Action Catalyst Update: Ryan Gottfredson

Best-selling author, professor, and leadership expert Ryan Gottfredson explains how mindsets aren’t just attitudes, distinguishes the doing side vs. the being side of ourselves, and talks about gauging your “window of tolerance”, the 3 levels of adult development, reaction vs. response, and healing to grow.

About Ryan:

Ryan helps leaders, executive teams, aspiring leaders, and individuals elevate (vertical development through a focus on mindsets) so that they can operate at a higher, more effective level.

Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge mindset author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. He helps improve organizations, leaders, teams, and employees by improving their mindsets. Ryan is currently a leadership and management professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton (CSUF). He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources from Indiana University, and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

Ryan is the author of “Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership.” (Morgan James Publishing), and Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best Seller.

He also works with organizations to develop their leaders and improve their culture (collective mindsets). He has worked with top leadership teams at CVS Health (top 130 leaders), Deutsche Telekom (500+ of their top 2,000 leaders), and dozens of other organizations.

As a respected authority and researcher on topics related to leadership, management, and organizational behavior, Ryan has published over 15 articles across a variety of journals including: Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Business Horizons, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, and Journal of Leadership Studies. His research has been cited over 2,000 times since 2014.

Learn more at RyanGottfredson.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
We’re here today once again, actually, with best selling author, professor and leadership expert Ryan Gottfredson, Ryan, good to see you.

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, great to be back on. I was looking at the notes and my notes, and I think the last time I was on was over five years ago.

Host
Yes. So episode 317 back in January of 2020. Is what we last had you on. And boy, did things change abruptly right after that.

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah. So that was January, and fast forward a couple months, and I was with my publisher in Nashville for my first book, success mindsets in March, and we’re there second week of March. I think it was like a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We’re doing this red carpet event. I get an email, you know, essentially, schools are shutting down, and I’m in Nashville, I’m thinking, oh my goodness, what is happening? Am I even going to get a flight back home? And that was the weekend that, of course, the world essentially shut down. And then fast forward, two months later, is when my book actually hit the shelves. And so it was, in some ways, I think there were some good things with that, with the book coming out of that time and other things, it just made things really difficult. So I think in some ways it was good because a lot of people were maybe spending a little bit more time reading. But on the other hand, is I do a lot of consulting work with organizations, and that completely shut down. So I think there were some good things and that helped it hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller list. But then my business slowed down for a little bit, like many others did. But that’s okay, it picked back up. And you know, we are where we are now, which is a different type of crazy.

Host
Just a little refresher for our audience, we talk a lot on the Action Catalyst, about growth mindset, fixed mindset, about mindset general for you, there’s actually four. It’s not growth and fixed. Do you mind just kind of walking our audience through that just as part of our table setting for the conversation today?

Ryan Gottfredson
One of the things that I’ve learned is mindsets is a term that is thrown out, I feel like rather loosely, right? A lot of people talk about maybe leader mindset or entrepreneurial mindset, and oftentimes, when people talk about mindsets, they talk about mindsets as our attitude towards something. But actually at a scientific level, even a neuroscientific level, our mindsets are much deeper than our attitude towards something. They’re actually the mental lenses that we wear that shape how we view the world around us. And so what that means is our mindsets are the part of ourselves that automatically interprets information in certain ways. So for example, this is what explains why some people can see failure as something to avoid, but other people see failure as an opportunity to learn and grow and in our mindsets, they really are the most foundational part of who we are. And for most of us, we’re not conscious of our mindsets, nor do we know the quality of our mindsets. So the quality of our mindsets exist along along a continuum from being more wired for self protection to be more wired for value creation and whether we have a self protective mindset or a value creating mindset, both feel right to us, but one helps us stay safe in the short term, but holds us back in the long term. That’s the self protective mindset and the value creating mindsets allow us to step into short term discomfort for long term value creation. So I coach my son’s basketball team. My son is 10 years old. That means that he and his teammates are not very good, so it’s my job as a coach to help them to develop. And so one of the things that I’m trying to help them develop at this age is, is they’re all right handed, and I want to help them learn how to shoot a layup with their left hand when they’re on the left side of the hoop. So this is a pretty important skill for a basketball player, and so I’ll instruct them. When we do, we call them lay up lines. They land up on the left side, and they take turns to shoot a layup. And I’ll ask them, all, right, try to shoot this with your left hand. And I get three different responses. The first response that I get is I get some players that don’t even try to shoot with their left hand. Well, why wouldn’t they try to shoot with their left hand? Well, it feels uncomfortable. They’re going to look awkward, and they’re probably going to miss their shot. You. So there’s some justifiable reasons for them to not try that. The second response that I get is I get some players that are willing to try and practice, but they’re not willing to try in games. Well, why aren’t we willing to try in games? Well, it’s because now my my parents are recording me for the rest of posterity to see, right? And of course, I don’t want to let my team down. I want to win the game. There’s a lot more pressure in that moment. So that’s the second response that I get. But then the third response that again, I only have a couple of players that are willing to do this, but they’re willing to try in practice and in the games. Well, why are they willing to do this? Well, they’re they’ve developed this capacity to be able to feel uncomfortable, look uncomfortable, and miss the shot, which may even mean letting their team down in that moment or even in that game. But for what benefit, it’s because they will actually improve their development of that skill so that they could be a greater value creator for themselves and for their future teams down the road. So there’s some responses that are more self protective in that moment, and others that are more value creating meaning. They’re willing to step into discomfort in that moment to become a better value creator over the long term. Are these responses by my players? Are they intentional, thought out responses, or instinctual knee jerk reactions, and that’s the role that our mindsets play. Right? It’s our it’s my players mindsets that are dictating when I invite them, do they move towards self protection, or do they move towards value creation? And that’s the mindsets. And if, then, if I also ask these players, do you have good mindsets? I think that all of them say yes, because they could justify it. Well, one the one that’s more self protective, well, it helps me feel more safe and more comfortable in that moment, and the one that has the more value creating mindset is, oh yeah, I’ve got a better mindset, because it’s gonna help me become a better basketball player for the future, right? So that’s the inherent challenge that we as people face, is we generally think that our mindsets are good, but we generally don’t know the quality of our mindsets. And so the reason why I bring this up is it’s really helpful to have a mindset framework to help us to start to investigate the true quality of our mindsets, and that’s what I put together. Is what you said, is these four different sets of mindsets.

Host
If they’re something that’s so foundational to us and kind of ingrained and shape the way we approach and view everything else, how can we influence or adjust our mindset?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, great question, and it all starts with awareness, and that’s where the framework is so powerful, because if I don’t have labels for mindsets, if I don’t have descriptions for mindsets, then I can never investigate them. They’re going to continue to reside below the level of my consciousness. But if I could put labels on it and descriptions now I could start to develop greater level of consciousness about my mindsets, and that’s been part of my personal journey. Is when I first learned about these different sets of mindsets, I quickly learned that I had self protective mindsets, which is normal. Most of us have self protective mindsets, and I just didn’t know what better mindsets to have. So the first thing I needed to do is to deepen my awareness, and then once I deepen my awareness, then I could come up with plans and strategies and interventions to be able to elevate my mindset.

Host
Shifting from mindset to growth. The science really points to there being two main types of growth, those incremental, transformational I think people think they know what each of those means. But could you define those for us?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, for sure. And it’s really helpful for us to understand that there’s two different sides of ourselves. So I’m going to give you some characters that you probably recognize who they are, and I want you to tell me what you think they have in common? Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Ellen DeGeneres, uh, Bill Clinton, Gordon, Ramsay Shia, LaBeouf. What do they have in common? They got multiple things in common. I think so. I think most simply, they’re all famous and well known. They have all been incredibly successful within their within their industry. I mean that they may be at the peak. I mean, we’ve got the king of pop in there for goodness sakes, right? So, so all incredibly successful people. But the other thing that they have in common is they all have some controversy. And so the reason why I’ve kind of cherry picked these examples is to demonstrate this idea that we have two different sides of ourselves. One side of ourselves is what I call our doing side. It’s our talent, our knowledge, our skills and our abilities. And all of these individuals are incredibly talented, knowledgeable and skillful individuals, and it’s their talent, knowledge and skills that has allowed them to reach the success that they’ve experienced, or at least their popularity. Priority. But then their controversy doesn’t really have anything to do with their talent, knowledge, skills and abilities. Their controversy has to do with a different side of themselves, and that’s what I call our being side. And our being side is the quality of our character, our mindsets, our psyche, the quality of our emotional regulation abilities. I call it as a whole our internal operating system, how our bodies are wired to operate. So each of these individuals were incredibly talented, knowledgeable and skillful, but they lack some emotional regulation abilities that caused them to misstep at different points of time in their life and and so the reason why I bring this up is coming back to your question is there’s a difference between incremental growth and transformational growth. And what I’ve learned is that when we improve along our doing side, it is helpful, but I find that it is only incrementally helpful, and if we really want to transformationally grow and improve, we’ve got to focus on our being side. We’ve got to we’ve actually got to focus on our internal operating system, our mindsets, our emotional regulation abilities, and when we could elevate along our being side, we transformationally become better people and better leaders. And what’s interesting about this is that when we think about development efforts in general, is almost all development efforts focus on our doing side. Think about our education systems, our athletic programs and our organizational development efforts, they almost all focus on gaining knowledge and skills. Yet it’s only incrementally helpful. And so my new book, becoming better is all about helping people learn that they have a being side, learn what it is, help them connect with it and evaluate their altitude along their being side. And then how do they elevate along their being side, so that they can transformationally become better.

Host
When it comes to the doing side, most of the time, we know what we don’t know, right? We know what we need to improve on, what we need to do to get better. How do we assess our being side so we know where to go from there?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, and what’s interesting, and there’s a variety of different ways that we can do this, right? So I’m going to step into a few different ways. One way is to look at our mindsets. Our mindsets are intimately connected to this, to our being side, because they’re about how our bodies are wired to operate more self protective or more value creating. So if you’re listening to this, I’ve developed a mindset assessment on my website called the personal mindset assessment. It’s free. Anybody could take it, and it will help them to evaluate the quality of their mindset. So that’s a helpful tool, but not everybody has access to that. I mean, it’s free. Now you’ve heard about it, but not everybody knows about it. But beyond that, another way to kind of gage This is window of tolerance. The window of tolerance was popularized by a psychologist called his name is Daniel Siegel. He’s written a great book called Mindsight, and he dives into this concept there, as well as in other places. But window of tolerance is effectively, how easily triggered are we to difference, to stress, pressure, complexity, uncertainty, etc. So we have a window that when, when the stress is low in our lives. It’s a it’s a window in which our body’s nervous system is regulated. And so when you know when challenges come our way, when we’re in this regulated state, we can navigate those challenges rather effectively. We are in cognitive and emotional control, but the more stress that we experience, or if you’re anything like me, if you get hangry, then you kind of sense that you’re moving closer to the edge of your window of tolerance, where you’re losing cognitive and emotional control. And there’s even times where we get we’ll call it triggered, and we actually go outside of our window of tolerance, and we’ve lost almost all cognitive and emotional control. And so when we when we move closer to the edge of our window of tolerance, or even beyond it, we become more reactive, as opposed to intentionally responsive. So one of the things that we need to recognize is all of us, the width of our window of tolerance differs just as we differ in height or weight. And so the wider our window of tolerance, our greater capacity to stay in cognitive and emotional control across difficult situations. And our window tolerance is also something that we could widen. We can expand. In fact, as we elevate along our being side, that’s what happens. So people with a wider window of tolerance are at a higher altitude along their being side. People with a narrower window of tolerance more reactive individuals, for example, then they’re going to be low. That’s a. Find that they’re lower on their being side. So that’s another, I think, a helpful way to kind of gage our altitude along that being side. The field of developmental psychology is the field that has actually done the most research along our being side. Now, developmental psychology has historically focused on child development. We know that children go through different developmental stages. They go from infancy to adulthood, but a narrow kind of area of focus for developmental psychologists is adult development, and what they’ve found is that just as children go through different development stages, adults can go through different adult development stages. In fact, what they found is that there’s three primary adult development stages or levels. And what’s interesting about this is that while adults can develop what they’ve found is that most adults don’t develop in adulthood along their being side. So if there’s three levels along our being side, let’s just call them for now, level one, level two, level 360. 4% of adults operate in level one and never get to level 230, 5% get to level two, and only 1% gets to level three. So there’s not many that operate there. And so one of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve kind of understand this, is the reality is, is that most of us, and most of the people that we know, operate at this base level, which is a rather self protective way to operate, right? So for example, if I were to say to you, how do most people respond to constructive criticism? Criticism, you would say they get defensive, right? And that’s a self protective strategy in that moment, but it’s one that probably is something that holds them back from learning, growing and developing. So that’s a self protective reaction, as opposed to a value creating response. So most of us and most of the people we associate with, are people that operate at this lower being side level. So this kind of becomes the norm, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s very cognitively and emotionally sophisticated. And so when we understand this framework, that’s another way to gage it. And in fact, I’ve got another free assessment on my website that will allow you to kind of gage what level you tend to operate at. It’s called a vertical development assessment.

Host
Very literally, once we’ve assessed that, once we know where we’re at, what is this trick to leveling up?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, at its core, what we’ve got to recognize is, is our being side is connected to our internal operating system, which really is our nervous system. So we’ve got to engage in efforts to better regulate and upgrade our body’s nervous system. And I think that there’s three different levels that we could think about doing work on our nervous system. So I’m going to say that there’s surface level approaches, there’s deeper level approaches, and there’s deepest level approaches. So at the surface level are things that I think are fairly common and they’re being increasingly promoted. These are things like meditation, uh, journaling, gratitude journaling, engaging in self talk, doing like we see, cold plunges. These are all actually activities that help us better regulate our body’s nervous system. And so I think that there’s surface level in that they holistically help us better regulate ourselves to get into the deeper level. I think that’s where mindsets reside, if, because, again, most people aren’t conscious of our mindsets, and so if we could help them to become conscious of our mindsets, we are getting directly at one of the primary jobs of our internal operating system, which is how our body makes meaning of our world. And if we can awaken to how we make meaning of our world, or how we’re prone to make meaning of our world, then we could do the work of adjusting and improving how we make meaning of our world. So for me, and that’s where this is the space that I primarily play, in terms of the coaching and the consulting that I do, is I help do some of this deeper level ver it’s called vertical development work, as opposed to horizontal development work. So that’s a deeper the deeper level strategy. At the deepest level, this is where we find things like therapy, like psychological therapy, trauma healing therapy, and even if people have neuro divergence, then we like ADHD, for example, is something that impacts our being side that there’s what’s called neuro feedback therapy, and that could help us, help us rewire our brain. And then one of the things that I’ve kind of got my ear to the ground on is some of the latest research coming out with psychedelic assisted therapy. So all of the initial research that seems to be coming out now is suggesting that it’s one of the most effective ways of rewiring our body’s nervous system. And so those are I don’t play at that level, because I don’t have the training for either any of those things, but I’ve participated, for example, in trauma healing therapy that’s been a part of my own personal development journey. And I would say, I’m currently not engaging with my therapist, but I started that process that’s about four years ago, and I spent two years working with a trauma therapist to heal from some stuff in my past, right? So, and I would say five years ago, when I was on the podcast, if you would have asked me if I had trauma in my past, I would have said no, I had great parents. They stayed married, they went to every basketball game I ever played. But what I’ve come to realize is that while my parents were always there for me physically, they were rarely there for me emotionally. So I’ve got some emotional neglect in my background, and I didn’t know that five years ago, and I’ve come to awaken to that and engage with the trauma therapist to help me kind of heal my body from that experience. I guess one of the things that I’ve learned is how we are wired to survive our childhood is not the wiring that we need to be successful as adults and as leaders. And that’s ultimately what we’re talking about, is, how do we rewire ourselves? And what I’ve learned just engaging in this deepest level strategy of engaging with a trauma therapist is doing that healing work has done. I have, I have grown and developed more as a person in that two years than I had the prior 16 years of my adult life. And I think at the end of the day, that’s why doing you know, coming on this podcast, sharing these ideas, is meaningful to me, because at the end of the day, if we want to elevate along our being side at a foundational level, it’s about healing our minds, our bodies and our hearts. And if we want to become transformationally better, that’s what it requires. It requires healing. And I’ve just come to learn that most of us need some healing.

Host
The first time you joined the program, we discussed your book, which was just about to release, Success Mindsets. We’ve touched today on a lot of the material that’s in Becoming Better your latest book, but in the meantime, you’ve also put out another great book, The Elevated Leader. We don’t want to overlook that.

Ryan Gottfredson
For sure. And thank you for bringing it up. And in fact, we have talked about it. So when I talked about those three adult development levels, level one, level two, level three, that’s what the elevated leader is all about, getting to know those three levels and allowing us to use that framework to introspect about the at the time, I wasn’t calling it this, but the I was calling it the quality of our internal operating system. But now the terminology we’ve used here is that plus elevating along our being side.

Host
You mentioned a number of assessments available on your website today that people can go and start taking action on what they’ve heard about today, lay that website on us one more time and talk about what some of those assessments are and any other free tools.

Ryan Gottfredson
For sure. So there’s the two on my website. RyanGottfredson.com, there’s a free personal mindset assessment, a free vertical development assessment, again, both of those are help us to awaken to the quality along our being side. And then, if you wanted to do deeper work for yourself, you know, I help, I do engage in coaching to help people to upgrade themselves. Or when I work with organizations, what I’ll generally do is I’ll have groups or teams or even the entire organization, take these assessments, and then I could aggregate those results up to a collective level, and we could look at the collective mindsets of an organization, of a group of leaders or of a team. So if anybody wants to do some of that deeper work beyond just taking a couple of assessments, would love to have some conversations with folks. What I’ve experienced, because I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations and 1000s of leaders, is for every group that I’ve worked with, this is an incredibly eye opening experience and which allows for transformation to occur. And I just feel blessed to kind of be playing in a, in a spot, and in a in a place where I could help people to awaken to the deeper sense of themselves, so that they can elevate themselves at this foundational level.

Host
Well, Ryan, thank you so much for taking some time to join us in the program today and for helping us become better.

Ryan Gottfredson
Thanks for having me, and thanks for creating this platform. I know having a podcast is not an easy thing to do, and it’s actually a very generous thing to do, so appreciate your willingness to do that so that people like me can share our ideas.