Speaker 1: 0:00

High costs, shifting regulations, employer expectations, administrative overload, engagement gaps Wow, it's no wonder some advisors are frustrated or, worse, stuck. What techniques can they use to move forward, and confidently? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Change either energizes or paralyzes. The choice is yours. This is the Shift Shapers podcast, bringing the employee benefits industry interviews with individuals and companies who are shaping the industry shifts. And now here's your host, David Saltzman.

Speaker 1: 0:43

And we've invited Reuven Shalef, ceo of Out of the Box Consulting and creator of Untangling Complex Challenges methodology. Untangling Complex Challenges that's where our folks are these days. Reuven, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3: 0:57

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:00

It's our pleasure, so let's level set. Why is it that people feel stuck or hesitant when they're faced with uncertainty, rather than seeing opportunities, which is what some people do, but a very few people? Most people get stuck.

Speaker 3: 1:14

Yeah, the automatic condition of the human mind is to be on the negative side. I'm generalizing things here, without going into brain anatomy and medical aspects. If you look at where we come from, as infants or even prior, we're not conditioned to any negativity. We acquire it along the way and then fast forward as adults, the survival mechanisms that we had to employ, no matter how great our family was and our upbringing was, even if it was the smoothest, we developed we as infants and toddlers, et cetera, developed survival mechanisms that remain with us as we mature and still run the show, I must say, unfortunately.

Speaker 3: 2:06

Now it's fortunate when you're in actual danger, like in the caveman times. However, it's not serving us in daily life. The automatic human response and actually it's not even a response, it's a reaction is on the negative side. It's not even a response, it's a reaction is on the negative side. And when we're faced with challenges some would call it the saboteur mind or the negative mind all that kicks in first, and then we have to actually invest effort and practice and have a muscle to use our other parts of the mind we can call them sage for the Zen aspect of it and then counteract the negativity and think differently. There are many ways to do that, but that's the basic reason why most of us will first be negative and get stuck versus be creative.

Speaker 1: 3:08

But you say we're not born that way. Does that mean that if, for example, we waited until we were older to learn to walk, we'd still be crawling around on all fours because we wouldn't take the chance?

Speaker 3: 3:20

So actually, on the opposite side, as infants, we don't mind taking chances. We take chances all the time, to the extent that responsible adults should stop us from jumping the cliff or banging our head on the corner of the table. So that's a beauty of kids is there is no fear. I remember skiing with my son when he was three years old and we would do jumps and he had absolutely no fear and I would try to instill fear in him but there was no one to talk to and that was so magical actually. So I got to get out of my comfort zone by just following my three-year-old son doing jumps on the side of the slopes.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Interesting, interesting. So what are the most common situations you find that trigger that stuck feeling? Where do human animals kind of start getting stuck? Is it overload, is it change? Is it uncertainty, is it some combination of those things?

Speaker 3: 4:25

Yeah, it's typically a combination. This depends a lot on the specific person and their ability and skill to handle challenges, able to figure out, slice and dice their challenge, and then they might have the challenge, which is more emotional and spiritual, to deal with the challenge, because not every challenge could be dealt with pure logic. On the other hand, people who are more in their generally speaking brain, creative brain, emotional, their emotional self is developed, maybe their spiritual aspects are developed and they have practices. They might not have the logical disciplines or tools to handle situations, but they have others that come in to help.

Speaker 3: 5:29

The stuckness comes from different places or the type of stuckness can be different for this group of people or the other group of people. And again, generalizing, slicing the world to two kinds for a moment. Of course it's not that way. The stuckness eventually occurs by the person, the specific person, not having either the skills, the tools, the experience, the awareness to handle what they need to handle, which is limiting them. You and I might face exactly the same challenge. In reality, we're presented with exactly the same challenge. However, each one of us will deal with it very differently and will get stuck in different places. It's pretty amazing to see even people from the same background, same education. You would say you know two hardware engineers that have been working together, so from a professional perspective they're exactly the same. Suddenly they get stuck completely in different places. You would be surprised.

Speaker 1: 6:36

Is their path out of stuckness oftentimes different? Do people employ different mechanisms, or are there some common denominators?

Speaker 3: 6:45

Absolutely. Some people would handle it. Just to make it simple, make a clear distinction Some people would go at it from their logical mind and some people will go at it from their creative mind. They will both advance. They will hit the wall, even in the process of untangling or on solving challenges, dealing with challenges, even in the path for finding the root cause, because typically people are faced with the symptoms and they deal with the symptoms.

Speaker 3: 7:24

I'm interested in getting to the root cause. So some people will get even to the root cause by meditating and others by drawing a flow chart. So the reason for stuckness can be different and the way to get unstuck can be different. The key and part of the I don't know if it's secret sauce, but the sauce that I boiled and distilled in the Untangling Complex Challenges methodology is to involve both aspects and rather it could be working with someone who's very logical and I'll bring more of the emotional and spiritual aspects to the work and it could be someone who is very emotionally intelligent, with high spiritual connection, and most of the work there will be putting order, organizing things, taking that big ball of hair or thread and untangling it so we can identify actually the different colors of the threads inside. That's in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 8:38

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Speaker 1: 8:51

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Speaker 1: 10:14

And now back to our conversation. How big a problem because I know this is pervasive in our community how big a problem is the feeling of lack of control, because a lot of the stuff that folks in this industry are dealing with are all things that are external to them. A carrier will make a decision. They don't have any input, they just have to go, deploy it with their clients. Or a stop-loss carrier will make a decision about a claim or all of those kinds of things. Or the folks in Washington decide they're going to make a change and then you've got not only the legislative change to deal with, but they've got the regulations that come from that and they don't have control over any of that stuff. But they have to make sense out of it. Is that a big place where people get stuck?

Speaker 3: 11:00

Yeah, we could spend a day answering your question. There are so many levels there when people, most of the time, when we feel lack of control and tend to go into victim mode, we fail to see how much control we have.

Speaker 1: 11:25

That's interesting, how so.

Speaker 3: 11:27

Yeah, while external entities can force certain things rules, regulations, etc. No one can force my internal workings, in my mind, in my body. And that's where people mostly don't recognize this difference that most of the anxiety, most of the suffering is self-inflicted, unconsciously. So it's not that I say, okay, I'm going to beat myself up. Sometimes that happens. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the beating up and the negative thoughts that are constantly running in my mind, regardless of what's happening outside. By the way, it could be good news released regulation, someone, a regulator, solved something, and that could create a conundrum within me. Or it could be, they added. So it's very subjective. What's good news? What's bad news? I'll go back to your point of external circumstances that we, let's say, we perceive as negative, as problematic, as restricting us, as controlling us. Most of our suffering is coming from internally. So it's the question that we need to ask is not what's happening out there, it's what's happening in here and, specifically, how are we responding to the external circumstances? The single most effective way to look at things is to distinguish between what actually happened, the fact, regulation, abc, we got approved and what is the meaning that we make out of that fact, some would say what's the stories that we are inventing? We have the ability. We're very capable human beings. We can invent all kinds of stories.

Speaker 3: 13:35

Going back to your first question, the automatic psyche will create negative stories, will choose the negative path, again, coming from survival mode, and. But we have other options. So something happens. What do we make of it? Too quickly we will go to the I'm being controlled. I have no control, I'm a victim. This is bad.

Speaker 3: 14:07

All these negative thoughts come in first in first. Most people, or many people, won't even notice that's happening and will stay in that circle of negativity without a way out. There has to be some intervention to say hold on a second. What actually happened is what actually happened. And now all the suffering that you're experiencing, all the challenges, most of them are self-inflicted. Let's break them down, see what's actually running the show and then we can deal with it. Now I'm not saying that there isn't actual, factual, tangible suffering that might occur. If now I have to start filling out timesheets every day and it takes me two hours a day that I didn't have to do yesterday, then there's no argument about that. I'm talking about all the rest that is not actually happening and we could. That's another day that we could talk about.

Speaker 1: 15:07

So if I find myself in that kind of a situation, or if our listeners find themselves in that kind of a situation, is there a tool or two that they can use to move that thought process from the amygdala, where that emotional stuff is coming up to their prefrontal cortex, where the reasoning takes over? Are there triggers that they can use?

Speaker 3: 15:27

Yeah, absolutely so. The first thing, like I said, that's the reason I brought this distinction, because it's very basic and it's very powerful, extremely powerful, which is, like I said, to distinguish between what actually happened, facts, and meaning and story. That, on its own, is to map. Some people will jot down lists, some people will draw a picture or a kind of a block diagram, a map. Doesn't matter how you represent it, but the essence of this step is to take everything out of our mind. Out of our mind.

Speaker 3: 16:12

We are very capable human beings and we can think. I don't remember the numbers, but it's a tremendous number of thoughts every second. Once I had the thought to create some technology that will capture all the thoughts that we have automatically. Didn't move it forward, but it's still a desire and with AI, who knows, maybe we'll get there sooner than later. In any case, when we have all these thoughts in our mind, it's all convoluted, it's very hard to separate the different threads of thought and even if we're able to do that for a moment, it disappears because there are so many incoming thoughts. So what's extremely useful is to do what some people call a brain dump and write down everything there is to write about the topic that we're challenged with. Then, once it's out of our brain and it's interesting to see when I do this with people so there is a big outflux. It takes sometimes five minutes, sometimes five hours, but the person gets everything out and then we start working with what's out there Also enables me or anyone else to deal with things, because if they're in a person's mind, I can't yet know what's going on. We can work with it, and the work that we do is first of all using the first tip of distinguishing facts from stories, and then we start categorizing what's out there to various categories. Why do we do that? So we can start seeing the forest out of the trees, understand what we're actually dealing with.

Speaker 3: 18:05

It's pretty amazing to see someone might come in with the challenge being completely professional. This is an example. It could be exactly the other way around. The challenge could seem to be strictly professional, workplace-related, work-related, and we do this initial exercise, just the initial step, of putting it out there and starting to look at patterns and common denominators and what's going on. And then, when we group the issues into or the elements we create the map, we see that the biggest challenge currently is actually at home and people are baffled with that because they see things that they couldn't see before because it was all in their mind and entangled. And suddenly they see things. And this is the comment. It's funny I have chills. I've been doing this for almost 30 years in different capacities and I'm still. I get chills when I have these visuals of people's realizations where me included.

Speaker 3: 19:14

In my journey, I went through these aha moments and learned how these things work. People say, oh my God, I've been dealing with this for years and this is the first time that I see things differently. Oh, this is running the show and I was always trying to solve here. So that's a beginning of you asked how it can be dealt with. That's a very beginning and typically this is 80% of the work. It's the awareness People say. Being aware is 50%. 50% of the journey is just awareness. It's like that and it's typically even more than 50%. Of course, afterwards there is work to do and there are skills to acquire and to practice in order to actually deal with what has to be dealt with. This is not magic powder that resolves everything, but it's at least creates awareness and helps people to see things that they didn't see before. So they have new avenues of action.

Speaker 1: 20:17

We've got just a couple of minutes left. I'm interested. A portion of our audience are managing teams of people. Is there something that leaders can or should do to help create an environment where their teams can take these kinds of actions and look at these challenges more dispassionately?

Speaker 3: 20:34

Yeah, absolutely so. There are two things that come to mind. One is the invitation for the team members to share their challenges. So in many cases people are afraid to share their challenges because they're afraid of XYZ, and you have to be a manager that welcomes people to open up and share authentically, have an open door policy and be developed as a leader. You have to be developed enough to be able to receive that input from others Once you're able and even before you're able, completely your willingness, because you could be on a journey of being able to become able the willingness is enough to hear people where they're at and help them.

Speaker 3: 21:35

That's a big deal, creating authenticity in the team and then cultivate the idea of we're first human beings Before we're workers. We're human beings, human beings Before we're workers. We're human beings, we have intelligence, we have emotions, we have a body and for the people that are already one step further in the conversation and willing and interested, we have some spiritual connection. I'm not talking about religion, I'm not talking about religion, just something bigger than us. And with that awareness we could have, as a team, conversations, one-on-one or as a team. We could have conversations about our full experience as human beings in the workplace, how we come to the workplace, how the work affects us and how we are dealing with it or not dealing with it, and then take measures to evolve, develop and enhance our experience by recognizing what's let's say, it's simply what we're not happy with, what is the source of it, and then how we can overcome and make things better.

Speaker 1: 22:59

And that is a great place to end our conversation for today. Reuven Shalef, CEO of Out of the Box Consulting. Reuven, thank you for a fascinating conversation.

Speaker 3: 23:08

My pleasure, David. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 23:19

David, thank you for having me. I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor and our producer, hatcher Media. Hey, if you need podcast production or professional graphic design, josh Hatcher is the expert to contact. For more information, visit him at hatchermedianet.

Speaker 2: 23:30

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