The Mental Strength Formula for Modern Leaders with Scott Mautz

Jo Meunier [00:01:16 ]:
Hello and welcome to the Future of work podcast by all work space. I’m Jo Mernier, and today I’m really excited to speak with Scott Mautz and to talk about his latest book, the Mentally strong leader. So thank you for joining us today, Scott. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

Scott Mautz [00:01:31]:
Thanks for having me here, Joe. I’m very hopeful that I can bring something very exciting about the future to future of work shows. So looking forward to our discussion too.

Jo Meunier [00:01:41 ]:
Fantastic. I’m sure you will. I want to dive straight in and ask before we get into your book and talking about mental strength, I’d like to know a little bit more about Scott Mautzer and your career backstory, your new book, and what brought you out of the corporate world and into your current world, where you do a lot of teaching, sharing knowledge, and helping people become better versions of themselves.

Scott Mautz [00:02:05]:
Yeah, sure, maybe like some of your listeners at least, Joe, I’m a corporate exile, if you will. On good terms, I should say. I spent, you know, three decades in the corporate world. I started in, in the banking industry. I moved into consumer packaged goods and spent 25 years at Procter and Gamble, kind of climbing their ranks through their marketing and general management chain, and was blessed to be able to run some of the company’s largest multi billion dollar businesses successfully. I learned an awful lot about leadership. But the interesting thing, I think, Joe, that’s relevant to your question is along the way I learned that not only was I a practitioner of leadership, but really a student. Just absolutely fascinated at what discerns the very best leaders from those that just happen to be people who are in leadership positions. They were given a job, and they’re not necessarily great leaders. I started studying it about halfway through my corporate career and actually even wrote my first book while I was still in the corporate world at Procter and gamble. And I enjoyed the writing process so much. I enjoyed the extensive interviewing I did in my first book. And it just really diving into the science of what makes the great leaders great. I enjoyed it so much that I knew that I was going to eventually want to leave the corporate world to do what I’m doing today. And it really came down to one question, and I decided to leave nine years ago. It came down to one question, Joe. I just kept asking myself over and over again, you know, do I have the opportunity to make more of a difference in more people’s lives, you know, running business units at Procter and gamble? Or can I multiply that exponentially by, you know, using my platform to make a difference in people’s lives with the spoken and the written word? And I just kept coming back to, you know, the answer to that question was very obvious to me, that I could have a chance to make a much greater impact in people’s lives on a broader global scale if I decided to pursue my passion of using writing and speaking to help people become even better versions of themselves. So I did that, and I left about nine years ago, and I haven’t turned back since. The best move I ever made. And it’s been really great.

Jo Meunier [00:04:28 ]:
Fantastic. And we’re all the better for it as well, I’m sure.

Scott Mautz [00:04:32]:
I’d like to think so.

Jo Meunier [00:04:34 ]:
And you mentioned just then you did a lot of interviewing for your books and for your latest book. Could you tell us a little bit about the research that went into it? Because I understand you hired a data scientist and worked for several years on the research.

Scott Mautz [00:04:48 ]:
Yeah. So, you know, I really started finding out, you know, getting really interested in the topic of mental strength, which is, you know, the topic of my latest book, the mentally strong leader. And it started simply with, you know, observations and really trying to discern what separates good from great within, you know, procter and Gable, the company. And I soon began expanding outside of that. And, you know, I’ll start with a definition of what mental strength is, and I’ll give you a little tidbit of some of the research we dove into with this, you know, mental strength, first and foremost for the listeners, it’s not, Joe, just Eq. And EQ is a thing we’ve been hearing about for the last decade or so, right? Eq being emotional intelligence, the ability to get your emotions working for you versus against you. Mental strength is broader than that. EQ just fits in under the umbrella of mental strength. And mental strength, by definition, is the ability to regulate not only your emotions, but your thoughts and your behaviors productively, even in adversity, as I like to say, shorthanded. It’s how we, you know, I guess the best way to say is it’s, it’s how we manage internally so that we can lead much better externally at work and in life. And I think, you know, most of us understand that to do that, to self regulate, we know we need to do that. If you want to succeed, you can’t just say whatever is on your mind. You can’t just translate every emotion directly into action. You have to be able to self regulate. But the thing is, that’s really hard to do that. So I started deeply researching this years ago when I started to understand that mental strength was a great differentiator of our times. To your question, I’ll tell you about an example of one piece of research we did in particular. If you step back for a second and go down one layer deeper, mental strength consists of six core mental muscles that all require self regulation, confidence, boldness, fortitude, decision making, goal focus and messaging. The ability to stay positively focused and positively, I guess, oriented, even in the face of negativity. And so I was conducting a really interesting piece of research where we asked 3000 executives, and I’ve done this several times now. One question in a big piece of research that we did, we said, okay, thinking about the, you know, the most, I guess, highest achieving organizations that you’ve ever been a part of that accomplished the absolute most. And thinking of all the obstacles that you had to get by in that situation, what were the attributes of the key leader in those situations? And here’s the incredible part, Joe. 90% to 91% of recipients of the study, every time we conduct this piece of research, and we’ve done this four or five times now, they all respond the same way. Here’s the incredible thing about what we found in that piece of research. 90% to 91% respondents all describe the same type of leader, Joe. They described leaders, and they described the six mental muscles that they are. They have incredible fortitude, incredible boldness. They showed up incredibly confident. They were decisive, focused on their goals. They messaged positively, even in the face of adversity. And then we did a follow up just to your question about the research. We said, okay, thank you for describing that leader. Now you have to pick from a list. Here’s a list of 100 choices in one or two words that describe now the leader you just described. You have to pick just one of them. That’s tough. Here’s where it gets crazy. Every time we do this, Joe, roughly about 94% to 95% of respondents circle two words in that pick list. We gave them mentally strong. And what that is telling us in our research is that we believe we have found the term that we’ve been trying to nail for the longest time. How do you really describe the leader who shines in times of adversity, who achieves despite all obstacles? What is it about that person? Well, they’re mentally strong. It’s what leads us to believe that mental strength is the leadership superpower of our time, Joe, and I truly believe you’re going to be hearing about mental strengths now for the next two decades, like we heard about EQ for the past two decades, especially because EQ is just a slice of the broader, more empowering skill that is mental strength. And that’s just a slice of the research that we, that we did for the book, the mentally strong leader.

Jo Meunier [00:09:50 ]:
Yeah, that’s really fascinating. And what strikes me as well is this is even though you spoke mostly to execs, this also applies to personal lives, doesn’t it? It could be if you want to improve in sports or become better at a hobby or anything like that. Those six muscles that you mentioned can help in all sorts of different things.

Scott Mautz [00:10:08 ]:
That’s right. Because we found, we did, we’ve done that particular study six times, and in one of the studies, none of them were executives. And we found the same responses we just asked people about. You could think about leaders within church organizations, within volunteer groups. We got outside of the business world, so we know how universal the concept of mental strength is. And you’re asking about data scientists. One other piece of research we conducted in the book, the second chapter, is all about assessing where you are in your mental strength right now. So you can take the mental strength self assessment.

Jo Meunier [00:10:53 ]:
That’s the first step.

Scott Mautz [00:10:55 ]:
Yeah, that’s kind of really the first step. After you understand what mental strength is. Yeah. You, you assess your mental strength. It consists, Joe, of 50 questions. It takes you about 15 minutes to answer the assessment, I would say. Right. And all I ask of the reader is that you have to be honest and you have to be vulnerable in answering these questions and find some quiet time where you can really self reflect and think about it. And what that, what that produces is an overall score, four tiers. So you will know where you lie. Which tier of mental strengths do you lie in? And no tier is any better than others. This is all about your individual journey. You can be at the top tier, which I call the beacon tier, where you’re actually. You’re literally a beacon of mental strength. People are drawn to you because of how mentally strong you are, all the way down to the lowest tier, which I just call the novice tier. You’re just starting to understand the concept of mental strike that might have come naturally. You’re up for the journey, you’re ready to go. And the assessment produces scores by mental muscle. So how. What’s your confidence score, your boldness score, your fortitude score? Decision making goal focus and messaging scores. And we work with a data scientist for multiple years to really make sure that the test correlates with those six muscles that we know are the determinants of mental strength. So by the time you’re done taking this assessment, I’m extremely confident, Joe, that it gives you an accurate reflection of what you and your unique profile is when it comes to mental strength. That’s the most important place to start. Right, if you want to be able to build your mental strength?

Jo Meunier [00:12:33 ]:
Absolutely, yeah. And everybody’s individual, and we’ll get onto that in a minute, but I’m really interested to dig into some of those six mental muscles that you mentioned.

Scott Mautz [00:12:42 ]:
Yeah, sure.

Jo Meunier [00:12:43 ]:
And they’re all jumping out of me, but I think fortitude, that’s a great word, isn’t it? I mean, I always thought fortitude was just general mental strength, but it’s not. It’s one of six. Well, potentially more as well. So what’s your interpretation of fortitude and how can we start to strengthen that particular muscle?

Scott Mautz [00:13:03 ]:
Yeah, there’s. Boy, there’s. There’s so many ways, and I’ll give, you know, there’s so many tools in. In the Melly strong leader to help you to strengthen each muscle, fortitude being one of them when it comes to fortitude itself. And it’s interesting, Joe, because a lot of people say, well, fortitude is just a synonym, replacement word for mental strength, but it’s not. It’s a slice of it. And of course, fortitude is what you would expect. It’s, you know, it’s our ability to push through challenges, onward to achievement and what, you know, we have learned, and I’ve learned in studying mental strength for almost three decades now. By default, it requires you to be good at solving problems. Right. So you’re asking you know, where can you even start to be to have greater fortitude, almost by definition? Well, fortitude means something isn’t easy in your life, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t need fortitude. You just blow right through it, which means you’re facing some kind of setback, some kind of, you know, problem, if you will. And a lot of times those problems take the form of setbacks in our life, Joe. And one of the tools in the book, the mentally strong leader, is based on classic, a study of classic psychology. I call it the four lenses of resilience. I won’t go through all four lenses, but there are all ways that you can reframe and think very differently about a setback that you face in your life. And I’ll give you an example of maybe just two of the lenses really quickly, that it can just be a place for you to start to build more resilience and fortitude into your daily life. The first is to understand what I call the perspective lens, which is to understand first and foremost, what your unique resilience needs are. Joe. And here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say I encounter a setback. And of course, like all human beings, I do all the time. My resilience needs and my fortitude needs are I need to talk to somebody I can have a laugh with, to laugh at myself. You know, I might call a brother or a sister, and I’ll say, oh, my gosh, you won’t believe this thing I’m going through right now. And I’ll describe it to them, and maybe they’ll mock me. I’ll get a chance to mock myself. I reframe the whole issue. That’s my resilience needs. Yours might be different, Joe. You might need to talk to somebody. I’m making this up, who will just listen. It’s just a friend that’s a really good listener. Other people might need to talk to a wise old mentor. Other people might need to talk to someone who’s really going to kick their butt and get them back into shape. Whatever it is. We all have to understand what our resilience needs are and know who the network is of people we can turn to in that moment that we need resilience. Because the truth is, fortitude is a team sport. It’s not a solo act. And a lot of people assume that when they’re facing setbacks, the first instinct is, I need to go this alone. You don’t. Some of the most highly resilient people we interviewed, and we interviewed thousands and thousands of people for the book, the mentally strong leader, I can tell you they weren’t resilient because they wanted alone. They had a very crisp network. They knew what they needed from that network, and they used it when they needed to. That’s just one lens of resilience. I’ll give you another one very quickly. I call it the react versus response lens. Again, this has to do with how you reframe setbacks. And the truth is, you can choose, Joe, to either react or respond in the face of a setback. And they’re two very different outcomes and two very different mindsets. If you react, you just let your emotions flow straight through into your actions without a filter. Right? Now, I am not suggesting here that you check your emotions at the door, because that’s garbage. That just doesn’t work. We’re human beings. What I’m talking about is, go ahead. You know, react internally, but respond externally. This is about managing your emotions, not minimizing your emotions. And I have. I even have clients, Joe, that they have. They’ll write down on an index card, you know, react versus respond, and then they circle respond. I want to respond here in the next setback. I don’t want to react. And response requires a pause, a breath. Think about what the issue is. Don’t just react instantly. It’s classic psychology. And, you know, the book is packed with advice and tools and frameworks like that to help you build each mental muscle.

Jo Meunier [00:17:24 ]:
It sounds like these six muscles are linked because when you were talking just now about react, it sounded a lot like the messaging muscle. This is sending the right messages of positivity and intent. So what can we do to build that particular muscle? Because it’s very easy, isn’t it, for someone to be feeling emotional or to just have a bad day and let it all out when they perhaps shouldn’t.

Scott Mautz [00:17:47 ]:
Yeah, it’s a question I get a lot, Joe, which is, okay, dude, I got it. You know, I can’t just react. I got to respond. But what about in the moment when I’m really feeling angry and I want to rip someone’s head off? What do I do? I don’t want to send that message to the troops as a leader. So in the. In the messaging muscle chapter of the mentally strong leader, you know, I have a very popular tool that I bet. I’ve been practicing it personally, Joe, for years and years and years, and it really works. It’s called the redirect rhythm, and I’m going to teach it to you now. And it’s based on just a few basic steps. Here’s how it works, and we’ll use an example so that your listeners can get the maximum value out of this. So let’s say, joe, that you and I don’t know, let’s say I work for you, Joe. Right. I’m a member now of the team at future work, and you’re just really frustrated with me on a project you asked me to do, and I haven’t seen it through the way you wanted. And we’re in an interaction, and you’re just feeling really frustrated. You’re about to blow your cool with me, but you don’t want to send that message to all the other people that work for you or to me. This is where the redirect rhythm comes in. The first step, and maybe it’s the most important, is you just have to create space. And the way you do that, first of all, is what you instinctively already understand. You have to take a breath. We all know, and I’ve all heard that, like, yeah, take a breath, Scott. That’s not particularly insightful. You know, calm down. What’s insightful is what happens when you do that which you might not fully appreciate and understand. Not only, you know, when you’re feeling that anger building up or whatever emotion you’re feeling, that’s not going to be helpful, produce a helpful outcome. It’s so critical to start this process by, first of all, taking your breath, because here’s what happens when you do, not only physiologically speaking, does it slow down your heart rate, does it lower your stress level? Does it allow you to think more clearly? It creates distance from the intensity of the emotion that you’re feeling. It actually breaks the gravitational pull of that emotion that is bringing you someplace that you do not want to be. That is why it is so important that first step, to simply take a breath. While you’re doing that, the next step is almost, almost instantaneous. You name the emotion you’re feeling. Okay, I am feeling very frustrated right now. You say that to yourself. And what happens when you do that is it begins to lose its hold over you instantly. You are not frustrated, Joe. You are feeling frustration. You don’t have to be that thing that you’re feeling. And when you can do that, and psychology has proven this many times over, and so is neuroscience, when you could create some distance between that emotion you’re feeling, what you can do by naming it, it begins to lose its hold over you, because now it’s a thing that’s happening to you. It’s not a thing that you are. Okay, I’m feeling frustrated. What do you do next? You go to the last step and it’s kind of simultaneously where you reassess and redirect and you say, okay, what’s really happening here is I’m feeling frustrated. I’m about to lose my cool at Scott and in front of the rest of the team. I don’t want to do that. I need to redirect here. And so what I’m going to do instead is calmly explain to him again what my expectations are and what I’m looking for and so on. Now, cognitive behavioral therapists call this the three C’s. You know, you catch it, you check it, you change it, you can use whichever format you like. I like the redirect rhythm because it reminds you to also name the emotion you’re feeling. But I use this all the time. I practice it, and it really, really works, Joe.

Jo Meunier [00:21:20 ]:
Fantastic. I’m going to try that myself. I love that. Take a deep breath. Recognize what you’re feeling. Take a step back. I think we can all benefit from that. Absolutely. And when you were talking about muscles just now, taking a breath as a physical muscle. So it’s a bit like going to the gym, isn’t it? So how often should we work these mental muscles? Is it something we need to practice every day?

Scott Mautz [00:21:43 ]:
Yeah. You know, and I often relate the concept of mental muscles to physical muscles because you’re right, Joe. It’s a perfect metaphor, you know, and if you think about it, let’s say listeners out there, if you’re a bodybuilder, right, let’s say you’re just ripped. Like you’re, you know, you’re totally muscular. If you just stop going to the gym, guess what happens? You don’t maintain that physique. It turns to flab over time. It’s the same thing with mental muscles, right? You have to keep going back to the gym to exercise them, to keep them whole, and to keep them firm over time. Well, to follow through on the metaphor, you don’t go to the gym every single day with a plan to work every muscle in your body, right? You don’t go into the gym for a 20 hours workout every day. That wouldn’t last. I don’t know about you, Joe, that wouldn’t last long for me. I’d be done after like two days of that, right? Maybe Wednesday is, I don’t know, back day and Thursday is arm day and Friday is leg day, whatever it might be. And you parse out over time and you don’t even, you know, maybe you’re not interested in building your calf muscles. You just want a stronger core. You know, it’s all up to the individual. It’s very similar to mental strength. So, you know, when you take the mental strength self assessment, you start, you understand? Here’s my baseline. Oh, wow. I’m not as, I didn’t score as high on. I’m making this up confidence as I thought I would. There’s really some areas I need to work on. And then maybe you see, oh, boy, I’m bolder in my life than I thought I was being. So, okay, that’s good. I’ll maintain that. And you get a score that’s relative to you. And then you develop your own mental strength training regimen. You decide which muscles you want to work on when, which ones are maintenance mode, which ones you want to overhaul, which ones you want to revisit again and again. And your gym is the book the mentally strong leader because it’s meant to be a guide, a resource that you can return to over and over again. That’s why there’s more than 50 plus habit building tools in the book to help you return to that gym and use different exercise machines. Right. You don’t want to just use the same thing all the time because you get bored and it doesn’t always build your muscle if you’re not changing your exercises up. That’s why I put a menu of exercises in the book.

Jo Meunier [00:23:52 ]:
Right. And to that point, how do you know if it’s working? How do you measure whether you’re becoming mentally stronger or perhaps slipping back a bit? How do you know?

Scott Mautz [00:24:02 ]:
Great question. What I encourage people to do, Joe, is to retake the mental strength self assessment. And we’re, you know, we’re seeing this now and I see it constantly with respondents. When you take it for the first time, you get a baseline score. And again, you know, you fall into one of four tiers for overall mental strength and you get a score bi mental muscle. And then you write that down. You use the tools in the book and all the questions in the assessment tie to a specific tool in the book, the mentally strong leader. So if you find out, for example, there’s a question on, you know, in there about, you know, how much do you really seek approval versus just kind of accept who you are? And if you don’t like the way you scored on that question, guess what? There’s a tool in the mentally strong leader that can help you with that and build that element of your confidence. So it’s really important to take that assessment first. And I’m even going to, you know, at the end of this talk, I’m going to let your listeners get a free download to take the assessment for free because I think it’s so important to start on the journey and then you could just retake it at the three months, six months, whatever’s right for you, and watch your score increase over time. Because, Joe, that’s what we’re seeing happens when people do that.

Jo Meunier [00:25:14 ]:
Fantastic. And this, this is a, one of those difficult questions that I’m going to ask it anyway because, I mean, I’m curious, but how long does it take to break out of old habits and embrace new ways of thinking? Now, I know this is incredibly down to the individual. Perhaps personality types come into it. For example, if you’re more introverted, if you’re more extroverted, is there a specific pattern?

Scott Mautz [00:25:39 ]:
Well, the good thing is I build a cheat code in, into the process here because, yes, of course, you know, the easy answer, Joe, is it depends on the individual, but there are things that you can do to accelerate your own curve, which is, first of all, don’t be intimidated by the concept of building mental strength. First of all, you know, like, you know, I said up front, Joe, it’s not easy, right? News flash. For future work, it’s hard. It’s hard to build mental strength, okay? But don’t be intimidated by that. It starts by taking the assessment. See where your baseline is. Know that you probably won’t score at the top tier. Only 6% do the first time they take the assessment. And, oh, by the way, that’s not necessarily the goal. It’s to get better in the areas that you want to. So first is to don’t be intimidated by that. Second is to understand that cheats are built into the system here for you. And what I mean by that is, you know, the arm around you that you can feel when you’re trying to build your mental strength because it’s hard, is habits. And the book is built on habit building science. That’s why the subtitle is build the habits to productively regulate your emotions, thoughts, and your behaviors. And it’s habit building science is built into that. So, for example, for every tool of the over 50 plus tools in the mentally strong leader, there’s a section in there that helps you understand. What’s the first small step you should take? A lot of people don’t build their mental strength and build the right habits because they don’t even know where to start. But for every tool, there’s a section that says this is the first small thing you should do to get the ball rolling. And there’s a section for every tool, also called in moments of weakness, which is, what do you do when you feel yourself breaking down? You’re trying to become more confident, for example, and you have a meeting with a boss who dresses you down in front of everybody. It didn’t go the way you wanted. And even though you’re a confident person, that throws you off and you start to spiral down. That’s a moment of weakness. What do you do in moments like that? So the extent to which you embrace the habit building science, because habits are really just repetitions, right Joe? They’re frameworks and systems that you put in place to get habits until it builds up muscle memory. And we’re trying to build up mental muscle memory here by using and giving you systems and frameworks to give you those repetitions over time.

Jo Meunier [00:27:51 ]:
Fantastic. And we are coming towards the end of our episode, but I have one last question, and you touched on it earlier, talking about the future, and this is the future of work podcast, so we can’t possibly let you go without talking about the future. And how will mental strength and emotional intelligence become so much more important in the future? How are things going to change?

Scott Mautz [00:28:10]:
Yeah, I think we’re already seeing this too. So I’m pretty convinced, Joe, this isn’t just, you know, opinion of one person here, but if you think about it, and we even measured pre Covid and post Covid, and we’re seeing the need for mental strength increasing even more. But if you think about it, if I were to ask you, do you think in the future that work is going to become less filled with adversity? You’d probably say no. Is it going to become less filled with potential anxiety, less distractions, less opportunity to doubt yourself, less conflict? You know, we live in a world where sometimes we different factions have a hard time on agreeing what the fact facts are. So obviously I’m being facetious. The answer, of course, is all of that is only going to continue to increase given the complexity of the world that we work in. It is why I’m starting to see now that mental strength is the, I believe is the leadership superpower of the future. It is what I hear is being required and look for, even if people don’t call it that term, mental strength, I believe once they understand the definition of it, they’re going to be able to find out, just like in that piece of research, where people were like, yeah, that’s it. That’s what I would call that leader. They were mentally strong. You’re going to see this coming into the vernacular like EQ has been in the vernacular and emotional intelligence for the past two decades. The term is going to be mental strength, and you’re going to be on the forefront and your listeners are going to be on the forefront of that. Now, after our discussion today, that’s my hope.

Jo Meunier [00:29:41 ]:
Fantastic. Emotional superpower. I love that. One thing that I took away from the conversation is the quote you talked about right at the beginning. It’s about managing internally so you can lead externally. I think that’s a great way to sum up everything we’ve just talked about just now. But before you go, can you tell us a little bit about how our readers, sorry, our listeners can find out more about your framework and how they can get hold of the book?

Scott Mautz [00:30:05 ]:
Sure. Go to scottmounts.com dot. You can find out about all the keynotes I give, the workshops I give, the courses I teach on LinkedIn learning. You can learn more about my books, including the latest, the mentally strong leader. And I’d mentioned this before, Joe. I feel so strongly about the need for people to start with a mental strength self assessment to see where you stand that I just want to give it away for free to your listeners. So if they’re interested in a 60 page PDF downloadable PDF that not only includes the 50 question mental strength self assessment, it also includes prompts to help you specifically get the most out of the book, the mentally strong leader. If that sounds good to you and it’s free, you just go to scottmoutz.com mentallystrongift. So just one more time. That’s scottmoutz.com mentally strong gift and you can download that 60 page PDF for free.

Jo Meunier [00:31:00 ]:
Fantastic. That’s very generous. I’m going to go and have a look at that myself. And on that note, we will say goodbye and thank you very much for joining us today. It’s been a fascinating conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it, and we hope to have you back in the podcast again sometime in the future to talk about what’s changed.

Scott Mautz [00:31:16 ]:
Thank you so much. The future is looking bright. I’d like to think that way as long as we all just stay strong.

Jo Meunier [00:31:25 ]:
Thank you, Scott.