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This conversation between Santiago Tacoronte and Stephen Shortt delves into the dynamic world of work, exploring key trends like job hopping, career pivoting, and the impact of AI on productivity and job satisfaction. They discuss the importance of strong leadership in fostering a positive work environment and promoting employee happiness.
Key takeaways from the conversation include:
The evolving definition of career success in today’s job market, where job hopping and career pivots are becoming increasingly common.
The crucial role of leadership in employee satisfaction, emphasizing the need for curiosity, open communication, and understanding of individual ambitions.
The challenges of corporate culture, including toxic leadership, hiring practices, and the phenomenon of «corporate cruising,» where individuals feel stuck in their careers.
The importance of distinguishing between team dynamics and group dynamics to foster collaboration and achieve shared goals.
Debunking the myth of individual productivity and highlighting the power of teamwork and collaboration.
The essence of finding happiness at work through progress toward purpose, both in personal and professional life.
This conversation offers valuable insights for individuals navigating their careers, leaders seeking to improve their workplace, and anyone interested in understanding the changing dynamics of the modern workplace.
Sources and related content
Santiago Tacoronte (00:01.754)
Hi Stephen and welcome to ProductiviTree.
Stephen Shortt (00:04.44)
Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Santiago Tacoronte (00:07.302)
Thanks for coming. Steven, today we have a very exciting topic which is career moves, job hopping. So I wanna start directly with the first question aimed to job hopping. Is job hopping the new power move? Some people say that staying in one job for too long, it’s a career killer. Some other says like you must be loyal to your company if you wanna grow. Where are we now?
Stephen Shortt (00:38.68)
So I am going to give the ultimate consultant answer. It depends. So I mean, there are people who, once they’ve done kind of nine months in a job, they go, I’ve done everything I can in this job. And I go to another job. And then they bounce around and then they end up in front of you saying, I’m not getting any, like, I can’t get promoted or I can’t get ahead from my position where I am now.
And I think a lot of employers, if they’re not in that kind of cutting edge tech sector where they’re just looking for fresh blood and fresh ideas and fresh perspectives all the time, it can be a little daunting for somebody who they might say, look, we want somebody for the long haul. We want somebody who’s here for the next three to five years at least to really get a feel for it.
it can be a red flag for some of them because their argument is you don’t have six years of experience in this field. You have one year of experience six times, which is a little bit different from what people are looking for. Having said that, there are lots of tech firms and what they want is fresh ideas, fresh blood. They thrive on innovation. They thrive on different perspectives and people bringing something from one place and merging it with somebody else. So it really depends on the career. It also depends on the person because
Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of people out there who they go into a job, they go into a career thinking this is what I want to do. And they have a very romanticized version of what that career is.
Then when they actually are at the cold face and they discover, this is what this job is. I don’t like this at all. I want to go do something else. But then they might feel a little bit stuck. They don’t want to do a full 180 and go in a completely different direction. So they try to go piecemeal by piecemeal to move into another direction. So really, it depends so much on the person, the career and the industry.
Santiago Tacoronte (02:32.888)
You are a defender of career pivoting. Yet career pivoting is many times look a bit down on, right? I mean, I have been in selections and processes where you hear comments like, he’s an interesting profile, but he wasn’t HR most of his life. So how can professionals switch careers multiple times as you advise?
without hurting their credibility or feeling like they’re starting again and again.
Stephen Shortt (03:05.432)
So everything, whenever you’re interviewing for a position, whenever you’re, whenever somebody is talking to you about a job, whether they’re on a panel, whether they’re using an ATS, whether they’re using AI to assess your intonation and your body language, and whether you’re sitting up or slouching or sitting forward or whatever. Ultimately, what people want to know when they’re interviewing somebody is just two things.
Can they do this job? And do they want to do this job? Because ultimately they don’t want people don’t want to spend their time interviewing people. They want to be getting on with stuff. So when you’re sitting in front of a person, they’re subconsciously, if nothing else, praying that you’re the one that they can go, at last, Santiago, just come start work on Monday and we’re done and we can get back to work. So ultimately what we tell people is when you’re interviewed, like there’s a couple of things.
That people, think sometimes get wrong as to why they, what they’re doing on their LinkedIn, what they’re doing on their CV and what they’re doing on their interview, like the different roles and the different jobs that each of those have in the process. But when you’re talking to somebody, if you make sure that you are spending about 60 % of your time either relating or enthusing, relating your previous experience, whether it’s a directly experiential or not,
to the job at hand. if you’ve managed people in one role, you can probably manage people in another role. If you’ve dealt with deadlines and projects and you’ve dealt with, even if you’ve dealt with tech, you might not have dealt with this tech.
But you’ve dealt with it. for the example that you gave, if you’re switching into HR from a technical role, have you led teams before you’ve had people under you before you’ve had you’ve led sprints, you’ve done project management, you’ve coached people, you have an awful lot of skills that are easily transferable and identifiably transferable into something like HR. Once you’re able to show you’re relating your previous experience to the role and you’re showing enthusiasm for look, I actually want this job because
Stephen Shortt (05:01.84)
find that this is something that’s appealing to me, this industry, this role, this job, whatever it is, spending your time relating and enthusing will help you to, to showcase to people that actually, even though you don’t have direct experience in this industry, you have the related experience and you have the enthusiasm.
Santiago Tacoronte (05:22.008)
Is there any specific threshold you recommend people to keep before switching careers? So it doesn’t look like, well, this guy or this person is doing trial and error here.
Stephen Shortt (05:41.152)
yeah
I would never advise somebody stays in a career that they hate. Like even if they, even if they discover after three months, having said that, if you’ve gone for three months and then another one for six months and another one for three months and another one for six months, maybe you need to spend a bit more time thinking about which direction you want to go in and maybe going and speaking to a career coach or career counselor or doing some assessments to be able to figure out what it is that you’re looking for as opposed to having this romanticized version of, I want to get into this or I want to get into that.
Santiago Tacoronte (06:12.699)
Hmm.
Stephen Shortt (06:14.342)
One of the things that I see though is people who they spend a little bit of time in a company or they spend a little bit of time, let’s say in some kind of customer service role.
and they decide, customer service is not for me. I hate it. I love dealing with people and I love helping people with their problems, but customer service is just not for me. One thing that I would advise rather than ditching the industry and ditching the career is maybe have a look at the culture because if you’re in the right industry, but the wrong company, that can still be a game changer for you. So to be able to move and understand, okay,
I enjoy the concept of the work. just don’t understand. I don’t enjoy the values of the culture that we have in this organization. But actually, if I can move to another organization staying in the same area and being perfectly honest, if you’re going for if you’re values based, if you’re really values driven and you’re looking to work in a values based organization, a lot of them, so long as you’re not.
I mean, we’ve had people who have interviewed for places with us and they’ve spent almost the entire interview giving out and complaining about their previous bosses and their previous jobs. Like that’s a bit of a red flag. But so long as you’re not doing that and you’re able to say, look, the values just weren’t there, the culture wasn’t there. From my research, I really think that I would be a good addition to your team. Then I think that’s a non-issue.
Santiago Tacoronte (07:30.832)
Yeah.
Santiago Tacoronte (07:40.048)
What about from the other side, companies? How often do you recommend companies to encourage their people, leaders, encourage the people to look into something else, right? I don’t know. You’ve been in IT for 15 years, Santiago. Maybe it’s time for you to look somewhere else.
Stephen Shortt (08:00.898)
Again, depends on, so, Santi Ayo, you’ve been IT for a long time. Do you still enjoy it? Are you still, do you still come up, come to work every day? Or sorry, do I feel like as your line manager or as your HR manager or something that you’re coming in to work every day, virtually or in person or whatever, and you’re engaging and you’re curious and you’re happy? Or do I feel, yeah, maybe Santi’s a little bit burnt out here or a little bit bored or feels a little bit stuck.
But we have a kind of a ceiling of like, you’ve reached as high as you can in this organization and maybe going to another organization and having that conversation, do you want to move? Pushing somebody else, dangerous role, but sitting somebody down and going, look, is this really for you? Every onboarding that I do with every team member that I have and have done for 20 years.
One of the first things I say to them is it only makes sense for you to be here every day, so long as you’re happy and we’re happy. Once one of those things isn’t the case, I would rather work with you to get the most out of you for like six months to then set you on your way, so long as you’re not going to my direct competitor. But I’d rather have that open and honest conversation with you.
Santiago Tacoronte (09:17.35)
It seems though that some managers are either blind to see that or they don’t want to see that. What’s your recommendation for managers to be aware of the happiness of your team or individual team members and how to detect that someone is not happy any longer coming to work every day?
Stephen Shortt (09:47.542)
For me, the most important quality in leadership, in any kind of leadership is curiosity. If you are curious about stuff and you have an interest in it, then you’ll learn more and you’ll develop more. I would argue that, there are, by the sheer nature of a bell curve of averages, there are amazing managers and there are terrible managers, but most people are pretty good. Like in the middle of 80%, most people are above average, below average, whatever.
I would say there are probably a lot of managers who a lot, not the majority, but a lot of people who don’t understand their people or don’t connect with their people. But I would. I guess is the wrong word, but from my experience of interacting with a lot of these HR managers, especially when they bring us in for coaching or for things like this, it’s not that they don’t recognize that their team is maybe not too happy or not too thrilled.
It’s either they don’t have the authority to be able to make those changes and they know that the team is in a bad place because of course they are because corporate or management or whatever has said that this needs to be done and I got to drive them. Or more often than not, they don’t know how to have those difficult conversations. They don’t know how to have the tricky conversations and they’re not confident in their own abilities to be able to have those crucial conversations. And there’s a fantastic book called Crucial Conversations.
which I would encourage every manager to read. It is a really simple seven step process to be able to.
Stephen Shortt (11:25.23)
Sorry, my camera for.
Santiago Tacoronte (11:29.742)
yep something happened there that’s all right we will cut this part
Stephen Shortt (11:31.574)
Yeah, sorry.
Santiago Tacoronte (11:37.936)
Seems like you switch cameras.
Stephen Shortt (11:40.524)
Yeah, I switched camera. For some reason, this, unit, just went completely dead.
Stephen Shortt (11:57.166)
Let me log out and log back in. Does that work for you? Because I think my audio is not coming through there as well either then. So hang on. Sorry, I’m very sorry about this. This doesn’t normally happen.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:02.022)
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, of course.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:07.27)
That’s right. That’s right. It happens. Happens all the time.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:26.138)
Ahem.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:38.138)
There you are.
Stephen Shortt (12:40.132)
Hi, really sorry about that. That’s very unusual.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:42.392)
It’s all right. It happens to me also often. I have an external camera that sometimes is pfff. You want to pick it up on the book, Crucial Conversations, and then I insert this part after the cut.
Stephen Shortt (12:55.418)
Perfect. So one of the things that I often recommend that managers get their hands on to start with is this book called Crucial Conversations, a fantastic book, really simple to follow seven step framework that helps you to understand the process of having that crucial conversation and being able to then have the conversation with the person who’s having the issue and then.
move past it and actually move the two of you or move the whole situation past. And it’s a simple seven step process that starts with you understanding your story and understanding where you are in your perspective, then understanding that they may have a different perspective and they might have a different viewpoint. And how do you have a conversation that’s safe for them and safe for you to be able to explore that? And then you come to a realization. the we’ve all seen, I suppose, this meme of two people looking at a six on the ground.
and one of them is looking from the top and one of them is looking from the bottom and the idea being well it is possible for both people to be right. Yes, in that instance they can both be seeing what they’re seeing but actually in a business and in life
you should be able to zoom out a little bit and you’ll be able to see whether that’s in the middle of a five and a seven or if it’s in the middle of an eight and a 10, then you’ll be able to see actually which one is correct. understanding, yes, you can have a different perspective on the same thing, but ultimately there is a solution. There is a way out. There is something that you can do. And even though the exit, how you get past that conversation might be that you split, might be that the person is no longer a fit because of what
whatever reason. But the book is a really, really useful tool and something that I recommend all managers and leaders familiarise themselves with.
Santiago Tacoronte (14:48.166)
Steven, you speak a lot about the future of work. How to prepare for jobs that doesn’t exist yet. I want to link this to productivity. What do you think individual productivity to start with will mean in 10 years?
Stephen Shortt (15:04.368)
10 years is very, far away. So five years, if I was to extrapolate out to 10 years, I reckon we’re all gonna have four day work weeks. I reckon we’re all going to be using, I mean, we’re gonna be using AI like we use email right now. And AI is gonna be able to do…
Santiago Tacoronte (15:06.502)
Give me five.
Stephen Shortt (15:26.704)
A lot of the general day-to-day tasks that does take up a lot of our time, and I’ve seen some phenomenal examples of how AI can actually make the tasks of our day-to-day life easier. The longer you use it, the more it learns from you. Now, over the last two days, I’ve been playing with DeepSeq and seeing the differences between that and OpenAI and kind of similar, but obviously there’s all the scaremongering and it’s a new thing and it’s a new tool. So it’ll be interesting to
what happens there, but there are going to be stronger and stronger and more powerful and more powerful AIs that are going to help us in every facet of our lives. But when we have that four day week, think, so when I talk about this, people sometimes say, they’re just going to make you do as much work in the four days. So if you’re able to do in four days,
If you’re currently, if you do, if you have a five day week and you’re able to do, let’s say two projects a week, they’ll either make you allow you to work a four day week and still make you do the two projects, which is fair enough, or they’ll make you work a five day week and work and do three projects because you can do them quicker. I think it will come down to people power and people will be going, look, we are able to do this. We are able to have a better quality of life. So let’s go with the four day week.
Santiago Tacoronte (16:42.086)
different.
Stephen Shortt (16:48.688)
And I think that will be a cultural shift. don’t think it’s something that will come as a result of companies optimizing for productivity. I think it will come as a result of people going, you know what, the next generation, the, the gen alphas and things like that, they, are looking for this better quality of life. They don’t have the same focus as we had on.
owning a home, being stuck in one place, the idea of travel and having these side hustles and having an Etsy store and having a Twitch stream and all these things for their community. I think it will move in that way that if you want to hire, if you want the top talent, it’s going to be in this four day week scenario to give them time to do, to have their other passions because
Santiago Tacoronte (17:34.278)
Mm.
Stephen Shortt (17:35.744)
Again, the other thing, is there’s been a lot of documentation around this. People are because people are getting more and more of being a relying on their companies and their jobs more and more to get all of the facets that used to come from community. Like my friends are here, my hobbies are here, my values are here. I think people will be more in line with I want to work in a company that shares the same values as I do. But then I also have my hobbies. Like I’m into archery. I’m not going to be shooting arrows in the office or I’m into
Santiago Tacoronte (17:46.47)
Thank
Stephen Shortt (18:05.618)
playing the saxophone and I’m really bad at it. So I need do that at home instead of being in the office. and if you see just the sheer breadth of companies now that are sorry countries that are giving these remote working visas where you don’t have to register and pay taxes locally for a year, people are going to be traveling and getting and having this work life balance in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And I think that’s what’s going to drive the four day work week.
Santiago Tacoronte (18:22.118)
Mm-hmm.
Santiago Tacoronte (18:34.02)
You mentioned AI before. I’ve been developing some thoughts about AI. In fact, we’re putting an episode fully dedicated to AI because the question I have in my mind is, is AI making us smarter or lazier?
Stephen Shortt (18:51.344)
So I have a good friend who he argues that we shouldn’t be using AI to make our lives easier. We should be using AI to make our work better. So putting in the same amount of work. I have, if I’m perfectly honest, I have found myself in the last kind of two months when I’m preparing videos or blog posts or something like that. Maybe not as
Santiago Tacoronte (19:01.689)
I think.
Stephen Shortt (19:20.972)
studiously going through how I would write a sentence or how I would write that paragraph and lifting it just from the AI. I’d say it was about maybe two weeks ago that I caught myself going, hang on, this is like, okay, I’ve trained it in my voice and all this, but this is what AI thinks, not what I think.
And having to then spend that time and go, okay, I need to go back into this because it’s been so easy. But again, it was easy to create an email back in the day. People got lazy about writing. When you use something like Grammarly for years, it’s easier to not pay attention to what you’re writing and have something else check it. I think people will start to build that muscle of making sure that they have their…
Santiago Tacoronte (20:07.621)
Hmm.
Stephen Shortt (20:11.61)
their voice in it. I did hear this really interesting thing that over the next 10 years, there’s going to be, what did they call it? A digital churn where if I’m writing an email to you, I need to say like one thing, but I’m to put it into an AI and go here, make this a really nice fancy sounding email. And it’s going to write,
Santiago Tacoronte (20:23.205)
Good night.
Stephen Shortt (20:34.96)
500 word email that just basically has that one line in it, is fluffed out. I’m going to send that email to you. You’re going to look at the email and go, I’m not reading that. AI summarized that and it’s going to come out with just the sentence that I wanted to send to you. So there’s going to be this churn that only AI is looking at because we’re going to be using this to make ourselves sound smarter and then to save ourselves time.
Santiago Tacoronte (20:44.806)
I’m done.
Santiago Tacoronte (20:56.004)
That’s going to be interesting. Steven, you run a very interesting website also called why you hate your job dot com. Amazing domain. What are the top career killers that ruins people’s work experience?
Stephen Shortt (21:16.688)
So again, largely it depends, but in general, it’s people. And we talked about managers earlier on, we talked about bad managers, we talked about people not having those conversations, either not recognizing that people are happy, not recognizing that people maybe are getting a little bit burnt out. So poor leadership and people like you’ve heard of the Peter principle, people rising to the point that they’re in confidence. So
Santiago Tacoronte (21:39.556)
Yeah.
Stephen Shortt (21:42.892)
I think there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of people who are in leadership positions who are not their leaders in title as opposed to in…
in actuality and I think that has a real demoralizing impact on people. One of the things that we look at in using some of our psychometric assessments is how there’s a difference between being an effective leader and an emergent leader. And an emergent leader are people who are very good at promoting themselves and very good at making sure that they get face time with the boss when something goes well and they’re able to claim everything else, but they might not be the most effective team players and the most effective leaders.
So people suffering from poor leadership and decisions that are made from politicking. It’s in larger corporations. There is probably it’s it’s more prevalent because there’s just more people. But at the same time, in smaller organizations, a little bit of politicking can have a much more dramatic impact on the percentage of the team. So it can have a real impact on headcount and turnover when people en masse decide.
Jenny’s our new CMO. she’s a tyrant. We’re all leaving to go to the competition or something like that. So that poor, poor leadership. But part of the poor leadership then is also whether people are able to progress in their career. Because there are bad leaders who…
don’t want other people to progress and don’t they see other people as a threat. So they have this high competition or they have this high secrecy or things like that. So people are not able to progress, not able to level up their career, not able to level up their training, not able to level up their money. And they get stuck in that.
Stephen Shortt (23:25.252)
Those are two the well, mean, the other one that we talked about at the very beginning is just in the wrong career. Like you’re just doing the wrong thing. And people are stuck to not have a clear idea of what’s actually involved in that role. We talked about this earlier, having a romanticized version of what it is to be a chief technical officer or
Santiago Tacoronte (23:31.206)
Thank you.
Stephen Shortt (23:47.42)
marketing executive or customer service agent or something like that. They have this romanticized version of it and actually it doesn’t fit in with what they’re wanting to do and what they’re wanting to develop for themselves. So it doesn’t matter how great the culture is, it doesn’t matter how great your leadership is, if you’re coming into work every day going I just don’t like this job, I don’t like this career, I don’t like this direction for me, you’re gonna be miserable.
Santiago Tacoronte (23:57.498)
Hmm.
Santiago Tacoronte (24:11.48)
Is this the reason? I’ve been reading recently about the concept of corporate cruising.
Stephen Shortt (24:18.99)
Yeah, corporate cruising and quiet quitting. a lot of this, people just… Corporate cruising, think, is a fan. It’s easier to cruise in corporate, I suppose, when you get to a certain kind of middle level, you just don’t rock the boat because there’s so many, such a big head count. But it happens in smaller companies as well, people who kind of get stuck and go, hmm.
Santiago Tacoronte (24:21.732)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stephen Shortt (24:42.908)
I don’t like what I’m doing, but I don’t hate it so much that I’m going to go through the pain of having to step away, maybe retrain, get a lower job for lower salary for a year or two to earn my way back up. they just kind of.
Santiago Tacoronte (25:04.646)
toxic leadership or bad hiring? Who is to blame? Do terrible bosses create miserable employees? Or do companies just hire the wrong people for the jobs?
Stephen Shortt (25:15.888)
Both and neither because if you have a toxic boss that boss has been hired at some point so they were taken on.
There’s both and I’ve experienced both. I’ve experienced terrible bosses. There’s a great book actually as well on this called multipliers by a woman called Liz Wiseman. If you’ve ever heard of it, it’s been around for a long time. Liz, I think lives in America and there’s another lady in Dubai who does her talks, Hazel Jackson. But it’s this idea of there are accidental diminishers and accidental multipliers. there’s somebody can be working for one boss and can feel like they can do 110 %
and they can give it their all and everything they do seems right and then they can change department doing the same thing or a different manager comes in and they feel completely undermined and diminished and those they might be accidental diminishers I think they’re they’re nice to to the people as assuming positive intent and assuming the people aren’t coming in with malevolence in their heart
So understanding one of those traits and one of those habits that can lead to people being a toxic boss or a diminisher or whatever label you want to put on it. think people can change and I think people can adapt. Sometimes it’s out of, in my opinion, it’s out of fear that they have this Peter principle or imposter syndrome that they think, gee, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to make it look like I’m powerful and all the rest of it.
But when it comes to selecting, the reason that a lot of these people are selected in roles in general is that the people who are selecting them and who are hiring don’t actually know what they’re looking for. And they don’t know what are they, they don’t break it down from a…
Stephen Shortt (27:01.966)
What’s the person spec? What’s the job spec? What’s the culture? What’s the, what are we looking for? What does success looks like? To really understand what, not just what that body is right now, but this person who’s going to be a leader that’s going to take us to the next level. What does that person look like? That’s who we need to be looking for.
Santiago Tacoronte (27:16.742)
Mm-hmm.
That sounds familiar, Stephen. I can tell you from a very close person to me who went to a job interview and when she asked, okay, so what I’m going to do in my job? And the answer from the hiring manager was like, we will look about that later. We have the head count and we need to fill it up. that was a, for her was like an eye opener. said, I don’t want to work here. people don’t know what I want me for.
Stephen Shortt (27:38.222)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Stephen Shortt (27:48.196)
We had a conversation with a potential client who was hiring a CFO for a huge semi-state company here. And they were saying, yeah, we want to hire a new CFO. Our old guy is going, okay, what are you looking for? What kind of person and what are you hoping for in the direction? And their answer was, we don’t know yet. We’re gonna see who shows up and then we’ll see which direction we go in. Okay, we are not the solution for you. Best of luck.
Santiago Tacoronte (28:16.646)
You
What is the most toxic leadership mistake you see happening over and over again and how does it impact workplace productivity?
Stephen Shortt (28:29.328)
toxic
Stephen Shortt (28:34.34)
Well, mean, curiosity is my number one thing. I suppose if we go in the other direction, I suppose it’s a kind of a sense of arrogance or entitlement of going, well, I know everything and I know who you to tell me what to do. And they become the bottleneck and they become this power trap or this this information value of death where they want to make sure that everything flows through them because they’re afraid of.
Santiago Tacoronte (28:46.916)
Hmm
Stephen Shortt (28:59.92)
anybody else getting any sliver of authority or recognition. So I suppose for me it’s probably that and it’s the polar opposite then of the curiosity and the interest.
Santiago Tacoronte (29:11.642)
Hmm. You know something that is, it keeps happening. I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who said that you hire smart people to tell you what to do, not to tell them what to do. But that’s still happening a lot, Steve. I see a lot of new hires, brilliant people that then are told, don’t do this, don’t do that. You’re not here to invent anything. Just follow my orders. Why does this happen?
Stephen Shortt (29:21.828)
and get out of their way.
Stephen Shortt (29:39.29)
So I work with a lot of family businesses and multi-generational businesses. And what I always try and get the current generation, the next generation to look at is they’re looking at the same problem with a different set, not perspectives, they both want the company to succeed, they both have drive and everything else, but the current generation has more to lose right now.
Santiago Tacoronte (29:43.888)
huh.
Stephen Shortt (30:04.472)
So there’s more risk involved for them. the senior managers who are in there, they are potentially being judged on or being being managed, rewarded, punished, whatever on don’t rock the boat. Whereas the young people that are coming in or the new hires that are coming in are going, wow, this is, we have the potential to do this and maybe try this in this direction and maybe sprout this out.
And from the managers who have been ingrained and keep the boat steady, that’s risky. And that could cause all kinds of problems. So there’s two concepts here. One is.
the S curve of innovation. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this. if you imagine an S curve on a graph, so it kind of starts here, dips down a little bit as it moves along the time, and then it goes up in hopefully a steady fashion as it progresses up towards optimization. So if we imagine a company, a project, anything, when we start off and we’re a startup, we’re down the bottom left.
We have no real optimizing. We’re just going with the flow. We’re seeing what we can build and we’re being scrappy. We’re probably going to drop down a little bit out of profitability and out of optimization because we’re trying new things and we’re scrambling. But at some point it turns and starts to come up along this S curve. The higher along that S curve you get, the more optimizing you need to be as opposed to experimenting. You’re experimenting down the bottom. You’re optimizing up the top.
Every business goes through this. Every business needs to, over time, be less about the experimenting and more about the optimizing to maximize their business. The problem is when people who are naturally good at the bottom of the S curve, the exploration people, the people who have the ideas and they’re all about taking risks and taking chances, when they’re getting dragged up along risk mitigation and optimization and processes,
Stephen Shortt (31:56.868)
They’re miserable. The same way as the people who are big on the process and optimization will be miserable in the churn and the ambiguity of further down the S curve. So that’s why for entrepreneurs, I tell them once they get to a certain point, whether they keep the business or not, I’m always in favor of people keeping the business, but they need to jump to the next S curve. They need to jump to the next thing where they can start building something afresh and then have people, they need to have a team of people that are optimizing and keeping it maintained. But then the people who
Santiago Tacoronte (32:05.22)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (32:26.834)
are the R &D department or the people with the crazy ideas who want to try doing new things, they need to get to the next S-curve.
Santiago Tacoronte (32:35.91)
Hmm.
Stephen Shortt (32:36.534)
And if we’re talking about in a business, if we’re talking about leaders that are looking to develop this and take people in, I call this an inside hustle. So we’ve all, you know, side hustle and the thing that you do on the side to make money. What can you do within the organization that uses a little bit of the resources of the organization and uses the knowledge of the organization that you try it, you build it as a little.
Santiago Tacoronte (32:57.926)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (33:01.848)
side project or a side project within the organization. If it goes well, brilliant. It can be folded into the main corporate or it can even become the new thing or it can be spun out to its own event. There are plenty of examples of times when the side project, the inside hustle becomes bigger than the main project and they sell off the main thing and keep focusing on the inside hustle.
Santiago Tacoronte (33:15.142)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (33:28.228)
But if it doesn’t work, you don’t kill the whole company, but you can still take some learnings from it.
Santiago Tacoronte (33:35.11)
Steven, I’ve worked for a good number of years in corporate. There is one of the people-related ceremonies that I find more absurd and awkward is the famous calibration, right? And yeah, where everyone gets ranked at the end of the year among peers. A frequent comment is, this person is not ambitious enough.
Stephen Shortt (33:52.144)
Okay.
Santiago Tacoronte (34:04.428)
is not going for more. It’s coasting. How do we put in the head of leaders that not everybody want to be the next Sam Altman or the next Elon Musk and that some people is there for the paycheck, do the best that they can, but they don’t have an ambition to climb the corporate ladder.
Stephen Shortt (34:06.384)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (34:18.736)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (34:30.148)
So to me, this is a real unconscious bias that a lot of these leaders have. So unconscious bias is everybody has it. There’s no point in saying we don’t. It’s how the human brain works. We have to have labels that we put on things as an easy way of being able to figure out, is this person going to fight me or are they going to be my friend? Am I going to be able to sleep in my cave with this person in the next village or are we going to…
go hunting together, whatever it is. We all need to have this. It’s the way that the brain works. The problem comes when people don’t address those unconscious biases. And unconscious biases can be like the most horrendous, wide ranging things. You were told as a kid, this type of people or this ethnicity is lesser than us. mean, there’s horrendous things. But more often than not, our unconscious biases come from a…
for want of a better expression, a good place. So we need to believe as humans, our brains need to believe that our actions are correct, are the right thing. Because if we’re showing up to work every day, what we’re doing, the way we’re behaving, the way we’re showing up, the traits that we bring are correct. Which means if somebody else comes with a different set, they must be wrong. Because if they’re in a fundamental lizard brain, if they’re right, we can’t be right. Whereas actually, everybody can be right.
Santiago Tacoronte (35:31.014)
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Shortt (35:51.44)
So I’ve worked with a lot of startup leadership teams who are high ambition, high drive, pushing, expanding, new locations, new products, new everything else. And they worked with customer service people or food and beverage people or hospitality people. And I keep telling them, you need to have a manager between you and them because you will kill these people because you’re driving and you’re pushing and your focus is
building and building and building and getting ahead and getting ahead and getting ahead. And you don’t understand that there are people who are the other end of that spectrum. It’s not a negative. It’s just the other end of that spectrum or the other side of that spectrum. And understanding that every company and every organization and every culture needs both sides. Everybody needs a balance. Otherwise you become Wall Street bros and everybody burns out and ends up driving their Ferrari off a bridge.
So understanding that there are people who don’t have that drive, but they still have the ambition to work in your organization, to do a good job, to take pride in their work, but they don’t necessarily want to be gunning for your job in five years time. Those are people that you want. Those are people that you want to be rewarding and nurturing. But there might also be some young guns that are wanting to drive and implement as we talked about AI and really drive that into the organization. Like, okay, we need both.
But we need to, like, we can’t treat the two the same. The other thing that a lot of companies, I think, they miss out on is they call, they say, we’re a team here. Like, we’re a great team. We’re not a team. We’re a group. And there’s a big difference between a team and a group. Like, people say that they have a sales team, but each sales member has different unique targets.
Santiago Tacoronte (37:22.726)
Hmm.
Stephen Shortt (37:42.99)
Three people can win and two people can lose. That’s not a team. That’s a group of individuals that have individual targets. If you have a team, like you imagine a football team, if the goalkeeper lets in three goals and the striker scores six, the team wins. But in a sales team, if one person gets two and another person gets six, that person wins.
Santiago Tacoronte (37:48.87)
Mmm.
Stephen Shortt (38:05.964)
Understanding the dynamic of a team and a group is very different and understanding that different people play different roles in that team is incredibly important.
Santiago Tacoronte (38:15.62)
What is the biggest, you’re a very productive guy. I’ve been following you for a while. You do so much and you do so much of quality. So what do you think is the biggest, this is a classic in this show already, the biggest productivity myth.
Stephen Shortt (38:19.084)
Yeah.
Stephen Shortt (38:31.386)
that can do it all yourself. Even with AI, can’t, need people, you need, you need a solid team of people with different skillsets and different interests and different strengths who look at the problem in different ways to make sure that you’re addressing it in the right way and being able to rely on those people and to make sure that you have their back the same way as they have yours. it’s everything is people.
Santiago Tacoronte (39:00.806)
Steven, rapid fire, 30 seconds answer questions. Ready? Annual performance reviews, useful or outdated?
Stephen Shortt (39:05.112)
Okay. Maybe.
Stephen Shortt (39:13.936)
In the existing format of checkbox, useless.
Santiago Tacoronte (39:21.346)
yearly goal setting. Is it useful?
Stephen Shortt (39:23.492)
Very useful. Very useful. Yeah. So long as everybody’s agreed and aligned on them. Yes. Very useful.
Santiago Tacoronte (39:29.168)
Do you think the year time frame is a bit long or it’s okay?
Stephen Shortt (39:33.06)
So we do a year planning and we also do quarterlies and the quarterlies feed into that. when we do the quarterlies, we make sure that they’re feeding into the year because 90 days is about as long as the human brain. when our team at about 80 days in, we’re all like, can we get to this quarterly so we can regenerate ourselves again? a year, absolutely having a goal that’s a bit of a stretch that realistic, but a stretch that everybody can believe in. It’s not like,
Santiago Tacoronte (39:43.088)
to the year plan.
Stephen Shortt (40:03.29)
The CEO wants a third yacht, that’s not a goal, but having those metrics that make sense to the drive of the organization is really, really important.
Santiago Tacoronte (40:12.538)
Best way to spot a future leader in a company.
Stephen Shortt (40:20.485)
Curiosity.
Santiago Tacoronte (40:22.692)
You’re big in curiosity, Stephen.
Stephen Shortt (40:24.176)
I, but it is, I mean, everything to me comes down to interest. have this argument, like I have a company called Talent Select. Technically, I don’t believe there is like talent the way that it is described at the moment. think talent is really focused interest and interest comes from curiosity.
Santiago Tacoronte (40:40.568)
brilliant. The number one sign that a company’s culture is broken.
Stephen Shortt (40:48.816)
Stephen Shortt (40:55.376)
If I come into a company and I say, who can I talk to? And they have a list of, we can talk to one or two of these people, the leaders, but they don’t let you talk to anybody else. Something’s wrong there.
Santiago Tacoronte (41:06.8)
So not having, how will we define this accessibility to?
Stephen Shortt (41:10.785)
Not being open to anybody in your team talking and talking about your culture and talking about your real culture.
Santiago Tacoronte (41:15.802)
Got it. What is the biggest red flag in an interview? The biggest.
Stephen Shortt (41:25.616)
from the point of view of an interviewee or an interviewer. If I’m interviewing you for a job, what’s the biggest red flag that you can have? Complaining about your previous people in a very personal way.
Santiago Tacoronte (41:29.08)
interviewer.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Santiago Tacoronte (41:39.588)
What do you recommend people to do if they had a bad experience?
Stephen Shortt (41:42.52)
Say I had a bad experience, I didn’t like the culture, didn’t like we had a clash, I’m looking to move on to something and what am I looking for?
Santiago Tacoronte (41:52.934)
Steven, you work, your tagline is I’m making lives people happier or something like that if I remember well.
Stephen Shortt (42:01.942)
So I’m on a mission to make the world a better place with happy people and fulfilling rewarding careers.
Santiago Tacoronte (42:07.45)
But then tell us, what’s the secret to staying happy at work?
Stephen Shortt (42:12.248)
So the secret to staying happy at anything. So happiness boils down to progress towards purpose. So long as you have a purpose, so long as you have something that you’re working towards, whether that’s in your personal life, your business life, whatever it is, so long as you have a purpose and you can have multiple purposes. I’m not talking about your core purpose. I mean, I have a mission, have a core purpose, but I have lots of things that I’m interested in. So long as you are making progress towards that.
that to me is happiness. So you could say, of my purposes is to have a loving home and a loving family. So actually,
sitting on a Sunday afternoon and doing nothing and just having a coffee and watching a movie with my wife and kids, that’s making progress towards that purpose. That’s fulfilling what I want to do. Or if I’m saying I want to learn how to play the saxophone or archery, I want to shoot in a different competition and I’m practicing and I’m getting better. Or I want to be a better public speaker or I want to be a manager in a certain size company so as I can have a team of X number of people because I want to see if I have it in me to do it.
Whatever it is that you have as your purpose, so long as you’re making progress towards it, in my opinion, that’s where happiness comes from.
Santiago Tacoronte (43:28.294)
Steven, thank you so much for being with us here today. How can people get in touch with you?
Stephen Shortt (43:33.424)
So pretty much everything is on my site, stevenshort.com. If you’re looking for finding your ideal career, you can go to findingyouridealcareer.com, which has lots of information about how you do that. Or if you’re looking to hiring the right people, then hiringtherightpeople.com has lots of information how we can help you with
Santiago Tacoronte (43:55.238)
Stephen, thank you again for number one, helping people to be happier and for teaching us, me and the audience, how to be a bit better at work. Tomorrow, how to treat people better, how to be aware of others and yeah, how to make corporate a bit better.
Stephen Shortt (44:15.738)
Santi it’s been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
Santiago Tacoronte (44:18.576)
Thank you.
Santiago Tacoronte (00:01.502)
Hello Riley and welcome to Productivity.
Riley (00:04.344)
Thank you, Santiago. Happy to be here today.
Santiago Tacoronte (00:08.094)
So you’ve been called the CEO whisperer for helping high performance sleep better. What is the most shocking transformation you’ve witnessed in your clients after you optimize their sleep?
Riley (00:21.09)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. And there’s so many different case studies that come to mind. But you do see the same overlapping issues that a lot of CEOs have. And a lot of the time that is stress. And they like to keep their stress sort of under the radar. They don’t want to show it. And they bottle it all up until it becomes too much. And then they just can’t sleep anymore. And they go towards sleeping pills or alcohol and different things like this that they only know that’s available to them. But I had one individual in particular named Jordan. He’s probably 49 years old CEO, three kids, wife.
stay at home mom and he was not able to sleep at all. And this was, this guy was a hustler, very successful CEO. I think he had a couple of businesses and we were able to help him just sleep better, get his deep sleep in his REM sleep back on track and get between an hour and a half or about two hours of deep sleep and REM sleep, which is really that sweet spot we need to really restore the mind and restore the body. And then as a result, he didn’t need coffee the next day. Didn’t need sleeping pills to get to sleep.
You can do it naturally if you find the root cause of like, where is this coming from instead of just looking at symptoms.
Santiago Tacoronte (01:24.628)
This is incredible. you saying that someone goes from not sleeping at all to sleeping like a baby. How do you perform these magics?
Riley (01:35.374)
Yeah, sleep is something that’s universal across all types of industries, right? We all need it. Some people need a bit more, some people need a bit less. But really what it comes down to is it’s case by case via everyone’s biology. Some people need a bit more work, some people not as much. Sometimes people have diagnosable sleep conditions, sleep apnea, rest of the legs syndrome, insomnia, but other people just need a little bit. So where I find the best…
Way an approach to look at people is look at the root cause and what we do is we send lab tests To their house and they would take a urine saliva stool sample Send it to the lab and we’ll figure out what is their cortisol like what is inflammation their body like do they have leaky gut is their heavy metals moles toxins in their body What is our their brain neurotransmitters telling us do they have too much dopamine that’s turning to adrenaline and that’s Keeping them sort of up at night. Maybe they don’t have the GABA which are the breaks in the brain to kind of chill out
Is it serotonin, which is the happiness neurotransmitter to really help them feel that sense of ease while they’re falling asleep? You know, there’s these imbalances within our body. And if any one of those is out of balance, it’s a bit like the game Jenga if you’ve ever played. You’ll pull out one puzzle piece here, create stress on the other side. You’ll pull out a piece here until the whole thing comes tumbling down. And so it’s like our body’s the same way. When each part becomes in balance over time, the full thing can come tumbling down.
And that’s where like the communication between all the different parts of the body, they’re just not as efficient as it should. So if you think of your body as like a machine, a system, it’s much the same way. We want all the different parts of the brain to communicate with the gut, the hormones communicate with the different organs. And it’s like a beautiful orchestra in unison. But if one instrument’s playing too fast, too slow, then the full song is off. And so that’s a good analogy that I feel kind of encapsulates high level view what I do with people.
Santiago Tacoronte (03:23.1)
Lots of people think of sleep as a routine. Night comes and then you go to sleep. But you have quite a scientific approach to it. What has been your most surprising discovery? You have analyzed the sleep of more than 2,000 people and gathered a lot of data and markers around it. What was your most surprising discovery?
Riley (03:48.878)
Yeah, the biggest one for people that I see consistently, and this is hidden. I think it’s going to be more well known as time goes on because it always takes a while for the mainstream to catch up when there’s something cutting edge that’s out. It can take five to 10 years sometimes. And what I think that’s going to be is parasites inside of the gut. And the reason why is parasites are something people can, sure, get second, third world countries. But you can also get it from contaminated, like uncooked meats, fish, sushi. You know, you’re swimming your local lake. You might swallow some of the water.
And if somebody has a resilient immune system, which most of the immune system is located in the gut, we’d be able to fight these things off. But for a lot of people, these parasites can stay there. Pathogens, H. pylori, there’s a lot of different evil little critters in there. And they can stay in our gut for years at a time. And essentially what they do is they can steal the nutrients of the foods we’re eating. So we might be eating a healthy diet and you know, I’ll talk with people and they’re doing all the right things, all the healthy things, and they can’t sleep and they don’t know what’s going on.
And so we look at their gut, we run a test and we can see they have got parasites and that’s causing the parasites to steal the nutrients from the food. Now they don’t have the building blocks that they need for their hormones, for their brain, no transmitters and all the different functions in their body. And so once we remove it, all of a sudden the body is very self-correcting and self-healing when you give it the right inputs. And so once we remove those usually over about 30 to 60 days, then we will see drastic improvements in how they sleep because
Now cortisol is not going to be as high anymore. Sometimes these things will come more awake or active at nighttime. And so that’s one of the biggest ones that I would see. There’s other things too, like heavy metal and molds, but that’s like one of the biggest epiphanies that I’ve seen. And people think, well, what’s a parasite in my gut related to my brain? And there’s a lot related to your gut in your brain. And that’s why they call your gut the second brain, because they have a two, two way lateral connection to the vagus nerve.
Santiago Tacoronte (05:43.208)
So is it easy to get parasites in your gut, in your intestine, and continue having a normal life without noticing or not having clear symptoms?
Riley (05:54.518)
Yeah, and that’s another good question too, because everybody genetically and based on their environment has a different size stress bucket. And there’s in our stress bucket, it’s called our allostatic load, we can put an internal stressors and external stressors. External, know those ones stress with work, drama and relationship, we can manage that through meditation or something. But the ones that are hidden are the internal ones. And one of those can include a parasite. Now, depending on
how many stressors you put into somebody’s bucket, depending on how big it is, some have a big stress bucket and a parasite might not even bother them at all. Other people are extremely sensitive to this. And so that’s where there is no cookie cutter, one size fits all approach. It has to be individually tailored to the person.
Santiago Tacoronte (06:40.52)
Let’s speak sleep hacks. The internet is full of sleep hacks. You open TikTok, Instagram, know, from breathing 10 times consecutively, very deeply, almost until you’re out of breath. Does these things work?
Riley (06:54.732)
Hahaha
Riley (06:58.478)
It’s a good question too. They all work and there’s different layers to this game. So you always wanna do the basics and the fundamentals first. You can go advanced with all the events biohacks, but unless you get the foundations in place first, the advanced stuff is pretty useless. starting with the basics, I’ll give you probably, you know, between five and 10. So number one is cool bedroom environment temperature. That’s between about 16, 18 Celsius, 65, 67 Fahrenheit.
And that’s number one, because within a 24 hour period, our body’s the coldest internally within about a couple hours after a sleep. So we want an external environment that’s conducive to that. Number two is we want it to be pitch black. Now ideally we would want it to be so pitch black that we don’t see our hand in front of us. It’s a good measuring stick and that’s idealistic, but to be realistic, we just want it to be as dark as possible. So that means blackout curtains.
Even in the morning when sun’s coming through, we just wanna make sure that like the curtain, the window, they’re pinched as much as possible. You can wear an eye mask, but we still have these light receptors around our eyes that can detect light at a subtle level. And even electronics within our room, like heaters, fans, cable boxes, we wanna turn those off or cover those with tape or whatever it is, because those can also impact our sleep as well. And it doesn’t seem like it, it seems like it’s so small and nuanced, but it does have an impact on our sleep.
Speaking of light, the second thing is going to be blue light. So blue light can directly inhibit our melatonin, which is our master sleep hormone. And within a 24 hour period, melatonin is highest right before we go to sleep, couple hours into sleep, and lowest when we first wake up in the morning. And it has an inverse relationship with cortisol. So when we go to bed, we want cortisol to be lowest and melatonin to be highest. But a lot of people, they don’t have melatonin as high as it should be because they’re looking at blue light before they go to sleep.
So maybe they’re looking at their phone, they’re watching TV before bed, and a couple things you can do is get blue light blocking glasses. Now there’s a lot on the market, but my favorite ones are called the TrueDark Twilight Classics, and they’re gonna make you look like Cyclops. They’re red, but again, I mean, we’re looking for results here, and it’s great, because it’ll block side from the periphery, and there’s other forms of light besides blue light. There’s green light, violet light, that can be stimulatory, but blue is on the top.
Riley (09:24.302)
for suppressing that melatonin. And there’s a lot of, like you can just Google blue light, potential risk of disease, not sleeping well. I think we’re gonna see more about the science with that too. So that’s that one. Now another one that a lot of people don’t realize is people think it’s all about the evening routine, but it’s also about the morning routine. So what that means is when we first wake up, we wanna expose our eyes to sunlight as soon, within about an hour when we wake up. The reason why is because light goes into our eyes and it.
comes to something known as our SCN and sort of our internal master clock, that is going to send a signal to all of our organs, all of our hormones, that it’s time to turn on, to hit that on switch. And that’s when that timer begins where, you know, 12, 16 hours later, our body knows when it’s time to go to bed. And you know, our bodies, our brains are really these outdated monkey machines. you know, our technology has increased, but our bodies haven’t changed too much since the, you know, during the age of our ancestors when we were hunting.
you know, hunter-gatherer society. And so we, it’s called the Savannah principle where there is this mismatch. So what we have to do is when we first wake up, expose your eyes to the sun. On a sunny day, you want between about 10 and 15 minutes is enough. Don’t look directly at the sun, but just try and get the light in the eyes. On a cloudy day, you want about 30 minutes. If you’re in a part where I’m like Canada, where we don’t get a lot of light at this time of the year in the morning, you can get something called a lux light. Usually you want to look between about
you know, 10 to 12,000, 50,000 lux, you just put it like on the 45 degree angle in the morning when you’re, you know, first working or something, put it on for 30 minutes. And that’s a great way until the sun goes up and then you can go for a walk earlier that morning too. So those are a couple of things that people can utilize. And there’s more too, but let me know if you want to keep me to keep riffing here, but those are some helpful ones.
Santiago Tacoronte (11:12.244)
Let’s switch to another important part of productivity. You work with people that is busy and successful.
Productivity, it’s addictive in a way, and success is also addictive. How do you convince people, clients that are super busy, that are successful, that are sleeping not so much because they have a lot to do? How do you tell them, time out, leave a few things because you need to get your sleep?
Riley (11:48.834)
Yeah, because what got them to the place they are is hustling, right? Burning the candle both ends, sacrificing sleep. A lot of these guys see sleep as a liability and something that’s kind of getting in their way. And if they had their way, they wouldn’t sleep at all. some of these guys are genetic. There’s about 1 to 2 % of the population that need less than about four or five hours of sleep. And if that’s them, then great. But if you’re sacrificing your sleep, can develop a risk.
health conditions down the road like Alzheimer’s disease with plaque building up in the brain, the list goes on. But functionally what I have to show them is yes, you know, the less you sleep, of course, the more you can get done. But look how much that’s impacting you during the day when you could be focusing better. You could be in, you know, deep flow states. You could have unlimited energy. You could have very good emotional intelligence so you could be a better leader. And if you know the game for them is all about efficiency. And so yes, it might take
more time to sleep, adding a couple hours, but the efficiency in your day of the hour spending your waking hours, that is going to be significantly more across all KPIs throughout your business and your personal life. And then I also want to tell them to like, sometimes you don’t have to sleep eight to nine hours, we can increase the sleep quality of your deep sleep, of your REM sleep and other markers to your heart rate variability, resting heart rate, the list goes on. And from there, we’re able to sometimes sleep less.
and actually feel better because we’ll track their sleep with an aura ring. I’ll be able to look at their stats day and night, what it’s showing me. And there’s so much room for improvement that when we make those improvements, sometimes they can slice hours off their sleep and they just feel better too, because their body is less inflamed. It’s just more healthy. And then they just feel better too. So when I put it in that lens, then they start to see and then they start to visually feel it. And then they never want to go back to what they were before because they just see how much better they feel.
Santiago Tacoronte (13:45.908)
Let’s talk a little bit about bad sleep. I read this week or last week something like, no matter how bad you’re feeling today, you’re only one sleep away to be the best version of yourself. But let’s say for the sake of the example that you had a bad night for whatever reason. You had dreams, you had nightmares. How can people recover and go back to being a normal being?
after a bad sleep.
Riley (14:18.03)
Yeah, that’s a good question too. One of the things that you can do is you can try a nap in the afternoon, but you don’t want to have a nap after 3 p.m. and you want to make your nap about 26 minutes exactly because if you start going over the 30 minute mark, you can start going to deeper phases of sleep and you’re going to wake up ending up feeling groggy. But if you didn’t get a good sleep, having a nap, you know, between 11, maybe 2 p.m. that’s a great way to do a recharge. Some countries do that and you know, the employers.
show great results like they have sleeping pods in different working organizations. I believe I think the last one I saw was in Japan, but it’s coming more popular in different parts of the world. So that’s one thing that you can do. Of course you can drink coffee and you can do these short-term things, but think of it like a bank account. If you’re taking withdrawals out of your bank account by having caffeine, that is going to put you in a deficit. We want to be in a surplus all day. And so you first have to go to the baseline of
If you were so much in a surplus, like if your bank account was let’s say plus a thousand, maybe you didn’t have a good sleep. Now you’re down to let’s say 700, but you’re still in a surplus. So you’re still feeling fine and sleep’s not going to impact you as much. It’s just that people are always hovering around maybe just plus 100 surplus. So when they get a bad sleep, now they’re in a minus 1000 deficit and they feel horrible. And so now they go to coffee, they go to alcohol, they go to sleeping pills just to try and feel better. So the first thing is make your body so resilient that
Even a bad sleep won’t interrupt you too much. But of course we all have busy schedules. So you can try coffee, you can try slight melatonin. But the best thing is to sometimes take the hit for that day and then plan on just going to bed at the same time and getting a good sleep that night. Because the moment that you try mixing around the schedules, sleeping for three hours, having too much coffee that day, what you’re gonna find is going to impact the next couple days afterwards.
the net result of that is sometimes a worse impact. But besides that, you can do a cold shower, you can do an Epsom salt bath, you can do like a minor exercise to get your heart rate going, you can expose your eyes to the sun. But some days if we have those, when those days do happen, we just have to take it a little bit more easy. And that’s where awareness comes in of like, we have all these tools available to us, but what ones do we take out at the right time based on how we feel?
Santiago Tacoronte (16:38.386)
Riley, I’m a data geek. It’s my profession and I love it. Let’s speak a little bit tech. Smart devices such as the rings, auto rings, FitBit, smart watches that measures your sleep. Number one, are they reliable?
Riley (16:40.942)
Thank
Riley (17:00.056)
They’re probably about 30 % off for the most part. So I don’t like to see them individual days. Like I wouldn’t take that data too, too seriously, but I do like to see the trends. And so if we can get 14 days, 30 days, I probably want at least 30 days of data to get a good baseline for somebody. But if I can see like three months of data, six months of data, and we can correlate that to how they’re subjectively feeling, then they can rate themselves. We see the data on that and we.
do different, you know, we’ll change the diet. How do their biometrics respond to that? If they’re exercising, how do their biometrics respond to that? And so we can tinker with that by changing one variable at a time. But the best sleep device on in the market today, it’s an expensive one. It’s called the eight sleep. And that’s a pad that goes over your bed that dynamically adjusts the temperature. You can think of like your, your mattress pad while you sleep. And that is so good for your sleep.
and it’s probably the most accurate for tracking your sleep. Number two is probably gonna be the Aura Ring. Now the version four just came out, so that is probably the best on the market today. The one below that, might be Whoop Band, it could be the Apple Watch. All the other ones sort of tie together, but you know, technology has reached a point where they are all pretty good for the most part, if we’re tracking the trends, but the 8 Sleep and the Aura Ring are still on top.
Santiago Tacoronte (18:24.752)
Have you heard about the technology applied to clothing, to apparel, to sleeping? Have you heard about brands like Daxmeyan that keep your body cool and the temperature at the same level while you sleep? What do you think about those?
Riley (18:42.87)
Yeah, I think they’re great. There’s a lot of technology coming out right now, whether it’s clothing or electronic gadgets. I’m a big fan of those things and I’m trying these different things. I mean, I’m a bit of a guinea pig myself. know, everything from like biohacker type clients to, know, EMFs. So they’ll paint their walls with a special paint that’s black. you know, the frequency won’t come in or EMF blocking close. Similar to what you’re saying.
I think it all is valid. Is it that one thing? No. But does it add, you know, it might be 5 % to their solution. And then it’s a combination of everything combined that you really get the most amount of results.
Santiago Tacoronte (19:24.308)
Let’s talk about, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times already, a few times. Let’s talk about the most consumed drug in the world, caffeine.
it doesn’t make people more productive and what are you trading off when you are exchanging caffeine for a big of let’s say energy against your sleep?
Riley (19:50.894)
Yeah, so caffeine and again everybody’s different. So some people genetically Are a fast metabolizer of coffee and we all know those people who can go for a cup of coffee in the evening They feel fine and they can sleep. Okay That’s one group of people. The other group of people is they’re slow metabolizers of coffee They can even have one cup of coffee at 10 a.m. And still feel wired at you 11 p.m. So they have to be careful Most people in the middle, know, what I suggest is if you’re going to bed at about 10 p.m
Your last cup should probably be at about 10.30 to 11 a.m. Just to be safe. They do say, you know, wait seven, eight hours, but I’ve just seen a half-life a lot more than that of coffee, that it can last for people. Now what coffee is doing for you is, and again, everybody responds differently, but you are increasing cortisol and you’re increasing adrenaline. Now there are studies that show the benefits of coffee. You know, it’s antioxidant property and everything else.
And there’s pros and cons to everything. You just have to weigh what is best for you and what are you looking for. But what we see is when we run a hormonal test, it’s usually a urine-based test where we can see somebody’s cortisol throughout the day. And when we first wake up within 90 minutes, our cortisol is at its highest. Throughout the day, our cortisol goes down to its lowest throughout the day before we go to sleep. And when somebody has coffee, and especially their adrenal glands, which secrete cortisol,
What we can see is that can be very detrimental for somebody who is in a state of adrenal fatigue or adrenal dysfunction. And so if their cortisol just baseline without coffee is too high, they’re running on a dirty source of energy and it’s very short lasting. And so the coffee is going to add to that where it’s going to spike up and it’s going to come down like a roller coaster. And what you’re doing when that happens is you’re now tapping into the backup generators and the backup resources of the body.
when it shouldn’t be there, you should be able to go, for example, plus one, minus one, just maintain that same level of consistency throughout the day. But now let’s say you have coffee and it spiked your cortisol up to plus 10, well, that’s gonna come crashing down. Again, there’s a couple things you can do with coffee, like having it with fat, MCT oil, things like that to make it more of a slow release. But for the most part, if somebody feels like they’re burnt out and they’re in stage two, three, four adrenal fatigue,
Riley (22:16.022)
you need to probably go off it for a period of about 30 to 60 days. And it’s tough. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You can get headaches, can get withdrawal symptoms. Coffee smells great in the morning. It’s a great ritual to have. But if you can get over that initial hump, you’ll see how much better you feel. And it’s like putting training wheels on a bike. You got to put the training wheels on the bike, learn how to ride the bike, give your system a break so it can build itself up again. And then once it feels healed and ready, you can take the training wheels off, go into maintenance mode.
and then just have it whenever you feel like it. But depending on how you feel, like a lot of these CEOs are so burnt out and they relied on coffee their entire lives to get to where they are, but their body just biologically can’t support that because sometimes their adrenals just don’t have the cortisol to to output anymore. And as a result, we got to give their body a break.
Santiago Tacoronte (23:09.276)
If you would need to change just one habit tonight about the hundreds of thousands of people that are going to listen to this podcast, one thing, what will it be?
Riley (23:25.678)
If they were to change one thing, I would say the earlier you can go to bed and it’s very cliche, but it’s very true. The earlier you can go to bed and the more that you can have a one hour ritual prior to sleep to make it like a sacred ritual before sleep and see it as an investment. Like sleep is an investment that is going to pay you dividends the next day and keeping your bank account in this big surplus so that
it’s only going to pay you back and you’re gonna be able to achieve what you want to. Just perceive less effort, easy, in a way that’s fun. We all are better people when, you we’re our best selves when we sleep better. And I think Matthew Walker said a quote, you know a lot more about somebody, not asking how’s it going, but ask how do they sleep? You’ll learn a lot more.
Santiago Tacoronte (24:20.18)
How do you reconcile this with social life? See, I’m an early sleeper and I’m totally with you. But it costs me sometimes tough conversations with people when I tell them that if I want to have an amazing day tomorrow, I might go to sleep at 9 p.m. And a common answer is like, you’re wasting your life. How can you sacrifice so much of your, particularly people that is busy or people that works the whole day?
It’s a bit of a struggle to say that you finish, you’re off work and dinner and whatever at what, seven, 7.30. And you have literally one hour, one hour and a half or two of me time before going to bed.
Riley (25:06.734)
Yeah, so we all need a social life, right? We all need to, we can’t be too strict every single day. And for the most part, like what I say to people is we need an outlet to let go. We need a social life. Sometimes people wanna have a glass of wine. That’s fine. I don’t wanna stop people from doing that. And maybe that’s good on a Saturday night, but maybe one extent, like instead of going to bed at 9 p.m.
Maybe it’s 11 p.m. like you can still do that with a social life or maybe it’s midnight if you’re really stretching it. But ideally it would be every single day you’re going to wake up at the same time and going to bed at the same time every day. But if you find that you are wanting that social life and it’s getting in the way of your sleep, then there are things you can do that when you wake up you can recover faster. So for example, like a cold shower.
or you can do like an Epsom salt bath or you can go to like the hot cold types of therapy. There’s biohacking devices if you’re somebody that wants to do that. But what you have to understand is bio the biohacking devices are good to supplement, you know, all the good healthy stuff you’re doing. But if again, if your bank account is in a surplus, you can sometimes get away with the social life of staying up later.
If you feel completely wiped the next day because you stayed up later than you should have, then that might be a sign that you should focus on other parts of your health to bring that up so you can get away with it once in a while. But if you feel like you can manage it and you’re going to wake up the same time, going to bed at the same time every day, then sometimes that can work out too.
Santiago Tacoronte (26:54.686)
What is one myth about sleeping that you wish it will disappear? Something that you say, gosh, this is not true.
Riley (27:06.67)
I’ve heard a lot of them. would say, you know, sleep is for the weak. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. you know, why would I sleep when I could get a bunch of stuff done? It’s a lot of it’s it’s at least for these high performer types, they, they want to remain really productive. So they again, see sleep as that liability. And so that’s the biggest myth, but I can change their minds pretty quickly when I’m visually make them feel better. It’s just people don’t know.
what they don’t know, right? You sometimes have to experience a new reality and then you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come.
Santiago Tacoronte (27:42.996)
Have you ever struggled with sleeping yourself?
Riley (27:45.494)
I did, yeah. Probably eight to 10 years ago, I was struggling with an autoimmune disease and sleep was a massive one. When I improved my sleep, a lot of those symptoms started to improve for me. But it was definitely something genetically that I didn’t have a good time with. And the healing process for me with all that was addressing all these parts of my body with lab testing. I did all the top 10 tips, dark bedroom environment, temperature.
making sure it’s cold, but it never worked for me. And so I went deeper and I went to the advanced things and I went to the lab testing, seeing there was molds in my body, I had parasites. The list went on, like there was a massive list of everything. And so once I removed those hidden stressors from our stress bucket, now my body had more bandwidth, just like a computer that’s full of viruses. Once you remove the viruses, you have more RAM, you have more bandwidth available on your computer. Now it runs a lot faster and more efficiently and my body was the same way.
Santiago Tacoronte (28:44.276)
Let’s try to predict the future, Reilly. Where do you think this science, I’ll call it science, the field of sleep optimization will be heading in the next five years?
Riley (28:56.45)
I think we’re going to be getting a lot into personalized medicine in combination with AI. You’re going to see AI, like for example, people’s biometrics from their Oro ring or whatever device they have using that in correlation with AI based on, know, what they like, what time they’re going to bed, what do they do for exercise? And I think they’re going to integrate people’s habits and daily schedule into some modality with that, I think.
and utilizing AI of giving people prompts at different times of the day when they should wake up, what time should they go to bed? But I think they’re also going to be able to measure more biomarkers like somebody’s blood sugar, somebody’s inflammation in the body. And to be able in the future, you take one prick sample and they can detect a form of disease coming up in the same way with sleep. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting revolutions around their coming with sleep. And maybe it’s going to be integrated into somebody’s house with, you know,
virtual screens around people’s houses, giving them reminders of what they should and shouldn’t do.
Santiago Tacoronte (30:00.796)
sounds really cool. Let’s do a quick round of a shoot out of quick questions.
Riley (30:07.662)
sure.
Santiago Tacoronte (30:10.568)
or advice based on your experience. What do you do with nightmares bars? You wake up in the middle of the night, terrible nightmare. What do you do next?
Riley (30:19.116)
And yeah, you wake up with nightmares, you can’t get back to sleep. The best thing that you can do is listen to something called binaural beats. And cause when you wake up from nightmares, your heart’s probably racing. Your brain is in a really like gamma brainwave state. So you want to slow those brainwaves down. So there’s an app on your phone you can download. It’s called brain.fm and you wear headphones that will put your brain into, and there’s a sleep mode on there and that will put your brain into a more sleepy.
state. And so that’s a quick hack to kind of get back into those sleepy states if you find you’re awake.
Santiago Tacoronte (30:52.296)
Water. Water, it’s basically fundamental and everything works much better in our bodies when we drink water. But if you drink water before going to bed, it’s likely that you will wake up in the middle of the night because you need to do pee-pee. What do you do? Water or no water before sleeping?
Riley (31:11.406)
Right before sleep, I went through water. probably saved my last cup like three to four hours prior to bed. But what can be beneficial if you find you’re waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, having salt, like good salt, like Celtic salt, pink Himalayan salt, this can help retain your fluids. It’s known as a hormone called aldosterone. And it can help so you don’t wake up as much to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Because if you’re low on electrolytes and minerals and you’re waking up a lot,
that could be a sign that maybe you want some salt. So maybe you had like half a cup of warm water, put in some salt in there, maybe an hour or two before bedtime. That can be beneficial.
Santiago Tacoronte (31:47.89)
interesting. Jet lag. Stay awake, sleep a little bit, don’t sleep at all. How do you fight this?
Riley (31:56.288)
Yeah, good question. So you a couple days prior to leaving for your destination time zone You’re in your current time zone You want to start adapting to that destination time zone a couple days if you can and then when you arrive in your destination time zone You want to expose your eyes to sunlight like as soon as you wake up putting on those bullet blocking glasses In your destination time zone and just adapting to that as fast as possible But also doing things like grounding like walking in like swimming in a body of water
walking with your bare feet in sand, dirt, grass can also help. And then you can also utilize melatonin in your destination time zone. And even prior, you can imagine if you’re in your current time zone, start using melatonin as if you were going to sleep in the destination time zone. And that can also help as well. So whether you go to bed earlier, you go to bed later, that can also help.
Santiago Tacoronte (32:50.558)
The red zone for sleeping in hours. You… Yeah.
Riley (32:54.306)
between seven and nine hours is usually the sweet spot. Everybody’s different based on their chronotype. Sometimes people are a morning person like yourself. They like to go to bed at nine or 10 p.m. And then you have the night owls. And usually the night owls are about one, two, three hours later for bedtime than the morning larks.
Santiago Tacoronte (33:16.756)
For those struggling, Riley, to sleep, it’s a serious thing. If you don’t sleep well, or if you don’t sleep at all, I have seen people that is really miserable and that are really sick of not sleeping. How they can start with your platform, with you, how they can start with a consultant like you, how can they improve their sleep?
Riley (33:44.376)
Yeah, great question. mean, for what I have is a bunch of free resources available if people want to go to the sleepconsultant.com. On the of there, there’s top 10 sleep tips, things you can do. There’s questionnaires to figure out why you might not be sleeping and what exactly you can do about it. But the most important thing is to start with the basics first. Sleep is one of the biggest and easiest things to fix compared to doing a full new nutrition plan compared to going to the gym, lifting heavy weights.
A lot of that stuff can be uncomfortable, but with your sleep, you just need to change certain things once and the ROI you can see on the next days, weeks, months ahead can be massive, but always start with the lowest hanging fruit, simple things first, and then you can get advanced.
Santiago Tacoronte (34:26.772)
Riley, thank you so much for your time today. I’ve learned a lot. We have all learned a lot about sleeping. And you have just said about your website. anyone that wants to learn, which the first step probably, and to understand how they sleep and why they sleep. Any read that you recommend, any book?
Riley (34:47.956)
A book for sleep?
Santiago Tacoronte (34:50.404)
book to understand better sleep and and yeah.
Riley (34:56.066)
Yeah, the best one is by Matthew Walker and it’s called Why We Sleep. That’s one that I highly recommend. And he was also Matthew Walker, you can just YouTube him. He was on Joe Rogan and other podcasts too, but he brings a childlike wonder to sleep that will make you lot more interested in sleep too. So that’s one I highly recommend for any beginner.
Santiago Tacoronte (35:16.98)
Thank you so much, Riley. This was super interesting. It’s 7 p.m. where I am now and I’m excited to go to sleep. Thanks so much and hope to see you soon in the podcast.
Riley (35:29.954)
Thank you, Santiago. Talk soon.