I'm coaching grade seven volleyball right now. They're like three weeks, four weeks into their volleyball careers. And in practice, they're actually pretty wild. They're kind of kids that have learned sports on the playground. And so, they have that natural talent. In warm-up, in these little mini tournaments we go to where we play against other schools, they're jump setting, they're calling the ball, they just want that ball. And then these mini 10-minute games come on. Their energy level goes from a nine out of 10 to a two out of 10. That look in their face where these very brave boys suddenly look terrified has me fascinated about trying to operate at our best in a state of fear and of stress.
Nate, that's why I wrote the book. I was stressed at work, you know, not unlike the volleyball players. I was looking at the scoreboard in money management and freezing.
Welcome to Leading with Curiosity. Command and control leadership is dead. We interview leaders, entrepreneurs, and executive coaches challenging old paradigms and fostering cutting edge leadership. Here's your host, certified executive coach Nate Leslie.
What do 12-year-old volleyball players playing volleyball for their first time and corporate leaders have in common? That's something we're going to explore today because my guest Sébastien Page is the chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price. But we're not going to talk about money today. We're going to talk about people and the psychology of leadership, which is the title of his most recent book. Sébastien, welcome to Leading with Curiosity.
Nate, I'm fired up. We're recording this toward the end of the week and I'm so excited about our conversation today.
I'm coaching grade seven volleyball right now. And the boys I'm coaching, it's their first year. They're like three weeks, four weeks into their volleyball careers. And in practice, they're actually pretty wild. They're a really active group in downtown Vancouver here. They're really energetic. They're kind of a group of kids that have learned sports on the playground. And so they have that natural talent. In warm-up, in these little mini tournaments we go to where we play against other schools, they're great. They're exciting. They're jump setting. They're calling the ball. They're, you know, stepping on each other's toes. They just want that ball. And then these mini 10-minute games come on. Parent volunteer referees like me, a few parents in the gym, but their energy level goes from a 9 out of 10 to a 2 out of 10. And they start like hands in their pockets and fiddling. By the end of the hour, we're literally getting back to where we were. But just seeing that look in their face where these very brave boys suddenly look terrified has me fascinated about this idea of trying to operate at our best in a state of fear and a state of stress. I think this connects to why you wrote your book, The Psychology of Leadership. But what's coming to mind for you right now? And how did you end up writing this book?
I love that intro and the teaser. What do leaders in the corporate world have in common with 12-year-old volleyball players? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. It's actually, Nate, that's why I wrote the book. I was stressed at work, you know, not unlike the volleyball players. I was looking at the scoreboard in money management and freezing a little bit. So, not only was I stressed, but I was also stressing about stressing. I was telling myself, I've been doing this for 25 years. I shouldn't have that reaction to the intensity of the job. I ended up exploring sports psychology, positive psychology, as well as personality psychology. Wrote the book part-time on the weekends. Read hundreds of scientific articles. Because I'm a nerd, I've published in scientific journals in finance and economics. So I had a lot of fun reading scientific literature from another field and making connections and ultimately published The Psychology of Leadership recently a few months ago. So, but the genesis, the origin story is I was stressed at work and I wanted to improve myself. And in the intro of the book, I ended up writing to my readers, you're reading this for self-improvement. I wrote it for the same reason. Now, let's go to the volleyball players for a second.
Okay? There are a few things going on here that I discuss in The Psychology of Leadership. First, I'm going to surmise that there's a difference for them between practicing, having fun, and being live in a game when they're looking at the scoreboard. And that difference is documented in sports psychology as the mastery orientation versus the ego orientation. A mastery-oriented athlete gets excited about getting better at what they do. A golf player gets excited about improving their swing. That's a mastery orientation. In business, in my world, I get excited about getting better at finding new sources of research to understand capital markets. All mastery. But when the scoreboard turns on now, it turns into ego, which is a different motivation and a different stress level. So, I think there's a little bit of that going on. Second, I'm going to guess they're clearly having a stress response.
Yes. One of the main findings in the book that applied directly to my life was realizing that optimal performance does not happen at a stress level of zero. That you actually need stress and activation. Well documented in sports psychology. However, the stress response looks like an inverted U curve. And when you get too stressed in sports or in life, you choke. And then stress hurts your performance. Not only your performance, it hurts your health. It's bad for you. Your cortisol levels get all out of whack. But these curves in my mind, when I picture your volleyball players, the stress is just at the right level. They're having fun practicing. The scoreboard turns on and they tip to the other side of the curve.
And a way to not tip to the other side of the curve is to realize that stress is just activation and you can turn it into fuel for performance. Other thing, Nate, that I think is happening is that when they're practicing, they're in flow. And when you're in flow, you lose track of time. You're in the moment. And when the scoreboard turns on, they kind of lose that sense of flow. So a lot of concepts here that I know about psychology of leadership that have applications in business apply to your analogy of the players freezing when the scoreboard turns on.
You nailed it. So let's use, we'll keep this about leadership and business, but we'll use the 12-year-old kids as that metaphor or analogy. And that inverted U, I can just picture it. They've tipped over past that peak of the U over from that healthy level of stress into something else and that flow is suddenly gone. In addressing it, we're trying to keep reminding them that we are literally here to fall in love with volleyball and it's about learning and so therefore it's about that mastery, the pure joy of getting better at something. So, can we get even this managing this stress? Could we get 10% better at it each week? I know my coaching style. It's not for pressure of the score in grade seven in 10-minute games. And so for you, where did that show up when you tipped over beyond flow into that essentially overstress and you're coming down the other side of that peak performance curve? How did that manifest for you when you were dealing with so much stress?
Well, we all know that stress is ultimately bad for you when you're on that other side of the curve. It will impact your sleep. It will impact your mood, your appetite, ultimately your health. I wasn't tipping into that far region of the inverted part of the stress curve, but I could tell I was getting closer. And I remember, you know, there was a moment I was getting irritable, right? I've been lucky to never suffer from clinical anxiety, which is a bit separate from what we're talking about here because it can be debilitating and it's more of a medical condition. I'm talking about run-of-the-mill stress, but run-of-the-mill stress, there's a lot behind it and it impacts your life as well.
I was at home and I was stressed about work and usually I can stop thinking about work and have a good night's sleep. I know you've talked about sleep in prior episodes of your podcast. It's important. And the kids were being noisy. I have two teenagers in the house and they were playing stuff on their iPads and music and arguing and slamming doors. I was trying to go to bed early because I knew I needed to get my sleep. And I'm someone who's really cool and calm, especially at home. I leave the work at the workplace. But at that moment, I was just like, I kind of screamed a little bit, right? Which is very rare for me.
And I shut that noise and I need to sleep. And my wife looked at me. I was like, what's up? And I kind of like, she's so good to me and helped me just look at this, you know, become self-aware of where I was in my professional life and personal life. That wasn't a healthy spot. Nate, you know what I did? I ended up talking to a sports psychologist. His name is Dr. Daniel Zimmit. He lives in Maryland where I live. He's a fascinating person because not only is a PhD sports psychologist, he trains Olympic athletes on their mental games, pro baseball players, NFL players. He's also an athlete and he holds 40 national titles in the sport of handball. Now for our audience, are you familiar with handball, Nate?
Vaguely from my time in Europe where it's so popular. Yeah.
Well, and there are also different sports that are called handball. So the one he plays is like squash, but you use your hand to whack the ball.
So he has 40 national titles. We sit down and I wanted to learn more about sports psychology. He decides to tell me the story of the best match he ever played. His best match ever. The match took place 10 years prior to that conversation. But it's kind of strange because he remembers everything about the match. He remembers at three the ball hit the back wall. It bounced that way. I made that shot. And then this emotion in him retelling the story. I was on my knees. I made an extreme impossible shot. But then something strange happens. Out of, you know, very in a very nonchalant way. He says then I lost the next two points and kind of tries to move on in the conversation and I cut him off and I go wait you lost that. And that's what he was getting at. It was as a sports psychologist that day on the court. Winning or losing the match meant absolutely nothing because he had a pure mastery orientation and realized as he was playing a much stronger opponent that he had played the best in his entire career and that he had made a giant positive leap in his ability to play the game. So then we started talking about mastery versus ego. So for our 12-year-old volleyball players, they kind of have to get into that mindset that it's about the game. It's about getting better at the game as opposed to what the scoreboard is showing and all the eyes, you know, all the parents looking at them when it counts. Right? I'm not about to tell you how to coach, Nate, because I don't coach, which I don't know how to coach, but just finding a way to build mastery into your team that you're coaching. And in my world, in the business world, into the organization, because in business, we're actually really good at what we call KPIs, key performance indicators. We know how to keep score, especially money management. We don't spend enough time on mastery goals. How do we get better at what we do for the sake of getting better? Because that's important and that's what we're about. You know what? I get excited about stuff like at work.
Hey, we're running meetings better.
We're having better conversations because we're more organized in our meetings. Pure business mastery, right? Has nothing to do with an ego KPI or a goal or the scoreboard. There's not enough of that in business. You know, as leaders, you can bring a mastery mindset to your team.
You haven't coached volleyball. And I guarantee you could come out with this group of boys who I mentioned have kind of learned it on the playground. You know, they're a recess and lunch hour rat pack.
And you could help them understand the joy of mastery. Like even if you can't describe how the ball should come off of their hands, they know when it feels right. And like celebrating that moment and do more of that and celebrate, you know, the tiny milestones even if you don't know the sport. I bet you might have to fly you in for our practice next week, Sébastien.
Well, Nate, it's research-backed because there's research that shows if you praise efforts in kids rather than praise the outcome. Oh, you're so smart, you got an A. But you praise the process, the effort. You were so resilient, you struggled with that math problem. They end up performing better over time.
Let's segue into this positive psychology. You report in your book that in some research that you did in a given year, there was as many articles on positive psychology in journals as there was about clinical psychology. I have not studied positive psychology. You are also not a psychologist. You are a chief investment officer in a large firm, but your passion for it has you talking about similar topics on, you know, Bloomberg TV and CNBC. This stuff matters to humans, to adults. Share with our listener on the power of focusing on what is good versus always trying to fix what's bad.
Yeah, I love that question, Nate. I've been digging into the research in positive psychology for several years now. I've also benefited from the advice of the sports psychologist I mentioned earlier, Dr. Daniel Zimmit. He ended up being my scientific referee for the book, The Psychology of Leadership, to make sure I was interpreting the research in the right way. But you're absolutely right. I'm not a psychologist by training. It's not my day job. But for me, what I bring is the leadership experience, the business experience into that perspective of research. Too many books are just research, right? And then too many books are just, oh, a successful business person who's just kind of making up stuff and I'm trying to bring things together here. So, what do we mean by positive psychology? Very simple. What makes people thrive over time? How do you achieve high performance or ultra high performance? Those are key questions that positive psychology seeks to answer.
Marty Seligman is widely credited as the founder, if you will, or one of the pillars of positive psychology. He built a model that I got to say, I don't like acronyms, but I love that one. It's PERMA and it describes how positive psychology works. P stands for positive emotion, what we seek every day. Good glass of wine with a friend, getting a bunch of likes on social media. And PERMA speaks to what makes people thrive in the long run. E stands for engagement. We were just talking about flow. R stands for positive relationship, the number one factor of long-term happiness. And believe it or not, physical health is positive relationships in your life. M stands for meaning. A stands for long-term accomplishment. Bringing more PERMA in your life, in your organization is going to help you and your organization thrive over time. So that's a basic 101 on positive psychology. You know the way I like to introduce this is to talk about Felix Baumgartner. Now let me ask you Nate, he did something absolutely amazing but he's not that famous. Have you ever heard the name?
So sometimes I ask audience like raise your hand if you know Felix Baumgartner and I get like 3% of the hands come up. He did something no human had ever done. And when I start telling the story you might remember what he did. Felix Baumgartner is a daredevil. He gets into a small capsule tied to a giant helium balloon and goes up in space 24 miles to the edge of space where there's almost no gravity left. Just to the edge of space. 24 miles up.
And then Nate, you know what he did?
