Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

One of Gary’s seminal works is Evolving Beyond Thought: Updating Your Brain’s Software. It’s available in paperback at https://amzn.to/4u3qXFh.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8 . The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– Self-Awareness: The #1 Predictor of Leadership Success with Belinda Gore

– Our Emotional Recession: How to Lead When People Are Depleted with Joshua Freedman

– From Stress to Strength: How to Rewire Your Brain for Resilience with Jon Wortmann

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Gary Weber is an American author and teacher known for integrating neuroscience, meditation, and nondual inquiry. With a background in science, military service, and senior executive leadership, Weber brings a research-informed lens to questions of consciousness and decision-making. He is the author of Happiness Beyond Thought and Evolving Beyond Thought, where he explores the nature of thinking, identity, and well-being through both contemplative practice and cognitive science. His work bridges rigorous analysis with experiential insight, offering practical approaches to understanding how the brain shapes perception, belief, and behavior.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] I am really excited to have Gary Weber join us. He’s a subject and collaborator in neuroscience studies.

So, Gary, thank you so much for being with us . Let’s start with the idea of the elephant and the rider. And I know you’ve talked about that before, but let’s reground in that first.

Gary: Okay. Maureen as we have discussed before, one chunk of new information we’ve gotten fairly recently is the fact that there’s a conscious part of the brain.

And a part of the brain is not conscious that we’re not aware of what’s going on down there. The difference in processing capability between the rider, the conscious person that we are, the blah, blah talk, talk, talking all the time, is it runs a 40 to 60 bit per second processor, can handle basically seven pieces of data at the same time and solve one problem.

Very limited capability. The offline part, the elephant that we talk about, runs at least at 25 million bits a [00:01:00] second, and much higher than that because it’s operating massively parallel. The rider has, has about one 500,000th of the capacity of the elephant. The elephant basically does all of the work.

Uh, virtually all of the decisions get made. All of the processing that gets done for the body is done in the elephant. Uh, the rider has a very small role in this. There’s a reason we evolve this to be the way it is, but really everything, 99.99% of what gets done physically, mentally, emotionally happens offline parts were non-consciously available to us in the elephant.

So begin getting at in your consciousness about the difference between what we’re conscious of. And what we can’t be conscious of, which is the vast majority of all the processing that goes on, including decision making and choices.

Maureen: So much of what we do is based on habit, and yet by being more conscious [00:02:00] and using the practices you talk about, I can start to reprogram that unconscious elephant and shift some of those functions to my conscious writer.

Gary: We can’t shift very much to the rider ’cause there’s not much processing capability there.

What you find happens is that as you become more accustomed to working with this offline processor and recognizing that’s where all the work gets done, that you begin de-emphasizing the strength of the rider. And you more let go into the realization that in fact, the decisions are all being made continuously in the elephant.

Second to second, every decision that you make, whether it’s, do I go left or right at this next door, do I pick up the tea or the coffee? Do I enter the phone or go someplace else that’s being made continuously offline? In the elephant, we’re not even conscious of that as the rider. It’s just happening continuously through the day, almost second by second in the elephant without us even [00:03:00] being aware that is taking place.

We’re just up there basically as a press secretary. We only hear about the decisions if there are major ones that might impact us and the need communication to other rider on other elephants. But it really goes heavily offline. The more you get into this and begin to understand where the processing is, and it’s 99.99%, there’s a pile of cognitive neuroscience research supporting this.

Maureen: How does that work?

Gary: Well, how it works is, you know, the elephant has lots of background information on all kinds of decisions. You might be making a decision in your business. And so the elephant has background history from having watched this operation go on for probably years and years.

And what it does is the decision comes up and the elephant has two sets. It has pro and con, and it’s running pros and cons against all major decisions, even all minor decisions. It really votes. [00:04:00] Basically, it goes out and gets constituencies that cross the brain. And assembles those and cues them up and whichever one has the most votes, pros and cons.

When the time comes to make a decision, that’s who gets the nod, and that’s what the decision is. And that’s how tr and it’s transmitted up to the rider as a feeling. How the elephant talks to the rider by feeling. As a feeling comes up, it has a certain energy to it, and the writer just broadcasts out, okay, this is what we’re going to do, but it’s all done vote by vote by vote offline. Almost none of which we’re conscious of.

Maureen: So there are these constituent parts of my brain. Where do those parts come from that are voting pro and con?

Gary: That’s wherever the elephant finds them useful to engage them. There’s kind of a recruiting process that goes on in complicated decisions where each side pros and cons, uh, runs around and gathers up constituencies all across the [00:05:00] brain that might have some kind of an interest in this vote.

But it’s scattered all over the brain and it’s, uh, basically going around and trying to recruit enough people for the pros or the cons, whichever side you’re on in the elephant. To get your votes there and it will change with time. I mean, what was a good decision for your business before?

With a lot of situations behind it may become, oh, the elephant gets more and more information con, it’s able to come up then and upset that, change the bias and then shift it over to doing the con. It’s an ongoing, continuous process of voting on who’s still only going to be pro or con and move this process ahead.

Maureen: I understand that when I’m out talking to people, there are different human constituents, but what’s curious to me is in my brain there are different constituents. How does that happen?

Gary: Well, if you watch, as you go through the day, as you talk to people, you’ll see that, uh, we don’t have the same personality show up for [00:06:00] every meeting. If you meet with person A, there’s a certain Maureen shows up for person A, person B, then a different Maureen shows up for person B and on and on. If it’s A and B, B and C, A, B, and C, different Maureens show up for each one of those meetings; you can actually watch this change.

You can feel it in the course of the day. So we have many, many different– It’s not just one I there. It has many, many hundreds, perhaps thousands of eyes there that situationally on ad hoc basis or as relationships change, the Maureen changes. So it’s really a dynamic process, which kind of undermines this idea that we have a constant eye that is there all the time talking to people.

If you watch carefully, you don’t think up what you say, you don’t even think up your thoughts. Okay. And so you have to get a feeling for this that in fact, you know this is a constantly changing, shifting ground, this Maureen thing we’ve [00:07:00] got or Gary thing or whatever.

Maureen: I get that I am different when I’m with my sweetie than I am with my business partner and appropriately so.

So it’s almost as if, if I look at an infographic and there are lots of little people, all those little versions of me are, one may be soft and kind, one may be more directive and business focused. One may be more compassionate. All those constituents live inside of my brain and they all vote against each other.

Gary: Well, what they do is as you show up in your meetings with the course of the day there is for that situation and there’s a lot of background on meeting with your sweetie or meeting with your business partner, or meeting with your boss, or meeting with, you know, one of your clients. There’s a lot of background behind who shows up for each one of those things and what your past history has been with that particular person.

It certainly gives you this sense of, okay, which [00:08:00] Maureen shows up and how is she gonna manifest today? Because that may also change as you meet your client with time or different clients or you’ve had good experience or bad experiences with them so that Maureen can change. But it is sorted out for each individual situation on an ad hoc basis, which Gary or Maureen or Bob or Fred shows up for whatever meeting is taking place. And so it’s important to recognize as leaders that we have this shifting ground and the people we’re talking to, they’re having the same kind of shifting ground. So they’re making this decision a different personality as we are.

Maureen: What’s happening in the brain that relates to confirmation bias?

Gary: One of the most, I’d say not good things that we evolved into our current hierarchical structure in our brain, which we evolved probably starting 70,000 years ago and really got cranked up maybe 45,000 years ago, is confirmation [00:09:00] bias.

We were in large hierarchical organizations. We were able to get large masses of forces assembled in complicated roles, and reassigned them to do some amazing things. And with that, we became the dominant species on the planet. Part of that hierarchical confirmation or hierarchical structure relied upon confirmation bias.

And what it was, was going to take whatever information I have now, I’m going to keep gathering more information to support that belief. So if I believe it’s, it’s the left. Then I keep gathering information that supports my belief that it’s left, and I just reinforce that and reinforce that continuously.

How this really bothers us as managers or really confounds us as managers is that we have a difficult time getting contrary inputs. We are, so you can see it in today’s news media with, uh, fake news, et cetera. We keep feeding [00:10:00] into what we call already believe. If we read left leaning newspapers, we keep reading, left leaning newspapers or right, or whatever.

If you like the Eagles and you don’t like the Patriots, then you keep gathering Eagle information and not doing Patriots information. So you just keep building up more and more information supporting your already existing biases. And what, how that, what that leads you to eventually is that you really are almost incapable of accepting information that’s contrary to what your current beliefs are.

This can be so some research on this that shows that in fact, if you get fed information that strongly predicts, contradicts your current biases, you’ll some in your brain try to find some way to twist that around so it really supports what you already believe. So it’s very important that, uh, managers, especially if you’re in the C-suite have some way to get some unwanted contrary inputs different from your current misconceptions.

Maureen: Every time I log onto my [00:11:00] computer, I get more information about the stuff I read regularly and I don’t get much information at all about contrary points of view. So I’m already being fed data that supports my bias and then my brain kicks in and reinforces that.

Gary: Well, that’s an important observation. What you make, if you’re on YouTube or something, you look over the right hand side, you will notice you get fed not just things that support your confirmation bias, but many things that are emotionally charged.

Google has found that everybody else has found that if you have very strong emotionally charged beliefs what you want to be fed is even stronger confirmation. And so, Google tees this up. The depend who you talked to about the, who did what when in the past administrations, in the past five or 10 years they just feed into the most emotionally charged input they can have.

That confirms your bias and you’ll jump to that. And the stronger it is, [00:12:00] the more powerful it is, the more you’ll go that direction. So they just feed this direction more and more. It didn’t, doesn’t matter. And from the outside really, if the United States people, this is a, a personal viewpoint, whether they went left or right, just that they weren’t far apart.

And so a lot of the feeding into this thing, that fake news was really designed apparently to split us apart even more and more and more. And so now we’ve lost our middle. All we have is left and right. So we’ve gotta find some way to force ourselves to get some unwanted contrary inputs. And I would suggest the ways to do this are to really make a conscious effort to get some viewpoints from the other side.

There is a rational decision on both sides of the equation. It’s not all one or the other, but you’ve gotta recognize that there is something behind other people’s viewpoints. And if you can, you know, get another news source, uh, read something, uh, meet somebody who comes from that other standpoint, [00:13:00] uh, you need that to get yourself self corrected.

And that’s why I, I urge people to start, you know, bring in consultants from outside that don’t just give you what you wanna hear, which is a real bias in consultants. They wanna get this contract, they wanna keep it going on, so they will tend to find out what you want to hear and they will tend to give you what you want to hear.

So from that standpoint, you need to look very hard to get contrary inputs. And managers have to also at the same time, be open to accepting honest input from subordinates and peers without fear of being punished. They have to recognize that you are interested in the truth in some different perspective on what you’re doing.

Many managers are not secure enough in themselves to be able to accept that. So they will just shut down any input that doesn’t fit into their bias. And they’re the ones that get into trouble, trouble with their business. You know, you get into your business and you won’t listen to any input from outside.

How do you know the stories about your business are true? [00:14:00] We believe they’re true. We believe these things. We believe they’re this and that. But if you look at the history of the last 10 years at what’s happened to many businesses, they’ve been completely blindsided. They completely missed the obvious challenge.

And so there are ways to just ask very simple questions about the stories in your business. Find out what the stories about your business are. Are they true stories? Are they just things you’ve been telling yourself? And can you be certain they’re true? Do you have anybody giving you a completely 108 degrees out different perspective?

But if you don’t do that, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna be sitting there and suddenly Amazon appears on the scene. Unless you’re ready for that, unless you can see that coming someplace along the line, you’re just wiped out. The big disruptions, you’re not going to see through the last 30 years there’re countless stories of big businesses, very successful who completely missed a turn because they were so stuck in their [00:15:00] stories.

Maureen: So it sounds like even if I get contrary viewpoints, they will feel uncomfortable as the elephant passes this information to the rider. So say I am liberal , but I have a trusted family member who’s conservative.

They give a well articulated point of view. That’s gonna feel worse to me than I hear even a less articulate point of view that confirms mine. Is that correct?

Gary: That’s absolutely correct. Yes. I mean, if you anything from the other side there’s gonna be a very strong attempt made by your elephant that’s really leaning that way strongly to twist it around to make it look like it really, okay.

It’s really this over here, they could turn it to 180 degrees, but if someone comes in from the other side, you have to find some way to predict that coming. Left and right. Yes, but also just look at your business. You can just [00:16:00] run down a long, long list of companies who completely missed the term they shouldn’t.

These changes shouldn’t have happened. They should have been able to see this coming. You could argue that Walmart should never have happened for so many other people in that space, and yet it happened. No one in that space saw this coming. Nor did they see what would happen with Amazon coming. Same thing happened in Books Publishing.

So many places just didn’t see it coming. You have to get contrary information in, so in fact, you’re ready for the possibility that your stories about your business are completely true. They may be false, may be totally false. You need to be prepared for that by getting some contrary information from some source, consultants, media, whatever.

Find some way to get contrary information.

Maureen: I get the point that I need to get contrary information. I heard that loud and clear and yet there’s still this bit of, even if I get [00:17:00] really solid contrary information, my gut response or my physiological response or, or the elephant passing the message to the rider is still gonna be a beware: That’s inconsistent with what I know. So I’m gonna hit this confirmation bias concern. Is there any way I can attend to that or just I know that that’s the way the brain works?

Gary: If you start to disconnect yourself from every piece of news, every day, every minute, I think is one thing you can do for yourself to begin to let this be less virulent. I mean, do we really need to know every piece of news? All the time, every day? If you’re chasing that, then you’re gonna get fed. You’re gonna s seek to feed that and strengthen it over and over again, your confirmation bias. So see if you can let go of very piece of news that you were getting before and just, you know, don’t do that.

Just let go of the necessity to do that, and don’t feed it more. You can, [00:18:00] but you really have to look. I mean, I would say sit down with yourself or your collaborators and ask What are the stories about my business? What do I believe this business is about? And what do I think its strengths and weakness are?

This is business, you know, 1 0 1. And just ask yourself, are these now still true? And they will all say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, are you sure somebody has to be there asking. Are you certain that’s correct? If you can get somebody from outside, that can be helpful.

Maureen: So I need to take in more data. I need to spend less time on social media and in the sources that continue to confirm my already clear bias. And I need to have a person or people in my life with a significantly differing point of view, not slightly different. Not my best friend who thinks a little differently, but that person that I’m really not so fond of having a glass of wine with who’s looks at the world incredibly differently than [00:19:00] me.

Gary: Yes. And one thing that this gets, this gets a little different is ask yourself just in the course of your day, put an app on your smartphone and in the course of the day, just stop. Four breaks, maybe every one to two minutes. And just ask yourself very simply, where am I?

It’s a question you should know the answer to.

Maureen: I should know where I am. I’m sitting at my desk recording an interview, but there’s a deeper value in asking that question, why am I doing that?

Gary: Yes, why am I doing that? Why I’m doing that is just to get a break in the course of the day. For me, it’s a question I ask myself many, many times for many, many years, and I thought, is it an empirical scientist and heavily involved in neuroscience? I should be able to answer that question.

You know, I say, where am I? You say, huh, interesting question, and I couldn’t find the answer to that. And now with our neuroscience, as we look across our brain, this goes back to what we talked about before [00:20:00] with the many Maureens. I mean, you try to look around your brain. You can see that there is no one Maureen.

You can actually watch the long wave frequencies sweeping across the cortex of your brain, creating new Maureens. As every relationship change, every situation changes. And you say, where am I? In fact, you find out that you can’t find yourself anywhere. There is no one eye there. And we’ve got lots of ways to do this, but just asking that question, you say, where am I?

You’ll notice the brain just stops for a little short period ’cause it can’t find the answer. It knows there’s not an answer. So it’s running around hunting for an answer, but it can find one, and that’s very useful. You get a break and it’s a very important data for the brain to get that little what?

What happened? Where am I? I can’t find myself. You begin to undermine this belief that we, in fact, as an or one continuous entity that makes decisions because in fact, we don’t make decisions, the [00:21:00] eye doesn’t make decisions. The elephant makes decisions, the writer doesn’t make decisions. The elephant makes decisions.

And so what are we doing and where are we?

Maureen: You’re saying I should do this on a regular basis every day because it gives my brain an opportunity to kind of recalibrate.

This is an ongoing practice that allows my brain to recalibrate and the value is the ongoing 30 second break or a minute break that my brain takes and recalibrates and then comes back online more effectively.

Gary: Correct? Yes. Even if it, it is just to give your stream of craziness during the course of the day a break. If you just stop for a minute or two and just ask yourself, where am I? You’d be surprised at the answer.

I mean, you might think, well, I’m sitting at my desk, but you say, yeah, but what? But where am I? Yeah. And this is a desk here, but, but this really, this eye that’s going around talking to itself all day long, criticizing itself, [00:22:00] judging itself, blaming itself, telling it to do itself better. Frightened, anxious, is that a real entity.

And you begin looking, where am I? You should be able to find that. And we know inside the brain watching the brain operate. It’s not any place. It’s all over the place. So you begin to understand that in fact, it’s the elephant that’s doing all this work. And what you as the writer are doing is not that important.

’cause we can’t even find out where you are as the writer. And we see you change all the time. You constantly change.

Maureen: Yeah, I do constantly change, much to the chagrin I think, of people who think they understand me. Gary, you said 99.9% of the calculations being done, I am unconscious of. And yet there is this perception as humans that we’re in control of our lives, and the more in control, the more effective we are. This seems to be at odds with the elephant and rider [00:23:00] idea. Can you elaborate on this?

Gary: Well, it’s more than an elephant and rider idea.

That’s the definitive neuroscience, we are not in control of the elephant clearly. But you say, well, can, can we accept, can we understand the fact that we don’t have control over the forces that move our lives? To quote ,Albert Einstein a questioner asked him, how did you come up with these amazing discoveries?

And Einstein says, I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined the beginning as well as the end by forces over which we have no control. And so that was the, the voice of one of the most intelligent persons of the last century. We really do not have control over who wins the election.

Who has the weather who controls the volcanoes? Uh, we just don’t have any control over those mega events, nor do we have any control over something as simple as do we think up our thoughts? If we don’t think up our thoughts? And we don’t. If you watch yourself think up what we say. All these other [00:24:00] things are out of our control.

Why are we trying to believe we can be in control when in fact we really can’t be, we can’t affect those things, the major things in our lives clearly, and even the minor things in our lives. If you watch in the course of a day, nothing comes out the way you expect it to.

Maureen: For those of us who were brought up thinking we are supposed to be in charge of our lives and our businesses and everything around us, this seems like almost a heretical statement that I’m in fact not in control.

So what am I doing here? Help me understand a little bit more of this. You’re not in control, and yet you live your life in a way that you’re a, an incredibly intelligent, successful man. How did you get there? How does this work for you?

Gary: Well, I was a highly deterministic person until I finally saw in fact that I wasn’t even there.

I did this, where am I? Who am I, what is this [00:25:00] thing? And I found out from all the reasoning we just discussed, that in fact, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t, I was never in control. I believed I had been. And so the great thing about it was it became a wonderful way to live because I didn’t punish myself as a fundamental Christian ex by saying how bad I was, how guilty I was for not succeeding, why I failed. You begin to recognize, look, All I can do is show up a hundred percent and just do what comes to me to be done. And I have found that to be an amazingly efficient way to operate and a much more creative way to operate. If I don’t have a narrative going on in a writer continuously that you failed, you’re no good. This is not working out. What’s wrong with you? If you don’t have that narrative going on, things get a lot different. And so you then can be look like the smartest person in the room. When I ended up, did all these things happen to me and I found out that I wasn’t there? Wasn’t in control.

It’s amazing how much better I became at business [00:26:00] because I wasn’t, I was the only person in the room all the time. Everybody else was someplace else in the room for most of the meeting. So I was the only person who really caught all the intonations, all the voice changes, had done the work ahead of time.

And amazingly, you’re much, much more creative. So it’s actually not to be in control of your life turns out to be much more effective than trying to be in control of it.

Maureen: So if I’m not in control then I can let go of those inner conversations and because I’ve let go of that, I can now be fully present to what’s happening in a meeting or as I’m writing or as I’m in conversation, all of my parts, all of those Maureens can now show up and be engaged ’cause they’re not off doing the other things that brains do.

Gary: Exactly. You look at why we’re so anxious, so frightened, so outta [00:27:00] control, so concerned. It’s because we think we are, we should be in control. But it’s clear we can’t be. We aren’t. We never have been. And once you realize that, you just let go into this.

Just try it for a week and just recognize, in fact, I am not in control. And see what happens. See what your life looks like. And see if it doesn’t make a much more holistic, useful, creative, happy life than the one that you’re reliving right now.

Maureen: So you’ve been doing this for how long? The idea of being not in control.

Gary: 20 years.

Maureen: And what did that feel like at the beginning? ’cause again, I’m imagining many people listening are saying no way.

Gary: Well, and they are, and they will do that. And I’m saying just, you know, take all this with a grain of salt. I recognize this. Mm-hmm. This is a big jump. But at the same time, just ask yourself, do I think up my thoughts as simple as that.

Just watch your brain and see if you think up your thoughts. If you don’t think [00:28:00] up your thoughts, why do you think you’re in control? And just see in the course of a day, does anything turn out exactly like you felt it had to turn out? We just don’t have that ability.

Maureen: So I can say thoughts come into my head all the time.

Uh, and some of them I hope I don’t think of ’cause they’re not very nice. Uh, others seem brilliant and I also think, I didn’t think those up, but the, the leap from that to I have no control still feels daunting.

Gary: It’s daunting, but just ask yourself if you just watch, do you consciously think up the thoughts you have or do they just appear?

Maureen: Lots of them just appear.

Gary: Okay. You just watch and see if any of them don’t just appear. They just don’t, they just, you don’t think up your thoughts, and if you don’t, how can you believe you could be in control?

Maureen: Because I’ve always thought I was in control. I thought I became successful ’cause I worked hard.

All that [00:29:00] stuff that we are taught our entire lives.

Gary: Yes. False. I mean, false, false, false. The neuroscience just doesn’t support it. And even your simple own experience, if you watch up, do you think up what you say? You don’t think up what you see. If you had to think up what you were saying with that tiny good old 40 to 60 bit per second processor in the rider, you couldn’t formulate a sentence.

You and I are thinking up what we’re saying today before we’re saying we’re just saying it, and so, it’s just happening.

Maureen: You know, though, I, again, I’m, as we’re talking, I’m reading my script and doing all this stuff. So I have some belief that it’s not just all popping into my head, although there were times, like I did a presentation earlier today, I did nothing that I had planned and it was way better than what I had planned.

So I get that. There are times I’m not in control.

Gary: Precisely. I gave a, two and a half hour talk this last weekend, and it was [00:30:00] hugely successful. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to say. I just stood up and start, and things just started to come out. They come out all by themselves.

The best presentations we give are the ones, we have no idea what we’re saying ahead of time. We’ve prepared, we know the data, we have the information, we know the audience roughly. We just stand up there and start talking, and it just happens. And it’s much, much better than a rehearsed presentation.

Maureen: Something you said there seems really important.

I did all the homework. I’m well prepared, and then I show up and be present. It’s not like I don’t do any homework. I don’t know where I’m going, and I just get to the airport and mysteriously know which car to get in.

Gary: Exactly. Same thing’s true in your business world. I, I always read the exhibits.

I always was well prepared for the meetings. Highest, highest level in the corporation, and yet I just sat there. I had no plan. I was going to say, and it turned out to be the smartest stuff in the room.

Maureen: You’ve studied your entire life to get here and before you [00:31:00] go to a presentation, you know who’s in the room, you know what their expectations are. You may have even , crafted a presentation. You and I crafted a script. We may not do any of the things in it, but we were prepared for the conversation.

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can’t walk into a room having no idea what you’re even gonna talk about as a subject.

Maureen: Okay. Well, when the, the no control thing, it could go all the way to, oh, I got up and I walked out the door.

Gary: But it doesn’t. It doesn’t though. I mean, you stand like this big presentation this last weekend.

You just stand up and you just start talking and amazingly it just comes out. You just have to trust that you have a lot of information and it’s gonna come out. As it comes out. It’s out of your control anyway. It really is outta your control. If you can’t think up your thoughts, you can’t think up your presentation either.

So just let it come out and see what happens. It’s much, much better, much more engaging, much more in the moment than if you have a scripted thing that you’re reading very careful to people and they get bored very quickly with it.

Maureen: [00:32:00] So just like we have a script for our recording that we haven’t followed, but you and I did a lot of work to prepare and because we’re prepared then we can throw it away.

Gary: Exactly.

Maureen: And in fact, it got much better when I stopped reading it because then I was paying attention to you.

Gary: Yes. And you could feel the difference, if you could feel the difference when you were reading what you had prepared as opposed to when you went extemporaneous, it was fantastic. It became alive. It was happening right in front of us at this very moment. And so it gets much more engaging to people who are listening because they can see what you’re working with. They can feel the difference between the immediacy of this presentation when you’re not scripting it or when you’re reading it, which they go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Maureen: That’s kind of how I feel too, but I still need to get your name right. So, and some of your experience, so some scripting seems relevant and appropriate. Or you’re gonna tell me? No.

Gary: No. I don’t have that [00:33:00] experience. I mean, no, I, I, I this pre back to specific, I mean, I’ve done a couple presentations the last several weekends and they’ve all been totally spontaneous, open a lot of discussion, a lot of shouting and hollering, a lot of questions, a lot of unpredicted stuff.

And you just are there in the moment, and you’re so much better there in the moment than having a script that just suddenly blew up in your face.

Maureen: Well, yeah. The emotion that happens when the script blows up in my face for me is not good. No. And then the conversation starts in my head about what an idiot I am.

Gary: Exactly.

Maureen: Not everyone has that experience, but I, I do.

Gary: But a lot of people do, and that’s why, that’s why to me, it’s dangerous to be try to reading something to a group, because they’ll just start, they’ll turn you off at best, and at worst, they’ll begin attacking you. And if you’ve gotta prepare the script, the script blows up in your face

Maureen: often.

This idea of control seems foundational and significantly different than I was raised with that the [00:34:00] most effective leaders, yes, do all the work to prepare.

So I don’t walk in unprepared and just have stuff come out of my mouth that I don’t have to be responsible for. So I, I’ve been well prepared. I show up and I do have the experience that things come out of my mouth that I didn’t plan. And generally I think they’re better than not. But occasionally I say stupid stuff. I don’t control it, so what do I do?

Gary: Just recognize that and, let go. It’ll be a enormous load off your shoulder. Just accept the fact that you cannot be in control.

You aren’t giving up something you have, you don’t have it to begin with, so all you’re doing is understanding that you don’t have control and accepting it.

Maureen: So I would pose to our listeners then to do an experiment, not with the biggest thing you do in life, but with something that if it goes wrong, the consequences are small.

And try on the [00:35:00] awareness that in fact, you’re prepared and you’re gonna be present and the, and trust that the right content will come out of your mouth because you’re prepared and present, and the elephant actually has the information and is more effective at giving the writer that information than our traditional role of writer trying to calculate.

So with that, Gary, can you give our listeners a way to contact you and then we’ll wrap?

Gary: Just put my name in Google.

Maureen: Okay. And you have a website and books, all

Gary: kinds of things. Website, books, videos, podcasts, interviews, articles, all kinds of stuff.

Maureen: You’re amazingly generous with your content.

So as people wanna learn more about this and test out these ideas, I strongly recommend Gary’s blogs and books, they are just brilliantly helpful.

I encourage you to give it a shot.