Feeling overwhelmed by the relentless pace of modern life? A Minute to Think by Juliet Funt offers a refreshing antidote, providing practical strategies to reclaim your time, reduce stress, and boost productivity. In this episode, Mark Cox welcomes Juliet to discuss the pervasive culture of busyness in the corporate world and the importance of creating space for reflection and intentional planning. Discover how mindful pauses can transform your work-life balance and unlock your full potential.
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How A Minute To Think Can Transform Your Life With Juliet Funt
Juliet’s Professional Journey
Juliet, welcome to the show. It's so great to meet you.
I'm so happy to be here.
A couple of thoughts. The book resonated with me so much, Juliet. Folks, of course, we're talking about A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work. For a very good portion of my life, I would have been one of those people maybe defined as a workaholic, and always working and pushing and feeling that busyness or sense of urgency that we create. Your book resonated with me when I was on a trip to Rome with my wife, and I got up crazy early in the morning. I was actually reading the book in the morning. When you're talking about, I think it's Martone, Italy, a town of 25.
Martone, yes.
Martone. Thank you. Martone, Italy, where you were talking in the book about this town of 25 people up this crazy, steep mountain. The main person helping you at this town of 25 people, you and your family, is talking about how busy they are. You start to think, how busy can you be in a town of 25 people?
I think it was 21, and then when we got there, it was 26. Tiny. The gentleman was a farmer. They made their homemade pestos and raised geese in the kitchen, but he had the same insane metronome inside of him that you would have if you were watching someone rush down Market Street in San Francisco on the way to a job at Salesforce. It's just so funny how it can be everywhere.
It's so pervasive. By the way, when I was reading it, even though I was on vacation, I was just loving it so much. Of course, I'm not the only one. Folks, when you pick up this book and read it, which you will, and of course, the link is in the show notes, folks like Seth Godin and Pat Lencioni provided wonderful testimonials on the back of the book.
One of our favorites, Daniel Pink, did the same thing. He's been on the show. We love Daniel. The idea of this topic being so important. Finding this opportunity to get away from the busyness, get away from quantity of work, and move to quality of work. Tell us a little bit about your professional journey. What led you to this specific topic?
They always say that you're solving your own problems. You and I could probably go to the same Workaholics Anonymous meeting if we wanted to go together. I would probably then leave you, have a coffee, and go to the Technology Anonymous meeting, where I would talk about how addicted I am to my laptop and my phones. When you start from this hardwiring of always wanting to move and go and be connected and get the next thing, I spent my entire professional career seeking solutions to my own problems that became very flexible solutions to share with others.
I sometimes feel if I don't have my own book in my purse, I would just disappear in a wave of busyness because it's a chronic condition that needs a repetitive and almost meditative return again and again, again, to remembering the benefits of slowing down, doing less, having it all be enough, which is so difficult when they say success is a mountain that gets higher as you climb it. I love that. I always have to take my own medicine. My journey was interesting.
Success is a mountain that gets higher as you climb it.
I started in professional speaking many years ago in youth and education. My first forum was colleges, high schools, and I talked to children and teenagers who were too busy. They became stressed, and the program was called Overcommitted, Overwhelmed, and Over It. As I sat in these mixed audiences talking about collegiate overwhelm and teenage overwhelm and the stress of busyness, the parents would be sitting in, saying, "Excuse me, I work in a firm that has the same problem."
I would be helping these college students and high school students with their collegiate stress and high school stress. Meanwhile, there were parents in the audience that were thinking, well, I have a firm and we have the same problems, which was the transition for me from youth and education to corporate and association, and then led into a twenty-year career, helping people solve their busyness and figure out not only how to find time to think, which is very important in the title of the book, but also to curb the volume and quantity of all of the rest of the workday.
A lot of our work in teams, when we're in companies, is really tactical efficiency work. I think I started to tell you about some of the things we're doing with the Air Force, the military, and special operations because everyone in the world has too much to do and too little time, and they all have more tasks in the day than they can manage.
Everyone in the world has too much to do and too little time, and they all have more tasks in the day than they can manage.
Culture Of Busyness
You touched on a couple of things that are so interesting there. This thing about the corporate world. I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been one for ten years. I grew up in the corporate world running large sales organizations and massive companies. This culture of busyness, and we'll talk about this, is the use of email, which was ridiculous in the CC, and the further up the chain you went, the more email became the unhappiest place in the world.
It's overwhelming all the time, the average executive getting 275 a day and all of this thing. I think one of the things that I found so interesting at the beginning, when we talk about this challenge that I experienced in the corporate world, I certainly wasn't alone. In the book, you call out a couple of key corporate stats. Gallup tells us 23% of workers feel burnout more often than not. Deloitte found that two-thirds of employees feel overwhelmed. An astounding 80% of men would like to work fewer hours.
Those were four years ago. It's worse. Definitely worse.
It's definitely worse. When I think of some of the environments I was in, there was this real culture of almost the more you work, the less you sleep, the more coffee you're drinking. It was this badge of honor. The reality, frankly, is that as an entrepreneur, the coaching programs I'm involved in as an entrepreneur are actually the opposite. The most successful entrepreneurs know they have to take days off, want to work less, and want self-managing companies. They're not doing everything, but it's completely reversed in this corporate world. Is the problem getting better or worse in your view?
We had a few gains from COVID. We had that little bit of extra balance that I think will retain itself in hybrid work. I'm going to give you my honest answer. I'll preface it by saying I'm very concerned that I sound negative about our horizon ahead. I'm trying so hard to be mindful of my choices and perspectives, but I feel very worried about people. I feel like something has happened in the last four years where executives and executive teams have seemingly demonstrated less and less care, especially in larger companies, huge companies, and that care is demonstrated by the resources that they spend on people. I understand why they're doing it. I think that they're very afraid of competition in the economy and AI.
They're distracted and think that resources should go elsewhere, but it's been years since people were the focus. I don't even understand what they think happened to all the latent burnout from COVID that was in everybody's bodies and systems. Somehow, we just magically moved into hybrid and then into normalcy. I don't think it left people. I think that it's living inside of us as this latent anxiety and stress all the time. I'm pretty worried about what's going on out there. I think the solutions being deployed are very downstream in their nature, therapists and wellness days.
That's way at the end of the cycle, as opposed to going up to these predictable, unbelievably obvious patterns of eleven hours of back-to-back Zoom meetings and vacations where you check email every morning before the kids wake up, and these incredibly predictable life circumstances that are leading to chronic burnout, but not really being addressed at that upstream point. I am never a hopeful person, but it's a tough time. I think it's a tough time to make room for people.
I think it's a tough time to be courageous. What I always find with these things is you have to be, particularly in the corporate world, I think you have to be in an environment where you're comfortable enough as a senior executive, where you can veer away from the norm for your team and step away because I think that the corporate mass, in general, it's not a smart animal.
Not in the big companies. That's why for the very first time in our careers, we're moving toward midsize companies because there still is a little bit more humanity and control retained. I'm finding the heart of the owner is still palpable in the environment. That's been a really big change for us, trying to meet these midsize and smaller business leaders.
You reference a couple of these great ones, like the CEO of Basecamp. We're big fans of Basecamp, but these folks who are doing smart things that say, "It's not optional. You've got to take your vacation. You've got to take your lunch. By the way, if you don't, we're going to penalize you." I think some of these things are so smart by standing behind the walk. Sometimes it does feel, without being cynical, it feels at the corporate level, they do some things really to insulate themselves from liability, to say, we have these programs available, or you could have done this, or we have an HR department.
The Importance Of White Space
At the core, you don't get that feeling that we're actually trying to help folks. This show is trying to help folks. By the way, you've spoken to a couple of people. You're a little famous in my eyes, for a couple of reasons. First of all, not just because you speak on some of the largest stages in the world, but one of the comedy gods in my eyes is John Cleese.
He was great.
Those folks out there who are fans of great comedy, smart comedy, Monty Python, life-changing. Some of the funniest things ever invented have come from Monty Python. Tell our folks the circumstances by which you ended up interviewing John Cleese and talking about him sharing the importance of white space.
I did. He, first of all, comes on the line. I don't know if he's 80, 85. I have no idea how old he is. He's flirting from the first second he's on the line. He's laughing. He's making me laugh. He's just incredible. I'm a huge fan. He wrote about white space for years. That's why I wanted to interview him in his book. I'm going to miss the name of one of the books he wrote in the past, but he wrote about what he called open mode and closed mode. He would talk to corporations, not a lot, but from time to time, about when they were in the Python-esque creative frame, how they had to be in this open mode of just receptivity and lots of space and 90-minute chunks of unplanned time, as opposed to the closed mode, as he called it, of doing and making work go forward.
In fact, one of his techniques has become one of my creative favorites, called the set-aside technique. He said that when he was working with the other Pythons, he found that he was talking about one in particular, whose name I won't say, but he said when he compared the two of them, he always found, honestly, that his inventions were a little bit more novel.
The reason that he attributed that was that when the other Python would get an idea, if it was a good, solid idea, they would go for it and use it. Cleese would not. He would get a good idea, he would note it, set it aside, and then return to the well. He would ponder again. He would get another good idea and set it aside. I do this all the time, creatively, when I think I've latched quickly onto the next fabulous idea. I'll use his technique to pause and say, "Nice, let me write that down," and then go all the way back to a whiteboard and see what comes next. He said that in that iterative process, he would get deeper and better ideas over time, which I completely agree with.
Was that the yellow list? When you say putting it away and coming back to it, is that the yellow list that you speak to?
You could. I'll teach you the yellow list because it's the number one tool to reduce email traffic. That is a form of a yellow list, but it's a little bit more strict in its usual definition. The yellow list is just a document you keep in your computer for each person or team you work with frequently. When you're about to send a digital communication, sometimes literally when you're about to type, you pause and say, "Should this actually be digital, or could I just jot this down on the yellow list for the next time I talk to this person?" When we get senior executives, we make them take out their email. We make them do yellow list inventories, and they go through and try to allocate what percentage of the email traffic that they are generating, if they had this mindful tool, could actually have been saved for a yellow list.
It's often 20%, 30%, 50% of email traffic. What that leads to then is that when you send an email, the thing about email is that every email has babies, and those emails have babies, and those emails have babies. If you cut it off at the source and you can stop before the first send, you compartmentalize. You bring things into an interpersonal realm because that conversation, when you finally debrief, the yellow list is going to be face-to-face or ear-to-ear. It has just so many incredible benefits.
You talked about the perils of email. I'll throw in one of the other tactical favorites for everyone, which is, in addition to the yellow list, you're curbing your outbound, that's going to curb your inbound, create a CCFYI folder and train your Outlook or your Mac so that every email that comes in that is either CC or FYI goes into one folder, and you only check that folder once a day. You've reduced the volume, and you've really cut off the stream with those two simple actions.
We're tactically on email. This stuff is just such gold. A couple of things I always share, particularly with folks in professional sales out there, email makes me sad generally. I know you talk about the dopamine hit and people, we can't wait to see, but having been a senior executive in a large corporation for so long, even sometimes with our smaller team here in the funnel, it's rare that I'm going to get a dynamite piece of news by email. It feels like it's work.
The work is getting through them because there's this thing in you that says, "I got to get through them." We file things away and all the rest of it, but there's absolutely nothing worse than opening your phone and seeing an email from somebody that's four paragraphs long and has a diagram. It feels, there's this ongoing coaching that I feel like I'm giving folks, saying you have to actually work very hard to write me the short letter. Mark Twain is right.
Absolutely. We say clarity, brevity, and punch are the three components of a perfect email. Clarity, are you thinking stream of consciousness, or did you actually put some intention into the thing that you wrote? Brevity, are you writing, let me say, like a bikini brief but covering the main subject matter?
How can you get it tight? Punch is a visual element where we're separating out certain text pieces with bolding, underlining, and bullets so that the eye doesn't have to be looking at this mass of, "Oh, I have to read this novel on my way down." It's a little bit lighter. It's a great thing. We can drill with teams and workshops, writing with clarity, brevity, and punch. Nobody teaches people how to write. We find this in corporate, and we find this in the military. When we hire anybody, the first thing that we do is get a video of them speaking and a writing sample because we want to see if they can present themselves and how they write. It's a fading talent, for sure. I would say that brevity of all of them is probably the one that is the hardest for people.
Sometimes I might be starting to sweat here a little bit. I've reported to some tough people throughout the course of my career. Think of the extremely nasty hockey coaches that, somewhere in their psyche, they thought they were helping you but weren't. One of them did teach a very good lesson because he just had absolutely no patience for anything.
When you communicated in any way or set an agenda for a meeting, almost anything you said was a bit of a turnaround person. You were watching the words that you shared. You were literally getting 1 or 2 sentences, but it did teach you to send that three-sentence email that set up the meeting perfectly. The objective was very clear.
These are the things we're asking for an answer to. To his credit, what he did do is, when you did that, he read it. If you did it properly, coming to the meeting still wasn't an easy meeting, but he would still actually read what you sent. This concept is all of us in professional sales. Think of what we're doing to our buyers when many of us still can't write. We're sending emails and proposals and presentations, agonizingly boring, super detailed. We wonder why they don't understand our competitive differentiation in the marketplace because they couldn't extract it from the 400-word email.
There are a million things to talk about there. First, I also write proposals for our training and consulting company. We all know that everyone just skips to the last page just to see what the price is. Everything that is before that is skimmed over the first time anyway, and then they'll go back and they'll read, but they've already made a value decision, probably based on the last page. You have to re-resell them almost in terms of your value. I love when people are willing to be coached to come down off of what Donald Miller calls the bowling balls that we hand people in communication, just such weighty, overwritten text. We get them to do it with a tool called the mental highlighter. We get people to have printouts of over-verbose emails.
We first have them highlighted with a yellow highlighter, which is actually of the highest value on the page. When they've done that, we say, "What if that tool was in your mind? What if you could just look at something and just mentally highlight it?" You could start asking yourself, "Well, why are the rest of the words there? How many of these words can you reduce?" You see emails begin to drop from 200 words to 100 words to 30 words. Sometimes, they disappear entirely. It's just a short yellow list mentioned at the end of that exploration. Thinking as if you have a highlighter is a great way. This works for proposals or slides, anything where you can identify high-value words, and then pause to step back and say, "Why are the other words still there?" It will give you the same objectivity.
Outside of being so frustrated when you read it, the forgetting curve with Hermann Ebbinghaus is still alive and well. In 1885, he created a formula for how quickly people forget learned information. The only reason we still know Hermann's name is that it turns out, he was right, and the formula keeps getting tested. When we run our training workshops, we realize that two hours after a workshop, half the people will forget half of the things you talked about unless you interrupt that forgetting curve somehow. This is critically important for all of us in terms of communication. Let's circle back to the top, we got really tactical, super helpful with email. Let's start at the beginning. When we start to think of this whole concept, we need this moment to pause. We need the white space.
What really resonated with me, Juliet, was the analogy of the fire. Because I'm like you, I've never camped before. If I was left out there, I'd have a hard time starting a fire. You use a great example of you, your three boys, and your husband out in the woods, trying to make that first fire up in the cabin. You had all the materials, but they were so condensedly packed together that there was no oxygen to let the fire breathe. Nothing happened.
As a novice firemaker, I packed it in there the first time. The beautiful thing about this oxygenation metaphor is that as soon as you re-fluff the stack and open up the space between the wood, the first match just takes everything away, and that's all it needs. What's so completely reliable is that human beings are the same, work teams are the same, and great ideas are the same. Everyone wakes up in the morning with a little spark that will be their professional contribution. They walk in, hoping for it to be fanned and oxygenated. Sadly, as we were talking about before, usually it's the opposite that happens, by about 9:45, things seem overwhelming, hopeless, and stressful. That little spark is quickly extinguished. We should probably define white space.
We call it time without assignment. The reason that it's white is because, in the back, I'm trying to see if I have a paper calendar with me. In the old days of coaching executives, way back in the day, I would get some busy, crazed executive, and I would try to get him to just open up the paper planner and say, "Show me the white spaces on there. Where is the time that you don't know where you're already going to be?" That is where possibility is held in your day. Those white spaces quite literally became this idea of time without assignment. We advocate that people take it in really manageable sips. We can't all take an executive stretch of 30 minutes, but you can take a minute and two minutes.
You can insert a little wedge of white space between activities, and you open and oxygenate. You have 7 minutes between your meetings and 2 minutes to transition projects. You pull in the driveway at home, and you take three minutes before you come in to the kids so you can be present, and all of a sudden, there's oxygen in the system.
It's so critically important. You go back to the pandemic days; those were some of the first things we picked up when we were on Zoom calls for eight hours straight, and how mentally exhausted we were. I remember physically putting in 14, 15, 16-hour days, no trouble at all, then working out at the end of the day. Suddenly, when I was sitting at a desk and it was all through Zoom, the exhaustion at the end of the day, the mental fatigue, was unlike anything I'd come across.
The second thing I always like to contemplate, whether we're executives running large teams or we're actually selling and interacting with clients and buyers, is that we owe it to them to be our best selves in the meeting. We owe it to them. Taking that pause and reflection, a little bit of meditation, whether it's box breathing or something that gets you out of that last meeting, allows you to leave that stuff and then come in to be your authentic self in this meeting. It's so critically important, but boy, I'd say that the wedge is not something that's universally leveraged in the business community these days, that's for sure.
Not yet. It's not. I will say this, as you talked about the well-being resilience angle of that pause, I will tell you that there's another one that's paramount for sellers, and it's difficult to sell to them because of the ego around, "I can get into my Herman Miller at $1.59 and spin around, and I'm on, and I'm good, and I know my stuff." We chronically undervalue the strategic white space before sales meetings to get to know the person you're about to talk to deeply, to what I call take a bath in the client.
I will spend 10 or 15 minutes just, I'm on YouTube. Is there a video of them talking? I'll read their website. I'll look at their LinkedIn. I just want to be in their universe deeply. Do I have notes from the last time we talked before I got on the phone with them? If you don't have wedges, you are pretending to be present for the first five minutes of every meeting while you secretly move the notes from the last meeting over.
You get your Post-its organized, and you're not as good an actor as you think you are. You're not as present. At some point, about five or six minutes later, you will click in, and they may or may not feel it. It's just a pernicious detractor of your connection with other people. From a sales perspective, that's where we really double down on white space for teams. Every seller should be trained in this protocol.
Whether there's a number of folks who've talked about how quickly you can sense somebody else's intent, if you walk into that meeting and you've, I love that, bathed yourself in the customer, I've seen them on YouTube, and I understand what's going on with their business. Maybe I've leveraged a little bit of AI to help me. I know them, their business. I know I've got this point of interest as to why we're having this conversation. I think psychologically, I feel like I've earned the right for an authentic conversation. I think it comes across.
I think you're right. I love that. There's the text-based preparation, AI reading, etc. There's something for me you can't always get it about the human part. If you can listen to them talk or on a podcast or video and you, and you're, it's not going to be the very first time you hear their voice. It's just an incredibly powerful way of orienting yourself to another person.
Thieves Of Time
Absolutely. The other thing we always throw out, I like looking at somebody's picture. Particularly if I'm selling and I'm doing demand generation, if I'm writing an email to them, I might be looking at your picture of you in your book. It feels somehow like I'm making a connection. I see your smiling face, and I feel a little bit more connected. I think those things tend to come across just wonderfully. By the way, you see how important all of these things are in terms of taking the rest, the break, all of these things are universal for executives or salespeople. Let's get into some of the thieves of time.
When we've got these folks out here reading, we're at work, doing the things we want to do, but there are thieves of time, and there are remedies for these thieves of time that we can talk about. A lot of folks, you talked about personalities at the start of this. We know there's a lot of driven entrepreneurs out there reading this. There's a lot of driven salespeople. What's the real risk when somebody's too driven?
Let's put that in the context of the thieves themselves. The thieves came out of our research studying busy people, and we found that there were actually four main drivers that fueled almost all professional overload. What was tricky was that they were all good things that had simply overgrown. There wasn't a bad thing in the list, and they were four things. They were drive, excellence, information, and activity. If you do a developmental assessment, we have one that's like a Myers-Briggs or a DISC, you'll see that different people lean toward different ones. I would assume from your audience, you're going to have a lot of high-drive people, but drive as an asset has a corresponding risk, which is, in the age of overload, it becomes overdrive.
Drive, excellence, information, and activity are all good things that have simply overgrown.
When we're doing nine projects in the same month for our poor, exhausted team, we are no longer running on an optimal battle rhythm for them. Each of the thieves has a corresponding risk. I am a high-excellence person, so mine is perfectionism. Information turns into information overload, and activity can become just frenzy.
What happens with the thieves is they love little victories and stimulation. They keep going for that dopamine hit, that thin achievement in the day. They keep us from the mode where we can go deep into that really quiet work. My deep mode time is about 7:00 AM before anyone's awake, and I can go deeply into it. Once you get into that cadence with the thieves during the day, for me, it all becomes about tiny boxes being checked. This is where you can end at the end of a day, a week, a month, or a year feeling like you didn't move the needle.
It's so unsatisfying. Those days are so particularly unsatisfying. The reference you use in the book, which resonated so much with me, was scary, Sunday mornings. The best work I've ever done? Sunday mornings. You ask yourself, I wonder why I'm working so well then. First of all, no crazy sense of urgency, no thieves, I'm calm. By the way, if I want to take a break for 20 minutes and lie on the couch, play with my cat, or do anything, I can do so guilt-free.
You're riding the natural pace of your body, too, on a day like that. You're in the flow of what's natural and normal. You don't have other people bothering you. You don't have Zoom calls. You don't have meetings. I think that that Sunday feeling is possible in the workday if we create containers for it. As an example, everyone on my team has a deep workday once a week. That's just a day where we don't interact with them.
That's their Sunday. Jamie, my assistant, had her deep workday. We had one emergency for a client. I made one phone call. She got pulled out for two minutes, and that happens sometimes. For the rest of the eight hours that she will work, she will be alone and not hear from anybody, which is all we really need to replicate that Sunday experience.
We're going to take that one and apply it to In the Funnel.
That would be good.
I've read the book, but I certainly haven't done that. Sometimes, it's a little more ad hoc where I'm thinking, hey, somebody is working on something. I'm going to try and leave them alone because a lot of the kerfuffle is actually caused by me.
Join the club, boss.
Happiness
We're a small company. A lot of the issues, I'm the stopgap for many things, I'm the logjam, but I also cause many of the issues. Instead of intentionally saying, okay, I've got to be careful, Sandra is super busy, so just say one day a week, and we have no meetings. Nobody has to do anything except spend some quiet time. They have their own quiet time to go and get the things done that they need done. Although I don't have the data point in front of me, Juliet, I bet you do. Just as we wind down a little bit here, one thing is how does this interrelate or relate directly to somebody's happiness in life?
I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a part of a great entrepreneurial coaching program called Strategic Coach. They're huge on successful entrepreneurs taking what's called free days, taking a full 24 hours, you don't even read a business book, nothing to do with business, try not to think about it. They have this theme that says the more time off you take, the smarter you actually get. It's amazing how, when you're away from the whole game, everything becomes crystal clear and you become better at what you do. Where does this play, particularly in your world, in this time world that we're talking about?
Does it play into somebody's happiness or reducing depression or anxiety? It feels to me like there's a real connection here.
I'm curious about that practice. Is it an additional day besides a weekend, or is it an instruction simply to take at least one of those weekend days disconnected?
It's the latter because you're an entrepreneur as well. You understand that to a certain ceiling of complexity, entrepreneurs work weekends until you have a self-managing company. They just generally, there's the Sunday that comes in for me. This idea is, hey, you know, you take at least a full 24 hours off every seven days, but literally the more successful you do, your bragging right is how many more days you take. That includes a weekend.
Absolutely. I'm a huge believer. I will tell you that some of the greatest demonstrations of white space power in my work have been the three times I've taken one month off. My little team is probably around the same size as yours. They manage without me so beautifully and so predictably. I've done this a couple of times, and the happiness that I regained from being gone that long is incredible. If you start with that as a grand aspiration, then you move downward from there.
I think that when you have time to step out, you are experiencing the only time that you have to look back at your business and become objective about it. I'll give you an example. I told you this air force new thing with the Air Force has been fabulous. It's honestly been overwhelming in how quickly it is building and pulling me into its constant work. I had to take some time to pause and say, “Do I want to build a big military training business? If I don't, what am I doing? Am I following this complimentary inertia of, if in five years I had a large military training business, would I want that? Would I want that?”
When you have time to step out, you are experiencing the only time that you have to look back at your business and become objective about it.
If you don't step out of those things, your happiness is always at risk because you're not planning your life intentionally. There's no way of actually being the coach to your own player as you move forward in your life. Whether it's the willingness to take a fifteen-minute walk without your phone, or whether it's a full day on the weekend or a one-month sabbatical, I think these are the moments where you check in with how your life is actually going and you course-correct constantly, every second, every minute, because it's never going exactly the way that you want it.
Oliver Berkman has a wonderful quote. He says, we spend so much time clearing the decks for the real life to begin. I experienced that so much. Even on a weekend, planning this and planning that and cleaning this and cooking that. You think, am I prepping for something for which this feels like a dress rehearsal?
It is not. I do think it's inextricably linked. I will tell you that the one you asked me for is a statistic, balanced people are 21% more effective than people who don't report themselves as being balanced. When you return to work after all of this leisure we're discussing, you show up differently, measurably so.
Thank you for that. By the way, I think it's so important for the folks who read this show because many are in sales, and many are CEOs of small and medium businesses, but all of them are going to be leading at some point in time. If you've got the growth orientation to wanting to be running, reading this show, they're going to be leading.
One of the things that always helped me reconcile taking free days, not filling my calendar when I was a leader, a sales leader, was I felt like I had to be my best self to be able to coach people effectively because they're looking for that calm, confident guidance. When I first became a leader, I remember it was a wake-up call where I was having a tough time running a sales organization. I was brand new to it. I didn't really understand success through people, and success was still about me.
I remember being in a one-on-one, and I think I said something like, one day you might be able to have my job. Somebody on the other side of the desk said I would never want it. Saying, you're making this look so unpleasant, there's no chance. What a wake-up call to go, hey, I'm probably doing this wrong.
That's a hilarious story. It's that thing we said earlier, I think we can come back to, as we start to slowly wind down, is success is a mountain that gets higher as you climb it, which means that you're always exerting more and more and more effort to be what you perceive to be at the same place. Just questioning what you really want and what your real value is can only occur in some white space. There is no way to be doing while pondering your life, one or the other.
A Minute To Think: There is no way to be doing while pondering your life. It’s one or the other.
Juliet, it was a super pleasure chatting with you here.
You, too.
Folks, we've been talking about A Minute to Think, reclaim creativity, conquer busyness, and do your best work, Juliet Funt, whose famous dad, I still remember, of course, Candid Camera, Alan Funt, and Candid Camera, great family connection. I love that in the book. Team, this is one of those books, as I mentioned, I was reading it on vacation. Not only are there nuggets of gold in here, but it's actually super well-written and crazy interesting. You'll actually enjoy the book while you're reading it and extracting meaningful things you can take away. Juliet, I know you do some other amazing things with your training company, including virtual training on all of us doing this better on Zoom calls. Tell us a little bit more about how someone reading this can learn more about you, your business, and stay connected to some of the great value you're putting out there in the universe.
Thank you for asking. We are at JulietFunt.com, pretty easy, and everything that you'd need to reach out to us is there. If you're a military friend reading, it's TheEfficientTeam.com.
Awesome. We like to really thank Juliette Funt for joining us. Hopefully, this won't be the last time we chat with Juliet. Team, I'd like to thank you for joining. As all of you know, we run this show to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales teams because we believe that in doing so, we actually improve the lives of anybody in professional sales. No question in my mind, this show and Juliet's book can help you with that. We also know we're growth-oriented and want to get better.
Your feedback is super helpful. If there's another way that we can make this show more valuable to you, please let us know. My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's my personal email. We love constructive criticism. Some of the things we do in the show and some of the guests we've chosen are a result of you giving us good advice. We respond to every email. Thanks for doing that. Please continue to like and subscribe to the show because that's how we actually get great guests like Juliet, and we'll see everybody next time.
See you soon.
Important Links
A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work
Daniel Pink – Past Episode
About Juliet Funt
A regular feature in top global media outlets, including Forbes and Fast Company, Juliet Funt is a renowned keynote speaker and tough-love advisor to the Fortune 500. As the founder and CEO of the boutique efficiency firm Juliet Funt Group, she is an evangelist for freeing the potential of companies by unburdening their talent from busywork.
Juliet’s warm, relatable manner and actionable content earned her one of the highest ratings in the largest speaking event in the world, and she has brought her powerful concepts to Spotify, National Geographic, Anthem, Vans, Abbott, Costco, Pepsi, Nike, Wells Fargo, Sephora, Sysco, and ESPN.