Leveraging Performance Science to Become a Better Leader with Dr. Carla Fowler
“One of the best things we can do as a leader is to tell our team they can drive their own growth. It will take work, but it doesn't have to be hard.”
In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Carla Fowler, Managing Director at THAXA Executive Coaching, who helps leaders level up and achieve their goals by using a unique approach combining the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices.
Listen in as Dr. Fowler shares strategies to help leaders gain more clarity and focus, take their time back, and what to do when we don't quite feel enough. Along the way you’ll also pick up tips on how to improve yourself and your team without feeling burnt out.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Spend 90 minutes every 90 days with each team member to work with them to identify their motivations for growth and create personalized learning opportunities
- Begin your week with personal reflection and planning to gain clarity on your leadership role
- Break down complex tasks and big goals into smaller, manageable steps to prevent feeling overwhelmed
Things to listen for:
[07:33] Continuously improve, simplify, and diversify practice methods
[11:32] Embrace uncertainty and don't judge yourself
[14:36] Clarity and intention are keys to becoming a successful leader
[19:22] Recognize inner dialogue and celebrate progress
[23:15] Embracing uncertainty and running good experiments
[29:19] Distill thoughts and turn ideas into impactful content
Resources:
Connect with the Guest:
Connect with the Host & Floyd Coaching:
Transcript
My guest is Dr. Carla Fowler, who is an MD, PhD. And for the last decade, she has helped leaders using a unique approach that combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their goals. Carla shares some fantastic strategies to help leaders gain more clarity and focus, take their time back, and we talk about what to do when we don't quite feel enough and how to improve yourself and your team without feeling burnt out.
Please enjoy this episode.
Carla, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited about our conversation today.
[: [:before we jumped on this call and I was like, there's so many different directions to take because you have such an interesting career.
You have worked
with a lot of different leaders and I'm interested to know what is your definition of leadership? Like when you think about leadership, what does that mean and look like for you? I often think about it as more of a set of behaviors than
[:some of it has to do with some vision or some ability. we may want to
talk about this later but
some ability to think about or have some clarity about where do we want to
go, What would be really impactful to achieve? whether it was on a sports team, whether it was a CEO, of startup. so I think that is a piece of it for me is that clarity of saying where we want to go. another piece of it though, is certainly in what do you create in terms of culture, Like if you were a leader, you have team members, you have people who are coming with you and saying, we're interested in that too, Let's go do that thing. so there is, of course, some modeling and some setting culture from the top. Because people are looking at you. so I think there is that element of it.
I have some other elements about leadership that. I think are not always the most commonly talked about, but that for myself the leaders or the, people who most influenced some of how I think about it really demonstrated. And so for example there are three things I really think about, and these have come out in different ways from performance sciences.
I tried to distill.
That all have to do with performance, but to make them usable, you have to sort of dig through and say, well, what are the big themes? and so these, to me tie very much back to leadership as well.
So I think one of the first is that ability to set some clarity both about where you're going as well as what's actually most important to you for the team and for everyone to be doing to actually get there almost certainly that is we can't do everything we can think of.
And so then it becomes an exercise of saying, what are our priorities? Where do we want to be investing time when we have to make a choice about our time or our resources? So I think that is an important one. The other two are really about.
And then the third one is about how do you help your team actually approach uncertainty there is so much we could talk about on each of those topics and I would be happy to go into it, but when I think about leadership, those were some of the things that really stuck out to me as I encountered the leaders who are most impactful in my own life.
What did they teach me to do? not just what did they do and they embodied those things as well, but what did they help me learn to do? So that I could be a leader in my own way as well.
[: [:You are not going to do everything as a leader, and you want them to actually be able to go and be independent and really be skillful and growing in their capabilities. So there's a, couple of pieces. your point about it takes time. Um, spending some time with your team is an important piece of that.
Number one, judging like, where is their motivation to grow? And what are the areas or the interests that really they have some self fire to go after? so that's an important piece of it. And being interested in that, thinking about that
the other thing you have influence over is what are the opportunities along that track of where you're trying to go, where they can actually, do those opportunities.
Certainly if there's a great book you can recommend, I'm all about , driving self learning and there are a number of great books on any number of topics whether it's. Be more confident with your speaking or learning how to negotiate or improving your ability to sell. So there's sort of some self-driving in the learning but also how can they.
Use that learning in service of the team, because that is something that feels very good to people is when they're like, I am learning. And as I get better at this thing, I do more for my team, for my people. And that just feels great. so looking for those opportunities but here's, the last thing.
I think it is tremendously impactful to help people understand how they push their own growth. So not just like, how do they grow when they're having the conversation, the inspiring one-on-one with their leader who supports them, but how do they actually drive that activity in their own life? because that's a skill that will follow them wherever they go and will help them wherever they go.
sometimes we think when we're trying to talk with people or coach someone on. How to learn a new skill, how to do something new. There's so many different ways you could go about it that it almost gets overwhelming. And so I use the 90, 90, 90 rule to make it more simple.
So there are a number of ways you could get better at something, but there are only a few ways that we fail.
And so the 90, The 90-90-90 rule is about like. Hey We only fail if we end up doing one of these three things, which is the first 90 is like 90 of us, we never get started on learning a new thing.
We keep thinking about it. We dream about it. We think how nice it would be to be excellent at that thing, but we don't ever get started. And we're like, Oh, we buy a bunch of books on Amazon but we just, we don't get started. The second 90 is if we do get started 90 of us don't keep going long enough to really start to see.
some traction and get that feedback loop. so that's the second way that we sometimes fail is we stop too soon. then the third way we fail is that maybe we keep going and we're doing the thing, but we keep doing the same thing over and over again. And so we sort of plateau out. we fail because we didn't actually say.
Can I increase the challenge of what I'm doing or can I practice in a different way or in a different scenario that might bring out some areas of blind spot or gaps where I'm like, Oh, I need to get better at that piece of this public speaking thing, or there's a, different methodology.
I'm going to read a couple books now that I've done some real time practice so, not getting stuck on that plateau and actually iterating and improving even how we're practicing a thing.
[: [:Cause none of us do. And number two, to think that has to be complicated to push ourselves and grow and it doesn't have to be complicated. so I think that's one of the best things we can also impart as a leader. Is to help our team
say, no, you can drive your own growth it will take work.
[:And even just being able to, hey, if you don't have. two hours and you're going to sit down and read a book for two hours, can you read 5 pages? Can you read 10 pages? breaking it down into like its simplest format. And I think
that's such a key point in leaders being able to remind their people of what they can control.
There's so
that is beyond our control. And there's so much that we do have control over. And so when we're able to help Our teams decide, Hey, these are the things that I can do. And now I'm going to make a plan to actually take those little steps forward. And in this world that glamorizes complexity.
We want simplicity. We want somebody that's like, here's step one, two, three. Like just do the thing and getting started. love that you said that was the first 90, because, oh my gosh, that is. The biggest
challenge for so many people and it's funny years ago. I remember Dan Kennedy, who is the godfather of copywriting.
I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's very influential in the copywriting space. And something that I read he said, yeah, if you want to create an online course, this is way back when it was still CDs, said, if you want to create an online course, just together the first CD out of an eight CD series. And if you just recorded the one the rest of the course was blank CDs. not even getting anyone that calls you because
nobody who buys the programs actually goes through with the whole
[: [:part?
[:Decide what starting is. just do that and don't start judging yourself. I'm like, oh, well, this is nothing because that's another thing we do. We start like performance discounting immediately saying like, oh, well, yeah. Okay. I read the first book, but I read one book and there are, , a hundred books on this topic and I'll never know it all.
And, we start judging ourselves. But what's interesting is. This point about wanting control and the uncertainty of starting anything new because of that thought of what if I fail? what if I fail at this thing is a great segue into, I think this other topic that is both about culture and about what leaders really help us do which is this idea of, can you learn to relish uncertainty and rather than have uncertainty be something that we're trying to eliminate.
To avoid, but actually have it be something that we can lean into and just have a different relationship with because at the heart of starting something new is this uncertainty of like, what if I don't do it, right? What if I don't ever get there? What if I'm not as good at this as this person over there. so I think it's this really actually.
Help people with and from my background, sort of the story is that I spent a lot of time training as a scientist and the thing is when you're a scientist, you walk into work every day and you don't know the answer. The whole point of why you have a job is that there is sort of biological uncertainty and you're trying to sort it out molecularly, understand how it works.
And so every day you come in and there's a thing that not only you don't know the answer to, but you have to design the set of actions and experiments you're going to take to understand how it works. And then when you solve that thing, the gift you get is you get to now work on something else that is unknown.
But the thing is, nobody makes you wrong as a scientist for that fact. That just is how it is. That's the job. And the truth is That's kind of our job in companies. Also in the workplace, we are trying to accomplish things. We're trying to get them done. And often, most of the opportunity is in areas where it's more uncertain.
And so I think actually the lab and the workplace have a lot of parallels and that If we approached it, like we didn't need to know the answer all the time, it doesn't have to be our responsibility to know all the answers, but it can be our responsibility to do our best effort to figure things out.
that's where I think we can really do our team's a service by getting them more comfortable with it. And so there's definitely a couple of things that I can recommend to leaders around how to do that.
[:It's, feels a little bit better because we're focused on what we can, again, going back to what we can
control versus what we can't control. you say that high performers are just like us, except for a few surprising things that they do differently. And I want to know what are
those
things.
[:happen. Because a lot of us walk around with kind of a vague sense that
we know what we want, but.
Spending some time and effort to be pretty intentional and put that into words and then actually translate that into what does that look like in reality? what does that look like in our workplace or in our life? is something that hyper probing people spend some more time on because it's, it's really one of the first steps.
I think another thing is sometimes we think, Oh, they must have the secret sauce. They must have, you know, the, trick or the hack that just allows them to do what they do. And I think that is actually not the case, but I do know that for most of us, we can spend a lot of time reading and researching and trying to think about is there a way to get to the top of the mountain quickly.
you don't need a hack. And in fact, hacks don't serve us very well, because even if you somehow find a way to leap to some results, what hasn't happened in the background is the developing of yourself that is required then to both stay at that level and get to the next level.
So what is happening. uSing maybe not the newest tool or hack or idea or habit, but just saying I have a good habit. And I use it consistently. that is both what changes and develops us as performers. But it also means we don't waste a lot of time trying to decide or look for the trick or the silver bullet.
We say, I can get going on this and it's gonna take some time. But if I'm working on it consistently, and I'm not looking for a shortcut, I think you can stay aware. There are things that are helpful. I'm not saying there aren't, but nothing really substitutes often for compounding on this long arc or this long game.
And I think that's something that I continually try to remind myself of is that, going faster is not always the best question. Often it's like, am I progressing and is it consistent? And is what I'm doing going to compound for me over time?
[:that I get to have with some Incredible people friends and colleagues and in fact, I was just chatting with a friend of mine who's very successful entrepreneur something that shows up a lot Carla is
worthiness and enough
feeling enough and when I think about high performers
It's that sense of like, but there's always more.
There's always that next mountaintop to get to. There's always something else,
something else,
[: [:with, how does that show up for people? And can
[: [:they're looking
for.
[:a number of days before you're actually seeing the results that you want to see.
obviously in our world, there are lots of ways to fuel things. There are things like solar energy. There are things like coal or oil. the point is there's trade offs for these things.
And one of the challenges with some of the fuel sources like coal or something like that is they're really effective, if you want to like power something up, they work really well, but they also have some side effects and produce some other less sustainable impacts.
So I actually think. As high performers, we sometimes use fuel sources like self talk or some of these things that actually are a little like coal or oil, like they're sort of dirty fuel, very effective, this underlying, like, I'm not enough, like I'll be enough when is like one of those fuel sources.
And so that's why I think it can be very persistent is because it often has been effective. To get us where we wanted to go, got us out of bed. It got us off the couch, . Got us into action. But the challenge of it, of course, is it can rob us of the enjoyment of the accomplishment, we reached the milestone and we immediately start discounting it. Like that was yesterday. our brains are like, what have you done for me lately? Like, what have you achieved
lately? Like.
[:what is funny about that is I think the teams that they lead. They're like, yes, get after it. You're awesome. Like celebrate your wins.
[: [:You got to keep going.
[: [: [:What the trade offs are in what way is it not sustainable? And once in a while, like
sometimes you just got to do whatever you have to do to like, get the deadline done and that's gonna happen sometimes and sometimes we don't use the best fuel for it But the key is perhaps understanding How are you going to get to the long arc of your life of your career and understand that we don't want to rob ourselves of celebrating the good moments, recognizing ourself and our own progress, because that is also motivating.
And I think maybe there is a fear that if we actually gave ourselves the credit, if we actually celebrated ourselves, that we would lose the motivation to go Um, Do a next thing we'd be like, that's it hanging up my hat. but the only way we
know that, and the only way we can actually see what we want to do when we're not dumping on herself is actually to stop and see what happens today, I'm going to celebrate this thing and we're not going to think about the next thing.
And let's just try that. it's a practice. It's like you said,
yeah.
[: [: [:Fantastic.
use?
[:to think about What you want to have happen.
It can be in an area of work.
It can be an area of life. It doesn't have to be the whole big
picture. In fact, I often recommend start with something more defined or smaller. Think about what you want. And then also think about what is actually most important to move you towards that thing. And I often find the easiest way to do this is to make a laundry list of everything you want in that area.
start then looking at it and saying, well, what's kind of thematically, what sort of alliance here and what kind of actually floats up to the top. If I really had to say, okay, cut it down now, cut it down from 500 words to like how could I express this in 100 words or 50 words?
And so sometimes this exercise helps you get clarity and be able to pull out what's most important. And then on the priority side.
jUst brain dump it, but then we can often do a second pass in another time and say, okay, well, what on this list is the equivalent of saying, like, I can be a high performer if I just eat a superfood, like blueberries, right? That's like, okay, well, maybe that's not the most impactful thing I could do.
So look at it and start to, thematically group things to pull out maybe three things that you're like, I feel very confident these three things will have some impact. If you look at it and you're like, honestly, I don't know. That's a great moment to say, what don't you know? What do you actually think might be the most important things to know?
And so. Maybe the next step is actually, I should talk to someone who has done this thing or who knows a lot about it, or I should read a book on this topic but it helps sort of direct and again, back to this, get started sort of thing, but it uses clarity as a practice to help you think deliberately about it.
And so in my practice, I break this down even more. We do three priorities and then we break down each of those into three parts. So it's sort of a one, three, nine, but you can stop at the three, pick an area. Think about what that one cohesive distilled goal is, and then try and come to three big priority areas that you think would actually move you towards that and be the most impactful things. that is a tool that I use a lot in my practice. And then the other tool I like is really about this idea of how do we start to lean into uncertainty? And build a new relationship with it and it's the tool of running good experiments. So straight from, you know, the lab and science I think it's great to ask the question.
All right. I feel uncertain about this thing. How is it that I could learn more about it? If I were going to run an experiment, what would I want to test? And then you can design that experiment to say, how can I make sure the downside, like the risk of if it didn't turn out how I wanted it to turn out, like that it's limited, and you can also say, make sure you're clear on what would be the upside.
You know, if running this thing worked well, so for example if someone was like, I want to do more public speaking and it's not something I have a lot of experience with maybe limiting the downside says, okay, I'm going to find an opportunity to share something, present something more publicly.
It does not need to be at the company all hands meeting, ? right? Maybe I should do it with my team of people I'm very comfortable with and I know, and it's only eight people. And I should look for an opportunity to take point on presenting like what we have come up with, So, that's just an example of how you set it up.
And then you should also think about, how will I get feedback on how it went? That's beyond just how I feel about what just happened. Because we might feel a number of different things, but that's different than, was it effective? How did it work? So, you might want to think ahead about who do I want to give me feedback on the presentation?
What do I actually want feedback on? Versus just, oh, it was great. Oh, it's okay. what would actually be useful feedback? So those are just some beginning thoughts about using the framework of running an experiment to actually have uncertainty be something we can really move into versus trying to avoid it or eliminate it.
[:like that idea of an experiment. It makes you think about whatever decision you're going to make , it almost eases the tension a little bit
because you're
[: [: [: [:so much better. And it almost feels like when we're making decisions, obviously, leaders make a ton of decisions every single day.
And when we're looking at it from the perspective of like we're putting
[: [:now.
and you might not have the pieces,
and with every experience that you have, you're
gaining the knowledge that could be the next piece that
you've, put right? into that puzzle.
So it just feels better It feels almost like you, can have a little bit more fun
in
[: [: [: [:is, we know where we're going and we're having fun doing it That's the
[: [: [: [: [:This is going to be kind of.
exciting. You can reframe like, Ooh, we're nervous and uncertain to be like that feeling we feel, I feel excited. And you just set it up to have so much more happen. I agree with you completely. You said it so well. It feels fun.
[: [: [:and that's one of the dreams that they have
is I want to be a
[: [:six months or 12 months in that goal of becoming a
better leader.
So what does that look like?
[:and driving some of that, as a leader, you get to keep growing too. It's not all about your team being the ones who get to grow because they're maybe earlier in their career. In fact, avoiding that stagnation, I think is so important, particularly when we actually are at those higher levels.
So asking yourself, what are my edges of growth right now? could I name what they are? And if I can't, I'm What edges of growth do I think would be valuable and am I interested in you can then also Ask your team or, assess your team. Like much are they stuck in their roles versus are they growing?
Are they changing? So I think there's that piece. And then finally, I think
one of the areas that helps us play big is being able to assess how are we feeling about uncertainty? How are we approaching it? what's our first feeling or thought when. When we come to a decision that is uncertain, you know, is it like I need to know the answer?
Is it like, okay, we need to have a good process to make the decision. And maybe we can inform that process by running some experiments. we can't totally control the outcome. That's the way this works, but we can relate control and say how do we want to be, what's the process we want to run?
And then you can also talk to your team and assess Are they really concerned or , not wanting to approach uncertain things? They want to stick with what they know, or are they leaning in and able to embrace how do we do something new? How do we try something?
How do we learn something that informs then what we do next? those are three, they're not the only things that you could assess yourself on as a leader. Absolutely. But these are three ones that I think are interesting and a little bit different that are fun to consider.
[: [: [:So I actually don't know who said it, but it's that quote that says I would have written a shorter
note. I
just didn't have the
time.
[: [:but to actually sit down and write it out.
And, when you shared, condense that, all right, if it's 500 words, now take it to 300 and then 150 and can you really solidify it so that you really understand where you're going? And even that allows you to breathe a little bit. Lighter because you're like, Oh,
okay. It's not as big as I think it is
this challenge that I'm dealing with it's a lot different
when I actually figure out.
What
is the one thing that I'm really
working towards and
[: [:Not to put one more thing on someone's plate, but I am curious What is one of the best books that you've read over the past year? that you think
[:So it is not a productivity book. I think it does a very good job of explaining how we struggle with time as human beings, why we struggle with time. because at the end of the day, I think a lot of our experience as a leader and in life comes back to what do we do with our time and then how do we feel about what's happening?
And that combination of those two things often leads to our results. And so for that reason, I am obsessed with thinking about time, not in the productivity, like. I have every minute of my day planned out, but I think a lot about time because it is our resource that we have to make impact. And so, I thought this was a very good book about time.
[: [:That is just yours, where you actually. Look ahead, you look at your time and you think about where are you putting time for yourself into that schedule because it is That time for
yourself where you think and you get the clarity.
It's that time where you assess how is my team doing? what am I learning about them? What am I learning about what we're trying to do? And we often do not have that. And so actually that takes planning and I think planning can be overdone for sure, which is why I love this as a 10 minute activity.
look at your calendar. If that time is not available, start blocking some ahead in future weeks and potentially think about canceling something to get some for yourself this week.
[:schedule that time to actually see what are we doing? What are we preparing for the week? And even juggle around what needs to be juggled, being intentional
about do I have to be at that meeting or is this really a requirement to have on my calendar?
So I love that. Carla, thank you so much for coming on the show. I so appreciate this. And I know that you provided
so many great tools. We love, tools that we can use to
help
[: [:leadership
journey.
[: [:And we want to make sure that you are walking away with some type of resource to use. To become a better leader and to bring back to your team to help your team become better leaders. And I love that we had this conversation around personal growth and development. And there are so many resources that are right at our fingertips, like all these books and courses and, we can learn about anything, but really deciding on, Hey, what do I want to get better at?
Right now and just taking that first step getting started like Carla said so we hope you enjoyed this episode And you are going to take some type of action especially right at the end that action step around looking at your calendar So I hope that you are taking some strategies away to help you become a better leader Thank you so much for listening to this show if you are interested in taking some of these strategies to the next level and what that might look like for you, we would love to talk to you about having a coach, having an executive coach, a leadership coach, a culture coach that can really help guide you in the direction of your dreams, the dreams that you have.
For your business and achieve the goals that you really want to achieve. So if you've been thinking about potentially hiring a coach and you're just not sure what that would look like, we would love to have that conversation with you so you can go to floydcoaching. com and one of our coaches will connect with you, have that conversation and go from there.
So go to floydcoaching. com and we look forward to hearing about your goals, what you're looking to do and how we might be able to support you in those goals.
Thank you again for listening and until next time, lead with culture.
