Resonance Episode: The Difference Between Noise and Signal

In this engaging conversation, Mike Ferrell, Steve Azar, and Randy Harrington explore the intricate relationship between noise and signal in the creative process, particularly in music. They discuss the pressures faced by songwriters, the importance of maintaining an authentic voice amidst external distractions, and the role of information theory in understanding creativity. The dialogue also delves into the concept of somatic intelligence, emphasizing the significance of intuition and emotional responses in decision-making and creativity. In this conversation, the speakers explore the complexities of noise in remote work environments, emphasizing the importance of discernment and the somatic experience in decision-making. They discuss the detrimental effects of remote work on mental health and the necessity of human connection for well-being. The dialogue highlights the significance of teamwork and synchronization in achieving success, as well as the role of effective communication in reducing noise and enhancing creativity.

 Takeaways

The difference between noise and signal is crucial in creativity.

Songwriters often face pressure from publishers and industry trends.

Authenticity in songwriting can be compromised by external pressures.

Creative processes can be influenced by personal experiences and emotions.

Information theory helps explain the relationship between noise and signal.

Entropy represents disorganization and uncertainty in information.

High entropy leads to more information but also more uncertainty.

Stability is essential for effective communication and creativity.

Somatic intelligence plays a key role in decision-making.

Listening to one's heart can guide creative choices.  Noise can be distractions from various sources, not just sound.

Discernment helps identify what is important amidst noise.

Our values shape our discernment process.

The body provides signals that can guide decision-making.

Remote work can lead to mental health issues due to lack of social interaction.

Human connection is vital for emotional well-being.

Great performances evoke strong feelings and experiences.

Effective teamwork requires synchronization and practice.

Good communication minimizes misunderstandings and noise.

Creativity thrives in environments where noise is managed.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Legends

01:41 Understanding Noise vs. Signal in Music

09:09 The Creative Process and Overcoming Noise

14:39 Information Theory: Signal and Noise Explained

21:09 Somatic Intelligence and the Heart's Role in Creativity

22:50 Navigating Noise in Remote Work

29:06 The Importance of Somatic Experience

32:21 The Impact of Remote Work on Mental Health

36:34 The Need for Human Connection

41:30 The Power of Team Synchronization

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is Resident, the podcast with leaders that unpacked the power of songs, salads, and strategy.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

We believe the great leadership begins with deep listening, not just to others, but to the still small voice within.

SPEAKER_03 0:21

It's not just about being a successful leader, it's about being socially aligned as well.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

In a world moving fast, resonance invites you to pause and reconnect with purpose, people, and possibilities.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Move down into some cool stories, celebrate with friends, and dig deep into the music too. A song has a way of staying with words and not alone.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

So whether you're leading a business, a team, or just trying to lead your own life with more meaning, this is Resonance. Resonance, Resonance. Welcome back to Resonance. I'm Mike Farrell, and I'm joined by the legendary singer-songwriter, musician, philanthropist, ace golfer, uh, you name it, he does it down in Mississippi. Steve Azar, and also the legendary ukulele player and uh brilliant strategist, Randy Harry. So Harrington.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

I'll take it. I'll take it.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

And I'm just a legend in my own mind, so there we go.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Hi, Farrell. Yes, there we go. Just straight wait a minute. Let me jump in right now. This is gonna be an unorganized intro, the worst we've ever had. But I can tell you, you're not gonna leave all that on me, uh, when, especially when my golf game is not what it used to be. Second of all, Mike Damon Got Farrell, you are the theologian of business and the Dr. Randy Harrington, the strategist beyond stratospheres. So let's go from there.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Ah, there we go. There we go. We needed a little songwriting meditation there.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

All right. Well, today we got a topic that is going to be right up Steve's alley. So uh the title of today's episode is The Difference Between Noise and Signal. And I know that Steve's got a lot of thoughts on that topic as far as what the difference is between noise and signal. I told him earlier I wanted to really name this the difference between music and noise, but I decided not to. But uh, Steve, I'm gonna tee you up and kick it right over to you, and let's talk about what the difference is between noise and signal.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Well, you've thrown some things on the board here, so I want to reflect on this. You're talking music industry and the creative side. You know, how trends, opinions, outside distractions or pressure sort of get in the way of the authentic voice and direction of maybe where that songwriter feels like they need to be at the time. Well, let me just give you an example. Songwriters in Nashville from their publishers, which is pressure, right? You're getting paid by your publisher. Song pluggers that go out and take your songs and play them for the artists and producers and record labels, you're getting pressure from them because they're getting pressures from the publisher and whoever, you know. So the the folks that own it, I mean, it's all it's sort of its own little stock market, right? And you have to answer to these things, and you've got a certain window of life. Maybe it's a two-year contract, three-year contract, where you gotta deliver enough to show promise or be recouped because they're playing paying you money. So you gotta listen. So every Monday morning, you'd get a it's called a pitch sheet. And this pitch sheet was telling you that Reba wants an up tempo that's a la like such and such. Uh Martino wants a ballad that reminds or a power ballad that reminds you of one of her biggest hits, da-da-da. And then so every artist in town is being pitched to all of these publishers, and they go in and they meet and all that, and they tell the songwriters, okay, eat your Captain Crunch or whatever your cereal of the day is, and go to your room and focus on that. Well, songwriters a lot of times have already been inspired before they walk in that room, and sometimes it's good to have some sort of direction. So that's kind of a cool thing. But a lot of times songwriters, the great ones, just like to write what they're feeling. And then they want the song or the song, they want the artist to come to them. I mean, not they're not going to come to them necessarily unless you're on fire. And then they just say, line up, you can have my next song. But that's rare. It's been done, and I know some songwriters has happened too Anthony Smith, Jeffrey Steele, Craig Wiseman, these guys, what's your next song? I'll take it. You mean that's where they were in the world of my my old producer, Rafe Van Hoy. So they were able to sort of live by their own rules because they were killing it, right? So anyway, it was always to me a unique thing to think because I was always writing for myself. So I was signed as an artist writer to write for myself. And I'd have folks come in or people from the same publishing company want to write with me. And so I was totally focused on that rather than this pitch sheet. Uh, all the songs that I've basically gotten cut in my life and recorded by other artists, they've heard walking down record label halls, they've heard this way, they heard it on my record, they heard it when I play live, when we did a show with them. There's all these ways, but I wasn't in that heavy, heavy game. Although I've gotten a lot more into it as I've played less, so it's not playing 150 dates anymore. I'm playing 75, 80 shows a year. So I got more time to focus on movie soundtracks and film and and all of that. But uh but I gotta tell you, it's a very unique thing. And it's almost like just you program the songwriter to do that. And then when the songwriter feels like they've done it, then you gotta play it for the song plugger who's gonna go out and sell it. There's no selling, guys, but who's gonna go out and sell the idea of this song, this artist recording it? And then there's the idea of the publisher going, like, wait a minute, you mean you should say this rather than this? Or you think that maybe these lines are wrong, or maybe this melody, and you have to go through all of that process. So your creative juices and everything that you thought was right sometimes gets beat on pretty good, and sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong. So you gotta sort of fight for it when you really feel like it's worth fighting for, like you really believe in it, and then you can say, I told you so, or the the publisher will go, I told you so because you made the change. Make sense? Sure, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

It's interesting to see that the whole creative process kind of is at a fork in the road there. You know, if you're and I imagine that there are songwriters that prefer to do that kind of they love that constraint of, oh, Reba wants a ballad.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Okay, now I've got a place to start, and I'm just not pulling out of not only that, Randy, they say a ballad and they'll say a description of some other song that it reminds I mean, some sometimes they'll go that far, which will I see what you're saying. Yes, a lot of songwriters come in and they're just so good at crafting a song that that becomes like they don't have to think before they get there. They just read the pitch sheet and they go in the room and let's go.

SPEAKER_03 7:35

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

You know, I I have a friend who's a uh contractor, and one of the things that he is very interesting about is he doesn't like the idea of like buying a house and flipping it or something like that. I mean, he could do that all day long, drunk and blindfolded. And I said, So why in the world wouldn't you just be doing that? And he said, because I would have to be doing work that is designed for everybody to like. In other words, if I'm building a rental or something like that or a flip, everything has to be neutral and boring and normal. He said, that's not the way I like to think. I want to go, I want to build something that's gonna last. And I want to build something that's amazing and that demonstrates you know the amazing materials or whatever it is. And it's not that it's ostentatious, it's not that it's over the top, but he brings a sense of my job, my work. When I'm building something, by God, I want it to be my work.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

He wants song of the year every time, not just it radio candy.

SPEAKER_03 8:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

There you go. I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

And he and happily he's able to do that, right? So he's good enough at what he does that he is able to uh he doesn't and he would see going and doing the house flipping thing as kind of a sellout, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Yeah. I get it.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

But somebody like me, that would be like an apex effort as a as a guy who, you know, I don't, homie don't drywall. I don't, I don't, you know, I I call the guy for that kind of stuff. You know, I'm not gonna be go ahead, Randy. No, no, no, go ahead. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So, you know, it's interesting because uh Steve, you talk about that aspect of all the pressure and all of that kind of stuff. I think another way to look at this is you know, when we talk about noise, there's a lot of things that are noise in our world today. You know, we get information overload, we get social media, we get pressure from this and pressure from that, and all of those kinds of things from a creative standpoint, and then I would actually argue that also from a leadership standpoint, how do you sort through all that noise to maintain that creative voice?

SPEAKER_01 9:58

That's a question for me. I tell you what, for me, look, you're starving for an idea because when you're in this situation where you're writing daily and you're not you're having to pick the pen up, whether the pen's ready or not, or has ink in it or not, you know, do do the side the math behind that and go a little deeper. But it's a lot easier for me when the I walk in and the pen jumps into my hand.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

It's going like, I'm ready for you to do this because all this stuff's been sort of stirring around, and it's been something that's been in my heart or on my mind for a while. And that is the way that I write best. Now I had there was one guy named Mark Allen Springer, wrote huge hits for Kenny Chesney, number ones, brought back Tanya Tucker's career with two sparrows and a hurricane. Wrote where corn don't grow. I mean, why corn don't grow just knocks me on my head because you might, you know, hard times are real. There's dusty fields wherever you go, but you might change your mind because the weeds are high where corn don't grow. And it's talking about him moving out of the farm and into the city. And I mean, that just knocks me out, right? And so anyway, Mark Allen was the one that told me, I want you to get out of the office. I want you to go drive, I want you to go build something, I want you to get away, do some things that you don't necessarily usually do, and I want the song to come to you. So he was a patient publisher with me. Everybody, you know, and then I had a very patient publisher, my first publisher, except I wasn't patient. So he was saying, okay, you're working your tail off, I see it, and things are good, you know, you're just you're writing every day and you're writing with three different people and you're da-da-da-da. And but I I felt like he was saying, slow a little down because let's get quality in there, you know, because quantity versus quality. But he was he he really he never put that down because he loved my work ethic. He could tell that I would just work 28 hours, I'd find an extra four hours a day if it meant me writing a third song a day. And he really appreciated that. Uh so it just depended on the situation and the pressure you put on yourself because you you start looking at a clock and you're going, like, okay, I got this much left of this deal. If I don't do something that's going to deliver, then what happens, right? You lose your deal, or you know, they three months later, they three months before your deal's up, they come and give you the good or bad news. And so I was fortunate enough each time in my publishing agreement to keep moving the ball forward until I didn't need a publishing deal anymore. So we're until you know I was out and having and make and doing it live, and it was my own thing, and and the live gigs were greater than the sum of everything else. So that was the deal. Now let me back up one second because I want to people always talk about this and they always ask the question. You don't sell a song, you can sell your publishing rights in the beginning. So say, you know, say, let's just give me somebody, say Dua Lupa, Lipa, right? She goes up and she goes, I want this song. All she does, she records it. If she's the first person to ever record it, she has to put it on hold. And then if she records it and it makes the record and she puts it out, then everybody starts to make money. If it's been recorded once and it's been released, then the world can record it. But they have to do the right things. They have to go in and, you know, and do all the right paperwork and you know, and let people know that they did all this stuff. And, you know, you get paid. You know, you'd like to have a song. You think about certain songs that have been recorded so many times. So you want it to be recorded many times, but the the song cannot be recorded by anyone unless permission given by the songwriter and or publisher to release it first. And then after that, it becomes a wild west.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

So, you know, you made a great comment there about getting away from things. And you guys know that I just got out of the car about half an hour ago, driving back from Spearfish Canyon, where I spent all day yesterday in beautiful Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota, getting out of the noise, getting away from it with a client of mine and doing a deep dive strategy day with them to really figure out some of the things that they needed to do to kind of move their business, their company to the next level. And it's really, it's really interesting because when you're able to get people out of the noise, then they can really focus on and think about deeply what it is they want to, what are the what do they want to do, what do they want to accomplish, what are the challenges they face, all of those kinds of things. And I think too many times in the work that I've done, and Randy, I know you're in the same boat, the work that I've done, they don't get out of the noise. And then they have a hard time separating the noise from the signal, what's really important, what really matters. Randy, talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 14:55

You bet. So these are trigger words for me, by the way, signal and noise. It's uh it's it takes me way on back. In fact, I I stumbled out after I uh saw what our topic was going to be today and uh hit the old Harrington bookshelf and found uh the lovely Stephen Littlejohn Theories of Human Communication. This was uh uh uh something I taught from for a long time at uh Chapel Hill and at a couple other places. And what we find out is that information theory is really what we're talking about here. And we talk about uh comes from Shannon and Weaver, goes back to the Bell labs back in like the 1940s and 50s, and they had this idea, the signal to noise ratio kind of thing. And what they tell us is that information is really associated with is a measure of entropy. Now, that sounds crazy, but hang on. I need help with that real quick. Time out. I know I'm I'm gonna explain it. Yeah, I'm gonna explain it. So entropy is the level of disorganization that occurs, it's randomness. Entropy is when things start going sideways or upside down, more or less when you are in a very uh when there's high levels of entropy, you can't predict what's gonna happen. You got no idea. Everything is up in the air. So on the other hand, if there's low levels of entropy, then there's no information. The more entropy there is, the more information there is. But the more information there is, the more uncertainty there is. So this is one of the things that is really interesting about this stuff. So think of it this way: would you rather play blackjack with one deck of cards or three deck of cards? One. One, right? Why? Because I'm counting cards. You're counting cards. I thought you were all the time, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

I'm gonna pay attention to how many aces and jacks and tens and whatever.

SPEAKER_03 16:48

Yeah, right. I mean, why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you try to understand that information? Because that's manageable. Now you get three decks of cards, or heaven forbid you go to Vegas and you have a couple drinks, then you're not good. You got then it's all every hand then is just completely randomized. You have way more potential, way more information, therefore, way more uncertainty, and the casino is gonna take you every time because of that. So, so this is the thing. So, what so then information then is a measure of entropy. And why is that important? Well, it's important because an organization, for example, really wants to be on stable ground. It really wants to be chunking along, it doesn't want to be doing this. And I know as a business owner that I've had a really good year, let's say this is particularly when I was doing a bunch of work for Microsoft, had a really good year, our company. But three months we made a whole bunch of money, five months we made next to nothing. So it it well, it's like this. It was like, yes, it was like great and then it's terrible, and then it's great, and then it's terrible, and that's a completely nauseating way to run a business. It's one of the reasons I had hair back in the day, and it was a lot more like yours, Azar. Not not really, but close. But anyway, I mean this is what this is what wears people out, is is so stability becomes a big important thing, and therefore, what we want is information that allows us to maintain a homeostasis or to be balanced, right? That's what we're really looking for. Okay, one more quick thought.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Yeah, come on.

SPEAKER_03 18:29

If you look at a high performance team, you look at a badass team, you look at a SEAL team, or you look at a somebody that's you know, a firefighter team or a paramedic team, yeah, paramedic team. Let's stay with so you know they swoop in and there's victims laying around and they're just they're on it, man. They're just ding, ding, ding, ding. And what you when you look at that high performing team, one of the characteristics is gonna be they don't communicate much at all, apparently. Because they've got the situation so dialed, they've controlled every conceivable variable so that they have reduced the entropy level to the to the biggest level they possibly could, where communication, that kind of communication is no longer needed. And so there's this this weird kind of kung fu, this this upside down thinking that happens in information theory. So now let's come all the way back to signal to noise, and then I'm gonna be done. Noise is what emerges as entropy rises in a situation. So noise is what's going to interfere with, it's gonna, it's gonna create a disconnect with anything. And so, for example, when you have to take your song out of the you you've just written it, it's a beautiful thing, you've played it six times, you feel pretty good about it, and then there's that first time you play it for somebody. Tell me about that, Azar. How does that feel when you do that? You've just it's brand new, it's like a little tiny baby, and you're gonna sit down, you got your guitar, and maybe you're playing it for Gwen. Would you play it for Gwen first?

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Is that something you would do? She usually hears me through the walls or somewhere, and she'll go, that's the same melody you did, such and such. Mix it up a little bit. I've heard that melody before. And I'll go, so I then I'll race to the piano where I it takes me away from that. So I do I'm a really good listener. I've gotten to the point right now where I do listen and and I love critique. And I think I've always been pretty good about that, but when I'm certain of something, I go with that. So and it's my gut's been right most of the time.

SPEAKER_03 20:34

Okay, so when you finish the song, you feel like this is it. I feel like this this is pretty much it. I that's it.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

The noise that I'm getting, yeah, the noise I'm I'm sorry, but the noise I'm getting from the outside to me, uh, if it's if it's gotta be a particular kind of noise, if that makes any sense. Sure. For me to to to move to move away from what's there. Uh and it I just feel like that there's a well a lot of times a noise.

SPEAKER_03 21:04

He's discerning the noise. There's a lot of noise he will let in.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

It can be very uncertain.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

Some noise he's like, I'm not paying attention to that.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Well, it when they're very uncertain, sometimes that means, you know, whatever. But I I it's hard to explain when I feel like I need to move on the noise.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Uh it's just uh you sort of sense it and feel it. Um, it's not a lot, it's not a lot of your noggin doing the work, guys. I'm telling you. It's more of your heart and how you feel. How do you feel about this? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 21:36

Ooh. Okay, so let's drop another big word. We're gonna drop the word somatic. Yeah, you are. So you're having a somatic response.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

I'm somatic at you. I'm somatic at you.

SPEAKER_03 21:50

Yeah, somatic, S O M A T I C. So, what somatic response is, is that your body is telling you something and not your brain. That's what you're just saying. It came from your heart.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

And And so this idea of a somatic intelligence is getting really hot in the business field today. There's a whole bunch of stuff that are talking about lived experience and all that kind of stuff where you don't know unless you feel it.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Yeah. Now, how do you feel without your brain? I mean, we can talk about all this we want, but I want to flip, I want to talk about that more, but I've got a question to ask you guys about noise. When I don't know if I can go there yet. Do I have permission to move there? Because I have three.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

I have a question.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Like the monk guy Farrell. I'm coming hard at him right now. So you talk about going to this secluded place and you're this beautiful place out of the elements of what they're used to. With the world going remote, and with folks not being around anybody, and everybody's at their computers, and they're not in this noisy environment. When does not enough noise hurt the situation?

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Well, first off, I would argue that there's as much noise, if not more noise, when they're remote. Because what's happening is it's all coming through their computer screen. You know, we're not just talking sound here. We're talking noise can be anything. Noise can be distractions, it can be emails coming in, it can be social media stuff coming in, it can be somebody talking in the background, you know, it can be the watch. Yeah. You know, that's that's the thing about it, is that's that's where understanding that just because you're in some place by yourself doesn't necessarily mean you're out of the noise. Now, in in the case that I had with this client yesterday, we purposely turned the noise off uh to really focus on the conversation between the two of us uh and looking at the data that uh you know we both pulled together to kind of think about where that where the company goes. But Randy, you you use the term, and you guys know that this is one of my favorite terms is discernment. And when noise is out there, discernment is critical because we have to be able to discern what's important, what we need to focus on, what's going to impact us, that's the signal, versus what we really don't need to deal with, what we need to try and turn off, the noise piece. And so discernment is a great way to do that because it allows us to first center ourselves from a standpoint of being in a place where we know that this is what we want to think about, that we want to gather information, we want to bounce ideas off people, we want to, we want to then weigh all of the all of the things that we have and then make sure that it fits. Again, talking about stuff that I've talked about before, make sure it fits within our higher purpose vision of what it is we're trying to do. And then we make the decision, you know? And so that discernment process, especially when there's a lot of noise, is vital because it really allows us to kind of sift through the noise and identify what the most important signal is, whether it's in our leadership, whether it's with our family, whether it's writing a song, whatever the case may be, but that discernment process is absolutely essential.

SPEAKER_03 25:13

And there's an implicit algorithm in your head, and it's associated with your values, right? Yeah. So I'm going to, that discernment is going to be an extension of what I care about. So if you do have a sense that family is it, family is what it's all about, and the family calls, then that signal is always gonna, that that noise is always going to be able to come in uh and be engaged. And if you don't, then you know, you can put it off. I know my my father was a military man, and I wondered about where, you know, where which what was important? I wasn't sure all the time because he had to go jump into that B-52 or go do that thing that he had to go do. And then you're a kid and you're going, gee whiz, what's more important here? Well, for people like police officers and doctors and and military people, those are the trade-offs that you you have to contend with. But so anyway, the point is that that discernment is related to your values, the values are shaped over time. We've talked about that in other episodes for sure. But discernment also implies your own sense of your locus of control. That is, so for example, Steve was able to write a song that was his creation, it was for him to perform, he has a very strong locus of control as an artist. Yeah, he's doing it, and so he can trust his own judgment because it's for him. It's like if I'm if he's cooking and he's gonna eat it, right? Right, I'm gonna make it the way I want to, by God.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

But if I'm cooking it and you guys are eating it, I'm definitely gonna ask. Yeah, you know, you want that, you need that reassurance. So if cooking, if we're talking about cooking, well, this is a good example, right? Uh because the three of us love to cook, and we're gonna want to know how each other one of us feels about that recipe. Sure. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it'll probably be a little competitive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very competitive. We could put on our own food festival, the three of us.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

I was gonna say, I could see a cook-off coming. Yeah. You know, the the whole one of the things that I would say is that the whole strategic planning process, whether you're a one-person business, an artist, uh, you know, a major corporation, whatever the case may be, the whole strategic planning process, one of the first things that should happen is to turn off the noise. It is to really sift through how are we going to do this in a place without all of the stuff coming at us? How are we going to do this strategic planning process? Because I think what happens a lot of times, and certainly I've seen this happen with my clients, is that they go into a strategic planning process and they got 900 things going on around them, and the strategic planning process is worthless because uh they can't turn off the noise, they can't get out of the out of the things that are going on. And so I think an effective strategic planning process really has to be a discernment. Uh and being in a place where you can do that process and do it well and understand that that's what the strategic plan ought to look like uh when you come, you know, when you come out the other end, um, and it's not impacted by uh all of the you know the noise that's going on around you.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Can we jump back into what you were talking about earlier when when I jumped to the noise part about being remote and all that, y'all set me straight. Yeah. Can we go back to what you were talking about, the feeling in that? I'd like to can we talk a little bit more about that? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_03 28:51

Yeah, yeah. It's it's very uh it's if there were trends, like trendy trends in organizational consulting, this would be one of them. And the idea that your neurology and your brain physiology and just your body uh is in control of a whole bunch of stuff. There are a whole bunch of decisions that are being made every second of every day that you have nothing to do with. You don't think about breathing. You can hold your breath for a little bit, but it's there's all kinds of things that are going on in the background. In fact, the vast majority of what it means to be alive is going on in the background. And then the other piece is you're not all, everything on you is not your DNA. There's like only about 60% of your mass, I'm getting this wrong, but it's this a whole bunch of other DNA in your body that has nothing to do with who you are, because we're a bunch of organisms in there. So this basic idea of somatic is that when your body is feeling or doing something, it's it's just you're you're sort of noticing it. It's inserting itself into your prefrontal cortex and saying, hey, buckaroo, it's time for you to get some sleep, or hey, did you realize you haven't eaten, or whatever it is. So it's rare, but sometimes it has to reach in there and tell you. And if you really dial in, and this is where the the kind of trendiness stuff is, if you really listen and start paying attention to the signals that your body is giving you, you can find this kind of discernment alignment. Your body will your body will go, yeah, that was the right decision to make. Or not so sure that was the right decision. Now, before we go too far down there, you got one part of your brain in the back there, Mr. Amygdala, who that's that's a threat. That's a threat. Can't go over there, don't put that up. I got don't whatever you do, don't get off that. So that's that's all that thing is doing. Prefrontal cortex is up there going, I don't think it's that bad. I don't know. And so your brain is fighting all the time. But when you can listen to your body, it's it's powerful. And it's so powerful that that we're understanding from a neurological level that your gut and your heart and your brain are all active in this dynamic dance that shows up being what we would call a decision or a feeling or an idea. So this idea of felt experience is a powerful thing. When you feel it, you achieve something. And this is what great service happened. When you have a great service experience, you feel it. It's like, wow, that was amazing. A great performance. Wow, you feel it in your guts. You can't even put your finger on what it is. That's somatic, that's real power. And in a world where there's so much BS in the atmosphere, when you feel it directly, then you finally have an empirical base. Oh, that was real.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Yeah, and I and I I think the other piece kind of the other piece of your question there, Steve, about the remote versus you know, in in person, and this certainly ties right into what Randy was just talking about. We're social animals. We need to be around people. This idea that I can sit behind a computer screen and get that same feeling, that same emotion that Randy's talking about eight hours a day, you know, 350 days a year, whatever it is, you know, it's virtually impossible. And I think what people, and especially what psychologists and sociologists and some of those folks that study this stuff are seeing now is they're seeing that this remote work is not healthy. But unfortunately, because we came out of COVID and started it all, everybody, especially the the you know, the younger generation, is saying, Oh, well, yeah, this is cool. I just get to sit around and look at my computer all day. And but you see so many instances of mental health, uh, you see so many instances of depression, of anxiety. I think that there are numerous studies out there that have been that have proven that this remote work is not such a great idea. And I think Randy hits it right on the head. You can't get to that feeling, that somatic approach that Randy's talking about when you're not intercommunicating with others.

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Isn't it interesting that we're aware of mental anxiety and illness and the stress that you know the neck this generation has and all that, and we're doing things that is not helping it. It's moving it further away from the fix. And so what are we doing? Like, what are we doing? Right. If that we're social animals and we need that, I mean, I know you can go get that later, but there's something about, look, there's something about being on stage with other people. I can do solo acts, I can work with my band, and I'm gonna tell you 99 times out of a hundred, I just love it with my band. I it's just more of what it's something about the camaraderie and the feeling of sharing it with somebody. Now, there's a I've had plenty of magical solo nights, you know, just a piano, a couple guitars, whatever on stage. Just with the audience. I mean, that's just more of a it's been very wonderful, but to do that every night compared to the other with with people and with guys, guys you really, really, really love. Also that part of it, aspect of it, you've been with a very, very long time. How good can we be tonight? You know what I mean? Like we're you know, and so that is and then a crowd of people, you know. I'm just saying that that is something that it's a must for me to survive. So what are we doing?

SPEAKER_03 34:26

It's feeding your brain, is giving you all kinds of cocktails when that's happening. Yeah, oh yeah, dopamine and everything is flooding through your brain, and it's going, yeah, baby, yeah, because this is how humanity has developed over the millennia is by being together and working together. Sure. It's it's what we do that the rest of the animal kingdom struggles with, or they do it differently, but you get my point.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

And I and and I think think back to our childhood. You know, I mean, I'm guessing we were all free-range kids. We were on our bikes, we were going everywhere, we were, you know, we were all over the neighborhood, we were playing with our buddies, we were doing all this kind of stuff. You look at some of these kids now, they're on a screen all the time. You know, how many times have you been in a restaurant lately where you've seen a family of four sitting there and there's no conversation going whatsoever? Mom and dad are on their phones, the two kids have tablets, and they don't even look at each other. And and you wonder why some of those things are some of those things are happening. This is a this is a societal issue, and it certainly feeds right into a business issue because these are the types of people that we're that the leaders are having to hire and and figure out how to how to work with.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Right. There's no way. And so that's definitely that nurturing process right there, is absolutely gonna affect them and everything that they do tomorrow. Everything. That's right. Yeah. I mean, you see that. Listen, if you go to a restaurant and you don't see most of the people doing that, then you go you wonder where the heck you are. You are you 20 years, 30 years ago? Like what am I dated back into this restaurant? You know, is this am I back in set back in time, back in the future? But you know, it's really interesting, guys, where we are, and talking about the noise that's in front of you and that people are using in their daily, not just daily, momentarily, every minute they spend, how much time are they doing this and without communicating with actual folks?

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Right. I mean, like and when you've got all that noise, how do you figure out what's important and what's not? That's that's the challenge, I think. That's the challenge. And as we see these people come to work in the in in the working world, you know, they aren't able to make decisions based on human interaction because they haven't had any. You know, they've got to they've got to make decisions based on what they've looked at on a screen. And it's like this is a this is a huge challenge for leaders in every single industry because we've got to figure out how to get them back in the office, how to retrain them on how to be social animals, uh, and understand that that's how teams function. And when teams are social animals, they function effectively, right, Randy?

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Well, well, Randy, I want to say before you answer that, I want to just back up, and you this will be a dual thing for what Mike just said. You brought up the Navy SEALs and the the they don't think about it, right? Great football, great sports teams, great sports teams, great bands, great, you know, you go in the time when you're practicing and you're learning things. Right. You know, this is hard learning how to pull and during this play. I mean, you you think about every little nuance that each person has to get. It's like being synchronized swimming. Everybody. And so when that happens and nobody's thinking about it and they're just doing it, and everybody does it right, then it becomes a work of art. And then you become a national champion or Super Bowl champion, or the your work, your band becomes the greatest band live, or whatever, in a workplace, you're on top of the world, your sales are out the charts, and you're being successful. I get that.

SPEAKER_03 38:09

So if you look into the world of quantum consciousness, what they will tell you, Azar, is it seems like we don't know this for sure. But when that happens, it isn't just like, oh, we're all doing the same thing. We're all doing this the same thing. I mean, it's not like yes, it's happening individually in your own head, but we're actually a part of a wave function where we are making interdependent oscillations of energy and adaptation that allow for that synchronization. And we're gonna do an episode at some point on this idea of rhythm and how that sense of aligned rhythm is one of the places where you get that synchronicity. And there's some other big fancy words around it, consubstantiality and other things like that. But the at the end of the day, what I'm telling you is this is back to that somatic thing. This is bigger than just you going, we were all together in that. No, you were all together in that. There was there was there was some kind of unity of purpose, and that's when you have that sense at a concert or wherever, where it was like, man, you had to be there. You just can't even, I can't even describe it because there was no way to experience it unless you were at that show.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

And I and I think that I think that also goes to the fact that you have practiced it, you have rehearsed it, it has become part of what you do. You've figured out how to turn off the noise. But think about what happens when one person on that team gets distracted, you know. Oh, it's yeah. Somebody fumbles a football, somebody picks off interception, you know, somebody throws the ball into the stands, whatever the case may be, that you know, that one distraction by the team, by one person on that team can lead to disastrous results. And so the idea that that rehearsal, that that practice, that that, you know, working together to create that wave, as Randy said, is so vital because it allows you to shut off the distractions and have utmost focus on exactly what it is you're trying to do.

SPEAKER_03 40:22

There's a there's a guy that I'm working with right now on a project, and and uh he's an interesting guy, very smart guy. And one of the things I love about working with him is I'll send him some bunch of junk for him to review, and about 15 or 20 minutes will go by, and then he'll send me back a text that says five by five or five X5. And that is a military term. Five five by five means I'm reading both the signal and the the readability of it. I I'm I'm hearing it and I'm getting it, is basically what he's saying. I've got five, I've maxed out there, and I in terms of the signal is fine. And so theoretically, he could send me one that was five by one. Yeah, you send it to me, but I got no idea what that meant, right? But it's very simple, five by five, and so he's not adding noise, but he's actually reducing noise for me. It's like, oh, okay, he got it, and he understands why I sent it to him. And so those three characters on my screen, and it made me relax for the next five hours because I know oh, I don't have to overthink that.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_03 41:32

Communication reduces communication.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's a good way to bring us home, Randy.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

I like that. Take us, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:39

That's what I do.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

I'm not taking this one home.

SPEAKER_03 41:42

Well, okay, I'll give it a I'll give it a crack here. So, what we talked about was signal and noise. And we started off with the terms just as they sound in nature. Just, yeah, there's signal and noise, and boy, when the noise is loud, you can't concentrate on the signal. We also talked about it though from the point of view of creativity and artistic production, and the idea that when you're producing something that's truly unique and a gift to the world, that's a very different thing when it's coming from the heart there, as opposed to blah blah wants a song about blah blah. Can you do that? And I would imagine for cooking, it's very much the same thing. Cecilia is gonna go and she wants to make some beautiful, amazing thing, and that's very different than the than the client saying, Yes, well, I want I want uh lobster bisque, you figure out how to make it fancy. Right. Okay, you know, that's that's gonna be a whole different kind of thing. Uh we talked a bit about information theory and signal to noise there, and and uh Shannon and Weaver, if you want to go look it up. It's there's amazing stuff in the and the emergence of communication as a system. All of that's there, amazing stuff. And then finally, we started talking about this idea of somatic or the experience of your body in that signal to noise ratio that you're you have a no, there's a whole nother player. It's just not me, Mike, and Steve talking, it's all of our biological bodies also saying, hey, you know, you've been on the road for the last seven hours, for God's sake. Right? You got no sleep last night. All right, Steve, wrap it up.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

You can find us at resonanceleader.com. You can bring us in live for a conference. It'll move you and move the needle, I can tell you. Nice something.

SPEAKER_03 43:25

It's a good tackle. It'll move something.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Check us out everywhere you stream and pod. We are rolling down the the uh the information highway. We're having a lot of fun collaborating on this podcast. So thank you guys for tuning in. Mike the Monk Guy Farrell, on behalf of Randy Harrington the Doctor. I'm Steve Azar. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to Resonance. Find us at resonance leader dot com.