, and how they can really leverage that to not just create amazing results in their careers and in their businesses, but in their own lives too. So I’m interested to hear, obviously you have been in a very dynamic, very fast-paced, high-stress industry and career. I can certainly relate to that, as you know, having spent 18 years in corporate retail, in what I call like the heartbeat of corporate retail, which was women’s apparel. There’s no harder area in retail, very—

Sebastien Price 05:42
Tough, very tough, very tough. We can compare notes on finance and retail. And I think I heard in the prior podcast that you were turning companies around as well.

Blake Schofield 05:54
Yeah, I was turning—I became known as a turnaround queen. So I would get a business that was either stagnant or, in many cases, the worst performing business in the division, and would turn it around. And I think there’s something for those of us that are wired to like challenge and growth, that we get to a certain place in our career where we realize what we’ve been doing doesn’t work. And it sounds like that’s what happened to you, and so I’m interested to dig a little bit into your journey. That was that turning point for you, because you said, I started to stress, and then I was stressing about being stressed. What was going on at that time?

Sebastien Price 06:33
You know, I think this is, in high pressure, high performance industries, many of us leaders, and it sounds like you went through the same experiences. We kind of live near the edge. And you know, you talk about burnout. The stats on burnout symptoms are unbelievable, and they’re way up since Covid. Like from 40% of, which is already huge, in 2019 of employees reporting potential burnout symptoms to 63. Now this is the Gallup data. There’s many different sources of data, but it’s spiking. And by the way, I don’t know if we’ll get into this in the conversation today, but work from home, on the margin, is actually a source of burnout because of the lack of boundaries, which is part of that jump, which I know I’m being controversial right now by saying that. But going back to kind of living on the edge of just too much stress and not enough stress, the concept that I found super interesting from sports psychology first is to learn to not add the second layer. My second layer was, I’m stressing, but I’m also beating myself up because I should not be stressed, because I’ve done this for 25 years, and this just is not helpful. And in sports psychology and other areas of psychology, there’s research on performance and stress. And you take an athlete, and you look at how they perform in javelin throw or 100-meter dash or whatever the athletic endeavor is, and you map the performance as a function of their stress level, which you can sort of measure by heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol, whatever, however scientific you want to make the measurement. And what sports psychologists found is that the optimal performance is actually not at zero stress. And when I started reading about that, I thought, Okay, why am I beating myself up for being stressed? Then sports psychology also adds the concept of reframing. The stress can be reframed as energy, more engagement. And I hope we’ll talk about engagement, because I know you talk about that on your show. And so reframing and channeling the stress, rather than constantly walking around in life trying to go to zero stress, which is, anyways, an unattainable state. Human nature is such that most days you won’t feel zero stress. So there’s an optimal functioning point. In sports, in particular, if an athlete is about to run 100-meter dash, if they have a certain amount of adrenaline and they’re jumping up and down and they feel anxious about the race, they’re actually going to perform better up to a point. So this is the important part, and this is why your show is so important, up to a point. So it’s counterintuitive to say that stress can actually boost your performance, but you have to remember that once you reach the point of optimal functioning in sports, and obviously this applies to other things in life, the stress curve starts to decrease, and your performance decreases. You’re too anxious, and we know that’s where stress is really bad. It will kill you. It’ll increase your blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, sleep problems, appetite problems. It’ll mess up your immune system. It’s just very—it’s just very bad. But looking at it as a curve, and thinking about what high-performing athletes do, they’re kind of operating near the top, not at the bottom. They’re not always chill, always calm, because, you know, that’s the nature of what we do. You know, Blake, when you were turning around retail companies in a super competitive industry, it probably would have been unrealistic to try to manage yourself to experience zero stress. It probably would have been counterintuitive. I don’t know if you agree with that, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, but to me, this mindset helped me, because just going close to the edge of where it’s too much, just realizing that there’s also a not-enough number. If a surgeon is going to perform surgery on me, I kind of want them fully engaged. I want them a little anxious. I want them prepared. I want them really paying attention to what they’re doing. Call it stress. Call it activation, as sports psychologists would prefer to do. But there’s something there that looks and feels like stress that you can transform into energy and focus. So I wonder, Blake, is this sort of contrary to the advice you usually give? I’d love to hear your reaction on that.

Blake Schofield 11:17
Yeah, it’s interesting. I have a couple things from what you shared. This belief that we can or should lead a life without stress. Data shows that we’re actually built to seek. We’re built for growth, and so when we aren’t growing and we don’t have anything to seek, and we don’t have any hope, because everything is so easy and there’s no stress at all, we actually atrophy. And so there is an important, from my perspective, zone for each individual about what that optimal growth and challenge look like, but most of us don’t understand that. You know, when you talk about sports psychology, I was very blessed to work personally, one on one, with Dr. Jeff Spencer, who was a former Olympian cyclist and nine-time Tour de France mindset coach. And one of the concepts that he really taught me that has so much influenced my work and also the work I do with my clients is what he calls zone pacing, which is really about understanding optimum pace for you. Right? If you think about it, if you’re a cyclist and you’re going—if you are cycling so fast, you can run off a cliff and you’re out of the game. We know that intuitively. What we don’t know intuitively is, if you’re going too slow, what happens? You get bored, start looking at the periphery and other things, and you can again fall right off the cliff. And so I think, to your point, what I recognize from my personal journey and so many of the high achievers that I help is we’ve never actually been taught, number one, how we work best so that we can learn how to optimize that. And we also don’t know what our own zone pacing is. And so, to your point, we are running at our maximum potential constantly, and you cannot do that, and there’s not enough margin in how we’re living and leading, that when life’s challenges come our way, we have the space or the capability to use our resources effectively to deal with that, and so we just get into these further and further cycles of increased stress, anxiety, and burnout and overwhelm without being able to understand that there’s a framework and a way to operate that enables us to roll with those punches that life’s going to throw us inevitably. So that’s my perspective.

Sebastien Price 13:47
Yeah, I share that perspective, because you’re indirectly talking about the state of flow, where the challenge is just hard enough so that you’re engaged and you have the capabilities to meet the challenge, but it’s not impossible, because there you burn out, and it’s just very discouraging. I want to talk about Simone Biles for a second, the famous gymnast. And I want to use this example indirectly to kind of bring up the topic of AI, artificial intelligence. So Blake, I was on my way here to record this podcast with you, and I drive a Tesla, and in Teslas now there is Grok, and you can click on the little speaker sign and have a conversation with the AI. I’ve never used Grok, so I thought I would try it. I clicked, and I went, Are you familiar with Sebastian Page’s book, The Psychology of Leadership? And Grok said, Yes, I’m familiar, but it just kind of read the broad description of the book. So I thought, Okay, it doesn’t actually have access to my book, which would be interesting, because that’s a copyright question, right? But then I said, I’m going on a podcast. Or I didn’t say I—I said, Suppose Sebastian Page is going on a podcast to talk about things like resilience and how to handle the risk of burnout and building rest into your routines. What do you think Sebastian Page would say? What would be a good story for him to tell? This is just a few minutes ago. I’m driving, I’m trying this new tool in my Tesla, right? And it’s an actual dialog with the AI. It’s a female voice, very soothing voice, and she starts telling stories from the book. So now I’m getting worried. She starts telling stories that I’ve told about Mount Everest and goal-induced blindness that occurs on Mount Everest. She starts telling a story about Roger Federer, which is a wonderful example in a speech he made about the sports psychology mindset. And so then I get taken aback, because I go, Wait, you have read the book? And Grok says, No, but I’ve watched all the podcasts that Sebastian Page has made, and this was live, right? This is the power of AI. So then I go, Give me a story that would be original and interesting for that discussion on handling burnout symptoms and burnout risk. And it gave me the story of Simone Biles, and it’s super interesting and illustrative of what we’re talking about, how high performers, as you said, try to stay close to the edge, but most of the time we stay too close, and we burn out. So Simone Biles had to, famously, you know, stop competing in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. She was not feeling well. She had panic attacks. She was kind of losing her sense of where she was when she was doing flips in the air. And it was mainly psychological, mental. And what she realized was that she was over-trained, absolutely over-trained. And this is the problem with high achievers in high pressure environments. She was training like 12 hours a day. She was actually not getting enough sleep. And it was this perfectionism, which is another issue related to burnout. And here’s the top athlete in her field just walking away from the Olympics, which is like, takes years of preparation. The wonderful part of that story is that she came back and performed even better later on. And so then I asked Grok, Tell me how Simone Biles came back from over-training, overworking, from anxiety, performance anxiety. And you know what she did? She took time off. She just stepped away from the edge. She apparently took all of her Sundays off. Netflix. Simone Biles became a better athlete by watching Netflix on Sundays. And she took time to learn yoga and to build breaks into her practice. And when she’s jet-lagged, she’s going to try to sleep eight, nine hours now, and she’s tweeting about, I had a wonderful night’s sleep. So here’s where an athlete or a high performer in any industry can go close to the edge. And now we have too many people in that state. 63% of employees reporting burnout symptoms, right? And here’s how she brought herself back. Rest, rest. It’s a wonderful part of any training program. If you’ve ever run a marathon, for example, you actually have to scale back your training every couple of weeks so that you can go back further high. Anyways, that’s my Simone Biles story, contributed to you by AI, AI that I’ve had a discussion with in my car. Here we are in the new world.

Blake Schofield 19:04
Yeah, it’s wild. And you know, I’ll just say, this is an aside, probably to wrap up the conversation on AI. I think there’s so much opportunity in front of us, and so much fear and so much uncertainty. In my perspective and what I’ve seen over and over again as someone who uses AI a lot—I mean, I’m definitely a high user of AI and a believer that it will and already is changing our world—is that in order to be able to truly see the ways of which to leverage AI and our lives can change, you have to be able to be in a space of creativity and innovation. And you cannot be in a space of creativity and innovation when you are burned out, when you’re in survival mode, when you are just going through the motions to get things done. And so I think you’ve opened a beautiful point that I feel like I need to share passionately, what I have seen to be true. I see so many professionals that AI and how much is changing is creating so much stress for them, they don’t even realize that the stress that’s being created is actually stopping them from being able to look at the landscape and be strategic about how to future-proof their career and about really where to go. And so this idea of helping high achievers understand you’re too close to the edge, what are the things you need to create that space, matters so much today. We need our high-achieving leaders to be innovative and creative and strategic and do the things they do best that gives them energy, rather than be caught trying to handle the level of, like, anxiety and unrest and stress that is in our society so pervasively right now. And so what you share right now is an example of that ability to be in the moment and be creative and look at the technology and go, Huh? I wonder what—I wonder, What if? And what I know to be true is when we go into our heavier cycles of burnout, because burnout is a chronic state of misalignment. It’s not this peak that everyone thinks it is. It’s sitting underneath, and that, right? But when we get to that peak, one of the first things we lose is our creativity and our imagination, which is one of the most important things we need today in today’s society with everything that’s changing.

Sebastien Price 21:26
I think it also relates to time management, something I know you’ve talked about with other guests. But if you differentiate between creative work, or also deep work, and shallow, busy work, which also is a source of stress, even if you’re in a high-level position, finding time to do the deeper work, or to take a step back and go for a walk and think creatively, is difficult for high performers, for anybody in any job in any industry. So the way I would approach AI, amongst other ideas, is that it will almost immediately, in almost every role, help you with the shallow work, with routine work that you can automate over time, and then spend more time on the deeper work or the more creative work. So I like to think of it as an opportunity to better manage your time, to build a little bit of freedom into your schedule. I know, I know, I make it sound easy. I know fully, like I’m just sitting here in a podcast saying, You know, take three-hour blocks at least every week to do something create. I know that sounds easy, but you know what, Blake? I think, in a way, it is easier than most people think. You know, we have such a hard time saying no. We have such a hard time saying no. It’s the most powerful word in time management. Even if you’re in a position where you don’t control how you spend your time, generally, there are plenty of opportunity for you to use that magical word. No, I can’t do this, and create a little bit of space. This goes beyond AI, but again, if you can automate routine, shallow work, I think it gives you opportunities to create blocks of time in your schedule to do more deep or creative work.

Blake Schofield 23:34
I have found it to be very powerful in that type of work. I’ve also found it to be very powerful in terms of initial thought-starter for creative perspectives, different approaches and ways to do things, in the same way that what you did—you asked in the car, came up with this idea—helped you think about, Oh, how am I being seen? What have I already talked about? What might be an opportunity I haven’t thought about? There’s such power in sometimes being able to reframe things in that way.

Sebastien Price 24:04
It’s amazing as a creative aid. It’s amazing. There is no writer’s block anymore. If I get writer’s block, I just put where I am into a large language model, and I say, Give me ideas to complete this. Like, writer’s block is almost gone. And it’s also just creative for silly little things. Like, I don’t know if you use AI to come up with titles for your podcast, but if you have something written or even recorded, and you go, Give me 10 different titles, it’s really useful creatively. And then people are—start, start—I’m not an artist whatsoever, but people use it for more artistic support endeavors as well. I think the downside, I’m a little worried about it. Blake, I wonder what’s going to happen to the art and practice of writing in general. It’s never going to be the same. Writer’s block being gone could also maybe be a bad thing. Maybe writer’s block is kind of part of the process of writing.

Blake Schofield 25:12
It’s interesting that you say that. My partner was a trained copywriter, actually one of the—he built the highest-performing copywriting training program that existed, 85% success rate versus an industry average of five. And years ago, when he saw what was happening with AI, he had this, like, huge panic of, My entire industry is going to be gone. And funny enough, that’s not what’s happening. What’s actually happening is so much is being used in AI that’s just slop. In fact, I read something the other day that said it takes two hours to clean up the AI slop that’s being created. So what’s happening actually is this gap where, fundamentally, it can help us be more creative and come up with things, but then you actually have to have the skill to understand how to refine it. So those who really understand how to communicate, the psychology of communication, how to work with people, are at a massive advantage, because now they can output 10 times easily what they used to, because they have the skill to understand, What is AI giving me, and where are the gaps? Where is it misunderstanding things? Where is it getting the language wrong? And how do I refine that so it’s more impactful? And then, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s like, it’s generated, it’s not super great, but it does automate things that maybe don’t matter as much. My perspective, there will—it will take a lot more skill, like an apprenticeship, right? I have a kiddo in college and a kiddo that’s a senior in high school, and I think, You know, you guys should start learning these skills from people right now, because those entry-level jobs are not going to be there in the same way that they used to be. And so you’re going to have to have a higher level of skill set, because it’s the higher-level skill set coupled with AI, versus, right, the leader plus a number of juniors underneath them. So my perspective on it, from what I can see anyway, is that people that actually have that copywriting and high level of communication skill, when they understand how to couple that with AI, can create exponential results, but it’s going to be a smaller pocket of people that have more expertise.

Sebastien Price 27:28
You know, what’s fascinating is, I have a colleague who is an expert at technology, and he invests in technology companies, so completely different background from yours. He’s coming to the exact same conclusion, and he’s told me the exact same thing. Small, concentrated, more sort of a, you know, super producers. Smaller groups, but supported, and their talent gets scaled broadly through AI. Look, I’m listening to your thoughts here, and I’m thinking it is an optimistic take. I’m an optimist as well. I think there are risks. Jobs will transform, maybe coding, really, we don’t need as many pure programmers. But again, every time there’s new technology, we all think all the jobs are going away and we’re going to have massive unemployment, and new jobs appear, new endeavors appear. I think this is going to happen again. But AI right now is so interesting. It’s pushing in so many dimensions. I’ll give you an example that I’ve come across. There’s a research paper, and it’s been replicated in a university out of Texas and in a university out of Sydney, where AI—are you ready, Blake, for this?—yes, can read your mind. And this is not hyperbole. So what they did is an MRI, fMRI, where they look at brain activity, and they asked people to read a script. Now, as the people were reading the script, they used a language model to translate the brain activity into language, but the AI knew what the script was, so it created a model that mapped the fMRI input, whatever scan they were using, to text. Then what they did, they took the text away, and they said, Just think about something. And the AI got it mostly right, not perfectly. So just—just, let’s just pause and think about that. I don’t know where this is going, but it just shows the power of it. I think my conversation with Grok in my car on my way here was pretty fascinating, because after 10 minutes of sort of going back and forth, I kind of almost forgot I was talking to an AI. It’s so strange. It’s exciting. I’m excited about it. Just to be clear, I—

Blake Schofield 30:00
Think, to your point, I do have an optimist take on it, because I am a natural optimist. I am a possibilities person. It’s why and how I’ve transformed people and businesses my whole adult life. And what I believe to be true is that those that win adapt and innovate, and when we talk about the burnout crisis that we have going on right now, what I know to be true: when you are in survival mode, when you are in anxiety, when you are in stress, you can’t innovate. You don’t have the space. You actually can’t even access that part of your brain. It puts you at greatest risk, because you don’t have the clarity or the space or the ability to see how to take your skills and use them in the most beneficial way. And so I think these conversations are so important. And certainly, we didn’t even plan to talk about AI, which is what I love, right? Conversation goes where the conversation goes. Can AI be used in ways that are nefarious? Absolutely. So can every single piece of tool or technology that we’ve ever had as human beings. They become reflective of our society. But we need people engaged that want to use it in an ethical way, right? We need to be able to understand that when you have a piece of technology that can produce 10 or 100 times what a human being can, we have to understand the laws of business, which is that that technology is going to replace what is less efficient. That is just the reality, right? We’re talking profit. We’re talking numbers. That’s just the reality of things. So what I look at and say is, Okay, this is coming. Clearly it’s coming, and it’s not stopping. So then what do I do with that? How do I figure out how to use that to an advantage? How do I understand that for me? How do I understand what I’m gifted and talented at? How do I understand the way of which the world is moving, and then how do I leverage what I can leverage about my skills, my experience, my passion to be successful? And I think those are the questions I would challenge leaders to be thinking about today. If they aren’t already, right, these things aren’t happening to you. They are happening for you when you have the ability to see the scope of what’s changing and start really understanding how to optimize who you are and the value you bring.

Sebastien Price 32:29
I want to read a quote to you that reflects exactly the same idea. I came across it last week, and I think it’s just so directly related to what we’re talking about with AI. It’s by Eric Hoffer: In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists. So I would say to those that come to you, Blake, that are anxious about AI disrupting their jobs, to be a learner, not a learned, not someone who knows things, but someone who likes to learn things. And that makes the whole journey exciting. Like you, I’m an optimist. Yeah.

Blake Schofield 33:21
Yes, I love that. Be a lifelong learner. It’s definitely the pursuit of learning that I have really leaned into these last eight years as an entrepreneur that gives me so much joy. From my perspective, there’s so much joy in learning who I am and what I am capable of and how to improve that on a weekly basis. That gives me a tremendous amount of joy. It also gives me an empowerment and an ability to know that I can navigate whatever change is coming my way. And I think so many more leaders need that sense of empowerment in their life. You shared with me one of the things I want to make sure that we cover, because I was like, Oh, I definitely want to hear Sebastian’s opinion on this. You said, You’re not burned out. You’re addicted to the wrong goals. How so?

Sebastien Price 34:15
So in a survey of millennials, 80% of respondents said their goal in life was to become rich, and 50% said their goal was to become famous. I want to be really clear, there’s nothing wrong with traditional measurable goals like this, but there are decades of research in positive psychology that show that reaching those goals is not going to make you a person who thrives in life longer term. And this is where I become fascinated with positive psychology, because you ask, If not those goals, then what? There’s a really famous story—not story—study, Blake, from Harvard. It’s famous because it’s been going on for about 80 years, so generations of people. Robert Waldinger is running this study right now, and in the study, they asked people throughout their lifetime to self-report their level of happiness and all sorts of different questions. It’s a real scientific survey. But what’s fascinating is they had people at five years old, and then they followed them throughout their lifetime over several generations. It’s called the Harvard Study on Happiness. Robert Waldinger wrote a book, The Good Life, about this study, and the goal was to say, Okay, what really makes people thrive in the long run? And in that sample, they had people that had tremendous professional success, they had people that went to jail, they had people that were healthy, they had people that had cancer. They had all the multiple colors of human experience. And they started running these statistical factor models, which I’m familiar with in my day job, because it was factor models for financial markets. But here they did factor models, basically trying to say what contributes positively to people’s self-reported happiness. And the first answer is not much. Like the millennials’ goals, or whatever sample of the population you take: I want to become rich. I want to become famous. Again, nothing wrong with pursuing these goals. It’s perfectly fine. Go ahead, go for it. It’s motivating. But clearly there was one factor, like whether people went to jail, whether people were healthy, whether they were sick, whatever—there was one factor. Basically, for happiness in the long run, it was the quality of people’s relationships in their lives. That’s it. And so if you’re addicted to your goals of making more money, getting a promotion—you know, I’ve been there. I’m still there in some ways, right? That’s fine, but there’s just such a different perspective you get from positive psychology, where you’re going to thrive if you have positive relationships, if you’re engaged—and I know you talk a lot in your show about lack of engagement at work—if you have meaning, which I know you’ve talked about on your show as well. You know, if you feel intrinsic motivation to learn, as we were just talking about, that’s a very meaningful sense. You get a sense of meaning out of what you do, not just how many dollars you make at the end of the year. And if you just focus on longer-term accomplishment, you just get a completely different perspective. So that’s what I mean, addicted to the wrong goals. And what happens when you are—you get goal-induced blindness, which is well documented in the literature, in psychology, Everest being the example. People sacrifice their safeties. The idea of goal-induced blindness is you’re just so addicted, so focused on your goal, usually a measurable goal, that you lose sight of everything else that might matter in your life. And according to positive psychology, it’s the relationships in your life that really matter, and you’re going to sacrifice those. Blake, I had a major case of this the first, say, 10 years of my career. And it sounds like you had it a little bit too in your retail experience, right? I just, I was not even taking care of myself. I wasn’t sleeping. I was traveling the world. I was just, like, addicted to success. So goal-induced blindness is a real, real problem. People will sacrifice their safety. Companies will cheat. People will sacrifice their relationships, and at the end, they’re addicted to the wrong goals. That’s the problem. And I know you’ve talked about this in prior episodes, but the dopamine effect of reaching a measurable goal, right? That’s kind of what creates the addiction. You always want more, and that’s a treadmill that accelerates, and at some point you fall off the treadmill.

Blake Schofield 38:48
100%. I often say that achievement doesn’t fix a misaligned life. How you feel about your day to day is what matters most. It’s really easy to believe You’ll be happy when—I’ll be happy when I get that promotion or that new house or X, Y, Z. And it’s a really interesting thing. It’s something I’ve studied quite a lot, experienced personally and through my coaching, which I know to be true by and large. Those of us that are high achievers, in many cases, became high achievers because that’s what we were praised for as children. That is how we’ve defined our worth and value in the world. And so when we are under high stress and pressure, we tend to actually work harder. We tend to believe that we can eventually get to this mysterious place where we’ve shown enough value, or we’ve achieved enough. And if you look at the patterns—and I’ve been studying this for decades—there becomes a point when you realize that you have all of the things on the piece of paper that were success, but it doesn’t feel like success. And for me, that happened at 40. I finally just got done, and I realized that what I was doing was—going to make me happy. And I think that happens to us all of the time, but often we don’t have the right mentorship, or we don’t have the right tools or strategies to understand you actually don’t have to sacrifice all the things that you worked so hard for. It’s actually about doing less. You don’t need to do more. You can do less in your zone and be far more effective, and then have a far more balanced life. And that is what I learned. I had all of the things—success on a piece of paper—but I had this deep feeling of unsettled that there had to be something more for my life. And my biggest fear was, How can I—how can I get that thing that I really want for my life, right? Being more present and more involved with my kids, suffering from less guilt from having to choose between—without having to sacrifice the income or the lifestyle or everything I worked so hard for. It’s a huge part of what I’ve been doing for the last eight years, and my heart is to be able to help high achievers who are stuck in that cycle understand there is a better way. Because it’s really easy to say, Well, you know, this doesn’t work, and change it. But when so much of your life and how you’ve functioned is from a place of survival—like, This is who I am, and this is how I survive—and you get caught in that survival mode because you’re stressed, it’s really important to get into the layers of understanding why and actually shift and get the root cause out of the way. Otherwise, it’s your willpowering your way through it with a lot of guilt and shame, like what you were talking about—like, I shouldn’t be stressed. I shouldn’t feel this way. I should be, you know, more present with my family—and you’re having to override, literally, your subconscious belief systems, which drive 90 to 95% of your decision-making, and your nervous system. It’s nearly impossible for people to do that because they’re not solving the root cause of the problem, right? They’re not solving what’s driving the overwork, or what’s driving the belief systems that success has to look this way. And so what you share, I fundamentally know to be true and have lived through, and want to be able to give hope to the high achievers who are successful but are saying, Gosh, there has to be a better way. There is. There is so much better of a way.

Sebastien Price 42:14
Yeah, look, I couldn’t agree more. And it really sounds personal when you explain this, and I can—I can—I hear you with a sense of mission, which I know you talk about meaning as well. But when you say, Now I want to help people discover that for themselves, that’s a mission that you have. That’s an intrinsic motivation. I love money management. I think I have longevity in this business because I really enjoy the intrinsic intellectual challenge behind it. But also, every day we go to work—and this is going to sound like we don’t talk about this enough, the role of money management—but every day we go to work, we want to make money for our clients so they can live better financial lives. You know, we make money for our clients so they can put their kids to college, so they can retire with more money, so they can, you know, pay their bills and just have more financial security. It’s tremendously meaningful. You know, people think of Wall Street—my friends call me a bankster—you know, they think of the money management world as just fully self-interested, all about your own goals that are materialistic. But I don’t think I would have—I would be at year 25 in my career if I didn’t truly believe that what we do is a mission where we just help people improve their financial lives, and it’s actually a meaningful activity to do. And—but, you know, it is an industry where goal-induced blindness can set in, and I’ve had it, and I almost died. I was exhausted. I spent a week in the hospital with an infection. And this is a story that I have in the book, The Psychology of Leadership. But this was around year six or seven of my career. I was completely run down, completely stressed and exhausted, and I went out to exercise, and I didn’t know what happened until much later, but I started getting fever. I had to be hospitalized. They couldn’t figure out what I had. It was massive pain. It was—it was like a life or death situation where they found the right antibiotics, but I was just so run down that I made it through. I was fine. But after that, I realized, like, I’ve got to take better care of myself. That story is in the book, The Psychology of Leadership, but I end the book with that story, because it’s a meaningful story to me. But we think of Wall Street. We think of money management as this just hardcore, materialistic world. But if really that’s what you’re all about, I don’t think you’re going to have a 25-year career or more. And so I’m saying that because I hear you speak with tremendous amount of meaning in what you do now. And I feel meaning in my work, and that’s part of—that’s part of it. Goal-induced blindness. You know, if you want to climb Everest, Blake—I don’t know—you have a 4% chance of dying if you want to reach the summit. That’s the statistics. 4%. So I don’t know—like, at the end of one chapter in my book where I talk about goal-induced blindness, I always finished a chapter with a little joke or a little quip. I go, If you take one piece of advice from this entire book, if you ever feel like climbing Everest, here’s my advice: Don’t. No, you know, and I’ve been on a podcast with someone who’s climbed Seven Summits, including Everest. So I highly respect the endeavor, but you know why?

Blake Schofield 45:45
Yeah, I think in the end, right? I truly believe, and what I’ve seen, is that each of us is wired a certain way—a wired a certain way—for how we create success, what is meaningful to us, the life that we want to lead. And I think there are some people that are wired to do that. And then, right, I look and I say, Well, you have a 96% success rate. So how do you avoid the 4% of things that you don’t—snap into you, Blake, you know.

Sebastien Price 46:13
You know the best way to avoid dying? It’s someone climbed, never reached the summit 30 times. The number one skill is quitting, which is actually a completely underrated skill in business as well. When do you quit something that’s not working? Yes, that’s an antidote to goal-induced blindness. Yeah.

Blake Schofield 46:34
So you quit when you need to, so you preserve your energy and you come back when you’re ready again. Is that it?

Sebastien Price 46:41
Yeah, or if the weather gets bad, and you know you’re not going to have time. If you have goal-induced blindness, you’re going to take the risk. You’re going to try to reach the summit anyways, and that’s when bad things happen. Also, a lot of the deaths are unpredictable, but yeah, the goal of quitting, whatever it is that you’re into—the way you describe your prior business life—you quit, and you made the right decision, because it wasn’t—you know, it was like, not good for you.

Blake Schofield 47:10
Obviously, one of my favorite quotes is from Virginia Satir: Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. Love it. Most of us continue doing something that has a very low probability of creating what we truly want in life, because we’re scared that we don’t know what lies on the other side. For me, I knew what I was going to get in my corporate career. I knew I was successful. I knew I had a paycheck. I knew what that looked like. I had to learn that uncertainty was actually a possibility. Uncertainty was all of the things that were possible that I was not giving myself access to by staying in something that I knew could not and would not fulfill me.

Sebastien Price 47:55
And making the leap, right? It’s a big leap when you’ve had—when you are in a successful career. Now, I don’t think right now we’re advising everybody to all quit their jobs and go do something that sounds fun, but I think it comes back to your concept that you’ve hinted a few times about of misalignment, right? That’s where—that’s where it’s not, fundamentally not, working. But I don’t think we’re telling everybody to quit their jobs, right? Just to clarify.

Blake Schofield 48:22
No, definitely not. And when I ran The Bridge to Fulfillment, I talked about, You can build a bridge instead of taking a leap. What I would say to people is these small misalignments exist in every part of your life. Every single part. And when you can see it and start actioning it in really small ways, that’s how you create the most progress. So, right? You’re doing something on a weekly basis in your job that creates stress, friction, misalignment. It’s not working. Why do you keep doing it? Because, quote unquote, That’s the way we’ve always done it. Because I’m uncomfortable and somebody might not want to change it. It’s something sometimes as small as that, where, like, This thing is not working. It’s creating misery for me. How do I start then looking at it differently? What if I actually tried to solve this frustration or this stressful relationship or this stressful project or this stressful way of doing things? It literally, Sebastian, can start that small. And what I have really come to embrace, understand, and is a huge part of my methodology, is helping people raise the floor. If you can start solving those things on a daily basis that are creating energy drains, friction, stress, misalignment, you start really realizing the capability that you have to truly transform almost everything in your life. It’s so powerful, but we often think it has to start with these big things, and it doesn’t. It really can start very small. This thing isn’t working. It’s not going to get me where I want to go. How do I think about it differently? And it’s less risk and tremendous reward when you can just start doing that on a daily and weekly basis. Over time, it creates massive shifts in how you feel on a day-to-day basis.

Sebastien Price 50:07
It’s amazing how taking a pebble out of your shoe is gonna—is gonna just make your life better, right? So these supposedly small things that are draining your energy every week, every day—can you—can you address them more proactively? I love that concept.

Blake Schofield 50:27
Thank you all. It’s been such a pleasure, and I feel like our time is almost up. But I would be really remiss if I didn’t ask you two more questions. Do you have a couple more minutes?

Sebastien Price 50:27
Absolutely.

Blake Schofield 50:27
Okay. The first thing I would love to know—you know, one of the big things that we wanted to talk about today was, How do you turn setbacks into growth and use failure as fuel for resilience? Can you share your perspective on that and maybe give a simple one or two-step thing that somebody that’s listening today that maybe is facing challenges or feels like they are facing failure that they could use to move them forward?

Sebastien Price 51:06
Okay, I’m gonna mention Roger Federer. I have to. Roger Federer went completely viral when he addressed students because he talked about losing. You know, here’s one of the top tennis players of all time. He’s talking to students about losing. He said that he’s played 1,500 tennis matches, and he’s won 80% of them—one of the best of all time. But then he looked at the students, and he asked, What percentage of the points do you think I won? And it’s remarkable, because he only won 54% of the points. So Roger Federer, one of the top tennis players of all time, almost lost one out of every other points. Then he goes, No matter what game you play in life, you’re going to lose. Get used to it. I’m paraphrasing. He also said, like, The best in the world, they’re the best in the world not because they never lose. They’re the best in the world because they know they’re going to lose over and over again, and they’ve learned to embrace—embrace the losses as growth, as learning opportunities. So it goes back to the growth mindset. In terms of practical tips—it’s really important in our business, but I think it can apply in multiple areas—something goes badly for you, it’s a setback, it’s a loss. There are probably several reasons why, including reasons that were not under your control. There’s a tremendous amount of randomness and luck and bad luck in life. If you start examining your losses, your setbacks, and differentiating between, Did I follow the right process? Did I do something that was aligned with my values? Did I do something that was meaningful to me? That’s the real question, not the outcome. So I want people to think much less about the outcomes and think about their skills, their process, and how they came to make the decisions they made. No one makes perfect decisions. The example I like to use is, If we go out and drink a bottle of wine and I decide to drive home, that’s a horrible decision, but if I make it home safely, it’s actually a good outcome. Now, am I self-aware enough—this is an extreme example—to know that even though I got a good outcome, it was a bad decision? Now let’s say I decide instead to hire an Uber, but the Uber crashes—horrible outcome—but it was the right decision. So it sounds trite, but there’s so much more you can learn from losing than from winning, and that’s why, in The Psychology of Leadership, I talk a lot about sports psychology, because sports psychology is not about winning. It’s all about losing. Sports psychologists are obsessed with losing, because that’s where you learn and grow. So it’s the growth mindset. Yeah, I think—I think, Blake, this has been so much fun. We could keep talking. We could do a Joe Rogan style podcast for four hours, but I think we both have to go on to other things. Yeah.

Blake Schofield 54:10
It’s been—it’s been such a pleasure connecting with you. Like I said, I believe that there’s so much opportunity for leaders to learn these skills. These aren’t things that we’ve been taught. We certainly know tremendously more about this than we did 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s these pieces of knowledge and tools and the way that we look at how we’re thinking, where we’re putting our time, energy, and focus that help to align people’s lives with what they value and meaning and fulfillment and better health and all of the things that I think ultimately we all want. But in a society that often teaches the opposite, we get lost in finding our own way. So thank you for spending the time and energy and your perspective with me today. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. With that said, how can we find your book? How could people follow you if they’d like to learn more from you?

Sebastien Price 55:13
Thank you. The Psychology of Leadership is everywhere books are sold, and the best way to find me is probably on LinkedIn, on social media.

Blake Schofield 55:21
Great. Well, we’ll put all of that in the show notes for anyone listening. And so with that said, is there anything you would like to close us out with that you feel passionate about sharing with the world?

Sebastien Price 55:31
Foster positive relationships in your life, and you shall thrive.

Blake Schofield 55:39
Thank you. Thank you for being here today, and until next time, lead with intention and create your Impact with Ease. Most successful people don’t realize they’re in burnout because stress and exhaustion have become so normalized, but burnout is actually a sign of deeper misalignment between how you’re wired to thrive and how you’re actually working and living. Fix the misalignment and everything changes. Take the free quiz at impactwithease dot com forward slash burnout dash type to discover your burnout type and get next steps to reclaim your energy, lead with confidence, and create more ease in your life and career.