Thoughts Unlocked – I Wish I Could Be More Like Them

* Website

Timestamps:
01:13 – Introduction to the book and its purpose
02:57 – The common phrase ‘I wish I could be more like them’
05:59 – The story of Chrissy, the nurse, and her work style
08:27 – The two types of thinkers: structured and adaptive
11:44 – The concept of misdiagnosis and labels in the workplace
13:57 – The story of the director and her team
17:47 – The importance of understanding your default operating system

Skot Waldron (00:05)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome to another episode of Thoughts Unlocked. This is going to be a little bit different. I’m not going to go on my typical rant that I usually do. Well, that I do sometimes. I don’t rant all the time, y’all. I just do it sometimes. But today I want to read you a very, very first rough draft of the first chapter of my new book that I’m working on. It’s not out yet. It might not be out this year. This is, you know, September of 2026. It’ll definitely not be out this year, y’all. Definitely not be out. I just realized it’s September. Goodness gracious.

So, I want to read this first chapter.

Number 1, it helps me get out there. It helps you understand a little bit of what I’m thinking about.

Number 2, it helps hold me accountable for doing it and getting it done and continuing to share the content. And,

Number 3, I need to start promoting this thing. I really do.

So, that’s what part of this is going to be about. And the book is it right now, the working title is Misdiagnosed, and it’s all about this idea of how we mislabel, misdiagnose certain behavior that we see. And we tell ourselves stories about these things that may or may not be true, but these stories start to affect how we interact with each other.

So let me go ahead and read the first chapter to you. And I want to; I’d love some feedback. This is a rough draft. Probably not going to stick to this, probably change things. It may not even be chapter one by the time all the editors get done with it but take a stab at it anyway. All right, here we go.

During coaching sessions with my clients, I’ve heard a lot of different emotions. And the common ones seem to be frustration, annoyance, hopelessness. You know, the ones you’ve probably felt at some point in your career. But there’s one phrase, honestly, y’all, that I hear more often than I’d like to. And that is, “I wish I could be more like them.” And it usually sneaks up, honest near the end of a session after reviewing their personality profile and their way of working and their way of adjusting and thinking and their way of showing up.

We walk through how they make decisions, how they process information, how they communicate in different environments. But somewhere in that conversation, when we start discussing how they work and how they solve problems or tackle projects, they get really quiet. Then comes the small, kind of uncomfortable laugh. And they look like it’s equal parts self-awareness and embarrassment. And then the phrase, “I wish I could be more like them.”

They’re almost always talking about someone specific that they’ve worked with or secretly admired, a colleague, a boss, that person who seems to move through work like a machine on a schedule. It’s some kind of foreign superpower they’ve seen and tried to implement in their lives many times. They’ve tried to start earlier, finish sooner, and give everyone a clear roadmap of where we’re going in every step along the way. They stay late, white knuckling. Days can be exhausting. They just want some peace and focus, you know, like “those other people.”

That person sitting across from me, the one confessing that little secret, as if they’ve been dreaming of it their whole life, because maybe they have, is usually not struggling as much as they think they are. As a matter of fact, they’re usually pretty dang good at what they do. Creative, perceptive, adaptive, open, the kind of thinking who sees things others don’t, or who can pivot when things go awry. But they have decided somewhere along the way or have been told over and over again by somebody else that the way they are wired is something they need to fix, that the burden is on them to find a fit into the system and that they have been designed, that has been designed for the acceptable way of working. That their particular way of working is actually a personal flaw. And my heart hurts for them. They think they’re broken, y’all. They think they’re broken. But they’re not broken at all. But they just can’t see it.

I had a conversation with my wife not too long ago, and she’s a nurse, and a very good one. I might be biased. I mean, I’ve never been nursed by her, but I don’t know. She’s won awards. She’s received numerous compliments from her patients. She’s had letters written about her to her boss complimenting her and even cried with patients and their families. Last week, one of her colleagues told her that if she were in the hospital, she’d want Chrissy to take care of her because she knows she’d be cared for.

And during that conversation, she seemed down and a bit defeated. She told me her story about the other nurses that she believes the hospital loves, the ones who leave on time, chart efficiently, and move through their shift efficiently and predictably, although healthcare is anything but that. It seems the system was built for them, and they were built for the system. She told me she gets bogged down caring for her patients. She’s been told she cares too much and that she’s too accommodating. She loses track of steps in the process because her brain doesn’t naturally move in a straight line. She can’t seem to make herself work the way they do. She usually walks alone to her car at night because everyone else has already done charting. And she hasn’t quite nailed down how to efficiently do that while caring for her patients the way she feels they should be cared for.

That first group of nurses, they get praised. They’re seen as profitable. My wife gets called in the office about working extra hours, despite the letters and the other things that she’s getting. Obviously, I was a little bit hurt and annoyed. This is the type of culture and mentality I’ve been trying to fight with my own clients. And I told her this. Sure, those nurses are impressive when everything is running smoothly. And when we need and we need those types of nerfs nurses to create some stability, predictability. But asking them to improvise when something goes wrong and there’s no protocol in place when a patient or their family needs more than medicine, they may struggle just the same as you do. And she looked at me, had a little bit of an aha moment, realizing those were the environments that she actually thrives in. The unexpected doesn’t rattle her. The personal deep, heartfelt conversations that keep her from charting are what activate her.

And later in this book, I’m going to talk about the two types of thinkers that exist. But for now, here’s the quick version. Some people are wired to move in a straight line. Step, milestone, task, check, done. They’re really good at creating structure. They’re predictable and they like operating in predictable environments. And they’re also really good at producing visible progress early. They seem very organized. They’re inboxes managed, and they probably meal prep on Sundays.

People look at them with admiration and wonder how they get it all done. They secretly love that type of praise. It’s validating for them. Everything looks like it’s under control because for them, it usually is. They’re what I call your structured thinkers.

The other type of person that’s walking around this world of ours loves to explore. They color outside of the lines and move around the edges of a problem before they actually really discover the center of it. Their best work often happens in bursts that from the outside look like it came out of nowhere. Because from the outside looking in, it did. They incubate, they process often in silence, observe, research, and continue producing that invisible work.

These are what I call the adaptive thinkers. I use these two categories to describe them. I describe a pattern I have observed that draws on several established psychological differences. Neither one is better, although, if you ask an adaptive thinker about the guilt and shame they feel from the stress they feel in their lives, or the stress they add to others, they will say that being an adaptive thinker can be a burden. What I want everyone to understand is they are just different operating systems running on different logic. It’s how their brain works. It’s their default. Sure, they can learn to operate differently, but that underlying preference tends to be very stable. The goal is to understand your default thinking, recognize when it serves you, and learn when you need to be just a little bit uncomfortable and make the leap to the other side.

Here’s the problem. Most workplaces were designed by and for the structured thinkers. We’ve seen it in our workplaces that early movement gets rewarded. Visible progress gets praised. The adaptive thinker has spent years forcing themselves to be more like the structured thinkers. But they weren’t built to think like that all the time.

In my research, 76% of working professionals said they felt judged for their pace at work. I’m going to read that again. I don’t have it in my book again, but I’m going to read it again. 76% of working professionals said they felt judged for their pace at work. I didn’t say their output, I said their pace. It’s not about the quality of their deliverable. They’ve internalized the gap between how they work and how others are expected, have expected them to work as a personal failure. They beat themselves up for pushing deadlines, apologize for the pressure they put on everybody, and finally sit in coaching sessions with me saying things like, “I wish I was more like them.”

The reason that phrase hits me so hard every time is this. You are constantly reaching for something you were never designed to be. Which means you are never, which means, sorry, let me back that up. Gosh, I’m going to, this is a punchy one. I want to read this straight to you. You are constantly reaching for something you were never designed to be, which means you are always behind on becoming what you already are. That’s good line. I love that I wrote you are constantly reaching for something you were never designed to be, which means you are always behind on becoming what you already are.

Tendencies run deep. The research on personality is complicated and constantly debated. But what is consistent is that your wiring, the way you naturally process life and move through the world, stabilizes over time and doesn’t tend to shift. My daughter has been wired as an adaptive thinker since the day she was born. She’s not going to become someone who color codes and a project plan for the strategic reason of timelines and calls it a good time. She will color that project plan to give it some life, to direct attention, to capture a story, especially if it involves her favorite art markers that cost more than markers should. I don’t see this as a limitation. This is just who she is. And who she is has its own extraordinary value. I would never look at her and tell her she needs to be somebody else.

I want people to stop apologizing for being themselves and to build an environment that actually harnesses the gifts they bring. Now, this is not permission for adaptive thinkers to stress everyone out on every project because they don’t communicate or use their incubation time as an excuse not to do the work required. We’ll talk more about that later in the book. This book is not just about sympathy for the adaptive thinker or defense for the people who have been labeled procrastinator, disorganized, or hard to manage. Honestly, I’ve sat across from different clients the same week, saying something almost identical, but from the perspective of the structured thinker.

I have a person I was working with. She’s a director of a mid-sized company. She has been in leadership roles for 16 years. She’s smart, competent, and completely exhausted. Halfway through our session, when we had been talking about her team, she said something quietly with a hopeless tone. I just wish they would update me on their own, so I didn’t have to be the one checking in all the time. That was it. She said the way people say things when they’ve been trying to figure out things for a while.

She had a senior associate who kept turning in work that was almost right, but not quite. There was a designer on her team who would go dark for three days, always making people wait for when she was ready to present things. Then the project manager, who was absolutely brilliant, but seemed to think deadlines were merely suggestions. She really did love the people on her team. This this client of mine. They were a great culture fit. They loved the mission of the company. They fought for each other. My client would even defend them in meetings with her boss, and when it came to review time, would fight for their raises. But every week, she was up at night, midnight, up till midnight, fixing mistakes, covering for them, and lying awake, wondering if the pitch was going to be what they had decided, or if the designer was going to quote unquote get creative with it. So, what did she do? She started checking in more often.

Because she couldn’t fall asleep at night without knowing where things were. She started asking for interim drafts because she wanted control of the output more. She started popping in more often, asking if she could help. You may think this all sounds reasonable, and you’d be right unless you understood the motivation behind it all. She had been surprised way too many times. She wanted control of the team, the project, of everything. Her team started calling her a, you know the word, y’all, micromanager. The senior associate had told her to her face gently but clearly, she actually cried in our meeting. Cause that’s not what she wanted. Her statement to me, “so I didn’t have to be the one checking in all the time.” That’s the sentence, that’s the same sentence as “I wish I could be more like them.” It’s the same problem from the other side of the table. The client in this earliest session was reaching for a way of working she wasn’t built for and couldn’t sustain.

The director from this last example was reaching for a way to trust her people that wouldn’t cost her job. Both of them were being asked or forced to be someone they were not. Both of them were being misdiagnosed by people who weren’t curious or generous enough to see what was really going on. The adaptive thinkers get called procrastinator, uncommitted, unmotivated. The structure thinker gets called controlling, difficult, or a micromanager. These labels don’t just come out of people’s mouths. They watch, observe, they quietly finish the story in their head. They’ve been writing a story for a long time. Then the story stuck. You’ve been living inside that story, fighting it, or shrinking since you’ve experienced their behavior towards you. This book is about both sides of the equation.

If you pick this book up because you were tired of being called a procrastinator, keep reading. Sometime someone has potentially mislabeled you. Or maybe you’ve been mislabeled yourself for years, been mislabeling yourself. I’m sorry, maybe you’ve been mislabeling yourself for years. This book will help you feel seen, recognized for the real person you are.

If you pick this book up because you’re tired of being called a micromanager, this book is also for you. You too have been mislabeled potentially. And the reasons you keep reaching for control may not be what people think. These labels are a misdiagnosis.

By the end of this journey together, I want you to feel seen for how you actually work, not for how someone else expects you to work. That part is for you. That’s probably why you picked it up in the first place. Then what I want you to turn around and extend that same curiosity and generosity to the people you have been quietly mislabeling. And that might be the harder part. That is where this book creates a bigger impact. You picked it up for yourself. That’s where it should start. Just don’t be surprised when it ends up somewhere else entirely.

Alright y’all, that’s chapter one. Chapter one. There’s some things in there I heard that I’m going to go back and revise. I heard it, y’all. But I love this journey with you. And I would love your feedback. Do you like this? Do you want me to read these stories to you? Some of these chapters. Is it too long? Are you like Skot, get on with it, you know? I would love to know that too. But seriously, y’all, I’m grateful for the opportunity I have to write this. I’m grateful for the insights I’ve had. I’m grateful for my clients that come to me and talk to me about these things. They’re giving me a lot of perspective about life, about my family, about myself, and things that I think will help me and things that hurt my heart. I think there’s an injustice in the world, and I think that we don’t give enough each other enough permission to be who we were designed to be. And I want us to work on that just a little bit more.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.