Your Seat at the Table - Real Conversations on Leadership and Growth

Bending Without Breaking: Olympic Resilience in Life and Business with John Coyle

• Mike Maddock & John Tobin

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What if the most valuable seconds of your life aren’t the longest ones—but the ones that ripple the farthest? In this episode, we sit down with Olympian and design thinking expert John Coyle to rethink how performance, memory, and time actually work, and how a few well-designed moments can reshape a career, a team, or a family.

For decision-makers dealing with impossible trade-offs, and for any leader who’s ever felt alone in tough calls, John shares what happens when you stop trying to “fix weaknesses” and instead “run toward the roar.” From Stanford’s product design program to the Olympic Training Center, he discovered that true design thinking means redefining the problem, racing your strengths, and embracing a question-driven approach. That shift not only saved his career but also became a blueprint for business: reorganize teams by talent, detach from first ideas, and commit only once reality proves the fit.

Along the way, we explore the six lenses that real leaders use to unlock outsized outcomes—showing why strengths are specific, weaknesses are broad, and why “not your problem” can actually be a catalyst for growth. The result is peer-powered disruption: a fresh model of leadership built on collaboration, clarity, and courage.

Then we take on time itself. Drawing on neuroscience, John explains why memory is the real currency of time and how to “buy” more of it. The formula is practical and bold: stack risk and uncertainty, uniqueness, emotional intensity, beauty, and flow to wake the amygdala and write thicker memories. From running into storms with your kid, to designing surprise rites of passage, to building travel itineraries that leave room for serendipity—you’ll learn how to create moments that feel bigger and last longer.

For anyone ready to challenge their comfort zone and perform better under pressure, this conversation delivers both mindset and method. Real leaders. Real stories. Real action.

If you’re ready to stop counting hours and start crafting experiences that matter, tune in, subscribe, share with a friend who needs a nudge toward their strengths, and leave a review with one moment you’ll design this week.

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John Coyle:

The value of an increment of time is not related to its duration. So the value of an increment of time is not related to its duration, which is so hard to swallow as a pill. But once you recognize that, then you can start to think about moments. I'm gonna create a moment with my spouse. I'm gonna create a moment for my company. I'm gonna create a moment for my client.

Mike Maddock:

Welcome to the Your Seat at the Table podcast with your hosts, Idea Monkey Mike Mattock, and ringleader John Tobin. We're two founders, a serial entrepreneur and a billion-dollar operator, who talk to leaders about how, when, and why they made their most pivotal decisions in life. Join us as we share wisdom, mistakes, and a few laughs learning from the brightest minds in business today. Okay, so we have a real treat today. Um we have our buddy John Coyle, who is an expert in design thinking and Olympian, a silver medalist, uh, and has a real curiosity around making time last forever. I'm not doing that justice, but I want to you've really made that trivial. Like, oh, it's a silver medalist. Yeah, no, it's not a good idea. Yeah, I've known John forever, so forgive me, John. I'm I uh yeah I've learned so much from you, and and um I think you're an amazing speaker also. So you're uh uh why don't we start there? Um you're you're an expert in design thinking and you want a silver medalist. If you did a Venn diagram, tell us a story about how that all came together.

John Coyle:

Great question. And there is a Venn diagram, of course. I'm an expert consultant. I used to work for my k in consulting, so you know I know my two by twos and Venn diagrams. Uh the Venn diagram here is I managed somehow to get into Stanford, despite being for sure the dumbest kid there. And uh could I went to a small parochial school, I didn't know anything about anything, so I got there and I was starting from way behind. But uh I managed to fail Math 202, my second year, which forced me out of mechanical engineering and into product design, which did not require it. And a few weeks later, after changing majors, I was fortunate to have David Kelly of IDO Fame, who's the head of Stanford's D School, become my academic advisor. He was also the right-hand man for Steve Jobs for 15 plus years, uh, co-creating products at Apple. Um, so all that kind of comes full circle to the sport I grew up doing, which is speed skating and cycling, which I continue to do in California with no coach, no training program, and very little ice time, just dodging figure skaters and kids on public rinks. Uh, but I still somehow, my senior year, managed to get 12th place in the world in the sport of speed skating. So I thought, all right, I'm pretty good, I think. Uh I'm gonna go from 12th to 6th to 1st in the two years I have to prepare with like actual coaches and real ice time and eating proper foods and whatever else they're gonna put you through. So I moved into the Olympic Training Center in Colorado and I began training with the likes of Bonnie Blair, Dan Chanson. They put me in a program of fixing my weaknesses, which turns out to be many and varied. And uh I went from 12th in the world with no coach, no training program to 34th in the world the next year, to not even making the team two years later, finishing 30th in the U.S. trials I had won two years prior. And it was just misery. So at this point, I'm two years in and I'm like, what am I doing here? I gotta quit. And I started thinking back to design thinking. And the core of design thinking is if you're having trouble solving a problem, you're probably solving the wrong problem. Have you defined the problem right? Do you really understand it from the shoes of the person you're solving for? And I was like, these coaches didn't solve this problem from my shoes, they solved it from theirs. They actually solved it from Eric Haydn's perspective. He won five gold medals a few years before. I'm not Eric Haydn, never will be. So I quit the team, not the sport, and I moved to Milwaukee and started training back on my own. And for one year by myself, I trained by myself for a whole year, didn't race at all until the equivalent of the Olympic trials and a non-Olympic year, the world team trials, same people, same structure, same everything. And in a sport where hundreds of seconds determined first from second by training myself and doubling down on my strengths, when I showed up my very first race, I broke the U.S. record by five and a half seconds, broke the world record by over a second, set every single U.S. record back to back, and went on to uh set the fastest time in the world at the world championships that year in the 500 meters as well.

Mike Maddock:

Hey, John, let me jump in for a second because five and a half seconds in speed skating is like an hour in every other sport. Say a little bit about that. I mean, five and a half seconds. Like you do this thing on stage where you go and that's like first through ten, right?

John Tobin:

Yes, correct. And what's what's the what distance? What were you was your major distance?

John Coyle:

Um so I did all of the distances in short track. That particular uh opening race was the thousand meters, which they run a thousand meter time trial to separate the wheat from the chaff, so it's run Purdue style. And I knew something was wonky when the guy that had won that race the year before the Olympic trials, I caught him. So I was like, he must be out of shape because I'm sick. I was actually sick there. So I didn't see it coming that this was gonna happen. I didn't know that my training regimen was actually working the way that it was. And and it was not just training, I also changed my technique a little bit. So, you know, getting back to you know, design thinking, if you solve the right problem and if you double down on your strengths, I think amazing things can happen.

Mike Maddock:

I don't want you to be afraid, but there is a giant black panther stalking like it's behind you. Don't look, don't look! You could die at any moment. It's a panther.

John Coyle:

Yeah, she is big. She's invading our pocket.

Mike Maddock:

So you I like I, you know, you and I have shared a bunch of stages, and I just my one of my favorite parts of your talk is how you were you came, your coach, your ex-coach came and like held a stopwatch, like and gotten your way on the ice at those time trials. And like, what have you been doing? You're like, you thought he was gonna bust your chops because you did so poorly, you just didn't even know. I have no idea.

John Coyle:

I don't know, you probably never heard this. I sometimes tell this part, but so he jumps out on the ice, he's holding the stopwatch, he looks angry, he's like, What the hell have you been doing? And I'm like, I've been sick, like because I thought I failed. And he's like, No, no, you just broke the US record by five plus seconds. I didn't believe him, so I didn't say anything. I zipped my lips, I walked off the ice, I look for a family that had a video camera. I'm like, Can I did you film that race? Can I can I watch it back real quick? So I rewind, I'm looking through, and I'm just literally counting laps because I was pretty sure I didn't do enough laps.

Mike Maddock:

Oh, really? So you thought you cheated. Like yeah, so so that's counted wrong. That's amazing. Did you um so you in back to so uh the segue to design thinking, you notice something, and you have a great story about training uh with or getting tested with Lance Armstrong, yeah, where he crushed you, like he just made you look really badly in terms of endurance, but there was something you picked up on, and that was kind of the keys to the castle. Can you talk about that a little bit?

John Coyle:

Yeah, one thing that I truly believe, and I I experience it regularly with myself and others, is that strengths tend to be broad and weaknesses tend to be uh sorry, strengths tend to be specific and weaknesses tend to be very broad. So I'm bad at all hand-eye sports, like every single one. I can't play golf, ping pong, go bowl. If you make me go bowling, if you force me, that you would have to force me, I bowl a 52 every time. I I'm a T-Rex of a human being, I can barely feed myself. I'm lucky to be alive that way. Uh I'm also bad at every single endurance sport. Um and so I go to the Olympic training center. I don't know I suck at things. I'm just a fast kid, as far as I know, at that point. And so they test us for endurance with the VO2 max test. And I went 13 and a half minutes, which I at the time I thought was good because I didn't know what a good score was. Lance was right up after me, he was 26 and a half minutes on a test that's only consecutively harder. I had the lowest test of anybody on the team. Okay. So I'm like, okay, but I was like, there must be something wrong with that test, because I was 12th place in the world last year. Thank you very much. And then two days later, a different test called the Wing Gate or uh max power test, 30 seconds on the bike. Uh, I wind it up, I get it going really good, I get up to 250 RPMs. They are yelling at me that I'm doing well, and then 18 seconds in, I pass out and fall off the bike, and they gather my dead body and move me to another room. And again, my results are poor on average for the 30 seconds, but in the data, there's an anomaly in the graph because there's a huge spike of power for between two and five seconds. And so I have a very specific strength, which is I'll break it down for you. I am good at only the following. I am fast, that was the category as a kid. Only in short events, I'm a sprinter, only in events that require huge bursts of power for a few seconds with short rests, well, traveling at high speeds, balancing, turning only left with a group of people trying to kill me.

Mike Maddock:

You could probably be a pretty good defensive lineman, like a defensive end.

John Coyle:

I think I could have, honestly. I really do. If I was turning left.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah. No, really. I mean, because you're just blowing by someone, yeah, then you got like two seconds to get to the quarterback, then you're done.

John Coyle:

No question. I honestly, if I could have played football, I think I could have been a pretty decent lineman or maybe a uh running back on the right side only.

Mike Maddock:

But the here's the thing. Like, how did you get even I did?

John Coyle:

I could get to the puck and then I couldn't do anything with it. Okay. But that's how you skated. Like, did you grow up in Chicago? Or I grew up in Michigan and we grew up skating on the lakes. Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

Mike Maddock:

So so I I want to like I just magnify this point. We spend our whole lives working on our weaknesses in school. You suck at math, do more math. For you in sports, you suck at endurance, well, start run 27 miles a week because you suck at endurance. And your big aha is and you say it better than I do, so I won't steal the line, but it's like, what is your strength? Double down, triple down, quadruple down on your strength, and you will you will flourish and have a happy life. Say, say a little bit more about that. In particular, what did your coach say about it?

John Coyle:

Like uh something about training your so I was fortunate to have before David Kelly, I had a coach whose mantra was race your strengths. Design around your weaknesses, race your strengths. And so that's the way we trained, and he trained us that way. We didn't know he was just a local guy, like he never got paid. We didn't know later he'd become world famous and raise, you know, 12 world champions, six Olympians, and 50% of U.S. medalists for 20 years. Uh, but that's actually what happened out of one club. So Mike Walden, my coach, had these short, pithy, sharp phrases for everybody about how to double down on your strengths. And then, you know, it turns out it works in the real world. My first gig, I don't know if you know this, Mike. I my first gig was a program manager at Goldman Sachs, which for Y2K, which there is no worse job for a creative visionary.

Mike Maddock:

You excelled, I'm sure.

John Coyle:

5,000 line items we had to get done in 24 hours on 1231 uh 99. And I, you know, I did the work. I worked 70, 80 hours a week for an entire year, and then I got my podium, my award, which was PM, partially meets expectations.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah.

John Coyle:

That was the reward for all that energy. And but what I did do, and this is what I'd encourage your listeners to do, is if you're in a job where your strengths aren't valued and your weaknesses are constantly being harped on, you're in the wrong job. And it doesn't mean you need to quit necessarily. It does mean you need to have a conversation with your boss and say, I don't think that this current job is the fit for me. I did that at Diamond at the time, Diamond Management Consultants. And I said, you know, I don't think partner management is my thing. I'm more of creative, innovative, you know, marketing type. And so they moved me over to Enron, um, where I built systems that they subsequently corrupted, but it was creative work and I flourished immediately. I went from partially meets and literally nearly the bottom of the force ranking of consultants my my class to force rank number one for four years in a row.

Mike Maddock:

Think think about though, from a leadership perspective or a parenting perspective, yeah, or a friend perspective, if you're looking for someone's strength instead of their weakness. You know, like we we um it like Jim Collins, the right the right people, right seats, right you know, people. Like the the instead of going, you know, you need to work on this, like you're so good at this. And like what if what if um uh you know top grading meant moving people? Like this is your seat. And I just I think it it's it's a really, really big idea that too many people um are trained to that we're trained to think differently. We're trained to work on weaknesses, and it's uh it leads to a pretty crappy life, I think.

John Coyle:

It does. And Thoreau called it a life of quiet desperation. And when you're forced to focus on your weaknesses all the time, you lose all of your willpower. People that work on their strengths at least the third of their day have triple the willpower of people that don't. Uh, I'll give you a great story of how this worked in real business is I got I left Enron, I went to work for US Sailor in their marketing uh department, and I had eight marketing managers, and they're distributed two per region. They all had the same job descriptions, they all did the same thing. And then I read Strengths Finder, this, you know, 15, 18 years ago, and I was like, you know, I've got two analytics on this team, I've got two people people, I've got two get stuff done people, and I've got two creative people. I'm I'm just gonna re-jeer the team, not tell anybody. And so we didn't go regionally anymore. I put my two analytics on research and analysis, I put my two creative people with the agencies, I put my two people people with sponsorships, which was a big part of wireless at the time, and I put my two get stuff done people to manage the rest of those six. And we went from a okay haphazard team to literally shooting through the roof. Like we killed it for the next several years until I moved on to a different role. And it wasn't technically fair, they did not do their job descriptions, um, but they didn't care, and nobody cared above me because the team was crushing it. And I think that's what we should be doing all the time. Find the right seat on that bus for the person, ask them to do it, and then more often than not, they'll just love it.

Mike Maddock:

Any advice for people find like with the with this like strength finders or I mean you you you talked about it with skating uh almost from a physical standpoint, but uh in terms of your traits, like how do you how do you think you best discover that? I know there's surveys and things like that, but it you know, more than more than that, like is there uh best ways to to really uncover and unlock what your strengths are? Um I'm actually going through this right now with with understanding my strengths. It's kind of interesting it came up.

John Coyle:

Well, I'll loan you my cocktail question, and then I'll circle back to the answer. At least that I have. My cocktail question is, and I loved it, I do it all the time, I really do. Yeah, what are you best at? Yeah. And 20% of the time I'll actually get a somewhat cohesive answer, but 80% of the time I get deer in the headlights, or they'll make up a real glossy broad term like uh communication. Well, that's a lot of things, right? To whom about what? Are you good with analytics? Are you storyteller? Are you better with medium-sized, small audience, one-on-one, coach, challenger, all these things, right? All different forms of communication. Um, I think Strength Finder is a good one. I think Colby's a really good one. Mike introduced me too. It's just a starting point, though, because they they're really specific. Um, and so I think it takes a lot of introspection and bouncing off of others and then practicing and then you know, find the place where you show up and you get in the flow state every time. I do get in the flow state every single stage. Never haven't, always have. The same was with cycling and skating, always in the flow state. Uh so I'll break down what I think my strength is now. I gave you my other one. Yeah. Only two I've ever had in my whole life. But I think I'm good at taking disparate information that's fairly complex, distilling it down to meaningful uh stories and metaphors that people can understand that'll allow them to latch onto it and make change.

Mike Maddock:

You could be in advertising.

John Coyle:

I could.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah. You absolutely could. As a creative director, that's what they do. Um, John, if you if you okay, so let's the I I have a whole bunch of s rapid fire questions, and I want to get to time as well. Yeah. Um but so so if you were gonna describe just tell tell the world what design thinking is. You're a design thinking expert. Uh, you worked with me at an innovation consulting firm. Innovation consulting is basically um a business model wrapped around design thinking. The best companies know how to do it. Um, what's the secret to great a great someone who's an expert at design thinking, what do they know that everybody else should know?

John Coyle:

I really think it's this really weird uh mindset thing that most people get wrong one way or the other. So, what great design thinkers, which you know, you and Raf and McRae and Maria and myself, hopefully, uh are able to do is look at a problem very detached, scientifically detached from the outcome of what the solution is. Most people do the opposite, they fall in love with the very first idea, and then it's Maslow's hammer and Occam's razor, back to back, actually Occam's razor and Maslow's hammer. So the simplest given solution to any given problem is probably the right one. So they latch onto the first solution they see, and then Maslow's uh hammer is when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so they just wail away at that one solution, and they never get that scientific detachment to say, late, let's look at it from other angles, let's get other opinions, let's get a bunch of ideas around this, let's be completely detached emotionally from any of them. Let's find the one that actually is the square peg and the square hole. Let's try it, let's still not get too emotionally attached. And then and only then, once you have some success, then you use that sort of human-centered design. That's what it's also called. You get actually emotional then to pursue it against all the things that will come out of the system to fight it. So being able to be detached in the problem-finding process, and then being able to be emotionally attached to a solution that's showing merit, and then backing up occasionally and saying, wait a minute, okay, square peg looks square, but maybe it's an octagon. Like, let's try again, let's back up. And so fast fails, trying different uh modalities, and you know, always in the center empathy for whoever you're solving for. I mean, that's the question I'm thinking about.

Mike Maddock:

You know, Tobin, I've never said this to you, but um, I actually think that uh what John just said is at the heart of what ruined Madddock Douglas. And here's why. Um so the insidious thing about the law of instrument is that um not that everything looks like a hammer, looks like a nail, but we'll actually bend problems to make a screw look like a nail. We will automatically see something as a problem we uniquely know how to solve. And it's that's that's what's so insidious about Maslow's law of instrument. I was so stubbornly committed to being um coming into problems neutral. And meanwhile, we were competing with everything was going to be a technology uh project in the end. And the tale of the business was, and you know, McKinsey, BCG, uh innovation was a was a Trojan horse to get technology consulting projects uh locked and loaded, which is a great business model. And I we had half of our company saying we need to build a technology team, and you know, from a business perspective, they were right. And I was stubbornly committed to no, because it could be a business model, a service, a uh it could be anything. And if we have a technology team, we will not be good innovators. And you know, turned out to be a pretty bad business idea, but you know, I we agree, John. I don't know if I've heard design thinking like that. I don't I it's I've been in a lot of different design thinking sessions, sort of ran them myself, but I don't I don't know if I've I I probably do latch on to the the the first idea, but in really good design thinking sessions, I do not do that. Right. And I that's I mean it's so obvious like when you say it, but like now with that mindset, like really, really letting go, really not being emotionally attached to any one thing, I think that's it's a great qualifier. And I I don't know why people probably don't tease it that way. I don't I don't know.

John Coyle:

Well, and this, you know, when I speak, I have three topics, and it's literally just reframing very commonly held Occam's razor questions. Yeah. You know, how do I fix my weaknesses? That's a that's it's there's nothing wrong with that question. It's a perfectly fine question. It's particularly useful for kids because the weaknesses could be strengths, they just don't know. Um, I think for adults, though, if you're over 25, that ship has sailed and it's time to focus on strengths. Um the second question, so instead of how do I fix my weaknesses, how do I design for my strengths? Better question. Better answers, better outcomes. Uh second question that you hear probably all the time, John, in your business is you know, how do I get work-life balance back? How do I reduce stress to perform better? Again, it's a fine question, but stress isn't going away. This pace of business life is only going to increase with technology and AI. So a better question is how do I perform better under greater stress and learn to like it? Which is what athletes have been doing for millennia, right? Yeah. Oh, this 20-pound curl is awful, it's brutal, my arm is ripping apart, and you know, 12 weeks later, 35 feels good. 35 feels good, because you've learned to take on stress and metabolize it in the right way. And then the last one, which we'll get to hopefully, is uh is my favorite. And it's you know, it's a question, as far as I know, I'm the only person in the world still asking and answering, which is if time is accelerating the older we get, why is that okay? Uh so instead of all of the focus, which where all of the industry and money is going, which is longevity, you know, how do I get more years in my life? That's a fine question. I think a better one is if time is nonlinear the way we experience it as humans, how do I experience more life in my years? How do I actually create time out of nothing and have a year that feels like a decade, a decade that feels like a hundred years, and you live a lifetime that's worth 500, a thousand years?

unknown:

Yeah, well.

John Coyle:

Do you have an answer on that?

Mike Maddock:

Yeah, he does. And so teeing it up, no, no surprise that a that a person that is spending years and years trying to peel a quarter of a second off of a race time, you have an obsession with time. You think deeply about time. So so how do we do that, John? How do we make moments last for a lifetime? What's the secret? Give us some secrets.

John Coyle:

Well, let's start with the metaphor of sport, because it's a really great starting point where hundreds of seconds often determine a completely different trajectory of your future. So, as Steinfeld put it, I'll try to do it on camera: gold, silver, bronze, never heard of you. Uh for those just listening, I just moved my nose back a quarter inch with each one of those. And and it's true. I mean, that the sad point is that's actually true, right? At fourth place, nobody's ever heard of you, and they never will. And so tiny increments of time can fundamentally change your future trajectory. Well, it turns out uh the Greeks had a word for this. So we only have one word for time. It's the most common word in the English language, and we overuse it. Inuit have 60 words for snow. We have one word for time. Uh Greeks had two, at least, kronos, which is clock time, and kairos, which is human time, the way we actually experience time in a non-linear fashion. And the the deeper meaning is when everything happens at once and the trajectory is reset. And it comes from the archer releasing the arrow. Well, if you think about, well, as I graduated out of sports, I noticed, oh my gosh, it's true in real life. I took the promotion across town, or I didn't, I avoided the car accident, or I didn't, I asked her out, or I didn't, she said yes or she didn't. Right? All of the big trajectory changing moments in her life, almost all of them happen in moments. There might be again years leading up to it, but then the big shift happens in a moment, and hopefully that trajectory is reset in a way that that increases your future capacities. So when it comes to time, the first insight is that the value of an increment of time is not related to its duration. So the value of an increment of time is not related to its duration, which is so hard to swallow as a pill. But once you recognize that, then you can start to think about moments. I'm gonna create a moment with my spouse. I'm gonna create a moment for my company. I'm gonna create a moment for my client. I'll tell you, Mike, I had a I had a Kairos moment with a client at Medic Douglas when I was there. I didn't intend it, but they brought it up every single time. It was Trans America. I'm on the phone. It's one of the first calls we had. So I'm on the phone with Key Client, and then we had just eaten some of those super hot chilies.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah, that you did. That was your that was your party trick.

John Coyle:

Yes. And it hadn't hit yet. So I answered the call and I'm starting to sweat, and I'm starting to like tear up, and my mouth is getting dry. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I really have to go. I'll call you back in like five minutes. So I just literally hang out with a client. And I called him back five late five minutes later. I'm I'm so sorry. I ate a super hot uh Carolina Reaper chili, and they like they brought that up for years, right? That was a memorable moment.

Mike Maddock:

I didn't design it on purpose, but you know, the the create a moment, and this is I don't know if this is gonna resonate with you at all, but like when you say that I'm creating a moment, it's kind of like well, the the are you familiar with the John uh the drama triangle, uh John? 100%, yes. So so like it's it's basically you know you're the victim and and just because things are just happening. Things are just they just well it is what it is, and it it it's this is just life, and but if you create if you're the creator, then you have options, you have choices, and you actually could create the moment. It's just a it's a it's an interesting parallel there on creating something versus just letting it happen.

John Coyle:

100% and back to the drama trainer. And I'm working with a lot of, and this only started a year and a half ago, but I'm working with a lot of family offices now. And I didn't even know what those two words meant two years ago. I didn't know those were a thing. Um but you know they have virtually everyone that I've heard of so far has a lot of uh internal conflict. These are for those who don't know, family offices are private businesses generally owned by families that are now bringing in outsiders because there's the business is too big to run with just you know siblings and officers.

Mike Maddock:

They have so much money they need someone to manage the money for the family.

John Coyle:

And manage them.

Mike Maddock:

Right.

John Coyle:

So they're bringing me in to orchestrate. I'll bother I I'm gonna try to figure out my own term for this at some point, but I'm borrowing Jonathan Haidt from Stanford's term, which is uh, and bear with me for one second, conversion moments. So Jonathan Haidt would dis describe a conversion moment where in someone's cognitive they've got cognitive dissonance with a situation, a person in this case, maybe it's dad, the founder. Uh, and the cognitive dissonance is I know rationally that I love dad, but deep down I can't stand him. He's he's just a total fill in the blank, right? Doesn't let me do what I want to do, he doesn't lean into my strengths, he only wants me to be him, and so they have this active dissonance for sometimes decades. And then the the conversion moment that happens by itself, which sucks because it shouldn't have to wait for this, is dad one day says, or grandma, whoever, I've got cancer. And then everything changes, right? The back brain and front brain suddenly align, and they're like, okay, now we got to do something different. I love dad, I really love him. This sucks. I'm gonna put bygones behind us, and we're gonna move forward to figure out how to make this work. That should, you shouldn't have to get to that moment. And you know, heights or origination is people that are living in sin, you know, so it's a religious conversion, right? Like, so I know I'm doing bad things, I know I shouldn't, I am, I am, I shouldn't, I am, I am, I shouldn't. And then one day they make a decision to change their life. So this is that moment where you get the back brain or front brain to finally align around something. And so the beauty of time perspective is you can understand that no matter how many years have gone by in this kind of situation, everything if I design the moment, I can create a moment as that creator in the drama triangle where the victim stops being the victim where the uh where that dissonance goes away.

Mike Maddock:

And we all we all have that um we all have that ability. It's just how to you you mentioned stories, John. Um when Ruthie was diagnosed with cancer, brain cancer, this is my late wife, um, my my uh friend and coach Jonathan Domsky called me and he told me the stories like you know, there's this monk walking through the jungle and he hears a twig crack, he looks behind him, and there's a tiger stalking him. So he starts walking faster, and the tiger starts chasing him, and in a panic, he jumps off a cliff, grabs a vine, and he's dangling 300 feet above the ground on this cliff. The tiger's above him, waiting for him to fall. He looks down in the bottom. There's another tiger 300 feet below, waiting for the vine to break. Just then he looks. At the vine, and there's a rat gnawing on the vine. So he's having a bad day. At that moment, he looks over, and there's a wild strawberry plant growing out of the side of the cliff. He reaches over, grabs a strawberry, eats it, and in that moment, that strawberry and life were perfect. And my friend said, Mike, you got to be looking for strawberries. So that that was like a wake-up call for me that, you know, we're all kind of dying, but it takes a moment to realize that every moment matters. John, I didn't tell you this. In in Ireland, I went over to watch Iowa State. Uh, we did, Tina and I went over there to watch a game with family. And right before the game, it was pouring rain. And I we had about a mile to walk to the stadium. And I'm like, I'm gonna play here. I'm gonna go get everybody an umbrella and a rain poncho. So I walked out in front of this bar, it's an hour before the game. I asked the bot, the bouncer, hey, did can I get a raincoat or an umbrella at the convenience store across the street? And he said, he's like, it's ironed. Every store is gonna have a raincoat. So I said, okay. And I looked left and I walked in, I walked out on the street and walked in front of a car that was going about 35 miles an hour because the traffic's in the other direction. And this car locked its brakes, honked, and came within an inch of my leg. And I never saw it because I was still looking left.

Speaker 03:

Yeah.

Mike Maddock:

And I look over and it was like boom. And my family's inside the bar at the window. And I'm going, God, I hope they didn't see that. Like, I hope that because I was this close.

Speaker 03:

Yeah.

Mike Maddock:

This close. Like we life happens in like these little increments. Um, and you're so give us some hacks, John. You want to stop time. Give us some hacks.

John Coyle:

And you described a perfect moment that gives me a great background. So the neuroscience of this is I'm gonna make a I'm gonna give a thesis or pracy of the work that I'm doing, but I firmly believe what I'm about to tell you that if uh money is the currency of as if money is our financial currency, and money can take different forms, it's cool, whatever, uh memories are the currency of time. And how memories are constructed is now known. It's relatively new knowledge, um, but memories are constructed in moments. So we're always living in a moment. The moment usually is about two to three seconds. So your brain, my brain right now, sweeping short-term memory to long-term memory, about every two seconds. The hippocampus is doing that. That's the primary function of what it does. It sits near the basal ganglion at the top of the spine, and it's a very difficult process. It's the hardest, if you think about it, like it's taking all the stimulus and writing it down. Think of it sort of like a photo that's also got emotions and sense and sounds and all the things, and it's writing it all over the brain, and then it does it every two to three seconds until the car comes from the wrong side of the road in the rain in Ireland, and then the amygdala wakes up and it says right faster. And so your frame rate goes up 20, 30x, uh, so like 20 times per second. So your frame rate goes up 50x, 60x. And this is why things seem to slow down. I don't know if they happen in that moment, but oftentimes when things get really intense uh with the frame rate going up, your sense of that moment slows down. And and there's a reason for this. The amygdala wakes up for only two reasons never do that again, do not walk out in front of that car, Mike Meta, or always do that again, ask for your wife's hand. And and it and the evolution of this is super clear. Don't die. Please procreate. So our grandest, deepest, most highly written memories are having to do with avoiding danger, the guy on the vine, and love, companionship, care, all of those things. And so a life that, and this is where people don't like, half of this talk, which is part of the way to get to the kinds of a life that feels like 20 years a year feels like 20 years, is you have to have risk and uncertainty. Um life begins at the edge of the comfort zone. That's when the amygdala wakes up. That's why eight-year-olds feel like summers last forever. Their amygdala's on high alert all 24-7. First time to the ocean, first baseball game, first win, first loss, first crush, first breakup, right? Eight-year-olds cry a lot because their amygdala's on high alert 24-7. Everything is scary and unique, or everything is amazing or terrible, right? So they are living an amygdala-driven life, and then we build a bulwark around ourselves with comfort and money, and we create a safe place where nothing new and nothing can intrude, and then people say, Where did that deck gate go?

Mike Maddock:

So you plan, you you actually orchestrate these amygdala wake-up moments in your life to slow down time, right? 100%.

John Coyle:

Like you're hella skipping.

Mike Maddock:

Right. And and so give me an example.

John Coyle:

Well, some of the easiest are just do the opposite of what everybody else is doing. Um trying not to get run over by the car. But yeah, like one of my favorite things that I always do with my daughter is anytime we're together and there's there's a snowstorm if it's got 30 below, if there's hail, if there's a uh giant uh uh not tornado, but what do you call it, dust devil, we're going into that. We're going outside, we're gonna go experience this thing that everybody else is running from. We went to the uh Orlando and we went to Universal Studios. Lightning storm is happening. It is pouring down rain, everybody else is leaving. It's like ants running out, and we're running in, the only ones running in, and lightning strikes the coaster right next to us, so loud, and my ear is rang for a good five minutes, and it's so bright I can barely see for a second. I stop and she just keeps running, saying, Papa, this is really living. And I'm like, bike drop, I'm done here.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah. It's so awesome. I think that's that is a super interesting way of thinking about it. But do you well, so there there's like a lot of great to that, a lot of a lot of really cool things that probably come and happen. I do think that um one thing that I used to do is I would like I'm not public speaker really like you guys are, but I force myself to do it just to do it. Like to because it is. You're good at it, John. I'm gonna you good at it and you get that like that endorphin, like it's totally do. Yeah, totally do, but like it's not like a natural thing. But I do think there's something to that, like where you um I mean, actually, for you guys, you probably almost have to challenge yourself like the venues or the forums at this point because it become maybe so rote, but I that if you do have just these routines, how do you get out of your routine? How do you create something that's totally different? How do you lean into where people are running? I I love that idea, that concept. Do you get though, John? Do you get like crazy though? Like, do you go, do you overthink it? And like, oh I gotta this has to be the most amazing time. And you know what I mean? Like, do you go like that's how I I feel like I probably would do that, like overthink it, and then it actually takes away from the spontane spontaneous kind of cool things?

John Coyle:

That's a great question. I'll just tell you what I do personally. International travel is one of the greatest ways to have these kinds of moments because just stuff's gonna go wrong, and then kind of the when stuff goes wrong moment becomes the thing you remember most because usually something good actually ends up at the end of it. You got lost, but then you found this great little cafe or what have you, right? You have this terrifying taxi ride, but you survived hopefully. Um, but you know, one of the things that I do when I'm traveling is I make a very detailed itinerary that takes into account possibilities for exciting things. What's the tallest place in this place? Let's go up on that building. What's the is there a dungeon? Is there a you know a place to go down somewhere? Where are the strangest people? What's the you know, just Google what's the secret places, stuff like that. And then I don't follow any of the itinerary most of the time. I just let things happen. Um, but knowing what is where and having a sort of a lay of the land of opportunity can help you slide into spontaneity much easier than just following the regular tourist route. If I may, I'll tell you a story of a client of mine that did a really great job of this. Um actually, you probably uh know him. I have to think of his name. Richard Barker, I think he was a Maddo Douglas client. Um he heard me give the talk once and he said, I'm going to go home and do something different. I don't know what yet, but I'm gonna let you know. And so a few weeks later, he's like, I figured it out. He's like, so last week my son was turning 12. We live in Australia. Uh I'm from London. I've been following a London football club since I was a kid. I made my kid watch them since he's five years old. So he's a huge fan of this London football club, but he's never even been outside Australia. So on his 12th birthday, I bought him a ticket to London, didn't tell him why we were going or where we're going. He got on the plane, he figured out we were going to London. He's like, Dad, why are we going to London? He's like, You'll see. So we get to London, they take the Uber to the stadium. Now he knows why they're there. And he's like, Oh my god, this is amazing, but that's not it. They don't go to the front door, they go round back, the doors that back open, the entire team files out with a jersey for his son because he's the mascot for the day. Puts it on, goes on the field with them, sits in the dugout or whatever they call it for soccer, watches the pole game, they sign his jersey, right? And dad can't tell the story without crying. Um, but he got as much out of it as maybe the kid. But this is designing a moment for somebody that they'll never forget.

Mike Maddock:

Here's a practical way to do it. I I feel bad. I can't remember the name of the speaker, but I saw a speaker out at MIT maybe uh five, ten years ago. And what he did was he took a picture a day. He challenged himself that he was gonna take one picture a day and he was gonna make an album. What happened was he's like, I can't just take a picture of like a conference room I'm in. And so every day he would be like, Okay, what am I gonna do today where I get a really good picture? And he stood up for an hour and told these stories about I never would have done this except I needed a picture. So he did all this really cool stuff wherever he was because he wanted to have a memory. And that little practice uh uh wound up being all these amazing memories that he never would have had unless he had that practice. One of the that's a good life hack. I like that, Michael. Yeah, yeah. Like every day I'm taking a picture. The other thing is, and I I belong to all kinds of these uh uh flourish advisory boards, and John, what you taught me was bonding happens when you do something together for the first time. And so I'm always looking for something like these let's go on a hike. Let's not, okay? Everyone's been on a hike. You know, what can we do in this city that no one's ever done before that just because no one's ever done it before, because we'll experience that together and it heightens the likelihood that we'll make some lifelong memories.

John Coyle:

Can I give you the five key drivers? Yeah, go go talking about several of them, and then I'll give you a super quick example of something I've been doing for clients lately. And John, we should do this at slum. Uh so now I don't just give the time talk anymore. Uh not always, but sometimes I do. Uh, there are five key drivers that wake up the amygdala that get you writing more memories that are more that are written, stored, and recalled. All three are important. Um, the first is risk and uncertainty, unfortunately, that just works that way. Second is uniqueness, which is similar but different, because you can be in a highly risky situation daily, but at some point it becomes rote. Um, people's jobs used to be like that when you know you're doing dangerous activities. Uh so risk and uncertainty, uniqueness, uh, emotional intensity, you have to be fully present in it. Beauty, trauma also works. Let's go with beauty. Uh and then the last one is a multiplier's flow state. So if you're in the flow state over top of amygdala-driven memory state, so your frame rate goes up 50, 60x, flow state you remember four to five times more. So that's a two to three hundred multiplier of the memories that you've written, stored, and recalled. So flow state plus uncertainty, risk, and uniqueness, beauty. You look, those are the memories you have forever. I now have been taking clients on little adventures before the talk. So the last one I did was for WIPO, uh WIPO, uh, Omaha. We took them to Asheville, North Carolina. I picked them up in a box van. So 12 guys got picked up in a box van, thrown in the back, sliding around on the wood floors. I'm taking them down these country roads at high speeds. I was being a little obnoxious. They didn't know where we were going, they didn't know how long I told them it's 13 hours of Tijuana, there's no bathroom. I'll see you there. Um they got out uh uh 45 minutes later, I just jerked to a stop and got out and ran away. It took them 17 minutes to get out of the truck, which that was that was killing me because I'm like, you gotta get out, like you have to get out. So they get out, they see the chalk marks I left behind. I'd run through a field and left chalk marks behind. So they crossed a couple streams, got their feet wet, it was cold, it was a miserable day, and then all their stuff still in the truck. They're like, What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Like So risk, uncertainty, uniqueness, but it was a beautiful woods that they were going through, and they crossed this hill as the sun was setting into this grotto where they were suddenly greeted with the scene of this amazing hot springs, two ladies with champagne glasses, towels, and robes, and they went and got into the hot water. So we orchestrated risk and uncertainty, uniqueness, emotional intensity, uh, beauty, and flow state, all on the passage of you know two hours, and then I told them why.

Mike Maddock:

Yeah. Wow. And then they fired you. And the check still has not come. You know, you've got a memory, so that's cool. I remember it. Uh, with a client that did get upset at all. Like I can see like some people seem to be uppity about it a little bit, maybe plan, for example.

John Coyle:

Uh so far, uh I haven't lost a patient yet, but you know.

Mike Maddock:

You're not you're not trying hard enough, Jim. That's right. That's right.

unknown:

Okay.

Mike Maddock:

I remember all my amazing golf rounds. But I don't remember, I don't remember like when I played bad. I just know I played bad. But I I literally like two years ago, I shot an 80 at Pebble, Pebble Beach. I I literally remember every single shot. I can go through the the whole thing in my head and and on hikes, Mike, that's what I do. I replay the Pebble. That's really interesting. I I think that I don't remember bad memories typically because I think it's a defense mechanism. I'm not sure we should talk about that offline, but I I have very little recollection of bad things that have happened to me. I just don't care to remember them, except for almost dying in Ireland. Um, I have a very vid. That woman, by the way, she she was going really fast, and she's like, No, no, no. She's screaming at me and crying because she almost killed me. And I went up to her window, and the guy, she's like, No, I'm like, I'm so sorry. Thank you for not killing me. I mean, it's like it happened yesterday. It really shook me up because I I I literally walked in front of a speeding car. Like it was just ridiculous. And by the way, the um that bodyguard, yeah, he's watching me, he's just like, mmm, mm, mmm. Like some American. Yeah. Anyway, okay. Right. Do you know who Georgia St. Pierre questions? Go. Wait, go ahead.

unknown:

Quick.

John Coyle:

Do you know who Georgia St. Pierre is? Because I'm gonna latch on to what John had and then let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Maddock:

Go. I don't.

John Coyle:

George St. Pierre was a number one MMA fighter in the world for a while. I don't know how long, but he's super famous. Um, I interviewed him on a podcast uh a few weeks ago, and I asked him this question, you know, because I remember every skate stroke from my best races, and I remember nothing from race, right? Same same deal. And I was like, you know, do you have that same memory? He's like, oh my god, I remember like World Championships 1998. He's got this thick Quebec accent, and uh he's like, I was about to get hit. I saw the fist coming. I know I'm about to get hit, but my eyes scanned, but I was on fire, but my eyes scanned the audience and I saw Cindy Crawford, and we made eye contact. And then I got hit. I took the hit and I took him down shortly thereafter, like, but he was totally in a blessing. He saw Cindy Crawford as a fist was approaching his face. His cream ring went up. All right, go ahead, Mike.

Mike Maddock:

All right, well, here's one uh idea monkey and ringleader in a cage match who wins.

John Coyle:

Oh. Neither, unless they collaborate. I think I always ask, what happens if you put a bunch of idea monkeys in a boy know in a room with a whiteboard? What happens? And everybody says nothing, and I'm like, no, that's not true. The whiteboard gets filled. Nobody says anything. You put a bunch of team leaders in there and nothing gets done because there's nothing to do. Right.

Mike Maddock:

If you could start over, one thing you would do different in athletics and one thing you would do different in business.

John Coyle:

I would never have rejoined the Olympic team for my sec second Olympics. I trained by myself for three years and had great success, and then I I got lured back into joining them hoping to go get the better training to get a gold medal, and instead they overtrained me again, and I didn't even make a medal, and you know that whole story, Mike. And then in business? Uh I think that I would have thought about going on my own sooner than I did. I didn't know how fun and exciting being an entrepreneur could be. Um, you know, I tr I trolled away in corporate for seven years. Um, at least in consulting, it's more fun, it's more exciting. But those seven years in corporate were the same. Every day was the same.

unknown:

Yeah.

Mike Maddock:

Okay, last two questions, and I'll let you go, Jen. Thank you. Uh, one reason professional athletes make great business people.

John Coyle:

I think that's a really easy answer. So I'm 30 years old. I've never had a real job before in my life, and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I'm retired. And then somebody told me about management consulting, which I somehow didn't even know about because, well, I was just in ice rinks in cold countries in winter. Um and they what they told me, which is true, is management consultants probably the only thing, only business that will hire you with close to no experience and pay you a decent wage because they know they can work you to death. Um, that you will just keep working, you will just keep trying. Like you have the will to just keep bearing down till you figure it out. Yeah. So I think that's true. I think athletes have the will and determination to know that the suffering is part of the game and that they can get to the place they want to get if they put in the effort.

Mike Maddock:

And I'll answer the next question for you. The same, the opposite is true. Like, one reason professional athletes make lousy business people, I would assume, is because they're more about grit grit than quit. And sometimes you just have to know when it's not working.

John Coyle:

100%.

Mike Maddock:

All right. Hey, John, thank you so much. Um uh I'm grateful that you jumped on with this. And anybody who got a uh had the delightful experience of listening to John, I can tell you he's great on stage, he's a great coach and a really good friend. John, thank you for being with us. This was awesome, John. I have I I don't know if you saw me, but I was writing down furiously a whole bunch of stuff that literally I can I think I can bring today. But I I I love the idea of creating these moments and getting out of what I normally go to, which is my victim state. So thank you really, really for for promoting. Do this, Johnny.

John Coyle:

Reach out and I'll help you design one for your wife. Okay.

Mike Maddock:

All right. And with that, thank you, John. Grateful. Appreciate it.

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Mike Maddock

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