How to Manage in a Distracted Workplace (with Curt Steinhorst)

Show Notes

Do you find yourself being perpetually distracted? Is it difficult for you to focus? Do you feel like your smartphone is making you dumb? The best-selling author of Can I Have Your Attention?: Inspiring Better Work Habits, Focusing Your Team, and Getting Stuff Done in the Constantly Connected Workplace hops onto today’s show to teach us how to become more productive and less distracted.

Find Curt’s book, Can I Have Your Attention?: Inspiring Better Work Habits, Focusing Your Team, and Getting Stuff Done in the Constantly Connected Workplace at – https://amzn.to/2A3XdiN

  1. Thrive Nation welcome back to another exciting edition of The Thrivetime Show on your radio and podcast download. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing, Curt Steinhorst who is the bestselling author of Can I Have Your Attention? Inspiring Better Work Habits, Focusing Your Team, and Getting Stuff Done in the Constantly Connected Workplace. He is on a mission to rescue us from our distracted selves. After years studying the impact of tech on human behavior, Curt founded Focuswise, a consultancy that equips organizations to overcome the distinct challenges of the constantly-connected workplace.
  2. Curt, welcome to the show, how are you?
  3. Curt, how and why did you first become interested in inspiring better work habits, focusing your team and getting stuff done in a constantly connected workplace?
  4. Curt, for the listeners out there who are not as familiar with your background, share with us your background and how you have been able to get to where you are today.
  5. FUN FACT – “In June 2016, another study reported that the typical smartphone owner interacts with his or her phone an average of 85 times per day.” – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201706/are-smartphones-making-us-stupid
  6. Curt, according to Gallup, 70% of employees are disengaged from the workplace, does that shock you and what can our listeners do about it?
  7. Curt, our listeners and I are always curious about the habits and routines of ultra-successful people like yourself. What do the first four hours of your day typically look like?
  8. Curt, according to Psychology today, “The average person is now interrupted by their smartphone, 85 times per day.” What should our leader and business owners do with this information? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/glue/201501/is-your-smartphone-making-you-dumb  
  9. Curt, according to the Journal of the Association of Consumer Research – “Cognitive capacity and overall brain power are significantly reduced when your smartphone is within glancing distance—even if it’s turned off and face down—according to a recent study.” Why do you think this is? – Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,
  10. NOTABLE QUOTABLE – According to Naval Ravikant (the legendary early stage investor in Uber, Twitter, Stack Overflow and other leading companies) – “I don’t think modern science has good answers here. I think that the modern world is actually really bad. The modern world is full of distractions. Things like Twitter and Facebook are not making you happy. They are making you unhappy. You are essentially playing a game that’s created by the creators of those systems, and yes, it can be a useful game once in a blue moon. You are engaging in the dispute, and resentment, comparison, jealousy, anger about things that frankly just don’t matter.” – Naval Ravikant. My friend, what action steps should our listeners take today to improve their lives as it relates to living in a world of constant interruption?
  11. Curt, does it all shock you that the, “American Academy of Pediatrics issued a warning that Facebook could trigger depression in children and adolescents, populations that are particularly sensitive to social rejection.” – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201710/is-facebook-making-you-depressed
  12. Curt, according to research conducted by Psychology Today, – “That experience of “FOMO,” or Fear of Missing Out, is one that psychologists identified several years ago as a potent risk of Facebook use. You’re alone on a Saturday night, decide to check in to see what your Facebook friends are doing, and see that they’re at a party and you’re not. Longing to be out and about, you start to wonder why no one invited you, even though you thought you were popular with that segment of your crowd. Is there something these people actually don’t like about you? How many other social occasions have you missed out on because your supposed friends didn’t want you around? You find yourself becoming preoccupied and can almost see your self-esteem slipping further and further downhill as you continue to seek reasons for the snubbing.” – https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201710/is-facebook-making-you-depressed  – Can you break this down for us?
  13. Curt, the “The Pew Research Center says 80 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 have at least one social media account. More teens than ever are using social media. Of those teens, 88 percent report seeing someone be mean or cruel online. New research shows too much screen time can have harmful effects on kids.” – https://nbc25news.com/news/local/excessive-social-media-use-linked-to-depression-anxiety-for-teens  – Why is this?
  14. Curt, the BBC also recently reported that, “Researchers have looked at general anxiety provoked by social media, characterised by feelings of restlessness and worry, and trouble sleeping and concentrating. A study published in the journal Computers and Human Behaviour found that people who report using seven or more social media platforms were more than three times as likely as people using 0-2 platforms to have high levels of general anxiety symptoms.” – http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns. Do you agree with this?
  15. Curt, for all of our listeners out there that are looking for the next great book to read, what book would you recommend for all of our listeners?
  16. Curt, thank you for being on the show today and for imparting your hard-earned wisdom with the folks listening all over the world. For the listeners out there who have become big fans of yours during today’s show, what is the best way to get in contact with you or to learn more about what you do?
Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

In a world of perpetual distraction, it’s super easy to not connect to anybody because you’re constantly connected. It’s super easy to become efficient doing things that don’t need to be done. It’s easy to become really dumb as a result of having a very nice smartphone. So how do you pay attention? How do you get more stuff done? How do you focus your business coaching team? On today’s show business coaching show, The best selling author, Kurt Stein, Horst breaks down. Can I have your attention and inspiring better work habits, focusing your team and getting stuff done.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity and a writer to introduce the show. This show Das two, eight kids, Koch, created by two different women. $13,000,000 businesses. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the thrive time.

Show what? All right, thrive nation. Welcome to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast downloads. On today’s show, we’re interviewing the speaker of choice for j Dot p Dot Morgan, the speaker of choice for chuck. Have you ever heard of the Naval Academy? As I’m going to do with the belly button, these figure of choice for all state, just figure of choice for Honda, the man, the myth, the legend, a guy with a plan, the Guru I may have with any of Mr. Kurt Stein, Horst. Mr Kurt Stein, Horst. How are you doing, my friend?

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.

Yes. Well my friend. We’re excited to have you on for two reasons here on chapter one. As of the time of this recording, we just hit number one on the itunes charts for all categories. Come on. Thank you. Thrive nation, which means our listeners deserved to have gurus on the show. Like a Mr. Kurt, so Kurt, the listeners out there who aren’t as familiar with your career, could you kinda share with the listeners how you started and how you were able to get from where you are now, how you were able to get from where you started to where you are now today?

Yeah. Be Happy to. And things are always easier. In hindsight. It was certainly less clear on the way to where I am. Right? Um, so, you know, where I started was with a Undergrad and graduate work in communication, so it was really a fascination by uh, what moves an audience rhetoric and then how does technology change. That was, was the focus that I had and so I went from there to serving as a speech coach, his speechwriter for people that have had a really big platform and that was then I worked at speaker bureaus and with talent agencies and somewhere along the way I started my own business to do that, a communications consultancy. And it was about that moment that this other side of the equation, which is that I was diagnosed with add as a kid, started to rear its ugly head, never been medicated.

And it all of a sudden I look up, I just use some strategies that worked for me to be able to move forward. And really that meant a lot of audio books. And, and so I, I was like, I have 40 different emails that I’ve started. I don’t have any idea if I’ve even sent a single invoice and I’m probably gonna have to live with my parents. If I don’t figure this out, and so, um, that was when I started studying and thinking about and engaging issues around distraction and attention and so I was doing that. I was a contributor and still am to the largest generational research firm in North America studying generational trends. And so all of those things collided into people asking me more about how can we actually have real solutions on these issues of distraction. And then eventually we gathered a team to really dive in and say what’s going on? How do we better think about attention? And so today what we do is we study attention through the lens of both how we think about it for our own, how do teams and organizations actually manage attention well, and then how do we, how do we get the attention of people that have too much coming out?

Kurt, you are the best selling author of a book called, can I have your attention inspiring better work habits, focusing your team and getting stuff done? And they constantly connected work workplace. You’re, you’re a man on a mission to rescue our listeners from our distracted selves. Um, you’ve spent years studying human behavior and I would, I would love for you to share the dangers of not being proactive about managing your daily life in this world where we’re constantly connected. Can you talk to us about the struggles for the average person of being in a constantly connected workplace?

Yeah. So the truth is I never have to convince anybody that distractions a problem, but really there is an underestimating of the cost and a misunderstanding of the nature of what’s actually driving it. True. And so if we, if we think about costs, just really basics, you know, first some numbers, like we’re only working about two to three minutes at a time before we enter being interrupted. We’re getting over 200 emails sent and received are spending about five point six hours a day just looking at our inbox. And then we think about all the texts that come in, about 90 percent are a respondent or read at least within three minutes and 70 percent of emails that are sent with a push notification or read or acknowledged or seen within six seconds. So we’re just constantly inundated with noise. And, and the real issues here are one, when we try to manage it all, what we actually see in the research is that we give less effort to anything true.

And number two, we, we lose the ability to differentiate what actually is important. Um, number three, we’re slower. We think we’re fast. We’re actually slower number for the quality of the things that actually demand our full attention. The quality of that work goes way down and press most dangerously. Uh, we, uh, we lose the emotional connection to whatever it is we’re doing. So we can be doing the tasks not perfectly, but when we looked back later, we typically can’t remember why we were doing it, which, you know, then we wonder why people are 70 percent of people aren’t engaged in the work. And it has something to do with this distracted world we live in.

I could not be more passionate chupp, but you’ve jump, you’ve worked with, you’ve worked with me for a long time and you know this, this is not just because we have kurt on the show. I could not be more passionate about what Kurt just said. Psychology today has shown that the average person right now, again, according to psychology today, the average person will put a link to it on the show notes, is now interrupted 85 times per day, eight, five, 85 times per day. Now, chuck, you know this because you’ve heard about this on our podcast. You’ve, you’ve listened to these people, you’ve seen us put this together. Lee Cockerel, a good friend of mine, he used to Manage Walt Disney world resorts. They have a million guests per week at Walt Disney world resorts. They have 40,000 employees. He does not allow his employees to bring a what to work cellular device, right?

And Dr Robert Zellner, my partner, who he and I have built a 13 multimillion dollar companies. We did not allow our, our business coaching employees to bring a what to work, uh, that would be a cellular device. And why don’t we allow people to bring a smartphone to the workplace and in our company’s chip a well, like Kurt just said, it’s distractions and we are elite at what we do. And we can’t be distracted because we have a lot of stuff to get done in a lot of clients to serve and so it is part of our culture and it’s very polarizing. You know this from the get go, but I would argue that the vast majority of our listeners, people who know our list of the other, not not you listening, but people who know you, you are allowing your employees to bring their smartphone to work and they are being interrupted.

A minimum according to psychology today, an average of 85 times per day. So I want to ask you this, Kurt. When somebody is working, let’s say they’re doing graphic design or video or photography and they have their phone next to them and it’s facing up and they get a text message or an unpleasant social media update or an unpleasant email, something that causes the almond size part of the brain called the Amygdala to be activated. When when somebody gets an unpleasant message, what tends to happen to them or to their productivity? When somebody gets. When someone receives an unpleasant social media message or a text message, well what? What happens in the workplace?

Well, there’s several consequences. The short and simple is our emotions drive our attention, so when our emotions are hijacked, whatever thing that we rationally you’re supposed to say we’re doing, and it’s not to win like attention at its core is given to what our brain tells us matters at a given moment and when something volatile that comes at us, there’s no doubt who’s gonna win that competition. But let’s even go further than that. I’m one of. You mentioned the 85 times a day. One of the most interesting challenges is that the more external interruptions, the more internal interruptions, meaning the more things come at us from the outside, the more that we actually didn’t seek out more interruptions and if you think about it, every time we’re interrupted what someone’s doing or something’s doing is saying, oh yeah, the thing that you were paying attention to, that’s not what matters. This is what matters. And every interruption is a reminder that maybe maybe we’re missing something. And so now we live in this state of not just, I’m not getting the work done, but constantly reminded of all the things that also might matter, which actually drives to the root of what distraction is. It’s not whether you’re on your phone, that’s a consequence. But the root of distraction is confusion about what matters and people don’t know what actually matters. So they’re interrupted.

No, Kurt, you and I don’t know each other very well have than I’ve researched you and you’ve probably researched me. One of the companies I have is called elephant in the room. It’s a men’s grooming lounge. We have thousands of customers. It’s kind of like the country club for men’s hair, um, and every day because it cut 4,000 people’s haircut per month and current. I’m going to put this out there for the listeners out there, um, a current Uva, Uva, Barbara, that you’re loyal to. Do you have a certain place you get your hair cut at every time? I do. I do. Okay. And uh, and I’m going to ask you for the person’s name, but you have somebody you’ve committed to because they do a good job. Is it a man or a woman or is it a

yes. If it’s a personal connection and it’s a woman.

Okay. So on average for us, if we do 4,000 haircuts per month, we typically make a mistake or somebody is not happy about two point seven percent of the time right now according to our last survey. So that means that 108 people per month are upset. Now, 100, eight people per month divided by the average month. Chuck, would you say the average month has as 30 days? Thirty days? I agree with that current. Is that fair for you? It seems about right. I’d have to do a little research. Does that mean are you the ones that means we have three point six people per day who typically don’t tell us they’re upset. Do they typically tell everybody they know on social media that they’re upset? Now, for the thrive time show, we have millions of people that download the podcast every month, millions of people, and when people download the podcast, if they’re not happy, they typically don’t tell us. They typically tell a social media, Kurt, what’s going to happen to the average listener’s brain if they scale a business coaching company where they personally know and immediately react real time to the dissatisfaction of anybody who’s haircut they mess up or who doesn’t like their podcast? Who doesn’t like there? I work with a lot of pop music artists, a top 40 music artists. What happens to somebody’s brain when they respond real time to anybody who says, I don’t like yourself when there’s millions of consumers.

You know, there’s, there’s statistics we could point to, but I think there’s an even deeper challenge here. And, and what happens is when we have constant outside noise and reaction and voices that are telling us things, what we do is we lose the ability to, to assess ourselves where we’re headed. And we ended up like. The analogy often uses is we’re in an ocean in a sea of distraction. Like there’s no way we’re in the ocean, it’s going to be there, there’s, you’re going to get somewhere, but depending on wherever you are personally between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements that are going to come at your eyes every single day like you’re in it, but the question is, are you going to just be rudderless and a victim to every single thing that comes at you because then you have no idea where you’re headed. So the key is how do you, how do you actually equip yourself with the tools to be able to actually weather the storm and charter trajectory?

Kurt, can you share with listeners your background? Are you, are you a married man? Are you a single guy? Do you have a family? Share with our listeners? Kind of a little bit about your background so people know a little bit about you from a, a more of a personal family side of things.

Yeah. My favorite subject. I am a married man. I have two children, two young boys and a third on the way due very soon. Congratulations. So yeah, and um, we met 10 years ago and um, the travel, so I know a lot of my job involves travel and so I have the benefits of a very patient and a wonderful wife who certainly makes everything that I get to do possible. Um, there’s, there’s a shared agreement that it’s worth the cost. Now.

How old is your oldest child? Right now? Four years old. And my wife and I, we had, it’s crazy, but lot of people don’t know this. Uh, we have five kids. But at one point chef, we had five kids under the age of seven. Right? Wow. And uh, my dad, um, contract did this horrible thing called a l s. Some people know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease and I made an agreement with my mother and my wife. I said, when Dad, because my dad, uh, my goal was to be a millionaire before I was 30 and to hire my dad before I was 30 because we grew up, we didn’t have a lot of money. And so I hired my dad when I was 27 and I hit my goals financially and I hired and chip, I don’t know where you. Were you working with us when my dad fell down?

Were you there? No, I was not. Okay. So I hired my dad and uh, he was working with us and uh, he was doing great for many, many years. And then one day he fell down and a guy by the name of Eric Herman sent me a text and said, dude, your dad fell down and a hard. And uh, that’s typically a sign of your body. Uh, if you have als at your body’s breaking down. So my dad fell down. He’s six foot five, almost six foot six falls down, heart break, something hurts his shoulder. And then probably four days later I get a text, hey dude, your dance have an issues. I called nine slash 11 and they’re happening every day. And I love my dad. Love my dad. May he rest in peace? He died on September fifth. But I had to tell my wife and I told my dad, I said, dad, if you need something, mom, if you need something, please text my wife Vanessa, because at work my Amygdala, my almonds, size part of the brain, I cannot do a radio show.

I cannot do a podcast. I can’t do. I can’t be a father. I can’t be coaching thousands of clients. I can’t do what I need to do. If I’m getting an update that you fell down and I care and I’ll be there, but can you please text Vanessa and she’ll be there immediately. And I had to set that up because my brain, I don’t know if I’m probably a weak person, whatever it was, but I would sit there and Kurt, I would pull over, like in my car, I drive a hummer. I would pull over on the, on the toll road. And I literally could not stop weeping when my dad would text me like Sun. I’m having a hard time talking. So I’m sending you a text. Right? And it’s like the worst ever, you know? And as an owner of a business with thousands and thousands at this point, probably hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of customers, even to this day when I get a bad complaint or someone who’s not happy with the service, one of our companies provided it really does.

Um, it kinda shuts me down because I care a lot. Right? So for the listeners out there who are doing over a million, let’s say, $5,000,000 a year of gross revenue, that means they have thousands of customers. What advice would you have for our listeners? We have hundreds of thousands of, of people that listen to every single month, millions of downloads a month. What would you say for our listeners out there who own a business where they have so many data points, what boundaries would you recommend that they would put in their own life to manage those sorts of things? Because I know with my dad, I mean, it just, it broke my mind when I got an update from my dad that wasn’t positive during the business coaching day or even today. I mean, if I’ve, if I have a customer that complains it, it blows my mind, what would advice would you have for listeners out there that are struggling to deal with the Amygdala and the emotional aspects of having a multimillion dollar company?

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. What you’ve actually just described is what we call

keeping people from being your enemies in, in attention and creating attention allies. And that means having conversations with the right people to make sure you’re all on the same page as to how and when you communicate with each other about certain things. Um, you know, every person and every role is going to require different boundaries. But I think the key here is to recognize the need for boundaries and the boundaries aren’t what I’m aren’t meant to like squelches. They actually are meant to create a recognition that we’re not infinite. Like you can’t respond to infinite requests. You can’t be an infinite places. You can’t understand if an IT demands. Right? So all you’re doing is saying I’m going to set clear boundaries to allow where I am and what I’m doing to actually be the full, like to get the full attention it deserves. And so, um, it’s, it starts with just having an understanding and an agreement and an awareness of the limits of your capacity and then it’s doing an like really simple, not in depth, but a review of the types of activities, the types of information in the spheres in which they occupy and saying, how can I create, um, barriers so that that’s what I’m doing.

So like real practically, filters and barriers are either one physical space, number two people or number three technology. I’m the best one is people. I have the same issue. I will give a speech and we’ll do it. We’ll send a, send out a review or the client will thousand people. They’re really great review. But I see one person that said something negative. And so the filter for me there is my staff doesn’t even show me those things. They show me the general numbers and if there’s something that actually needs to be seen. So that’s a filter that’s intentional so that I don’t lose.

I mean, cause you are naturally going to care about the one negative review, right? I mean by default the one, I mean, it could probably, you could have 100 people that said a positive thing, but the one is the one you’re going to remember, am I, am I, am I exaggerating? Am I wrong? No. And, and, and it’s important to realize that’s not just personality, that’s biology, like

our attention. There’s the primary mechanism that dictates where we put our attention is hardwired for survival, which means we see threats, we focus on what could hurt us. And so we’re always going to see a negative things are always going to be worse than we think they are. They’re always going to be the one thing that we need to fix. So the key is making sure that we, um, we limit the volume of what we can actually see in that category. So we have some space to actually have peace and rest and focus on what really matters.

You know, according to a naval ravikant, the legendary early stage investor in Uber, twitter stack overflow and other leading companies. I, uh, he says, I don’t think modern science has good answers here. I think that the modern world is actually really bad. The modern world is full of distractions. Things like twitter actually at the facebook are not making you happy. There are making you unhappy. You are essentially playing a game that’s created by the creators of those systems. And yes, it can be a useful game once in a blue moon, but you’re engaging in dispute, resentment, comparison, jealousy, anger about things that frankly just don’t matter. What are your thoughts about novel Ravikant notable? Quotable?

Well, I agree with him. I think for me the differentiation, and I don’t mean to keep going back to this mantra of what matters, but really that’s the core question is twitter, social media and these things can be useful when we already are going there for a particular purpose. Like, so facebook, if it’s because we specifically, we want to reconnect with family or we want to see what our friends are doing, but what happens is we just go there to what? Just seeking out what might be potentially interesting and new and what we find is everyone else in charge of our attention preaching. So

yeah, that’s good. This is huge. This is huge for somebody out there listening right now. This is huge for you. Write this down. Take notes. Kurt is occurred. I 100 percent agree with you. Continue my friend.

Yeah. So the, you know, facebook, twitter, this, the numbers are overwhelmingly clear. Um, we are prone towards, on commenting and emphasizing the negatives. Then we’d go there and what we pay attention to shapes who we’re becoming. In fact, um, my, one of my favorite philosophers says, tell me what you pay attention to and I’ll, and I’ll tell you who you are like, so we have to hold sacred, what we’re allowing to come before our i’s and cross our mind because otherwise what ends up happening is we lose complete control. And, and the key is, do we want to actually have any measure of control and if we do that, we to make sure we put things like that into the context and the space that allows us to still take control.

Chuck 10 is, I feel like we had, I feel like we have to hit the knowledge bomb right there that now I want to ask you this, Kurt, because, um, psychology today, it shows things that I feel like, you know, and I feel like, oh, listeners already know. But I want you to break it down. According to psychology today, they report that, that experience of Fomo or fear of missing out. Fomo, F o, m o, the fear of missing out is one is one that psychologist identified several years ago as a potent risk of facebook use. You’re alone on a Saturday night. You decide to check in to see what your facebook friends are doing. But, but, but by the way, while you’re on a date with your wife and you see that they’re all at a party and you’re not, why are on a date with your wife? And then facebook friend, what will you check out my facebook friends are doing and you see that they’re at a party that you’re not at you, you long to be where they are. It looks better. Can you talk to junior, can you talk about comparison, jealousy, Fomo, fear of missing out and why? Uh, it’s just not healthy to go on social media on a consistent basis and just check that out. And you gotta you have to set boundaries. Talk to me about setting boundaries on social media.

Yeah. So, I mean, this goes back to the real core challenge. That technology, what it is offering is infinite. It’s offering. You can be an infinite places. You can learn infinite piece of information. You connect in infinite ways. But art, we are not wired for infinite. And by trying to do that, what it does is it eliminates the boundaries of space and time in particular. And so as long as we think that we’re not going to have consequences as finite human beings trying to explore infinite, we’re going to have issues. Um, we like, for instance, when it comes to Fomo, the challenge is one that we’d rather be somewhere else which makes us never satisfied with where we are, but the truth is even more deeply, we can’t even recognize the sacred spaces in moments when they come with the volume that comes at us.

That was it in the sonogram room and there’s a sign that says no cell phones allowed, like you’re about to see your kid for the first time in your life and you feel the need to immediately exit that space to enter into a digital disembodied experience. And so I, I think it really does come down to, um, a recognition that in arrest that comes, like I always go back to this piece of you’re not infinite is it’s actually really freeing to say, oh, wait a minute, I can just be here. Now. I have permission to like enjoy being here. And I, one of the things I’ll say about Fomo is, I think in the corporate world the most dangerous type of Fomo is the fear that you just need one more piece of information to make a decision. Like you need more info and so we schedule more meetings. We see we, we asked for more ceasing on that. We, we searched the end of the Internet and we ended up paralyzed for fear that we don’t have everything we need. We have what we need, we need to close it off and actually execute and create the space to have the processing. We need to make these decisions because it’s not information. We need more of

that right? There is some something that somebody out there needs to write down. You need to take notes of it because it is absolutely business coaching powerful. And if you’re out there and you’re, you’re, you’re finding yourself being perpetually less happy. Kurt is a source of wisdom. And Kurt, uh, the, the, the Pew Research Center says that 80 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 have at least one social media account. More teens than ever are using social media. Of those teens, 88 percent report. Seeing someone be mean or cruel online. New Research shows too much screen time can have harmful effects on kids. Why is it so important? We limit the amount of time that we spend on social media for both ourselves and for our kids,

well, for our kids in particular, we’re giving them a device and giving them access to something at a point in their brain development that they simply can’t actually restrain themselves from and that they don’t have the experience and knowledge to be able to put it into the right proper context and so perhaps one of the greatest frustrations I have on this topic is this feeling that I hear from parents and from educators that educators say that they need to be able to connect to technology because that’s the world they’re going to live in. It’s a tech centered world. They need to be prepared for that for businesses. They need to equip them, but you go to any business and they’ll tell you what young people lack or the skills lost due to technology. So that happens. And then two, you have parents.

Hey, real quick, can you repeat that again? Because that right there was a knowledge bomb. Kurt, that might’ve been the main reason we had you on the show today. That right there was profound. You said that kids today don’t have what? No. You Go, no, this is huge because you said that kids today don’t have what kind of skills

that kids today as they move into the corporate world, the skills that employers see that they lack are the ones that are lost due to technology, so communication skills, problem solving, prioritization, conflict management. These are the skills that do not come in that actually deteriorate when we enter a fully digital world. True, and then you and then you go into the homes and parents say, I can’t take my kid’s cell phone away from them or put boundaries around it because that’s gonna. Mess them up socially so we won’t remove the greatest source of social isolation for kids and bullying because we fear that there’ll be socially isolated. It’s the same thing,

Kurt. I know that you are talking from a sincere place. I can hear it in your voice. I can hear it in your energy. I can hear it in the research I’ve done about you, your book. Can I have your attention inspiring better work habits, focusing your team and getting stuff done in the constantly connected workplace is profound. For our listeners out there, chuck, we have a lot of listeners out there that have most of our listeners own a business or thinking about it and jump. They have that they, they, they, they do have. You do have Mr. Listener, Mrs. Listener, you have the $20 needed to buy the book. You had, you had the money to do it, but you’re kind of on the fence. You’re going, should I buy things that I probably will regret at a convenient store? Chipotle, a Burrito, or should I buy his book? Kurt, what’s your elevator pitch? Why should everybody check out your book?

Well, the number one goal of the book is to actually provide real practical solutions to these challenges and even more to do it in the format and at the pacing that actually recognize the realities of our, of the world we live in. So it’s a quick read. It’s meant to be entertaining and fun for those of us that have add and can’t dive into the 600 page novel at a single moment. So, uh, if you want practical solutions that actually engaged the issue on us in a comprehensive manner, then this is the before you,

I would ask, I would ask you. This is my final question for you is you are very, very passionate Kurt about this topic. Why do you care so much? Why aren’t, why aren’t you apathetic to it? Why do you not just turn a blind eye to it? Why do you actually care about this topic?

Well, first it’s personal. I, I feel the weight I’ve experienced the, the exhaustion and the pain that comes with all that comes at us and not having an understanding of how to get out of it. But I would say even deeper than that, that I really do believe that these issues are the very, um, the, the greatest threats and, and some of the biggest challenges to the world that we live in. And the, the younger generations in particular, for really what it means to thrive as as humans and an automated age. And so I just think it’s too important not to have a life full attention.

Kurt, I appreciate you more than you could possibly know for taking the time out of your schedule to be on the show. I know that were rated high on Itunes, but you know, you could be doing a lot of other things. And so I appreciate you being on the show and we’d like to end every show with the big boom. Now Kurt boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum, which I believe to be the thing that everybody needs to do on a daily basis to change their life. And so, Kurt, are you prepared to give us a boom? I’m prepared to give you a bone chip. Are you prepared to give us a boom? I’m ready to boom. Here we go. Three, two, one. Boom.

You know, Marshall,

the entire reason that we do this show on a daily basis, the entire reason that we do our workshops on a bimonthly basis at this point, the entire reason that we coach our 160 clients is because we want to mentor millions, mentor millions. That’s the. That’s, that’s the whole goal, but I think when we say mentor millions, it is of no use to you, the listener or to our employees, unless we can have the, the, the, the business coaching mentorship personified in some way and wasn’t unless we can have a real example on a macro level of somebody who’s actually a case in point. An example of somebody actually implementing the proven systems, and so I’d like for you to be able to, to kind of Brag on one of your clients right now that is really, really dominating, doing well, gaining traction quickly as a result of diligently implementing the thrive time show business coaching.

So I want to brag on Doug Greene of macro meals. This is a guy who started our program, had to make some sacrifices in order to be able to start the program. It was just a side job and now he’s been able to grow the business to the point where he’s been able to go full time into this new business, which is a, a meal delivery service, a meal prep service. Okay. Um, where they’ll actually prepare a whole bunch of nutritional meals and he’s killing it. He’s dominating. They’ve broken several records. He’s implementing the processes. He is hiring employees through growing at an exponential rate. It is so cool to see his success and he is an example of why we do this. And he’s also at grateful kind person. That’s right. And so he emailed into us a testimonial where he just wanted to express to the hundreds of thousands of people that listen to this podcast a about the success of the, about the success he’s been able to have. He wanted to share, you want to testify about the success he’s having as a way to encourage you, the listener. And so now that need further ado, the audio testimonial of the diligent doers known as macro meals and a man named doug

literally over the last month. We’ve broken every record. We’ve could even fathom, um, I want to tell you how happy we are that we’ve actually gone off the deep end, so to speak. I’m actually working with the thrive team. Um, our systems were an absolute mess beforehand. Um, whereas now we have a dedicated system that we follow. It’s a repeatable system, repeatable processes that it’s actually taken us to the next level. I’m literally over the last business coaching month we’ve broken every record we’ve could even fathom, um, every single week we’ve broke a record guys. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. Um, all we’re having to do it sounds insurmountable, but it’s not, it’s just following the systems that a clay and marsal have created, uh, taking the time and just breaking those down and really working with it. What’s crazy is as we get these google reviews and we’re like, man, we will never get to 100 google reviews. Yeah. So we got to 108 and holy crap, uh, let, let the floodgates open. We’re getting, you know, we’re a local company. We’re Metro Tulsa only. We’re getting calls from Idaho, California, Illinois. Um, California, I think I said that anyway, so if you’re thinking about jumping on the thrive nation, do yourself a favor, jump on board. I hope everyone has a great day. Thanks. Bye.

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