As your company’s growth accelerates, the heat turns up and teams break down. It gets harder to work together when things get tough. My next guests revealed surprisingly simple skills required to get your team to the top fast.

Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by authors David Greenspan and Justin Follin. We’re here to talk about their new book called, Be a Better Team by Friday: A Playbook for High-Performance Business Leaders. So let’s look through it.

Hello friends and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with my two friends, Justin and David, who have just launched an amazing book actually. It’s all about getting your people, your team better by our favorite day of the week, by Friday. I call it Floral Friday but these guys are going to make your team that much more efficient and in so many incredible ways. Justin and David, thank you for joining me today on the show.

Justin Follin: Thanks for having us, Hussein.

David Butlein Greenspan: Yeah, thank you.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: This is really exciting for me because, as I said earlier, I get to have the opportunity of reading so many different types of books, and yours just kind of stuck out to me today. I was reading a little bit last night just trying to craft the questions. I think what I came up with, you guys will enjoy. I really love this idea of choosing your mindset and practice and I want to get into that here in a moment.

But first, I want to introduce to our audience. Justin, we’ll start with you. If you could give us a little bit of your personal background, perhaps where you grew up, maybe someone or an event that inspired you to be on the path that you’re on today.

Justin Follin: Yeah, definitely. Well, my name’s Justin Follin. I’m the CEO of BLUECASE and author of this book. I was born and raised in Falls Church, Virginia. I moved to Texas probably almost 20 years ago. I live in Austin. I think a relevant story, it’s one that I tell in the book about how I got into this.

I was a graduate from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and I was not totally sure what I was doing with my life at this point. It was right after I graduated, I was working in the banquet hall at the alumni center at the university and I had the chance to be a server for the UNC basketball team the night before their very first game.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh wow.

Justin Follin: And if you’re familiar with the University of North Carolina, the basketball is—

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Religion.

Justin Follin: Pretty much, yeah. It’s religion. There’s two things that are important in North Carolina, religion and basketball.

David Butlein Greenspan: And basketball, right, right, and you mush the two, yeah.

Justin Follin: Uh-huh. So I had the chance to do this and now, this is the year that the coach, Roy Williams, had just come over from the University of Kansas to coach the team. So the year that I was at Carolina, it was the losing-est team in the history of the school and they brought in Roy Williams to take that team over. He took the same five guys that were on that team and in a matter of two years, they were national champions.

And that night, when I was serving them on that very first night before their very first game under Coach Roy, I was standing in the back of the room and I was getting, kind of, secondhand get coached, hearing him talk and inspire the team. He was talking to them as if it was like he was talking to every single one of them personally. I was standing at the back of the room and I was getting fired up. You know, I was ready to win the championship.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that.

Justin Follin: That really stuck with me and I thought about that. Over the course of my career, I’ve really been interested in knowing what is that, that somebody has to be able to coach such high performance? I saw it, I experienced it, I felt it, and then the results were there. So I pretty much got into the field of high-performance psychology and became a coach and I’m doing what we do now and wrote this book after many years of learning.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s fantastic. What a cool story. I love hearing stuff like that, man. You never know when in life those moments hit you and they just, like you said, they fire you up. They get you intrigued about the human experience in such a unique way. That’s amazing. What about you, David?

David Butlein Greenspan: Let’s see. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I also live in Austin, Texas right now. As a kid, something that really inspired me from the age of five was actually Superman. Back then, we had Underoos, which were like pajamas that looked like Superman. I had a cape. I actually practiced flying, I broke my leg once doing it but I was really interested from a young age in Superman. I also, growing up, was very nerdy. I had really thick glasses, braces, I didn’t know how to dress.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: So you were Clark Kent? You just weren’t Superman yet.

David Butlein Greenspan: What’s that? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: You were Clark Kent.

David Butlein Greenspan: That’s right. That’s right, yeah, actually that’s perfect. I hadn’t thought about that. I was interested from a young age in extraordinary performers and that inspired me to go on and get my doctorate in the field of high-performance psychology, which looks at why do certain teams and individuals perform at exceptional levels even in suboptimal circumstances and how do we apply those behaviors, mindsets, and practices.

So that’s part of what we have really shared because people are often asking, “Well, what are some of the basics? How do we do that?” That’s part of the reason why we wrote this book, so now people can just read the book.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful. I know it’s taken you guys some time to bring these things together. Years and years of wisdom and knowledge and experiences, it takes time to put together a book that highlights all those components and I think you all did a good job, but what brought you two together? How did you all start working together? When did you all meet?

Justin Follin: Well, David and I have been friends for many, many years prior to working together and over the years, we kind of talked about what might be possible if we did do some work together. There was a very specific time in our friendship when we were at Ojo Caliente in New Mexico, which is a really beautiful hot springs resort place where you just kind of soak in hot springs and hang out, talk to people who are in the pools.

We were just sitting there and we were talking and there’s something about, for us, about being in that spot. It’s a real power spot for us and we just kind of get into the vibe. We were just talking and just asking the question, “Okay if anything were possible, what would we do together? How would we bring this sort of experience that we have when we’re together, which is that we want to make people better, we want to make the world a better place. And for some reason, when we’re together, we’re even more excited and we’re amped up so there’s something we have here. What might it look like if we did something together?”

And at the time, David had recently founded BLUECASE and I was working in another job and I just thought we were having a conversation of just kind of dreaming. And then one thing led to another, and one year later, maybe a little less than one year later, we were business partners and we were taking BLUECASE from where it was to really create a big firm. We’re now working with clients that I think we never would have been able to work on together if we hadn’t taken those first steps in those early years.

Results of Choosing Your Mindset

Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s amazing. What a cool story. Well, I’m glad you two have come together to work on something this powerful but I really want to talk about how you sort of define this idea of successfully implementing the “choose your mindset” practice. That was