216: Brandon Voss, part 2: Negotiate Like Your Environment Depends On It
We start talking about how to learn—you have to practice. This is one of the most important things to get, not just in learning but in life. Too many people read and analyze, expecting to learn. If you don’t change your behavior, you aren’t learning, which I took a long time to learn.
If you read and analyze, you behave impersonally—that is, you don’t learn social and emotional skills.
Then we talk about his smiling challenge. For what I said last time about it ducking acting environmentally, it showed how experiential exercises work. Reading and traditional learning alone don’t get behavioral results like these.
Also, he started acting more on wrappers, which I didn’t talk about. If I had chastised him last time on doing too little, I think that imposing my values on him that way would have inhibited him to doing more. I tried to react with nonjudgmental support for where he was, not counting what I said in the post-conversation audio, which he didn’t hear.
Not sure if you heard how the conversation was about support and reward, while still focusing on doing things. At least that was my goal. I consider support one of the most critical elements of leading.
Most conversations I see on the environment are analytical and judgmental—“government should do this,” “corporations should do that
. . . anything but “I’m going to act.”
I read his saying that he was already doing things as revealing a common but tragic result of mainstream environmental message: that acting distracts or is a chore. I felt that way, but with experience I’ve made acting on my environmental values become something that adds joy.