Wie gutes Feedback aufgebaut ist

0:00My worldview on why anyone does anything is that they've been rewarded for doing that in the past. And so, you know, one of the one of the really difficult things with language in general is that there's descriptive and explanatory language. And so, for example, I'll give you the simplest example, you know, Timmy stole a bike uh because he is dishonest. Okay, well, if we define dishonest, we would say, well, dishonest people steal things. But that's a circular definition. It doesn't actually help. The explanation of why did he actually steal it is because he's been rewarded for stealing in the past and so he repeated that that action because it got him something good. And same thing goes for lying, same thing goes for cheating, all of these things like why does someone do it? It's like because they've been rewarded for doing so in the past. They've been reinforced.

0:40And so, why do people Yeah, why do people uh do anything? That is and and you know, my worldview is just somewhat different than I think many people's cuz I come from everything from a behaviorist perspective, but it has made me significantly better at business because I get better at predicting behavior. And so, um I'll give you a simple example. So, um you know, there was a an exact kit, you know, one of the companies, uh and I was talking to one of the other owners and they're like, "Hey, you know, I I this guy said that he would leave if we changed the his title or whatever."

1:08And I said, "Okay, well, how many times have you changed his title uh historically?" And he said, "Plenty of times." And I said, "Okay, has he ever left?" And the answer was no. I said, "So, based on his history of behavior, I would say that he says these things to decrease the likelihood that you do it because that's his preference. But the likelihood that he quits as a result is low." And so, it's like those kind of deconstructions, some people just take things at face value. It's like, "Well, if we look if we actually try and find the explanation rather than the description of the event, we can get way better at predicting behavior, including our own. And I think that's where like people are like, "I want to get back to the the the trauma of whatever." It's like maybe like can I go to this cuz I think this this might be helpful. So, um

1:43>> I love the direction you're going. >> [laughter] >> So, many people will will use trauma or some event and they will create a narrative around why why haven't I started? It's because my dad didn't hug me enough as a kid and I don't have this confidence. And they just create this big story. And then they're like, I need to go see a therapist so that I can, you know, untangle all of this. But if I were to say, "Hey, I'm going to teach you how to how to serve in pickleball, right?"

2:08We wouldn't have the first session be, "Hey, do a serve." And then you would serve not ideally if I'm a pickleball coach, right? And then I'd say, "Okay, so for the next, you know, few weeks, what we're going to do is we're going to try and go back in the past, and we're going to try and figure out why your serve is so bad." And no, we're just going to say, "Change your wrist like this. This is how you do it." And so, it's so much more productive to just focus on what do we need to do instead, rather than trying to figure out uh why you did it, cuz the reality is, you're never going to know. It's a convenient narrative, and it might make sense, but at the same time, it could just be that you were rewarded for doing something like this in the past, period. Now, there might have been conditions that created that reward, and you can lament the person, but at the end of the day, the only thing you can do about it is change behavior. And so, um trauma, which is tossed around a lot, um I define as uh a permanent change of behavior from an aversive stimulus, some a bad thing. So, you permanently change how you act because of something bad that happened. Now, the question is, is trauma bad? Well, did the change in behavior result in increase or decrease in likelihood of achieving whatever goal we have? And so, if a kid touches a hot stove, and they say, "Ouch." And then they never touch hot stoves again, then that was a traumatic event by that definition, and it's probably good trauma. Because they never touch hot stoves again. So, decrease the likelihood they die in a fire. Great.

3:18>> [snorts] >> And so, sometimes it's like, well, then maybe we can be grateful for some of the quote traumas that we've had because it permanently changed my behavior in a good way. Now, if we have quote trauma that that uh permanently changed my behavior in a negative way, so I had, you know, bombs and saw somebody die in front of me, and the next time I hear a loud noise, I you know, I freak out, and I can't, you know, perform my job, then that would be something that decreases the likelihood. But then at that point, rather than trying to figure out the triggering event in the past, we just think, "Okay, how can we condition this person under similar conditions so that they can act this way instead?" And so, trauma, what ends up happening is it becomes an accelerated learning event.

3:50And so, something bad happens, your brain's like, "Pay attention because it's like I'm going to learn and you're I'm going to permanently change our behavior to make sure this doesn't happen again." And so, it's not this and I hear this because a lot of people will anthropomorphize you know, make human or you know, try and bio biologize. Um that's a word. Go for it. Uh >> [laughter] >> Um something that occurs is like it's stored in your body and I was like, "We're not computers, right?" It's just that you have a behavior set and all we have to do is change these behaviors and then it eliminates. And so, um the reason so, this all started with feedback. And so, the reason feedback is fuel and what makes feedback good versus bad or rather useful versus non-useful is the latency of the feedback. How quickly do you get it? And how specific is it? And so, if you say, "Hey, that sucked" in the moment, uh not helpful.

4:35I will be less What it will do is make me less likely to do the thing in front of you, right? If you said that. On the flip side, if you were to say immediately, "Hey, real quick, when you do your intro, raise your tone a little bit at the end cuz I think it'll actually create more curiosity and people want to stay longer. Okay, do the intro again." There, I have a very specific piece of feedback and I did it immediately so that the likelihood that you change behaviors is really high and maybe that it sticks. And so, the reason feedback is fuel and ideally, if you're trying to change someone else's behavior or even your own, it's like I want to seek out very fast feedback that's as specific as possible to the behaviors. And so, um I tell the story a lot cuz it's a it's a story that we tell inside of our company cuz it's almost become lore, but we had a a director super proficient, very competent in his role, really high performer. The problem was that everyone said, "He's such a dick."

5:18And the thing is is that I really like I like his performance and I want to decrease the likelihood that I get complained to about him. >> [laughter] >> And so, he had four different people in the company have like one-on-ones with him being like, "Hey, I need you to stop being a dick." And the thing is his behavior didn't change. And so, I I I was supposed to be like final boss in the situation and be like, "All right, let's let's let's have the sit-down." And so, I said, "Hey, I I don't care if you're a dick on the inside. I would like to decrease the likelihood that other people describe you as one." And so, I want to be clear, I have no judgment. I just want to change this likelihood of this outcome. And so, that kind of took the personal tax out of the conversation and then it was like, okay, so what are the behaviors you do skill wise as minutely as possible that get people to say this about you. So it turned out it was you interrupt people on calls, you tell people how to do their jobs and and it was two other things, whatever it was. And so I said so next time you have the you know desire to tell someone what to do about their job, you have two options. Either say nothing or say, hey, I I heard this thing that might help. Do you mind if I share it? If you just say that first and if they say no, then just be like, okay, no worries. Or they say yes, then now you have permission to share it and when you share it, share in terms of behaviors, criticism, not insult.

6:24And so I just had to change a couple of those things and then within a week people are like, oh my god, he's had he's had night and day he's a different person. They create all these narratives. Maybe it was because his mom didn't hug him, she called him or because we told him what to do instead. And so I I I bring this up because I think many people do not take action around pursuing their dreams because of narratives that they create about their past. But the reality is that none of that matters because all we have to do is just say, what do we need to do instead under these conditions? And if we if we take that premise, then you need to learn.

6:56And learning means same condition, new behavior. And so if every day is the same for you, to your point of insanity, then you have the same conditions and if your behavior has not changed, then maybe you are insane. >> [laughter] >> Or at least for at least for expecting a different outcome. Yeah. And so that I think makes it significant more palatable of like just change this one thing and then run it again. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.