Ruth Gotian: Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine

In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal sits down with Ruth Gotian, Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine and the author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance.

As research for her book, Ruth has spent time studying the highest of high achievers across diverse fields, from Nobel Prize-winning scientists to Olympic athletes. She knows what distinguishes their approach to challenging situations and how they maintain their momentum once they’ve achieved a goal. During this discussion with Alex, she shares the 4 characteristics that she has observed in these hyper-successful people.

One of these characteristics is intrinsic motivation, and Ruth also explains how she identifies and fosters this trait in a coaching context. As a coach, Ruth believes that helping her clients connect with their passion is paramount. Here, she explains what a Passion Audit consists of and how she uses this to help her clients reconnect with their objectives and avoid burnout. 

Another topic that Ruth and Alex analyze in this episode is imposter syndrome, and Ruth isn’t only an expert on this affliction - she’s also a sufferer. Here, she outlines her most successful coping strategies and explains why she believes an episode of imposter syndrome should be considered a sign of success. 

Listen to this episode of the Coaching.com podcast to find out how saying no to a nuisance responsibility can open up new, lucrative opportunities. You’ll also discover methods that will help clients align their schedules to ensure they’re really practicing their passion.

Resources:

Ruth Gotian: https://www.ruthgotian.com/

Socials
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgotian/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTG7Bo7f5QZ3aaxOxAX5_3Q
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ruthgotian
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ruthgotian/

Books
The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance
Handbook of Research on the Efficacy of Training Programs and Systems in Medical Education (Advances in Medical Education, Research, and Ethics)

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Ruth: Align your work with your passion, with your goal, so we need to be able to find these goals, tap into that intrinsic motivation, but then look at how you’re spending your day. How much of your time, how many of your activities are actually spent and aligned and connected to your goal?

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an expert in mentorship and leadership development and she’s the Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine. In 2021, she won the Thinkers50 Radar Award, cementing her place as the number 1 emerging management thinker in the world. She’s also a semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she’s a regular contributor to Forbes and Psychology Today where she writes about optimizing success. Her research is about the mindset and skillset, including Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, and Olympic champions, which she writes about in her bestselling book, The Success Factor.

(interview)

Alex: Please welcome, Dr. Ruth Gotian. Hi, Ruth. 

Ruth: Hello, Dr. Alex. How are you?

Alex: Dr. Alex.

Ruth: Well, you’re calling me Dr. Ruth, right?

Alex: True, true. You know, I think a lot of us that are not medical doctors don’t really go by that as much but you sometimes get the email that says doctor and then reminds you, it’s like, “Oh, I did spend all that time getting a PhD.”

Ruth: It’s not for the weak, that’s for sure.

Alex: That is certainly for sure. It is so good to have you here, Ruth. I’m excited for our conversation today. So, it’s Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee and today we’re actually drinking coffee, so what are we actually drinking specifically, Ruth? 

Ruth: So, I’m having a latte. I have many lattes a day. Thankfully, I have a Nespresso maker and I get my money’s worth. There’s three machines that work a lot in my house: the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the Nespresso maker.

Alex: Love it. Well, love it and not so much, I’ll tell you why in a second, but I am drinking also a latte to match you and I actually went to the Erewhon supermarket here in LA this morning and I got some almond milk, I love their almond milk, so I’m drinking a vanilla organic coffee almond latte. So, thank you for suggesting that. I haven’t had coffee in a week so it’s kind of nice.

Ruth: In a week?

Alex: Yeah, you know, I used to never drink coffee and then I really got into coffee for a couple years and then I realized, although we have podcast, Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, I should be drinking a lot of coffee, I don’t think coffee’s that great for me so I’m trying to limit it for once a year. I have too much energy so I’m using it for special occasions like when the guest wants to drink coffee. But I was going to tell you, I don’t know how I feel about those pods in the Nespresso machines. Hot plastic and aluminum, I know people love them but I was talking to my aunt yesterday at my nephew’s birthday party and she loves them and I was like, “I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” so I go back and forth on that. I know convenience is there but is it good for you? I don’t know. 

Ruth: You know what, there’s so many things that are not good for me but, to me, the coffee is a vitamin so I just keep drinking it. In fact, when I wrote the book, The Success Factor, in the acknowledgments, there’s a thank you to my husband for always making sure we were stocked with Nespresso pods. 

Alex: Look, I’m not going to get in between people’s Nespresso pods because I’ve noticed like people get very defensive, you haven’t, but I’m not going to push on that front. But I’d say get an espresso machine and do it the old school way is probably healthier but that’s what I used to do when I drink coffee every day. Now, I think if we were to name the podcast today, maybe I wouldn’t necessarily call it Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee because I’ve been actually cutting back on coffee but it’s a whole thing. So, cool. 

Ruth: But it’s good, and I will say, to build on your almond milk, I have definitely switched in my coffee, I now have nutpods as the milk, which is like an almond milk, and it’s much better. 

Alex: Oh, that’s awesome. Sometimes, when I have time, I make my own almond milk. Not that it takes too much time to do it but it’s like —

Ruth: Really?

Alex: Yeah, it’s like the cleanup. I’m good at cooking and things like that but I’m not good at cleaning so when I’m going to make the milk, I’m like, “Oh, man, I’m gonna have to clean and all that —

Ruth: I can’t even imagine. How many steps is that? 

Alex: It’s like three steps. It’s like so easy. 

Ruth: Really?

Alex: It is really so easy. I think probably our audience wants us to start talking about your amazing career and the incredible book that you wrote, but —

Ruth: Not how to make almond milk. 

Alex: But you know what, I will tell you very quick, you soak almonds overnight and then you add like three parts water the next day in the blender and you put two or three dates and then you blend it and then you buy one of those tree nut bags that you can buy anywhere and then you just put the milk through that bag and, in five minutes, you have almond milk, and then you put it in the fridge and it’s unbelievably delicious. I like it even better than whole milk, which I like the taste of but it doesn’t agree with me as well. 

Ruth: I like to open a cup and pour it in my milk. 

Alex: There you go. You’re a pod and cap kind of girl, that’s okay. I do live in LA so you start like doing your own almond milk and all that making it but —

Ruth: There you go. 

Alex: Yeah. Cool. 

Ruth: Moving on. 

Alex: Yeah, moving on. 

Ruth: Moving on. 

Alex: Yeah, I mean, high achievers don’t have the time to make their own almond milk, a lot of them, so, yeah, there’s not a lot of time for that. Well, it’s so cool to have you here today. So let’s start with you have such an interesting career. You started your doctorate kind of later in your 40s and you’ve just done a lot of really cool things in your career. So, let’s start at the beginning. How did Ruth Gotian get started?

Ruth: Well, it started when I was premed and that lasted one day. So I went to college, I was sure I was going to be premed, I did very well in all the STEM classes in high school and really enjoyed it. And then I sat in on chemistry and I lasted one class. Not a course, one 40-minute class, and I was like, “Oh, no, no, this is not for me,” and then I studied business because that came naturally to me, I understood that, so my first two degrees are in business. And when I finished grad school, what do good business students do? We go into finance and banking, so I did that for a couple of years, and that was my first inclination that you could be good at something and not enjoy it and that’s really what happened. And I knew I loved working with students, wanted to go back, but I wanted to work with — I did not want to work with undergrads as I had done that before, I wanted to work with people who had too much to lose, right? So I wouldn’t have disciplinary issues to deal with and I quickly realized that was a program called an MD-PhD program so my students would get the dual degrees, MD and PhD, and it had a 3.5 percent acceptance rate so you have a better chance of getting into Stanford than you do this program. And I had noticed that people in this program worked so hard, I mean, they worked their butts off, and they had sacrificed so much to get into this program and yet still people were leaving the workforce and there were books written about it and articles written about it and every year after year after year, this was the topic of every keynote at our national meeting and the needle hadn’t moved. And you know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So I was much more fascinated with not those who were leaving but the other end of the spectrum, those who were staying and whose work was so incredible that I said, “What if we can make more of those people?” Their work would more than make up for anyone who’s leaving, their productivity, their effectiveness. So, as you said, at the age of 43, while working full time and raising my family, I decided to add one more thing and I got my doctorate and then wrote a book. 

Alex: Hence, I introduced us as doctor.

Ruth: Here we are. And then wrote a book and became a dean and a chief learning officer and all that fun stuff. 

Alex: Really cool. And your book, The Success Factor, has been acclaimed. People are fascinated by high achievers, and that kind of in-depth study looking at different people, from astronauts to athletes, through that like academic but very practitioner-oriented lens, I think has really resonated with a lot of people. How did you think about the book, the structure of the book? How did you go about the research process, and ultimately, came up with this really amazing book?

Ruth: So the research actually started with my doctoral dissertation where my mentor, Dr. Bert Shapiro, when I was deciding on a dissertation topic, he said to me six words which changed my life. He said, “Do something important, not just interesting.” Because if it’s interesting, it’s interesting to you, but when it’s important, it could change the way we do things. It can create a ripple effect. And those six words changed it from a single institutional study to a national study. And at that time, I studied the most successful physician scientists of our generation and that’s when I first started meeting Nobel Prize winners and a former Surgeon General of the United States and people who won the biggest scientific awards, the last for the breakthrough, and NIH institute directors and then I was curious if the four elements of success which I found in these physician scientists, if the same thing would hold true for other extreme high achievers and that led me to start interviewing the astronauts and the Olympic champions and NBA champions and CEOs and all of these incredible people and I kept getting pushed to write a book about it, because I was writing articles about it in Forbes and Psychology Today and people were really pushing me to write a book. And it was actually when I was sitting Shiva for the loss of my father, Shiva is the Jewish mourning period, where a publisher reached out to me and said, “Oh, we’ve been reading your work. Will you write a book about it?” I’m really simplifying the story but that’s what really led to the book, The Success Factor, and here we are.

Alex: Really cool. Sorry about your father. 

Ruth: Thank you. But you know what, something really cool, the book came out on the 17-month anniversary of his funeral so I am convinced that who is watching over me.

Alex: That always feels good, doesn’t it? Where people that love you kind of stay on in their presence and that support never goes away. 

Ruth: Never.

Alex: What are some of the common threads that you’ve identified in hyper successful, driven people?

Ruth: So it’s actually there were four of them and it really didn’t matter if you were the Nobel Prize-winning scientist or if you were the Olympic champion, it was the same four things. And I think you’re going to recognize them in yourself as well. So the first one is what we call intrinsic motivation, which is very different from extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is that fire in your belly. When you talk to someone and their whole face lights up, they have tapped into their intrinsic motivation. It’s the reason you get up in the morning. It’s the reason you can’t quiet your mind at night. It’s what you would do for free if you could. That’s intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is you do it for the awards, rewards, bonuses, Olympic medal. If you’re doing it for those reasons, that’s other people judging you. That’s extrinsic motivation. If other people judge you, you can’t sustain that so what’s going to happen as you will fail out or burn out. So tapping into your intrinsic motivation is one of the most important parts. That’s number one. Ready for number two? 

Alex: Yeah, please. 

Ruth: Number two is how you approach challenges. So, yeah, it’s your work ethic, your perseverance, your grit, all of those sexy words. Really what it means, it’s not about working 18, 20 hours a day, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about what you’re doing during those hours, how you’re doing it, and how it is that you are approaching challenges. So look at all the Olympic athletes. They trained for the 2020 Olympics and then a pandemic comes along and the Olympics are postponed for a year but most Olympians did not back out, say, “I’m not doing this for another year, I’m not training.” Most of them actually continued to train. They found a way to do it. They can’t meet with their trainer, they went outside, they did a Zoom, they did what they needed to do. They never questioned if they’ll overcome a challenge. They know that they will. Instead, they focused on how. What is the challenge I haven’t thought of yet? And adding that word “yet” as you approach a challenge completely changes the trajectory because now you are in the driver’s seat. That puts you in charge. And that’s why they don’t give up when they get a failure, when they get a rejection, when a manuscript is rejected, when an experiment doesn’t work. This is why they keep going. 

Alex: The definition of practice, right? When I think about like meditation practice, yoga practice, it is sometimes we don’t think about it for a long-term process of training, let’s say, for the Olympics, but call it, “Let’s go to practice,” but it’s this longer term, sustained approach to development. Yeah, makes sense.

Ruth: Absolutely. And the third one, what worked for you early in your career, you have to continue doing that. You can never rest on your laurels. You have to go back to those foundational techniques. So, one of the people who I interviewed was Neal Katyal, Neal Katyal, you probably see him on the news all the time, he has argued 45 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, more than any other minority lawyer. And I said, “Neal, what do you do to prep for these cases? I mean, it’s the Supreme Court of the United States,” and he said the same three things. He said he prepares a binder that has the answer to every possible question that he might get asked and he walks into the Supreme Court and puts that binder on the table in front of him. He said in 45 cases, he’s never once opened that binder but just the practice of preparing it actually prepares him for the case. The second thing he does are moot courts. They’re like simulated court environments. He said he does five of them before every case and he said he’s been doing that since his first case, moot courts, over and over and over again. And last but not least, if you are Neal Katyal’s children, the night before the opening arguments of the case, your bedtime story becomes the opening arguments, because he said if children can understand it, the court will understand it. And he has done that same exact practice for each of those 45 cases. He doesn’t say, “Oh, I’ve done this before, I don’t need to do moot courts, I don’t need that whole binder, I don’t need to simplify it so a child can understand it.” He does it over and over and over again. And last but not least, and this is the one that surprised me the most, you’ve heard of the billionaires, Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, they are notorious for reading three to eight hours a day, but it’s not reading that made them so successful, it’s opening their minds up to new knowledge. So they do it by reading but how can the rest of us do it? So, sure, we can read books, but maybe we have the time or the bandwidth or the attention for something shorter, such as articles, or maybe we like watching webinars such as the Summit that went on, or maybe we like listening to podcasts, hopefully, we’re sharing some good tips here, or maybe you like LinkedIn Learning courses, or maybe you learn by talking to other people. And that really is because they all have learned that no matter how successful you are, you need to surround yourself with a team of mentors who believe in you more than you believe in yourself. And these four elements of success, it doesn’t matter if you’re an astronaut or a Nobel Prize winner or a CEO, all of them did the same four things and they did them all in tandem.

Alex: Do you think they just ended up with that approach just because it’s what makes sense? And it’s interesting that a lot of these very successful people end up with very similar patterns around how they prepare and how they look at their craft. 

Ruth: Yeah. Well, look, I’m a social scientist so if I said to them, I said, “Alex, how did you become so successful?” and I don’t know what your response would be, “I worked my butt off,” right? “I just work really, really hard,” but I never asked how did you become so successful, because we can’t usually put words to what we don’t really know. So I had to ask very targeted questions because they don’t even realize it. And layer by layer, I was peeling that onion of their story because I was not interested in what I can Google about them, I was much more interested in what it took to get there. And very often, they didn’t even realize it but what happened was the more people I’d interview, and I’ve interviewed over a hundred people for this, the same four elements kept coming up over and over and over again. And I knew coming into the interview that I was going to see these four elements, because after a while, you get what’s called data saturation, you know what you’re going to hear, it was just a different story. So it was my job to put words and categories and labels to the things that they were doing but didn’t even recognize that they were doing. So I was just there to bring it to light.

Alex: Very interesting. So since a lot of our audience, the majority of our audience, are coaches, how can coaches apply some of the learnings from your research to the work they do with clients? 

Ruth: It translates so beautifully because one of the first things we need to do is make sure people have their spark in their work, people have the passion in their work, and doing that passion audit is one of the first things I do when I coach people to make sure that your work is aligned with your passion. And it doesn’t have to be 100 percent of your work. There’s actually research that shows you only need to spend 20 percent of your time working on your passion for the other 80 percent not to burn you out. So burnout has just become so rampant these days that we need to make sure we’re getting back to the passion. So the book comes with a lot of tools and one of those tools is a passion audit, which is something I do every single time I coach someone. The next is really to align your work with your passion, with your goal so we need to be able to find these goals, tap into that intrinsic motivation, but then look at how you’re spending your day. How much of your time, how many of your activities are actually spent and aligned and connected to your goal? So I ask them to start looking at all the committees and task forces and working groups and special projects that they are a part of and I say how many of them are actually related to your goal and as I coach them through this, they notice that while they have a goal, they’re very often on 20, 25 committees and special projects and task forces and they don’t always know how to say no and what happens is that it pulls them further and further and further away from their goal. Because the things that they love to do, the things that are connected to your goal, they’re not even working on them anymore. So then we work on how to say no and how to make sure that your no actually creates an opportunity for somebody else. So while it may be a nuisance for you, it could be a career opportunity for someone else and this is your opportunity to mentor somebody through this transition and actually help them and your saying no means you could be a sponsor for somebody else. So it’s all of these steps and coaching the people through all of these steps and now it opens up time for them. It opens up time to start working on what it is that you love doing. And then we focus on how to increase productivity during that time and we talk about deep work, what time of the day you’re actually doing deep work, how you’re doing it, doing sprints, doing Pomodoro techniques, all of that.

Alex: That’s very interesting, that spending 20 percent of your time on your passion will help you navigate through a lot of the things that perhaps you don’t love doing as much but they are necessary for you to be successful in your work. It’s almost like it reminds me of Google, I think, where they do 10 percent of your time you can spend on like a passion project. I mean, if we can start shaping the way employers think about time, you could unleash so much power. People being able to work on their passion, which will help them to be more effective and efficient at their responsibilities at work. It’s interesting. I think we’re just really starting to think about things in this way. Work used to be a lot more mechanical, companies used to be a lot more inflexible, and I think it’s part of the revolution of bringing coaching at scale in the workplace comes from that approach of really thinking about if you take care of your people, you will grow your company and you will hit all those financial markers you’re looking for but you have to think outside of that financial landscape and really look at people as people and impact beyond work to be able to enable that. And it seems like we’re navigating through that transition of —

Ruth: We’re getting there.

Alex: — different ways of thinking.

Ruth: But, remember, we have five generations in the workforce right now so getting them all aligned, it’s really hard. 

Alex: It is.

Ruth: It’s really hard. But I always like to give this example of getting this idea around. I have written many grants and I’ve written many government grants during my career. I hate writing grants, Alex. It sucks the life out of me. But if I was going to write — if I wanted to create a program, let’s say I wanted to create a program for emerging female coaches and I had to write a grant to fund that program, I would be quite passionate about writing that grant because it’s going to feed into a program that I’m very passionate about. So now I’m excited about writing that grant because I see the possibilities it could have. It doesn’t become the chore it once was. So that’s why we need to be able to blend those activities to feed into our passion and that’s how you can actually decrease burnout.

Alex: Interesting. I know you’ve been doing coaching for a really long time. How did you first learn about coaching? Do you remember the first time you were like, “Oh, there’s a thing out there called coaching and I like it,” do you remember that moment? 

Ruth: So, I studied business so this is something that people who wanted to get better at what they were doing hired coaches and I was not going to be on the sidelines. So I was all into it because I realized, every Olympic athlete has a coach, every single one, nobody’s going there alone. If the Olympic athletes have it, why do the rest of us think that we don’t need one? And it became crystal clear to me because I was that person that watched every single Olympics. I would watch sports I’d never heard of before because I wanted to see greatness at play. And they all had coaches. And after every meet, they ran to their coaches, “What could I have done better? How can I have done it better? How could the start have been better?” and it was very evident to me from watching the Olympics how great it can be. Now, in high school, I was a student athlete so we always had coaches and then switching into the business world just became so natural to do that. And then, of course, as I was advancing, I hired coaches and I hired different coaches based on what I needed at the time. And then I started doing it myself and I do it internally, for physicians, and I do it externally and I’ve been doing it, I mean, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing it.

Alex: Hearing you talk about athletics and the Olympics a lot is making me think about nature versus nurture and you can really see it in athletics because there’s some people that just naturally their bodies are built for certain sports in ways that are going to lead them to be naturally more gifted than other people, but then you have the people that maybe are good enough in terms of, let’s say, their body structure but they worked so hard that not only do they change their body as they work but they get so much practice that they’re able to be better than people that were naturally, let’s say, more gifted than they were. And it’s like a race for greatness, and everyone’s built differently but that idea that you can actually spend the time and focus and become extraordinary, regardless of that nature component, that you really use nurture to grow into world-class performance, it’s fascinating. And applying that to everyone in the workplace and being able to provide access to someone that can help you be great is really, I think, that’s what makes me get out of bed in the morning, as you were saying earlier, like that’s one of the things that I love. So hearing you talk about that and the correlates between athletics and the workplace, I just find it fascinating. 

Ruth: And you have to love it. So you can be really good at something but if you’re sitting and binging Netflix all day, you’ve wasted that talent. And so many of the Olympians whom I’ve interviewed, like Apolo Anton Ohno is the most decorated winter Olympian. He has seven or eight medals. But he actually started out in swimming and then roller skating and he was good, he was state level swimmer, but he didn’t love it. He didn’t love it. But you see him on the ice and his whole body changes. He loves it. Now, we were together, Alex, you and I were together in Nashville for a conference a few weeks ago and while I was there, I actually met up with Scott Hamilton, who is an Olympic champion and he was known, you could see when he goes on the ice, this is his place. Now, if you think about his life, he was never meant to be there. He was as sick as can be his entire childhood. He was raised basically in a hospital. He went on the ice because the doctor said he needs some semblance of a normal childhood. And then he got good and then he started to work at it. And then, after some point, yeah, he won the gold medal and he said, “You know, this phase of my life is over. I wanna do something else. I have a new goal, something else I’m passionate about,” so now he’s raising money in honor of his mother who died from cancer for cancer research and cancer treatments. So that’s his next goal. And, in fact, every single Olympian who I’ve asked, I said, “Can you show me your Olympic medal?” they don’t have it on display because they said to me it was never about the medal. “That’s a chapter in my life.” 

Alex: The intrinsic motivation, you were talking about.

Ruth: Right. “It’s a chapter in my life, not the entire story,” and there’s always another chapter afterwards. So, for Scott Hamilton, it was this cancer research. And they know that and they know that there’s always something afterwards. And if you think about it, every Nobel Prize winner, they should have quit doing science after they won the Nobel if that was the only reason they did it was for that gold medal, for that Nobel Prize, that’s an extrinsic motivation, but not a single one quit because of the intrinsic motivation.

Alex: And I think that’s why you see some athletes like Tom Brady, he’s 45, but it’s hard to hang your boots because you’re just driven to a different level. And it’s not just winning but it’s what it means every day to wake up and want to achieve greatness. I just finished reading the, took me a while to actually read it because it came out in 2009, but Andre Agassi’s autobiography, and I found it just to be fascinating. My sister had read it and told me I should do it and I did and it’s so interesting, because, basically, the beginning starts just like, “I hate tennis,” and you’re like not expecting that, but obviously he loves it in a different way and it takes the whole book for you to realize how much he really doesn’t like to have been put in that position but likes to be in that position and want to be great and just how difficult it is and the toll it takes on you to want to accomplish greatness. And I really got a lot out of that book, even with a coaching client that just came up that, for example, when Agassi realized that he was just aiming for perfection, every shot had to be perfect, that he didn’t let his opponent make mistakes because he was making all the mistakes because he was trying so hard to be perfect. And when he recognized that, he was able to start letting other people play more and make mistakes and his game really took off and went to the next level. And then aligning with what you were just saying, when he was done with tennis, the thing that inspire him the most is to create this school for underprivileged children in Las Vegas and it’s so interesting that the thing that — because when you read the book, you’ll see that he really didn’t like school and he was a high school dropout and the thing that he was the most inspired about and the thing that he thinks is the best thing he did in his life was to start this school for underprivileged children and school was that not the thing that he really liked growing up. So it’s just people are fascinating and people at that level, operating at that level, just are very interesting to study and, yeah, so I wanted to show a little bit of the Andre Agassi book. I don’t know if you’ve read that.

Ruth: I have not but what you’re saying is not surprising, because I’m often asked how do I define success, because the definition changes based on who you ask, but the definition I used, which was two other parts to the research that we don’t need to get into but the first part is people who have achieved something, that created a paradigm shift in the way we do things, think about things, process things. We are different today because of something that they did. That’s number one. Number two, as they ascend and they start going on to greatness, they are pulling other people up with them because they realized that a spotlight on someone else does not detract from the light on them. So they’re very intentionally pulling up other people with them. And last but not least, when they reach the pinnacle of their success, they are mentoring other people, and they do that either one on one or through groups, in a one-to-many model. So when you said that Andre Agassi opened up a school, I’m not surprised. That is perfectly aligned with how these high achievers, the true ones, view success. Paying it forward. 

Alex: Even talking about Andre Agassi, he had this competition going on with Pete Sampras, it’s a legendary rivalry, that makes me think as you were saying that, you can also get inspired by your competition and that interplay. I mean, you see it in the wild with animals, like they’re literally adapted, an animal’s body is adapted essentially based on who their predator is, so the relationship between the prey and the predator is like this very longstanding relationship that shapes who they are based on what they compete against. And it’s the same with athletes, like they —

Ruth: And all humans.

Alex: — have this relationship — and all humans, yeah. I mean, when someone breaks a record, that opens up the pathway for someone else to say, “Look, this person created enabled this record,” but they open up this competition to be able to go, “Hey, if that person can do it, I can do it,” and it’s how we push each other to be great. There’s obviously the dark side of competition, which is a zero sum game, but a lot of what you’re describing right now is that a lot of these extremely successful people see competition differently and it’s not a zero sum game. 

Ruth: That’s right. They actually crave the feedback. They crave the challenge. They crave the competition, because they know that’s what’s going to make them better. If you have no boundaries at all, if you have nobody pushing, nobody running on your tail, nobody in your shadow, you’re going to start resting on your laurels. You’re going to start getting lazy and this is the way to actually push you forward.

Alex: And a lot of what we’re talking about now is really pushing into this unchartered territory and that’s when I keep thinking about, “Well, that’s why it’s so important to have a coach,” not only to propel you to get there but to understand where you are once you’ve gotten there, and that’s not an easy thing to do. 

Ruth: Yeah, that’s what you need the accountability for and I think the coach is very good because it goes back to success and that perfection. We don’t always recognize it when we see it so a coach is probably the best gift you can give yourself to be that accountability tool. Before you set out on your journey, they can ask you, “Well, what would success look like? How will you know if you reached it?” And write that down, because when they reach it, they’re already thinking about the next thing that they need to accomplish and they didn’t take any time at all to recognize what they’ve just been through, what they have just accomplished. And you can say, “You have just succeeded, you have just accomplished that thing that you said would make you successful. Now we’re setting new goals? Fantastic. How are we going to know when we achieve them?” So that coach is the greatest accountability partner that there is. And they can also tell you when you’re just going too much off the mark, too much focused on perfection. 

Alex: So we talked a lot about the positive elements of being a high achiever, what allows them to operate at that level, which I think it’s an incredible thing to see. What about the dark side of being a high achiever at that level? What did you uncover? 

Ruth: People at this level, they have figured out ways to mitigate the dark parts and they have a lot of support systems in place for that. But the part that still exists is, one, your calendar. Everybody wants a piece of you. Everybody wants, and if you’re not careful and you don’t have very, very strict boundaries, they could just take over your life and then you’re actually not going to accomplish anything. The second part is that it can be kind of lonely, kind of isolating, because when you’re operating at that level, there are not too many people operating at that level and you don’t get to be around other people and have these normal conversations because they don’t understand what you’re working so hard for, what you are working toward, what you are hoping to achieve. They can’t understand that if they’re not at that same level. And that’s why you see high achievers tend to hang out with their own. So a funny story that happened, at my book launch, there was an event for everyone who is in the book because I knew them but they did not know each other so it was in January and one of the astronauts texted me and he said, “Oh, will Dr. Fauci be there?” because Dr. Fauci is in the book.

Alex: Just one thing, how cool is it you having astronauts texting you? I’ve never gotten a text from an astronaut.

Ruth: Well, I’ll tell you why. People like to work with people who they know, like, and trust, and when people know, like, and trust you, it goes way beyond the research interview and that’s how you develop strong relationships and if you know how to cultivate these relationships and be your authentic self, these people can very quickly become friends. And that’s why these Nobel Prize winners and astronauts and I, we text each other and we’ve become good friends because we have found out that focus on what we have in common versus how different we are and it is never ever transactional. Never. So —

Alex: So your party.

Ruth: My party, the virtual party. So, the astronaut texted him and he said, “Oh, will Fauci be there?” Dr. Fauci and I said, “Oh, no, we’ve got a pandemic going on.” Omicron was just going on. I said, “But this Nobel Prize winner will be there,” and he said, “Oh, Nobel Prize winner, now, that’s a high achiever.” And I said to the astronaut, “You went in a tin can in the sky into space. If you’re not a high achiever, what does that say about the rest of us?” And I quickly got to thinking, everyone he knows is an astronaut or working in the space program. These are his people. These are the people he’s with 24/7. Several weeks later, I’m telling this story to the Nobel Prize winner and he said, “That’s really interesting because I know a lot of Nobel Prize winners, we get together all the time, we have conferences, we see each other at the Nobel ceremony, we communicate with each other, but I don’t know any astronauts.” I said, “I can fix that.” So I introduced the astronaut to a Nobel Prize winner, which is my lesson for everyone that everyone has something to offer. These people clearly outrank me in every single way —

Alex: Well, not in their ability to connect with other people outside of their network that are also great. There you go.

Ruth: Exactly. There you go. So now they’ve got this whole bromance going and I think they’re going to collaborate on something but —

Alex: You’re like the high achiever matchmaker.

Ruth: That’s it.

Alex: Yeah.

Ruth: But it’s really the issue of people tend to hang out with their own because that is where they are mostly understood. So going back to your question on the dark side, it’s that they’re misunderstood, that’s why they often hang out with people who are just like them. And it’s up to the rest of us to bring them into our worlds, bring them into each other’s world. And I always say we’re all a Venn diagram, we just need to figure out where we overlap. And for me, for that astronaut and that Nobel Prize winner, it’s basically two people who grew up in New York at around the same time and they were both in my book. That was the commonalities they had. 

Alex: Cool. Yeah, I think a lot, I spend a lot of time thinking about the dark side of success, because when I look at society, civilization today, I find it so interesting that we enable all these gadgets that, let’s say, FaceTime, FaceTiming someone, what we’re doing right now, you’re like doing Zooms all the time. When I was growing up in the 80s, that was kind of out of like the Jetsons or something, and now this is our reality, but the more we’ve had these mobile devices, the more you walk around and you look at a couple having dinner and they’re both on their phone. And, to me, that’s a little bit of the dark side of success and progress, and we push ourselves to new heights only to sometimes not realize where we are. That’s where that question came from around the dark side. It’s just so interesting, when you achieve at that level, what are some of the things that perhaps are blind spots or perhaps are commonalities of things that perhaps don’t work the way they should with people at that level? It’s just interesting. Before in a green room, just to build on that, I was congratulating you for being named like the number one upcoming leadership thinker in the Thinkers50 ecosystem so, congratulations. 

Ruth: Thank you.

Alex: And we started talking about impostor syndrome. So I know you’re an expert in the topic and this is something that comes up a lot for coaches working with clients. Let’s talk a little bit about impostor syndrome, which I see it’s a little bit of the dark side of success, because to have impostor syndrome, you actually have to not be an impostor. I’m sure, in some ways, sometimes, we are impostors because sometimes you are. The impostor syndrome is not actually real in certain situations for certain people, but when it is actually real, it is something that comes up a lot in coaching and you as an expert in that topic, I thought, let’s talk about it. 

Ruth: All right. So, it’s really fascinating to me, every physician scientist who I interviewed, even those that don’t see patients anymore, they still keep their medical license active. And I said, “But you haven’t seen patients in decades,” and they said, “Well, just in case this whole science thing doesn’t work out, I need something to fall back on.” I said, “If the science thing doesn’t work out? You won the Nobel. What do you mean?” And they said it could just disappear. Now, of course, it’s not going to disappear. And I never really understood that but it kept coming up over and over and over again, and when I was in the green room for the Thinkers50 Gala, because it was virtual, and I was told by the co-founders, by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove that they wanted me to essentially be the hostess of the green room and I thought, “Oh, it’s because I’m an extrovert and I can just chat with people.” Well, that’s what I was doing. I took my job, I felt like Oprah, I took my job very seriously. And all of a sudden, I am pulled out of that room into this other room and I said, “What’s going on?” And all of a sudden, I’m thrown on the virtual stage and I hear my name called and I was stunned. And they start asking me questions. For the life of me, it was an out of body experience, I have no idea what they asked. I have no idea if I was the least bit articulate as they were responding. 

Alex: I’m sure you were. I’m sure you were. 

Ruth: I’m not sure. I won’t look back. 

Alex: Now, everyone’s going to start Googling that, like Ruth at the Thinkers50 Gala.

Ruth: I’m not so sure. But the award came in the mail and it’s an impressive looking award and it’s heavy. Do you know I kept the box for, I don’t know, two months? Because I was sure I was going to get an email saying, “We made a mistake. Can you please send it back?” Now my name is engraved in it but I was convinced that they were going to say it was a mistake. It’s the same thing when I got my doctorate, it took me five years before I ever framed my diploma. It took another two years before I ever hung it on the wall. I still have a binder with all of the hundreds of pages to study for the certification exam.

Alex: Interesting.

Ruth: It’s fascinating, but what I have realized, now 70 percent of us suffer from impostor syndrome, it’s real. It happens when it’s a new experience we’re not used to. But the way to overcome it, and there are many ways and I’ve written about this and other people have written about it, but the one that has worked the most for me is that this is when something new happens, something you achieve that you’ve never achieved before so it feels different and our brains are confused, but rather than it being a stressor, a trigger for anxiety, we need to understand that that feeling is a marker for success. We just achieved something. That’s why we did it and we just need to retrain our brain to say, “Yay, you got something. This is great. Throw away the box it came in. This is yours. You have achieved it. No need to stress out.” That’s the approach I’m trying to take.

Alex: I like flipping it on its head and really looking at you can only suffer from impostor syndrome when you’re not an impostor, and that, although, as we were talking earlier, you may actually be experiencing impostor syndrome but it’s not impostor syndrome, it’s just that maybe you’re not ready for a certain challenge. So I think recognizing that is also important. But for most very successful people that a lot of the coaches listening in are working with, flipping it on its head and saying, “Look, this is a good thing that you’re feeling this way. Now let’s explore it,” it is really a great pathway for having a good conversation. As you were talking about your diploma, it reminded me that I still have my PhD diploma in my —

Ruth: It’s in a file.

Alex: — the FedEx envelope they sent it in, like, yeah, it’s somewhere there —

Ruth: That’s exactly what happened. 

Alex: So the first one that they sent me actually had like a thing in the corner so I called the school, I was like, “Hey, send me a new one.” I mean, I spent five years or eight years working on this thing. Send me one that doesn’t have the corner all scrambled. And they sent me another one —

Ruth: Alex, next time, I’m coming to the office. I want to see it on your wall. You’ve earned it. 

Alex: I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think it’s impostor syndrome, I think it’s just like — I don’t know. But maybe it is. I’ll book a call with you —

Ruth: We could explore that.

Alex: Yeah, we’ll explore it and then you connect me with an astronaut, I want to ask some questions to an astronaut. But you know what’s funny? My Jewish mother, of course, has the version that came in first and it’s in her house and it’s like —

Ruth: Framed, I’m sure.

Alex: — framed, (a), it is 100 percent — 

Ruth: Not in a FedEx envelope. 

Alex: No, it’s not but mine, I have two copies now, I guess, because the first one was like, so I have mine somewhere over there. I don’t want to lose because it’s important, it’s an incredible achievement. I don’t want to lose it but I’m not quite ready to hang it yet. So we’ll see.

Ruth: I did it from peer pressure.

Alex: Who was pressuring you? 

Ruth: The people I work with.

Alex: Yeah.

Ruth: I had to find my other degrees. They were still bubble wrapped from when I moved 18 years earlier. 

Alex: I have my undergrad and my master’s degree diploma, I have them framed because I used to work at CCL, the Center for Creative Leadership, and there, most people hang their diplomas there, I was like, “Hey —

Ruth: Your brag wall. 

Alex: — at that point, I was like I have a master’s, I was like I got to display it. But, yeah, by the time I got the PhD, I was not going to the CCL office and I don’t think people at coaching.com necessarily will be like, “Hey, where’s your diploma?” but it’s nice to have it there. 

Ruth: Well, next time, we’re going to have a latte with almond milk and I want to see your diploma on the wall.

Alex: Well, I’ll find — the thing is, I paint so I don’t have a lot of wall space. I have my paintings in the walls and then I have my friend Joey’s amazing photograph, he’s an amazing photographer, in one of the walls and then I run out. But, Ruth, maybe that’s an excuse, I will frame it and we’ll figure it out. 

Ruth: Look, framing it is the first step. Why don’t you just do that? 

Alex: I know, right? 

Ruth: First get it framed, then we’ll worry about getting it on the wall. How’s that for coaching? 

Alex: I will do that. So, yeah, that’s great coaching. In the moment. So now I’m like, okay, let’s go back to the podcast. Let’s stop this coaching session —

Ruth: Enough about me.

Alex: Yeah, yeah. Please, please. 

Ruth: But that’s the thing about coaches, we can’t turn it off. We can’t turn it off.

Alex: Look, I’m more of an entrepreneur than a — I’ve done like hundreds of coaching engagements, my PhD is in coaching, but I don’t — I think since I’m more of an entrepreneur, like it actually takes effort for me to turn it on because, when you’re executing and you running a software company, I have to use coach-like behaviors and approach, I’d love a coaching style of management, I think it’s the most effective, but there’s a coaching style of management and then there’s also the coach approach on and those are slightly different. And like I try to not have that on, especially with friends too, but I know coaches, when we go to conferences, that you and I go to, I always appreciate the coaches that are magnificent coaches but I can’t tell that they’re doing that and there’s an art to that. Does that resonate with you? Because some — I’m like, dude, this is not a coaching session, we’re just having a drink.

Ruth: We’re just having a conversation in the Delta Lounge, look, I totally, totally get it. But you know what you’re telling me is that your passions have changed and that’s okay because our passions change, especially when we have transitions in our lives. So that will always be a part of you, that will always be who you are, but your focus has changed on this new passion. Now, I sat next to you when you were showing me the software and I saw you geeking out. You could have talked about that all day, and something was off by a millimeter on the software on the screen and you needed to get that fixed immediately, where I was like, “Oh, it’s no big deal,” you’re like, “No, it must get fixed,” because that was what you were passionate about. So it just changed over time. 

Alex: Right, and it’s cool when passions build on each other and that happens. So the software, ultimately, is to enable coaches and clients to work together and accomplish people’s objectives and organizational objectives. I like that about my passion, how it evolved, that it was like I’m really passionate about coaching but at the moment, I don’t do as much coaching as I do creating these ecosystems so you saw that. Exactly. 

Ruth: But that’s your foundation now. You couldn’t have one without the other. 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And, one day, I think I would want to go back to doing more of that and writing a book. So one of the things that I really want to do one day, and I cannot possibly do it right now, it doesn’t feel responsible to write a book given all the scope of my responsibilities and the fact that the book is about human development but it’s not necessarily. Sometimes, you write a book and it’s marketable for your business and it’s a great thing to do. In my case, it’s more of a passion project. But I always admire people that are able to push through the development of a book. So, how was it for you to write the book and get the routine? I know you probably used a lot of your coffee pods. But how was the experience? Because I know a lot of coaches, writing a book is either the best thing they’ve ever done, the worst thing they’ve ever done, or the thing they really want to do. So how was the experience for you? 

Ruth: Well, I will say it was building up to it for a long time. So my grandmother always told me I was a great writer, but I felt like I was always writing what other people wanted me to write, book reports and things like that, and I was like that’s not exciting. But I thought there was like, maybe there was something in there. So I’m an academic so I write a lot of academic articles but if you’ve ever gone through a peer review process, that’s not so exciting and that is not a great confidence builder. But I said before I write the book, I need to know what the other side is like. What happens behind the scenes? So I co-edited a book with two other deans and I got together over 75 authors and I had to edit that and work with the publisher and see what were their pain points and really what were they excited about. That actually taught me a lot. And then, over the time, I started writing for Forbes and Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review. That gave me the content because I was like, “Do I even have what to write a book about?” But then I saw that these articles, hundreds of articles later, oh, yes, I have a lot to talk about and a lot to teach. And then it was actually the former Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. David Satcher, when I was telling him this is about the original research on physician scientists, he said, “Ruth, you have to publish this. You have to write a book,” and I said, “Ah, who would be interested in this?” and he’s like, “No, no, no, you have to write this book.” And here we are years later, that book was written.

Alex: That’s incredible. What is next for you? 

Ruth: Another book. Now I’m addicted. 

Alex: Yeah, do you have a semblance of what it is?

Ruth: Yes. It’ll be about mentoring and I figured out a system. So I work full time so writing during the week was just not possible for me and I realized that I am more focused in the early morning hours of the day and if I can get what I want to write in my head, I could type it very, very quickly, and that’s really what I did. I spent all week during my commute thinking about what I want to write next and then, on weekend mornings, I would write it up. So, basically, the chapter would be written in one or two weekends, spent the third weekend editing it and submitting it, and that was my process. And now I’ve got this process down. I’ve got it. And I think the next one, which will probably be a collaboration with another person, we’re pitching it out now, hopefully, that’ll be the next book. 

Alex: That’s awesome. And I have one last question for you today. So, success, being an expert in success, I think it makes you also become an expert in failure and how to turn failure into success and we didn’t really speak too much about that. And as coaches, sometimes, we coached people through many successes and how to make people better and how to help them continue to grow in a path that is very linear and people are doing well and they get a promotion. But in many other cases, success is not as linear. 

Ruth: Yeah. 

Alex: So how do very successful people cope with failure? 

Ruth: I think they understand that failure is part of the process and it’s not really a failure, it’s what didn’t work this time and what can I learn from it. And we all need to develop that mindset of the musicians and of the athletes of what is that feedback to make it even better so I can be better, faster, stronger, more fluid. What can I learn from this experience? I may not have gotten it now but what could I do differently? Not necessarily better but differently for next time. It’s an opportunity for enhancement. And I think all of the high achievers, there’s really one quote that they live by, which is, “Fear not trying more than you fear failing.” Failure is part of the process but you have to fear not trying more than you fear failing.

Alex: We hear this a lot in business, sometimes the biggest risk is not taking action.

Ruth: That’s right.

Alex: And it applies, for sure. Well, I said it was our last question, but I love talking to you so I’m going to open up one more theme here. In human development, when you look at how people develop, there’s really a lot of different lines of development and some people are very developed in some lines and very underdeveloped in some. In fact, when people are hyper developed in certain lines of development, it is very likely that they’re very underdeveloped in others, and this applies both to individuals and societies. When you think about the people that you’ve encountered in this journey of connecting with amazing, very successful people, does that resonate with your experience? I’m thinking, for example, of someone that is an amazing engineer but perhaps cannot invite someone on a date, it’s like they just can’t muster the way of like, “How do I go and actually engage with this person and take them out for coffee?” like it’s just such a — we’re so imbalanced when it comes to development in some ways. So I just want you to expound a little bit on that. 

Ruth: Yeah. It wasn’t so much of that kind of awkwardness but it was more of a part of they were very insulated by people who are in the same industry as them. Not because they didn’t want to expand, they didn’t always know how to expand because they were so focused on their work. But here’s to their benefit, they will be the first ones to ask for help. The rest of us don’t ask for help this easily, but they’ll say, “I don’t know how to do this. Do you know how I can do this?” and this happened over and over and over again. One of the Nobel Prize winners, he wrote a book. He got the Nobel Prize, I’m never going to get a Nobel Prize. He got the —

Alex: Never say never. You never know. Maybe your next career.

Ruth: I’m not a scientist. That’s not a goal. But he won the Nobel Prize and he said to me, he said, “Your book is doing really well. I wrote my book. I’d like it to do better, but all I know are other scientists. Do you know how I can reach people in other industries?” and I said, “This I know how to do.” I know marketing and I started plugging him into all of these other things and then his book is doing extremely well because he was able to branch out. He asked me. I am a generation younger than him, I am not in the same field as him, I don’t know the first thing about getting the Nobel Prize or doing the science that he does, but he knew there was a gap in his knowledge in one area and the high achievers are willing to ask anyone who has greater expertise for help. And they don’t see asking for help as a sign of weakness, they see it as a sign of strength. So I think that’s a great lesson that all of us can learn, because a lot of us are afraid to ask for help. That’s probably in our own human development. Somewhere it was embedded in our brain that if you don’t know something and if you ask for help, that’s weak. It’s not weak. It’s strong. It’s strong. So, they are fully aware of what their challenges are and they work diligently to overcome them. 

Alex: Self-awareness and not being afraid of saying things the way they are so that they can change if they have to.

Ruth: That’s right.

Alex: Well, and maybe some time when we talk, we’ll be like, “Well, welcome, Ruth, Nobel Prize winner for…” maybe you win the one for peace because you’re making so many connections —

Ruth: You think? Maybe. 

Alex: — with like different fields. Maybe in the future, as science becomes even more dominant, maybe making all these connections creates so much value that it’s like —

Ruth: You never know —

Alex: — or something like that. You don’t have to be a scientist to get a Nobel Prize. 

Ruth: Not that one, but Peter Hotez, he endorsed my book and he’s actually nominated for the Nobel Prize this year. You never know. 

Alex: Well, there you go. I mean, you have the right connections. That’s awesome. Look, thank you so much for being here today.

Ruth: My honor.

Alex: Fascinating conversation and just keep doing what you’re doing, Ruth. I love your work. It’s fascinating. It’s so applicable for coaches. I love books that are not necessarily meant for coaches but when you read it, it just makes so much sense. And I love coaches because coaches work with people at scale to help them be better. So, to me, there’s very few professions out there that have so much impact as coaching and I think people like you that are focused on the value and power of coaching and your work is a little bit outside of core coaching but it’s so applicable, I just find it fascinating and super impactful, so thank you. 

Ruth: Well, that’s why at the end of every single chapter, I actually listed coaching questions.

Alex: Love it.

Ruth: And it says Coaching Questions, because this is really for coaches to use.

Alex: Honestly, absolutely, and it’s just — coaching has so much potential. I mean, it’s such an exciting time that we live in. Ten years ago, people are like, “Well, really? A coach? Why would a company want to purchase coaching for their employees?” and the last 10 years have really been transformative in terms of understanding. Like you said, if an athlete has a coach, why doesn’t an executive? Why doesn’t a manager? And we’re in the age of coaching across the organizational hierarchy so lots of challenges to be solved to make that truly super scalable, but, I mean, just the number of people that are coming into the coaching profession is fascinating. So we’ll see where it takes us, but such a pleasure having you today and looking forward to continue our conversations, both online, offline, recorded, not recorded, so looking forward to that. 

Ruth: Likewise.