ReThinking: Getting to the heart of team culture with Pete Carroll

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That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro. Your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates and finding your next great hire. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, LinkedIn found that its users are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com/worklife. Terms and conditions apply. Hey everyone, it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the Science of What Makes Us Take. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Pete Carroll, the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He's among the most successful football coaches of all time, one of just three ever to win both a Super Bowl and a college national championship. When I met Pete a few years ago, I was surprised by how different he was from a stereotypical football coach. He's not particularly loud, and berating people is not in his playbook. His coaching philosophy revolves around culture and care. And as you might have guessed, he's a fan of the Craiteful Ted. I think I'm supposed to ask you what's on your heart? Oh shoot, there's a lot going on right now. It's a really interesting time because we're constructing and reconstructing a team. Because of the possibilities, because of these guys that are here in this program, it's a really exciting time. There's a lot of positives. There's a lot of really good forward thinking and anticipation of stuff going well. So it's a great time right now. Glad to hear it. Well, that, I think, goes to one of the big topics I wanted to talk to you about, which is recognizing talent and potential. You spent your whole career trying to size up what people are capable of. What do you look for now in a player that you didn't early on? We're advancing what we appreciate, and what we understand is important, has expanded. Whereas one time maybe we were more concerned about really getting the fastest guys in the best looking athletes and all of that. We felt like if we just had that, we'd be okay. We look much deeper into the players now, and much deeper into their makeup and capture who they are as soon as we can so that we can go to work with that. In the process of evaluating players as they come to us, we're trying to figure out the makeup, the chip on the shoulder, the competitiveness, so that we can tap into that. The most fundamental way I can tell you is I've always looked at guys, I'm trying to figure out who I would want to pick to play on my team if I was playing in the park. That's the basics of it. The guy that I want to compete with, it's really trying to uncover that during the process. The chip on the shoulder phenomenon is really interesting because on the one hand, I can see the motivation that it brings. On the other hand, I imagine it makes people hard to coach sometimes because they have a plan and a path, right, and who are you to tell me how I do things? No, that's exactly right, but that walking that edge with guys has really been something that I've taken pride in over the years because I appreciate so much of that edge. I want them to feel like this is a place where they can demonstrate really as openly as they can what's right through to their heart, and so I'm trying to uncover that and try to create an environment so they feel comfortable and free to express themselves. Some guys, they carry it different than other guys, and I appreciate the heck out of that. Once I sense that, they get a little attitude with me now. I want to give them the space because I want them to be whatever that is, that whacked out over that crazy or that intense or that fiery or sometimes it's even in the quiet guys too, that they go all the way the other way, so it's the whole spectrum. What does that conversation look like if you do pick up some attitude from a player? The conversation from the beginning is to try to get them to feel comfortable to be open. I know you've talked to Brunei Brown. She was one that impressed upon me a long time ago that you got to create an environment of openness and vulnerability so that people will express themselves. They won't hold back. If anybody's holding back, then I'm screwing it up, so I'm trying to find ways to connect with them. There's a relationship based set up here and that means that we got to get to know who we're dealing with. I've got to put them in different situations. I've got to get them to speak. I've got to get them to react. I've got to get them to laugh and tell the sadness of their story and the joy of their story and get to all of those things during the process. We're a very open communicative group and that's where the relationships are so important. I don't need to be friends with them. I just need them to be willing to express themselves and really to be willing to expose themselves for who they are. That's an ongoing conversation and there's no one way to do it. It takes time and you're going to be a really good observer to make the most of it. One of my findings from recent research is that especially in leadership, one of the most powerful ways to elicit vulnerability is to show it. As a leader, I can't expect you to be vulnerable unless I am too. How do you show vulnerability to bring that out in your players? Every way I can. Really, I'm trying to be as open as I can possibly be. But more importantly, I've got to get to the source of what's moving me and what's making me think that it's worth talking about the topic I'm on. I need to get to where I can get emotional about it. I'm doing that because I want to communicate with them really well and I know that most of the time, the communication is most powerful when you are really engaged and really willing to express yourself and it isn't always the words you say, it's how you say it and how they feel it. I'm trying to get myself and my coaches and my players to that point because that's when we're really functioning at a high level. It's why we really like to have guys tell their story. Tell us where you come from. Tell us which backgrounds and then man, they go off and they get going and before you know it, sometimes they're in motion as well and that just draws everybody. Is there an example that jumps in mind of, you know, if something you shared or opened up about that we wouldn't expect a coach to? I talk about when you really love somebody, you'll do whatever it takes to protect them and to look after them and I want to express to them what it is to be a father and to be a parent and how far will you go to help your kid be the best they can be and be the safest and the most objective and have the most fun? How do you get there and what does that take to do that? I love talking about that topic because it's so real and it's so important for everybody to make their choice how they want to operate that. When I'm talking about the love thing, that to me is really as deep as I can try to go and I try to let myself get there. You must have some colleagues in the NFL who think it's a little unusual for a football coach to talk a lot about love. Yeah, I like to think if I can demonstrate to these guys that caring for people is your best way to help motivate them and to help reach them and to help, you know, help them find themselves. I know that that topic is a little bit different but I think it's the key to everything. I really think it's the key to everything, all of the relationships with my coaches to help them stay at their best is I got to keep finding ways to keep shown why it's important to me to care for them. I haven't really been a mainstream guy. I'm not like in the groove of some of the classics but I'm not doing that to be different. I'm just doing it to try to figure out how to be at my best, too. I remember the last time Bernay was on this show, she said one of her big takeaways from working with Air Force leaders was that you cannot lead people you don't feel affection for. We have seen this over and again, the difference between coaching in college and coaching in the NFL for me has been, and I've been both back and forth. Guys graduate, they leave and you know they're going and everybody knows it and there's kind of an end coming the whole time. Well, the end that's coming in professional sports doesn't have a timeline to it. You can kind of age out but there's not a really defined time. What I've realized here in this job, I think I'm starting my 14th year, you know, so we've been here a long time, that I've lived through careers of guys. And when you care for people as much as we care for them and go through as much and respect what we've experienced together to come to a point where you have to say, you know, it's over now, you know, and you're you're done and we got it, you know, get ready to move on. I'll help you in every way I can. But for that. to take place. That's a huge transition. You know, you don't, you don't cut your family. Your kids, they're going to be your kids forever. Well, in my, my approach, I'm never leaving these guys. When they've been here for a while, I'll be here. I don't matter how far apart we get or where they go or whatever. I'm not leaving them. That's both moving and unusual to hear. This goes back to your point about asking players to tell their stories. I imagine that not everyone opens up right away. So when just asking what's your story isn't enough, how do you begin to get to know them? It's really just by relating. Competition is the central theme in our program. We've used competing as a way to get guys to interact and get guys to, you know, have to show themselves and have to battle when we shoot hoops in almost every day in their meetings. And it just gives us an environment kind of a tool to have fun. When you have fun, often you're not worried about, you know, how you're coming across and you're getting close to who you are. And I can see the guys that aren't and that are struggling with it, but it's also just being receptive and being available. So when the other times come, so that you can come in the office or you can catch them in the hallway or hang out with them or whatever. You have some rules in place to try to facilitate that. Tell me about your C-HUX rules. Well, they're pretty basic. Always protect the team is rule number one. And it gives me a chance to talk about what that means. That's about your conscience. You hold people that are on your team, in your conscience always, and you have a mindfulness of them. And you do what it takes to protect them and look after them. Rule number two that I borrowed from Coach John Wooden is no whining, no complaining, no excuses. That's a mindset for us that has to do with how you talk, you know, how you communicate with people. And do you share your ugly thoughts about something or whatever, or do you try to help one another be positive and be supportive and work to bring out the best in people. And so that's another part of it. And then rule number three, and I tell you, they're really short and they're really easy, is be early. Again, it gives me a chance to communicate to the guys, you know, what's important. To me, it's about priorities, you know, getting organized and getting your life together so that you can show respect, which is the biggest aspect of rule number three towards the people around you that I'm prepared to come to wherever the meeting is or wherever it's supposed to go. I figured out my plan. I got up on time. I ate on time and got to the building on time, whatever. And I had a plan about it. That's getting your priorities in order so that you can present yourself in the best light. And when we talk about that, we talk about respect a lot. And I've asked guys over the years, they tell me what respect is. And they got a million answers. It's hard to figure out what respect is. So we've brought it to using the word regard, how you regard something or somebody. When you think about regard in terms of respect, you can also think, how do you regard yourself? How do you present yourself? Do you present yourself where it shows that it's important? Or do you not care? It doesn't matter to you. You dress crappy. You don't pay attention to people. You may listen, you may not. You may do right. You may not. That's all an opportunity to demonstrate your self-regard and self-respect. And so if you want to be at your best, you've got to present yourself your best as well. Those rules have a lot that I can work with and I can pretty much run the show on that. And so it's helped me over the years. They're easy to remember, but they're also powerful. No excuse is one is interesting to me. I find that I sometimes get in trouble on this because I'll try to explain my behavior not to excuse it and people confuse the explanation for an excuse. How do you separate those two things? To me, it's intent. And if you mean well and you're trying to explain yourself or describe why you did something or make sense of it, if it's true to you, then it doesn't really matter kind of what they think about it. Because in the end, they'll figure it out. If you're making it up and you're BS and then they're going to find out, it's really just getting to the truth. You modeled that in a very powerful way in a moment that I'm sure you're tired of talking about, but I have to ask because I think it's so fascinating on two levels. If we go back to the 2015 Super Bowl, you made a pass call, I think 25 seconds left that got intercepted, C-hux lost the game and you immediately took the blame. I think you said to your team, that's my fault totally. I thought that was an incredible leadership moment. How did you get there? Well, through a lot of years of preparing for that moment, you know, I always go to myself first in terms of accountability. And I mean, if somebody doesn't act according to the way I would like him to as a coach or whatever, and the first thing I think was, well, maybe I didn't explain it to him right. Maybe I wasn't clear enough that he understood, you know, where I'm coming from, and so I'm not going to blame him. I'm going to figure out how can I do a better job to help them be more effective and be in accordance with me. Well, I'm asking our guys to be, to hold themselves accountable for everything that we're doing. It's got to start with me. There's moments. They're not that frequent, but there's rare moments when things happen when, you know, accountability is really the most important thing. And what do you undo when the time comes? You know, in my mind, I prepared myself for those moments and then I want to demonstrate the epitome of poise and understanding and clarity and all of that. So really in the instant that that play happened, I think I bent down and then by the time I stood up, I said, well, here you go, you know, this is that time because I realized how much just occurred. And I knew that in going in the locker room, there was going to be an array of concerns, you know, with emotions and all of the life effect that it has as an athlete on the coach, you know, those rare moments. And I didn't want to leave it any gray area. I didn't want to, I didn't want them to have to think about this or that or the other thing or come up with their own, I'll take it, you know, and then I'll deal with it and then I've prepared for years to be able to do that. Whether it was preparing for the good of the bad of it, you know, I want to be ready for it. Wow. How did the team react when you took responsibility? I said, you guys are going to take this differently. It's going to hit everybody in their own individual way and we want to give space for people to respond the way they do. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to, you know, how we're going to move forward. But I think it's going to take us some time. I don't think I mentioned that it was going to be a grieving process, but it was a grieving process. And you know, you got to take the time that it takes to get your mind clear and to be on your stuff. Pete, one of the things that's that's telling it to me in a situation like that is psychologists have found that it's easier to admit some of your failures and shortcomings when you've achieved success. And I wonder, with that moment of been harder, if you hadn't come off a Super Bowl victory the previous year? Yeah, it's some extraordinary times in Los Angeles that I see that helped me, you know, shape the way I wanted to be. That's why I was prepared enough. I've anticipated if something goes really terrible that, you know, I'm going to handle that too. And so I've had enough time to get to that. And I think the winning certainly had a big factor winning the year before, but I think it's more than that. I think it's much deeper than that than just the one Super Bowl win. Now, I want to challenge our football fan listeners to rethink their view of your play call in that situation. I was talking with Annie Duke about this recently. And I think it's such a clear example of what she calls resulting, right? Where, okay, the interception happened. Therefore, it must have been a bad decision. But empirically, I don't buy that. Right. I think the interception rate in a situation like that is something like one or two percent. And if you had scored a touchdown there and won the Super Bowl, people would have called you a genius. Right. So Annie would say, you made a good decision that happened to have a rare bad outcome. Where do you come down on that? After time thinking about that's kind of how I express it to. It wasn't the worst decision. It was a worse outcome. All of the time it takes to get your mentality correct and get close to fully functioning. You've got to have the goods in the bats. You have to go through it. I hate learning the hard way. I always want the other guy to learn the hard way. But I do appreciate the fact that it's important. And we have to pick ourselves up and respect that to really work to prevent that. But I agree with her. That's exactly how I interpreted it. Well, this is, I think one of the biggest challenges of your job as a coach, right, is you have to learn from decisions where there's a lot of luck. Sometimes good sometimes bad involved. Sure. So when you analyze your judgments, how do you figure out what was the situation and what was on you? We've got a format for that. It's called Tell the Truth Monday. It's get to the essence of what it just took place. And try to share that with everybody. So everybody can share in that as well. I don't think I get 100% of buying all the time on my interpretation of the truth. But I try to do that really well. And that's to really step back and get clear and listen to the people around you and watch the players and the coaches and how everybody can express what took place and then and then try to present that so that we can put it somewhere and move on. That's the whole point of Tell the Truth. It's not about getting to the truth of it as much as getting on. It's just as difficult to respond to a great win as it is to a great loss. Whatever enters into your mind when you're trying to perform at your best, it's a distraction. It doesn't matter what kind of distraction it is. Any of those factors can keep you from finding the clarity it takes to perform at your best. So I got to get rid of that. That's that we got to we got to put that behind us and and and stick the big win or the big loss behind us so that we can take the next step we take getting back to the basics. And that's why I theme it like it's competition Wednesday for us is there's a big purpose in that. The reason is we're going to go back to competing we're going to go back to focusing on our craft focusing on what it takes to to play good good ball. And part of that is battling and wanting and trying to win on the practice field. And that's all to try to draw our focus away from what took place and into what's really important and that's getting good at what. This episode is sponsored by another nine. Have you ever wanted to play more golf but just couldn't find the time? Turns out golf is changing nearly 50 million Americans play today and more of them returning to simulators for a faster, more convenient way to enjoy the game. Another nine was built to meet that demand. 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Are you up for some rapid fire questions and answers? Let it rip. What's a book that we should all read? My favorite book was Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and it was a book by a guy named Chowgim Trungpa. And I read it back in my college days and I've never been the same. But I would give you one other one though, too. The inner game is a great book, too. I love that one. What was the thing that hit you hardest from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism? I'm not familiar with it. Helping yourself do things for the right reasons. You get to the truth, get to the source, get to the what's authentic, you know, and represent that way. Who is your coaching role model? A bud grant is really my favorite guy. He has great tastes in a last name. Yeah. He just passed away recently and I only coached with him for one season. He hired me after I got fired and NFL after my first year. He hired me back into the league and then he retired after that year. But we remain connected throughout all of the years, but he's affected me the most. His extraordinary abilities and just the person that he was, you know, was really affected me in a big way. He's a great observer. Man, he just didn't miss stuff. He could hear things, see things kind of almost before they'd happen and he had awareness that, you know, that could only envy. But I just love the guy and he was a great winner. Speaking of being fired and the opposite of winning, what's the biggest lesson you've learned about how to bounce back from a setback, whether it's losing your job or losing again? Don't sanction the person that fired you. If you buy into it and you think that you're beaten and that was the truth that you should have been kicked out, then I don't know how to bounce back. Anybody let me go, I thought they made a mistake and that's kind of that chip on the shoulder that we talked about a little bit. I'm just not going to sanction that decision. I remember the time I got fired at the Jets. The first thought to hit my mind is that I got two more years of my contract. We got to go to Disney World, you know, in my world, you know, there's a lot of people talking about it and you get a lot of exposure about it and all that and a lot of criticism and all and you got to stand strong. So that's part of the mentality of competing to me. What would you say is the worst advice you've ever gotten? Anybody that's trying to tell you to act like somebody else. I had a coaching job that people in charge wanted me to be, you know, more like this guy. And why can't we do it more like that? And fortunately, my mentors that I checked in with kept telling me to stay the course. You'll never be any good at being somebody else. Who would you say is the most underrated player in football past your present? This guy may not be underrated, but I thought Troy Polomalo was one of the greatest players I ever was ever around. He's a hall of fame and all that, but I don't know. He never got enough credit in my book. Did not expect a stealer to come up, but we'll take it. What's an interview question that you've found especially insightful when you're looking at either a potential draft pick or a player to vet? Why do you treasure this player, you know, what is it? What is it that you treasure? That to me, and I'm not answering that because of his numbers, you know, and I'm not answering that because of his stats and how big he is. I would answer it because I want to be able to express why I think so highly of them. And you know, what I appreciate most about him and why we would make a decision to bring him on your club. Is there something that you've rethought recently? I've just jumped back into my work in a way that I haven't done in a few years and I'm really excited about it. I just feel that the connection to going for it right now in a little bit different way and my whole world has shifted forward and I'm really excited about it. And what it means, I'm just getting more involved with one side of the football and the defensive side. Just because I want to, you know, and I want to help and I want to be there to give them everything I got. And I felt like I had more to offer. So it's really been exciting and I'm looking forward to it. Wow. What pulled you to defense? Well, that's just kind of always been my strength and it just thinks it's time to revisit it. And so rethinking is to take a step back, but yet with new vision and new eyes and all of that, so I'm excited about it. It's almost like you used to be a defensive coordinator and defensive backscotch. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, it's diehard. Yep. Since you're a fellow podcast host here, is there a question you want to ask me as an organizational psychologist? Knowing that you're always pressed to get to the next idea, like rethink, you know, how do you handle that? How do you deal with the fact that, okay, I got to reinvent, you know, another concept or a principle because I think that's an exciting challenge for somebody who's been creative. Okay, how are you going to, you know, paint another story night, you know, what kind of thing? I think early on, I made the mistake of saying, all right, I don't want to get typecast. I don't want to keep doing the greatest hits or I don't even believe in nonfiction sequels. Once an idea has, you know, has grown big enough for, you know, a series of studies or a book, then it's time to move on and not everybody wants you to move on, which is always a challenge. But I think I was a little bit too eager to say, if I'm excited about an idea, that's enough. And it's not enough because, as you well know, from writing ideas can follow you for a long time. And sometimes that's a curse of success, right, is that you can't ever escape your past work. One of the things I've tried to pay more attention to is not just what's interesting to me, but what do other people care about? What do they keep asking questions about? And then also, where do I have a novel perspective to bring to the table, right? And if something is exciting personally, and it matters to other people, I don't think for example, the world needs yet another leadership book at this point, right? So I'm probably not going to write one. But there are other topics that I feel like are massively underrepresented. And so I want to go where there's interest, where there's importance, but there's not necessarily a lot of light that's been shined. I'm kind of stuck being a ball coach, too, you know, there's no much I can do about that. But there's a lot of ways that I'm interested in continuing to find out how that makes sense in other ways also. I think one of the things that's most interesting about your role is that you're really shepherding people through a major transition in life in a lot of cases from college to being a professional athlete and then to something you touched on earlier, to walking away from the game that's defined their entire life. How do you help people navigate those transitions? And I don't need to tell you, it can be a massive loss of identity. It's the main deal that these guys have to have to deal with. And I liken it to guys coming out of the fighting and wars, you know, and the guys are in service and they give their life to the guy next to them, they keep them alive. That takes so much of yourself that you can't see yourself as anything other than that. And the football players, myself included, I've never gotten over it really. You know, I've still got to chip my shoulder about it and I shouldn't have cut me when he cut me the last time. You know, like that's just still be playing. It's a major issue to deal with and it needs to be understood and respected because it's real. And when you've primarily thought of yourself as a player, as a football player, you know. any sport. And then all of a sudden you don't have that to wake up to where you can act on it. You don't know who you are without it. When you're a mom and the kids leave the house, you know, when you're married and then you're not. When those things change, those major shifts that happen in your life, somebody passes away, I don't have that person any longer. It really takes consideration and love and caring and time and grieving and all of those things to get back on track. The game has been the purpose, you know, it's been why you do stuff, you know, and everything kind of fits around it. When that goes away, you got to rediscover. And to wait till it's over, it's late. It's late in the process. There could be some real pitfalls and they see it all the time with our guys. They really have trouble finding their way. And so we hope to be always connected. That's why I always want to be connected, guys, so at least we can communicate. And I can see them who they are because we're always ball players, you know, we are and they can't get away with it. You're always a guy that fought in the war. You can't get away from it. You don't want to. I don't think. I think you need to hold on to that because that has been a major part of your upbringing and you need to stay connected to that. But we have to go. We have to grow. From one year to the next, I hammer my coaches on this start to get ready. They're coming back. It's a new year. They're not going to be the same as they were last year. If you expect them to be exactly the same, you're going to be mistaken. So you have to be open to the newness of that that comes to you and you have to observe and listen and watch and and be tuned into all of that. It's that clarity that gives you a chance to deal with the things that are uncomfortable or that don't feel just right or a person doesn't come across like they used to. They don't talk to you the same way that they used to. They don't respect you in the same way. They may respect you more even. You just have to be wide open and there's that openness and that willingness to listen and to watch really carefully and to be a great observer is crucial and moving forward. When you're talking about what's new, it reminds me you're a big believer in the importance of beginnings. You've often said that the first day is when you make mistakes that can haunt a team for years. How do you approach those beginnings to make sure you don't make those disasters mistakes? Well, one of the ways is anybody can have a good day. Can you come back and have another good day? And it's not unlike, you can win a big game, but can you come back and win another one? Can you get refocused and can you get tuned in? It's just like you're talking about. It's about rethinking. Can you get on the wavelength that you need to be on to be at your best? And can you return to that? I haven't mentioned the word, but the word trust is really important here. If you've been able to be effective at what you do, then you have acknowledged that. That doesn't mean you need to be cocky about it and shove it in somebody's face. You just need to know the truth. And then when you know the truth, what did it take for me to get there? And then, okay, how do I reconstruct my path to get back on course again? That's a day-to-day thing. I mean, I get them all tell, okay, we had a great day of practice yesterday, but that didn't mean anything. Because that thing's already gone. What are you going to do now? It's been a really helpful tool because you reset. And you don't get swayed or affected by what happened in the past, in any other way than to build your belief. And yeah, I can do this again. Yeah, I can get that done. So there's a real discipline to that. We've talked a lot about care and relationships and the importance of connecting with people. I know that especially earlier in your career, you got a lot of criticism for being too soft on players, too late back. And you didn't change your style. Why not? And what would you say to those critics now? Because clearly, they were wrong. They didn't understand. They didn't know. You know, they didn't know what was important and what was happening. They just knew it was different. And different was bad. And different, that's a terrible thing. When things aren't like you want them to be, you think they're wrong, you know, or they're bad. And I haven't been a typical coach. I think it was my second year of coaching at the University of Pacific back in the day. I was a graduate assistant. I was at a night meeting during camp as a defensive back coach and I had a thought to ask the guys, what do they need to work on in the drills tomorrow? What can I do to help you? You know, and all of a sudden these guys started, I mean, I filled up a chalkboard with ideas and things that they wanted to do. It was like the best meeting I'd ever had because all of a sudden, they were interacting and we're going and we're working. And so the meetings over and, you know, I take on a jog back to the to the off of the football office. And the first guy I went into is my old head coach, Chester Catalyst, you know, old Kentucky guy, you know, a Southern is an old style and authoritarian as you can be. And I said, coach, I just had the best meeting I ever had. He said, what happened? I said, well, I asked the guys what they wanted to do work on in practice tomorrow. And they were all fired up and they told me a million things. They said, don't you ever ask them to what they want to do? You don't ever want to know you're listening to what their considerations are. They said, I'm a slumber. Oh, because I love my coach. And I said, oh, man, I just, I was totally wrong. You know, I thought, I thought about it for a couple of minutes. I got like left and I like, wait a minute, that I was just there. I watched what happened. That was freaking awesome. And so I did just what I said I was going to do. And we did the drills that they were talking about. And that point forward, you know, I realized that I was on different wavelengths than the guy was working for. I was really a big moment. Look, I still remember it. It was just that moment of when you connect with people and they communicate with you and they realize that you care enough that you would ask them. And then you'll act on it and you'll back it up and you'll come through for them. The relationship just skyrocketed. It's such a deceptively simple idea. Right. And I think it is to say that if you want to show people that you care about them and also that you're invested in their growth, ask them how they want to grow. Tell me your story. You know, if I was going to try to help a company do better for a corporation or something like that, I'd go right to dealing with your people. Start a level of communication that isn't present and is uncommon and show them why it's important to see how extraordinarily unique they are and uncover that and make them realize that you care about understanding that and then you recognize them. And in essence, you see them and you hear them. I don't know how you can't perform at a higher level if that's the way you deal with the people in your company. I don't care what you're doing. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's getting people to realize that you see them at their best. And then that's not easy. You know, it's not just automatic that you do that. You've got to work at it. And that work that you put in and the time that you spend, that's where the real sweet stuff is. So given your passion for growing and learning, what are you hoping to get better at this year? I'm real specific about that. Now I need to really, really do a good job of listening to my guys now. I've got to draw from my coaches everything that they got. And that means I've got to just be on point every single moment. I've stepped into this building and whenever I'm with them and when I'm not, I can't stop competing at helping. I had a coach one time. I said, "Hey, I'm sitting on a beach. I had a thought about a pass route." And the guy says, "You're sitting on a beach." I said, "Yeah, I was in Hawaii sitting on a beach and I had a thought." So I called you and I'm calling you. He said, "Well, when I go to the beach, I don't think about anything." He said, "What are you doing?" So I realized, "Yeah, I can't turn it off." And I really don't want to. When the brain goes, you've got to go with it. It's just too important. And that's competing. I got to do that with my guys. That's what this year is all about. It's helping them be great at what they do. And then we'll get all the good stuff if we do that. Well, I'm excited to see where it takes you. And for the record, I cannot imagine what it's like to not think about anything. I know we're cursed, but that's okay. That's okay. I have no complaints here. And you don't allow complaints anyway. So I'm not going to complain. There you go. That's it. Rule number two. Pete, this has been a lot of fun and super informative too. Oh, I appreciate that. Pete has been thinking a lot about the importance of communicating our standards to other people. So many times when they disappoint us, we think it's due to their actions. But it's actually because their behavior fell short of our expectations. And in many cases, it's because they didn't know what we expected. If you want people to rise to the occasion, you need to communicate what your expectations are. And if you want to live up to other people's expectations, you have to find out what they are. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Ben Van Chang, Hannah Kingsley Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard, original music by Hans Dail Sioux and Allison Layton Brown. Seems like you and Ted Lasso would get along with his idea of if players becoming like a goldfish and having sort of a 10-second memory. I've not watched that. I've always saw the first episode. What? No, I don't watch it. You haven't watched Ted Lasso? No, I'm going to watch it some other time. But I love what he's doing and how it's coming across in the fact that he's had on people. I think his ways is marvelous. But I don't This episode is sponsored by Toyota. Expression shows up in ways we don't always notice. It's not just what we say. It's the choices we make, the things we surround ourselves with, the way we move through the world. Even something like the car you drive can be a form of expression. Toyota's new all-electric family leans into that idea. The CHR, for example, has a bold, distinctive design, something that stands out a little in a good way. While the Beasy and the Beasy Woodland each bring their own personality to the table, it's a reminder that the things we use every day don't have to be neutral. They can actually reflect who we are. Learn more at toyota.com, the new all-electric family. Toyota, let's go places. Hey, this is Elise Hue, host of Ted Talks Daily. This episode is supported in part by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning Behavioral Scientist and author of the book. best-selling book How to Change. Troysology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Here are true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Troysology at Schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen. Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's Healthy Optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more.