Change Your Mind to Change Your Body

The Power of Neuroscience 

Our thoughts and mental patterns have a profound impact on our physical health. This connection between mind and body is not just philosophical—it is backed by emerging neuroscience. In this post, I’ll share a personal story about how I discovered, quite by accident, that an outdated mental model drove my long-standing aversion to physical exercise. With a simple shift in how my brain predicted physical exertion, I was able to completely transform my ability to exercise without wishing I were dead. This is the power of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to change and adapt in response to new experiences.

My Personal Experience

For as long as I can remember, every time I engaged in hard physical exertion, I experienced severe nausea. Growing up, I never played sports, I was active, but rarely found my limits, so this wasn’t something I encountered often. The first time it became a real issue was after I graduated from high school and went to basic training. We ran every day—something I’d never done before. After every run, I felt absolutely awful. No runner's high for me; instead, running and other intense exercises were torturous, and this pattern persisted throughout my adult life.

In January 2022, I began working with a personal trainer. Again, during every workout, the nausea would return, forcing me to stop and recover. Before one particular session, I remembered that ginger, when held between the cheek and gum, could help prevent nausea. I had some ginger candy in my pantry and decided to try it. To my surprise, it was like magic—no nausea! Then, a few weeks later, I forgot to take the ginger before a workout and didn’t even notice the absence of nausea until I was walking home. For the first time in my life, I had completed a workout without feeling sick! 

At that point, I was doing yoga three times a week and walking five miles daily, so I was in decent shape. Still, I found myself drawn to the empirical evidence suggesting that resistance training was the most important form of exercise for health and longevity, particularly as we age (Doidge, 2007). But I had always struggled to maintain an exercise routine because of how it made me feel. So, why had the nausea suddenly stopped? Was it random, or had something fundamentally changed?

I don’t believe my physiology simply shifted overnight. Instead, I suspect that sometime before I turned 18, I developed a faulty mental model that caused my brain to associate intense physical exertion with nausea. This mental model was likely reinforced every time I exercised. But when I used ginger to interrupt the nausea, I believe I inadvertently interrupted that model and allowed my brain to form a new more beneficial model. 

The Neuroscience Behind It

In 2022, I came across How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett’s research shows that our brains are predictive rather than reactive, constantly generating predictions based on past experiences to prepare us for future events (Barrett, 2017). According to her theory of constructed emotion, emotions are not hardwired responses, but rather constructed experiences based on the brain’s predictions. This aligns with the idea that my nausea during exercise wasn’t a direct reaction to the exertion itself, but rather a prediction my brain had been making for decades. When I used ginger to interrupt this response, I believe I began to "teach" my brain a new prediction model—one that no longer associated physical exertion with nausea.

Ginger and Nausea: A Practical Solution

The use of ginger to combat nausea is backed by science. Ginger contains compounds such as gingerol and shogaol, which have anti-inflammatory and antiemetic properties. Research supports its efficacy in preventing nausea in various contexts, including motion sickness and postoperative recovery (Lien et al., 2003). When I began using ginger before workouts, I effectively interrupted the brain’s conditioned response to physical exertion. This allowed me to dissociate exercise from the nausea response, resetting the faulty mental model that had plagued me for decades.

Interestingly, I had learned about ginger's anti-nausea properties back in 2005 when I practiced Native American spirituality with Lakota Indians in San Diego. During our sweat lodge ceremonies, where the heat and steam could become overwhelming, the lodge leader would hand out ginger to those feeling sick. Despite knowing about ginger’s effectiveness, it took me 16 years to make the connection and apply that knowledge to my exercise-induced nausea. Functional fixedness in action.

Now, I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, where I work with a personal trainer three times a week, walk five miles a day, and, as of last week, I’ve started running. For the first time in my adult life, I ran for 20 minutes without feeling sick—and I was ecstatic! I can run, and it's now a regular part of my routine.

Rethinking Our Mental Models

This experience made me realize how deeply ingrained mental models can affect our behavior and physical responses. Our brains create mental models—also known as cognitive schemas—that predict what will happen based on past experiences. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a well-established approach in psychology that helps individuals identify and modify harmful or limiting thought patterns. CBT operates on the premise that by changing these cognitive schemas, we can alter our emotional and physiological responses (Beck, 1979). It was created long before Barrett's research and doesn't take advantage of the predictive nature of our brains, but it's in the right neighborhood, as are its more modern counterparts. 

In my case, the nausea I experienced during exercise was likely due to a cognitive schema that my brain had developed long ago, associating exertion with discomfort. By interrupting this model with the use of ginger, I essentially rewired my brain to expect a different outcome from physical exertion—a process known as cognitive restructuring.

The Future of AI and Wearable Technology

This leads me to wonder about the potential for technology to help us identify and correct faulty mental models more systematically. Cognitive therapies like CBT provide us with the tools to recognize and replace unhelpful thought patterns, but what if we could take this a step further? Imagine a future where wearable technology and AI could monitor our physiological and psychological responses in real-time, predicting when a mental model might be working against us and offering suggestions for improvement.

Already, companies like Apple, Google, and startups like WHOOP are developing wearable devices that track health data and provide personalized insights (Topol, 2019). AI-driven predictive models are being explored for their ability to detect early signs of chronic diseases by analyzing continuous data from wearables (Esteva et al., 2019). It’s only a matter of time before such technologies allow us to identify faulty mental models and replace them proactively. This could represent the next step in preventive medicine, where AI can monitor and optimize our mental and physical health.

While this level of monitoring may feel invasive to some, I predict future generations will more readily accept and adapt to it, recognizing its potential to improve both mental and physical well-being.

References

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Penguin.

• Clark, A. (2013). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

• Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Penguin.

• Esteva, A., Robicquet, A., Ramsundar, B., Kuleshov, V., DePristo, M., Chou, K., Cui, C., Corrado, G. S., Thrun, S., & Dean, J. (2019). A guide to deep learning in healthcare. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0316-z

• Lien, H.C., Sun, W.M., Chen, Y.H., Kim, H., Hasler, W., Owyang, C. (2003). Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dysrhythmias induced by circular vection. American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 284(3), G481-G489. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpgi.00187.2002

• Topol, E. J. (2019). Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Basic Books.

How to Gain Trust Faster and Have Deeper Business Relationships

There are a number of ways to quickly develop rapport with folks at work, whether they’re clients or internal partners. In this post I’m going to write from the perspective of Behavioral Economics and Positive Psychology and focus on deepening client relationships. This is a long-term strategy. It’s about becoming a trusted advisor, not making a quick buck. You may not make a dollar today, but you’ll make many more dollars tomorrow by following these ideas. 

This post is about my personal preference to build rapport with clients by always doing the right thing for them or as the Atlassian team says, “Don’t fuck the customer.” Behavioral Economics is focused on influence, not taking the client’s perspective. And this is how I quickly gain trust with other people so I can become a trusted advisor, develop social capital and be more effective at work. The goal of Positive Psychology is to have optimal mental health.

Behavioral Economics says we have two types of relationships, transactional and social. Transactional relationships are win/lose, social relationships are win/win. In business, we start out in a transactional relationship and where we want to be is in a social relationship. In my experience, the best way to make the transition from transactional to social is by showing in words and deeds that I care more about doing the right thing for the folks I’m working with than I do about selling them anything. 

There is a caveat, you have to genuinely care more about meeting the other person’s needs than you do about selling, you have to put the client before your company. The idea is to build a solid foundation for a relationship by demonstrating caring in words and deeds, but you can’t pretend to care, you have to genuinely care. Faking authenticity is very difficult and if the other person feels you aren’t being genuine, things will likely go badly. 

Be intentional, intent is powerful. When I work with a client, I let them know that my intent is to make them more successful at their jobs, because that’s the role I’m in. I do that by showing them best practices and always doing what’s in their best interest, even if it conflicts with my self-interest, at least in the short term. In the long term, both parties are likely to be more successful.

Be confident. No one is going to see you as a trusted advisor if you don’t believe you’re a subject matter expert. The quickest way to gain confidence is to act as you have it. Fake it until you make it is a proven technique in Positive Psychology to build confidence. However, faking it isn’t enough. You have to put in focused effort to become a subject matter expert. Before your meeting ensure that you feel confident with your understanding of the subject matter by doing some research and at least gaining a high-level overview. Take notes and record the call if possible. Then use the recording as a feedback loop.  Listen to calls and try to find ways to improve. 

If you discover a solution to a client’s problem that doesn’t help you or your company, say it’s recommending a competitor or an off the shelf software package and you share that info with the client, it’s a demonstration of your caring for them. Most people won’t step out of their comfort zone to do this. It’s a risky strategy to those who haven’t worked this way. It’s most effective to use this strategy early in the relationship, but it will help you build trust across the life of your relationships.

Social relationships mean both people are invested in each other’s needs, that fairness is at the center of the relationship and over time you can build up social capital. That is you can build up goodwill with your clients and create social obligations. In social relationships, we naturally seek out win/win solutions. And we aren’t perfect, social capital creates a social burden and can be used to help others overlook mistakes we make and it allows us to make asks that are more likely to get a yes. 

How do we to make the transition from transactional to social relationships? You have to change the way you think of your clients, to think about them more as friends who you want to help rather than businesses you want to profit from. Changing the way we think about things is a challenge for most of us, it takes practice and focused effort. It’s simple but requires dedication, time and practice. One tool we can use comes from Positive Psychology and is called reframing. The idea is to pay attention to our thoughts and alter them just a bit and over time, that change in thought will become our new reality. Then we repeat this process until we have adapted the desired perspective. 

Let’s say I want to change my behavior around asking other people for help. I’d start by paying attention to the chatter in my head around asking for help. I might start out with the message, “I’m a strong independent person who doesn’t need help, I don’t want to take the chance of being let down.” Let’s say my goal is to change my perspective to, “If I don’t ask other people for help, then I’m robbing them of that good feeling I get when I help other people.” I start with a small change, “I’m a strong independent person who doesn’t need help and I get that I’m being selfish for not asking for help, so I’ll ask for help with things I could do myself, so if people let me down, it won’t hurt as much.” As I put my thoughts into action and I take chances and ask for help, I keep iterating on this until I adopt my goal perspective. So far we’ve talking about internal changes we can make and actions we can take to build closer relationships. These ideas will work in most any context, work, family, friends, as long as you genuinely care for the other person and ensure your words and deeds match up. 

We want to be in social relationships with our clients and build up social capital because it gives us influence. Influence is the beneficial side of manipulation. Manipulation has negative connotations because it’s often used for the benefit of the manipulator and to the detriment of the manipulated. With influence, we try to change the behavior of others for their benefit. Once again, we are taking actions that benefit the person we are in a social relationship with. If you try to manipulate someone against their best interests it will likely come back to you in a way you don’t like.

People value things they create more than things they buy, this is the Ikea effect. We know from research that even if all you do is assemble something, you will assign it a higher monetary value. Partner with your clients and have them participate as much as you can. You want them to feel like they have ownership in the thing you are collaborating on because they’ll value it more. That’s why if I offer to edit a client’s writing, I call it optimizing, not fixing, editing or whatnot. I don’t want to imply that there’s anything wrong with what they did, just that I want to make it optimal. 

You want to make it easy for the other person to think nice things of you. Every time someone gives you an enthusiastic YES, their brain releases dopamine and after about 5-7 yeses they start feeling closer to you, and they start to trust you. A yes is a metaphor for any sort of positive interaction. The idea is to provide massive value before asking for anything that might benefit you. This is a social capital shortcut. Your goal should be to make the time you spend with your clients, the most valuable time in their day. Make your time with your clients about them, not you. 

Avoid choice overload or the Home Depot effect. It’s better to give clients a few good choices than 100 choices. You want to reduce the friction they have between wanting to do something and doing it. If a client is having a hard time deciding on something, see if you can schedule a call to help them narrow down their choices and help them move forward.

People tend to default to the first options presented to them. Opt in/out is a good example. Most people will leave the default on an email list signup, whether it’s opt in or opt out. Present your desired perfect state first, then other options if it’s a good idea. Just keep the number of options low. 

Scarcity is a powerful motivator, the less there is of something the strong the desire for it is. False scarcity is a common tactic used by marketers everywhere but nowhere more than on the internet. Even when you know how it works, it still pulls you in to buy. Just last weekend I went to book a hotel room and one that looked nice only had one room left, so I booked. Then I found out it was a room in a shared condo with a shared bath. No thanks. I was able to cancel it and then did a better job of looking at my options. False scarcity is manipulative, things like count down timers, limited offers, and deal expiration all create scarcity.

Lastly let’s talk about framing or priming. You can make people more receptive by putting them in a more beneficial mental state. You don’t know what kind of day the other person is having and if you can do something to brighten up their day at the start of a meeting, it can influence the outcome of the meeting. Getting them to think a happy thought can cancel out the soul-crushing commute they had today. Your goal is to get your client to think about something that makes them happy, it could be their children, a recent trip, a hobby they love, etc. Even showing a picture of a cute animal can put someone in their happy place. I do research on clients before a call, I look for anything that we have in common or anything positive I can bring up about them or their company.  Our brains focus more on how things start and end than what happens in the middle. Start and end meetings on a high note, starting on a high note sets the tone for the meeting, ending on a high note, gives people a lasting positive impression. 

We’ve talked about a broad set of topics and if one or two of them ring true to you, then start using them to get better results. As a side benefit, you’ll likely feel better about yourself by working this way. Knowing how and why we do what we do helps us to be better people, to have better relationships and to have a more satisfying life. 

Creating a Sustainable Company Culture

An organization’s vision, mission, and values are the roots of its culture, and creating them is a completely different topic. This post assumes you have these things already and did a good job creating them. A good way for you to know if you did a good job with them is to ask a bunch of random team members what they are and what they mean. In the vast majority of organizations, a mission statement is largely window dressing. A marketing exercise completed and forgotten except on some walls and marketing materials. If this is you, then your culture is already in trouble. And lastly, before we move on from this related topic, a vision creates an asymptote, something you can approach and get close to by never meets. A mission points the organization in a direction and the values tell you how to get there.

This is important for culture because if your vision, mission, and values are a great fit for your organization, then a core part of your culture will be to follow them.

Before we go any deeper, let’s define what sustainable culture is. It’s durable, long-lasting, adaptable, inclusive and it’s the guiding force for creating trust and transparency in our organizations. It’s something we live in our work lives, not a marketing exercise. A sustainable culture serves its organization, customers, and partners. It helps to define the organization and should be easily propagated. Zappos culture book is an excellent example of an artifact that supports a sustainable culture.

Branham and Hirshfield’s book, Re-Engage is basically a set of case studies for how to define your culture, it’s essential reading to help you define your culture. In fact, there are a few areas of research that will be key to creating a sustainable culture. Positive Psychology teaches us to have optimal lives, how to be resilient, and how to be grateful and feel like we are enough. It teaches us how to motivate ourselves and how not to have a negative impact on other people’s motivation. This field also tells us how to attain Flow States which increase our well-being and the quality of our work. Behavioral Economics is the science behind marketing, it’s the study of why people do what they do and shows that while we are predictable, we are also very irrational. Most of why we do what we do needs to be researched to be understood because it’s so counterintuitive. For instance, in studies done around the world, when you offer someone a reward to do a creative task and measure things like time to completion of a creative task, the person being rewarded is always slower to complete the task. Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of how our physical brains work in conjunction with our cognition. We learn how memory and recall work, that our brains are essentially serial processors. We can only hold a small number of things in our minds at a time, which means we are bad at multitasking. Systems Thinking is also a key topic. It shows us how to create feedback loops to see how things are obscured by time. If you have long-term goals that span 20, 30...100 years, this will be very important. Human beings are very complex, and our problems generally require complex solutions. Browse my reading list for related books. It would be a great idea to get a grounding in these areas before trying to create a sustainable company culture. Like with most things, the more work you do upfront, the more it will pay off. Go slow now to go fast later.

If you are a bit overwhelmed by fulfilling these prerequisites, that’s normal. This is a huge undertaking that requires massive work and dedication. If the idea of this excites you, as it does me, it’s a good indicator that this sort of work is a good fit for you. Getting a grounding in these areas can take a year (if you work on nothing else and learn very quickly), to 3 or 4 years. 2 years is a good timeline to shoot for if you can be dedicated. To speed things up, work with your team, commit to being a SME in an area, and share your knowledge. If you don’t do the prework, you’ll make a lot more mistakes, take wrong turns, and find dead ends. You’ll also much more likely to fail or get crappy results.

I’ve been studying these topics since 2010 when I launched my blog. I’m obsessed with creating generational companies. Companies that last at least 50-100+ years because big hairy problems take generations to solve.

What next? Use your learning in intrinsic motivation to help your team inspire itself to take on the task of defining your culture. The more the team is involved, the more they will buy into the results, the better the results will be. Keep in mind the things you’ve learned while you are defining your culture to keep the team engaged and put in feedback loops to help you know when things are going off track so they can be addressed.

The vast majority of company cultures are random and not well thought out, many that are thought out are not based on good science, either way, the results aren’t great and usually not very sustainable. That’s because doing this well is hard work and most companies want a quick fix. Even the ones with great intentions can easily go off track if they don’t understand the science.

If you thought you were going to get a quick answer, sorry about that. That would be like looking up how to do a laparoscopic appendectomy, having not been to med school and expecting you could hit the medical supply store, read up and do a quick operation over the weekend. Humans are very complex, the more of us that interact, the more complex things get.

Now get out there and change the world!

The Most Impactful Thing You Can do as a Leader!

From a team perspective, the primary service we can perform as leaders is to enable the success of our teams, to be servant leaders. To do that, we have to know what success looks like, ensure that the team has the tools and knowledge they need, that they are developing mastery and growing, and that we have created an environment conducive for them to motivate themselves.

There is a lot to unpack here!

Knowing what success looks like starts with our mission and vision, then working with each team member to negotiate their goals to support the mission. Once we do that, we can work with them to create measures. The goals should be stretch goals. They should cause the team to learn new skills or expand existing skills. Having a learning organization is central to keeping up with our ever-changing world. It’s also essential to consider the area(s) of mastery team members are developing so their goals align.

Now that we have a direction and goals, we can do a gap analysis to ensure that team members have the tools and mentoring they need and a learning plan. We are setting them up for success and fulfillment. Measures of success should be reviewed regularly. This may vary due to the complexity of the task or the goal date. A weekly check-in is a good idea. If we had waited to look at measures until near the end of the project, it could have veered off track. It’s also important to take an agile approach and adjust or even eliminate tasks as business needs change. If you have to change direction or end a task, make it a collaborative decision. Don’t make a pronouncement. More on that shortly.

Team members’ mastery is essential for an organization to stay relevant. The rate of change in society and technology is ever-increasing. If we think of an organization as an organism, we can’t just have some portion of the organization growing and learning. The whole team needs to participate. The whole organism needs to evolve. Not just the head or the feet.

Underpinning all of this creates an environment conducive for the team to motivate themselves. Extrinsic motivation, command, and control, or carrots and sticks, is an outdated and harmful practice for team members who do creative work. In the knowledge economy, that should be all of us. This leads us to intrinsic motivation, the engine of personal purpose and self-motivation, our “why.” Dan Pink, in his book Drive, says the team needs Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose for us to motivate ourselves. We need autonomy about the work we do, when we do it, and who we do it with, we need to be constantly challenged and growing toward a deeper mastery, and we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These things are necessary and not sufficient.
All of this is important because if our team does not feel safe, valued, and relevant, if they don’t trust their leaders or each other, their fight or flight reaction will be triggered, and their ability for creative thinking will be impaired. Any time this happens, it takes a lot of effort to build trust and feel safe again. Because of how our brains work, it’s much easier to make us feel unsafe or threatened than to do the opposite. This is one reason why trust and transparency are so important. We are less resistant when we feel safe, trust our leaders, and are involved in change. And we want our teams to embrace change, not actively resist it.

This is why servant leadership is so important. Leaders must build relationships with their direct reports, trust, and demonstrate care. They have to be dedicated to the well-being and success of each team member.

Being a servant leader is more like being a coach than a boss. And a well-cared-for team will walk over hot coals for such a leader!. Some of you are probably thinking, what about the shit work? That’s easy. We all do it, each of us takes a turn. We do it for the good of the team. When I was in IT leadership roles and a truck pulled up with equipment, I was the first one out the door to help unload, and with a smile on my face and a spring in my step.

Building these relationships with the team, understanding their passions, what motivates, them how they like to be recognized, and what they are good at is hard work, helping them create goals and measures is harder still. At our core, we all want to be of service, and this is the way leaders can be of the highest level of service. It’s the most important work we can do.

How to Get Started in Remote Work

Malecon, Puerto Vallarta

Finding a remote job is hard work. In the last couple of years, remote work has caught on, and the supply of remote jobs has not kept up with demand. That means that many more people are looking for remote work than there are available jobs. The competition for remote positions is fierce! I think the main reason for this is that most companies are not “remote ready.” For remote companies to be successful, they have to operate by different rules than brick and mortar companies, but I discussed that in a previous post. It would be an excellent idea to go and read that post now and then come back to read this one. It will give you a broad sense of culture at a remote company.

If you have worked remotely, worked for a startup, or owned your own business, then you likely have the skills to work remotely. Unlike a traditional job, where you show up at time X and leave at time Y, and put in your 40 hours, most remote workers set their own hours, decide where they will work from, and have to be self-motivated to get things done.

The research on remote work is clear. Remote workers get more done in less time. When working in an office with your team, you have little control over your time and distractions. The focus tends to be on how many hours you work, not what you achieve, and you waste time commuting.

Let’s look at the skills most remote workers need:

• Self-discipline

• Time management

• Stellar written and verbal communication skills

Competence with communication, collaboration, project management, CRM, and other common apps used by remote teams

Ways of thinking or mindset:

• The ability to develop a deep trust in your team members and managers

• The ability to be completely transparent

• Have a bias toward action

• The ability to focus on results

Remote work is not for everyone. Some folks have a hard time being alone all day. Some can’t focus on work when they are at home. They get distracted by kids, pets, or chores. Some people have difficulty engaging in work unless someone is cracking the whip. I like to work from my home office. Other folks like to work from coffee shops or co-working spaces. These more public locations can help with loneliness or whatnot.

If you have the skills and mindset mentioned above, you're ready to look for remote work!  If not, you need to acquire those skills and that mindset if you want the best chance to succeed. Look for a future post where I’ll address this.

Like anything important, the work we do to prepare is often the most important. Thorough preparation makes for easier execution. I always advise folks looking for work to create a success inventory if they don’t have one. Here is a sample success inventory. It lists all the successes you have had related to work. It’s best to focus on times you made money, saved money, increased efficiency, or decreased expenses in your work. No matter what a company tells you they care about, what they care about is making and saving money. Now that you have your success inventory, you will use it to write resumes and cover letters and prepare for interviews. Start by picking the niche you will apply for. It’s best to choose a single focus for the job you want. For me, it was Project Manager. Then create a resume that focuses on showing your achievements in your niche and your remote work skills/mindset. Use your success list as proof you can do the job.

Next, optimize your LinkedIn profile to match your resume and highlight your niche and remote work experience. The skills and mindset I talked about need to be highlighted for remote work, and they are transferable, so even if you’ve never done remote work, these skills will make you remote work ready.

Now you know what jobs you want to apply for, and you have what you need to start applying. Now it’s simply a matter of persistence and networking. You can use this document to find remote job boards and remote companies. Apply for every job you are well qualified for.

Join all the freelancer sites, like Upwork, that you can.  This is a great way to get experience with remote work. If you are a native English speaker with a 4-year degree, consider getting a TEFL certificate and a job online teaching English. The pay is ok, up to $20 an hour, and it’s another good way to get remote experience.

Beware of scams. If anyone ever asks you to pay them to give you work, it is very likely a scam. If your job includes recruiting new team members and you get a cut of what they sell, it’s very likely a scam. If a company wants login info to your bank account, it’s a scam. If it’s too good to be true, it’s a scam.

The Seeds of Remote Company Leadership and Culture

Sunset, Puerto Vallarta

If you want your remote company to be successful, you’ll need a culture centered on results, trust, and transparency. You can run a brick-and-mortar company in the old way, it will be at a competitive disadvantage, but you could do it. If you try using traditional management practices with a remote company, it will likely fail.

Until very recently, there has been little to no management innovation since the 1800’s when the British East India Company created the first management practices. They used command and control or carrots and sticks, otherwise known as extrinsic motivation to run their companies and over 85% of companies are still run this way.

Fully remote companies run best when they are run asynchronously when it doesn’t matter where you are or when you work. Requiring folks to work core hours, be in certain time zones or whatnot is a competitive disadvantage. Technology has advanced to the point where as long as you have a decent internet connection, 20 megabytes or greater in most cases, you can work from anywhere in the world.  Zapier.com is a great example, they have 350 team members all working asynchronously.

There is no set formula for creating your company culture, and the culture is what makes the company special or unique. Zappos.com is hyper-focused on customer service. Gore.com is privately held and run democratically. Atllassian.com has values like, “Don’t fuck the customer” and has no sales team.  There are things that should be incorporated into all remote companies.

• Results Focused: It’s about getting results, not how much you work. You negotiate your goals with your manager/team and when they are done, you are done. The reward for a job well done is not more work!

• Trust: Hire good people, work with them to ensure they don’t have skills gaps, and create an environment that will help them to motivate themselves and foster their success.

• Transparency: Share everything, good news, bad news, financials including salary, and all communication with perhaps a few small exceptions. Be an outstanding communicator.

Traditional management empowers a handful of people at the top to do all the thinking for a company and forces everyone else to conform to their will, do it their way, in their time and a place they prescribe. Human beings resent being manipulated and when someone offers you a reward or punishment, they are manipulating you. If you do this, I’ll give you that. When we feel threatened, less than, left out, looked over, unappreciated or whatnot, it causes a fight or flight reaction in our brain, our amygdala secretes adrenaline, and blood is rerouted from our frontal cortex to our hindbrain. This is a major cause for folks being disengaged at work and disengagement for remote companies is death. It creates a vicious cycle.

Traditional managers give orders, they tell their employees what to do, how to do it, where they should do it and when they have to do it. The thought of working like that again makes me ill! It takes little to no training to be a traditional manager, it’s mostly administrative training.

It’s best for remote companies to follow a servant/leader model. Servant/leaders are facilitators of the team’s success, they are coaches, not authoritarians. Leading this way takes coaching and training. It means learning about each person on your team, how they work best, what motivates and demotivates them, how they like to be recognized and rewarded, and most of all it means caring deeply for the folks that work for you.

Traditional managers focus on you having your ass in a seat for 8 or 10 hours a day. There is always that one person in the office, who is the first to arrive, the last to leave, and seems to be constantly busy. In my experience, when a company makes the shift to results-based management, these are the folks that can’t adapt. They seem busy but are not achieving results, they seem engaged but are just spinning their wheels.

If you use modern management practices like the servant/leader model, you can more easily focus on results. Working this way is much more flexible, more agile. It builds better relationships on the team and it lets us get a lot more done.

When trust is the default mode when we treat team members as adults, not people we need to control or keep under our thumb, it creates a virtuous cycle, it’s uplifting. And it makes it easier to face and admit to failure. According to research in behavioral economics, we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships, and transactional relationships. The former is built on trust and in that mode, we seek win/win outcomes. The latter is built on selfishness and results in win/lose outcomes. I’ll take win/win outcomes every time!

Transparency can’t really happen without trust. Many remote companies publish salaries or have transparent pay scales so everyone knows what everyone else makes.  When they have a problem, instead of 3 guys in a room trying to figure out what to do, they pose the problem to the entire team to seek a solution. No one likes to find out later about a bad surprise! Would you rather trust a few people at the top to solve problems, look for opportunities, and give feedback or would you rather use the combined brainpower of the entire team?  I’ll take the many over the few, every time!

In summary, if you want your remote company to be successful, focus on results, trust, and transparency. Look to your team to define your culture and figure out what makes you unique and play to your strengths. Train and coach your managers to be servant/leaders and you’ll have the best chance of creating a sustainable remote business.

Perseverance = Success

What is the biggest factor in one’s success? Is it talent? Who you know? Luck? I think it’s perseverance. That and saying yes, more than no. If you show up every day and try, if you put yourself out there and never quit, eventually, you will be successful. I had one period of unemployment that lasted for two years. I applied for 400 jobs in the first year, had a 10% response rate, and made it to final interviews 20 times with no job offer, this was right after the tech crash, and I was living in San Francisco. I never gave up and applied for everything I was well qualified for. I couldn’t even land a retail job. I was desperate!

One day I got called in for an interview for a job I didn’t want. It was a full-time job to last only 30 days. I spent two hours on the interview; job interviews are more like business presentations for me. I was able to show them that their plan wouldn’t work, and then I outlined a plan that would, and they asked me if I could make it happen. I said yes and that I’d get them a proposal. I had no idea what I was doing, I was about to start a consulting business by happenstance. I went home and started researching how to be a consultant and land great gigs. I found a well-reviewed book and followed its ideas to create a proposal and asked for way too much money with 30% paid upfront. And the client accepted my offer.

About 18 months after that engagement was finished and I was living in Bangkok teaching creative writing at a high end high school, I answered a job advert on LinkedIn for a startup job in Koh Samui. The pay was 2.5X what I was making, and they hired me as a project manager. Six months later, I was the director of operations, making a western salary, living in a two bedroom house with a private pool, and having the time of my life.

My point is that I end up in these weird situations that can’t be anticipated, which works out amazingly well because I’m not a quitter, and I say yes. It helps that I’m single, have no debt, and fear is not something I’m familiar with. I don’t have a traditional life or a traditional career. If I’m in between jobs, I do personal development and travel. When I do work, it is most of the time I’m usually doing interesting and challenging work that keeps my brain sharp and my heart light.

I’ve had a recent epiphany that is making my life less stressful. It’s normal for me to go six months or so between jobs. I’m picky about the work I do and who I work with. I need to eat like everyone else, and I’m not wealthy. I’m also not going to take soul-killing work unless I’m completely down and out, and that has never happened yet…

Finding Remote Work and Living Abroad

Man made lake. Penol, Colombia

People are always asking about how to find remote work and what does it take to live abroad? There are tons of online resources, which I’ll list in the blog post.

Why work remotely?

• Location independence

• Set your own hours

• Work from where works best for you

  • Home

  • Coffee Shop

  • Co-working space

• The ability to be more flexible with salary

• Easier to travel

• Work without distraction

To succeed in working remotely, you have to have discipline. You know what I'm talking about if you have successfully run your own business. This is why working remotely is not a good fit for some folks. They get distracted or just don’t have the intrinsic motivation to push themselves.

You’ll need a good internet connection, which limits where in the world you can live. You need to know what hours you can work. If you live in Mexico, having a remote job in China may mean getting up at 4 am. You’ll need to be a great communicator, written and verbal. And, of course, you have to have to be competent with technology.

Where to look for remote work?

Your favorite online jobs platform has them, LinkedIn, etc. But this is the best source I know of for where to look for online work. It’s a google doc maintained by its users. In addition, look for Facebook groups in Digital Nomad Hubs, like Medellin and Chiang Mai, or your desired destination.

Your reasons for wanting remote work might be different than mine. I almost always choose to live someplace with a low cost of living. Doing so gives me more freedom to take a wider variety of jobs, and I have a long history of going from being the low man on the totem pole to being the guy running things. But that is not my only criterion. A new home has to have good internet, at least 15 megs, have a great quality of life, friendly people and preferably be near the beach. This year, I live 200 meters from the Pacific Ocean in Puerto Vallarta, MX. Six months before I got here, I was in Medellin, CO.

If you are a native English speaker with a 2 or 4 year degree, the easiest and best-paying job to get started is teaching English to Chinese kids online. It pays around $20 an hour and would be a great way to move to Asia. Countries like Vietnam and Cambodia have very liberal visa policies, good quality of life, and a very low cost of living. The other option is to go to Korea or China and get a full-time job teaching English. These two countries pay about the best and have the best benefits. I did this in Thailand, and it was a great experience. But I’d not recommend teaching in Thailand. Their education system is horrible, and the pay is meh. If you want a job like this, you’ll need to be a native English speaker, have a 4-year degree, and have a TEFL certificate.

Money

I don’t have any debts. If you are going to move overseas, in most cases, you’ll want some savings to fall back on. For me, that’s about $15,000. I use Mint to manage my finances because I want know where I am at any time. Depending on your job situation, you won’t need that much money. For instance, some schools in Asia will send you a plane ticket and give you one to get home, and in the countries I mentioned, if you live frugally, you can save $1000 a month. But If you plan to move somewhere and then look for work or just start teaching English online, you’re going to want some savings to fall back on.

I figure out my savings goals and my monthly living expenses and use that as the lowest salary I can take. I can’t take a job if it doesn’t pay the minimum.

Sure, most Americans seem to live paycheck to paycheck. But that could be a disaster overseas. When I was teaching in Bangkok, nearly all the guys I worked with were living paycheck to paycheck. What happens if they get fired? If you lose your job in Thailand, you lose your visa and have about ten days to leave the country. Not good if you don’t have savings to fall back on.

The Super Happiness Challenge!

Investors Panel

A friend forwarded me a link to a pitch session yesterday morning, and as I’m in networking mode, trying to find an amazing job, I signed up and attended. I didn’t know much about the event before I arrived and the first thing that struck me was that all of the folks pitching had startups that did good things, that aimed to make the world a better place by increasing what Project Heha calls “Super Happiness.”

I’ve been to quite a few pitch sessions, and this was by far the most inspirational pitch session I’ve ever been to. I was brought to the point of tears many times over the course of the afternoon. To see so many people trying to do good in the world in one place was humbling and quite inspirational. 

The Super Happiness Challenge was an international competition that started accepting applications in May 2017.  There were two tracks, an Idea Track, and a Startup track.  Five finalists came from as far away as Iceland and Africa to pitch. The event was hosted by GSV Labs, great people with an amazing space.

From my perspective, the winners in both categories were obvious choices, and the judges had difficulty deciding, especially between the grand prize and runner-up prizes.

All one needed to enter the idea track: “The idea track is open to individuals who have an innovative, creative solution that promotes happiness.” Most of the idea track entries were pretty far along. Many had apps or significant achievements. The winner, Smart Garbage Medical Insurance, created a micro-insurance system where slum residents in Tanzania collect plastic refuse, which widely pollutes the slum, it’s collected monthly, and turned into plastic timber, which is sold to make things like decks and fences. The proceeds go to buying insurance. So far, they have insured 75 families!  It’s a triple win, people most at risk get insurance, the environment is improved, and a new building material that is much more resilient than wood is created. What an innovation! 

To enter the startup track, one needed to, have a startup along the same lines. All of the startup entries were impressive, not just from their ability to do good but also from their viability. The winner, WeFarm.org, blew the top of my head off!  They have created the world’s largest farmer to farmer digital network.  They have over 420,000 farmers connected in Kenya, all via SMS.  Farmers are rated, and AI is used to connect folks who have questions to those who can answer them. We are talking about folks who have, until now, no access to the internet and no way to communicate outside their personal networks. WeFarm is also using this service to sell supplies like seeds and insurance and plans on a peer to peer market soon.

For those of you who don't understand how big a deal this is, 80% of the folks in Africa have cell phones, and only 30% of the population has internet. Similar numbers exist for other developing regions. This demographic represents the biggest opportunity for service providers, eCommerce, and social media worldwide. It’s a nearly untapped market, and luckily the brilliant folks at WeFarm are using their foresight for good.

I’d take a job at any of the companies that presented at whatever they could pay me. They were that good and got me that fired up.

This is the brainchild of Project Heha, started by Sammy Lee.  Sammy took the idea of propagating sustainable happiness to new levels and, in the course of doing so, has created a multinational, multibillion-dollar company.  The phrase, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” was never truer. 

We need more of this in the world! 

Unintended Consequences of the Fair Pay Act

California takes a huge step forward by requiring employers to be transparent about wages. Gone are the days when HR and a few high-level folks knew who gets paid what. The new law, created under the guise of equal pay for women, requires employers to reveal pay ranges for open positions upon request. It also prohibits policies forbidding employees from disclosing their wages. I think it’s just a matter of time until all CA employers list pay ranges with employment ads.

Companies like Glassdoor will add fields to their site to capture salary ranges that candidates discover. Before long, all job seekers will be able to avoid the lowballing game practiced by many companies. If you are unfamiliar with this scummy practice, it works like this. During the interview, an employer will ask you about your current salary and use the information to give you the lowest wage they can. The new law forbids this information being used when offering a salary, even if it is given voluntarily. But you should never share your salary history with a future employer.  The first person to talk about money loses.

Another centerpiece of the new law is that the burden now falls on the employer that wage differentials are based on factors unrelated to gender. So, if an employer files a gender based pay claim, the employer has to prove it’s not so, taking the burden off of the employee!

The age of wage transparency is upon us!  And I, for one, can’t wait!  The new law goes into effect after the new year.

Companies like SEMCO in Brazil are way ahead of the curve, not only are salaries shared, but employees can choose their salary, which everyone will know about. This social pressure keeps folks from overpaying themselves.