Polly Labarre: Let me take this down to the individual, nitty-gritty level. I know from personal experience that you offer such profoundly practical approaches to really meaningful change. And we all know there is nothing harder than creating meaningful, sustainable change when you’re talking about an organization or an individual. In the case of individuals, can you offer up a handful of mindflips, practices when it comes to getting into that upper right quadrant in each of these zones – emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual?

Tony Schwartz: Yeah. Let me see if I can give you a crisp one in each category. So it’s easiest to make the suggestion the physical because it’s most concrete. The single-most important thing you can do in the physical dimension is sleep more. We have so radically undervalued the importance of sleep. What’s the surprise? We don’t value anything that involves not doing. But sleep is more important than eating. If you starve yourself for five days, don’t eat one thing, just drink a little water. At end of five days you’ll be hungry. If you get no sleep for five days, at the end of five days you will be psychotic. Sleep is more important than food but we are unbelievably quick to take one less hour of sleep in the name of one more hour of productivity. If you could simply make one change in organizations, give every single person one more hour of sleep at night, you would dramatically change performance. So I’m going to start there on the physical.

I can tell you that that’s true because since I discovered all the research about sleep, I sleep more. And guess what? I’m doing better.

Polly Labarre: You’re looking very well rested.

Tony Schwartz: And I am. Even though I flew across three time zones last night because you know, here’s the interesting thing. I knew exactly when I’d be likely to be able to get to bed. I knew what time I wanted to get up. I knew what number of hours that was and I knew it was 90 minutes less than I need to feel rested. So I slept 90 minutes on the plane. And that’s how I travel. I always make that calculation before I travel.

Okay. So that’s physical. Emotional. Well emotional, I’ve talked about the idea that it’s, the core of this is that when your value is under threat, you default to places that are dysfunctional for you and dysfunctional for other people. So the incredibly simple first thing that I would say to people is, when you feel yourself moving toward negative emotion is to quiet the physiology because the first thing that’s happening is physiological. One system, the parasympathetic nervous system is giving way to another system, the sympathetic nervous system, which is the system of fight or flight. And what’s happening is that no matter what you think in that situation – and your thinking it’s compromised – you can’t take yourself out of it unless you can lower your arousal.

So a deep breath in through your nose to a count of three, out through your mouth to a count of six, two or three of those breaths, feeling your feet at the same time so you ground yourself back in reality is a way to cut the flow of cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenaline. So you put yourself in a position to make a choice. And at that point, we introduce the golden rule of triggers, which is whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t. Because what we are in that situation is incredibly reactive. And that reactivity is the beginning of all kinds of trouble. So that would be my one on emotion.

Mental. Do the most important thing first every morning for up to and no more than 90 minutes uninterrupted. I’d said that focused attention, absorbed attention is absolutely critical to sustainable high performance. And that you’re more efficient when you do it and you do a higher quality of work when your attention stays focused. We all know that.

So choosing to do the work you’ve decided the night before could add the greatest value if you got it done without interruption. Before you answer email which would turn your agenda over to other people, the work that you believe will add the greatest value if you get it done for an uninterrupted period, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, but no longer than 90 minutes because that’s the longest period that a human being can stay fully engaged on a task. And all the research shows that great performers when they’re practicing their craft never do it for more than 90 minutes at a given time. So at the end of whatever your work period is, take a break. Refuel your energy. Go from high positive to low positive so you can come back to high positive. So that’s the mental one.

One of the great insights that researchers like Anders Ericsson at the University of Florida have had is that practice is not only the most important thing to improving at any given craft. So if you’re writing, practice is sitting in the seat doing your thing. But it’s also the most difficult and the least enjoyable. That’s pretty profound because what it suggests is that in order to produce anything that’s really meaningful, you have to be willing to suffer a certain amount every day. It’s not, you suffer for a while and then it goes away. It’s part of the craft, part of the practice of getting excellent is that you have to push beyond your current comfort zone every time you go there.

So that’s the part that the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua had right. She had it right. You can’t get good if you’re not willing to suffer. She had virtually everything else wrong but that part was what made so many people feel bad because they knew that in one way or another, I’m talking about parents, in one way or another, they hadn’t been able to transmit that understanding to their kids. In her case, she forced it down her kids throats, and that’s not comfortable for most of us. But the perception around hard work was exactly right.

So at the spiritual level, what would be a practice? You know the spiritual level is different than the other three because the other three are really very much focused on the how. The spiritual level is much more focused on the why. Why am I doing what I’m doing and in the service of what. So it doesn’t lend itself as simply and easily to practice. But here’s one practice that I find is very, very useful in situations where you’re trying to decide what’s the right thing to do here. And the right thing to do is always the thing that serves your deepest values.

So when you find yourself stuck or when you find yourself in a situation where you’re not sure how to respond, one of the best things you can do is to ask yourself the question, how would I behave at my best here? If I were feeling my best, if I were acting my best, how would I behave? Because what we find is that almost invariably embodies the values that you hold most dear. And so it’s way to stop yourself in the moment of reactivity and pull yourself back to, "Who is it I really want to be?" And doing that as I say by asking yourself the question and taking a moment to reflect, how would I behave at my best here? And if you can’t figure that out because you’re so triggered, then think of somebody you admire. Think of somebody who you respect a great deal and ask yourself, how would that person respond here? Once again it will connect you back to your own values.