#693: In Case You Missed It: August 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I ask you a personal question?

Now it is the night for a few time.

What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal skeleton hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in between episode which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to wet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below. Wherever you press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to Tim blog Slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

First up, Dustin Moskowitz, co founder and CEO of Asana and co founder of Facebook.

How have you worked with Diana, who's great, spent a decent amount, not as much as you have, but a decent amount of time with her. She is one of a kind and very, very good at what she does. How have you worked with her? If you're open to discussing it to whatever extent, one on one, what does the format look like or what were you hoping to accomplish in working with her? Were you working with her mostly because you were basically test driving language and shared concepts that you hoped to put into Asana? Was it mostly individual in the beginning and out of personal interest? Yeah, it's interesting.

It's changed over time. I don't have a one on one coaching relationship with her at the moment, but a lot of it. When I first started, I was a total novice on the commitments and I had a lot of stories I was holding tightly and they were impacting my energy because I believe them and she really helped me a lot with that. Part of the reason I don't work with her anymore is like I kind of know what she's going to say every time I'll do the back and.

Forth on my own. Are you open to and if not, that's okay. And it could be a hypothetical, but sharing a story that you held tightly.

Sure.

And think that would be useful.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the one that has been most difficult for me and I think is maybe universal for entrepreneurs in general, is just this sense of huge responsibility to keep going and endure and persevere and do well by your employees and this sort of thing. And it's very easy to feel like you're trapped and that there's no other possibility. You're kind of just Sisyphus as a leader, and I don't want to scare my employees. I'm not thinking about leaving right now, but I think going through the coaching of this really helped because she would just constantly deny me on anything that I really believed. Like, it would be terrible if Asana had a different CEO and it's like, well, how's the opposite of that story true? Maybe a new CEO would bring in fresh perspective and they'd have more energy, things like this, or be terrible if the sauna shut down and all of our employees wasted all this time and part of their career doing it, and she'd say, well, how's opposite of that story true? What about the experiences they got building Asana? What about the value your customers got while Asana was alive? And obviously I'm still there. So it's not like this coaching led me to think I should leave Asana or shut it down. But it helped me understand that I was choosing to be there. And every day is in some sense a new decision. I can't just walk away tomorrow like that has other kinds of consequences that I choose not to accept. But in the longer arc of time, I have agency here, the Asana employees have agency, our customers have agency. And it's much more productive for me to engage with the problems from above the line rather than from this place of fear and scarcity and anxiety. And there's time and place for that. You also need to feel all feelings in the commitments framework. But it's bad if it's just like always, appall on every hour of every day and every decision, and you want to not grip around those things. And so it's useful sometimes to indulge in how is this story not true? And with Diana, she'll go all the way to fear of death. Imagine your own funeral, whatever your deepest anxiety is, and just try and loosen your grip on that.

And for people who want maybe a name for the technique, there's more to it. And Diana has her own flavor and approach. But the turnarounds that are often associated with Byron Katie, people can find the work online and worksheets that are really helpful for this if you aren't able to work with someone like Diana. The 15 commitments is also an excellent book, and an excellent book, not just for companies. It's a great book if you want to improve your communication with your significant other, which is actually how I used a whole large portion of that book with significant others.

I just want to add to the other thing. It's a lot like, is cognitive behavioral. You know, if you want to take a more western approach, I think it gets at the same ends with very similar methods.

Yeah, totally. One particular aspect of what Diana Chapman and Jim Deppmer, who've both been on the podcast, embrace that I have always, well, this is a story. Part of this whole training is like helps you to identify the stories. But my story is that I have long struggled with having incredibly uncomfortable clearing conversations when there is a conflict or you feel some resentment or whatever it might be. And I think historically there's been a lot of fear for me around the consequences of trying to have an open conversation about these things. So my question is, how do you handle that if you implement it at Asana, those types of clearing conversations, or broadly speaking, if this is easier, just disagreements, tension between or among employees and so on?

Yeah, it's a big company, so I don't think it happens the same way everywhere. But what I try and coach people to do and what I experience with my immediate team is that we do try and get into this mode. It's a little bit conscious leadership, it's a little bit nonviolent communication, but very speaking unarguably, reflecting back what the other person said to make sure that they feel understood. I've definitely, over the years, my biggest takeaway with conflict is people want to feel heard more than they want the decision changed. A lot of it is just, you got to make the space for that. And if you're going to do some difficult change management, you just got to accept that there's going to be some of that, and it's important to do it at the right times. Can't have everyone get involved before the decision is made, but the people who especially need to be bought in and need to help you with the change management after they kind of need to be heard before it's finalized, and then even after it's communicated, you're going to have to really listen to people on why they're disappointed or unhappy and reflect that back to them. Not just be a literal sounding board, but actually be engaged in empathetic conversation. I think that goes the longest way. And sometimes people use conscious leadership has a literal clearing script. The facts are, when this happened, I generated this story or I had these feelings, and this is meant to explicitly get away from language like you did this, and that made me feel angry. The whole idea with conscious leadership is you're responsible for your own feelings and you're going to have a reaction that doesn't necessarily mean the person was trying to hurt you or that that's really what happened. Often it has to do with stuff from your past or your childhood or situations like that that you don't want