Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-Winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And lastly, you can get a copy of our book that we co-authored with some of our amazing clients at firmsconsulting.com/gift. And today, we have with us Sébastien Page, who is a Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price and author of a new book, The Psychology of leadership. He has done more than two decades of leadership experience and has done extensive research on positive psychology, sports and personality psychology. Sébastien, welcome. Thank you.

Sébastien Page  01:55

Thanks for having me on your podcast.

Kris Safarova  01:59

So very interesting background. I know that you regularly appear on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and you’re often coded in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. So on top of your very demanding career, you’re also a successful writer. What do you think are some of the things that really help you succeed in two different areas?

Sébastien Page  02:21

So most people don’t realize that actually, 81% of Americans want to write a book. That’s a staggering number when you think about it. So I get that question all the time. How do you I’m going to rephrase it a little bit. How do you find time right to write a book on psychology and do the research while you’re employed full time as a money manager? The answer is simple. You just do a little bit at a time very consistently over a long period of time. So you build a writing habit that way, the writing is not that hard. There is work that goes into editing and putting a book out, and as we record this, I’m about to put the book out, so I’m super excited, but that’s my answer. You do a little bit at a time, very consistently. I would write every weekend for a fairly long period of time, say, a year and a half, and then you have a book. There’s more work that goes around it, but that was the process. And I will say there’s a little bit of that in everything we do in life. Things look insurmountable in many ways, but if you do a little bit at a time very consistently and build the right habits, they amount to a lot over time.

Kris Safarova  03:42

That is very true. That is how license success is created, one step at a time, one day at a time. Do you remember when you decided to write your first book? How did it come about that you made that decision?

Sébastien Page  03:55

So my first two books were on Investment Management, which is my day job, and I’ve been writing and doing research in quantitative finance and economics for a couple decades, which, by the way, gave me a head start to read research in positive sports and personality psychology, because I can understand the statistical test. I’m just used to digging into research. It’s just a different field. But So for my first two books, it was part of my job to communicate to our clients, people that give us money, to manage how we manage their money, and to help I had, I had this idea that I would really make a contribution to the industry, not to make money from selling books, because I had to break it to any of the 81% of Americans who want to write a book in their lifetime, but 99% of books don’t sell, basically. So it’s very competitive and very hard, but I had this educational mission with it, and to me, that was super important. So that motivated me with. First two books, this last one on self improvement and leadership, the psychology of leadership. I was struggling myself, and I wanted to improve myself. I have a sentence in the introduction of the book where I say, you’re reading this book for self improvement. I wrote it for the same reasons, and also was so much fun to just reflect on two decades of leadership experience. Read the research about it, because psychologists have a lot to say about leadership, and then match it with my experience. And I think that’s what made the book special, because other people write books about leadership or self improvement are excellent writers, but they’re not, they’re not necessarily leaders every day in a large organization. So that’s my contribution I’m hoping to make.

Kris Safarova  05:49

Was it difficult to make a decision to write a book on leadership, given that it does not immediately, directly contribute to being successful in your current role, and then you would take time away from your other parts of life when you already have such a demanding career?

Sébastien Page  06:07

Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s a really important question, and my answer is counterintuitive, but my day job is as a money manager, but it’s also now more than ever, as a people leader, as a leader of an organization, as chief investment officer of an organization. So writing this book, there’s no doubt in my mind that it would actually make me a better leader, as the self improvement idea. And by the way, this was just fun. I’m making it sound like it was work, and it was but to me, people play golf, and sometimes it’s frustrating, but general, it’s a lot of fun. I don’t play golf, I don’t watch a lot of TV. I like to sit down and write and learn interesting things. So it did help me a lot in my day job. It did because I learned to manage stress, to be more resilient, I learned all sorts of counter intuitive things from research and psychology about how we can make leadership better, and am I applying these things in my day job? So it all in the end, it all works well together. But yeah, I had to write it on weekends, Saturday mornings, big cup of coffee. Have one now, and I would sit down and write for two or three hours and then have a second look for an hour on Sunday, and that was it. The rest of the time was for family. So kind of like the same commitment as someone who likes to play golf regularly.

Kris Safarova  07:35

And in writing those books, what was the most challenging part for you?

Sébastien Page  07:39

Editing? So I’ve been writing for 20 years about economics and finance, mostly, but there’s this process when you write a book and then you want the book to have an impact on people’s lives. Between those two things, there’s something called editing, and there are pros that are going to help you at edit, at editing, but for me, it was about just learning to accept the feedback from my editor, who’s an excellent editor. That’s a really, really famous book, The Psychology of money, that was put out by the same I love that book. It’s by Morgan Housel. It was put out by the same publisher and actually the same editor who worked with me. So it’s highly experienced, highly credible editor, but Kris, if your question is like, what was the hardest was get getting those edits and cutting places where I didn’t want to cut, and just taking them on board and leaving some at the end, I’m the author, right? But that was a learning process for me. Out of this, I think I’ve gotten better at getting feedback on my writing.

Kris Safarova  08:47

I think this is very common for authors, and it is even more challenging when you’re writing fiction and you have to cut out parts of the world you created. I think in my experience as an author myself that is even more challenging than non fiction, because with non fiction, it’s close to your heart, but it’s also very intellectual. You’re teaching something, but with fiction, you’re basically taking something from your heart and soul and putting it on paper and sending it into the world.

Sébastien Page  09:18

Yeah, and one way, at least, for non fiction, that I’ve gotten better at this, is by creating a file that I call the cutting room floor. That’s the name of the file, and when my editor would say, take that out. For example, I have a bit of a fascination with billionaires. I’ve read so many biographies of billionaires, and I’m interested in what motivates them? Why a lot of them appear to be pretty horrible at relationships, but why, at the same time are they so successful? But at some point, my editor is enough with the billionaires, right? So I have that’s on my cutting room floor. I have a lot about billionaires, and I might put it out as an article on a sub stack newsletter. Example, but that helps, because you don’t feel like you’re, there’s this expression in writing killing your darlings, you know, you don’t, you don’t feel like you’re, and I can only imagine in fiction, because you’re destroying part of a world that you’ve spent time created, creating, but if you put it on that cutting room floor, know that you can use it later, a good writer once told me, good writers don’t throw anything away, and so you just keep it somewhere for later.

Kris Safarova  10:28

You mentioned that you have a fascination with billionaires. Share with us some of the things that you uncovered that really makes them successful beyond what most people can accomplish.

Sébastien Page  10:43

So they’re really interesting people to study, because they have an incredible sense of meaning in what they do. Because, and I’m using a generalization, right? Every individual is different. They’re very every billionaire is very different, but if you try to look for commonalities. They’re all on a mission. I mean, think about it. Kris, at some point, once you have ten million once you have $100 million once you have a billion dollars, what keeps you going? It can’t really be money. And so I dig into the motivations of billionaires, because I dig into positive psychology and what motivates people and how people thrive over time. And we all know that above a certain level, once you get out of poverty, getting more money really is not a bad thing, and it’s a pretty valid goal to go for it, but it just like, statistically, on average, won’t necessarily make you happier, right? That’s trite. We all know this. But what about when you have, like, all the money in the world where, well, billionaires have a mission. And I talk about Steve Jobs, I talk about Jeff Bezos, I talk about Elon Musk, I talk about and then I talk about some billionaires that had too much of a sense of mission, and I have these billionaire car crash stories as well. Right? What happened with the founder of Uber? What happened with Adam Newman at WeWork? He wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire. But as a general statement, they all have a big sense of mission, and that is part of positive psychology, that is what we learned from positive psychology. You can withstand a lot. You can find motivation. You can live a life where you thrive. If you have a big sense of meaning around what you do. In money management, it’s about making financial lives for millions of people better, helping people put their kids to college, pay their bills, get a better retirement. So whatever, wherever you find meaning, and that that’s that’s why I think billionaires are inspiring in that way, not because they have lots of money, because a lot of them have a deep sense of meaning.

Kris Safarova  12:53

You mentioned that another thing you observed and studied is why a lot of them are struggling to build relationships. What did you uncover?

Sébastien Page  13:02

So if you take There’s a famous model that I cover in the book about positive psychology, which is called PERMA. I love that model, P, E, R, M, A was built by Marty Seligman, who’s considered the father of positive psychology. The letters stand for P, positive emotion, E, engagement, R, relationships, M, meaning an A accomplishment in the long term sense, a long term sense of accomplishment, and what we’re all after day to day are the positive emotions, a laugh, likes on social media, a good glass of wine, a good show on Netflix. The problem with positive emotions is that some of us are not necessarily predisposed to experience positive emotions all the way to clinical depression, which can be heritable. You can hear you can inherit a sense of Doom or clinical depression, but what really makes people thrive in the long run is Erma. So positive emotions are like the sugar. I describe them as a sugar high for the soul, and Irma as the proteins for the soul. And so the billionaires have a tremendous sense of M again, generalization. A lot of them do not all of them, they have a big sense of accomplishment that goes beyond money. They’re pretty motivated by social comparison. When you start studying them, they kind of like, why would you want to make more money when you have all the money that you’ll ever need? Because someone else is making more than you, but where they really, really suffer is on the R and sorry, that was a long winded way to get at your question. But I just wanted to set the context of positive psychology, and the research shows that relationships, the quality of the relationships in your life. Life are basically this a number one factor of people’s long term happiness and ability to thrive in life, even though some are climbing the social ladder, some are going down, losing their jobs, health, no. Health, the number one factor is, do you have quality, positive relationships with people around you, most billionaires, especially if you read the biographies that were unauthorized or not edited for PR public relations purposes, they were all pretty horrible at relationships. And to me, that’s fascinating. It’s like an imbalance in the Irma or the perma Steve Jobs was remarkably well known to be really, really harsh to people around him, and I think what’s going on there is to have such a sense of mission that they lose sight of relationships. They lose sight of what it might mean for other people around them. They lose sight of the importance of quality relationships. And that’s kind of a shame, right? I’d rather in my life, and I think in my reader’s life, find some level of balance and perspective. It’s something I call in the book goal induced blindness. When you lose perspective, you just focus on a goal and you sacrifice your health, your relationships, your sense of ethics, just for the goal that’s well documented in the research and psychology. Well, I think billionaires have some goal induced blindness, and it shows up a lot in how they treat people around them.

Kris Safarova  16:34

Anything related to PERMA beyond what you already said that our listeners need to know about?

Sébastien Page  16:41

Let’s talk about meaning, because I think that’s really important. Nowadays, there’s a famous story about the three brick layers. I don’t know Kris if you’ve ever heard the story of the three brick layers.

Kris Safarova  16:54

It sounds familiar, but I don’t recall the details. o

Sébastien Page  16:57

S othis supposedly takes place a couple 100 years ago. There’s an architect who walks up to three people laying down bricks. And the architect has the first person who’s kind of clearly struggling, what are you doing? And the first person says, the first bricklayer says, I’m laying down bricks because I need to feed my family. I need to get paid. Then the architect walks to the second brick layer and say, What are you doing? And the second brick layer looks a little bit more engaged, and he says, I’m building this wall here. Same task, different perspective. Then the architect walks to the third brick layer, same question, and the third brick layer says, I’m a cathedral builder. I’m building this ode to the Almighty, this awesome cathedral, and that third brick layer in the story is way more productive and engaged in the work. Well, if you look at corporate America, we kind of have a crisis of meaning, in the sense that surveys show that a majority of employees are not engaged in their work. And I think it has to do, in part, with a lack of meaning. So in the book, I use an example. It’s hypothetical to help leaders think about meaning in their organization. Let’s say in mine, I have three analysts who are working on a spreadsheet. I walk to the first analyst and I go, What are you doing? The first analyst might say, I’m debugging this spreadsheet. I’m fixing this error in this spreadsheet. The second analyst might say, Well, I’m building an investment strategy where I think we can beat the markets and make money. The third analyst might say, I am actively finding ways to make our clients richer so they can live better financial lives. This is a contrived example, but it’s the same idea of the layers of meaning. And there’s meaning everywhere in what we do. So I think that’s a huge part of perma especially in the sense that a lot of us on the P the positive emotions that we all seek have a harder time experience in experiencing them, you know, I don’t, I don’t the books about positive psychology, so I don’t talk about clinical psychology, which treats depression and anxiety. But I have people close to me that suffer with or have suffered with depression, and I think in particular, there Irma engagement, finding flow in your life, having quality relationships, finding meaning in what you do, and looking for long term accomplishment. These are all things that positive psychology says, even if you’re not predisposed to feel happy moment to moment and feel those positive emotions you. The Irma will make you thrive in the long run. So I thought that was fantastic, a fantastic contribution from positive psychology that hasn’t really made its way into business. So that’s why I’ve spent a few chapters on this.

Kris Safarova  20:14

You earlier mentioned that billionaires, for them, the meaning part of PERMA is much bigger than for an average person, what do we need to understand around them and how we can enhance the sense of meaning in ourselves?

Sébastien Page  20:27

The number one thing I would say about meaning is to take a very long term perspective. And the more you take the long term perspective, the more you start thinking about, why am I doing what I’m doing, and what’s my lifelong mission? Stephen COVID wrote one of the most famous self improvement books. It’s the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and one of the habits is, begin with the end in mind. And it’s fascinating how he talks about, if you think long term, where you want to be, how you want to reflect, on your deathbed, if you will, on your life, if you think about this and use this to guide your values and guide your sense of direction, first of all, it’ll make it easier to go through the ups and downs every day and second under stress, if you remind yourself of the meaning of what you do your long term mission, whatever that is. Right now, for me, with this book, is to get as many people to read it as possible, to help them in their lives and to build a sense of community around the book. It just centers you. And so that’s the number one piece of advice. Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking very, very, very long term. There’s this trend of philosophy, for those familiar with stoicism, where people are asked philosophers say, think about the fact that you’re going to die one day. Kris, you might not think this podcast was going to get that depressing that quickly, but that’s actually not depressing at all. We’re all going to die one day. And the fact it’s quite liberating when you think about it.

Kris Safarova  22:11

Sport psychology. What COVID principles of sports psychology are most valuable for leaders to know to understand?

Sébastien Page  22:21

So Roger Federer went viral a few months ago in a commencement speech to university students where he talked about his pro tennis career, and he told his students that he had played over 1500 matches and that as one of the best tennis players of all time, he’d won about 80% of them. But then he asked the students, what percentage of the points do you think I’ve won? And it turns out, Ferrers only won 54% of the points. And he then went on to say, whatever game you play in life, you’re going to lose a lot. And it’s fascinating about sports psychology. It’s not about winning at all. It’s about losing, and it’s about how you learn and improve as an athlete from your losses. There’s a story at the beginning of the book which explains how I got really interested in sports psychology. I met with a sports psychologist here in Maryland. His name is Dr Daniel zimmet, and he’s a fascinating sports psychologist, because he’s also an athlete. He plays handball. That’s the sport that looks like squash, but you hit the ball with your hands. He holds 44, zero national titles. And I sat down with him to talk about sports psychology. He told me the story of his best handball match ever, play by play. He remembers it was years ago, all of it, and then the ball did this, and then I was on my knees. And the takeaway is that he was playing a much, much, much stronger opponent. But towards the end of the story, I realized this is a complete letdown, because he actually lost the match. He talks about the moment where he hit the ball and he didn’t think he could hit it, and he just made it, and it was one of his best shot ever. And then he goes, Well, then I lost the next two points. I go, Well, you lost the game. And he goes Yes, but to him that day, as a sports psychologist, as a trained sports psychologist, it was not about the win or the loss at all. It was about the fact that he realized he had made a step change in his ability to play a much stronger player, and he was in a different. League from that match on. So that’s what sports psychology is about. And then you get into resilience, because athletes get nervous, by the way, we look at them as superheroes, but they get very nervous. And he trains a lot of athletes on their mental games. But so then I dug into what does this mean for a leader in an organization, or for anybody, in fact, in terms of resilience, learning to lose, and resilience in the face of stress. So I started to explore that. And then there’s a lot more on that that we can talk about.

Kris Safarova  25:37

Let’s talk about mental preparation techniques that leaders can adapt from sports.

Sébastien Page  25:44

A lot of sport psychology is about visualization and repetition. So for leaders, they’re often called on communicating to large groups of people. They’re often called to participate in high pressure conversations. And the way you can draw on sports psychology, there is before whatever challenge the leader might face to visualize going through this challenge not once, but several times will actually it’s almost like getting actual repetition at the challenge, and when you get in, it makes you better prepared. And then, most importantly, leadership jobs are high pressure, this idea that the leader is resilient, zero stress person. It just like athletes are not zero stress people, and they have to deal with stress. It’s the same for the leader and so learning to engage with the stress and the pressure of different situations in a way that you reframe it as activation or motivation, can be super productive for a leader or for anybody. And again, you find a lot of those techniques and ideas in sports psychology. So there’s a lot to it. I think Kris, we don’t talk about sports psychology enough in investing, because investment management is, in many ways, like sports psychology, or like, you know, portfolio managers have to deal with issues that athletes have to deal with quite a bit. And so I don’t think we talk about it enough. I don’t think we use it enough. And by the way, now in pro sports, sports psychology is everywhere, like the baseball teams already, eight out of 10 professional baseball team has a sports psychologist on staff. And I strongly believe the two that aren’t they’re just not telling you the other two that they have a sports psychologist on staff. So there’s room for us to look at this in business, and look at this as leaders to become more resilient, learn to visualize challenges ahead of time and so on. There’s just a lot we can draw on.

Kris Safarova  28:08

When you were researching sports psychology, what surprised you?

Sébastien Page  28:15

Look. I think the moment where I would say I was the most surprised researching sports psychology is when Dr Daniel zemet, who ended up being a bit of a consultant for the book, he helped me with some of the research, and guy pointed me in the right directions and reviewed some of what I was Writing. Is when he said, you know, athletes are incredibly neurotic, like they get incredibly nervous. And to me, just stepping back and realizing that, yeah, that makes sense. Like the basketball player who has to make a three point shot with five seconds left on the clock is going to get nervous, and just this acceptance of the fact that optimal performance does not occur at zero stress, it occurs at some point on your stress curve, beyond which, if you stress too much, then you choke. And we know athletes choke as well, but there’s an optimal point for performance in any one stress curve, and it’s not zero. I think that’s, you know, I don’t know if it surprised me the most, but it was, I would say, the most important realization, because it has direct implications for all of our lives, we can now. We can now stop beating ourselves up for feeling a bit anxious about things.

Kris Safarova  29:46

That is very interesting. Tell us a little more about that. So how would someone, let’s say, a leader, managing a team of 30 people, how would they figure out what is the optimal point for performance for them and their team?

Sébastien Page  30:03

Two things. First of all, stress curves. I call them. They’re called Yorks dodson’s curve. I explained this in the book. They’re different for different people, so some people will reach peak performance at a higher stress level than other people. Second, they’re different for different tasks. If the task is simple and straightforward, go ahead and put the pressure on the team and put some aggressive targets. If the task is complex, like research and development, realize that putting more pressure might not help with optimal performance for individuals and for the team. I’m not going to go to our research and development team and and scream and say, innovate. Innovate right now. By tomorrow, 6am I need 10 innovation that doesn’t really work that way. So sports psychology shows that and some serious scientific research around it, tasks like power, lifting or sprinting, you will reach optimal performance at a very high level of stress. Or sports psychologists don’t really like to refer to stress in this context. They’ll reframe it as activation or arousal in the literature. But those simple tasks, printing, power, lifting, you’ll peak in performance at a very high adrenaline level. But archery, you need to bring your breathing down, and your optimal performance point will be at a lower stress level. And I think this applies directly to motivating teams, depending on the nature of the tasks they’re engaged in, and to motivating individuals. And when you get to know individuals, some individuals will need a lot of stress and activation to perform well. Others will perform better under lower stress levels, and they have different stress tolerance. Neil Armstrong is an example I use of someone who is incredibly stress resilient. Could perform very well at at very low stress level, or could, could do very stressful things without getting stressed like most of us would. The first manned moon landing famously went completely wrong. The Lunar Module lost connection. It went off course. They ran out of fuel. The computer wasn’t working, and Armstrong had to take manual command, and they landed in a different spot. The whole thing, the kind of the history of humankind, would have looked different if it hadn’t been for his cool under pressure of actually landing the lunar module. And then famously, he got out and said, it’s a small step for a man, but a giant step for humankind, for humanity. But most people don’t know this is that he was as an astronaut, hooked to a heart rate monitor, and that for almost the entire mission, including when everything went wrong, up until just the last very you know, the time he actually landed it, his heart rate was 75 that’s for most people, maybe not for him, because probably pretty athletic, but for most people, is a resting heart rate. So we all want to be like Neil Armstrong and be cool under pressure, but I think one way to deal with stress better is just to realize that optimal performance does not occur at zero stress. And by the way, zero stress is not possible. It’s just not how humans are wired. So once you start embracing stress, you get to the point of what Tim Ferriss said, who’s famous author, he’s fantastic. He has one of the biggest podcasts out there. He said, you know, embracing stress is like a superpower, and you see this in athletes. Those are the ones that get excited, as opposed to too anxious, and on the other side of their optimal point for performance.

Kris Safarova  34:19

Could you share with us a personal example of very challenging moment where sports psychology techniques or a specific technique helped you come out stronger?

Sébastien Page  34:30

So I have to do live national TV, as you said in the introduction, and in my business and money management, that’s very hard because the questions are tough, and it’s usually a little bit of a debate, and you have to be quick on your feet, and you’re on live national TV, usually in a studio, that’s very intimidating. And to this day, I done this for a very long time, I still get very, very, very nervous. Kris, and my heart rate goes up before I go on the air, and it’s a scary thing. And by the way, some people around me said they were surprised. I posted something on LinkedIn saying I still get very nervous before getting on the air. And I had colleagues reply, do you really that’s impossible? Yeah, just like we don’t think that athletes get stressed. They do. Tom Brady gets really stressed or used to now, I don’t know if he gets stressed as a broadcaster, but and so for me, the two components of sports psychology, or just performance management in sports and mindfulness, were number one, the visualization I get up in the morning, I know I have live national TV in the afternoon, and I’m gonna do some mini reps in my mind, maybe ruminate a little bit around it, but just realize that I’m kind of preparing mentally, playing the scenarios in my mind. And athletes do that a lot. They have visualization coaches and so on. And second is, might be the simplest thing, and don’t fall off your chair with how innovative, innovative this advice is, but it’s got to do with breathing. And by the way, top athletes, from Michael Jordan to all the big names they have, most of them actually have mindfulness, breathing meditation coaches, by the way, but I like to do a four by four. So I take four seconds of inhale, I hold it for four seconds, I exhale for four seconds, I stay down for four seconds. And I do that a few times before going live. And that is a way for my conscious and my body, the part that I can control, to signal the part that I can’t control to settle down, right? That’s breathing is like the only connection between what you can and can’t control. It’s a crucial bridge. And so if you do it at the right time, it helps a lot.

Kris Safarova  37:02

Being interviewed for CNBC and so on. How did that come about for those of our listeners who want to be on TV like you?

Sébastien Page  37:13

So for financial, for the financial media, it’s all about the insights that you can provide on a given day. So you have to have the training and the insights to contribute. The other element is that it really helps if you’re associated with a big firm, and so in which case, your firm can ask producers on your behalf to get on the shows, and then if you have to do it on your own, you have to go and find who the producers are and kind of make your pitch. But it’s about insights. And I hate to say this, but access, right? So you need some access in some ways. So that’s for my world as a book author now in psychology and leadership and self improvement, the way we got in touch, for example, and that’s common in most industries, is that people use publicists, right? So they hire people to help them get media exposure. But now, Kris, you’re the best example. There’s no barrier either for social media and Creator content, and then it’s just you want your content to be, to be as good and and eye catching as possible and insightful as possible. So we’re kind of in a new world. You don’t need to go on a major network if you have insights, but you don’t have access and then just go and put it out there for the world to see and just be patient. You could probably give your listeners a lot more advice on that side of things than I could.

Kris Safarova  38:59

Thank you. Sébastien, I also wanted to ask you, could you share any daily or weekly habits that help you maintain your own mental and physical strength and well being?

Sébastien Page  39:10

Yeah, thank you. That’s a great question. I talk about conscientiousness in the book as a personality trait and one of the best ways to become more conscientious, because I strongly believe that personality traits aren’t set in stone. They depend on the situation, and they depend on, you know, people. People change over time. So to become more conscientious, the best ways to build habits and small habits. And James clear has a fantastic book on this. It’s one of the biggest best sellers of all time in non fiction. It’s titled atomic habits, and he’s leaning on research also about Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit, which is another book on this that preceded atomic habits. So you want small habits that add up to a lot. We talk about how you can get a book. Two together doing that. So for me to finally answer your question, was a long preamble to answering the question. I exercise every day, and sometimes, if I don’t feel like exercising, or I feel like my body needs a little bit of a risk of a rest, I’ll still exercise because it’s important for me to keep the daily streak, which I’ve had for over 10 years, and I’ll just do 30 minutes of a slow jog, but as long as I do something, 30 minutes of a slow jog would be the absolute minimum. But otherwise, I exercise every day. It’s usually every morning. I don’t have a perfect diet, but as I’ve gotten older, I try to watch what I eat every day and be mindful. I actually count my calories. I think that’s useful just to realize what you’re eating and how things add up over time, and to educate yourself on your diet, even if you eat bad stuff, just put it in the app, still, just keep counting. It really helps mentally. So that’s one thing I do every day. I do meditation. I don’t do it every day, but I do it at least three or four times a week, when I just take some time, pause for 20 minutes, very simple meditation. I like supplements. I don’t believe they all work, but you know, as long as they’re not bad for you, I use a few supplements. I use creatine, for example, for maintain muscle, muscle tone. I do some weight lifting. I’m 48 years old, so I find that useful. I also use omegas, omega threes, so healthy fat supplements. And you know, a few of those, like aminos and those types of things. So those are the types of things I do daily. I tried to not bring work home, and I have a very demanding job, and most days I’m working 12 hours, but I tried to kind of wrap things up. And after 25 years in this business, I’ve learned to stop looking at my email after a certain hour of the day or before a certain hour of the day. I do exercise before I even look at my email. So I tried to carve out time and headspace for family and other things.

Kris Safarova  42:20

Sébastien, and the last question for today, my favorite question to ask over the last few years or 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you can pick what is comfortable, what comes to mind, what were two, three aha moments/realizations that you feel comfortable sharing that really change the way you look at life or the way you look at the business?

Sébastien Page  42:41

So let’s talk about in the process of writing the book, which has been a few years, really excited. It’s finally coming out, and in the context of leadership, it was a big aha moment when I realized that leaders aren’t effective. Leaders aren’t really what you think they are. You think of effective leaders as and this would be multiple aha moments, but I’ll just put them all together. You think of them as fantastic communicators, and a lot of them are but you think of them as being decisive builders of consensus and you know, very resilient to stress, like they don’t get stressed. And at the end of the book, I hope my readers will realize that in almost all of these aha moments, it’s actually the opposite. It’s actually the opposite. As further up you go in leadership in an organization, the more important it is for you to be a good listener as opposed to a good talker. And that’s counter intuitive, but the higher up in an organization you go, the more you have to listen rather than talk. And this thing about being decisive, yes, when decisions need to be made. But what I’ve realized over the last few years is there’s a strong bias to action and to make decisions even when they don’t need to be made when you can take advantage of the time you have left to make a decision. Say you’re hiring someone and you have time because the person who’s going to be retiring is going to be retiring in 12 months. Take the 12 months to find the best candidate so leaders, the really good ones, know how to parse the decisions and exercise strategic patience when it is needed. And that’s vastly underrated in business. And so it’s all the opposite of what you might think, right? And this idea we’ve just talked about, this, that leaders have zero stress, and that they go go around super reserved, it’s not that at all. It’s like athletes. Athletes get stressed. We all get stressed is the reaction to stress and how you find your optimal performance point, which, again, is not at zero. Row stress. So we go from a leader who’s very smooth communicator, decisive builder of consensus. That’s also counterintuitive, because as a leader, you need to make tough decisions and be disagreeable sometimes, because otherwise you can’t get things done. And also decisive, well, not really. Sometimes you need strategic patience. So all those things are a little bit upside down, and there’s psychology behind it, and it’s all in the book, but those would be my several aha moments Kris.

Kris Safarova  45:32

Sébastien, thank you so much. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your books? Anything you want to share.

Sébastien Page  45:40

Two things, psychologyofleadership.net, N-E-T and you can go and buy the book on Amazon as well.

Kris Safarova  45:49

Our guest today, again has been Sébastien Page. Check out his book. It’s called the Psychology of Leadership. Sébastien again, thank you so much for being here, for everything you shared, for being so open and generous. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free gift we prepared for you. You can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is the actual resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And having a good resume is important at any stage of your career, so I definitely recommend you take a look and see how you can improve your resume. And lastly, you can get a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our amazing clients. One of the books which recorded a few and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift, and it is called Nine Leaders in Action. So it’s all about leadership, just the same topic we discussed today. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.