As we often say, it’s important to see the forest through the trees – seeing the wider perspective is the key to rising up the corporate chain to the promotions and bonuses you desire. But how do you put this idea into practice?
On this episode of Level to Power, we’re joined by author and management consultant Jim Luisi, who defined the level system in his book, Sensitive by Nature: Understanding Intelligence and the Mind. We discuss the many ways you can start adding value to your workplace, why you should start doing self-assessments, and how to best align yourself with the goals of your manager and company.
Apex Level To Power is a podcast that examines the inner workings of human interactions and teaches you how to succeed within your own interpersonal relationships. Change your level, change your life, change the world.
Episode Highlights:
- Step one: Finding your place within your environment
- Step two: Adding value and being a good corporate citizen
- Being soft-spoken versus being direct
- Adding value during corporate meetings
- The benefit of doing research, staying late, and leaving early
- Step three: Doing an accurate self-assessment
- Working within the big picture: Status reports, value metrics, budgets, and resources
- Survival of the fittest within the corporate cycle
- Step four: Defining your personal philosophy
- Closing the gap between who you want to be and who you’re perceived to be
Resources:
- Sensitive by Nature by James Luisi
- Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture by James Luisi
Visit Level To Power for episode archives and transcripts Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and post a review to empower the podcast
Quotes/Tweets:
“Simply showing up to your job every day isn’t enough. You also need to add value”- Mark
“When you’re the most helpful person to a manager, you become the go-to person for important tasks”- Jim
“You can’t fake value. The people adding serious value are the ones doing things no one else wants to do”- Mark
TRANSCRIPT
| Mark Gleason: | Welcome to the Apex Level to Power Podcast, the podcast completely dedicated to your self-empowerment. The title of this episode is Levels in the Real World.
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| As a management consultant, I’m always being asked to explain how people can advance themselves in a social context. How do they get promoted? How do they get noticed? How do they motivate teams? How do they avoid manipulative personalities in the work environment and succeed anyway?
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| I was excited to be able to get author, Jim Luisi on the program to talk through this idea of these paradigms of looking at the world, these lenses of looking at the world, the Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and talking about some real world applications of dealing with different personality types and different paradigm levels in a corporate environment.
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| Thank you for joining us. Welcome to Apex Level to Power. Escape the herd, rise above the pack, this is the Apex Level to Power Podcast, the only place in the web that teaches you to identify and control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We teach sheep to become wolves, a challenge to be sure, but one that we answer and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host, Mark Gleason. I welcome you to the program and I invite you to visit our little corner of the web at leveltopower.com for more information and to support the broadcast.
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| Today is a special day. We have author, lawyer, poet, philosopher.
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| Jim Luisi: | Ballroom dancer.
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| Mark Gleason: | Intellectual, both pseudo and otherwise, Jim Luisi. Jim, how are you doing? Welcome to the podcast.
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| Jim Luisi: | I’m doing well. Thank you very much for having me. This is an honor to be invited to this incredible program.
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| Mark Gleason: | It is. it is. I can’t deny that. You are a man who states facts and I like that. We like that in our guests. The way that this conversation came about, in the process of doing my research for the Apex Level to Power framework, I had come across your book, Sensitive by Nature, where you spelled out this concept of levels. I tried to take that and build upon it with the work that I was doing so, I was pretty excited at the opportunity to get you on the podcast. That might be a good place to start is how you developed that way of looking at the world, which I think is very useful, and then looking at it from that perspective, how does the world look to you?
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes. There’s a lot to discuss there. It’s interesting. When you look at what these levels are, there’s a completely different discussion in how you traverse through them and then, once you understand them and how you can move your way up through these levels, the tremendous use that you can get from these as an intellectual tool because they allow you to handle your ability to interpret the things that are happening around you, and that’s really key difference between people. It’s how they interpret things that they’re experiencing.
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| The levels, we could start off with what you added to the levels, which is the level 0, which is the concept that there’s a collection of say living creatures that have some sort of a mind. However, in this particular level when someone is in this level, let’s say it’s a person, they are completely suggestible to somebody else who they have basically given control to. They need to be told what to do, how to think, where to go, and they are hence characterized, as you put it, as a hive mentality. We think of the [board collective 00:04:21] say as something that we would all relate to from a television series, but we also think about insects and how the insects in a beehive or even in an ant colony behave. They are not thinking for themselves necessarily. They’re all working as one collective.
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| Then we have the Level 1s. The Level 1s are a bit more common among people. Level 1s are ones that have a sense of self. It’s interesting because one of the things that science uses to distinguish between say humans versus other animals is they say, “Humans are different because they have a sense of self. When you look in a mirror, you know that’s you.” Whereas their assertion is when an animal looks into a mirror, it doesn’t realize that that is him or her. It’s interesting concept. I don’t know whether that can be proven to be true, but that’s an interesting concept.
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| You have a sense of self and as a sense of self, you have pretty much one, hence the Level 1, have one way of interpreting the things that happen to you. You tend to always adopt the interpretation if there were possibly multiple interpretations. You tend to adopt the one that first occurs to you. Now, your upbringing, your family, the schools you go to, the friends that you have, the sports teams that you might adhere to, all these things create how you think about things or help inform you how to think about things. You tend to think like the people who you hang out with that you go into a Level 1 collection of people and if you gather an opinion from somebody on some topic, you could be pretty sure that the rest of the group is going to have a similar opinion on that topic. It’s just people tend to stick around others that think like them.
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| Then you have the concept of Level 2. Level 2 is interesting because it’s not limited to say two interpretations. It’s really meant to be a few interpretations. We don’t call it Level Few. We have say individuals that see that yes, the first interpretation that they may have stumbled upon just in their normal thought process, but also, there are other ways of thinking about that thing. Being able to put yourself into the shoes of another, some people can do that and some people just cannot.
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| These people make very good lawyers, negotiators. They’re able to help bridge the gap between two people who have different mindsets and these are most commonly referred to as the paradigms of individuals. A Level 2 is more apt to see that when two other people are talking to one another that they might be talking past one another. They could see this person is coming from this perspective and this person is coming from that perspective. They’re using the same words. They both understand the same words, but they understand them in different ways. Hence, you get the phenomenon of them ending up talking past one another because they’re both going down different thought processes.
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| Then you get to the next level, which is Level 3 and Level 3s don’t just have a few ways of interpreting things. They realize that there are basically an infinite number of looking at something. There are many, many interpretations. They tend to be so aware of other interpretations that they’re going to more apt be confused. It’s fascinating because when you look at say a multiple choice test where the test designer may have come up with a particular question that they feel that say C is clearly the answer, but a Level 3 might look at that and say, “Wow, I can see a scenario where that question could lead me to A or B or C, just not D. D is silly.
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| Then because of that, the Level 3 has to go through an extra step or an extra wave of intellectual effort to try to put themselves in the position of what did the test designer have in mind? What was the most likely thing they were trying to test here? They have to put themselves into the shoes of the test designer and then, go in and interpret the different answers. It’s going to take say a Level 3 a lot more effort to go through a multiple choice exam say. Once they master this though, they can pretty much fly through a multiple choice test like that, but they have to learn how to go through that thought process.
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| Mark Gleason: | Of course, this podcast is called Level to Power and that’s because the concept of levels is foundational if you will. It is the foundational level to the entire framework. This is very, very important to understand. I also want to add a little color and unpack this a bit for our listeners because we’re not saying that Level 1 or Level 2 is necessarily better than the other. Sometimes, it is more appropriate to be Level 1 and sometimes more appropriate to be Level 2. Let me give you some examples of that.
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| Let’s say that I am in a fight in an alley with a mugger. We’re both of about equal skill and equal size and strength, and he is just trying to kill me. I am trying to defend myself and I’m worried is this guy going to sue me? What’s his perspective? Is he trying to rob me? Is he trying to kill me? Is he trying to scare me away? Did I cause this somehow? Can I get sued? Is there a camera around here? Does this really constitute self defense? I am fluttering through all these different ways of looking at the situation and he is just trying to kill me. In that situation, he’s going to kill me.
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| To be able to fight in a tactical situation half in, half out, looking at it this way, looking at it that way is not good. Tactically, in the moment, in the immediacy, an instant reflex of action, dealing in the perceptual, dealing with what is real, dealing with what is happening is extremely important where you have one way of looking at things. You’re not looking at things always. You aren’t trying to see it from every angle. You are simply Level 1 in this moment can be helpful.
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| Now, let’s say we’re earlier in the evening and we’re in a bar and the same situation happens where it starts brewing, the situation with this guy. There being a higher level and being able to see how the bartenders and witnesses are perceiving this exchange, understand how a judge is going to look at the situation next month when we’re in front of him explaining what happened, noticing whether he has friends, noticing his relative size and strength, then noticing that there’s cameras around where you’re going to get into altercation, you got to make sure that you’re not caught on film being the aggressor for instance, where later this guy can come back. Now me thinking wow, this guy can come back and sue me. He could fight me and then, come back and sue me.
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| Looking at things strategically from a bunch of different ways is extraordinarily powerful. Therefore, while he’s blundering through life wondering why things just don’t work out for him, in reality, other people are just seeing more than he sees. That translates, of course, to the boardroom as well and to the sales cycle as well. I’ve met very strong CEOs. I’ve met very strong executives. I have met very strong salespeople who are strong pure Level 1s. All they see is their own perspective, that’s it, but the power behind the throne is always a Level 2 somewhere. All right, somewhere there’s a Level 2 helping and advising this Level 1 even though they are the one who’s out there in front. Let me give you an example of that.
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| As you know, I’m a management consultant. My job is to go in and help businesses run better to save money, implement change, mergers and acquisitions, joining organizations, getting herds of people moving in the right direction is basically what I do. We had a situation in a remote location where we had to ask people to work over the weekend. It’s a holiday weekend actually. It was a three-day weekend and we had to ask people to work. Now, I can’t help but think as I get on the phone with them, it was me and an executive, I could not help but think okay, here’s my perspective. Here’s the perspective of these people. We’re going to ask them to do this. Really, we’re going to require them to do this, but what are all the different ways we could approach this super nice, super gruff and say, “You have to do this.” What’s all the different nuances of this situation to help get this done?
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| We get on the phone and this executive just says, “This is the job. We need you to work over the weekend.” They went, “I don’t know. I have a wedding this weekend and my mother’s in town and I haven’t seen her in 30 years.” They begin to list the items, but those items were invisible to the Level 1. It literally slid right off him. It didn’t even consciously register. It was like they were speaking a foreign language. He let them speak and said, “Okay, by Friday at 8 PM, we need you guys in the office to do the following.” That was it. There was no drag.
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| Now, I would’ve probably ended up somewhere similar, but I could not help but be impacted by their statements. Now, I still would’ve said, “Okay, I understand all that, but we need to do this anyway,” but my cognitive empathy, not my emotional empathy, my cognitive empathy, understanding their perspective was high and therefore, I was impacted in a way that he was not.
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| You could see in a negotiation, you could see when it comes to being an executive who have to tell people to do things and then go home and sleep at night and not have to lose any sleep over it, that being a Level 1 in those circumstances is extraordinarily helpful. The problem is that you need to have a Level 2 point you in the right direction. This is like having a boxing coach where you’re just a great boxer who’s going to dedicate himself to boxing, but somebody needs to be telling you, “Yes, learn this. Don’t learn this,” because that’s a different skill set than boxing. Coaching is a different skill set than boxing. That’s the strategy of it.
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| Jim Luisi: | You bring up a great point. Not only is it not right or wrong to be say a Level 1 or a 2. It’s also independent of how intelligent the individual is. It’s also independent of the personality style of the individual …
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| Mark Gleason: | Just want to underscore that. That’s an excellent point. Just to underscore what you just said, intelligence is not a factor here or certainly, it’s a small factor.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, very small.
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| Mark Gleason: | You can be Level 2, have a lower intelligence than a high IQ Level 1.
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| Jim Luisi: | Level 1, yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | An entrepreneur who has 10 geniuses all working for him making the entrepreneur billions of dollars likely is a Level 2 with high IQ Level 1s working for him. This is independent of intelligence and IQ, right.
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| Jim Luisi: | Now, I’m not sure how we would look at a Level 0 from the intelligence perspective because it’s conceivable that there could a very intelligent Level 0, somebody who can solve difficult mathematical problems or different puzzles, but still not have a sense of self and have to be told what to do.
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| Mark Gleason: | Level 0, and we don’t talk about that a lot because most of our dealings everyday is with Level 1, Level 2. The level 0 that I added to your framework was because I found that there is a state of humanity which is not truly Level 1 because Level 1 is completely aware of their own paradigm, only their paradigm. There’s only their way of looking at the world. That executive who is telling people they had to stay the weekend, they had to. That was it. That’s reality. That’s the only reality he even sees. Therefore, Level 1 is definitely that.
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| Now how do you describe though somebody who is in flight or flight reflex where their forebrain has shut down and now they’re in a mode where they are dealing with perceptions, 100% perception, and no conception? That is where I draw the line between 0, 1, 2, and 3. One of the differences between levels is are you dealing in a perceptual level or a conceptual level?
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| Perceptual is hot, cold. I feel fear. I feel hungry. I’m dealing with the simple realities of the moment as I perceive them to be through my senses. Conceptual is about ideas. It is about higher level ideas like yes, these are sticks, but if I put them together, I can make a chair out of it and I can build a tool that will help me in some way. That is a higher level concept that animals don’t have very much of, but somehow humans have acquired.
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| If you’re dealing in a purely based on perception, you are in a daze. You’re in fight or flight. You’re on drugs. You don’t even have a concept that you are separate from your reality, your environment. You are simply part of it and you’re almost going on autopilot and reflex. That to me is a Level 0, somebody …
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| Jim Luisi: | Lizard brain.
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| Mark Gleason: | Exactly, your lizard brain has taken over the gears of control. Once you now get to Level 1, you’ve established a sense of self. If I had somebody who was in a daze and they were a cult member and they were dealing at Level 0, and I gave them a sense of self, a sense of identity, a sense of distinction between themselves and the world, now they know at least that they exist and the world exists, that they exist in the world. They’re not the world, right. They’re not part of the environment like we suppose an animal just thinks it is. Animals just perceive simple truths. They perceive what is. That’s it. They cannot make conceptual errors so I …
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| Jim Luisi: | I can conceivably might be to shake him out of that lizard brain stupor, you might be calling him by his name. You might be telling him that you know his mother and she sent you to go find him and bring him back, but something to pull him out of this mindset that he is what he finds himself in right now into something where he did have at one time a sense of self.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes, so reestablishing that sense of self and that identity. You would almost think that somebody was in a cult who has lost their sense of self. In other words, they don’t know right or wrong unless someone tells them. They don’t feel good about themselves unless somebody rewards them, but they always need to go to some authority figure from their most basic functioning. It’s almost like a pet. That’s how cult members are. Again, this is a subpart of the population. It’s a small part of the population, but I think Level 0 is important because when we drop to a lizard brain, when we drop to fight or flight, we are on autopilot.
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| They say that you should practice, physically practice dialing 911 with your fingers on your phone, 911, 911, don’t actually dial, right, but you should practice because in an actual emergency when there’s blood flowing everywhere and your loved one is at stake, people will take their phone, know they have to call someone and look at their phone and forget what the number is to dial 911 because their forebrain shuts down. It’s part of the body reaction that your body has. Those endorphins get released and adrenalin gets released, kicks in as a protection mechanism.
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| I’m assuming when a tiger jumps out of the jungle at you, it was far better to not waste any time and just run, rather than sit there and think about it and consider, “Hmm, I wonder what I should … I wonder if this tiger is really going to attack me.” It’s a mechanism to protect us, but the problem is our brain shuts down and we operate on autopilot, whatever we’ve trained ourself to do.
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| It is important, even though it’s a small part of the population that stays at Level 0 to understand it because there will be situations that we can talk about where that becomes important, but most of us spend our lives at Level 1 where we’re aware of our own interests, my money, my food, my shelter, right, my family. We’re aware of those things. The problem is we don’t see the chess game beyond that. We don’t see all the different perspectives.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. Compared to the cult member who has given all their personal belongings to the cult leader and now has nothing of their own and so, they have less of a sense of self and they’ve just been stripped of their whole concept of self. To come back around as to the value of these levels, it’s a tool that intelligence by itself does not lend support. It’s a tool that even different personality styles don’t get you through.
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| Suppose you had a graduating class and all of you were chemists. You all scored the same exact amount on your exams. You’re all equal from an intelligence perspective. You’re still going to find that if you go into … Say you all get hired by let’s say DuPont. Nothing against DuPont, but let’s say DuPont as an example. That in that team, you’re going to find …
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| Mark Gleason: | I’ve got something against DuPont. That guy is a crazy man. Isn’t that the guy who was killing people or something, and they never arrested him because he’s hugely wealthy?
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| Jim Luisi: | I don’t know.
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| Mark Gleason: | One of the DuPont heirs was doing some bad stuff and paid off people to not go to jail.
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| Jim Luisi: | As a team, you’re going to find that some of these people are going to end up being able to rise up higher in the organization, some people will stay down at a very low level, some people will end up working for other people. That dynamic is something that’s very interesting to comprehend.
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| I think that’s one of the things I love about this program that you’ve established is that this is one of the first times I’ve ever seen somebody establish a curriculum geared to help people understand those differentiators that separate one individual from another individual based upon the key ingredient, which is the ability to understand what’s going on around them better than somebody else, to be able to interpret the actions and the words of other people around them, how they’re being positioned for good or poorly because it’s definitely a skill and if you have no insight into it, it’s like these things are happening to you and you can’t explain why on earth they’re happening to you. There’s nothing that you can point to that says, “Why didn’t I get that promotion? Why didn’t I get that raise? Why didn’t I get that girl? Why didn’t … ” So on and so forth? When you would say the more wealthy or the better attractive or you’re more attractive, you still were undermined by somebody else and you’re not able to put your finger on what those differences are.
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| Mark Gleason: | Let me give a practical example because I think people are probably still trying to struggle to understand what exactly that means. Here’s one practical example that maybe you have more. I had an associate of mine who approached me. He was involved in a business deal. He was not getting paid for the last segment of work that he had done. He was going to send an email to this man who owed him some money for this last piece of work. There was some dispute over whether or not he had actually brought the value that he was supposed to bring. He let me look at this email before he sent it and I looked at the previous correspondence.
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| It was obvious to me because … Now one of the things that drops you levels is your emotional energy on an issue that you can be all very empowered and looking at things from different perspectives and then, your family member calls who you hate and next thing you know, all you see is how right you are and how wrong they are and that’s the only reality that exists for you in that moment and you crash to Level 1. He was operating at Level 1. He was annoyed at this person who hadn’t paid him, but looking at the email history, it was obvious to me that, and it started off very friendly, back and forth, back and forth with can you do this for me? Sure, I can do that.
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| Then there was a shift on this person who owed him the money. The shift was he started writing for a judge. You basically could see he stopped being the friendly exchange and started writing it for a third party because this guy knew where it was headed. He knew it was headed to be in front of a judge. I think this guy had some legal training. Now, my friend was oblivious to that, right. He did not catch the shift, the subtle shift in language that I’m not writing this to you anymore. I’m now writing it so that I look good in front of a judge and you look like an irrational fool.
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| My friend almost fell into this bear trap because his response was pretty blistering and unreasonable. The last previous responses were headed toward unreasonable and this guy was just giving him rope and giving him rope and giving him rope because he knew that at some point, they could easily end up in front of an arbitrator or a judge and he could say, “We had disagreements, but he didn’t deliver as agreed and look, he’s just a really hostile and unreasonable party to deal with.” Of course, me seeing this, I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you cannot. You cannot send this reply. He is setting you up. You’re making this personal. At the moment, you’re only seeing this from your perspective and you have the dimmest of view perhaps his perspective and you don’t see at all a possible theoretical third perspective, which is this judge.”
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| Now, there’s a simple case where he could’ve gone through that business interaction, ended up in court, ended up not getting paid, and would’ve cursed his luck and would never know what he did wrong. Yet a person with levels, a person with perspective, the person with a power to be able to see things from different ways could intercede and manage things and pull the strings of power to make sure, guide events to make sure that you land in some kind of optimal way.
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| That is an excellent example because it’s so simple, but he not only had to see his perspective. He had to see the other guy’s perspective. He had to see a third abstract perspective, which could be anything. It could be his wife reading it. It could be the president reading it. It could be the FBI reading it. It could be … There’s all these possible states that hang out there in the ether and you have to run through these things in your mind and collapse down to the relevant ones.
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| That, of course, comes with experience. When you see certain language, you say, “This sounds a bit like legalese. I wonder if he’s setting me up to go to court.” If you see other language, you say, “Wow, this sounds like this guy’s trying to lure me in to a criminal conspiracy. I wonder if this is entrapment,” right. You have to be able to theorize on the fly all these different states and strategize your way through it. That’s my example. I’m not sure if you have some other ones, particularly from business that we can think about where these kinds of power politics occur all the time.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, there are a lot of them. One I could offer was years ago, I had worked for a company and I had taken a very simple job primarily to have time to publish my first book. I was looking to not have a high stressed position so I can focus on getting the book finished off. Went into an environment where the manager was very insecure and managed really through terror, if she thought anybody was competent and potentially be able to take her position.
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| Mark Gleason: | Can you give her first, last name, and social security number?
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes. In that environment, I had learned that other people who had come in before me who really wanted that position were goaded into losing their temper. They were put into very extreme circumstances. They were treated unfairly just to get them to blow up. The more calmly I responded, the more upset she became.
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| It came down to one day, I was called into her boss’ office and he said, “So Jimmy, tell me, how’s things going?” I said, “I think they’re going very well. I’m trying to work with the other groups we interact with. We’re trying to be included in as many things as possible and we’re having a good effect upon the people we’re supporting.” He says, “Your boss has a list of complaints about you.” I said, “I’m unaware of them, but I can be told what they are?” She’s on the other side of the table and she says, “No.” He says, “No, I think it’s reasonable to let him hear what the complaints are.” She said, “No.” He said, “Humor me. I want to know.”
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| Mark Gleason: | Hold on, hold on. She was saying …
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| Jim Luisi: | She had 10 complaints about me.
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| Mark Gleason: | From other people?
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| Jim Luisi: | No, actually from her, just from her.
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| Mark Gleason: | Just from her.
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| Jim Luisi: | Just from her.
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| Mark Gleason: | She said that she had her own list of complaints about you.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | But was refusing to go through that list.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | That sounds very reasonable.
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| Jim Luisi: | Doesn’t it?
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes.
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| Jim Luisi: | Finally …
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| Mark Gleason: | I have my own complaints about you.
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| Jim Luisi: | I do as well.
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| Mark Gleason: | Which I am happy to list.
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| Jim Luisi: | My list about me is even longer than yours. She goes through her list. She goes 1 through 10. At the end, I asked, “May I respond to those?” She said, “No.” Now, her manager said …
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| Mark Gleason: | This is your direct manager.
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| Jim Luisi: | My direct manager.
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| Mark Gleason: | Sitting in front of her direct manager.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes. Isn’t this beautiful? She says, “No, you may not respond to them.”
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| Mark Gleason: | At what point did your male privilege kick in? I’m just asking.
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| Jim Luisi: | It didn’t. The big boss says, “Don’t you think he should be allowed to respond to these complaints?” She said, “No.” He said, “Humor me. I want to hear what he has to say.” The first item was one where she had left me a note in my chair and the note said, “Come and see me in my office.”
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| Mark Gleason: | Now, hey, whoa. This was a pretty boring story up until …
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| Jim Luisi: | Up until now.
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| Mark Gleason: | Up until the point where she left you a note in my chair saying, “Come and see me in my orifice.” This I got to say even with my ability to see paradigms, I did not see this one coming.
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| Jim Luisi: | It said, “Come and see me in my office.”
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s what she said. That’s what she said.
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| Jim Luisi: | I know. I said, “I remember seeing that note on my chair. I picked it up off the chair. I read it. I immediately holding the note walked out my office door, two doors down to your office. You were not there. The note did not say stay here until I return.” She slams on the table, “I knew this would happen,” and really lost it. The boss wasn’t ready for me to respond to the other nine because she would’ve had to be taken away in an ambulance if I had done so. He tapped me on the knee. He said, “Jimmy, you can go back to your office now.”
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| Mark Gleason: | This is an example then of could we call her an evil Level 1 because she didn’t even know enough to know how ridiculous some of these things would sound to an objective party?
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| Jim Luisi: | In this case, she was reduced down to a 1 because she got very emotional about it. Her maneuvering before that, I had already perceived that she had done Level 2 maneuverings, but … Yes, she was definitely down to 1.
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| Mark Gleason: | She may be partially operating Level 2, but obviously, any complaint I have about you and I have many, cannot be so easily rebutted. If I said to myself, “I did leave Jim a note and he never came and saw me, and I was annoyed by that,” before I added it to my list of complaints to my boss, I would think, “Yeah, but I really can’t hold him accountable for that one because maybe he got the note and I wasn’t in my office. I have to somehow lock Jim into this. How can I get him? I’ll send him an email with a read receipt so I have a record that he opened it and he must’ve seen it and then, I can say he never came and found me after that.”
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| Jim Luisi: | This would be true though if …
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| Mark Gleason: | The note thing is just too … If you say …
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| Jim Luisi: | If she thought I was going to be responding to these things, but remember, from her point of view, she thought I was never even going to learn of these things.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s true, but even her …
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| Jim Luisi: | If I learned of them, she never anticipated I would ever get an opportunity to reply to those things, but yes I agree …
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| Mark Gleason: | I know, but I would never go to my boss with a complaint, right.
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| Jim Luisi: | Exactly.
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| Mark Gleason: | That said, “I left a note on his chair and then he didn’t do what he was supposed to,” because my boss, first thing they would say is, “Why are you leaving notes on chairs? If this was important, why wouldn’t you schedule a meeting with him or do an email or type a letter, and you have the secretary send out a memorandum,” something, right? Putting a note on someone’s chair when they may sit on it and walk out with it on their behinds is insane. Right from the get-go, you’re not considering your audience. She was not writing for the judge, right, which is her boss …
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | … when making this list. I have some doubts whether this woman was really operating at Level 2 even early on this process. Now granted you probably were infuriating her for quite a long period of time so …
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| Jim Luisi: | Without doubt. I had great standards from the previous places I had worked and I was trying to bring those into the environment, and she hated those and she wanted things done the way she had done things. When I finally did it exactly the way she wanted, she said, “I want to tell you, your work has improved.” I said, “I’m glad you think so, but you do know I had to lower my standards to achieve that.”
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| Mark Gleason: | You are a dream employee.
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| Jim Luisi: | I am.
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| Mark Gleason: | You are a dream employee.
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| Jim Luisi: | I am.
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| Mark Gleason: | The pieces are beginning to fall into place. I want to hear the story when you had seen the chess board so thoroughly that when you had a conflict with a co-worker and she said that a third party wanted you gone …
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | … and you said, “You know what,” to the powers that be, “You know what, go talk to that person and if they agree with that, I agree, I should be gone.”
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes, this was a beauty. I’m working in an environment in a large insurer years ago and I’m told by my boss that the people I’m working with say that they don’t want to work with me. I said, “Really? Did they come to you directly to say this or is this something that you just came up with somehow?” She said, “No, no, your manager came to me and said that your co-workers don’t want to work with you, specifically this one young lady.” I said, “You can either believe that person that that’s the case or you can go find out the truth and go speak to that young lady and ask her yourself.”
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| She said, “That would mean going around your manager.” I said, “Yes, it does mean that. What’s more important to you? Knowing the truth and going around that manager or being fooled by that manager because they’re not telling you the truth? Your choice.” She went to my co-worker, had a one-on-one and then came back. Then called my manager in and then called me in and said, “How dare you make things up about him. I spoke with her. There was no problem here. She loves working with him. Why are you making stuff up like this?” Then I was asked to leave the room and then again, similar to the other story, even though I was far away, I could hear yelling and screaming from a long distance.
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| Mark Gleason: | I think it’s important to make the distinction here that when you’re in a corporate environment and you are facing opposition, they are often what you’ve referred to as an evil Level 2. A Level 2 is somebody who can see other paradigms and, therefore, is much better at influence and persuasion and manipulation.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, they think they can manipulate people because they actually believe that they’re smarter than everybody else and everybody around them is some sort of a fool.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s because they can see other paradigms whereas most people cannot.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | Therefore, they’re used. Now some people use that for good. Some people become leaders or counselors, right.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | A counselor is somebody who sees your paradigm, sees where it needs to be, and tries to help you get there. A conman is somebody who sees your paradigm, sees where he wants your paradigm to be, and gets you there. The fact that you’re a Level 2 is simply the ability to see paradigms. Whether it’s good or bad is just relevant to the local tribe and what’s perceived as good or bad. In a company, for instance, the good is things which help the corporate mission, which is to manufacture products or have customers.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. That’s actually the distinction I look at, the good versus the bad. The bad is usually when the individual is purely acting for their own benefit at the cost of the organization. Good is where they’re looking for the team, the company. They’re trying to better the whole group, not just enrich themselves.
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| Mark Gleason: | To give everybody a mental picture, a typical evil Level 2 would be that troll bureaucrat who has a little bit of power, a little fiefdom over here, and they’re impossible to deal with, didn’t get anything out of them because they just use their little tiny bit of power as a club. The idea of trying to accomplish anything or get the job done is just not even enter their minds. It’s all a matter of how can I use this club to beat people because I’m a gatekeeper of some vital information.
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| I think most people probably have experienced that somewhere in the office. You have this evil Level 2 that you run into from time to time because people are going to encounter different challenges in the business world. Some of those are going to be Level 1s that can’t see the grand plan you’re laying out for them and they need to be brought to it somehow. That’s one challenge we have. Sometimes you have an evil Level 1 where it’s almost laughable because they’re so clumsy at trying to do manipulation, it’s obvious, and it’s a little easier to deal with.
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| A evil Level 2 though can be very difficult and very dangerous to deal with mostly because if you actually have a mission which is to get the corporate agenda moved forward to deliver your project, to make the sale, to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. All they have to do is stop that to win. They’ll spend all day long writing emails, wasting time, documenting the heck out of every single mistake you ever make because that is their job as they see it is just be a troll.
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| I just want to point out that your last story was one tool in your arsenal, which I’m going to name right now and that is calling the bluff.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | What you did there was you had laid out a good understanding of the relationship with these co-workers that you had, you were able to see from their perspective, and you had a high confidence that you accurately understood that they enjoyed working with you. You also gauged your manager quite well to know that she was a fair-minded individual who could be counted on to react in a certain way. When this whole thing happened where this other person, this evil Level 2 came to oppose you and impede your progress, impede your promotion, get you fired, whatever it was that she was trying to get done there, you enacted the tactic of calling her bluff.
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| I want to point out though that it was only the preparation, and by saying preparation, I don’t mean you were consciously laying for that event, but just knowing your landscape, knowing the people you were dealing with, always being in tune with that lets you with total confidence call her bluff. Everybody hates working with Jim. “Okay,” Jim says. “Go talk to everybody. If they truly hate working with me, I agree, I shouldn’t be here. If they do like working with me, then we have a whole other problem because my co-worker here is just lying to you,” right. Brilliant, a brilliant tactic to call the bluff.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, it’s fascinating when you are faced with that situation because I think the human tendency is to be paranoid. If you allow yourself to become paranoid, then you start thinking, “Wow, I misinterpreted, and the people who I work with don’t like me. I’m misreading my surroundings and now I can’t trust anybody.” It could cause you to go into a tailspin all by yourself that you will now be self-destructive because you’ve just gone paranoid.
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| However, if you could resist that urge to go paranoid by realizing that this is merely a manipulation and that you have options in front of you, that my options since if I’m right and I’m in the realm of truth, I have a stronger tool set. I can choose to use that tool set or I could be frightened away from that tool set. I’d say most people are frightened away from it and are made paranoid and go in a bad direction.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s important, right. It’s important to point that out and that is you were on the side of truth and reality. She was trying to obscure. Therefore, your mission was to shine the light of day on the entire situation, as much light as possible. Sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant.
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| Jim Luisi: | It is.
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| Mark Gleason: | You were confident that you had been doing your job, that you had been working well, that you were a good colleague to work with, and that was not a game. It wasn’t a scheme. You weren’t trying to pull some kind of cynical maneuver to fool people into thinking that you were adding value. You were adding value.
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| The skill set is not mostly about tricking people and fooling people and conning people. It’s about when you do good work, when you have the right product to sell, and people are having their own mental blocks and they can’t see the reality that you’ve created for them and you’re inviting them in and saying, “Look, how your life can different with this new product,” you are sticking to the truth, being authentic is going to save you a huge amount of mental capacity. By the way, all that extra capacity gets freed up, then can be used for cognitive empathy to understand what other people’s perspectives are.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | Because people might say, “Look, this sounds like a lot of work.” It’s not a lot of work.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | You do your job and you get in the habit of trying to understand things from somebody else’s perspective.
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| Jim Luisi: | Though I think it’s worthwhile mentioning, though pointing that you have a choice when you see the same thing happening to other people. I often see where somebody else is being victimized by somebody who’s distorting the truth. I’m more than happy to go in and basically rescue them. It’s so much easier for say me to go and rescue somebody else who is under attack unfairly.
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| It’s much more difficult to rescue yourself and you have to be very careful and very skilled about doing so. When you have somebody else coming in to rescue you, if somebody came to rescue me, I have the benefit then of there being say another party who is observing this and they’re outside the system. When I have to rescue myself, then I’m doing it from within the system and it could be looked at as being defensive or things like that, and I have to be very careful then not to trigger that.
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| Mark Gleason: | Certainly. Certainly. A third party is going to have the authority of at least a chance at being objective. Even when you’re trying to be objective, everybody’s going to assume that you have some self-interest that is motivating your position, but it all comes down to energy level as well. You will be much less emotionally vested in the outcome of something else that’s happening to somebody else versus when it’s happening to you. If somebody else is being wrongly accused, that will get my moral justice hackles up and I will go in there and assist, but there’s a whole other level of emotional energy if somebody wrongly accuses me of something. My level of outrage is about 10 points up, right, if somebody wrongly accuses me.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah. To properly handle that, you have to struggle to bring that down.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s the thing. You need to be … I’ll only hurt myself.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. You almost have to get yourself into a mindset where you convince yourself that you don’t care about it at all and now, you can act very sensibly.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s what it is, but the way you do that is with perspective.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | Right. If you understand your perspective, their perspective, you understand that it’s just noises they’re making, they are traveling through the air, and hitting your ears. Nobody’s hurting you. They have their own perspective as to why they’re doing this. It’s not even really personal. It’s mostly about them, not about you. It’s so easy to collapse that Level 1 where things are happening to me. You’re hurting me with these words. You’re not hurting me with these words. These are simply words and …
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. We hurt ourselves with the words.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. We hurt ourselves with the words. That’s easy to see when somebody else is being accused and they’re getting all hot and bothered, and you say … Like my friend with the email exchange with this person who owed him money. He was offended. He felt, I’m sure if I was in his position, I would feel anger. I would feel bad about myself that maybe I’d mishandled this whole thing. I’d be kicking myself like I should’ve had a contract. That makes me even angrier that I screwed this up.
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| All those different self-recriminations are coming in feeding your anger and emotion which needs a target, you have convenient target which is this guy over here. Unfortunately, he’s setting you up to go for a lawsuit in front of a judge and, therefore, your anger is only going to hurt you here. Easy for a third party to see, “Hey, don’t take it personally. This is a business thing. This is what this guy’s doing. This is how we’re going to handle it.” It’s a whole other thing when it happens to you.
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| That’s where the better you are with perspective, the better you are at choosing the proper level to be in. For instance, if somebody says something to me, which emotionally triggers me, I collapse to Level 1, but I’m getting better and better with time and practice at popping right back up to Level 2. Whereas somebody like my brother used to say something to me, some snarky comment, boom, I’m now angry, ready to make a snarky comment back. I’m better now at being able to pop right back to Level 2 and say, “Okay, hold on. That’s just he’s had a long day. That’s his perspective. It’s not really that personal. Even if he means it to be personal, I don’t care,” right.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. He’s just trying to push your buttons.
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| Mark Gleason: | Now we all get there.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | Now we all get there eventually. When it happens, we all say things and then six months later, that’s when we have our perspective. “Wow, you know what, when you said that to me, yeah, I overreacted a little bit. I didn’t really mean all those terrible things I said to you. It was in the moment. I was angry.”
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| Jim Luisi: | I didn’t mean to hit you with the car.
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| Mark Gleason: | Exactly. I didn’t mean to run over you accidentally four times.
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| Jim Luisi: | I think one of the things that the listeners need to understand is that these stories are just the beginning. These are the things that we use as tools early on and we started to understand them better, but when we look at what these mean in the bigger picture, now we look at them and we look at a debate, and we could see how the debaters are communicating with one another either honestly or dishonestly. We could see how they’re throwing things out say to members of the audience where certain communications are meant for the masses, not for say the intelligent few because to get elected, they might need to have a certain set of numbers to achieve in certain areas among certain demographics.
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| Now, when we look at the usefulness of this tool set, we are really implementing it across large political cycles, economic cycles. We see this as a very comprehensive tool set for understanding everything that’s happening around us and we realize more and more that all the constructs around us, what we call our community, our city, our state, our country, all these things are concepts that not all that many years ago, these types of concepts did not exist.
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| It wasn’t long ago really that the whole world was really driven by kingdoms and emperors. Concept of nations where people got to vote is all relatively new and all of these things are abstractions on concepts that we have operated within. When you see people, actors, actors being politicians or people in business or people in the media, all these people who are giving out messages are doing so with very specific purposes. They have very specific objectives that they’re trying to achieve.
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| As you learn the system that Mark is going to take you through, you’re going to have an appreciation as to when you are really thinking for yourself versus when others are being in control of your thinking. This is going to be quite a journey and I encourage all of you to persist and learn from it.
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| Mark Gleason: | It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be fun. What I tried to add to your basic concept of levels and then add on top of that for the Apex Level to Power is you could do analysis on a debate, between opponents that are both making claims and oftentimes, they’ll be committing logical fallacies against each other. Each opponent will put a straw man up, for instance, a straw man fallacy where they completely misrepresent, they create a caricature of the other person’s position and then knock it down, which is what a straw man is, and that’s very useful by the way. It’s very useful to do that kind of analysis and be able in a meeting when somebody’s committing a fallacy to understand what it is and how to overcome it.
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| What Level to Power’s about, we add in the level concepts, is how are they also committing fallacies against their own audience, against their own people, their own tribe, their own herd because they have an agenda there as well. Their agenda there is to keep you at Level 1. For instance, if I say, “No true Democrat would ever believe this, right,” I’m speaking to my own group. What I’m trying to do is tamp down with a logical fallacy called the no true Scotsman fallacy, which basically says, “No true American would think this. No true Republican would do the following.”
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| Making that claim, just simply saying, “No true American would,” that’s not a legitimate claim, right. I can give you a lot of reasons and maybe a premise why that might be true, but simply saying it is a fallacy. That’s a logical fallacy being used against their own audience to keep them at Level 1, to keep them locked in so they will not critically analyze the positions of their leaders. That is where the subtleties of power become very, very interesting is when people are trying to control you and what’s invisible to most people is their own leaders in their religious organization, in their political leaders, their community organizers, their CEOs, their managers, their subordinates, their wives, their children.
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| This is where the subtle logical fallacies can be used to box you in and you don’t even realize it’s happening that’s why it’s so insidious. At least your opponents, your open opponents, the evil Level 2 in the corporation, you know they’re an enemy and that is something that we all deal with and we need to look at. Much more subtle are your allies who have their own agendas, who they’re moving not necessarily against you, but they are moving for them. When they are trying to get the promotion, it’s possible they are positioning things so that you’re not getting the promotion, and that’s where the stuff becomes very, very interesting.
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| Jim Luisi: | I think one of the fascinating things about what you started off with the fallacy is the whole notion that there are constructs for debating, tools in debating, tools that are valid to use that are based on logic and reasoning versus say the tools that are based purely in rhetoric and trickery. Being able to learn the difference between those so that you basically inoculate yourself against being manipulated by the trickery is such an important feature.
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| When I have conversations with people and I see them shifting the conversation to something else, changing the topic, I’m realizing hey, this is not intellectual honesty here, but better than that, whether it’s one of the top 40 techniques, Mark knows the name of each technique that they’re using, and I think one of the things that I’m looking to learn from him is these different tools, their labels so that we all can share in these things and we can learn this together.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, on the website a great resource is on the Apex Level to Power website. We have a poster which lists out the top fallacies with an explanation. You have them on your desktop, on your computer or you can print it out and put it on your wall so you always have them with you and you begin to internalize some of the names these fallacies that we’ll be using in a lot of our analysis.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. That way when somebody’s having a conversation with you and …
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| Mark Gleason: | You just point to it.
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| Jim Luisi: | Or you say …
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| Mark Gleason: | Have it in your office, you just point to the fallacy.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, or you say, “I like that one, but I think you should’ve used this one because it’s even more damning. However, both of them are not really fair, but … ”
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| Mark Gleason: | You know what, I think this is a great idea. I think I’m going to have on the site for sale Apex Level to Power business cards with the different fallacies on them so you can hand them out to people.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | On the back, there’ll be the scarecrow or straw man rather.
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| Jim Luisi: | Straw man.
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| Mark Gleason: | There’ll be the straw man fallacy so that when somebody does it to you, you can just take the card and hand it to them, has the definition at the back.
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| Jim Luisi: | With the definition on the back.
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| Mark Gleason: | Say, yeah …
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| Jim Luisi: | Say, “Would you mind reading this aloud to everybody in the room?”
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| Mark Gleason: | “I hate to play the straw man card, but … ” That’s brilliant. I’m going to do that.
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| Jim Luisi: | I like it. I like it. Because it’s a deck that every manager should have, every executive should have.
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| Mark Gleason: | Absolutely.
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| Jim Luisi: | Especially when they go into boardroom meetings because they’ll be flipping cards like crazy.
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| Mark Gleason: | It’s going to be like a card game.
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| Jim Luisi: | I want this. I want this card set.
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| Mark Gleason: | I’m going to see your slippery slope and I’m going to raise you ad hoc.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | There you go, ad hominem.
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| Jim Luisi: | I love it. I love it.
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| Mark Gleason: | Actually, this is actually great for our seminar as well. We’re going to be doing an Apex Level to Power seminar. It’ll be great if people had a deck of cards of the fallacies and when we do a little skit, you choose one of which fallacy that was. You pull the card and then everybody flips it over at the end and you can see what you chose. We run through a bunch of skits. That would be a great exercise to help train people to be able to spot these fallacies.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, yeah. I love this conversation. I look forward to many more of these. There are so many more topics that I think we can cover.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, you’re never being invited back. This is it. Make the most of it.
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| Jim Luisi: | I figured that.
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| Mark Gleason: | I hope you found value here walking through some real world scenarios with author, Jim Luisi. We will be inviting him back to talk further about some of these concepts. The one ability we cannot give ourselves is credibility. You need to give that to us so please, if you found value here, like, subscribe, or post a review. You change your level, you change your life, you can change the world. Welcome to Apex Level to Power.
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| Automated: | This has been the Apex Level to Power Podcast with your host, Mark Gleason, the podcast where your opinion changes, but you still get to feel right. The one ability we cannot give ourselves is credibility. You have to give that to us. Please like, subscribe, or write a review. Change your level, change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to Apex Level to Power.
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