Links:

Book your place on my February 2023 group coaching programme Time for the things that matter.

'Reclaim Time to Read' 2022 reading challenge

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

My talks to organisations and professional networks

Rob's website

Rob's book Attention! The power of simple decisions in a distracted world

Harvard Business Review's article on the 'toggling tax'

UK leisure time statistics from the Resolution Foundation.

Transcript:

 Helen: This week, I'm talking to Rob Hatch, author and coach for business owners and executives. He brings a unique blend of knowledge and background in the field of human development with his experience as a successful business leader and coach. He has written a weekly newsletter for over a decade, which is read by tens of thousands of individuals all over the world. As a coach, Rob works primarily with business leaders and teams guiding them through critical transitions in their organization. He's the author of the international bestselling book Attention!: the power of simple decisions in a distracted world which was named a 2021 Business Book of the Year finalist. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant Rob!

Rob: Thanks so much, Helen. I appreciate you having me.

Helen: It's great to have you here. And that's an incredible newsletter record. Has there ever been a point in that decade where you thought, I don't know what to put in next week's update?!

Rob: I write it every week. So it's always what's on my mind. So I thrive on keeping it as relevant to the moment as possible. But yeah, there are those moments where I don't exactly know what I'm going to write, but it always comes. It always comes.

Helen: Yeah, that's fantastic. And to give our listeners a feel for who you are behind the CV and the professional bio, could you tell us about something perhaps unexpected that's happened to you in your work or your home life?

Rob: The thing that comes to mind right away is our fourth daughter. My wife Megan and I had three children who are biological children and then several years later, she went on a trip to Ethiopia. It was a humanitarian trip. And a few years later - it's a long story that I'm condensing - we adopted a girl from Ethiopia and she came to our home in 2012. So she's been with us for a long time, but one of the amazing things in this story is that we actually have a picture of my wife holding her when she was 11 months old, cheek to cheek, which was taken on her first trip to Ethiopia long before we knew we were going to adopt any child. We actually have a picture of her holding her. So it's quite remarkable and not a very common experience for adoptive families when a child arrives at the age of three that you have that connection back to when they were an infant. So it's very sweet.

Helen: That's a wonderful story. What a wonderful way to have grown your family. And as you say, for it, to have been a journey that you didn't almost know about at the beginning, when your wife first held your little girl.

Rob: And she almost didn't go on that first trip. For various reasons we had chosen to have her home with our kids who were still very young and so leaving them for that long was very hard and affording a trip like that was very challenging at the time. And just thinking about all those things that would've prevented us, all the things, all the rational things. And then finally getting a call one day from her that said, 'I'm going', and as soon as she decided to go, everything fell into place as it should. So it's quite remarkable.

Helen: And it's a wonderful reminder of how sometimes we just need to say yes to doing something, even if it feels like a logistical challenge or there are so many reasons not to do it. You just never know what comes out of that little bit of adventure or that new experience that might feel like it takes a bit of discomfort to get there in the first place.

Rob: Yeah, those were some of the words I said to her, I feel like this is something you don't try and figure out how you're going to afford; you say yes and then whatever you need sort of finds its way to you. And I'll add one more detail to this story, which was in all of that consternation about should we/shouldn't we/should she, as soon as she said yes, some friends reached out to us and she told them that that she was going. She said, oh great you can be our fundraiser. And she's like, no, I've gotta raise money to figure out how I'm going to go. She said, no, no, no. My husband and I are turning 40 together. We have similar birthdays and we were going to raise money for a cause. You're gonna be our cause. And so within hours of saying yes, a friend was saying, we're going to help you raise money and get you there. So it was really cool.

Helen: That's wonderful. And an example of the power of just simple conversations, isn't it, when we tell people what we're up to and what we're doing and what avenues that suddenly and unexpectedly might open up. That's wonderful.

And so you are a business coach, you've been a business leader, you're an author and we share a publisher, it's how we connected. How did you get into your current role and develop your expertise? Could you give a little feel for how your career has taken you to where you are today?

Rob: Sure. My background is actually quite different. It's in the field of early childhood education and human development, and I spent about 20 years in that field. I was a teacher in an infant classroom, a toddler classroom, preschoolers and I loved it. I loved working with children, I loved communicating with their families.  But there was something about that work where I realized I was better suited in a more administrative role or leading a team of those people. And I ended up directing several childcare centres individually, and then here in the States, there's large corporate childcare centres.

So I was overseeing at one time about 33 childcare centres. But in all of that, there was a realization that I loved supporting people who were really good at this work and finding ways to allow them to be successful in the mission of educating young children. And that that was a role I was better suited to than actually being in the classroom. Again, I loved it and I was a decent teacher, but there were people who were just so much better at it. And that sort of evolved over the years, that idea of being in a leadership role where I can create the environment or help shape or lead a mission where people could do the work that they were meant to do in service to a mission, in service to children and families.

And now later on when I joined and partnered up with a friend of mine, Chris Brogan, and we run a company called Owner Media Group. From that emerged this idea of coaching again, I was coaching him as the CEO and supporting him, but also just started taking on individual clients and it's my favourite type of work, really helping individuals, business leaders, through critical moments, you know, transition moments with decisions, I love that and helping them do their best work.

Helen: Fantastic. And when you are coaching people through those transitions, what is it that you hear people say they struggle with in their working lives or their working environments? Are there certain things that keep popping up that you find yourself in conversation with clients about?

Rob: Yes although I don't think they always say it directly. It's one of those things that emerges through the conversation. A lot of times clients come to me with an idea of what it is, but the idea of what it is that they want to work on isn't always the thing that they need to work on. So we discover that along the way, but it really does come down to making better decisions and figuring out in this situation, what do I need to know what information do I need to gather, so that I can make the best decision to move myself forward? And then that will be in a situation where there's another decision to be made, but it's always about these transitional moments, change, a desire to grow or scale their business, a desire to change a career, a desire to a leadership role within an organization or to be a better leader in an organization.

So we look together at what's the situation? What do you need to know? How do you want to communicate that? And so it's always about decisions in transitional moments and having someone - even the most successful people need someone who's invested in thinking through a problem with them, that isn't always directly attached to the team or to the outcome. So I get to be that person with them and help them think that through, ask questions and work with them to arrive at the right decision for them.

Helen: Yeah, that makes sense. It can feel such a luxury to have that time and a listening companion to carve out for yourself; to really reflect on stuff. And I know in your book Attention! that's something you really encourage readers to get into the habit of doing is this establishing a reflective practice and in particular looking at what works and building on that.

And you talk in the book about ' our culturally induced ADHD' and this constant urgency that we are all operating in. Can you say a bit more about this and how it affects us or our businesses?

Rob: Yeah. So I want to be really careful to say that ADHD is very real and it is a genetic issue that does require people to sometimes be medicated if they choose, but it has a real major impact on lives. That's very different than say the culturally induced ADHD that I'm mentioning.

However, there are similar traits that get expressed and I'm going to forget the name of the doctor that coined this acronym of VAST which is variable attention stimulus traits, which resemble this culturally induced ADHD and the experience that I'm describing in Attention! that I think we are all regardless of whatever challenges we might have, that we're all susceptible to, is just the constant flow of information and the notifications that we have and everything coming at us all at once and what it's done to trigger our dopamine and what it's done to pull us away from important work, important conversations.

I mean, everyone's made the mistake, most people have made the mistake of scrolling through their phone around friends or picking it up when they didn't need to or even feeling faint, silent, buzzes in their pocket and reaching for it when nothing actually happened. So that's a sort of culturally induced challenge that I think we all face with distraction in general.

And the ideas that I'm talking about in Attention! are how do we manage that? My hope is to restore some element of the locus of control to the individual to say, you actually have a choice here. And I think we know that intuitively, but we may not take the time to look at what is it that we want this device to do for us rather than responding and reacting to it? How do we want it to serve the type of information that we want? Can we set it up a certain way? We can, by the way, certain notifications getting through for example, or there's certain points in the day where only the people on my priority list can actually break and reach me. Everyone else will be muted or whatnot; I can set it so that only my family's texts get through to me because I know those are the most important. So deciding for yourself, how do we want this device to serve us? And then taking a little time to set it up in that way and keep the distractions at bay.

Helen: That's some great advice. And it's not just about our technology, although that's obviously a huge part of our daily lives and our working lives as well, but it's also about how many of us feel just overloaded with multiple decisions all the time. Some might be very tiny, like do I need to put the washing on now? Or what are we going to eat for dinner? If you are catering for families and stuff. I love in your book you come back a few times to the one really good question to ask yourself and correct me if I'm phrasing it wrong, but it's "what do I want to do now?" And keep asking yourself that, and that's about adopting more intentionality, is that right? Can you say a little bit more to give people a sense of how they put this into practice?

Rob: Yeah. So there's a couple of questions. So in the moment that's a great question to catch myself, to say, all right, what is it that I want to do now? Or what is it that I need to do now? What's the most important thing for me to be doing in this moment? Particularly in that moment when I'm caught with the impulse to switch a task or a reminder that my brain gives me oh, right, you've got to call the doctor and make an appointment. It may not be worth it to break that focus. I have something that I'm working on, but we get caught up in the well, if I don't do it now, I'm going to forget and if I forget that's bad and so 'let me just do it right now before I forget' becomes a phrase that we tell ourselves. But then we end up chasing all those little tiny things throughout the day and rarely have time to focus on the most important stuff or it pulls us away constantly.

And so that helping to slow your brain down a little bit, catch yourself and say, wait a second. What's the most important thing here? And that's that locus of control. I don't have to react or respond to that interruption either externally or internally from my own brain. And my silly little trick for that and I have it right here, like I have blank paper next to me at all times and a pen; a fresh sheet every day where I just capture those random thoughts from my brain because they will, intrude, they will try to pull me away, and I do need to remember them but I don't need to break away from this work to do that. I don't need to jump from my seat right now just because you reminded me that I have to switch the laundry over. You know, I don't need to do that. This is far more important. I might jot it down to say, remember to do the laundry so that I can stay focused with you.

Helen: Yeah, because as you make the point in the book, if we give into that temptation as that thought pops into our mind, oh, I must not forget to do X. ... and a lot of people would argue if it only takes a couple of minutes, that's more efficient way of doing it. But then you make the point that you are more likely to be distracted while you're just doing that one thing and then end up doing another two or three things and then forget actually what it was you were trying to do in the first place. And you've just discovered half an hour has just been lost from your precious time.

Rob: Half an hour's been lost and, and the focus that you had. So there's this idea of residual attention; just even that task of switching to the one thing, even if you did come back, finding your place again, carrying over whatever it was that you just did, even if it was something simple, there's still some thought energy that's spilling over from what you just did.n  And I used to do this a lot, I had an open door policy when as a leader, a manager, I always thought that was the right thing to do. And what I realized was if someone popped in and I was focused on let's say writing a grant, if they came in and I said, sure, sit down, I wasn't going to give them my full attention. Because I was going to continue thinking about the grant that I was writing. And while I might turn my face and look like I was focused on them, all of that extra energy was still spinning. So I'm not giving either thing it's due.

And so I started to switch and say, I would love to talk to you, I can't right now, I'm focused on this. I can't give you the attention you deserve. And I want to, so let me just finish this up. We can meet later on or I'd set a time. That part doesn't matter, but just saying to someone, I want to honour what you've just come to me with, but in order to give it the attention it deserves, I need to resolve my focus over here.

Helen: That's a really helpful example because one of the questions I was thinking about is if like you and I, we, we work for ourselves or run our own businesses, I would understand that if some listeners say, well, it's much easier to manage those demands on your time when you are in control of your work life or your business.  But if you're working in a bigger organization or you are part of a team, and there's a certain way of doing things and it's a very fast paced working environment, you are perhaps going from meeting to meeting or call to call and there's constant inflow of emails into your inbox, and you might feel quite helpless in that environment in terms of being able to manage those interruptions and those demands on your time. But in that example you were just giving, you were just sharing some good language that you can use to negotiate with others around interruptions or around your availability. Are there any other bits of advice you can share with people about not just how to regain control over our working time, but how to manage those dynamics with other people when we perhaps don't feel like we are in complete control of our time?

Rob: Right. Well, I think it really does start individually with understanding - and this is where reflection comes into play - understanding what works for you and what doesn't. I was kidding myself to think that I could do that. And it took a fair amount of Not catching what someone was saying and not giving them the attention and reading the fact that I could see that on their face that they felt like my attention was split from them even though I had told them to sit down. I had to catch that and understand it. And it was understanding while I posed it as a 'I'm doing this for you' was also about me because I couldn't take it in, I couldn't take in their information properly. I needed to understand how my brain worked and what supports I might need or what boundaries I needed to set.

So, first and foremost, it's about the individual. But the communication part, in your book, you talk about having a healthy time culture and I don't know always where that comes from, but I think it starts with individuals starting to slowly, subtly make those declarations of boundaries and communicate things like 'I want to meet the expectations of this work for you. However, when this happens, it's pulling me off' and maybe even working with your supervisor, if you're not in a position where you've got control over the culture, shaping the culture.

I had a woman who I used to work with, and we got to a point where I would throw new ideas to her all the time. Sometimes it was just a brainstorm, sometimes it was something that she actually needed to start working on. But at one point she was overwhelmed and because I just thought she was amazing and she could do so many things and I unintentionally overwhelmed her.

So we talked about her coming to me with a plate almost and saying "I've got five important projects on my plate, and my plate is full. You've just added a sixth. Can you help me figure out which of these other five priorities can be delayed or set aside or removed altogether?  Are these no longer the things that you want me to be working on? Because it sounds like you really want me to work on this sixth thing right now, this has now become the top priority." And having those conversations openly about here's the situation; I want to do well, but help me make sense of which one I should prioritize ... I think it's a really good place to start because you start to set up those boundaries.  

Again, looking at and maybe not accepting and opening up conversations about the way information flows on email. If your organization is treating email as though it's a chat feature that's probably not a good, healthy way to use email. And even in Slack do we need to have every notification for every Slack message that comes in inside of a group? Because every little ding and buzz whether you think you can ignore it or not is pulling you into that or pulling you away. So thinking critically about how information flows and opening up those conversations is a good place to start.

Helen: Yeah, that's really helpful advice thank you. And when I get into similar conversations with people I work with on some of my time management programmes I've heard people say to me who are managers, that when their team members respond in that kind of way that you've just described, they find it not only helpful, but they're actually as a manager, quite impressed by the good quality of communication. Because listening to that, somebody might say, oh, I'm a bit concerned that I'm effectively saying no and I might be judged poorly for that, but that's not usually what I hear managers say. Actually, they're quite impressed that people are able to articulate their workloads, manage their boundaries confidently, and so using the language you described that actually should help people in their relationships with their seniors.

Rob: Yeah, I totally agree and I'm glad that you're confirming that because it that's always been the way I've received it as someone who was in a position of leadership, but I've been away from that role for a while. So to hear you confirm that in your conversations is nice as well. Yeah. Communication skills, honestly like boundaries, communication skills, reaching out and asking for the right types of support. And you're not saying no, what you're saying is help me prioritize where this goes. And you might have a manager say to you 'figure it out' and you also might have a manager say, ' it's as big as everything else and you just have to add it to the plate, I'm sorry'. And that's going to start to open up other conversations about whether or not that's a place you want to be. Is that the type of healthy environment you want to work in? But yeah, it does start with understanding yourself a little bit that you can trust that feeling that you are overwhelmed and probably everyone else around you at work is feeling quite similar, no matter how they're positioning themselves. And to start looking at what are the ways, for lack of a better word, that are triggering that overwhelm, the notifications or the flow of information and think about ways that you can control it and communicate the need for that control.

Helen: Yeah. Fantastic thank you. And can I ask what resource or piece of advice has significantly influenced your own work or your thinking, or you have found particularly helpful during your career that listeners might want to look up or access?

Rob: So one is a little tied to my work in early childhood, but I found it's just supporting me time and time again throughout anything. I actually wrote about this in my last newsletter last week. And it was from a paediatrician named Dr. T Berry Brazelton who was a paediatrician in the United States and he developed an approach to working with children and families that he called the touchpoints approach.

And in it, he had certain principles and assumptions and one of the assumptions was that all parents have strength. And that the parent is the expert of their child and all parents have something critical to share at each developmental stage. So in the newsletter that I wrote, I flipped that a little bit to say what if we looked at that with our employees? That all employees are the expert on their situation. Maybe not the expert on their job, it doesn't mean that they know more than you or that you don't have something to share as well. Like a paediatrician has a certain level of expertise, obviously, but the parent knows that child really, really well. And so it's up to the pediatrician to understand and take the approach or assume that this parent has something critical to share, that they do know this child better than the paediatrician. The paediatrician just happens to know child development and medicine better. So finding that place where you can have a strengths-based approach where you can level the playing fields, and that opens you up to hearing information. Like you said, when someone comes to a leader and says I'm having trouble, they appreciate it because now they're demonstrating the expertise of their situation. I'm overwhelmed. Here are the six things that I've been told to manage. Can one of them be shuffled off? Can we reorder them? Can you help me? Is a way of demonstrating an expertise over your situation. So it forces the leader to see the strength and the expertise in some ways and something critical to share at a developmental milestone within the business.

So I've taken these principles and assumptions that Dr. Brazelton developed for work with children and families and found them so useful in work within organizations, with work, with working with my own children; any conversation that I'm engaged in. Certainly with coaching, because I do not know the industry even closely; I can't even touch their level of expertise. So I really have to rely on them sharing with me their expertise of their situation, their industry and then I get to help guide the conversation with my expertise as a coach.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And one of the things I love about that is that if you are starting from the premise that everybody is an expert on their situation, therefore they have an expert view, no matter if it's not comprehensive about everything but about some aspects of their day to day work, then that opens up a very inclusive culture where you recognize that everybody has a perspective worth sharing.

Rob: Absolutely. And that's, to me, one of the most exciting things particularly as organizations are exploring issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, to take an approach where you accept the fact that someone is the expert of their situation, their life experience, whatever it may be, that they have strengths and they have something critical to share.  And in particular, I was working with a client recently around new employees. Their team is about 40% new people at varying stages let's say within a year. So no-one has been through that situation recently, and it would behoove the leader of this team to understand and hear from them. So what's it like at six months? What's it been like for you at three months? And have them share that experience so far and communicate that would be extremely valuable in shaping how they could support them in the future and help other new people acclimate better.

Helen: Yeah. Great. Well, that'll give listeners a real practical way of putting some of that thinking into action where they work.

And for people that have really enjoyed hearing your advice and your coaching expertise, how can listeners connect with you after the podcast or find out more about your work, if they'd like to do that?

Rob: Yeah absolutely. The best way is just to go to robhatch.com and you'll see just about everything I'm doing right now on that page.

Helen: Wonderful, thank you. Rob it's been such a pleasure having you as a guest on the show. Thank you for joining me, sharing your wisdom, helping us make sense of our complicated worlds and lives and helping us really focus on the things that we want to be doing more of. Thank you for joining.

Rob: Thank you, Helen.