The Flow State Formula: Stress, Safety & Success with Blair LaCorte

When you find yourself in that. So how do you get there? It's that balance between stressing, you have to be learning and stressing and having that confidence that you can do so you're in that line where you're pushing right up against it and you're continuing to challenge yourself and, and you get into a zone where, okay, you can separate what you know from what you don't know, and you can enjoy.

The safety in, in that zone. And that, to me, the key term to flow state is a sense of feeling safe. I do think that constructive trauma and destructive trauma are really what defines you early on, and then you figure out how you work through it and work on it. The goal in life is to figure out who you are, right?

And that means that you have to look at these things and look at what you don't like and what you like, and ask yourself why. In this episode, part one in a series with Blair Lort, visionary business leader, his charity, the Buck Institute. Welcome to the show. Well, that's the interesting thing about you, right?

You're able to connect with so many different people. Yeah. You know it, but it comes back down to why, you know, I, you have to ask yourself, like, I think that for me, that's the way I defined meaning, was that didn't have to talk to everybody, you know, talk to everyone every day. That when I have people that I care about, I need to make that effort.

Like my dad would always say, you know, send people a card when it's not Christmas or their birthday, because they will know that it took an effort for you to do that and to think about that. And so that's kind of the way I think about this kind of stuff. When I call 'em up and say, Hey, would you like to come speak?

They know that I am actually, you know, I wanna see them. It's just that humans are much simpler than we. You know, we wanna believe this is really complex. We all just want to feel loved and appreciated and seen, you know? Well, it's so true. I mean, and every time, you know, anytime I spend time with you, um, I'm always amazed by the, um, like the, you're really president in that moment.

Yeah. You know, but I get as much back. I mean, that's the irony. It's like, um, you know, people say, well, you're doing, you know, you're doing, no, no, I am actually. I, you know, I'm sucking it in, which is why as I get older, it's tougher for me to hang out with people who are negative or people that I don't believe care because it, it just, the energy, it's, it makes it much more difficult.

The title of the podcast is The Pathway to Pete Performance. So it's really about your story, right? It's like reading a biography, you know, everyone gets something different out of it. Like you, something in there reminds you that you're not alone or that. Someone actually has grappled with the same thing you're grappling with.

It's, you know, and that, I mean, I, I used to love biographies. Yeah. So give us the chunked up version. Yeah. I mean, you've done so many things in your career, it's almost like, how do you, where do you go? How we could spend the entire day talking about that, but, and then like, where are you today and what's important to you?

So, you know, I, again, it's interesting, you know, and I would, I would start with that. I love the way you describe why you did your podcast because. I miss biographies and I don't read as much as I used to read, but when I was younger, those were my favorite books. It wasn't science books, it wasn't, uh, even, you know, fantasy books.

It was biographies because it was a way for me to actually experience the world through someone else's eyes and first of all, not feel like I was alone in some of the challenges. Um, and second to see if I could connect in some way to gimme a hint on where I was supposed to. Supposed to go, you know, I remember when I was 14, I remember thinking to myself, I got in trouble for something and I was sitting on a hill and I thought, God, it still seems like everything is gray.

I, I don't even know exactly what I wanna do with my life, and I'm not sure exactly how I should get there. So I'm really looking forward to when I'm 18 and I really have a good, good sense of that. From that day on, um, I've realized that it never gets less gray. Um, there's always decisions to be made and always things to learn.

And the trick in having things be black and white is to accept that things aren't black and white. And that's why I love shows like this and, and, uh, because it, I think it is the new biography. So you grew up on the east coast, you're doing a lot of things. You're wind up at Dartmouth eventually. Give us some highlights, give us some highlight reels, some, some life experience.

Sure. You know, the older you get, the more you look back for what you didn't see when you were going through it. And that's just natural, right? Like it's looking at a game film and saying, you know, I didn't realize I dropped my shoulder right there. And that changed the way people reacted and the, the ball moved left instead of moving.

Right. And uh. You start to, to think, what are those patterns? Because just like in gaming, I'm trying to level up, trying to get to that next level of that next game. I don't think there, there's ultimately this, uh, Maslow car, car EVs that, uh, needs that you get to self-actualization and you're there. I think there's, you know, different levels and, uh, self-actualization means you drop down and you come back up.

So I would say for me, looking back, um, you know, I had a lot of, I had a lot of interesting. Trauma. And I had a lot of, um, interesting opportunities, um, as, as someone who was young, and I think I married a, a psychoanalyst, so I apologize for this, but I do think that constructive trauma and destructive trauma are really what defines you early on.

And then you figure out how you work through it and work on it. Right. So my early life, uh, like many people, my parents, um, were both from the same neighborhood and, uh, they, uh. We're both from a pretty tough neighborhood and they got married. My mother was very beautiful and uh, you know, she was the first person to, uh, go to college out of her siblings and cheerleader and model and really bright and believed that she was going to be something special.

And, uh, my dad, um. You know, was one of those hardworking kids out of the pool hall who was great with people and wanted to change the world. And I think they had that in common that they both wanted to change the world from, uh, different directions. I would say my mother was probably more focused on how to change it by getting to the top, and my dad was more focused on changing it by helping underdogs get to the top.

But there was definitely an overlap. And if I look at my life, um, those trends have followed through. I have a continuous improvement mentality, I think, for my mother and I am always looking to try to figure out, um, who are the underdogs and how to team with that, right? So we like to say that we, we leave everything behind, but I think those two things, uh, are there.

So I probably, you know, can most people be a tough childhood? I have, um, you know, I was the only child of my parents. You know, I want people to think about that when they think about their upbringing. 'cause it does matter. But I had eight brothers and sisters. I was the oldest male in my, uh, family, but I also, uh, was split between two towns.

Um, one town fairly affluent, and the other town not affluent at all. So right there you see a dichotomy of environment. And, um, I would also say if you, if you really have to be honest with yourself, you know, one family looked wealthier, but the house on the outside looked wealthier, but it was fairly rotted in the inside.

And my father, my stepfather, was a, you know, had a tough childhood and violent alcoholic and, you know, very, um, highly decorated war hero who never left the war. And my father was a guy who every Friday would go out and teach people how to interview and give them suit coats and random acts of kindness were her, were his thing.

So I got to see the opposite ends of the spectrum. So in essence, I think I became a facilitator. Um, from the negative side. I was always try to figure out who people were so that there was no drama. From the positive side, I was always trying to figure out who people were so I could actually help them and I could understand them and I could get better because I always wanted to get better.

So, um, we can talk about where that went, but I think that all of us have to go back and ask, you know, where we started. And it has nothing to do in that sense with, uh, with that I wanted to be a doctor or that I would be good at business. It had to do with how I found safety and peace. In my environment that I grew up in.

And what were the good things about that and what were the bad things? It's pretty deep, you know, if you really think about it, I mean, I obviously you've had some time to look back at it, like you said, look at the game film. Right. And, and you know, again, when I, I said to you earlier before the interview, I said, you know, sometimes you feel there's a gray area because you can understand, not a gray area in the law, not a gray area in morals, but a gray area.

And is that good or is that bad? Right. You know, I, it, it all depends, right? It all depends on where you are at that moment in time and, uh, what you're able to do. So I always, when I pick up teams and I'm coaching, I always think take people from where they are, right? You can't coach and say, this is the right way to do it, until you understand where people are and what they're good at and what they're not good at.

And that goes for yourself. I mean, um, it's easy to talk about coaching from the outside. Um, but, you know, our goal, I think my, the goal in life is to figure out who you are, right? And that means that you have to look at these things and look at what you don't like and what you like, and ask yourself why, and then reconcile, and then move on.

And then ask yourself why. Again, and again and again, I believe in positive thinking, right? You can re, um, do your neurons and you, you know, you have 17 million bits of information that you pull in every second. You only process a hundred, 150. So if you ask yourself, what do you process? You either process things that are a threat.

Your eyes and your ears and your senses are all looking for threats. So you'll process that right away through your mic. Nuclear, the other thing you process is patterns that, um, that you've put into your head. And if they're positive patterns, you see positive things and you see opportunity. If they're negative patterns, uh, uh, patterns, you actually see the negative things.

So the, I do believe that there is a, you know, a great power in being able to be positive, but not without self-awareness and reality because, you know, the placebo effect does work, um, but it doesn't work when you, um, are stacked up against facts that completely contradict it. So I am always focused on, in my default, I look for the positive first, and then I try to process, if it's not positive, how well I react to it.

Not, will I change it? How will I react to it? One of the reactions may be I can change it early in my life, I would always say I can save everybody. Um, and my dad would say, listen, you can't save anyone. You know, your job is to, is to save yourself so you can help someone, but you can't hold 'em up if you help someone up and then you let go of 'em and their legs aren't strong enough 'cause they can't stand on their own, they're gonna fall down anyway.

So at, at the end of the day, be very careful to blur the line between when you're reacting to something to think you can change it, um, and to think you can help change it. And the first thing I always look at in, in people especially uh, at work is, you know, who are they and where do they want to go?

Because if they want to improve and they want to succeed and they want to look at those tough things, I can bring them to the next level. If they don't want to, that doesn't mean I have to fire 'em. It means that I can't put 'em in the same position that I would put someone who wants to grow in, and that may mean they quit because they don't get promoted.

But there are some very skilled people who just wanna do what they're doing and don't want to be any better. And there's jobs for those people see 'em every day. Yeah. And and by the way, that's the way tribes are built. Yeah. Right? If, if a tribe was all one personality or one psychographic, you would kill each other, right.

You have to have diversity within the OR or for it to function. So let's talk about like flow state for you, some practices and things that you do when you find yourself in that. Like, so how do you get there? So if you looked at the traditional, um, definition of flow state, it's that balance between stressing you have to be learning and stressing.

Having that confidence that you can do. So you're in that line where you're pushing right up against it and you're continuing to challenge yourself and, and you get into a zone where, okay, you can separate what you know from what you don't know, and you can enjoy the safety in, in that zone. And that, to me, the key term to flow state is a sense of feeling safe.

Everything slows down. You know, I feel good. Um, I know where I am and I should be here. Whether it's in sports or it's in business, or it's in a relationship, um, you need stress and you need safety, and you need to ride that line between the two. And I think that that is, it's a tough one because people think that those two things are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and in reality, they're not.

They touch, right? So if you're always worried about safety, you're not gonna grow. And if you're always stressing yourself out and trying to push yourself to that next level, you're not gonna get into flow. You're gonna, you're gonna be worn out and you're gonna be frustrated and you know, you can't actually move that one level up.

So it's being able to accept those two things simultaneously, that it's okay to actually worry and feel safe at the same time. I'd love for you to talk about some of the challenges that you found along the way. It's sort ofdecision making or ways that you overcome them. Tough stuff. Yeah. I mean there, I mean everyone has those moments where they um, they have doubt, right?

Or where you push too hard or, and you know, I always step back and say to myself, look, this is a portfolio theory problem. If you only are focused on one thing, like you want to be an Olympian and you're gonna focus on that and you're gonna go to the extreme and you're not gonna have any balance, because you can't have balance when you go to be an Olympic, I have good friends who are Olympic athletes, and you know you have to be, you're not gonna be norm, okay?

You're not gonna be in the middle of the curve, even no matter how skilled you are, you need to do things that are extreme right? And so. I think that that's fine. Humans are made to stress. We die if we don't stress. Okay? Neurons are built. When you take a look at neuroplasticity, it's built because the neurons actually have to, you have to get stressed so that you can actually reprogram.

And when you're physically trying to get stronger, your heart, your lungs, ripping muscle, you have to stress. So humans who don't have enough stress die. Humans who have too much stress, which I'll call chronic stress, which means there's not a release of the stress, um, so that your body and your mind can actually recover.

IE deep sleep and rem sleep, replicate that process of recovery and maintenance. If you don't do, if you push too hard on either of the ends, you, um, you don't grow and then you die. Okay? So I think that, um, it's good to have stress. I always use the analogy with people. Look, you, you've seen the, the, um, practice where, okay, I'm gonna jump rope and I'm gonna get my heart rate up for a minute, and then I'm gonna time how long it takes my heart to get back to a normal level.

What's my recovery time? It's a great indicator of resilience. This is how resilient I'm back to it and only took me 32 seconds. Okay? Now it took me 29 seconds. I am much more resilient than I was. The same thing happens in almost every aspect of your life. How it's not that you don't stress out. It's how quickly can you recover from that stress state?

Stress itself is a trigger and it, it activates a lot of things in your mind and activates a lot of things in your body. But chronic stress leads to poor performance or leads to physical degeneration. And I think that's the big thing that people don't realize. We get very good at absorbing stress and especially, uh, you know, as a male you're told, you know, supper.

A little bit. You worked really hard, um, collapse and then get up and, and do it again, and, and everyone else around you says he's a tough guy. Um, if you don't actually have someone in your life, in that portfolio of your life, but you can actually find safety in or that will sit and take care of you and have compassion to you, then you will suboptimize, right?

It, that's just the, it, it's very simple. Or a machine, right? We're just a very sophisticated machine that has feelings. That's really interesting. I mean, you think about it like you hear other guys that retire and they all die, right? There's no more stress. There's no more things that are, keep we going. We have a guy that we both know, um, doesn't need, we don't need to name them.

Uh, but I mean, a guy's like, you knows, late eighties, I think he's gonna turn 90 next year. Uh, and it was amazing, right? He's still going, he's still crushing. He looks like, you know, you look at him physically, it's amazing. He's never stopped, still walks like 10, you know, 10 miles a day basically. I mean, he's suit ultra successful guy.

Um, but he'll never quit. And I think he knows intuitively that if he ever were to stop and just not have anything, there wasn't any stress in his life in managing his assets and all the things. Look, and I, I think that retirement is one of those outdated concepts that we used during the industrial reso, uh, you know, revolution, which was do your time.

Then you'll get rewarded right at the at at the end of this, right? You get a pension and you'll get to do whatever you want to do, and you're sacrificing for the greater good. And I think there was a cultural ability to do that at a certain time, but let's just reference the study that. That you just referenced, there's been a bunch of them that males, uh, tend to deter, deteriorate, get two chronic health illnesses or die within two to three years of time they retire.

And you say, what? Why is that? Well, there's two factors. Um, one factor is purpose and the ability to push and know what I'm doing every day. It's not what keeps you up at night, it's what gets you up in the morning. So if someone, um. Switches from working to taking care of the grandkids. You don't see the statistic when they look at the subgroups and the cohorts that does not follow the same path When someone stops working and their purpose goes away and they, um.

They don't have anything to fill it with. Then you see that, that path. But the second piece is this idea around connection. When you're at work, there's a whole set of connections that you have that are institutionalized. You know, when you show up at the office, someone's gonna say hello, they'll smile at you.

You know, when you run into someone in the hallway, um, that they're safe, you have, you know, and so this whole idea of connectivity and that you have a tribe. And people who know what you do, even if they work for you, and even if they're not always hugging you, you feel very safe because you know what your tribe looks like.

Retirement pulls out both the purpose and then what you find with men. The average man in the United States when you take the average is less than one best friend. And when you actually ask them who their best friend is, men define it as someone they've known the longest, not how many times they talk to them and not what they talk about.

Which is very different than, you know, how women define it. But when you push 'em further and say, well, who maybe not your best friend, but who are your friends? 90% of 'em are come from business because that's where they spend their time. And those friends tend not to be wide-based friends because you're functioning with them only through one lens, which is a shared goal in business.

Now, uh, Dunbar who was a genius, he was a, actually, you know, was one of the few PhDs in anthropology and, um, psychotherapy and studied Dunbar's number was how many people you can connect to the size of your neocortex, the size of your brain. Why can humans actually create tribes that are bigger and connect?

And that's how they, they're, they've taken over, um, the leadership, the alpha position, even though they're not the biggest and the strongest. Um, one of the things they talk about when they define it is those aren't really friends. Those are acquaintances. Now again, the colloquial in our thing is what acquaintances seems like.

Someone you said hi to acquaintance can be very intimate, but it's defined on one interaction and what you talk to them about is defined on one plane. What I mean by that is it's very difficult to be vulnerable at work. Okay? And so while it is a very fulfilling relationship and it's part of your, what you need in a tribe is to know.

That we're in this together, um, you're missing a big piece of it. So if you don't have family and friends, best friends that fill in that vulnerability, um, area, then you're, you're very, very narrow. Um, and, and not to, to get to geek out too much, but this really brings us back to that first, where we started this whole thing, which is self-awareness and growth.

Because it turns out that the highest correlate to you growing. Is your ability to show others who you are and in business. Or in pick up basketball or in single acquaintance types of things. You often don't show everything about you. You show the public image is what people need to know and how you'll be accepted and how you'll get picked for the team.

Right? You don't walk up to the pickup game and, and start talking about how that you're depressed about your relationship and you know, no, you're out. The, you play ball. They want, you know, are you gonna play ball today? You know, you're, you're, I mean, this is not what you talk about. And, and we need that because what it turns out, the simple answer to self-awareness and connection is that they are two sides of the same coin.

If you don't have people in your life who know both the good and bad about you, how are you ever gonna believe that someone can love you? Yeah. Because even the people that love you don't really know who you are. And then you say, I know it doesn't matter. I can compartmentalize that 90% of who you are is your subconscious.

And I will tell you. That your subconscious does not believe that they love you. If they don't know who you are, how could they, how could they, how could they love you? You know, they don't know who you are. Now, you consciously may override that and say, ah, I can handle it. I'm a guy. Um, you can't. I'm not saying that you should tell everyone everything.

What I'm saying is that if you don't have at least one diadic relationship at any given point in your life, now that can be your wife, it can be your best friend, it can be your parents. One of the toughest things, um, when you have a good relationship with your parents is they know who you are. So when your parents die, I mean, again, I'm talking from a male perspective when, uh, and I've seen this in my life and I've seen it in a lot of my friend's life.

When, when your father dies. It is very traumatizing. Not just because you love them, but because you are the end. You're now the end. But no one knows you like they know you. Yeah. And no one, you don't feel like you had a good relationship. That Dtic relationship showed you what love was, not perfection.

'cause you know, every parent waits for their kids to stay that day, that special day when they say thank you for all you've sacrificed and every kid. Is waiting for that special day when their parents go, you know, I did fuck up a lot. I'm sorry for that. And, and they're, and at some point you get both of those things and you get to be, you know, best friends who, who accept each other.

But that's the, the challenge. The, the challenge is that we like to make this very complicated. Um, but this whole idea of public image, which has been amplified by what happens in, uh, in social media. And I'll take a breath there, but there's a, there's an interesting lesson if you want to hear about it, about why social media is so effective at, um, tearing apart and, um, someone's psychology.

So I get, I, I spent, I try to, you know, I try to go to things that. Scare me. So, you know, because I don't know as much as everyone else and I want to meet people and maybe they'll like me, maybe they won't like me. So I, I have gone to a lot of weekend retreats and this one weekend retreat we went to, which was really was all the people in social media.

And I'm not a big techie, although I do like Facebook and I know that's, uh, cool to say, but I get to see, put my kids up there. I like to see people happy and on Facebook, everyone's happy. It's like a Hallmark movie, and I, as long as I don't get jealous, I don't care. It's happiness. If I, I scroll through a bunch of happy people, my brain says The world's a happy place.

I got enough enough trauma. At this weekend we had Tristan who, um, did the movie Social Dilemma. We had Francis, who was the Facebook whistleblower. We had the, uh, Cambridge Analytic whistleblower. We had all of these different people, um, from all sides of social media. And one of the most striking things that I learned was that if you really look at it, this wasn't a conspiracy theory.

When you're talking to Francis about the fact that they can tell you, Facebook can tell you who's gonna commit suicide in the next two weeks, they're never gonna tell those people because if they ever did tell those people, they would actually get sued for invasion of privacy. But you don't need to invade someone's privacy.

You can actually, they can tell when there's gonna be a genocide, which is why she leaked the information about, um, Facebook having all this information. 'cause they weren't, you know, they, you can see these trends now. Why? Um, can they see these trends? Because they took an assistant product manager and said to 'em, can you have someone stay on the site for 10 more minutes?

You'll get promoted. There's nothing nefarious about that. I have advertisers, they're gonna pay me money. Can you get someone on the site for 10 minutes? This is not like evil, but these, you know, the kids, they figure out how to get you on 10 minutes. So how do they get you on for 10 minutes? They have to go to your amygdala, and your amygdala is always looking for safety.

All we do. All we do as humans are look for safety and love. Safety and love. Safety and love. Safety and love. But safety is primary because it's an attack. So when you look at social media, let's take a topic that's in the news today about young women being depressed. Why are they depressed? Because one of the biggest fears we have is not being accepted in the tribe because.

If you're not accepted in the tribe, if you're not high enough up in the tribe, you're either gonna get kicked out or the tribe's gonna kill you. So if a girl thinks that she doesn't fit in and she's not thin enough, that is the equivalent of death. So while people aren't trying to do that, what they're doing is they're playing on this connection thing.

How can anyone love you? If you're not moved in? You don't fit in. And that is hardwired in our brain. Um. I'll talk about something that just very few people know, but you know, I had a bunch of stuff happen, you know, in different places around the world. Um, and, you know, I may have breathed in a bunch of stuff that, um, hurt me and eventually my breathing system, you know, started to break down under stress.

When I got divorced, it triggered a bunch of stuff that was in there and I ended up having my entire face taken off. It's really fascinating when they don't tell you that you will look completely different than you did before. Um, and the loneliness of not being recognized is terrifying. Hey, thanks everyone for watching the show.

Please remember to like, comment, and subscribe. It really helps us out here at the channel and share the video with someone who might be interested in supporting the charity that our guest, uh, mentioned in the episode. Thanks again. We'll see you soon.