Episode 274 – Dr. Carla Fowler

Richard Matthews: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show.

Richard Matthews: My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have the pleasure of having Dr. Carla Fowler, Dr. Carla, are you there?

Carla Fowler: I am here. So great to be here. Thanks for everything.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. So glad to have you here. I always like to start off for my audience just to let them know where we’re at. We’re currently in in central Florida because a lot of them know we travel and we’re staying for the winter.

Richard Matthews: So, you know, next couple of episodes, you’ll probably see us saying the same thing.

Richard Matthews: We’re in Florida enjoying our time here. Where are you calling in from Dr. Fowler?

Carla Fowler: I am also mobile. So I am calling in from Lisbon, Portugal. Later in the day here, but the weather is still surprisingly great in November. So.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I’ve got a good friend of ours who is currently working on a dual citizenship with Portugal. It’s cause she wants to have her second home there for a whole bunch of reasons. But anyways, my understanding is it is a beautiful place and I can’t wait to go visit at some point.

Carla Fowler: Highly recommended. It is gorgeous, very friendly culture.

Carla Fowler: I like the food, lots of great seafood. And also just enjoy the [00:01:00] countryside. There’s a lot, there’s surfing, you can bike, you can hike, and then Lisbon is just an amazing city.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: Sure. Interesting. Thanks. So.

Richard Matthews: So what I want to do before we dive too far into the conversation is goose go through a brief bio for you, so our audience knows who you are and then we’ll dive into your story.

Richard Matthews: So Dr. Carla Fowler is an MD, PhD and elite executive coach for the last decade. She has been a secret weapon for scores of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other senior leaders.

Richard Matthews: Carla’s unique approach combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their goals.

Richard Matthews: She graduated from Brown University, Magna cum laude, earned her MD and PhD at the university of Washington and completed her internship in general surgery at Stanford University.

Richard Matthews: That’s really cool. I’ve actually never had a surgeon on the show before. So, do you.

Carla Fowler: One fifth a surgeon in the sense that I completed one year of residency, but more surgeons that would actually have done a lot more.

Richard Matthews: Did you actually get to cut anybody open like for real?

Carla Fowler: Absolutely. Yes.

Richard Matthews: Oh, that’s [00:02:00] terrifying. So, like, I appreciate that people like you exist, because, like, if I cut my hand and I bleed too much, I’ll pass out on the floor. So, like, not a job for me.

Carla Fowler: It is no longer what I do either, although I find that because we spend enough time in the wilderness and out hiking, That I try to keep up some basic medical skills because like when we’re in the wilderness if I’m the only doctor around, I’m the doctor you get.

Richard Matthews: My wife actually just, she’s self taught. She went and got the whole kit and training stuff for, like, doing stitches and whatnot.

Richard Matthews: And, you know, she’s actually quite talented at it. So, If I ever slice myself open, she can fix me up or my children and whatnot. But it just reminds me, I have a little scar, probably can’t see it on the calendar, but it’s like, or on the camera, but it’s right there on my finger.

Richard Matthews: And I remember I was, you know, when you clean a knife, you put the sponge over the backside of the knife and you clean it. One time I did that backwards and put the blade towards the sponge.

Richard Matthews: You know, cut the knife open and my finger, I’m at home alone with my three year old. And it cut almost down to the bone and I remember holding it and just like bleeding there and being like, I’m gonna pass out.

Richard Matthews: I’m home alone with my three year old. I [00:03:00] can’t just like pass out, clock my head on the ground. He doesn’t speak English yet. He can’t call someone if something goes wrong.

Richard Matthews: So like he’s following me around like, what’s wrong daddy? I’m like, I’m trying not to pass out. I’m like holding a paper towel on my finger and I lay down on the couch and you know, he’s very concerned for me because I’m like bleeding all over the place.

Richard Matthews: I’m just trying to like breathe. I’m like, surgery is not for me.

Carla Fowler: It’s a good story. I’m glad you’re okay. Hope your three year son.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, he’s 15 now So yeah, he’s quite wonderful. And he has picked up his dad’s unique skill to injure himself doing pretty much anything. And so it’s useful.

Carla Fowler: It doesn’t break you, it just makes you stronger.

Richard Matthews: Just makes you stronger. So I always start these conversations off with talking about what you’re known for now, right?

Richard Matthews: So this question sets up who you are now, what your business is like, who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Carla Fowler: Great question. So I am an executive coach. I have a coaching practice called THAXA that I started 11 years ago. And I built that practice under with the intention and with the idea of [00:04:00] taking all we know from performance science and actually integrating that into a coaching methodology to help leaders, people who are starting businesses or companies.

Carla Fowler: Help people actually use that in a really practical way, not in sort of an academic, you know, overly complex way in a way that like could really help them chase ambitious goals that they’re setting.

Carla Fowler: And so, this was an idea I had, obviously coaching’s not new, but I came into it very much from a standpoint of wanting to create something, wanting to create something a little different, and do it in the way that made sense to me.

Carla Fowler: And so, built a methodology and started working with folks and practices grown over the years. And now I’m both coaching, but also love talking about performance science, sharing those ideas to a wider audience.

Richard Matthews: So, tell me a little bit about what you mean when you say performance, because I know, just in my own head, performance is one of those [00:05:00] words that has a lot of baggage associated with it.

Richard Matthews: Are you talking about performance, like mentally, or are you talking about ideation, are you talking about project completion, are you talking about, you know, high level martial arts or some other sports kind of performance?

Richard Matthews: Like where are you going with performance, or is it all of the above?

Carla Fowler: To some degree, it is all of the above with perhaps the exception of, I think there is a whole cohort of practitioners who are very focused on sports performance.

Carla Fowler: And so, I’m not coaching athletes. I think that is an area that if I’m going to do it, it makes sense to really specialize in that area. I now that being said, it does not mean that physiology and biology isn’t a piece of.

Richard Matthews: Performing at your best.

Carla Fowler: Like performing at your best. And so I’m often working with people who are thinking a lot about, for example, decision making, how to evaluate risk, how to make a business successful.

Carla Fowler: So there is a lot of mental and thought performance that’s involved with it. How to deal with the stress that comes from running a big company [00:06:00] or how to think about where you spend your time and resource at this rate.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: Those things. So, that, when I think about performance generally, I’m thinking about what helps us do our best as human beings.

Carla Fowler: What helps us go after the goals we set for ourselves and be successful at that. And again, I’m typically working with people who are in kind of the business and or leadership realm, not on that sports side.

Carla Fowler: But one of the interesting things about performance science is it definitely started with athletics, like how do you physically perform at your best?

Carla Fowler: But kind of came into and got adopted by other areas. Like there are crossover fields. Surgery is a great example. It’s got a physical art to it that you need to sort of physically be able to do the maneuvers at a very high, precise level, but it also has a mental decision making component.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, especially under pressure, right? Because like someone’s bleeding out on the table, you got to make decisions right now.

Carla Fowler: Yeah. And even when someone’s not, you have to make [00:07:00] a decision about, you know, what are the probabilities and the prognosis if you operate on someone or don’t, like sometimes that’s the biggest decision.

Carla Fowler: And so, there are those crossover areas, I think, like flying an airplane, another great example of a crossover area, there’s a physical piece to it, but also a mental piece.

Carla Fowler: But then, of course, came fully into the business realm where people began to understand that you could, there was some science behind this. We can understand how our brains work as human beings, how they tend to thrive, what are some of the common errors or biases that we have?

Carla Fowler: So there’s a lot of great ideas out there. And these fields started to adopt them and say, Oh, like, how could we use this? And it comes full circle because eventually I think the business realm also realized that, how we were functioning like physically as human beings has a lot to do with how our brains are functioning because it’s.

Richard Matthews: Yeah

Carla Fowler: Right? And turns out if you don’t get enough sleep, your decision making capacity may be impaired. So.

Richard Matthews: I learned so [00:08:00] much about that over the last few years. It’s such an interesting conversation to me because like if I go, you know, I started my entrepreneurship journey when I was like 13 and I convinced my dad to give me like a loan to go get candy at the big box store and like, you know, hawk my wares at school, right, under the trench coat kind of thing before I got shut down by my first government agency.

Richard Matthews: They told me I wasn’t old enough to have a business license at 13. So I tell people I had my first government shutdown at 13, but like all the way up through, you know, building our company now, Pushbutton Podcast over the last five years that there and my previous company, there was a distinct difference about maybe seven years ago.

Richard Matthews: I started looking at my physical performance. I like my physical health as a lever to pull for my business performance. And over the last couple of years, there’s been at least three or four different categories that have had massive impacts on my ability to run a bigger, larger, more successful company that serves more people and does more good in the world.

Richard Matthews: And it was, you [00:09:00] know, I started off with work, like how much time I was putting into work. And realizing, like, I was under the very wrong impression that more time spent working and equaled larger, better results and was in that, you know, 12 to 18 hour a day trap, six days a week kind of thing and burning myself out and realizing that I had, you know, massive negative impacts on my ability to be productive.

Richard Matthews: And you know, started to solve that and then started looking into health stuff. And you know, I was 119 pounds until I was in my mid thirties and real and we could never really figure out why I couldn’t put on weight and why I couldn’t like gain muscle and stuff like that. Hired a functional medicine doctor and started fixing some of those issues.

Richard Matthews: And. that it fixed my problems with insomnia and I know I have a lot more energy during the day, much better ideation, that kind of stuff. And then started working with my son and I do martial arts together.

Richard Matthews: Now we hired a world champion to train us, which as looking back in the mirror kind of thing, you might not necessarily decide to hire a world champion because they train hard, but you know, I feel like I bit off more than we can chew, but it’s [00:10:00] also put me in something like the best shape of my life, right?

Richard Matthews: And I’ve realized that all of those categories, like learning to get my sleep right, and learning to get my weight right, and learning to get my eating right, and learning to get my, like all of these things, as I told you before we got on the call, I’ve 10x the revenue in my company over the last five years, right?

Richard Matthews: And I work less and I sleep more and I spend more time on those things. And all of those things have positively impacted my performance. And it feels like, man, performance is one of those things that there’s just so many levers to pull. And so it’s interesting, like people like you who are in the business of helping people like me perform at their best, there’s so much to that.

Richard Matthews: How do you sit down and actually help someone decide what are the areas that they need to look at for peak performance?

Carla Fowler: Yeah, it’s a good question because their performance science is really deep. There are a lot of ideas. Some of them are sort of trivial, some of them are deeper and more impactful.

Carla Fowler: And so one of the first things I had to do was say, well, what’s most important? That’s actually here, right? What are the most, I like potent ideas because part of the challenge [00:11:00] with any academic field, right, that has multiple disciplines contributing to it, is that it’s, it gets really complicated and most normal people don’t have time to like, do that parsing and figure out what’s the idea that’s going to be most impactful for them.

Carla Fowler: And so, one of the ways that I broke it down and parsed it was to say, well, you have to figure out what are some of the most important, like, buckets or angles through which you can attack a problem and what’s probably the most important principle in each of those buckets.

Carla Fowler: So, I now think in four buckets, one bucket is around strategy or focus. It’s this idea of, it’s what you said. You had a misimpression that like working more was the lever to pull to get results. And you reached the edge of that.

Carla Fowler: So, the strategy bucket is really about brutal focus.

Carla Fowler: How can you decide what’s actually most potent that you can be working on and not simply try to do as many things as possible, which often ends up diluting like what you’re actually doing?

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely.

Carla Fowler: Strategy bucket. [00:12:00] Right? And I said, you know what? I think the principle in this one is brutal focus.

Carla Fowler: You really have to look for competency and get clear on what that is. I think another buckets execution there’s, and the productivity movement, by the way, lives in this bucket and as things in it, but also can kind of steer us in the wrong direction sometimes.

Carla Fowler: But more or less, like as human beings, there are better and worse ways to work through and actually execute on something or to help a team execute on something.

Carla Fowler: So there’s a lot of good ideas in there, but one of the most important things in that bucket is we have to know how to get ourselves started.

Carla Fowler: We have to know how to get our team started and start to stack up hours into something, that is often what’s there.

Carla Fowler: And third bucket, what about our mindset, right? That there, it’s the psychology of things. Are we feeling confident and motivated or are we not? Are we mentally burned out on stuff?

Carla Fowler: And so there’s a lot that lives in that but I think one of the most challenge, biggest things that is a challenge is that we often have to [00:13:00] deal with uncertainty as we’re trying to do big things like growth and take risks, the kind of risks that might allow you to do a 10 expert, right?

Carla Fowler: Like what you’ve done. That’s third bucket. And so I often say, Hey, we have to lean into uncertainty. We have to like almost find a way to relish the opportunity that it represents.

Carla Fowler: And there’s some different ways to do that, but fourth bucket, you got to use your biology because we aren’t separate, like mental, physical creatures, we actually are one big bucket of cells.

Carla Fowler: And so we have to also do things that actually calm and or help with the recovery of our physical system, whether that’s sleeping enough. Having ways to come down off peak periods.

Carla Fowler: Stress is not necessarily bad, but if we view the stress as bad, or if the stress doesn’t have a purpose or meaning to it, chronic stress can be damaging to us. Right?

Carla Fowler: So there’s a lot of important biology to look at. So, part of [00:14:00] how I help people think about what they’re trying to do is we work our way through the buckets.

Carla Fowler: And so we start to try and get them clarity about. What do you want to happen? What’s most important? Can we focus? We can then think about, like, what’s gonna help you execute or what’s going to help you stay motivated?

Carla Fowler: What’s gonna help you have this be physically sustainable for you? And different people have different challenges, so we don’t have to work through all the buckets for person because we just try and figure out what are the kinds of ideas that are most like that.

Carla Fowler: And so that’s kind of how I take a science, but then say, yeah, how do you help a person use that?

Carla Fowler: How do you work with them together?

Richard Matthews: So, I love this first off because I see a lot of things just in my own life and business that like fall into those buckets. And if you’re open to it, what I’d love to do for a couple of minutes is go through and give you some of thoughts on things that like that I’ve done over the last couple of years with either my coaches or with our team and see if you might be tell us a little bit about some of the science behind some of those things how they fit into these buckets.

Richard Matthews: [00:15:00] So I have some ideas. So, I’ll just go through each of your four buckets, right? So you said first one you said was brutal focus, strategy, deciding what’s next that kind of thing.

Richard Matthews: And so the thing that pops in my head for that and where I started to have really big shifts was two big things for me.

Richard Matthews: One was something called or I don’t know what you’d call it, but it’s the idea that creativity thrives with boundaries. And the second one is micro completions.

Richard Matthews: And so I’ll talk about both of those independently real quick. So creativity thrives with boundaries is the idea like a painter paints on a canvas and the boundary is the canvas, right?

Richard Matthews: A photographer has the window that they’re looking through. And anytime that you’re working on something, it always the boundaries that you put in place are where you see creativity thrive. Right?

Richard Matthews: So, the less boundaries you have, the less creativity you have. And so one of the things that I started working on to solve particularly that focus problem. I was having working just trying to work so much was well what happens if I start putting creative restrictions on my time, right?

Richard Matthews: So things like maybe instead of having an unlimited amount of time to work today I only work eight hours a day, right and I cut it off at the end of thing. [00:16:00] Maybe instead of working six days a week is only five maybe instead of five it’s only four, maybe instead of eight hours a day at six maybe instead of six hours a day it’s four right, you know, I average four hours a day four days a week now and run a massively larger company that provides massively larger value because of that one idea of creativity thrives with boundaries.

Richard Matthews: And then what you see is it really helps you decide what you’re going to do next because you’re like, I’ve got this block that my business is allowed to have from me, right?

Richard Matthews: Which is a very different conversation for what I’m going to do today. Right?

Richard Matthews: What am I going to focus on? It’s like, no, my business is allowed to have this amount of time. What’s something that I can do that’s going to either unlock someone on my team, or that’s going to you know, turn into a process that can happen over and over again without me. Right?

Richard Matthews: And it shifts your focus into things that allow you to snowball. Which brings me to the second point, which is micro completions.

Richard Matthews: And the other thing that I realized was that trying to look at, you know, for lack of a better metaphor, right?

Richard Matthews: Trying to eat the whole elephant never works. And so you have to look at what is something that [00:17:00] I can just take from start to finish right now? Right?

Richard Matthews: And so if you’re going to say, Hey, I’ve got four hours today. And you know, I got a couple of calls that I need to get on, I got some other stuff, I’ve only got an hour of time that’s going to go towards working on my business. I need to complete something, right?

Richard Matthews: And even if it’s like I’m just completing the headline for an article, it’s at least it’s complete, right? Like I’ve completed a thing. And if you complete something every day, it snowballs really fast, surprisingly fast.

Richard Matthews: So that’s the first one, brutal focus on those two concepts to creatively thrives with boundaries and micro completions.

Richard Matthews: The second one on execution, productivity, how to get yourself started and get your team started and stacking hours is something that like, I’m still looking at a lot, you know, and we were talking before we got on about our new project over in the, you know, push button politics and whatnot.

Richard Matthews: What we’re actively doing is we’re just meeting every week and talking about what needs to get done and assigning a task or two or three, or maybe a phone call that needs to happen.

Richard Matthews: And we don’t really know what needs to happen in order for that project to [00:18:00] be ultimately successful we want to get.

Richard Matthews: So we’re just sort of exploring it and going and just getting work hours behind it.

Richard Matthews: And we do that with a lot of projects. And a lot of it is like, we don’t know what we don’t know until we actually start looking and researching and playing and who do we need to talk to and then talking to some of those people and realizing they aren’t the people we need to talk to, but they know who we do need to talk to, and it’s like that.

Richard Matthews: The act of getting an action helps with, I love the idea of stacking hours, right? You’re just stacking hours onto the project. And not like, I don’t want people to get the idea that you’re just like doing useless things, but you’re actively like making forward progress on something.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And then mindset, right? So confident, motivated, burned out, dealing with uncertainty, taking risks, allow for big wins.

Richard Matthews: This is one of those things that like, I don’t know how to describe this to people, but I think entrepreneurs are a crazy brand bunch of people and the world needs us because we’re the ones that will jump off the cliff and figure out how to build a parachute on the way down. Right?

Richard Matthews: And that’s, I used to think when I was a younger entrepreneur that anyone could be an entrepreneur and I realized as I’ve gotten older that it’s [00:19:00] more similar to like ratatouille and what, you know, that chefs, I can’t remember his chef Gusteau, right?

Richard Matthews: It’s not that a entrepreneur, anyone can be an entrepreneur is that a good entrepreneur can come from anywhere, right?

Richard Matthews: And it’s a very specific type of mindset that is mostly having a willingness to take risks that other people are unwilling to take and I like the way that you learned it, you phrased it lean into uncertainty and be comfortable with not knowing what the next steps are, but taking them anyways and knowing that, like, part of the journey of getting ready is taking those steps, like you can’t wait for all the stars to align and you’ll never do anything. Right?

Richard Matthews: And so you take steps and you course correct along the way.

Richard Matthews: And the last one, the biology, we aren’t separate mental and physical features. One of the things that like I’ve realized is that like, no, if I wanted to step up and perform as an entrepreneur and do big things and make big shifts in the world.

Richard Matthews: Like I need to be fit and capable and well rested and I need to eat well, and I need to sleep well, and I need to, most importantly, take time off of work, and so, like, this metaphor that [00:20:00] you know, you’ve probably heard the metaphor a whole bunch, right? The legal scales. Right.

Richard Matthews: You know, we’re trying going for work life balance and we’re, you know, like the scales of justice trying to get our work in life to be like perfectly in balance.

Richard Matthews: I’ve always hated that metaphor because I don’t think it’s useful. And I think what’s the metaphor that I use to describe for people is I call it a the rubber band analogy that, you know, if you want forward progress, you have a rubber band, you can stretch the rubber band.

Richard Matthews: And, but there’s limits, right? If you stretch the rubber band too far or too long, you’ll either break the rubber band or it’ll lose its elasticity.

Richard Matthews: So in order to have forward progress, you actually have to let go. You have to let go of the rubber band and it goes from a stretched state to a relaxed state.

Richard Matthews: And that relaxed state is what, where you propel forward. And so entrepreneurs tend to, and you know, I just know this cause we’ve, you know, I’ve done 300 of these interviews, right? We tend to look at rest and relaxation. As a reward for a job well done instead of a prerequisite for showing up and doing good work.

Richard Matthews: And I think if we can shift that for people. That if you start looking at rest and recreation and sometimes even like [00:21:00] you’re working out and you’re eating and you’re cooking and your sleep habits and the stuff that goes into your biology and your life and your relationships as a prerequisite for showing up and doing good work.

Richard Matthews: That’s what allows everything else we just talked about to happen, how you can actually perform and actually do more work in four hours a day than most people do in 16 hours, right?

Richard Matthews: So anyways, that’s my sort of diatribe of all my thoughts that I had as you were going through those buckets.

Carla Fowler: I love that. And one of the interesting things I knew, like, There was clearly a bucket that you resonated with for each of those things the most. Some of them, I actually think, are places where you’re seeing different principles cross.

Carla Fowler: And that’s what’s fun about performance science, is that there are often multiple things at play. Like, for example you know, micro completions. Right?

Carla Fowler: Number one, you have to have the clarity to actually say, and designate, like, what can I complete to set an intention. Right?

Carla Fowler: But also the idea of like, that it feels good to complete it. Is very related to mindset. Yeah. It’s well, and related to mindset and like just how our brain [00:22:00] feels that positive feeling. That’s the psychology of it.

Carla Fowler: And because our brains don’t like open loops, our brains also tend to like a sense of achievement. And so, there’s some of these things that are really fun because they’re crossing over.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, like multiple buckets.

Carla Fowler: Yeah. And when we say we’ll do something and then we actually complete it, our sense of self efficacy, our confidence grows, right? So.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it builds an identity of, I’m a completer.

Carla Fowler: I’m a completer. I finished things. Exactly. You know, the piece you were talking about the team and right now you’re like, okay, it’s not totally clear to us cause we don’t know what we don’t know. Like what it’s going to take to do this big thing, this exciting thing that we’re building towards.

Carla Fowler: But what’s great is number one, you are building momentum. And again, like from mindset standpoint, like at part of what motivates teams is having clarity. So this is a little bit of brutal focus to say.

Carla Fowler: Here’s what we are going to do this week. [00:23:00] Maybe these ultimately won’t be the most important things we do, but for the moment they’re what we can see.

Carla Fowler: And so number one, you’re setting your team up with clarity so that they know how they can contribute, right? When you all split off and your team and like they go do their thing, when they come back and they’ve completed it, now you get this sense of like, each of them has a sense of, I’m a part of the team, I am contributing, and we are moving forwards together.

Carla Fowler: And so this is one of the funny ways in which again, like focus can be really linked to how confident or motivated a team is. And you might think those are separate things in leadership, but it turns out when you can actually tell a team, here’s the goal as best we know it. And sometimes you have much better clarity about the goal.

Carla Fowler: So you say that, but you also say, here’s what we’re prioritizing. Here’s your role. Here’s how you’re going to contribute. And sometimes it’s more of a dialogue than that, but like, that clarity matters and helps people know how to win as a team. And it turns out winning as a team is one of the [00:24:00] best ways to create, like, a team connection.

Carla Fowler: It’s not a ropes course. It’s not like, I don’t know, some, like, team party. It’s actually like doing work, doing challenging things together, and being successful at it, and each being good at it.

Carla Fowler: So, I thought you brought up a lot of great things. And again, they tie into different buckets. And that’s, what’s really interesting about performance science.

Carla Fowler: It’s multidisciplinary and it creates these upward cycles. Also can create downward cycles.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. You can get really good at doing things wrong.

Carla Fowler: Compound in the wrong direction.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I’ve been there. I think most entrepreneurs have.

Richard Matthews: So I want to talk a little bit about your origin story, right? How you got into performance coaching, especially from a surgeon, right?

Richard Matthews: So every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made you into the hero you are today. And we want to hear that story.

Richard Matthews: Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to, you know, start a business? Or did you start a job? I know you said you started as a surgeon, but we want to know where you came from. How did you get here?

Carla Fowler: Yeah. you [00:25:00] know, and this may relate to other questions we’re going to talk about later, but I did not start out wanting to be an entrepreneur.

Carla Fowler: In fact, I think I understood like, you know, as a kid, you’re like, okay, I am going to need a job to do something. You know, you.

Richard Matthews: You have to provide some value to society so you can put food on your table.

Carla Fowler: Yeah, exactly. That’s just a part of it. And also, you need to be able to independently just survive in the world. Like I grew up like, in the Pacific Northwest my family was like we went backpacking a lot.

Carla Fowler: That was like our vacation definitely built some toughness into me at a very early age because we had three kids. And as soon as you could be walking and carrying anything, you were carrying something. If it was like a teddy bear and a wolf.

Richard Matthews: Our kids do the same thing. They had a North face backpack. That was like a one year old size backpack. And I’m like, if they could walk, they can hold their own bulk.

Carla Fowler: So we would go out for like a week at a time and carry all our food, all everything we needed to survive for the week or longer.

Carla Fowler: So, definitely built some toughness in me, but I think from about the time of being [00:26:00] like fifth grader, I started to be very interested in what I would now say is performance, but I just wanted to understand, like, how was it that people were good at whatever they were doing?

Carla Fowler: That could be, like, how did the social, like, groups get set up? Like, why was someone who was popular you know, why were certain people friends? Like, how could you be friends with the person that you wanted to be friends with?

Carla Fowler: But it also was like, okay, the track meet. If you want to, like, if you want to win, Like 100 meter dash. How do you do that? Should you warm up in the morning? Should you train? Like I started to think about and observe these things in a very fifth grader way. But I think like this fascination just continued.

Carla Fowler: And I, at some point really got the sense that I both was terrified of doing challenging things, but loved doing challenging things because I would finish them and I would feel stronger and more capable.

Carla Fowler: So, you know, you can imagine like in the hero’s journey, the montage of like, [00:27:00] you know, they come in totally unable to do anything and they get tricked.

Richard Matthews: I call that the great suck a tude in our family.

Carla Fowler: The great suck a tude. Yes. So I had a middle school class with a teacher who made us do insane physical challenges. It was an alternate PE class. She had like 11 and 12 year olds walking 55 miles in 24 hours.

Richard Matthews: Whoa, like the average human limits like 22 miles in a day.

Carla Fowler: Yeah. We trained for a half marathon one day. We ran 29 miles from Seattle to Tacoma. I mean, we stopped and took breaks, but we finished.

Richard Matthews: I mean, that’s nuts.

Carla Fowler: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: So she really toughened us up. And I think that was really the start of understanding that if one could figure out how to do really challenging things, that one could, I mean, almost like one could make someone a superhero.

Carla Fowler: If you dislike.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: Putting yourself up against that stuff. So fast forward, like, you know, I loved math and science. I also was pretty interested in human beings. [00:28:00] And ultimately, was like, learned about these MD PhD programs, wanted to have a career that really like helped people.

Carla Fowler: And this is how I ended up in a nine year, fortunately was funded program to get an MD and a PhD, I was like, this is the best, like learning something interesting.

Richard Matthews: Yes.

Carla Fowler: Challenging. But, I have a lot of autonomy, which probably should have been my first cue that this was not how the story was going to end.

Carla Fowler: Like I would study on my own time. I also played high level ultimate frisbee during this nine year period.

Carla Fowler: So I won a world championship. I won a world championship and multiple national championships on the side because I just managed my time.

Richard Matthews: Might as well. Right? Might as well just be a national championship while I’m studying for my PhD. That’s totally normal.

Carla Fowler: I say this because this is like how my brain works. I would see something and I was like, if I could be a sports pro and also a doctor, like, that would be amazing. And [00:29:00] it just grabbed me. Like, that was the kind of person I am.

Carla Fowler: And, ultimately, some of this came home to roost as I was getting into residency, which is when you really lose all flexibility of your time, because I was in a general surgery residency program. And I loved the challenge of surgery. Again, how did I end up there?

Carla Fowler: Like, it was like, what are the hardest specialties you can practice? And how fascinating are they? And.

Richard Matthews: Hopefully your life was easier than Meredith Grey’s because everyone around her died.

Carla Fowler: That program, man, I will tell you, no one looks as good when they are actually an intern.

Richard Matthews: As all the people on that show because they’re all just like straight out of you know, iconic magazines. Yeah.

Carla Fowler: And everyone is too tired to do anything except just get back to sleep.

Carla Fowler: But at any rate Yeah, you know, you’re working 80 to 100 hour weeks and, you know, I think one of the things that I really came to realize was that number one, [00:30:00] it is a constrained system, like our health care system is under challenge, right?

Carla Fowler: And also, I think this is when I started to realize that I loved organizing my own time and I wanted to be potent with my time. But, like absolutely willing to be ambitious, absolutely willing to work very hard, but that there were a number of things that were just naturally how I would have chosen to do things like in that setting that weren’t going to be helpful in that setting.

Carla Fowler: Like if you’re a person who’s thinking about performance or like, Oh, how should we do things here? How should you treat a patient? Like, what would be the best way to get a good outcome for them? Like in terms of like that patient care piece, or there just wasn’t time. And I think for me, that was a real challenge.

Carla Fowler: If you’re like, I like talking with people about decision-making or being able to spend some time with them. And I think for me, the other thing I was realizing is that maybe I was more interested in performance than I actually was interested in medicine.

Carla Fowler: I was more interested in the challenge of things just generally than I [00:31:00] was about this specific practice.

Richard Matthews: You were interested in the art of mastery itself.

Carla Fowler: Yes. Well put. And, that’s when I realized I needed a practice outside of medicine that was more entrepreneurial, that I had total freedom to design how I wanted it to work.

Carla Fowler: What would be the methodology? And so, I made a very unpopular decision. I finished the year. I told them I was going to finish. I said I’m going to leave at the end of the year. And I left and that’s not something very many people do.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, not from surgical residencies No, those are hard programs to get into you. Don’t just leave them.

Carla Fowler: And I knew it was the right decision. It was not an easy decision to make because again, it’s hard for other people to understand, but, and then I started at zero and built something again.

Carla Fowler: So that but this was not in the plan, like going into performance coaching, leaving a medical program was never in the plan, but I actually think [00:32:00] many things led, made me very equipped to actually do that.

Carla Fowler: It was still absolutely challenging. Lots of things, lots of mountains to scale, but some of the things I’m most proud of I’ve accomplished actually during that phase of my career.

Richard Matthews: So, I actually wrote something this morning about mastery that I think I won’t read you the whole thing because it’s a whole long post but there’s a piece of it that I think you might really appreciate.

Richard Matthews: And basically, let me see if I can find that find a piece of it because to master something, to truly master it, isn’t about dominance, it’s about submission.

Richard Matthews: Submission to the process, to the practice, to the countless hours spent toiling in the quiet. It’s about offering yourself up to something greater than you, and in so doing, becoming greater yourself.

Richard Matthews: Mastery, then, is not just a human value, it’s the human value. It’s the way we push against the tide of entropy, the way we resist the pull of mediocrity.

Richard Matthews: It’s how we move from survival to significance, from existence to essence. In a world where machines will do everything better, faster, and more precisely than we ever could, it’s tempting to ask what’s left for us.

Richard Matthews: The answer is mastery, not because we need to compete with the machines, but because in the act of mastering something, [00:33:00] we remind ourselves of who we are.

Richard Matthews: We are the ones who create, not because it’s efficient, but because it’s meaningful. We’re the ones who pursue mastery, not for what it produces, but for what it makes of us. And that is something no machine will ever replicate.

Richard Matthews: Anyways, it just sounds like it would be something you would resonate with, that you are fascinated by the pursuit of mastery.

Carla Fowler: I thank you for sharing that. I think it is the meta. I’ve been fascinated by the meta of performance and love trying out and being in challenging arenas.

Carla Fowler: I’ve learned a lot from being in them, but like, yeah, it’s the meta of it. It’s not about, you know, I stopped playing Ultimate Frisbee after 10 years.

Carla Fowler: It was great. And then I moved on to other things.

Richard Matthews: I have a question for you because I feel like you might be very similar to me in this. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. I have a propensity to what I call collect hobbies, or collect skills. Like I collect skills the way other people collect stamps.

Richard Matthews: And it’s not like I like to get good enough at something that someone else might be like, Wow, you’re really good at [00:34:00] that.

Richard Matthews: But like, I’m never like in the realm of like the true masters, right? Like, you know, I’ve done a whole bunch of carpentry and like, I built the desk that I’m sitting at here and I built all the cabinets and I built our tables and I built our benches and I built my kids beds and I was like, well, that was fun.

Richard Matthews: And now I have like that skillset. None of them look nearly as good as like my stepdad, who’s a professional work, woodworker would have done.

Richard Matthews: But anyone who looks at them is like, wow, you did pretty good, right? I got the same thing going with carpentry, piano playing, you know, calligraphy you know, there’s a few things that I’m like really good at it, writing and photography, like those are some of like, I haven’t spent in 30 years doing those things, really good at them.

Richard Matthews: But I really like the challenge of learning something new and going through that well, I call it the Great Succotude, going through that Great Succotude period of learning a new skill, because that process fascinates me to no end, and I don’t really know why.

Richard Matthews: I just know that I love it, and it’s the thing that I love more than almost anything else, and it is going through that, like, learning a new skill and picking it up and being bad at something and realizing that, like, it [00:35:00] doesn’t really matter what it is, the process is almost always the same of how you get good at something.

Richard Matthews: And I don’t know, I’ve always really liked that and it, I don’t know, it kind of makes you feel limitless.

Carla Fowler: I definitely have a track record of like different things. Mostly it might be a little bit focused in the sense it was often like different athletic things. I wrote and I walked on because they were taking walk-ons.

Carla Fowler: So I was like, great, I’m into that. But I think It has always been focused. I’m definitely more aware now of, like, there is a limit to the number of, like, even athletic hobbies that I can practice.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, so you have to, you get to a certain level and you have to put them down and do something else.

Carla Fowler: So

Richard Matthews: So, there are a couple of things that I wanted to bring up. One, I love that you were in Ultimate Frisbee. I did that through college as well.

Richard Matthews: My best friend at the time, we used to get up every morning at like, as soon as the sun came up and like you could like to see your hand in front of your face kind of light.

Richard Matthews: Then we would go outside and we would play frisbee and we would play frisbee until school started. And then we [00:36:00] would go all the way through school and then after school was out we would play frisbee until like, we started getting hit in the face with the frisbee because we couldn’t see it anymore.

Richard Matthews: And that’s when we would know like when I can’t see it anymore, that’s when we were done. It’s time to go eat dinner or go in.

Richard Matthews: And so I was at the time I was, you know, we were, we can play a little bit of frisbee. You run a lot. And so I was like running like eight hours a day and my roommate at the time was a powerlifter and he was like, you should come to the gym with me, and like woke up and I was like, that’s never going to happen.

Richard Matthews: Like, I’m never gonna bulk up, right? But anyways, he took me to the gym, and I remember the, you know, they do like the intro at the gym, and they’re like, here’s all the things, and, you know, what are your goals, and blah blah blah, and the the guy at the gym who owned the gym was like, if I see you come in here and do any sort of cardio, I will kick you out immediately.

Richard Matthews: Because I was at like 3 percent body fat. And he was like, you were allowed to do muscle building, but no cardio in my gym because I played a little bit of Frisbee a lot.

Carla Fowler: Oh, good. Yeah. My team captain was like, no more distance running for you when they sprint. That was what I got on our date, I was a distance runner, like, [00:37:00] growing up. And so, I could do lots of running. I had great courtesy.

Richard Matthews: See, you got to do it like professionally, like on a team. We didn’t have a team when we were a small college. So it was like, it was me and my best friend that like, we put together the, you know, every week you know, we brought kids from campus to go play ultimate Frisbee in the front and we’d be the team captains.

Richard Matthews: We had, you know, 20 people a week that would play with us kind of thing. But yeah, it was just, that was our hobby. I guess.

Carla Fowler: Spreading the joy.

Richard Matthews: We were spreading the joy. Yeah, we had a tire swing on the front of campus on a big tree and we used to practice through the tire swing.

Richard Matthews: And so we would play frisbee like we would swing the tire swing and play frisbee through the swinging tire. And we got to the point where we could like swing and spin the tire and play frisbee through it, which was super fun.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So, which I guess it reminds me like your whole story just sort of, it touches on something that I’ve been exploring a lot lately with a lot of conversations and I’m curious about your thoughts on this because, you know, you’ve actually got some study into the medical side of this and other things.

Richard Matthews: And it’s this idea that we don’t really know what human potential is. We have [00:38:00] ideas but every time we have someone who puts a requisite amount of attention on any particular limit, we find that we don’t know what that limit is.

Richard Matthews: And I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, because the more I’ve studied it, the more I’ve looked into this idea of human beings limitless, the more I’ve realized that we’ve never really found limits that we haven’t been able to push.

Richard Matthews: And so, maybe, human capability is a box inside of a box, and the, you know, we can only see what our current capabilities are, but our potential is the box outside of that, and we don’t know what those limits are, and every time we push on our capabilities, we find that we don’t actually know what the limits are.

Carla Fowler: I suspect that the law of diminishing returns exists as a mathematical relationship for this, but that we don’t know where we are at.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: So like, we may think we’re right at the edge where it’s really diminishing, but I don’t really know that. So I think my point is that generally, I agree with you that we don’t totally know where the limit is [00:39:00] doesn’t mean there isn’t a limit.

Carla Fowler: And so this might diverge on this piece. But I don’t think we know where we are in the curve. But I think we assume often that like, oh, we’re at the edge when in fact, we’re not yet.

Richard Matthews: Maybe we’re not.

Carla Fowler: I think it’s the same beliefs about what is what are the capabilities as we age. I think there’s a lot of data to say that on average, what are people doing, like, when does physical activity start to tail off with age?

Carla Fowler: But I don’t know that’s a given. I think that

Richard Matthews: Yeah, Jacqueline slams from the English Channel at 96. Right?

Carla Fowler: This is, I agree with you that I think there’s some really interesting questions here. some ideas that are quite challenging.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s a fascinating conversation and I would love to have, like we’re discussing starting a second podcast specifically called Limitless just to sort of explore that whole idea because you’re absolutely right. There probably are limits in every category.

Richard Matthews: But I think we’re maybe not capable of knowing what they are, which [00:40:00] means that we’ll always sort of push on what we think our capabilities are , which functionally means that we should approach the world like we are limitless, right?

Carla Fowler: Prepare for that idea.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and prepare for it. So, and I think that fits nicely into the idea of like, how do you operate at peak performance because we’re talking about like, Hey, you know, if you want to be able to sleep better, you want to be able to, you know, do more work with your business, like any of the categories where you want to have more performance, right?

Richard Matthews: You’re looking at like, Hey, here’s what you think your capabilities are. Let’s push on those capabilities and see if you can push them past where the current limits are. And you find that.

Carla Fowler: I think the important thing here is that it isn’t just about like, push in unlimited areas, because we have this limit of how much time do we have each day, and everyone has that.

Carla Fowler: And then you have the limits around, all right, you could push harder in this area, but it’s coming from somewhere. And you have to like, you have to balance those things.

Richard Matthews: That’s probably the most important part of the discussion of being [00:41:00] limitless, that there’s only one real limit, and it’s human attention, right?

Richard Matthews: And the attention is how much time you have to put towards something, or collectively how much time we together as a team or as a community have to put towards you know, a certain endeavor.

Richard Matthews: And so human attention is the limiting factor that we have. So, you know, if you’re going to give more attention to one thing, it’s going to come from something else. Like that’s the limit. So that’s interesting.

Richard Matthews: So I want to talk then about your superpowers. Right? Every hero, every kind of hero has a superpower, whether that’s your fancy flying suit made by your genius intellect, or your ability to call down thunder from the sky, or your super strength, or maybe your ability to throw a Frisbee, right?

Richard Matthews: In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with where you develop over time and sort of energize all your other skills.

Richard Matthews: And so the superpower is what really sets you apart and allows you to help your people slay their villains and come out on top in their own journeys. What I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at, like, all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of your very storied life, what are the common threads that sort of tie all of those, [00:42:00] like, skills or accomplishments together?

Richard Matthews: And that common thread is probably where you’d find your superpower.

Richard Matthews: So what do you think your superpower is today?

Carla Fowler: Well, I think the superpower, it’s a combination of things. As it turns out, I’m quite smart. I don’t think that was always, I don’t think that was always apparent.

Carla Fowler: But I think I have some taste or some particular intelligence around performance as it turns out, and I know this because you see it as early as fifth grade.

Carla Fowler: But the thing is, I was able to reach a high level of success starting over in many different fields that were not necessarily linked together. They spanned from playing music, growing up at a high level to like athletic performance, but across multiple sports. I was a distance runner when I was in high school, but I walked onto the rowing team, like a nationally ranked rowing team.

Carla Fowler: I then switched to an entirely different thing, played ultimate frisbee. And like made a team. We went to national [00:43:00] championships. We won them.

Carla Fowler: I want a beach world again. Oh world championship, a beach ultimate, like, but there was also the scholastic, like there was the medicine side. There was the science side.

Carla Fowler: Those are not necessarily the same kind of performance. So, have an intelligence around being able to come into a new space, identify what it is that is considered high performing. Like what are the standards? But also then identify how is it that people are doing that thing.

Carla Fowler: Like what are the techniques? What’s most important to be investing in? And sometimes it’s not obvious. For example, sometimes you need to have work success to be both investing in social relationships as well as your actual work performance, right?

Carla Fowler: Like so performance is complicated thing in that way. But I have always had the ability to come into a new space, spot how things worked, like, figure out how they worked, and then use that to then rise to a very high level.

Carla Fowler: Like the highest level? Like, [00:44:00] maybe not, it depends on how much time I actually spent doing that thing. But this is what I think is my superpower.

Carla Fowler: It’s a particular kind of intelligence, and I even used it for the scholastic things that most people would say, it’s just related to IQ, where this or that, but like, even watching, like no one in my circle is a doctor.

Richard Matthews: I have a couple of thoughts for you because I think some of them might be useful because I think we share a superpower in that arena. I’ve always called it the ability to see the systems behind things. Right?

Richard Matthews: And so, yeah, I’ll give you an example. I’m a photographer, and have been for 30 years.

Richard Matthews: So it’s one of the things that has never lost my attention. In the realm of sort of like, I do the same kind of thing where I’m like, I can enter an arena and then get really good at it really fast, like much to the chagrin of the people who are already there they’re like, that should take you two years to learn, not six weeks.

Richard Matthews: Like, how did you do that? And I think a lot of it is that I ability to identify what’s happening that other people can’t necessarily see. So just to, to use, the photography example, I, [00:45:00] my wife sometimes find it frustrating to watch movies with me.

Richard Matthews: Because I analyze the story and I analyze all the cinematography and the music score and all the things that are happening there.

Richard Matthews: And I would like the I’d like, they’ve got two different lights on this scene. One’s over here, one’s here. This is the type of lens that they’re using. It evokes this kind of emotion. They’ve got this kind of music, this kind of stuff that’s happening with the story. The character arc does this kind of thing, like and can with almost like scientific rigor, like, predict what’s the next scene is gonna happen, and like the entire story all the through.

Carla Fowler: This is fantastic because I like in my own life I have a fictitious TikTok channel that is called, this is why this is high performing with Carla Fowler and we analyze everything from like, my out leftover lunch.

Carla Fowler: Why is this? Why is this so good? To, you know, why is this chair I’m sitting in at the cafe, like, the best chair? So, I can resonate with your analysis. Like, oh, here’s why the lights and lighting of this is great. Here’s why it’s not great.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, like all the way through and it’s just [00:46:00] this like you see the world differently than I don’t want to say normal people because I like I don’t know that it’s normal or abnormal It just is the way that we’re wired Right?

Richard Matthews: And everyone’s got their own wiring to see the world in the way that they see it And like that very specific like you can see the matrix Right?

Richard Matthews: Like, you can see the code that’s making it happen. So it’s really easy for you to identify, like, Oh, I need to do these things in this way to get this result. And other people are like, how did you come to that conclusion? The rest of us had to go through the Great Sockitude, like, for 20 years.

Carla Fowler: That I like how you put that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s an interesting superpower. I’ve only met a few people who have it. And the other side of that is have you ever, so my wife has her degree in early childhood education and psychology and a couple of other things?

Richard Matthews: And one of the things that she broke down for me, which helped, that really helped me understand where the whole, you know, IQ versus like, you know, am I smart or like what is going on here?

Richard Matthews: And have you ever heard the distinction between someone being bright versus being gifted?

Carla Fowler: No, I haven’t.

Richard Matthews: So, It’s two categories, and the IQ distribution is very similar, right?

Richard Matthews: So, if you’re looking [00:47:00] into your kids, so your IQ distribution is a bell curve, obviously, right? And when you get to the right side of the bell curve, where people are starting to get into the higher IQs, 130s plus they tend to bifurcate into two different groups, right?

Richard Matthews: And the overwhelming majority of them, 80% plus, are going to end up in the bright category, and then the smaller subset are going to end up in the gifted category.

Richard Matthews: And the difference between the two is someone who’s bright. If you ask them a question, you know, what is one plus one, they’ll respond with an answer, two. If you ask a gifted person, what is one plus one, they’re going to return with another question, right? They’re going to be like, why are you asking that question?

Richard Matthews: Like, what are the parameters? Is it like one plus one in a mathematical sense? Like, I have one egg and two eggs and I have another one.

Richard Matthews: Are we talking like, if you have one husband and one wife and they get together, like, maybe they have six, right? That’s what our family was. It was one, and we have six, right?

Richard Matthews: Like you didn’t give me enough information to answer the question. And so there’s

Carla Fowler: Beyond the question that there might be many different.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That there’s a lot of different frames. And so that’s the the gifted category. What’s interesting is a lot of times the gifted category people actually be lower on the IQ scale than the [00:48:00] bright kids are.

Richard Matthews: But the gifted category kids, that’s where you’ll end up with your savants, right? Your savants are almost always in the gifted category.

Richard Matthews: So like the ones who were, you know, like your Einsteins or your Sheldon Coopers from, you know, the Big Bang theory. And it’s that distinction is the. Asked a question, give an answer, ask a question, ask more questions.

Richard Matthews: And that was really helpful for understanding sort of like my own, like how my brain works, because I’m definitely in that second category of like, it’s almost impossible for you to ask me a question and me not to follow up with more questions.

Richard Matthews: I just, I can’t give you the answer. I have more things that I need to know.

Carla Fowler: Having, models to understand yourself, those can be really

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to flip gears, right? If we talked a little bit about your superpower, your superpowers, your ability to see the systems, then the flip side of that, of course, would be your fatal flaw, right?

Richard Matthews: And every Superman has this kryptonite. Every wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

Richard Matthews: You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something that you struggled with. For me is things like perfectionism, right?

Richard Matthews: As you can probably tell with all of my [00:49:00] ideas, I don’t want to make it better. Everything from, you know, that would affect shipping products to lack of self-care, which, you know, I let my clients walk all over me or let my time walk all over me.

Richard Matthews: And so I think more important than what the flaw is, how have you worked to overcome it so that you could continue to get the results that you’re getting in your business and that you get for your clients.

Richard Matthews: And hopefully sharing a little bit of your story will help our audience, you know, sort of see their flaws in a different light.

Carla Fowler: Well, it’s a really great question.

Carla Fowler: And I think one of the clearest answers to me is just, when you are a high capacity person and when you understand performance and you understand what good performance looks like, one of the challenges is it is hard to not say, well, I should then do that in every area at every moment of every day.

Carla Fowler: But one of the interesting things about that, so whether you call that perfectionism or something else, the challenge is that one piece of focus is, what do you choose to do? What do you not do at all? That’s one way we can think focus and using our capacity to the fullest, figuring out what you’re going to do and all the things you’re not.

Carla Fowler: But there’s another way to think about focus, which is that [00:50:00] you’re going to need to do some things and some of them are going, you need to, you’re going to need to do them at like 15th percentile, not 110th percentile. Right? Like there are many things like.

Richard Matthews: I just need to do the bookkeeping until I can hire or afford a bookkeeper. I’m never going to be great at it.

Carla Fowler: Yeah, it’s gonna be imperfect.

Carla Fowler: In fact, my taxes are probably, like I mean I’ve been assured by accountants that like you can’t do your taxes perfectly even if you are endeavoring to do so, so there are just things you have to get them done, whatever they are and that not everything can get a 100% of your effort or of your performance nor does it need it.

Carla Fowler: So, I think one of the ways I really come to combat this, because it can start to suck up your capacity, is to try and build in, number one, learning curves for myself.

Carla Fowler: Because one of the challenges is if you always want to have something unique at a very high level, because you have very high standards, well then it becomes hard to do new things.

Carla Fowler: So one of the techniques I’ve used is to build learning [00:51:00] curves into new projects. So, for example, when I started like being interviewed on podcasts, that was a new thing.

Carla Fowler: And one of the ways I thought about it was like, well, I should go seek out a lot of podcasts and just build in enough repetitions over time that I get better at it.

Carla Fowler: And for anyone in the audience who wants to hear the difference they are all on my website, which we’ll put the URL in the notes. You can go back and they are dated and you can see me learning in public.

Carla Fowler: But one of the things is, you know, if you stack up enough time that you will get better human beings, we are learning machines. We want to get better.

Carla Fowler: So I think that was one of the things that both helped me create and share content that I really wanted to like ideas that I thought would really help people, but also help me learn.

Carla Fowler: And because I was willing to learn in public, I was able to do two things at once, but I knew I would come up back.

Carla Fowler: So [00:52:00] Sometimes

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: The things I do is I try and build that work.

Richard Matthews: So what I love about that, I love your example with the podcast, by the way, mostly because we run a podcast post-production company, so it’s wonderfully self-serving for us. But the podcast piece in particular is it’s really useful because it shows a very particular thing.

Richard Matthews: We talked about going through the great succotude and like, you’re not really ready. until you start taking the action, right? There’s no way that you can get good at being interviewed on podcasts until you go and get interviewed on podcasts, right?

Richard Matthews: And so you go through that process of like, hey, I just have to do the work to get better at this. And when you do the practice, you start to find out, you know, when I tell the stories, I get these kinds of reactions.

Richard Matthews: So maybe I changed the story a little bit this time. Maybe I changed a little bit this way. You start to realize what are the details that are important when I’m sharing a story.

Richard Matthews: What’s the pacing that actually, like I can use when I’m on camera, how do I reduce the number of times I’m saying and actually instead maybe have thoughtful silence? Right?

Richard Matthews: And you know, as you’re like, those are all things that you learn from practice from actually doing the work and it’s because it’s [00:53:00] in public, it’s really cooled for not only for yourself, but for other people, you could go back and actually like, look at your interviews.

Richard Matthews: And I can tell you, you know, if you go back and look at this show, this shows on it’s like 300 plus interviews, right? And you go back 300 interviews ago, it was five years ago, or six years ago now, like, first off, I look like a baby because I was younger back then.

Richard Matthews: I’m like, wow, but second of all, like it’s vastly different. My camera and lighting setup is terrible. My microphone is terrible. My ability to interview people is, you know, it’s so, and, but you put in a lot of repetitions, you start to get really good at it. And you can see that progress. And you can do the same thing with almost any YouTuber creator.

Richard Matthews: You can go, you know, you look at what’s his name, Mr. Beast. You know, he’s a big, famous YouTuber and you go look at his videos now versus like his first ones that he put out 10 years ago.

Richard Matthews: They look really different because you get better when you put in the reps.

Richard Matthews: So I know we’re sort of running out of our time here, but I do have one more question I want to ask you, and it is about your guiding principles, right?

Richard Matthews: One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham [00:54:00] Asylum.

Richard Matthews: So, you know, or if you know too much about Peter Parker, he always pulls his punches because he’s afraid he’ll hurt people. Right? So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life.

Richard Matthews: Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Carla Fowler: This is a great question. Well, one of the meta principles that I think a lot about is that two of the best levers that we have to pull in our lives around our performance one is our results come down to how we spend our time and how we feel.

Carla Fowler: Like those two things basically encompass our experience.

Carla Fowler: I like that because it’s very simple and I can always ask myself whatever challenge I am in, all right do I want to work on how I’m spending my time? Or do I want to work on how I am feeling about what is happening? So often how we spend our time is how we actually change what’s happening.

Carla Fowler: But sometimes what is happening is perfectly normal and fine. So for example, when I started my practice. Like [00:55:00] they don’t teach you business in school.

Carla Fowler: And I had to learn how to sell. I had to go out and network. I had to tell people what I was doing, answer a lot of questions, and I did not teach like a pro in those practices.

Carla Fowler: Did it feel good? No, it did not feel good, you know at at 35 when you’re like post one career, starting the next. Like, that never feels good.

Carla Fowler: And yet, if I looked at how I was spending my time, I had brutal, I was using brutal focus and I decided that the two things I needed to focus on, or at least the first three years were that I needed to focus on my coaching and making sure that was absolutely at the highest level it could be.

Carla Fowler: And I needed to focus on learning how to sell.

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

Carla Fowler: Those were the two things, no blog, no social media, no, none of it all. Like there were so many distractions that could have gotten in the way. It was like, you need to learn how to sell.

Richard Matthews: Product and selling it.

Carla Fowler: There’s making stuff and there’s selling stuff. That is what there is in another principle.

Richard Matthews: That’s 100% accurate. I approve. I’m Richard [00:56:00] Matthews and I approve this message.

Carla Fowler: Seal of approval. So, I applied brutal Focus and I said, how are you going to spend your time? Because the more time you can put in on these things, the faster you will be in a place where you feel better.

Carla Fowler: But there are other things where sometimes one’s perspective needs to change. There’s not something different you need to do about your time. You may just need to have a different perspective, and say, Oh, okay, like, how am I, how am I going to feel about learning in public? Right? Like, this is a great way to be learning.

Carla Fowler: I’m excited to be on podcasts, like, okay, how are you going to feel about that? When you listen to an episode, you’re like, Oh, I said.

Carla Fowler: So I just think it’s a useful thing I go back to again and again. For example, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself, if you’re going through a challenging time, or even if it’s just a normal day, you can ask yourself, what [00:57:00] will help me build a good day today?

Carla Fowler: That’s about time usage. It might be to say, well, I’m going to hug the people I love. I am going to make sure that I sit down and I actually do a solid eight hours towards the thing I, you know, the work or whatever it is I am working towards. I want to exercise, I want to get to bed on time, and tomorrow will look different.

Carla Fowler: But like, there’s some real beauty in saying, am I using time? Or like, how am I feeling about something? And are there some other perspectives I could take that might change how I feel? Or is the perspective to take to say, I’m feeling this today and it’s quite possible after a night’s sleep? I will not be feeling that tomorrow.

Carla Fowler: And that is what there is, right? Like feelings

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: So I think those guiding principles that I

Richard Matthews: I love that, especially that last one. I always refer to that last one about, you know, feelings. We call that the truth train in our house. And so the truth train, right? You have your engine of the train. That’s the truth, like what’s actually going on. [00:58:00] And then you have the, you know, all the things that are happening.

Richard Matthews: That’s the body of the train. You have the caboose. The caboose is the feelings. And the feelings are a part of the train. They’re real, they exist. You can go stand in the caboose. You can ride in the back of the train. Like the whole thing, and a lot of people try to dismiss their feelings.

Richard Matthews: Like, no, your feelings are a part of your experience. But you don’t drive the train with the feelings. Right? You drive the train with the truth. And so, I love that.

Richard Matthews: And then the other part about shifting your perspective, right? You can either change what you’re doing or you can change how you feel about what you’re doing. And I love that.

Richard Matthews: I’ve never really heard it put that way. But you talked a little bit about like sales, you know, businesses is making products and selling products.

Richard Matthews: And I know just because again, we’ve run the show for a long time and I know a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this is the perspective around sales.

Richard Matthews: You get into business and they have this negative perception of sales, that sales is this bad thing. It’s smarmy or it’s slimy or it’s, you know, used cars, salesmen and hurting people but you know, you have to get good at it.

Richard Matthews: And one of the things that helped me a lot in that shift from my own perspective was realizing that sales actually isn’t this slimy smarmy thing.

Richard Matthews: Sales is someone else has a problem. [00:59:00] That is currently hurting them. And I have a solution to that problem and sales is how you connect that problem to that solution, right?

Richard Matthews: It’s how I can save them, how I can make their world a better place. The only way that you can really provide your value to the world, your perspective, and your skills and the things is with sales sales is the mechanism by which value is exchanged.

Carla Fowler: And we are all in the business of sales. So even if you are not an entrepreneur, we have to sell our ideas. We have to sell ourselves for promotions. You know, every conversation to like, get your kid into bed at the right time, that is a sales conversation.

Richard Matthews: Or convincing your mom that you want to go to the movie theater and watch this movie instead of the other one, right?

Richard Matthews: Or your wife at my age, right? Like, how about this action movie instead of the romantic comedy, right? It’s sales. It’s all sales.

Carla Fowler: Yeah, it’s a way of communicating and it’s a way of having your impact on the world.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. I love that. Thank you so much for taking coming on our show. I’m going to wrap up our interview there. I do finish every interview with a very [01:00:00] simple something I call the hero’s challenge and the hero’s challenge. We do this basically to help get access to stories we might not otherwise find on our own.

Richard Matthews: So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think is a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come and share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Carla Fowler: First person comes to mind to me a woman in my network named Julie.

Carla Fowler: And she runs a very interesting business around leadership and training and development all around respect,

Richard Matthews: Oh, cool.

Carla Fowler: We can show respect, how we receive respect and run, I love it. Like she has a team and. She has some really interesting ideas about how we often, most games are multiplayer games versus like independent projects, and some really interesting.

Carla Fowler: And her background is super interesting. She has like, a PhD in history and so very [01:01:00] interesting.

Richard Matthews: Well, awesome. Well, we’ll see if we can get it, you know, connect afterward and get an introduction to her. Maybe she can come on the show.

Richard Matthews: They don’t always do, but when they do, sometimes we get some really cool interviews we might not otherwise get for the show. So I appreciate that.

Richard Matthews: And so, you know, our sendoff here, you know, in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering, cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

Richard Matthews: So our analogous to that. As we close is where can people find you if they want your help in the future? Where can they light up the bat signal and say you know, Hey, Dr. Carla, I would love to, you know, get your help with my performance.

Richard Matthews: And I think more important than where, or who are the right types of people to actually reach out and ask for that help?

Carla Fowler: Well, generally speaking I work with people across industries as well as different levels of leadership.

Carla Fowler: Typically I would say the common thread is people who are setting ambitious goals for themselves. And who are looking for, it’s that level of tools like who want to see behind the curtain to say, how do I go about this deliberately and really push my performance, push the goals.

Carla Fowler: Generally, these folks have a [01:02:00] level of responsibility and autonomy that they have the ability to make some of those decisions for themselves, whether it’s the department they lead or.

Carla Fowler: It’s not a fixed career level per se. And a great place to connect with me. There are two. One is my website, which is Thaxa.com. T H A X A. And that is fun because I have a great FAQ section, but I also have all my podcasts.

Carla Fowler: If you want to hear me learning in public, you can go check those out. And you can message me through the site. But another place is LinkedIn. So I’m always posting content when I have a conversation about performance science. I put it up there. And I’m at Carla-Fowler.

Carla Fowler: So if you want to follow along, hear more about performance science, that’s a great spot.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate you taking the time to share your story, Carla.

Richard Matthews: And do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience for this stop record button here?

Carla Fowler: Oh man, I feel like, I think but I’ll come back to time because I think you know, how we [01:03:00] spend our time is how we spend our life.

Carla Fowler: And so I think time is absolutely worth thinking about, spending time, working on it, planning it, understanding how your time makes you feel.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Carla Fowler: It is a worthwhile thing to geek out on, to spend some time on.

Richard Matthews: Because human attention is the only real limited resource that we’re aware of.

Richard Matthews: Bring it all together. Thank you, Carla.

Carla Fowler: Thank you, Richard.