You really need to pay attention to the mental game, especially to your point with AI, with what's going on in the world of business, the pressure on everyone at work, the lack of engagement. The surveys are unbelievable. Like, more a majority of employees are not engaged at work. That's part of the mental game, and we don't even talk about it.
Welcome to Start With a Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With a Win headquarters, it's Adam Contos with Start With a Win.
What if the biggest leadership advantage isn't strategy, talent, or even experience, but psychology? Today, I'm joined by Sebastian Page, someone who sits right at the intersection of leadership, decision-making, and performance under pressure. He's the head of the global multi-asset division and chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price, overseeing more than 500 billion in assets, but his influence goes far beyond markets. With over two decades of leadership experience, deep research in positive sports and personality psychology, multiple award-winning research papers, and regular appearances on networks like CNBC and Bloomberg, Sebastian brings a rare blend of rigor and real-world insight. He's also the author of multiple finance books and has a great one out now, The Psychology of Leadership. This is going to be a powerful conversation about how great leaders think, decide, and win, especially when it matters most. Let's get into it. Sebastian, welcome to Start With a Win.
Adam, no exaggeration, I am psyched, I'm pumped, I've been looking forward to this.
Awesome. This is obviously both of our favorite topic here, the whole aspect of leadership, but we're going to tie a lot of AI into this also, and I think that's really important in this day and age, since our employees, the businesses, even the customer base. Everybody's kind of going, what about AI? How does it impact my leadership? Things of that nature. But I want to start with your book because there's a huge concept in there and you can even tie this into AI if you want because I personally do in my life, but you talk about leading yourself first before you can lead others and you know, we see that as a problem in this day and age, but there's also some solutions to that. So, talk to us about that.
What do you think? What does lead yourself first mean to begin with? Okay, first Adam, I want to say I finished my manuscript maybe a couple months before ChatGPT came out. I wrote the entire book as a traditional author. And by the way, AI is awesome to help write. There's nothing wrong about it and I hope we'll talk about that. But you're asking about managing yourself before you manage others. It's a big theme in the psychology of leadership. I bring in resilience into the practice of leadership. Super important. Adam, it was important in my own development. I got the idea for the book when I was stressed at work and not only was I stressed, but I was stressed about stressing. You know, I was telling myself, oh, you've been doing this for 25 years in the rough and tumble world of money management. You can handle this. Why are you stressed? And I discovered sports psychology initially talking to a sports psychologist and I became completely fascinated with the whole world of positive psychology. In society, we think of psychology as treating mental illness. Super important role. Anxiety, clinical depression. But half the academic research, at least half if you go on Google Scholar, is now on the positive side. What goes well when you do things the right way? What makes people thrive? What makes people happy? What makes athletes perform? What about the mental game behind leadership? So, that's how I weaved in know yourself, your ability to improve your resilience, and you'll be a better leader over time. That's the whole idea, Adam. So, I'm glad you're starting with that.
It's fascinating you say this because, I mean, you're when you talk about performance psychology and super achievement and things of that nature, and then, you know, obviously, folks like yourself and myself, we get together in small masterminds with other key business leaders. And it's interesting and always seems to start with tell me a life hack or what are you doing to make yourself better. But when we go to the office, we never have that conversation, it seems like. Is that safe to say?
We don't. We don't. I think the world of business at large does not spend enough time on the mental game of it, whether it's entrepreneurs or large blue-chip companies. We think HR is just this thing that we go to and we have issues to resolve. It's not. We really need to pay attention to the mental game, especially to your point, with AI, with what's going on in the world of business, the pressure on everyone at work, the lack of engagement. The surveys are unbelievable. Like, more than a majority of employees are not engaged at work. That's part of the mental game, and we don't even talk about it. I like to use the example, in terms of super achievement in the positive side of psychology of Felix Baumgartner. Now, Adam, does that name ring a bell? He's not as famous as he should be.
I think he jumped out of a balloon, didn't he?
Yes. Yes. It's amazing what he did. And I'm glad you know him. He's at Red Bull. He's sponsored by Red Bull. He got into this small capsule attached to a giant helium balloon, went up 24 miles vertical to the edge of space. He basically was in space, but there was just enough gravity to bring him down to Earth, wearing a special suit, but nothing with any equipment beyond that, a helmet. He jumped out and skydived. He was in freefall for 4 minutes. He fell for 10 minutes. First human being to break the sound barrier without any equipment. He didn't know if he was going to pass out. This is like a crazy achievement, right? Felix Baumgartner famously was coached by a sports psychologist. His achievement was driven by, in great part, the mental game. Once you reach an elite level in business, in sports, what's the differentiator? It's not the skills anymore. It's the mental game. He had his coach prepare him. He had his sports psychologist talk to him the day of the event. The sports psychologist's name is Michael Gervais. He's actually a great book author as well. He's got great books out there. I use this as an introduction to say, look, you think of psychology as treating anxiety and depression. Super important, and basically the rates of anxiety and depression are only going up in society, but there's a whole other world on the positive side that we constantly underestimate. Adam, that's why I ended up writing the book. I ended up writing the book to improve myself, too. In the intro, I'll say, you're reading this just for self-improvement. I wrote it for the same reason.
I love that. You're talking to yourself in the book, you know, to make yourself better.
So, I had to switch book agents. And my first book agent was very critical, and we had creative differences. But, as an example of that, and he was right, and it's not in the book anymore, but I was talking about this concept that basically goes back to Marcus Aurelius. One of the best Stoic philosophy books of all time is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It turns out most scholars think that when he wrote this, by the way, he was a practitioner. He wasn't just a thinker. He was a Roman emperor. You know, a small job. But, most people think that he wrote the thing not to publish, as notes to himself, talking to himself. So, in my intro, I go, just like Marcus Aurelius, we're on this journey together, dear reader, and I'm going to dig into the research for you, cuz I'm a research nerd. And my book agent was like, dude, you're not Marcus Aurelius. Don't compare yourself to Marcus Aurelius. Take that out. So, I took it out, but now I mentioned it today.
There you go. Do you think writing this book made you a better business leader?
Oh, 100%. 100%. Because I discovered so much about sports psychology and positive psychology, what makes people thrive. It's not your positive emotions day to day. It's your engagement, the quality of your relationships, the meaning you bring to your work, and your long-term accomplishments. That's called the PERMA model. Positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment. I learned all of this. And then this idea that optimal performance, especially in sports psychology, does not occur at a stress level of zero. In other words, like we walk around trying to reduce our stress to perform better. But you can flip that on its head and say, if you're not activated enough, you're not going to perform at your best. And to me that was one of the most important insights. And you can translate that into how much pressure you put on the team when you're managing a team and so on. Of course, stress is bad. Once you reach the point where your performance decreases because you're too stressed, it can kill you. I mean, it'll mess up your appetite, your sleep, your sex drive, your everything will go wrong if you're too stressed. But up to a point, stress increases performance. It increases your ability to focus. Put two athletes side by side, ask them to run a 100-meter dash, the one that's more anxious is probably going to run faster because he's got the adrenaline pumping, he's got the biologically things are happening that are going to improve his or her performance.
I think that's a really important aspect. You know, I've heard the analogy of leadership is like a muscle. If you don't exercise it, if you don't put it under pressure, it's going to atrophy. So, I really like what you're saying there, you know, adding that stress, functioning under stress. Do you think goals add to that stress and help us get better? You know, you have a section about goals and don't die on Everest or something like that.
Yeah, goals are super important. Right, for a leader? What's your job as a leader? It's to set the goals. If you don't, who will? That's your job. And by the way, your job is to set long-term goals. Show people the long-term direction for the organization. So, I end up spending quite a few chapters on goals. What happens in high-performing organizations is not a lack of goals. It's overusing the goals. Creating measurable goals that lead to goal-induced blindness. So, I introduce my readers in The Psychology of Leadership, of course, to the importance of goals, but that's trite. To the risks of goal-induced blindness. And goal-induced blindness in the literature in psychology is defined as being so obsessed with your measurable goal that you neglect everything else in your life that's not goal-related directly. It could be your health. It could be your ethics. You know, people get so obsessed with reaching certain metrics and goals, they start cheating and lying. So, that's goal-induced blindness. The famous example in the literature in psychology is about Mount Everest because, you know, Adam, I'm going to ask you, to me it's a large number. I would not try to climb Everest, but do you know the death rate if you want to reach the summit of Everest? What's the percentage chance that you die if you want to reach the summit of Everest?
I'm going to guess 50%. 40%? Probably lower. Like about 15%?
Okay, so it's 4%. And maybe given your guess, you feel like that's low, but 4% to me as a risk manager, that's in my day job, it's huge. Like think about every 100 people that summit Everest, four die. And in order to get to the summit, you have to step over frozen dead bodies. This is what this goal-induced blindness does to you. But, you know what the best climbers do? Someone has the world record of Everest summits over 30 times. Do you know what they're good at? They're good at knowing when to quit. They're good at managing their goal-induced blindness. They know when the risks are too high, even though they've invested so much to get so close to the summit. And they'll quit. They're good at that quitting decision, which is greatly underrated in life and in business.
