reframing

129: Judd Hoekstra: I had all that junk swirling around in my head

Intro Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:  Okay, Fast Leader legion I’m excited because on today’s show I have somebody who is helping to bring together two things that I love that’s helping people move onward and upward faster and baseball. Judd Hoekstra was born and raised in a Edina, Minnesota with two brothers one older and one younger than Judd, parents are still married and actually living in Minnesota. Judd grew up with a passion for sports and any competitive activity. He was part of teams that excelled and teens that floundered. He was interested in knowing why so he began to study leadership at Cornell University where he played hockey and baseball. 

Early in his career Judd worked with Andersen 2consulting now Accenture and change management practices and also focused on how to lead people through change both personal and organizational change. And he’s currently the co-author of Crunch Time: How to be Your Best When it Matters Most with Rick Peterson, Currently Judd serves as the Vice President of Central Region at Ken Blanchard companies. In his role he serves on a sales leadership team responsible for developing sales strategies, accountability for creating customer devotion, enhancing Blanchard’s Purpose Driven high performance culture as well as top-line revenue growth and bottom line profitability. He’s also responsible for leading a team of sales consultants to achieve individual and team performance targets. This role gives Judd the opportunity to use methods he shares within his book. He also graduated from the advanced business management program at Kellogg School of Management. Judd and his wife Sheri live in Naperville, Illinois with his two kids Julia and Cole. Judd Hoekstra, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Judd Hoekstra:  Absolutely. 

Jim Rembach:  Now, Judd, I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Judd Hoekstra:  Sure. My passion for a long time has been actually to help people be their best and to help them overcome some of their probably self-imposed constraints, if you will. Things that maybe hold them back that they don’t even realize are holding them back and so that really is what helped me get into the idea of how do you perform your best under pressure. I’ll share a little story Jim that some of my toughest moments in life and worst moments frankly that ones that give me nightmares still are the times that I choked under pressure. And then as a parent when you see your children going through pressure situations and if you see them struggling and not their best and knowing that they’re not performing up to their potential whether it be testing, idea or whether it be in sports sort of try out, it kind of leaves you heartbroken that they’re not able to pull it together when they need it and so I kind of felt like this is a problem that needed to be solved both for myself as well as those around me. 

Jim Rembach:  And I would dare to say you know getting the opportunity to look over the book and the more and more that I read into it it’s one of those things that while it does have the sport context attached to it I mean really this is a life book. 

Judd Hoekstra:  It is, absolutely. We use the sports stories and analogies because number one there’s experts who have figured this out already in sports and second of all I think it makes it easier for us to learn in a situation that maybe isn’t exactly like ours because it lowers our defenses so we can learn from these stories and then we can figure out which situations are we in and how do we apply those same principles to our pressure situations. 

Jim Rembach:  Well and I like it too because it really fits into what really I’ve done with the Fast Leader show. We talk about life hacks in order to help people move onward and upward faster but the fact is that it’s about doing things correctly and having that self-awareness and learning from the stories of others that’s really going to help us move onward and upward faster. In the book you talk about working harder and that’s one of the myths. When I look at a lot of the things in this book they’re really common practice debunk things, I mean, it’s like this is what we do socially this is what we actually communicate and we passed down generations socially however these are bad practices.

Judd Hoekstra:  Exactly. Exactly, there’s a lot of truth to that I think. We’re hardwired in ways that don’t help us right now that maybe helped us in much earlier times than we’re facing today. Primitive times where physical survival was really the name of the game and now for most of us especially I’m sure your listeners, physical survival really isn’t the threat the  threats are psychological in nature. So, we’ve got hardwiring that helps us against physical threats but actually hurts us in psychological threats. 

Jim Rembach:  I think as I was reading through and even listening to you talk I started thinking about the whole concept of—hey, if I’m not doing well or not performing well then I need to work harder. That works great if I’m harvesting and having to bring things in from the field but that’s not the way that work today. It requires a whole lot of complex thinking as well as being aware of not just our emotions but everyone else’s emotions around us in order for us to get work done. So, we have to start thinking differently than we have in the past.

Judd Hoekstra:  Yeah, absolutely, well said.

Jim Rembach:  And I think one of the things that for me and you had the theme throughout the book you were talking about reframing. Tell us a little bit about reframing? 

Judd Hoekstra:  Reframing is really recognizing when you’re kind of reflexive reaction to a situation isn’t serving you well in choosing to take a different perspective on that same situation a different viewpoint that will actually serve you more effectively. There’s a couple steps with it, one is just pausing and recognizing when you’re kind of reflexive reaction isn’t doing what it needs to be doing for you and then second is actually choosing a different thought. Many of us think that we’re a slave to our thinking, if a thought comes into our head we have to act on that and the problem is that a lot of the thoughts that come into our head aren’t helping us. In pressure situations we face common thoughts or fear, worry, and doubt we call those the deadly trio of de-motivators. You don’t have to act on the fear when in doubt, you don’t have to succumb to it and you can choose different thoughts. The major theme of the book is how do you reframe, how do you think differently about a pressure situation when the natural reaction is to think of it as a threat and how do we actually learn to see it as an opportunity.

Jim Rembach:  And I think one of the things that for me stood out is more and more in in both work as well as personally we have to do a better job at coaching those that are coming behind us. I think too often we just kind of leave things to their own devices and we don’t proactively address them. If we don’t proactively address them we get the negative consequences that is often referred to as choking, choking under pressure, choking with the test where if you know we were actually to address those things in a proactive manner and doing it doing it in a way that really is going to promote the positive outcome is what we have to really start designing and thinking about doing. For example, people say you shouldn’t tell your kid not to go in the street, what we should tell them is to stay in the yard. I coach baseball and I tell my kids when they go up to bat what I say is that, I know in your head you’re saying to yourself don’t strike out I said but what you need to be saying to yourself is I’m going to it. You know where the strike zone is if the ball is within that strike zone you need to tell yourself I’m going to hit it but it doesn’t change the outcome.

Judd Hoekstra:  Yes, it’s what your focus is on and I think again it goes back to—again unfortunately our instinctive reaction is to be focused on preventing catastrophe, preventing failure, preventing loss and you’re exactly right it needs to be flipped you need to kind of flip that switch in your head and say, I need to focus on the success I’m trying to achieve. I play golf and it’s a classic example is you’re standing on the tee and you see water on both sides and the first thought that naturally goes through your head is don’t hit it in the water. The reality is the minute you start saying that you’ve put that thought in your head it’s much more likely to happen whereas if you said strike this thing right down the center of the fairway you’re much more likely to achieve that.

Jim Rembach:  Yeah, and I think for me being influenced on this whole visualization programming your subconscious mind to really allow you to execute is something that were not very mindful of. So when you start thinking about both in leadership development and you have a team that you’re working with sales development, what do you find is one of the most common conversations that you’re proactively having with people to get them focused in the right way?

Judd Hoekstra:  Yeah, I think I think especially in sales, one of the things that people focus on too much is their big goal for the year—hey, I’ve got to sell two million dollars this year and I’ve got that wrapped in my head and I wake up in the morning and I think about that two million dollars and I go to bed and I’m thinking about that two million dollars that I got to achieve, the reality is that’s really distracting it actually causes you to get stressed, it causes you to worry. It can in some ways motivate you to take action but actually once you realize, what are the actions I actually need to take to achieve that goal to break it down into very bite-sized pieces and to get people back focused on the activities that are going to lead to the achievement of that two million dollar goal.

I’ve talked about it in the book that I think salespeople get distracted by the numbers and I think that the reality is how you get to the numbers is more important. Having great quality interactions with your customers with the prospective customers that you’re working with and setting a target for how many of those you’re going to do each day so that it doesn’t become so daunting it appears very achievable to you and is achievable and actually then gradually building on that. If you’re starting with two quality interactions a day with your customers build on that and try to get to three after you’ve really gotten it honed in where you’re getting two a day for a couple of weeks then build it up to three and so on. You’re going to start seeing the results of that activity in your numbers but instead of looking in the rearview mirror at your numbers you’re actually looking ahead and saying what activities I need to take to drive the numbers. 

Jim Rembach:  And the word that you use in the book is called chunking. When you started thinking about you know chunking, and I see this happen in a lot of different ways and I’m even trying to merely just have a conversation with one of my kid’s teachers where they were giving him way too many instructions and he wasn’t even able to figure out his first step. You need to give him smaller pieces and so that he can have that one step be an easier step because that inertia will also allow him and help him to take the second step. If you put too much weight on top of his shoulder and it becomes too complex you know he’s not going to be able to move forward. I think we do that a lot of times when we think about the workplace where we give people a particular task and we give them all the details and all of the information we’re like, I need to tell them everything they need to know but that’s a mistake or a failure as what you’re saying.

Judd Hoekstra:    It is. It is. With how fast the world is moving and how much information we’re all taking in the simpler the better. I actually have a colleague of mine that affectionately refers to it as, let’s think like a donkey let’s keep it really simple let’s make sure that we’re making it simple if we spend an hour as sales that you’re sitting in a room figuring something out and we communicate it to our sales teams the people that are out there on the frontline selling they didn’t have the benefit of sitting in the meeting with us for an hour and talking through they need to be able to get it quickly. How do we actually boil it down to its essence and make it simple and easily executable?

Jim Rembach:    Now you had the opportunity to co-write this book with Rick Peterson who is soon to be I’m sure a Hall of Fame coach.

Judd Hoekstra:    Yeah, he is absolute genius as a coach.

Jim Rembach:    When you started working with him with all the experiences that you’ve already had with the Blanchard companies and even being in a leadership role yourself, what was one thing that kind of just stood out like a huge epiphany for you?

Judd Hoekstra:    One of the things that he said to his pitchers—and he talks about—he brings this big huge cardboard check, like the one that they give to the golfers after they win a tournament, and he brings a check like that and it has five million dollars written on it and he asked his pitchers in spring training, who of you wants to be able to cash this check? And all the hands go up. And then he says, okay, let me tell you what it’s going take to be able to cash this cheque and he goes through and he has a very systematic way of developing pitchers and task by task by task he knows what good job looks like he knows what success looks like he coaches them on it but he says, now that you know what it takes how many of you are willing to pay the price to do that? Not all the hands go up so. I think the thing that’s interesting to me is when you get to the major leagues what he said is everybody’s got talent and in our workplaces there are a lot of people with a lot of talent but what’s going to distinguish between the talented people is are you willing to pay the price and it’s really often a price that others aren’t willing to pay to be your best and to separate yourself and distinguish yourself. 

So, one of things I’ve learned from him is his preparation is second to none. His ability to prepare himself and his pitchers to know exactly what could happen in the game and to be ready for any in every situation. That allows him to remain so calm when the heat is actually on whereas those that haven’t thought through all those situations in advance they’re having to think through him on the fly and they’re more likely to panic. And so, I think just his preparation there’s a whole chapter on the light bulb went off for me that what I thought was good preparation I’ve learned mediocre preparation at best and that’s what great preparation looks like and is more akin to what Rick does in getting his pitchers ready and getting himself ready for major league action.

Jim Rembach:  When I would dare to say, because even when you were talking I started thinking of, well the preparation—I have to work harder. But no, that’s not it because one of the things that you talked about with Rick and with many of the coaches as well as business leaders is that they just think differently. They look for ways to do things easier. They look for the things that when you start talking about chunking them down to their smallest sub-essence that when we do those things it’s going to lead to the outcome that we want.

Judd Hoekstra:  Absolutely. I’d love to share a story if you don’t mind. It’s the story that actually opens up the book and it’s the 2001 American League playoffs the Oakland A’s are coming into Yankee Stadium it’s shortly after September 11 the nation as a whole is sort of pulling for New York knowing what they’ve been through and the A’s going there they’re up against it they’re up against the Yankees, they’re up against the sentimental favorite in many cases. What happened is the Oakland A’s take it to 2-0 lead. They’re going to the bottom of the ninth inning and they bring out their closer Jason Isringhausen who’s referred to as Izzy by his teammates. As he steps on the mound and he walks the first two batters, now you’ve 2-0 lead but you’ve got the winning run coming to the play and it happens to be someone that earlier in the season had hit a home run off of him and someone standing in the on-deck circle had also hit a home run off of him. 

So, now he’s feeling threatened and Rick could see from the dugout that Izzy wasn’t right he on the back of the mound and you could see he was tense Jason Giambi the first baseman went over to talk to him to try to calm him down he still looked tense so Rick goes out there calls time and says it puts his arm around his shoulder, and that’s one of things that Rick did all the time in his major-league careers he would put his arm on his shoulder just as a sense of saying it’s just you and me just the two of us out here even though there’s 57,000 fans screaming at you it’s just the two of us let’s have a quiet conversation out here on the mound. And he says, Izzy how you doing and Rick could feel his whole body shaking. And Izzy said, Rick I can’t even feel my legs right now I’m so nervous and he said, well don’t worry about it, Izzy we need you to kick a field goal. 

So, he lightened the mood by obviously cracking a joke providing humor which sort of—Izzy immediately starts laughing sort of lets out a big exhale. And then what Rick did after that in addition to kind of loosening him up a little bit was he got him focused back on the task and so he said, forget about the runners on base, forget about the crowd screaming at you, forget about the umpire in fact forget about the batter all you’ve got to do is throw the ball in the catcher’s glove where the catcher’s glove is set up and you’ve done that millions of times before in your life this is so easy for you Izzy. He got him focused back on the task and ran back to the dugout Izzy strikes out gets a couple guys to pop out game over, A’s win. In 30 seconds or less he had him back on track from a guy who was about to have a meltdown.

Jim Rembach:  I think even being able to recognize and connect with the individual then doing what  Coach Peterson did is really going to differentiate the leader of tomorrow from the leader of yesteryear.  When you start thinking about all of these things and even that story, it’s just loaded with emotion, one of the things that we look at on the Fast Leader show are quotes to help us focus sometimes give us some inspiration and make sure we’re head in the right direction. Is their quote or to that you can share?

Judd Hoekstra:  There’s a lot of them in the book. One of them that comes to mind is when you think about the junk that goes through your head when you’re under pressure and the negative self-talk and the criticism a lot of us think, gosh, why am I even here? I have no chance at this, people are going to laugh at me if I don’t succeed or when I fail they’re going to laugh at me, what are people going to think of me and one of the things that Rick has said was you have no right to be your own worst coach what would you think if I talk to you that way as your coach? You’d think I was a jerk. That’s one of my favorite quotes because we all have that swirling negative self-talk that goes through our head that’s instinctive. Again were hardwired with that and we have to fight against that and he’s just saying listen if anybody else talked to you the way that you talked to you, you wouldn’t be allowed to be the coach. So, why do you let yourself coach yourself that way? His whole point is learn how to coach yourself the way that I would coach you as opposed to the way that you’re coaching yourself right now.

Jim Rembach:  I think that’s a great piece of advice because most of the time mine’s yelling at me.  

Judd Hoekstra:  Mine too. 

Jim Rembach:  With all of this, and even know we’re talking about in the book and the work that we’re referring to really helps people get over the hump, we have to get over our own hump like you’re saying a lot of times we create our own that we have to get over, is there time that you’ve had to get over the hump that you can share with us?

Judd Hoekstra:  Yeah, absolutely. Interestingly enough when I was playing hockey growing up, I grew up in Minnesota and it was it was a little bit like football in Texas and baseball in Florida and basketball in Indiana it’s the sport that everybody wants to play, I grew up dreaming of playing for my local high school team and my senior year I made the varsity and was excited to be playing and couldn’t wait to get into the season and got into a scenario where I basically got into a downward spiral. I started out and I was playing on the third line out of four lines and that quickly went to the fourth line of four lines and I wasn’t getting the ice time that I was used to getting and I had all that junk swirling around in my head and I got to the point where I said every time I step on the ice I can’t get scored against, I was a forward so my job was to actually score goals and to set up my teammates for goals, and that was putting all the emphasis in the wrong area because I knew if I got scored against I might get sat even more and I wouldn’t get any more playing time and so this just created this huge negative cycle for me. It got to the point that I didn’t even want to show up at the rink by the end of the season and it was a moment that sticks with me even though it was more than 25 years ago. 

And then I go to the point where I said—the season passed and I got to the summer and there’s a summer hockey league going on and I thought just go out and enjoy the sport that you’ve loved your whole life just go and play for fun. At that particular point in time I didn’t have any aspirations to play any further didn’t know I was going to be playing in college, I said, just go out and have fun. I went out played my best hockey I’ve ever played and it was because I didn’t focus on all the things that could possibly go wrong. I didn’t focus on what were the consequences going to be if I made a mistake, I just said, just go play and I had the skills already so that was the frustrating part of when I wasn’t doing well, is that I had the skill and I had the talent and I just didn’t use it. And so, that was a big lesson to me that nothing had changed with my skill set from the end of the season to the summer league that players that I was playing against with the same competition nothing was really different other than my mind, it really kind of kicked me off on this journey to say how important your mind is your performance.

Jim Rembach:  It’s a great lesson for all of us to stop and reflect upon. I kind of envy you that you came to some of that realization so early on, I think I will not listen last week.  

Judd Hoekstra:  It was painful but I can tell you that I’m glad as well. I wasn’t glad at the time that I was going through it but I’m really glad now because having that adversity early and then learning a way around has been instrumental to later parts of my career both in business as well as parenting.

Jim Rembach:  The parenting thing brings back so many of those memories of me going through what you’re talking about and I try not to set my kids up for the same failures. Like what you’re saying earlier when we first started talking you see your kids go through those things and you feel their pain and anguish and you just don’t want them to feel that way. When you started thinking about the book, you’ve co-authored a couple other books the work that you’re doing with the Blanchard Companies, family, you’ve got a lot of things going on, what’s one of your goals?

Judd Hoekstra:  I really have a goal with this book around crunch time to have it positively impact as many people as possible. The opportunity to do that through a book and certainly you have a large following yourself and to be able to come on and speak with you and have the word get out to many others, that’s a goal of mine. And just to not have people go through the pain that I personally have gone through and that I’ve seen others go through if they can avoid that by learning some lessons. One of the things that I’ve been I guess really heartened by is every single person I talked to struggles with being their best under pressure there’s not a single person—I mean, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or whether you’re the highest level ranking executive whether you’re a kid facing a test whether you’re at a piano recital every single person has their own pressure situations and every single person without this help is going to struggle and is going to face the same thing that I talked about, it was so painful. So, my goal is that we have less people experiencing that pain and more people experiencing the joy of actually saying, WOW! When the lights were brightest I was ready and I perform my best and that’s really the overarching goal is to make a positive difference in those people’s lives whoever the readers might be.

Jim Rembach:  And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor: 

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Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay Judd, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Judd Hoekstra, are you to hoedown? 

Judd Hoekstra:  Let’s do it. 

Jim Rembach:  Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Judd Hoekstra:  For me, it’s all about prioritization. Where should I be spending my time and am I spending it in the right places and there’s times I feel like I’m not.

Jim Rembach:  What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Judd Hoekstra:  Be yourself. Be authentic. 

Jim Rembach:  What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success? 

Judd Hoekstra:  Desire to compete and win. 

Jim Rembach:  What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Judd Hoekstra:  I believe it’s a sincere desire to help others. I think if your heart’s not there in the right place to start with it’s going to be tough to lead.

Jim Rembach:  What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, and it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to Crunch Time: How to be your best when it Matters Most, on your show notes page as well. 

Judd Hoekstra:  I’d have to say one of my favorites is, Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Jim Rembach:  Okay, Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Judd Hoekstra. Okay, Judd, this is my last Hump day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age 25 and you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skills or knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Judd Hoekstra:  I’d have to say it would be reframing. Because it is the key to being able to quickly change your mental state to be able to look at something that is originally threatening and see it as an opportunity to take advantage of that opportunity and it’s a skill that I didn’t learn until after 25 but certainly glad I’ve got it now and I would love to take it back to when I was 25.

Jim Rembach:  Judd, it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Judd Hoekstra:  Sure. The best way to reach me is at Judd at juddhoekstra.com or at my website. 

Judd Hoekstra, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

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