On the second of two special episodes, acclaimed executive performance coach and doctor of psychology Dr. Julie Gurner goes in-depth on a variety of strategies and actionable advice that will help you perform up to your potential. During this portion of her interview, Dr. Gurner discusses the standards we set for ourselves and others, cognitive ruts, curating friends and relationships, fighting up front, what success means, and much more.
Available now: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Dr. Gurner has spent the past 14 years working with top-percentile executives, talent, and teams operating in fast-paced, competitive environments. She specializes in improving personal productivity, focus, and decision-making strategies, as well as developing high-performance cultures, teams, and executives emphasizing ownership and leadership.
Listen to part one of this interview here.
Here are a few highlights from our conversation:
How you bring people to the standard that you expect is incredibly important. You want to do it through a way where people feel inspired to rise and to hit their own potential because you are the person that they believe sees something in them that they do not see.
I think that it’s very useful to see business or things that you care deeply about [as] the things that you do, not who you are.
People can take hard feedback from people that they know are in their corner.
I try to frame things always as opportunities, challenges, ways in which people can level up or improve in some fashion, [reach] the next kind of level of operation.
Rather than me and then you are the problem, it is “I’m pulling you to my side of the table and it’s us together versus this problem that we’re going to talk about.”
The notion of fighting upfront is [that] if you do it right, it shouldn’t be a fight. It should be something that you address early, as quickly as possible, in a way that can help to resolve whatever it is that you see as the threat.
And so these cognitive ruts we get in—sometimes we have to really think, Are we reinforcing our own rut and how can we begin to expand outside of it?
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
00:58 – The consequences of high standards
06:44 – The dangers of basing your identity on what you do
08:28 – How to remove blindspots in life and work
11:43 – How to have hard conversations
16:59 – Julie’s strategies prior to confronting someone
22:25 – How to overcome emotions on days where things go wrong
25:25 – How to end toxic relationships
27:44 – Red flags to look for in bad relationships
29:35 – How to fight up front
32:58 – How to get out of ‘cognitive ruts’
39:35 – What Julie has learned from her work that’s made her life different
41:52 – What success is for Dr. Gurner
