Equipping Teams to Use AI Without Losing Purpose

David Rice: We talk about optical performance being different from high performance, but we still get sucked into that sort of all or nothing mentality that leads to burnout. What do you think the most important factor is in flipping that dynamic?

Matt Granados: Yeah. Number one is you don't solve for burnout. You avoid it. High performance — high output, unsustainable pace compared to others. Optimal performance — high output at a sustainable pace compared to one's own abilities.

David Rice: You measure each week across four vital sides. Can you walk us through what those are and why each matters?

Matt Granados: Internal, how are you growing your mind? Relational, how are you growing the connections in your life? Physical, how are you growing the body that you have? And then professionally, how are you growing the contribution to society?

David Rice: How should HR leaders and managers be leveraging AI to sort of boost meaningful purpose-driven work?

Matt Granados: It's how we use it. Is it a tool or is it an idol?

David Rice: Welcome back to the People Managing People Podcast — the show that gets into the messy human side of work, the technology that influences it, and the bold ideas that are gonna shape the people practices of tomorrow. I'm your host, David Rice.

Today's guest is someone who's not here to hand out fluffy motivation or recycled TED Talk advice. Matt Granados is the Founder of Life Pulse, and he is here to challenge everything you think you know about productivity, fulfillment, and the purpose of work itself. In this conversation, we're gonna dig into why you can't accidentally stumble into a fulfilling life, why high performance is actually a trap, and why most workplace burnout has less to do with workload and everything to do with misplaced identity.

Matt breaks down how confusing passion with purpose has derailed entire careers, why HR needs to stop babysitting and start equipping, and what optimal performance really looks like in the age of AI. And yes, we're also gonna talk about whether or not anyone's actually been lit before they start throwing around the term burnout. This is a big one. Honest, practical, refreshingly unfiltered. I really enjoyed this conversation, so let's just get right into it.

All right, so Matt, welcome!

Matt Granados: Appreciate it, David. Thanks for having me on.

David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. Wait, you're in Atlanta, right?

Matt Granados: I was in Atlanta for a while. I'm in St. Louis now. So grew up in Philly, moved to Atlanta, then St. Louis. I always joke Philly in the Northeast, they don't like you and they tell you they don't like you, and then I moved to the southeast where they don't like you, but they tell you they do like you.

And then I finally came to the Midwest where they tend to just like people, so middle of the country, easier to travel. Came here because of my daughter's medical condition, but absolutely love St. Louis where I get to live. Wish the travel was a little easier, the airport was a little better, but other than that, the people are great.

David Rice: Oh that's cool though. Like, I like the, you got around the country a little bit, saw the different parts of it, right?

Matt Granados: Yeah, absolutely. Very different.

David Rice: Yeah. The old melting pot.

So we're gonna be talking about productivity a bit today, and I want to get right into it, you know, kinda like how we change how we think about it a little bit. Because I think that's something that's gonna have to happen, especially as I know, like we talk about AI all the time and people are starting to think about productivity in different ways because it does change how you do things.

But I wanna start with more like a philosophical question if you'll indulge me. So why is intentionality so central to even the concept of fulfillment. Right? And why can't someone accidentally become fulfilled?

Matt Granados: I guess I've never met anybody who's experienced fulfillment without intention. I kind of joke people can win the lottery. They can get lucky. And how they're born. Where they're born. But when it comes to experiencing fulfillment, intentionality is what I call as the catalyst of it, right? Like you cannot go without it. And I describe it. As if you were taking a road trip. That's kind of what life is.

And if you have intention and structure, you'll get where you desire to go. So the intention is the vehicle, the structure is the route, but if you have a vehicle with no route, you've wasted energy. If you have a route without a vehicle, it's a wasted opportunity. So you need intention, you also need structure, and if you put intention with structure properly, which is what our entire business is around you, will get the desired outcome, which as a human is fulfillment.

Now we kind of mask it in things like, well, I need work life balance. No, you don't. People who love what they don't ask for work-life balance. People who hate what they do, ask for work-life balance. Now there's an element of balancing life. Yeah. That's just the general nature of what fulfillment comes from.

But you cannot do it without intention because with intention, it is a recognition of where I am, a recognition of where I need to go, and the actions that need to happen in order to get there. And it's making the choice to take those actions. You cannot become fulfilled accidentally, and that's the reason why intention is the catalyst for fulfillment.

What our system does is it takes intention, it combines it with structure so that by using the structure, you're re-engaging the intention, and we call that perpetual development, which leads to productivity. The byproduct of fixing the root cause is the results that we want. So long answer to your simple question, but that is the reason why I truly feel you will never experience fulfillment accidentally, and you need intention in order to experience it.

David Rice: I love that, 'cause we talk a lot about like purpose-driven work cultures and helping people identify purpose. Right. And it's like, it sounds like everybody's got an idea of what their purpose is, but I think a lot of people just like don't really know. Yeah. When they get started, it's like you need systems in place that will not only help them do that, but then like identify what are the sort of like avenues to get there.

'cause there's, a grotesque old saying, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. Right, right. So, so yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things like, especially for younger professionals, you've gotta learn the hard way. You just gotta go through that. And it's an interesting time for that for sure.

Matt Granados: Yeah, that's without a doubt. And when it comes to purpose, I think it's not even that, it's hard to understand purposes. No one knows really where to start. And because of that, we confuse purpose and passion. When you confuse purpose and passion, bad things happen. For example, if I followed my passions, I'd be a ninja turtle at this age, right?

Like that's what I wanted to be back then. And that wasn't really what my purpose was, but I was passionate about it. And then I won't even go into what would happen in my teenage years if I just followed my passion on a regular basis. And now even as an adult, right? There's things that I, if I was to fall trapped to my passions.

I would be making major mistakes, whether it's in business, in relationships, whatever part it is. But it comes to understanding what do these two words mean and how the world has manipulated them and used them against us. So if you were to Google the word passion, don't scroll too far down. You're gonna get very bright, very attractive images.

Pretty intense images, and that's what I said. Then you scroll down, you're gonna get in trouble for what you're searching. If you were to look up purpose, you're gonna find boring clip art. Things like a guy who's kind of like weirdly shaped, looking down a path, like that's your purpose. But if you were to look at the definition of the two, and this is where it gets serious, the purpose, the definition of purpose is the reason for which something exists.

The definition of passion is strong, uncontrollable emotions. My question to you is, which one would you rather follow? You'd obviously rather follow the reason for which you exist. Now, we get into an entire existential conversation on that. Happy to go down that rabbit hole with anybody because I think there is an actual answer, and I think there is a true answer to that question.

But in order to understand your purpose, whether we agree on the foundation of it, we all have to realize there's a reason we exist. The question is, what is that reason? I found the best way to do that is to break it down into three categories that make up how we live out that purpose. And it's understanding your identity, your calling, and your assignment.

And where we make a mistake is we confuse those three where we think our assignment is our identity. And because of that, when our assignment changes, for example, with me, if I have people who retire, they go to a different job or a different role. They think their entire identity is off basis or their entire purpose is lost because my assignment has changed and I've come to find our assignment changes all the time.

My assignment changed when I got married. It changed when I had a kid. It changed when I had a second kid. It changed when I found out about my daughter's health condition. It changed when I had a business. It changed when I didn't have a business, right? Our assignments change all the time. We need to understand the purpose in which we exist versus the uncontrollable, fleeting emotions that is passions.

Do not try to seek your passions. Instead, what I say is look at your purpose as an umbrella, and that umbrella is gonna be over your head, and that umbrella is going to protect you from the elements like it does out in the weather of life. And the most fulfilled people I know understand their purpose.

They take the time to find it, which it's not in the future, it's in the past. Which again, I can explain that later. They go and they walk on the proper path to the right point, at the right pace, and they're finding the passions, but they're bringing them in proper alignment with their purpose. Once you do that, you can walk through life and it's kind of like the hardships of life falls off your shoulders as if you had rain and an umbrella protecting you from the elements.

Now, that's how it works. The question is, how do you do this at scale as an HR professional? That's what we come in and teach, and those are the systems that we've developed through life Pulses to allow you to do just that. But the first thing to realize, you never find your purpose by looking into the future.

That's your desires, that's your wants, that's your passion. You find your purpose by reflecting properly on your past. What was it like growing up as a kid? What was it like in your teenage years? Now for some people, they're like, I don't wanna mess with that stuff. Well, you don't pick your purpose. You discover it.

Those are the exercises that we put people through because self-discovery is the key to every single thing we do, which is why our content, when we bring it into companies, regardless of the industry, regardless of the size, are so impactful to the people because it's all based on self-discovery just like I think your purpose needs to.

David Rice: You've put it into some really interesting language here.

I think this is like something that a lot of leaders shy away from, especially when we talk about things like calling. I think for leaders themselves, they sometimes don't know what necessarily the calling is, aside from, you know, attaining the job title and keep going. That's always been sort of the goal, but what is the calling of it?

You know, that's more of a deeper question and I like you alluded to there, some of this work can be a little bit uncomfortable. You might have to think about things that you don't wanna think about or that you've forgotten about. And yeah, I just find that the language that you've put around this very interesting because it is, like you said, self-discovery work.

There's a lot of like counterproductive advice out there. I mean, you'll hear people say Follow your passion.

Matt Granados: Yeah. And it's a disaster, right? Maybe be passionate about what you do. I could see that of like be emotionally invested in the actions you take. And we have a whole in our book, motivate the unmotivated of what is it that takes someone to be a motivational all-star?

And one of it is proof in living and actually they live out what they say. So I get that concept if you wanted to try to bend it to make sense. But this is the issue is words have meanings and leaders seem to have forgotten that. And because we've been told we can kind of change definitions of words, that is a disaster in all of society, let alone in the workplace.

So for example, your identity, I define that as who you are. Your calling is how you're going to do it, and your assignment is what you're currently doing. So what we do is we take these big hard to understand concepts, but we break them down into simple thought process that allows individuals to go through it themselves and not have the leader have to walk them through everything.

I think that's when it gets a little crazy of like, Hey David, let me tell you what your calling is. Like you don't need my opinion on what your calling is. You need me to guide you through it. But as an HR professional, a lot of them that we work with are like, man, I'd love to do that, but I just don't have the time to sit down with everybody.

And that's why we created the programs we created is because you don't have to sit down with everybody. You give them the assignment, they go do some work, not all the work, and they come back with a closer step towards truth. That's what we want. We want progress towards reality and towards truth. We don't need everyone to be at the perfect truth 'cause that would be impossible to get everyone at in an organization, but at least moving closer towards it.

And when self-realization starts to become enjoyable. People will continue down that path. We just haven't had a lot of leaders who are able to walk them down that path because they're distracted by other things. And if everyone was able to do it, honestly I wouldn't have a company. So that's the hole that we fill, is we help people become the most optimal version of themselves, so that as a leader you can stop babysitting and actually manage the way we're supposed to.

David Rice: Now the system that you've created, you measure each week across four vital signs of productivity being the byproduct of all this. Yeah. Can you walk us through what those are and why each matters?

Matt Granados: Yeah. So the four vital signs of fulfillment is what we call it, but it's internal, physical, relational, and professional.

And they're in that order based on, you know, the needs of humans. So internal, how are you growing your mind, your soul, your spirit, right? Me as a Christian, it goes from a spiritual side, but it doesn't necessarily matter where your belief system is. It's again, the purpose for which we exist. It's how we're built as humans.

So internal, how are you growing your mind? Relational, how are you growing the connections in your life? Physical, how are you growing the body that you have? We only have one of these. We gotta take care of it to be able to do the things we need to do. And then professionally, how are you growing the contribution to society?

Now, I wanna sit on that word for a second because the world's again told us they've taken words. They flipped them on us. Just like follow your passion. They tell us that our job is to consume. Our job is not to consume. Our job as humans is to contribute. And in that contribution we get to consume. But the world has shifted it, and that's why we are like, man, these younger generations, we always hear that every single generation is upset with the younger generation.

And what happens is it's that reality that our job is not to consume, it's to contribute. So as we focus on those four vital signs, I have found that the goal is not to necessarily balance them. In a present tense, but is to continue to be balancing them right in the sense that we are actively trying to balance these four vital signs.

The way we do this is we do just a quick pulse check, Hey, how did you do last week? In these four vital signs, we rate it on a scale of zero to 10. It's a completely subjective measure. It doesn't matter what the true answer is. It's really where you feel you are at that moment. Then we ask yourself, what are you gonna do next week or this current upcoming week to move the needle forward in that area?

Our goal is not to get people to make these huge jumps in every single area. It's to make small, consistent steps every single week, 52 weeks a year, and all of a sudden you are going to see drastic change in all areas of your life. But internal, physical, relational, professional, you take a minute to just make sure we're at least paying attention to those four vital signs. You're gonna get where you need to go.

David Rice: You know, it's interesting, he's talking there about kinda confusing consumption and contribution. And earlier you had mentioned kinda confusing identity and assignment and you know, how much of this do you think is cultural? Like is this sort of. Maybe more prevalent in Western society in general, or is this, you know, something that we've done within our business world that has driven a lot of this.

What do you think some of the key driving factors behind this?

Matt Granados: I think the key driving factor, yes, is cultural because you go into different countries and organizations, the different parts of the world who don't have the access to things that we have, the advancements to things that we have. The availability of things, the impulsive, I want it now and I can get it.

The, I would say almost the lack of need that we as a Western society have. And yeah, you're gonna get a Dre they will laugh at the fact that we're dealing with some of this stuff, but all that being said, the cause we can address to culture, but the impact still needs to be taken care of the solution still needs to be offered.

I think the biggest culprit of this is the self-growth world. It is the self-development world is the grinded out mentality is the you do what you gotta do for you and don't worry about anyone else. You get as much as you can while you're here. Yolo, all those things that have come up through the generations, I think has led to the fact that, Hey, I need what I need and disregard what you need.

Not realizing the way humans were made were to be in community and to work with each other. That is why we sit there. So we bring in these quick fixes that I call symptomatic solutions, meaning they focus on the problem, they don't focus on the root cause. So for example, the biggest issue is a lot of companies, especially in the HR world, and I'm not knocking everybody, this is gonna be a pretty counter cultural approach.

'cause everything we do kind of goes counter to what the traditional personal development world has done. And I think that's why it works, because what we've been doing isn't working. Symptomatic approach would be if I broke my arm and I had my bone sticking out, and I come to you and I say, David, my arm hurts.

I need help with the pain, and you gave me pain meds. What's gonna happen is the pain is going to go away for a little bit, but eventually 20, 30 minutes in that bone is still sticking out. It's still hurts. So what needs to actually happen is not that you gimme something for the pain, is you need to take the bone, reset it and put a cast on it.

Now that's gonna hurt a little bit more than just giving me the pain meds. But the beautiful thing is the way we are created is that our bones, if placed properly, will heal themselves. I find that our people, if equipped properly to bridge those gaps, will heal themselves. So the biggest mistake that's happened from a developmental situation is we feel that we as a company have to bridge these gaps to every single individual based on their individual needs.

Because of that, we've enabled people versus equipping people, but we've enabled people to assume the company's gonna gimme what I need. I just have to negotiate harder. I have to stand firm. I have to not agree with X, Y, and Z, and I'll get what I want. But the information really needs to be is hey employees, we are going to spend resources to properly equip you personally and professionally.

We will be a strong foundation for you, but it is your job to bridge the gap back to us. Why do we do this with every company we work with? Because individuals get a little caught off guard going, whoa, that's different. But they start seeing the results and that feeling of fulfillment, and now all of a sudden, I don't care whether you have 10 people, 10,000, a hundred thousand people in your organization.

When you flip that cultural mindset that, Hey, we are going to be a strong foundation for you as employees to live the life that you want, do the things that you want, and there will be expectations of what needs to be met. On top of that, we are going to be offering a personal development option for you to ensure all of that, that you can choose to use or choose not to use.

But the expectation is we will be the foundation and it is your job to bridge the gap back to us. That goes against everything that's been taught in culture for the past 20, 30 years. Since we've started focusing on it. It's all been about what can I give to my people to get them to want to come to work?

And I have found is how can I help my people solve their personal problems and their professional problems? On their own, so I don't have to do that work for them. And that allows them to come do their job. If you have a decent business, if you're an HR director and you're taking care of your people effectively and properly, the job's not the hard part.

Life is harder than the job. The job should be a vehicle to live the life you want. And that's exactly what we started solving for companies, regardless of their issue.

David Rice: I love it. I've long said, you know, work to live, don't live to work. It's great because you're taking the onus off of leaders.

Because I think we've put it on them, but it's, we're putting in the onus on workplace leaders to do something that they're not actually equipped to do.

Matt Granados: Absolutely. And they can't do, it's impossible to do it at scale.

David Rice: And it's also like not necessarily the role that you should be playing in these folks' lives.

I think that this role that you're, the way you're describing is much more realistic and sustainable versus trying to be someone's hero, essentially.

Matt Granados: Yeah. Because you also have the other half of what HR has to do. HR, I find, and this is why I love HR people again, I'm biased towards certain departments at certain companies I go into, right?

HR and I get along really well because HR gets sucked into the administrative side of HR a lot, so they can't do the developmental side of people. That's why our system comes and actually helps them do exactly that so that they can focus on what they need to focus on. People are being developed on their own pace, doing their own thing, but they come to the HR department to kind of get confirmation on where to go next.

So it's more of like a mentorship than a babysitting. And I always keep saying that we are babysitting our people. But then what happens is HR seems to have turned into like instead of like resources for humans, it's like we've just started seeing humans as resources. And just like we talked about with contribution versus consumption is companies have started to create this HR department to consume all they can out of their people.

Well, you suck your people dry. They have nothing left to go for. Just like in the grinded out mentality of the self-growth world right now, if you grind it out, do you know what happens when you grind something? It goes away. It grinds to nothing. The concept itself is a terrible concept. Now, there's times where we have to work hard.

We call them expansion cycles, but there's times where you have to work hard. And we had a client of ours who introduced us to that concept of, Hey, it's gonna be tough from this time to this time, but this client of ours who's a very successful chiropractor out of Atlanta, Georgia, they go on a vacation at the end of that cycle.

Like they have a clear start and stop date, and when that's done, they're back to reality. The grind it out, all of that, man, it's just HR has been kind of left with their hands tied behind their back, and all leaders have, but it's not that difficult. We just need a systematic approach that can be solved by the individual doing their work.

If they do their work, the byproduct is the productivity. The byproduct is the workload being less, and that's how our entire company started was we got reached out to by all these large companies and they would say, man, we have an issue with communication. Your system helps us. We have an issue with personnel.

Your system helps us. We have an issue with workload, time management, you name it. I call them the Amazon top 10. Like what are the top 10 personal development categories that are talking about now? Change management, right? AI, how do we manage AI? If your system helps us, and we'd come in and we would teach the same system, and the reason why is what our system does is it takes people to a fourth level of performance.

That's not high performance, right? That's where everyone thinks is the best place to be, is a high performer. It's not, I'm so unimpressed with high performers at this point. It means nothing, and with the introduction of AI, a high performer is going to get squashed instantly by AI when they come through.

What we need to focus on is optimal performers, which is the key to every single thing we try to get to when we work with clients.

David Rice: It's interesting because like, you know, when we talk about optical performance being different from high performance, you know, I think we're moving in a direction of sustainable outputs being considered the better goal, right?

We still get sucked into that sort of all or nothing mentality that leads to burnout. Like it's pervasive, it's everywhere, rising, grind, culture, all that stuff, just like you said. So what do you think the most important factor is in flipping that dynamic?

Matt Granados: Yeah. Number one is you don't solve for burnout.

You avoid it. You need to not get there. Right? How do you stop something from burning out? It's already burnt out, right? The other thing is people are like, I feel burnt out. I'm like, I don't know if you've ever been lit. Let's make sure you've been lit first before we start saying I've been burnt out. So there's a couple mindset shifts that need to change.

The other part that comes of that is when we are focusing on the difference between high performance and optimal performance, we need to define terms. We've talked about this, right? Words mean things. Like I said, there's four levels of performance. Number one is lazy and unaware. I'm sure all of you who are listening have somebody like that.

Number two is high potential, right? The high post. There's a ton of those, but what do we do with them? Well, we're too busy focusing on the next level, which is high performers. High performers are great, but they aren't actually what we need to go for. We gotta go to level four, which is optimal performance.

So high performance, high output, unsustainable pace compared to others. Optimal performance, high output at a sustainable pace compared to one's own abilities. Let me explain why AI is going to crush high performers, right? This is gonna be a controversial comment, but. That's why we do these things, right?

If high performance is high output, unsustainable, which means it cannot continue, and it's compared to others, when you put a robot in there, high output, sustainable pace, not compared to any human, you can't compete with that. It would be like a calculator versus a human. Eventually there's going to be a break.

I don't care how well you can compute numbers. The calculator will outlast you on a timeframe. We joke, my daughter, she's in a wheelchair. She's got a very rare muscular condition, and we'll go on walks with the family and my son, who is six, and my daughter who is eight, they get at each other like any brother and sister would because he is faster than her until we're about a mile into the walk.

Does that make sense? And not even a mile, we'll say half a mile because her wheelchair will go for 24 hours and she stays at two speed at all times. So as we're messing with AI, if you're still focusing on high performance, you're gonna be left in the dust. Optimal performers, high output, sustainable pace compared to one's own abilities As an optimal performer, you are going to figure out ways to leverage AI as a tool and not look at it as an idol and really be able to use it because your focus is, like you said, on sustainability.

So you will take the time to not run the race as fast as you can, tortoise in the hare to leverage the tools that are available to be able to get a greater output at a more sustainable pace because you are an optimal performer. When you're in the high performance world, when you're in that grinded out culture, that hustle mentality, you will get crushed the more AI comes into this.

David Rice: First of all, I wanna say I love that you said that line. Have you ever been lit? Because now I get to make, at some point I'm gonna get to make a workplace related post with the hashtag get lit. But no, I I'm curious, you know, like AI, you mentioned there, it's either a tool or an idol. How should HR leaders and managers be leveraging AI to sort of boost meaningful, purpose-driven work?

Matt Granados: Yeah, I think there's a couple things. In one of our books, we talk about different revolutions that have happened. All throughout history, revolutions used to be a once in a lifetime, if not more experience. Right. So you're talking a hundred years if not more of a revolution or a revolutionary. And as society has become, we'll say, more innovative, right?

The industrial revolution, the technology revolution, they went from like generational to like decades and now they went from decades to like five years and now we're kind of at like a six month period. There's a new revolution every single six months. With that, what I would say. I would focus, primarily, I would focus on how are we leveraging this tool.

And what I mean by that is depending on the size of the company, one thing we do with clients is we suggest them to offer bonuses and actually incentives, whatever you wanna call that. I know that word scare some people. Incentives to create SOPs, not standard operating procedures, but suggested operating procedures, right?

So it gives the flexibility without it being too formalized on how I could do my job with AI, how can I leverage AI so that I met as a single employee, can do 10 x the work? Here's how I'm gonna do this. Oh, and by the way, as a company, I don't think it's too foolish to say, Hey, if you do this, we will actually pay you more.

Because you're getting more work done, but you're gonna have to show us a 10 x impact on the output you're able to do. And just think about this logically. 'cause this is the way I think we need to think about it, not necessarily the actions you need to take. Right? So I hope that makes sense. I'm not suggesting to use this math, but think about it.

If I as a singular employee can do 10 x my output at 30 hours a week versus 40 hours a week, because I'm leveraging AI and technology in creative ways. Would it be problematic to say, I deserve, or I could get a 10 to 15%, maybe a 20% increase in my pay if I'm able to do a 10 x the output of work. Now all of a sudden it's like, no.

We're gonna hit that work-life balance by encouraging you to create and use more AI tools. Now, the Pennywise pound foolish individual people cut their nose off to spite their face. All those individuals who are like, ah, but then we can fire all of our people. You're missing the concept. Humans are still needed in all of this.

AI can work. And again, it moves fast. So it could be at a point where that's not needed. But at the point of this recording, humans are still needed. So how do we incentivize and leverage the individual to use it for the best output possible? And that's what I found is the way we think about it. So if I can, instead of going, they're gonna take all of our jobs, no, they're gonna allow us to 10 x our output.

Same people, 10 x the out, but well, there's not a market for that. Well then get sales to figure something out. Let's build a market. We have the infrastructure, let's get creative. I think a lot of companies get big. We get fat, we get lazy, and we kinda like what we're doing. So because of that, we're not forcing things the way we need to force things and getting things where they need to go.

So I would be highly encouraging. You have an administrative individual, how are they gonna use AI to better do their job and share it? Don't hide it. I don't want them to know I'm not really doing the work. No, that should be exciting. That is called working smarter, not Harder. We have been trying to teach leaders to do this.

We've been trying to teach our people to do this, and now we have a tool that allows us to work smarter and not harder, and we're gonna penalize people for it. The hypocrisy that we run into. 'cause we don't sit back and go, let me think about this. This is an amazing tool that is it gonna destroy society?

Maybe. But it's only gonna destroy society because of the humans who create it and use it. And it's the same concept. It's not that I don't trust AI, I don't trust the humans. That's my biggest issue. Yeah. So like it's how we use it. Is it a tool or is it an idol? If we idolize it, it's gonna be a disaster.

If it's a tool, then we're gonna be in a great spot, just like every other revolution and growth in society that we've experienced to this point.

David Rice: Yeah. I love that you said that. I often call it the evangelist crowd, like the idolization of it, like. Acting as if it's gonna solve all society's problems.

Like we are still the ones that have to fix everything.

Matt Granados: Yes. And we're still morally flawed and we still do things that are not good to other people. So instead of wondering if this tool is going to destroy us, the question is how are we going to, it's still the most adaptive and advanced creatures that have, that we know of that have ever walked on this planet.

What are we gonna do? How are you gonna use it for good versus bad? Our instinct is naturally to go bad. We talk about this when we say that, you know, people aren't the problem. People have problems, and that's why you have people problems. And once we can get our people to recognize, Hey, my issue with my spouse is actually impacting how I'm working here.

If I could fix my marriage, I could probably do my job better Financially. I'm a train wreck. Health wise, man, it hurts to wake up. I'm outta shape. Putting clothes on uncomfortable sometimes it helps to fix that part of our body so that we can come to work and do what we know we can do. It used to be a big trend of, you know, man, we have a major hiring problem.

I think that was very well addressed. Companies that I work with hire really well. The issue is we don't get the person who came in for the interview to show up at the job, because you're getting the best version of that person in that interview. We want to make sure that we're moving them in the proper direction.

And when they show up on that first day and by day 30, it's like they're not a, you can't even recognize who it was in the interview, that willing wit, who's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, transaction happened and all of a sudden they never showed up. And I joke with people, I go, Hey, out of the transaction that happened at the interview was, we will pay you X dollars to do this job.

Who hasn't held up their end of the bargain? 'cause I can almost promise you, legally the company hasn't rescinded on their offer. Yet your offer of what you were going to do for that compensation, you might not wanna push that envelope. 'cause if we were to pay you on the actual effort, based on what you said you would do in the interview, you'd getting a 50% pay cut for most people.

The average person's only functioning about 40% of their ability. When we come in, we show them that, which bumps them to 60, and then we give them the tools to get them to 80. The key is that 80% number, we call it the 180, a hundred. I wanna hire someone who can do a hundred percent of the responsibility at 80% of their effort to get a hundred percent of their compensation.

The reason I say that is some people would be like, well, they need to be working a hundred percent. If you are hiring someone who needs to be at a hundred percent of their effort to get a hundred percent of the expectations that you have set, they are already coming in and they will burn out very quickly.

I want someone who's got some more left in the tank. If you're redlining the whole time, you're gonna spend more time in the shop and you're gonna have that burnout. So instead, if you hire somebody, you're like, man, if they could do it at a hundred percent they could do this job. That might not be the best fit for that person. Just saying.

David Rice: Yeah, we might wanna just leave some cushion for them to have a bad day. Exactly. Right. So maybe we didn't bring our human being expectation.

Matt Granados: Yeah. And, and that's the issue that comes with itself.

David Rice: You mentioned there, you know, delivering on some of the you know, more efficiency, productivity.

And when we were talking before this, you had told me that the plan kind of on average delivers an extra 15 hours of productivity per week. I'm curious, what do you believe most people will spend that time on?

Matt Granados: So without a proper system put in place, I kind of joke about it is maybe the first, an extra 15 hours of productivity.

It's an extra weekend every single month or an extra month, every single year. If you were just to do the math. And when you ask me what would they do is you kind of get a couple hobbies thrown out there, and then eventually someone's like sleep. And I was like, yeah, we all know that, right? Like we would sleep, we would relax, we would rest.

And what happens is I tell people a story, and it's a story about a woman named Evelyn Adams. Evelyn Adams in the late nineties was sick of being poor. So she made up this entire plan and followed through perfectly. Made $2.5 million the first year, followed the plan again, the second year, another $2.5 million, $5 million.

Evelyn Adams entered her life poor in the same trailer. What happened? Evelyn Adams went to the corner store, bought a lottery ticket, scratched it off $2.5 million, ran through that money, went back the next year again, jackpot again. Same scratch off. Only person in history, at least that I know of, that has hit the same scratch off lottery ticket twice, back to back the years.

The reason why I say this is Evelyn Adams did not have a money problem. She had a spending problem time. We all have 24 hours in a day, so we don't have a time problem. We have a spending problem. If I was to give you 15 extra hours without giving you a solution on how to best handle it and maximize what you do at that time, within probably maybe a year, maybe two, you're just gonna have a 13th month.

In your 12 month calendar, you'll go right back to where you were. We as humans, default down. You look at the second level of aerodynamics, right? Entropy, that everything leads to chaos, right? Anything left on attend leads it to K. Humans are the same exact way. That is why intention is so necessary in order to experience fulfillment.

From what we talked about in the beginning is this exact same concept. So what do I think most people would do if they did this properly? They'd spend more time being, not doing. We're human beings, not human doings, right? Like you said, we are people offering a professional service, not professionals, trying to pretend to be people, and we confuse that very often.

Same situation here. More people would be, here's what being would look like. Taking their time to be with their family, taking their time to think through things. Just contemplating sitting out there and looking up at the clouds and just thinking that is what humans do when it comes to being in that restful state, we think.

And then what we do after we think is we create. That is what we do. We naturally create things. When we have time to do things, we solve problems and we create things. That is the strength of humans and it's called adaptation. It's the only reason we are where we are in the chain of command of what's happening in this planet is we were given this gift of adapting in a way that no other animal can.

How do I know this? 'cause I'm speaking to you from a whole different part of the world, right to you covered up with lights on, microphones, power, all that stuff. That didn't come from being rushed and overdrawn in your workplace. That came from individuals having time to think, right? You look at all the times Thomas Edison failed, or Tesla failed, right?

They had time to process and do this stuff. So that is what I'd like to say. I would love to see people do with that extra 15 hours. What I find that people do with that, that are clients of ours is they do, they sit there and they go on what we call daddy daughter dates or daddy dude dates, or they go on life dates with their spouse.

They rekindle all the things that value, they start going to the gym. If you had an extra four hours every week, would you go to the gym? Yeah. You eventually kind of get bored of doing nothing. So you start doing something and when you actually have intention on your week, you're gonna start filling it with the stuff you want to do.

One of the concepts that we do is we call it reverse planning. This is how you get these 15 hours. You start with what you want to do, then what you need to do, and then you only do what's actually important. You delegate the rest. Now, there's multiple ways you could delegate. If you're like, I don't have anyone to delegate it, to, call me up, shoot us a message, we'd be happy to show you how to do that.

The key to all of this is that concept of intention. Setting your week in the beginning of the week, living seven days at a time. 'cause a month's too long, a day's too short and a week has flexibility. 'cause if I can't do it on Monday, I can move it to Tuesday. If I can't do it on Tuesday, I can move it to Wednesday.

But it also gives you enough of a finish line on the end of the week that you have a little bit of pressure. And humans work well with deadlines. So that's why we do all this. So what would they do with the 15 hours? I hope they would do more of the things they like to do. They'd go play golf more.

They'd go fish more. They'd spend time with their family more. They'd just go hang out more. Like that's what I'd love to see humans do more of stop and be versus constantly do.

David Rice: I think you're right because I think if you look at what people started to do during COVID, right? When all this space was cleared, they start picking up hiking, going to big parks.

Yeah. Golf exploded during that time. Yeah. Think about the things that people chose to opt into. It was those things that were just gonna give them space, allow them to think, give 'em some quiet time. So I think that's natural.

Well, I wanna ask you one more question before we kind of wrap it up, but you were describing a dynamic to me when we were talking before this about a big tech company, which people either felt entitled or enslaved. And by that we mean enslaved in the sense that people didn't understand how to pay back the company's investment in them.

And they stay and they work their butt off. Right. Even like grind themselves down and it becomes a diminishing return after a while. Take me through this idea of flipping the usual, you know, company teaches employee model on its head.

How do you equip the individual basically to kind of sum up what we've been talking about, to bridge the gap back to the company?

Matt Granados: Yeah, so I think the biggest thing to focus on is realizing in that specific situation, this was a huge organization, one that every single person, if I said would know it. One that was known for worklife balance and they called us 'cause they needed help with worklife balance and I was just caught off guard.

I was well wait a minute. I need to understand this better. You are the reason all of us do this stuff. You kind of started this concept and when I was talking with the individual that I was working with, I asked, I said, what's going on? How do you not have worklife balance? You have everything you need right here.

How does it not happen? They said, well, because I either feel entitled, meaning, well, I just deserve it. That was part of the package I was told I was going to get, or I felt enslaved. Meaning, just like you said, David, that they worked and they kind of kept trying to earn back what it was that was given to them.

There was no true value understood behind it. When we as managers, HR, specifically when we're working with humans. The focus needs to be on value, not on offer, not on the actual tangible item. Hey, here's a bonus that means nothing. If you are giving your people meaningless bonuses, percentage raises because they've been there for a year, you're shooting yourself in the foot, you're losing all benefit of motivation.

What we need to do is properly articulate what is happening, why we are doing this, and what is expected because we are doing this. For example, if we are offering a benefit to an individual, the expectation is not that they can pay back the value of what they're getting out of it. The expectation is they can focus on their work.

In this hardship that we're trying to remove for you is no longer a hardship. Like why do we offer healthcare to our employees? You ever walk people through that? We're offering this through you is so that if you were to ever have an issue with your family, you can go to the doctor and you're not financially gonna be destroyed.

That's why we're offering this to you. It's not to compare apples to oranges, like, well, theirs is better. Mine's like, like, that's not why we're doing this. So how well do you articulate the benefit package and how well do you offer things that they truly care about? And that's the other thing, we spent so much money because especially with the larger companies, we sit there and we go, well, we can't customize it for everybody.

And I say, yes, you can. We worked with another company. Had about 900 people we were working with very regulated within the company that you couldn't give more than $20 without going to legal to approve what it was. Hourly employees. How do you get these 900 employees just for this department of this company to do this?

Well, you're able to do it when you ask the right questions and you put the proper system behind it and you track the proper metrics. We step back and we kind of accept how complex or complicated what humans are that we feel We don't need to be tracked by any metrics. And when I do everything I do for UHR professionals or whoever's listening into this, I tell people I always get metrics, even if they're not accurate from a data perspective, there are still ways to use them.

So for example, I will ask someone, where are they today and where do they want to go? If they say they're a five and they want to go to a seven, and then I ask them 90 days later, where are you? And they say, I'm a six. I know we made progress. We didn't get where we wanted to go, but we did make progress.

So I can evaluate the actions we're taking to see is this working or not? If I go into a company, we always track metrics. We always track benchmarks and then desired outcomes. In certain situations that benchmark, let's say we get on a scale, right? 'cause a lot of our one-on-one executive coaching clients, right?

They wanna lose weight, they want to get healthy. That always pops up. If I have a conversation, I'll ask them. I'll say, what's the scale? Say? Well, let's say the scale is off by 10 pounds. So the scale says I'm two 10 when I'm really 200, but my goal is to get to one 90. So my goal is to lose 10 pounds. I walk on that same scale.

90 days later, that same scale is still 10 pounds off, but instead of saying two 10, it now says 200. I can confidently say, as long as the scale is at the same amount that I've lost those 10 pounds I was looking for. So the number on the scale is not accurate, but the progress is. I use questions with individuals.

They set the growth they wanna make and they're the one who's gonna judge it at first and judge it afterwards. And what I found is we as humans, because we don't take time to explain the benefits, because we don't take time for people to understand what is going on. We are burning resources and not getting what we want.

And that is why we focus on maximizing results with the current resources we have. The last thing we could do as a consultant, I think is so foolish. Just come in and say, Hey, you're gonna pay us all this money. Let us tell you now what you need to invest in. It's like that. That is a disaster. What I'd rather do is, Hey, let me show you that you're at 40% of your efficiency.

Here's how you get to 60, and if you want to add these systems, it'll get you to 80, but you don't need to be at a hundred. Being at 80 is a great place to be because when growth happens, change happens. A pandemic happens. A war happens. Economic unrest happens. These gaps get larger. One other thing that happened with COVID is it exposed the weakness within companies.

Oh man. Well, how do our pe We can't get our people to work from home. Well, 'cause you couldn't, they weren't working at work. You just didn't know it. You thought they were, 'cause they were showing up, like it didn't change. What COVID did outside of the health part, which obviously was a big issue, is it took away our structure and our rhythm and structure brings freedom and rhythm brings peace.

And without those two, if you're not equipping your people to experience structure and rhythm on a regular basis, humans don't function well. We don't function well in chaos. We've learned to function in chaos, but it's not our natural state. It's not our most optimal state. So because of that, we come in, we customize solutions, which I suggest you all do.

You make sure they pass the test, that it's not just works in their professional life, but it also works in your personal life because truth is constant in application changes. So as an HR director, if I was to challenge anyone who's listening to this, what do we do? If you don't want to gimme a call, that's totally fine.

But if you don't call me, take the time to make sure is the stuff you're offering to your people actually going to allow them to experience the results they want and properly equip them to deal with the problems themselves.

David Rice: All right, Matt, well, this has been a super fascinating discussion. I love, I could talk all day with you about this stuff.

It's been it's a lot of the same stuff that I'm really interested in around this and I know a lot of other HR professionals are asking themselves the same questions. Before we go, there's a couple things we always like to do. I wanna first give you a chance to tell people more about where they can connect with you and find out more about what you've got going on.

Matt Granados: Yeah. Well, lemme know when we're gonna go round two. 'cause again, we just scratched the surface. But this is a topic I love what you're doing in the field that you're in. If you wanna connect with us, what we'll do is we'll just create a custom page for this podcast for these listeners, which will be lifepulseinc.com/pmp.

There's a couple simple ways, some free resources we'll give on there. That way if you're kinda like, Hey, this makes a little sense, how do I dive deeper? Come on through there and you can access those right away. You can find us on social of @LifePulseInc. All socials, LinkedIn. Friend me. I know HR. We live on LinkedIn, so let's connect on LinkedIn, have conversations there, and if there's any major issues you're running into.

We get free consultations all the time. I love having these conversations, either myself or another expert on the team. We'll jump on a quick call with you here, what issues you're running into. What are the gaps that you're hitting when it comes to performance? We'll just tell you how to fix 'em. Again, if it leads to something, fantastic.

But if not, we just wanna see the culture change and get away from the grinded out mentality and get to a metric driven people focused attention that will get sustainable results regardless of the industry you're in and the size of the company.

David Rice: All right, and the last thing that we have on every episode I give you a chance to ask me a question, so I'll turn it over to you. Ask me anything you want.

Matt Granados: All right. So question I ask when I am in a situation like this with an expert who's in this industry and you have interviewed a lot of people, is what is the one thing that pops into your head when it comes with a concept you were taught that was misleading. Mean, once you actually started working through it, you realize, wait a minute, this is not a good concept, right?

And I say, ask this to preface the fact that the self-growth world, especially now with the internet, has so many people that pop up as gurus and they give advice and I'm listening to it and I'm going, that's terrible advice. That's detrimental to do, but it's hard to understand that in today's world of what's real, what's not real, who is who.

So what would you say is something that you've experienced guidance or something you heard that when you put into play, you realized that was not based in truth?

David Rice: That's a good question. I think the first thing that comes to mind is sort of the way that the law of attraction is taught or like put out there, right?

This idea that like you can vision board and daily aftermath is your way to whatever that you want. And the truth is like. That's a mindset exercise. It's a valid one. You can, there's a million different ways you can do it, but that's a mindset exercise. That's to help you identify what's important to you.

That's to help you cultivate a vision for the future. It's not necessarily what you're gonna get, and that's important to remember, but it's about like you. Putting into your mind and also into your actions. And that's the part that gets lost, right? Is like, how is this gonna inform my actions?

Because it's fun to make a vision board, but it's not inherently useful unless you have some kind of action plan for how this piece is gonna be. Get onto the board of your reality and how this piece is gonna get onto the board of your reality. You know what I mean? And so like. You might get like an uplift in your mood or you might start thinking more positively around those things.

But the thing that you envisioned isn't actually going to happen unless you have a clear action plan attached to it. And then I would even go so far as to say tactics. Like you need tactics to think of like, okay, if that action doesn't work, what's this one? What about this one? Or can I move, pivot in this direction?

And will that achieve the same result? And sort of thinking through all this. When you put the system in place and you have that time to look at the clouds, there you go. That's what you need to be thinking about.

Matt Granados: That's so good. That's we actually, our OPC, which is our coaching community, we do, one of the topics we do is debunking the concept of manifestation and affirmations.

It's exactly what you're talking about, that it's not, oh, if I think hard enough, I can make it happen. No, you can't. That's the same concept of fulfillment. The catalyst of it is intention. There are actions that need to be taken in order to get where you want to go. Now, it might keep you focused, right?

Like when I see pictures of my family, I'm reminded, Hey, don't forget, you gotta go up and love on 'em a little bit, right? Like that concept that is a reminder, like you said, keeping me focused, but man, it is so true. There's a great episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if you haven't watched it, where they come at this pretty hard and if you come in and hear any of our content, we are very vocal on our disdain for that type of a snake oil sales pitch, which is what it is, and it gets you excited, doesn't get you results.

So truth is what we focus on. But man, David, I appreciate you having us on, and again, what you're doing in this community, getting good content out there, honest content is something that's very much needed.

David Rice: Awesome. Well, Matt, thanks for joining us today.

Matt Granados: Thanks, David.

David Rice: And listeners, until next time, you know, #GetLit. No, I'm just kidding.

No, but if you haven't done so already, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe, get signed up for the newsletter.

And until next time, look at your calling, your near assignment and don't get 'em twisted with your identity.