The Currency of Time | John Coyle

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Reframing Leadership Through the Science of Time

What if leaders could reshape time itself? This episode explores how moments, flow state, and storytelling can expand impact—and why memories, not minutes, are the true currency of leadership.

What if time wasn’t fixed, but something you could stretch, compress, and reframe?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, host Bill Sherman sits down with John Coyle—Olympian, design thinking expert, and author of “Design for Strengths”. John has spent his life chasing the meaning of time, from hundredths of a second on the ice to decades in thought leadership. His work asks us to reconsider not just how much time we have, but how we experience it.

John shares how fleeting moments can reset the trajectory of our lives—an insight that came from his Olympic journey where fractions of a second separate gold from “first loser”. He explains the Greek distinction between Chronos (clock time) and Kairos (human, transformative time) and why organizations and leaders need to design for the moments that truly matter.

We explore John’s unique career path—from competing alongside Lance Armstrong and working with Enron to translating neuroscience and psychology into practical lessons on leadership, innovation, and resilience. Along the way, he reveals how flow state, storytelling, and emotional engagement can make time slow down and make ideas stick.

You’ll also hear John’s most powerful Kairos moment—the story of a silver medal, a boy who became an Olympian, and how one act of kindness changed two lives forever. It’s a reminder that you never know when a small choice can alter someone’s future.

This conversation challenges leaders to rethink their relationship with time, memory, and meaning. It’s not about adding years to your life—it’s about adding more life to your years.

Three Key Takeaways

• Moments reset the future. Leadership pivots often come from brief Kairos moments that redefine direction more than years of steady effort.
• Memories are the currency of time. Flow states, risk, and storytelling create lasting memories that make life feel longer and leadership more impactful.
• Design for strengths, not weaknesses. Leaders unlock innovation and resilience when they focus on amplifying strengths instead of patching flaws.

If you found value in today’s conversation about designing time, flow, and moments that move you forward, you’ll want to listen to Maximizing the Flow of Ideas for Your Organization. The episode digs into how leaders generate more ideas over time—and why volume, variety, and experimentation are just as important as insight or vision. Both episodes ask a powerful question: how do you create an environment where your best ideas don’t just happen—but compound?

In short, if you want tools for turning strengths into breakthroughs, and moments into momentum—this is your next listen. It’ll help you scale creativity, lead from possibility, and expand what “thought leadership” can mean across your team or organization.

Transcript

Bill Sherman Good thought leadership plays with the audience’s sense of time. It causes them to pause. Wait, what did you say? Tell me more. Thought leadership breaks the trance of everyday life and encourages people to think and consider. But how does that work happen? Today I speak with John Coyle, who as part of the 1994 U.S. Winter Olympic team won the silver medal in speed skating relay. His journey has been a lifelong exploration of time and how we construct it. John is the CEO of Speaking Design Thinking. And in today’s conversation, we explore moments of setback, self-doubt, reflection, and his research journey. We also talk about how he uses the perception of time to impact his audience’s experience. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, John. Thank you, Doug. I’m glad to be here. You have developed an interest in time. How’d that come about?

John Coyle There’s a sort of made-up word called chronoception, which I’ve been trying to peddle out there. But this isn’t, you know, horology, which is a study of watches or timepieces. And chrono-ception as the perception of time? Yeah, the study of the perception time. Okay. You know, it really came from my athletic career. You know for 15 years, about 15 years I spent all of my time, most of my available time. Try and court more meters, more miles, more pedal strokes, more skate strokes into the same amount of time in order to, you know, achieve some sort of ephemeral rewards in that world. And, and you did short track ice skating or backtrick? Short track speed skating, the Olympics, and also I did velodrome cycling as well.

Bill Sherman Okay, so you were on the bike as well as on skates. Yes, but only turning left. Okay, yeah. And as I think about that, both of those are measured in the hundreds, if not the thousands of seconds.

John Coyle Hundreds of seconds determined first from second from third and and the the inside that athletes all know is that you know still Seinfeld joke gold silver bronze never heard you I was moving my neck backwards with each little notch true right like nobody’s ever heard of the fourth place person and so hundreds of seconds determine a reset of the trajectory of your career based on how a particular race because the important once goes, and the inset I had as a retired from sport at age 30 was, Oh, that’s true in real life. How so that a lot of the things that determine our alternate futures tend to happen in moments. There may be weeks, months, years going into them, but you said yes, or you didn’t, you took the promotion across town or didn’t you took the job or you didn’t. You asked her out or you. She said, I love you. Or you didn, you know, all of these things tend to happen in moment and they reset your trajectory. And when those trajectory setting things happen, while the alternate futures are fundamentally different and the Greeks knew this 2000 years ago, they had more work, time is the most common word in English language bill. We overuse it. The Greeks had two words, kairos and kranos. Kranos being clock time, the way we tend to use it, planes, trains, and automobiles. But kairous being the human time, the way and their etymology, the deeper meaning is when everything happens at once and the trajectory is reset, which I just love that term.

Bill Sherman So let’s jump in a time machine. If you will, I want to go all the way back to you as you’re on your athletic track towards the Olympics. And you were self-coached to begin with, right? I was well, talk a little bit about that journey and your experience of time and how that changed.

John Coyle Sure. Uh, you know, I was, I was raised in a, in Detroit area. So there was good cycling and speed skating clubs there. And, you know, when I finally, uh, left the club and joined the Olympic team, having been 12th place in the world the year before with no coaching, no training program, I was pretty sure I was going to go from 12 to six to first in the two years I had to prepare for the next Olympics. That did not happen. Um, the team, well-intentioned as they may be, put me on a plan of fixing my weaknesses. And I actually went from 12th to 34th to not even making the team two years later, finishing 30th in the US trials that had won two years prior. So at this point I’m studying, I just finished studying under David Kelly at Stanford about design thinking and as always design thinking anchors back to, are you solving the right challenge? And I was like, hmm, maybe fixing my weakness isn’t the right challenge, maybe I need to design a better, different question or challenge. How do I design for my strengths? Which by the way, is the title of my second book. And so I quit the team, not the sport, trained all by myself again for the next year. And in the same meet where I was 30th the year before and where hundreds of seconds determined first from second in the first race back, I set a US record by five seconds and a world record by a second.

Bill Sherman So you mentioned David Kelly, not only of design thinking, but also of IDEO, you’ve also been influenced by Philip Zimbardo and his work as well. Let’s do the Zimbarto connection. And then I want to talk a little bit about your career and how you went from student and athlete. Into the world of thought leadership, but first let’s connect.

John Coyle Zimbardo. So Zimbarto was my Psych 101 teacher and he had a big section of the course was on his fascination with time which I adopted later on. He’s written several books on time, the time paradox, he has ZTPI versus Zimparto, time paradox inventory, and you know basically the the question he had started to ask that I sort of picked up the mantle on is why does time seem so different under different circumstances? So fast forward and I’m done with skating and uh, you know, retired from my career. And I noticed that summers are getting shorter. And so I got, I started getting obsessed by this notion of why it’s time speeding up, why has nobody solved for this? Why aren’t we fixing this? Why can’t we go counterclockwise with somebody must’ve figured this out. So I actually emailed him and the called him and oddly he picked up, which I was not expecting. And I describe what I was going through and that was in my early thirties and the time was speeding up and he’s like, Oh, that’s true. All cultures, 98% of adults feel this way. Uh, it doesn’t matter geography, culture, environment. I’m like, what did we do? How did we go counterclockwise? And his answer was really my life’s challenge, which was, well, nobody’s done that research. And I was like, okay, sign me up. Sign me up!

Bill Sherman So it sounds like, in some ways, that’s a moment of transformation in your definition of moments that matter.

John Coyle 100% Kairos moment that became my session ever since that about, you know, 15 years ago

Bill Sherman Yeah, because you could have turned left and went, Oh, nobody studied that. Well, someone should rather than, well, that’s me.

John Coyle Right, and that’s where David Kelly sort of features in, which is if nobody has an answer to a complex question, we’re probably asking the question wrong. And so, you know, it’s a reframing of Abraham Lincoln, but instead of how to have more years in your life, a better question is how do you have more life in your years?

Bill Sherman So you had a corporate career as well before thought leadership. Let’s weave that strand in there. And also some of the clients, because I want to talk about thought leadership through the lens of some of appliance that you had worked. Let’s do that.

John Coyle So what was your corporate career like, John? Well, so I retire from the sports of speed skating, cycling at age 30, never had a real job and then oddly my first gig, I went into consulting cause that’s the only people that hire people with no experience and pay them at least a decent wage, but they make you work, you know, 80 hours a week.

Bill Sherman First gig was, go ahead, at least as the analyst, right? Then, you know, as you move up, it’s an entirely different gig, but starting out as an analyst in the back boiler room, totally different gig.

John Coyle So my first gig, I’ll be centered around time again. I worked with 2000 people for one year. So 2000 man years of effort to make one second happen. Y2K. So all of us consultants working with Goldman Sachs, trying to get all their computers to go 1231.99 to 0101.00. And so, you know, my life is still continuing to suck around time. And then my next client, very next client oddly was Enron. Where I was thrusting the role of helping to design the trading systems that would increase trade velocity and decrease trade time by putting trading systems online. So I designed bandwidth trading, freight trading, power trading, and gas trading for Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay of Enron, who were my indirect bosses through the partner on the consults.

Bill Sherman And so Enron was basically promising an idea of, hey, we can optimize and create value that’s latent in the energy market, right? Does he have an idea? Of how not only to manipulate time, but how to create value.

John Coyle 100%. And if you get back to it, like the currency of time, like increased trade velocity, more trades, more people in the trade chain, more ability to be more fungible throughout the trade chain creates additional value. Every step has a value component. And that’s they’re creating that’s the efficient market hypothesis. And it worked until it didn’t. I mean, they corrupted it. We built completely legitimate systems just to say.

Bill Sherman Exactly. So you have an idea, but then you also have someone who starts using it for deceptive purposes, rather than authentic valuable purposes where the idea adds value to the community and to the polity rather than just the individuals who are promoting the idea. So what else happened in your career?

John Coyle Work with anyone else. Well, in that same region of the country, there was a, um, uh, cyclist by the name of Lance Armstrong that I shared a cycling team with for a brief period. So I’m the only person on the planet to have worked for Jeff Schilling and Ken Lay and cycle on the same team as Lance Armstrong. The two greatest frauds perpetrated modern mankind by most people’s estimations, so, but I never whitewash traded and I never dope. So, um. There is that.

Bill Sherman And again, you have a question of the, the message and the messenger versus the reality, right? What is being said versus what is happening. And I don’t want to go into deep on the story of Armstrong or deep into the story event run, but I think if we’re going to talk about thought leadership. It’s important to go. Who is the messenger that’s talking about this? And why do we listen to them and trust them with their perception of an idea? Right? You’re telling me, Hey, I’m figuring out a way to, you know, manipulate the perception of time. Okay. Interesting. You have my attention for a short period of time there. How are you going to earn that and actually convince me. Yes, this guy’s credible. And something of value to me.

John Coyle  We live in the presence, we live in these short-term memory increments that are somewhere between a tenth of a second to seven seconds. It’s about the range that we write short- term memory to long-term, and most often how you and I, it’s about every two to three seconds. So your hippocampus, that’s the memorandum, is writing memories from short-terms to long term about every 2 to 3 seconds when things are normal. If you’re trying to remember a long number like pi, you might hold up to seven, but that’s about what the human brain can do. What gets interesting though is when there’s a stimulus. That awakens the amygdala, which sits right next to the hippocampus. When the amygdala wakes up, it says, write faster, write more. And remember it. And so your frame rate goes from every two to three seconds to 10, 20 times per second. So your frame goes up, which means things seem to slow down. This is why it feels like you’re in slow motion in a car crash or when you’re about to ask that girl out for the first time. When everything gets intense, that’s because the amigdala is woken up, it’s told the brain to write stuff down faster for two reasons only, Bill. Never do that again, or I’ll always do that. Again, it only wakes up low reasons. Don’t die. Please procreate, avoid the car crash, ask her out, but get a yes. And so writing memories of this rapid frame rate. And that’s why, uh, you know, summers for eight year olds feel like forever because they’re making those pretty much awake all the time because everything’s scary or new or exciting, unusual. And so they’re writing everything down and storing it in a highly recallable fashion. And then we get lazy as adults. You know, your brain’s 3% of your mass, but it’s 28% of calorie burn. It’s a giant light bulb. It’s lazy. Hardest thing it does is write memory. So it just says, nothing new to write down here. And that’s how you got to the parking garage without knowing it. So what we need to do, if you want to expand time, if you wanted to dilate time and experience summers like when you were a youth, you’ve got to create more of these unique. Intense experiences where your emotions are on fire where your amygdala is awake where there’s some risk, unfortunately, which people try to avoid But if you live in a world that’s risk-free and completely safe all the time, you’re gonna lose decades

Bill Sherman So we’re bouncing around, but that takes us to Mihaly, Shickson, Mihaly and flow state. And then you and I had a great conversation about Steven Kotler in the rise of Superman, where he argues, and I think rather compellingly that not only are athletes doing what they do because of flow state, but the rest of the world pays to watch athletes, poets, you know. Broadway performers, musicians access that flow state constantly on command. And we pay a premium for it because we know something important has happened.

John Coyle Yes. And what happens in the brain, by the way, is you got the frame rate up. Because by the way, from Kotler’s book, it writes Superman. The easiest access to flow, at least in the world of sports is the high-risk sports.

Bill Sherman Right, most of his examples are like, snowboarding, and things where you look and you go, you make a wrong mistake, you could easily die.

John Coyle Swimmers are not getting in the flow state like, you know, skiers and surfers and things like that. And the reason for that is that risk factor, which triggers the amygdala, which wakes it up, which causes memories to be written factor. And then if they get in the Flow state, what we know about the Flow State is you remember four to five times as much. So now if you’re writing down memories a hundred times faster and you’re storing four to five times more of that, you’re literally writing four to 500 times more memories per minute. And you know that I’ve told you this before, this is my The positive my entire book and philosophy is memories are the currency of time. The more you have, the more you store, the more you can recall, the longer you’ve been alive. And so that’s why flow state athletes are literally dilating time. They are expanding time beyond all temporal boundaries.

Bill Sherman And you become a time junkie in some ways, right?

John Coyle Yeah, you want a whole week to go by and you don’t remember it ever like I don’t want that certainly not a month definitely not a year.

Bill Sherman Yeah, exactly. To wake up and go, Hey, we’ve been married 20 years. Right. You notice I didn’t notice. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So Kotler, I think also makes the claim, which is really interesting that flow state is accessed when you’re pushing yourself three to 4% beyond your skill level, right? And that there has to be Not only that risk, but the, Oh boy, I don’t know if I can do this. That sinking feeling in your stomach words, as you said, activating the amygdala as well as even in that, do I ask someone out, right? Right. You’re paying attention. You’re minding the details.

John Coyle Yeah. Oh, and that’s right. It was around three or 4% more than that. You’re probably an overwhelm less than that You’re not fully triggered into the potential getting in the flow state once you get in the float state it sometimes starts with adrenaline which works for some of these adventure sports, but then it’s Epinephrine and then it says serotonin then it still for me and then its oxytocin and then as on dynamite Which as Kyler has said and we’ve skied together. We’re friends If you got took all of those chemicals externally, which by the way is Meth coke heroin like it’s all the bad things you’d be dead or drooling but the brain right naturally and when it does so in the right order you’ve created the perfect landscape to settle down store and recall intense memories that are never forgotten that have a before and after so I want to switch.

Bill Sherman Everything we’ve talked about is the foundation for this piece of the conversation. How did you get into thought leadership? Because there’s a difference between raising your hand and said, huh, nobody’s really studied that adjustment of the perception of the time to I’m gonna tell everybody that I can about what I’m learning. Those two things are not a logical sequence, at least for most people. In the thought leadership community, we make that choice. How did you make?

John Coyle Well, I suspect that many of you listeners have been, are going to, or will go through again some imposter syndrome. So I definitely had my period of that and my business partner at the time when I was writing my second book, which was my first real book, I was slowing down and I’m like, but I’m not a doctor, I’m a PhD, I am not a neuroscientist, like why should anybody listen to me? And she had the perfect answer, which is somebody we both know, she’s like, He does not have a PhD, he is not a neuroscientist. He takes information journalist from super smart people that can’t speak English like normal people any translated translate it into a way where other normal people can actually understand that I’m like that’s what i do. That was really the transition was I can I think reasonably well understand fairly complex information from at least the types of things I study. Turn it into stories narratives and metaphors that are easily recognized by others.

Bill Sherman But you could do that through coaching other athletes. You could do executive coaching. What leaves you to the stage or to writing? Why do you choose the modalities?

John Coyle I make an argument, again, this is completely biased, but I think that maybe storytelling might be the most important skill of emergent leadership today. We know very much from behavioral psychology that if you want people to change, an organization, a group, a team, even one other person to change their behavior, they have to be emotionally committed to that change. They can nod and smile rationally all day, and we had to work for that in consulting, which I won’t say out loud here, but it was Grin. Mm-hmm not smile walk away and do nothing with what they just learned, but when you can get people emotionally engaged in a story That’s a thank you for spending six figures on that PowerPoint, which you are spot round file. Yeah But when you get people mostly involved and I think the best way is through storytelling Then they just might actually act on the information that supports the story or the story that supports the data.

Bill Sherman Well, it’s interesting. You go back to invocations and storytelling, Shakespeare, Henry five, oh, for a muse of fire, go back to classical Greek epics rage. Got a sing of the rage, right? These are not small emotions. These are. The petty parking ticket offenses. This is, tell us the seven deadly sins, make the invisible visible and meaningful to us, which ties back to what you talk about of wake the amygdala up.

John Coyle 100%. I mean, Dylan Thomas, right? Rage, rage against the dying. It’s the dying of light. Yeah, that’s not to do that. And this whole, by the way, just as a whole pet peeve of mine, but this whole idea of gracefully, gracefully aging and just accepting that I’m just going to get old and die. No, I don’t. I don’t accept any of that. I don’t. I’m going to go out. I’m not going to. I’m going to burn out or fade away one of the two.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So, I want to go into a meta-conversation. How does your understanding of time influence how you practice thought leadership? And that might be your work on stage. That might be how you approach the work or why you approach it. I’m asking an open-ended question and we’re going to dig deep into this, but how does the object of your study, time, influence how you practice thought leadership? Great question.

John Coyle So, you know, I, I am a keynote speaker by trade. I stay on the stage for 45 minutes to an hour, most often, sometimes longer if I’m lucky and what I like to do, I like the Trojan work. You’re lucky. You get the standing ovation, right?

Bill Sherman Very few people get a standing up. Well, you were an athlete at the Olympic level. You can get a Standing Ovation for, you know, a performance in athletics. And that’s less than 45 minutes, I guess, for a keynote. Right. But few people, get a, standing ovation for just doing what they do.

John Coyle True, that’s true. And you do get used to that. There was no podiums at Goldman Sachs.

Bill Sherman That’s a great quote, I don’t know where I’m going to use it.

John Coyle That’s a great quote. I like John. My award after a year of working eight hours a week was a PM, a partially meets expectations. Back to the question

Bill Sherman So how does time influence your practice of thought leadership?

John Coyle So one thing that I sometimes tell my clients is that I, I’m a bit of a Trojan horse when it comes to what they buy and what they get. So in theory they buy, that’s not leadership, right? Innovation, leadership, creative teams, how to create a culture of innovation. How do you inspire each other to double down on their strengths? These are all, you know, more rational, frontal cortex things. And then. I lay a framework like design thinking of me like two minutes and then I start telling stories and then I surprise them by getting them emotional and they don’t expect that. They don t see it coming and so they’re looking around trying to wipe the tear out of their eye not expecting this is about to hit them right here not just here.

Bill Sherman So, and many good keynoters use story either at the opening or if you have a great closing in your last five minutes, that’s what the client and the audience remember. There it is. Yeah, exactly. You’re talking about using the construct of the speech as a manipulation of time and activation of emotion. A hundred percent. I, when you went down at like the minute or the second level, how do you construct. Walk us through this and I’d like to hear your sort of approach to designing and customizing the keynote.

John Coyle My keynotes follow exactly perfectly the monomyth or the hero’s journey. Um, so it’s a nine step or 10 step, whoever, you know, uh, and so, you know, I started in the ordinary world and mood mix for a new world and I bring it back to the ordinary, new world. I have the adventures. I have that near death crisis moment. And then I bring them back to reality. Fundamentally the answer, the call, all of those. Yes. And so if I may, I’ll tell my closing story, please, which I think you will see is, well, it’s my most important Kairos moment, meaning a moment where my trajectory was reset. I’ve had multiple, obviously everybody has in their life, but this is probably continues to be the most important and it’s 19 years ago. So I’m, I make one Olympics only and I get second place, which is in my head as a competitive athlete, a one-timer first loser.

Bill Sherman Which is a harsh way to judge in a planet of eight billion people, but you know everybody else looks and goes I could never do what he just did right, but we’re all seeking the gold medal. Yeah, yeah, yeah My performance pressure that you put on yourself as much as anything. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m into it

John Coyle So, you know, I had trained for eight years and only won Olympics. I failed to make my second team. So I got off the ice. I did not put on my skate guards. I destroyed my skates, walking across concrete to my car where I took off my skats in the car. Balling my eyes out, I drove to Arizona, 45 hours away from Lake Placid, and I had nothing to do with the sport for nearly a decade. Didn’t watch it, didn’t talk about it, got a new job, went to Golden Saks, went to Enron, did all that stuff. And then 10 years later, NBC called me asked me to be the analyst for the next Olympics and I couldn’t say no to that So there I am back in the sport at the Olympics not competing then in my head still a one-timer first loser, but everybody knew me and I was warmly welcomed back and you know people do recognize the silver medal is something and But on the 16th of 17 days of the Winter Olympics at dinner night before the gold medal round One of the parents of one of the skaters who I’ve been talking with the whole two weeks pulled me aside and changed the entire trajectory of my life. It’s the only reason we’re talking right now, Bill. So we’re at dinner. He looks across me, he looks nervous, and he says, I need to talk to you. And I was like, oh, okay. So we walk away from the table and we move into the corner of the room. He says, I just want you to know, John, that we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you. And I said, I don’t know what you mean. He said, you probably won’t remember, but 12 years ago, after you won your silver medal, He brought it to a little reception in Bay City, Michigan. I brought my son Alex, he was 11 years old at the time. He never skated before. You put your medal around his neck, you sign an autograph. The next day he decided to join the Bay City Speed Skating Club and tomorrow he is skating in the gold medal final. Just like that, Cairo’s moment, everything changed. I started coaching, I got my daughter skating, I continued to announce for NBC, I continued be the analyst for them and I started talking about it, which I had never done and now this is all I do for a living, which is to speak and tell these kinds of stories and that’s often my closing story. The way that story ends just so you know is I wrote him a letter that night telling him my whole life was going to change and he wrote me back three days later saying he just got home to Bay City he went to his son’s room looked at this bulletin board that holds only the most important rewards and memories from his skating career and pinned in the right corner was a picture of us together so we went downstairs he printed off the photo with Alex’s medal around my neck which she had won the next day. Put it back in the same corner of the bulletin board, stepped back and contemplated all the things that had to have taken place for those two photos to be in that place together. And his conclusion was, I guess you’ll never know what you’ll do or say or not do or that could change someone’s life forever.

Bill Sherman I can see how you close there on the keynote. I want to push you further. I’m ready. OK. How does that impact? Because you’re making a choice every time you speak. Sure, you know, it’s a gig. It’s another audience. But at the same time, you’re choosing to speak, to share what you’ve learned. How does that story, do you feel a sense of obligation? Do you feel sense of joy? Are you chasing after more transformative moments? What’s getting you out of bed to do this again and again to tell this story and why?

John Coyle Uh, great question. Yes, more often than not, I have a pretty good line of people that want to tell me their story at the end of the talk, which I absolutely love. And you know, every once in a while I get the kind of story that really, really just makes everything worth it. Not that I don’t love what I do anyway, but I’ll tell you one example of me guy waited for a good hour on a Friday at 4 PM to talk to me. It was a big line and he was last in line. He was very emotional and he said, Hey, I just, I had to tell you this. Like you got off stage, I walked out in the hallway. I called my wife. I was supposed to go to brokerage meeting over the weekend in Florida. And instead I said, honey, no, I’m not going. I canceled my flights, sat out the car, get the kids ready. When I get home, we’re going to drive the five hours to Des Moines to visit their great grandparents who they’ve never met and might not if we don’t do it now. And I was like, yes, this makes swimming work.

Bill Sherman I think where I look at is the manipulation of time comes both from conscious choice. You can poke the amygdala yourself or you can surround yourself with people who are poking it and then you get sort of in an ecosystem bubble if you will And you’re right, life is so much better when it slows down. You’re encoding your present. You could describe it as mindfulness. You could, describe it, as, you know, a balanced state. I think we’ve, for as many languages and cultures that we have in the world, we have many words to describe that. But this is where we aspire, many of us. To be in that quiet place where time feels forever and you’re doing a million things at once.

John Coyle I’m stops, speeds up, slows down, does all of these things when you’re in those modes.

Bill Sherman So you talked about, you know, not fading out as a goal, how’s the leadership fit into that? Is this something you see yourself continuing doing? Is this a step on your journey? How’s it fit into the puzzle?

John Coyle I think the time topic is the rest of my life. Honestly, um, you know, I’m going to be beating with under our science, a friend of mine Moran surf and two weeks when I’m in New York and inevitably he or David Eagleman or some of my other inputs will say the same thing, which is everything I’m about to tell you is wrong. It’s just less wrong than last time because we have learned more about the brain in the last nine months than in the entire history of the human race, which is always true. And so there’s just so mind how cool is that? Right it’s amazing yeah so that’s why the book hasn’t written itself cuz every time I talk to these guys there’s new information that I’m trying to incorporate and at some point I have to declare a finish line and

Bill Sherman I just see the inscription on the front that says this book is wrong and outdated, but please read it anyway. Yes, 100% 100%. So you said something I want to jump back to. You said time is going to be the focus the rest of my life, right? And if I were to borrow a metaphor, it’s almost like a nuclear reaction. You’ve started it. And it’s self-sustaining. It continues. You don’t have to wake up in the morning and say, Oh, time to think about time. Right. You’re not punching the clock here. This is like having dessert in some ways, right? It’s like, I get to do what I love.

John Coyle 100%, it’s a burning passion and I love to talk about it. I will talk about ad nauseum with anybody all day, every day. But my favorite is when I have a really smart, inquisitive person to ask challenging questions like you, Bill.

Bill Sherman Well, thank you. And one of the things I look for, and I know this is turning a little bit into mutual admiration, is that I look specifically for guests who, when they talk about their area of expertise and their passion, and I now in a podcast, this is hard to capture, but you look at the non-verbals. You look for the spark in the eye. The genuine smile rather than the fake smile, that energy, you see it in the face in the moment, there’s a presence. As you said, you could talk about it with someone all day and you could probably talk about it at the 101 level all day, as much as you could with top neuroscientists, right? And you can make that switch. And those are both good days. Am I right on that or am I misinterpreted?

John Coyle Because you know the part of the 101 is. I mean, after I talk to Miranda, I’m gonna have to like process a bunch of new big words. You know, but how do I make those things palpable to people that don’t spend all their time reading these weird manuscripts that I tend to read?

Bill Sherman Or someone shows you an fMRI and goes, look at this, this is cool. And you’re like, it’s a picture of a brain. Right. Why are you excited? Things are glowing. I don’t know. Yeah, exactly. And how do I explain this to others in a language that they will understand? Because you’re right. As knowledge increases, it doesn’t always remain accessible. It’s locked behind journals. It’s, you know, an increasingly smaller percentage of the world that even understands the technical details. The peer reviewed paper that maybe only seven people in the world can fully understand, in fact check, right? And when you look at that percentage of an audience to the people on the planet where how many people are impacted by their perception of time. I would argue a large percentage, if not all, I’m sure there’s a counterexample I’m not thinking about. Someone who’s like, yeah, no, I don’t want to encode more moments and have, you know, on a get it over. So yeah, exactly. Set that aside. This is going back, as you said, in Western tradition to Greek philosophy, and you could pull out the concept of eudaimonia. What is a life well lived and fulfilling not only for us, but for others? I’m gonna ask you two questions as we wrap up here. All right, and they’re, one is retrospective and one is prospective, okay? The retrospective question is, and you, we talked about imposter syndrome in several different ways. One in thought leadership, one as defining the silver medal in the Olympics as one time first loser. Given your understanding now, whether you’re talking with the self that storms out failing to qualify for the second Olympics, or the young self who puts on his skates the first time, or someone working in consulting, what advice would you give your younger self around time and imposter syndrome.

John Coyle Quote a German cyclist, uh, I think it’s Hans Hans Ulrich who has a quote that I just love. I think because I had really great parents who truly believed in me, I was able to adopt this sort of mentality, which was self belief beyond all reason. At some point I stopped caring what other people said. Like when I quit the team and not the sport to train on my own, nobody wanted that to happen. Everybody told me it was a bad idea except for my parents. And when I quit my job 10 years ago to go into speaking, having no idea if this was actually gonna pay the bills, thought I’d be couch surfing for a while, which I did actually for about three months. But if you have a passion that keeps you ignited every day all day, and I know this is a bit cliched, but self-relief beyond a reason, you’re gonna make it work. You’re gonna to make it. And…

Bill Sherman To underscore that, I think almost everyone who spends a long period of time in the field of thought leadership figures out how to make it work for them. And your answer, John, isn’t another keynote speaker’s answer, let alone someone who might be primarily an executive coach or consultant. We’ve all got to figure it out in our context. My second question, a little bit different prospectively. What is the challenge you’re working towards now that you’re trying to crack in thought leadership? What is that next defining moment you’re working towards? And it might be personal or it might be, hey, I want to get on X stage. There’s many ways to define impact and success. What are you working towards?

John Coyle Another great question. You know, for the first nine years of speaking, this is a B2B gig, right? Well, I’m talking about innovation, leadership, creativity, design, thinking, strengths, resiliency. It’s primary.

Bill Sherman Customers are corporate clients and their buyers are execs or event planners and because they have a conference with a theme and they say, get me a speaker, a hundred percent.

John Coyle My target market can be extremely small and that doesn’t matter. As long as I get 40, 50 gigs a year. I’m, I’m good. Yeah. The market I don’t yet understand. And you are my first podcast of even attempting to be in a podcast. Uh, I mean, I’ve been on before, but other people invited me this first time I sort of help invite myself is I want to move more to a BC model. I’d like to have broader reach. I would like to be able to have more people hear this message that Time and money are fungible. And if you’re not trading your money for time, you should be if you have financial resources, which is gonna be, you know, most of the audiences that see me, these kinds of podcasts are probably not for, you know the people that watch this have some financial resources more often than not.

Bill Sherman Right. Yeah. And so cracking a larger audience to move beyond. And you can debate of your, you have a large audience of people in white collar jobs that work who will come to events, but not everybody goes to the event in Scottsdale at the princess hotel. Right. You know, and there’s a lot for everyone who goes there. There may be 10 employees that aren’t there. A hundred percent.

John Coyle Matt, tell a quick story to share what I was with a friend of mine. He’s a CEO, but he’s got two kids. They were 14, 16 at the time. And he was like, can you just tell them a little bit about this time stuff? So I gave him the sort of short version Ted talk version and they looked at it and they’re like, so what you’re saying is I’m basically wasting my time doing the same thing every day. Why, why am I doing this? Why am I even going to school? I’m like, hello, you created exit steps.

Bill Sherman Apples at six years old or something.

John Coyle But what I love is the next day they walked to school, which they never don’t, it was over eight miles. So it was like two and a half hours. And they came back so excited that afternoon. Like we saw, I never, I didn’t know all the stuff that was on the way to school from our house, because I’ve always been spending the car and they’ve both kind of gone on to be, I mean, they were already that way because they’re dead, but they’ve both gone on and to be pretty adventurous. And Cal is traveling the world doing video blogs about all his adventures and you know hopefully I had a little part of that.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s the thing is impact doesn’t have to be world changing. It’s about compounding, right? And the change, the small changes you make with one individual can be massive, like a butterfly effect. You know, if you pull into chaos theory. John, I wanna thank you for joining us today. Thank you also for suggesting and inviting yourself on the podcast. And I call that out because we as a podcast and we’re now 660 some episodes. Yeah, we’ve had conversations with many people that we know, but at the same time, there are amazing people out there that we don’t know who come to us and say, Hey, I got a story about thought leadership and we welcome that. So thank you. And if you want to talk to us, reach out. Yes, we do and welcome pitches again. Thank you, John, and thank you for sharing. Your story is about time and how to manipulate it.

John Coyle Thank you, Bill. Look forward to having coffee soon. We’re very local to each other.

Bill Sherman It’s down the street. All right. Thanks, John. Bye

Bill Sherman Okay, you’ve made it to the end of the episode. And that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought-leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership, and finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you wanna polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.