Lessonly: To See It, Be It – Notes on Doing Better Work and Living a Better Life With Max Yoder

Music:  00:00

This is RecruitingDaily’s recruiting live podcast, where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week, we take one overcomplicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William:  00:33

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Today, we have Max on from Lessonly. We’re going to be talking about a book that he’s recently written, To See It, Be It, notes on doing better work and living a better life, and Max is going to talk to us about all of that in the context and how he got there and all that stuff. So, Max, you’ve been on the program before, introduce yourself and introduce Lessonly.

Max:  01:01

We’re getting good at this, William.

William:  01:02

We are.

Max:  01:03

I’m glad to be back. Yeah, Max Yoder here. I started a company called Lessonly with my friends, going on nine and a half years ago. We make training software that helps people learn in practice, usually sales teams and customer service teams. In the past three months, we were acquired by Seismic, a San Diego company that also helps sales teams. It’s been a good ride and the ride continues, and thanks for having me on to talk about the book.

William:  01:27

Absolutely, absolutely, and Lessonly, for those that aren’t aware, best in breed, just an absolutely great company and a great company to work for. If you go and look… You talk to people that have worked there and currently work there, it’s rave reviews. It’s, I wouldn’t say cultish, that’s not the right word. People love it. They really, really, really love Lessonly. So the culture that y’all built, it’s just been amazing.

Max:  01:57

Thank you.

William:  01:57

All right, so writing a book, so let’s start with the title and let’s go into what were you thinking? Why’d you go down this path, Max? So you could have done anything, but why’d you do this?

Max:  02:12

Yeah, I really enjoy writing. It’s one of the ways I get my thoughts straight. It’s one of the ways I get my emotions sorted out. It’s one of my ways of just emotional processing, and I’d been writing notes to my teammates and our customers, anybody who wants to sign up for four years, and it started out just our teammates and then people would invite other people, and it’s been a really fun thing to know that more and more people are reading. I’ve never once looked at the statistics. People have told me how many folks read it. I’ve never looked at the stats. I don’t know the open rates because I tell myself that is not what this is about. What I want to do with this note that I’ve been sending out for four years, that ultimately became this book, is share things that matter to me. So if nobody opens the email and it matters to me, it still matters to me, and I don’t want to be guided by what I write about. So four years of writing about what I want to. I took-

William:  03:01

So what was the, sorry to interrupt Max, if you can remember the first one, if not the first one, what was one of the one that you either got push back or was the most impactful for folks?

Max:  03:14

I got push back on many of them, which is fine. Different folks have different perspectives. If this is resonating with everyone, then I’m probably being pretty vanilla.

William:  03:26

Good point, good point.

Max:  03:26

I’ve got a perspective that I think work and life should work a certain way. I’m glad not everybody agrees with it, and I know for a fact not everybody agrees with it. So many folks who are just like that’s not my life experience, they share their life experience, and I welcome that. The note that has gotten the best reception from responses, because I get the email responses when people reply, I don’t look at the stats, but if they reply, it goes to me, is ultimately the name of this book, To See It, Be It, and that was a note about the first time I ever held my daughter, so my wife was asleep after going through labor and going through surgery, and our daughter Marnie was born, and I was holding her for the first time, and the nurse walked up to me, while I was holding my daughter, and she just gently pushed my shoulders down. And I asked her if I seem tense and she nodded. She’s like, “Yeah, you seem tense,” and basically, I was wearing my shoulders like they were earrings, William, like way up.

Max:  04:25

And the nurse, very calmly, pushes my shoulders down and says, “The more relaxed you are, the easier it’ll be for baby to relax.” So, you know what? I take this as if I want my daughter to be calm, calming myself becomes the first step, which is something I have gone back to again and again. I’m a year into being a dad now, but especially during paternity leave, when my daughter was very new to me, and she would start crying and I’d instantly tense up, and then I’d remember, okay, that’s not going to work, because she’s tense, and now I’m tense, and two tense people, that’s not the ticket. So what do I have to remember to do? Well, what do I want to see? Well, I should try to be that. I’ve got to take some deep breaths. I’ve got to relax my body. I’ve got to be peaceful, to encourage peacefulness, and this works a lot of the time.

Max:  05:09

Not every time, right, because sometimes my daughter, she has to eat, and me being calm doesn’t mean she’s not hungry, right? Sometimes she’s got discomfort in her body, and me being calm doesn’t mean that discomfort isn’t there. But if it’s about being consoled, what I saw is if I just need to soothe myself first, and then I can really be there as a guide to soothing her. So this ultimately boils down to my guiding principle, which is where I kick this book off. The guiding principle, the book is To See It, Be It, which is this idea of conveying the lesson that the nurse taught me, but it’s something that mattered to me for a while, which is if a person’s agitated, this I think is incredibly important, because I see the opposite of this a lot in myself and others. If a person’s agitated and I want them to calm down, well, responding with my own agitation is just really confusing.

William:  05:57

That’s right. That’s right.

Max:  05:58

You’re agitated and I’m like, well, stop being agitated, and getting agitated right back.

William:  06:02

The decimal level keeps getting a lot higher and higher.

Max:  06:04

You’ve got it. It’s escalation. It’s escalation, and so if I want consistency from what I’m looking for in the world, then I need to be that thing, however difficult it is. So I need to calm myself, and the way I describe it in the book is to be an example of what I want, not a mirror of what I’m seeing, and how often have I become a mirror of what I’m seeing, instead of an example of what I want? Far too much, but this guiding mantra, this guiding principle is like, I can’t control what other people do.

Max:  06:35

The best I can do is take care of myself, take care of my own energy, and it might influence them along the way, or it might not. It’s not really up to me, but if I want to see more calmness, or love, or curiosity, or forgiveness, or emotional restraint, or restraint in general, the best thing I can do is embody it, and the rest is just out of my hands. So that was the note that got the most reception, and it ultimately is my guiding principle for life. So it made a lot of sense to call the book To See It, Be It.

William:  07:03

It’s really interesting because there’s, I believe, a part of Buddhism that’s you’ve got to visualize things. So you’ve got to be able to see it yourself, and then you’ve got to be able to project it. You’ve got to be able to actually internalize it and understand. Whatever it is, like all the emotions that you’ve talked about, and other things that you want, you’ve got to visualize it yourself, and then you’ve got to then communicate and let other people know that you’ve got an idea of what you want, whether or not that’s a negotiation or whatever, temperament or things like that. So, first of all, I love that, and I love that you have the intellectual part, that basically says, if you want other people to… You want something from them, then behave a certain way and act a certain way, and again, if you’re asking them for something, then there’s a humanity to that that you brought back to.

William:  08:11

A couple questions obviously. One, starting off with, as you look back at your notes, so four years of these notes going out, is there any that… We’ll start off with, is there any that you went back to and went, eh?

Max:  08:28

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

William:  08:32

Didn’t make the cut, this is cutting room floor type stuff. You’re like that was a good take then. Eh, I’ve modified that position.

Max:  08:40

Yeah, or maybe it wasn’t a good take then, and I just had a lesson to learn, but yeah, we called it the cutting room floor, and there’s 25 notes in this book, and I wrote a lot more than that in four years. I was writing these weekly at one point, so there was a lot on the cutting room floor and things that I’ve learned recently around compassion have colored my notes in a new way. So when I’m really truly being self-compassionate and compassionate to others, those are the notes I wanted in this book. When I’m recognizing that what works for me does not work for everyone, those are the notes I want in this book. I am one person and these things, these notes work for me. They call me. They encourage me. They help me be more compassionate. They help me be more creative.

Max:  09:25

They are not a guide book for everybody. There might be one or two or three notes in here, out of the hour read of the 25 that are in there, that really work for somebody, and the rest maybe never move them, and that’s okay to me. I don’t pretend to have the answers. I’m saying these are answers for me and right now.

William:  09:44

Yeah, I think that’s really, yeah, exactly, at this particular point, because in five years from now, you might have other things that you’ve learned, other notes that you’ve made, that you want to add to the second book, et cetera. I think this is a mistake that folks made, especially in HR, in recruiting, with Tony Hsieh’s book, they basically wanted to model Zappos’ culture because here’s kind of a map, and you’ve, I think, rightfully said, both pre-show and during show, this was for me and it’s for me to then be able to make… Yes, other people will gain and they’ll glean things from it, of course, but it’s not a blueprint, and with Tony’s book, unfortunately, a lot of people thought it was a blueprint and thought of it as we’ll just take Zappos’ culture, and then apply it to our culture, and that failed miserably for a lot of folks.

William:  10:44

So I love that the folks… That you’ve reversed this and said, listen, I actually wrote this for myself and I truly hope that you get something out of the 25, but [crosstalk 00:10:57].

Max:  10:56

Even if it’s just one.

William:  10:58

Yeah, even if you’ve got one, you’ve moved the needle in one way, which is more than most people do in a day. So it’s out, Amazon, you know the whole bit?

Max:  11:10

It’s actually not on Amazon. The first book I wrote, Do Better Work, that’s on Amazon, still on Amazon, it’s on its third printing. I wrote this for me. I dedicated it to my daughter.

William:  11:21

Oh cool.

Max:  11:22

And on this one, what I wanted to do was just give it away. So Lessonly has made it possible that you can get this book. If you go to dobetterwork.com, you just have to pay shipping. It’s like $2 or $3 or $4 to get it shipped, but the book is free, and that was important to me because I just don’t want it to be unavailable to somebody, and I know $2 to $3 can be very meaningful, but I think this expands the amount of folks it can reach, and we’ll print as many of them as people need, and they’re a beautiful, hard cover, beautifully designed by Helen Gardner who’s somebody I really respect, and who would design my first book as well. So I think it’s a pretty sweet deal, but I didn’t want to sell this one. Something about it, it just didn’t make sense to me.

William:  12:08

I like that. Well, and again, what I love about that is just the way that you’ve approached this particular book, the subject matter is you’re trying to figure things out, is what we’ve talked about in the past, is like, this is a big puzzle and you’re just figuring out different puzzle pieces, and this is what an inflection point, where you want to communicate to people, here’s some things that I’ve figured out so far about me. And then you can see this moving forward, that you’re going to do this periodically in your life, to just kind of, okay, here’s where I’m at now.

Max:  12:42

Yep, amen.

William:  12:42

Do you see, and not that it would, but do you see… Could this be Lessonly content or content, like training content in some ways?

Max:  12:55

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I think totally.

William:  12:58

I know you didn’t write the book that way. I know that’s not the way you did it, but I was just thinking to myself, with the 25 notes, couldn’t those be videos, where people could then, again, glean from it what they glean from it?

Max:  13:11

Yeah, we probably put them as just straight up text in lessons, and totally. These initially got sent out to my teammates, our customers, our partners, anybody who wanted to read them, my friends are on the list, and so I would hope they’d be instructive. My point is that not every one’s going to be as instructive to you as it was to me, but I’d hope they’d be instructive and I’d hope some of them would be things that people go, hey, I started doing that. One of the notes is about being my own witness, which is about observing myself, watching what I do, and then tracking how do I feel after that? What’s my sense after that? How does my behavior change after that? And following the patterns of my own behavior, but observing them as a witness.

Max:  13:52

So instead of saying I am angry, it’s more like, there I am, getting angry, and I’m watching myself. There I am drinking a Red Bull again. There I am feeling agitated two hours after that Red Bull again. What’s the pattern here? Oh, that this intake of this Red Bull may or may not be leading to agitation. So what should I do? Instead of judging myself and saying that was stupid for me to do X, Y, or Z, just watching things and being observant to my life and then communicating to myself.

William:  14:23

It’s also holding yourself accountable in a different way.

Max:  14:26

I think it’s really being compassionate to myself and it’s holding myself accountable. I think accountable is right. I’m accounting for things now. Yeah, to really get down to the root of it. I’m able to account for what is happening, and it is in a way that does not cloud my view of myself, because I think judgment clouds, judgment obscures.

William:  14:45

That’s right.

Max:  14:47

It just does. As soon as I begin to judge something, it can both clarify and obscure that very same thing.

William:  14:50

And if it’s negative, it sends you into a spiral, a shame spiral, and you don’t get to the root cause.

Max:  14:55

You’ve got it.

William:  14:57

And if you’re a witness, you can be objective.

Max:  15:01

Right, you’ve got it.

William:  15:02

And you can be compassionate, maybe even forgive yourself along the way, and go, okay, all right, and learn from it, et cetera. What was the-

Max:  15:08

And, William, I’m sorry, I want you to get to the next question, but the reason I pause at accountable is because the thing that I struggle with, with being a witness, that I want other people to know, is just because I see the pattern doesn’t mean I’m able to break it with these, and so just because I’m accountable, I can account for the pattern, doesn’t mean it’s easy to stop.

William:  15:29

100%.

Max:  15:29

So that’s where my compassion comes in, compassion for self, grace, and some folks would go, oh, you’re just going to keep giving yourself rope, rope, just rope, rope. Nah, I have found that not to be the case at all. It’s that when I actually give myself space and I give myself multiple chances, that grace, actually, is how I get the problem into a different place.

William:  15:48

That’s right.

Max:  15:49

But if I limit and judge and say I’m going to have to be hard nosed in myself, the problems persists and with much more ambitiousness.

William:  15:58

Oh yeah, and it’s guilt, wrought with guilt, and all kinds of other stuff that you have to then unpack. Do they even get back to that place, being forgiving of yourself, to then understand the root cause?

Max:  16:10

Amen.

William:  16:10

I have some friends that do homeopathic medicine, and one of the things I love about what they do is they’re all about the root cause. All the stuff that happens, okay, your skin breaks out, then, okay, they’re going to go why? Why did that…? What was the combination of things that led to that? And you’re doing something similar, in that you’re like there’s a root cause to these things, and as a witness, I’ve got to get to the root cause, and again, it might change it, but at least I’ll understand it more, and then maybe over time, I can tinker with it and eventually change that behavior or change that output, whatever it is.

Max:  16:54

Amen. Tinker’s a great word, man. I love that word.

William:  16:58

You’re just chipping away, just chipping away, just a little bit here and there.

Max:  17:01

Yeah, small experiments, right? Small experiments.

William:  17:03

I’m fascinated with Michelangelo carving. He would carve a big giant box of marble and he would see inside the marble, and it was a reduction. So he basically, with all of the statues that he made, he would reduce things away, and so it’s like he had to have the vision of seeing inside of that what was going to come out. It’s fascinating, and so it’s looking into your soul and saying, okay, what do I want to change about myself? What are the things that set people off into a different direction or what makes me excited or what’s my best thing? And again, you’ve brought it back to work and life and living better on both fronts. The hardest and the easiest, those are the two things I want to kind of get into. After you hold this down and you’ve got it to 25, which I’m sure was difficult enough, out of those 25, what do you think was, for you, is the easiest and what do you think was the…? It maybe is still the hardest.

Max:  18:13

Yeah, great question. So I’m going to tell you what just jumped out at me, because I have not actually thought of that, so I’m going to tell you what initially popped out at me and I’m going to consider those true, because they were the first things I thought of. Asking clarifying questions is not a challenge for me, and there are multiple notes on that topic. It comes very naturally to me. I see its benefit. I’ve lived its benefit. It’s in my DNA now.

William:  18:40

So now, before you go on, how did you learn that?

Max:  18:44

I started asking clarifying questions and seeing how much I was assuming that was incorrect. As soon as I started clarifying, I was like, wow, I’ve been guessing all the time.

William:  18:54

Or assuming.

Max:  18:55

And I’ve been way off. Yeah, and a guess is an assumption, right?

William:  18:58

Right, so with your parents and even maybe your college experience, or did this start once you started getting into work life stuff, where you started to [crosstalk 00:19:08]?

Max:  19:08

It was totally work. Work, and here’s why, William. It’s always easier for me to see problems with myself first in others and then recognize, oh, I do that too. This is textbook psychological projection. I get frustrated by somebody else doing something and then have to drive it back to myself and go, oh, I do that too. I do it maybe in a different context, but underlying, it’s the same damn thing. So one of my teammates would not ask me clarifying questions when I was right there, and they would make assumptions about what I meant. I’m the CEO of Lessonly, so I make a lot of announcements. I make a lot of decisions with the help of other people, and people would hear my announcements or decisions and go to somebody else and make assumptions about them, instead of coming to me.

Max:  19:52

That irritated the hell out of me. So we created a value of ask clarifying questions. Ultimately, I do the exact same thing to other people, because I’m a human. I’m a human, and so I have to be what I want to see, and so it’s really important to me to model this at work, asking clarifying questions, and the more I do it, the more we, as a team, have clarity. The more than means we, as a team, have camaraderie. We understand one another better. We trust and respect one another, and the more my teammates see me do it, the more comfortable they are doing it. We made that-

William:  20:19

That’s right. You’re teaching and you’re also learning from them at the same time.

Max:  20:23

Amen.

William:  20:23

You’re getting better at asking clarifying… You’re already probably at expert level, but you’re getting better by learning from them. Did this bleed over into your personal life?

Max:  20:32

Oh, yes. I don’t even think of them as different. I think of everything as relationships.

William:  20:32

Neither do I, yeah.

Max:  20:38

It’s all relationships, and some of those relationships exist for different reasons, no doubt.

William:  20:44

So, on a Saturday, when you’re sent out to do a thing, you ask clarifying questions to make sure that-

Max:  20:49

Yes, but it’s super important that you ask that, William.

William:  20:52

100%, 100%.

Max:  20:53

Because it’s context. I talk about domain dependence in my first book, which this guy, Nassim Taleb, really taught me about domain dependence. In one domain, it is that things are clear. So he uses the example of somebody who has a gym membership, who takes the escalator or elevator up to their gym, and then hops on a treadmill. In that moment, they don’t see that using the stairs is the same thing as using the treadmill because they’re in a different context, and so they take the escalator or the elevator than to use the stairs that don’t move to exercise, and it’s like, it’s still exercise, even if you’re not in the gym. But because we have different domains, we have different contexts, and in different domains, we might forget that clarifying questions are valuable, and in others, we might know for a fact that they’re valuable. It’s the doctor who learns something very much at the operating table, that then does not do it with his wife or son, or his or her wife or son, daughter. You get the idea.

William:  21:48

Toddler, shoes. What’s the hardest? So if clarifying question is it comes naturally and you’re just getting better and better at it, what’s the most difficult?

Max:  21:59

Yeah, emotional liberation. The fifth note in the book is called liberation and I go back to liberation and that note, and I’ll explain what it is, but in that note, and then also in a later note on boundaries, which is called The Bridge, which is about an essay by… Not an essay, but a fable by Edwin Friedman, a rabbi, both of them have to do with liberating myself from the emotions of others, and that does not mean that I’m not compassionate to the emotions of others. That means that I do not carry them as my own, and that is my lifelong struggle, and it is the dragon I’ve had to…

Max:  22:34

When I say slay the dragon, it, it doesn’t stay dead. I have to continually slay that dragon, but I’ve slayed it in a big way, where I don’t feel like I’m a different person now, than I was before Lessonly, when I was a slave to other people’s emotions, where if they had this feeling or they were frustrated, then I felt responsible for it. I don’t feel that way anymore, and that’s because of my journey. Now, that is still very hard for me, and the closer somebody is to me, if it’s my mother, my brother and my dad, the harder a liberation is, but, wow, have I made some major strides there, but that does not mean it’s not the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do in my life.

William:  23:14

Do you attribute to the emotional liberation, and again, the way that you were formed through childhood, all the way to today, was that childhood? Was it college? Was it parents? Was it school? Was it just something that just became a part of your personality?

Max:  23:39

Are you asking if, how I came to [crosstalk 00:23:41]?

William:  23:41

When you took on other people’s emotions.

Max:  23:43

Oh, got it. Got it. Yeah, so I don’t know when that started. It’s been a long time.

William:  23:48

You’ve blocked it out. I got it.

Max:  23:51

Yeah, it’s probably many, many memories without recall. But I think, where I come from, that is very common, and it might just be in the water in the mid… I don’t know if it’s in the water outside of where I come from, but I presume it’s in the water a lot more places than just where I’m from, where a separation of self and others, it’s really important to recognize we come from one thing. No matter what you believe, from the Big Bang to divine, we all come from one thing. If it was the Bang or if it was something else, it’s all coming from the same damn place, some exploding star. So recognizing that I am one with all that is around me, but that I’m also separate, because as soon as I try to take on other people’s feelings and emotions, I lose myself.

William:  24:38

Do you communicate to them, like when someone, I was going to say unburdens you, or burdens you with those things, do you do that in silence and just divorce yourself from those emotions and say, okay, they’re going through that, I have empathy and sympathy and all of those things, but that’s not my responsibility? Is that just a part of your brain moving and doing it internally or do you talk to them about it?

Max:  25:05

No, it’s not… Nobody’s ever asking me to carry their stuff, so it’s not a problem with them. It’s a problem with me.

William:  25:13

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, I can see that. I can see people coming into your office or being on a Zoom call now, being more relevant, and then just unloading and telling you about whatever’s going on in their life, and you’re one of these people that then, historically, at least, you would then take those on.

Max:  25:30

Exactly, exactly.

William:  25:32

And you probably didn’t leave enough room in doing that to then fix some of the other stuff. There’s only so much time in the day. If you’re taking on other people’s stuff, carrying their bags, if you will, then you can’t carry your own bags.

Max:  25:47

Right, and they’re not even asking me to. It was just something that I felt compelled to do. I felt a sense of duty and that duty was warping my life, and so now, here’s how I think about it, and Robert Sapolsky, who’s a Stanford professor who I absolutely love, he made the comment that if you come to your doctor and you say, “Hey, doc, I think I’m in trouble,” you don’t want your doctor sitting there and empathizing and running the same circus and be like, “Oh my gosh, we are in big trouble here.” You don’t want your doctor panicking. You want the doctor to sit there and center themselves, listen, and if the patient asks for guidance, to give it, but you do not want them panicking right there with you, and I was panicking right there with people, and I thought that was my duty to sit there and be in it with them.

Max:  26:32

Now, I sense that my role is to maintain my own inner peace as best I can, because that in and of itself is helpful to somebody who’s in a crisis. That in and of itself is helpful to somebody who is in pain.

William:  26:43

Yeah, so two questions real quick. One is your daughter, and at one point, she’s going to read this book. It’s just inevitable. My sons, they go back and listen to my podcast. It’s crazy, ask me questions about podcasts I did 10 years ago. So at one point, she’s going to read this book. What do you want her to get from it?

Max:  27:05

Yeah, the reason I dedicated it to her, William, is this is one big elaborate plan to make sure there’s hard copies around the house, so that she can meet a version of dad that I care a lot about her meeting, and my time on this earth is not guaranteed, and so getting this locked in, I want her to pick that book up and get to experience her dad’s spirit in one way, and then take from that book what she thinks is right for her at that time, and if nothing is right for her at that time, then so be it.

William:  27:36

Yeah, revisit it in a couple of years.

Max:  27:37

But I’ve worked to clarify it. Yeah, I’ve worked to clarify it, and these things matter to me and I just want her to know her dad, and so I can’t promise I can be there to explain her dad to her, and this is my opportunity to lock some of it in.

William:  27:49

Oh, I love that. I love that. Okay, last question. What’s the next book?

Max:  27:55

Not even thinking about it.

William:  27:56

Come on, you can’t say that. You can’t. You just can’t say that.

Max:  28:01

You got me. You got me. I’m not thinking about I’m making it a book, but the topic that’s really interesting to me right now are rituals, resources, and reappraisals, as basically ways to build my roots in life. So what are life giving, calming, encouraging rituals? These are practices that calm and encourage me. They get me into my present state brain or my God brain. They calm me down because I live in stress, so these are places for me to tap into the non-stress part of me, the parasympathetic instead of the sympathetic. The resources are my relationships that calm and encourage me, and I call them resources instead of just calling them… Easier thing to call them would be just straight up relationships, but resources are active relationships. So these are relationships that I’m using to be calmed and encouraged and ideally bringing calm and encouragement to the other person as well. They’re not inactive, where if one day I’m crying, I know I can call them, because that’s not a resource. That’s a relationship.

Max:  28:53

These are active people who accept me, and those are my resources, and having a big net of those, so that when I fall, I can be caught by that net of resources. This is very important to me. Then lastly, reappraisals. This idea of an event happens and I have a reaction to it, and that is all valid. But given some time, I can gain some perspective from it, and my first appraisal of that event and my reactions is still that first appraisal. I can’t go back and change it I’m not attempting to, but when I get some perspective, I can reappraise and say, where was the gift in that event? So these three things, rituals, resources, reappraisals, for me, are a spiritual package of how I stay in touch with myself, how I calm and encourage myself. Because, like I said, my default state is to be stimulated to the point of stress. So this is how I counterbalance and harmonize with other parts of myself, so that I can live longer, healthier, happier, and I think that’s a very important model to set.

William:  29:49

And it’s a continuous loop. It’s a relentless pursuit of understanding yourself, and I love the going back and looking at something, once you have some perspective, and not being locked into whatever you thought at that time. Just going, you know what?

Max:  30:07

Yeah, that’s my appraisal. At the time it was my appraisal. Now, I can reappraise.

William:  30:10

Right, and you give to yourself the freedom to go, you know what? I had a hard take there. Let me soften that a little bit, now that I’ve given it some time, now you’re being a little bit more objective. Okay, so now, I knew you had a topic. I knew it was somewhere, written somewhere. I knew it was there. Max, thank you so much. I know you’re crazy busy, so thank you for coming.

Max:  30:34

William, I love speaking with you, man. You don’t have to thank me. It’s my pleasure, every time we do this. So thank you for having me.

William:  30:40

Well, I appreciate it, and thanks for everyone that listens to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.

Music:  30:46

You’ve been listening to the recruiting live podcast by RecruitingDaily. Check out the latest industry podcasts, webinars, articles, and news at recruitingdaily.com.