choice Magazine
choice Magazine
Episode 123: Unlocking Coaching Potential: Genetic Insights and Motivational Alignment with guest, Dr. Antoine Eid
Unlock the secrets of human potential with Dr. Antoine Eid, a luminary in the fields of neuroscience and behavioral genetics. Promising a groundbreaking journey, we dive into how the core of a coachee's nature can revolutionize the world of coaching. Discover Dr. Eid's innovative tool, Meet Yourself, which merges genetic, neurological, and psychological insights to redefine coaching strategies. Together, we explore how aligning a client’s inherent traits with coaching practices can create transformative outcomes.
Our conversation takes a deep dive into the powerful realm of genetic and thinking motivators, dissecting how they influence talents and skills. We unravel the essential distinction between innate motivators and learned competencies, showcasing how true alignment can enhance leadership and personal growth. With engaging examples, we highlight how understanding one's genetic profile can reignite forgotten passions, leading to unparalleled job satisfaction and productivity. As we venture into potential AI advancements in this field, this episode uncovers profound truths about passion, motivation, and performance.
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Find the full article here.
Learn more about Antoine here.
To access the Brain Assessment, click here.
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Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, as you can tell. I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest articles, have a chat with the brilliant author behind them and he's right here with us in the wings and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. Take some time to join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques and just make a real difference in our clients' lives, which is exactly what we all want to do. Right? This is your go-to resource for all things coaching. Let's dive in.
Garry Schleifer:In today's episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Antoine Eid, who is the author of an article in our latest issue, and I don't know if you can see it if you're watching, but it's called Coaching in Flux ~ The Ongoing Evolution of a Dynamic Field, and I just lost the page where the article is but there we go. This is how it goes on live recordings. The article is entitled From Nature to Nurture ~ Understanding your Coachee's Nature to Enhance your Coaching Impact.
Garry Schleifer:A little bit about Antoine, which is how I know him because we've been hanging around for a while. He's the founder of Meet Yourself and previously served as a Senior Associate of the University of Cambridge and head of the Brain-Based Leadership Program. His purpose is helping others understand their innate motivators and helping people understand each other. He uses his passion as a leadership and performance consultant with a background in neuroscience and behavioral genetics to link science to personality assessment and development and help others dig deep into their innate and thinking motivators and understand what makes them who they are. Thank you so much, Antoine, for joining me today for this podcast and for writing for choice. Really appreciate it.
Antoine Eid:Thank you for hosting me.
Garry Schleifer:No problem, and the one thing that I should have said that you're allowed to say, so we're going to say this because it's going to come up anyway is you've actually created a behavioral assessment, using all these things in there, called Meet Yourself, and I would invite you to feel free to reference that as we go through our conversation today, because I think it's otherwise going to be that elephant in the room that you and I know about and we're not talking about. But for those aspiring writers out there, we do ask our authors not to be self-promotional in the articles, which Antoine has been kind not to do. But all bets are off when I do these things, so you don't promote away, right, and so, um, I know we've been talking for a while, but I never did ask you what inspired you to write this article and submit it. After all of our conversations.
Antoine Eid:Well, two things.
Antoine Eid:First thing is you. Talking to you is always inspiring. I might actually end up writing something right after this conversation.
Garry Schleifer:Bring it on. We look forward to it. We look forward to it. It's brilliant.
Antoine Eid:And two I have for many years, seen the impact of what I do on the work that coaches and trainers and leadership experts do, and your great magazine was the perfect channel to spread the word and let coaches know that something like this exists. It will change the way they actually are able to understand their clients.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah Well, thank you, and you know, before we go further. So one of the things that I've done with you is I've taken your Meet Yourself Assessment and I'm working through it now. In fact I was just doing a bit of work with it this morning. And I say that because it's important to give some of the context to your article, because one of the words you use a lot in the article is genetic and your Meet Your self Assessment, it has behavioral, psychological and genetic measurements. So before we go further, just tell our listeners a little bit about what all is involved and how that came about.
Antoine Eid:Yes for sure. Well, our personality is quite complex as human beings because it's a combination of different factors and the most important factors are genetic, neurological and psychological. So with genetics, we all inherit some characteristics, some physical and personality characteristics, from the day we're born and these have their influence on the way we look from outside and also what triggers certain behaviors, certain passions and certain motivation, those things. We usually call them talents, we call them potential. So that's hidden in our DNA.
Antoine Eid:The second part of our personality is the way our brains function. So our brains are directly influenced by our genetics and also develop through the early experiences and learning in life. So that also should be measured because not only our brains think, but they're also structured in a way that motivates us towards certain things more than other things. And the third aspect is the behavioral aspect of us where we learn and we become or we behave in a certain way in life, and these are acquired and learned skills and behaviors. Now the interesting thing when you study this is we understand that not many of us actually behave in alignment with what we were born with and that's normal.
Antoine Eid:That's a nice thing about humans, in a way, because we're not like other species. We were born a bird and we stay and remain a bird for the rest of our lives. Humans have this amazing ability to adapt to their environment, to learn new skills and to immediately, instantly, change their behaviors based on the person and the situation they're dealing with. But that behavior does not change who they are originally, does not change what motivates us, what makes us happier, and that's the purpose that is born in each one of us. So this led to me trying hundreds of different assessment tools and understanding that they're missing this thing. They're all good, but they're all measuring one aspect of personality. So what I've done is I found existing science and all I've done is I've mapped three sciences together to have a more comprehensive understanding of not only what we're good at, but also what motivates us in life.
Garry Schleifer:Brilliant. Ever since I first heard about it, when you and I first connected, I was just blown away by the brilliance of bringing those three together, so I'm sure that makes you brilliant. But anyway, that's another point, and you are, and while we talked about this too before and you're referring to it in the article, is that what if we had this assessment when we were younger? How would that have affected our journey? And also, while you were speaking, it brought up a question. I don't know if you know the answer. I'm not trying to you know but what percentage of the world's population is not doing what their genetics might have indicated would be an easier path or a better path would?
Antoine Eid:Well, 100 percent. Very simply, because we are full of talents, we are full of potentials and we're lucky if we are able to discover some of them. So you see, even the champions, the stars, they were able to identify that one talent and they nurtured it with discipline and learning and practice. But that's only one talent and we all have many talents and many potentials. I have done thousands of assessments in my career so far. I've never seen one that does not have a good amount of talent and potential.
Garry Schleifer:But do they follow it? Maybe that's my question. Right, yeah, oh no. Okay, now I understand you're 100%, so yes 100% of us have that, but how many, how many of us are actually following that path of nature versus nurture and I know your assessment does nature and nurture, but how many of us are actually following on the gifts that we are born with?
Antoine Eid:So I can give you real statistics.
Garry Schleifer:Oh, I love real statistics.
Antoine Eid:So I've done close to 20,000 assessments in my career. So we're talking DNA plus neuroscience, plus behavioral psychology, and the few hundreds out of these 20,000 that I have debriefed face-to-face, such as the session we had together, those who said that I found my purpose and tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and do something that I enjoy and I'm meant to do, we check their genetic profile and we see that it's there. That's the thing with our purpose. If it wasn't connected to what we were born to do, it wouldn't be called a purpose. It would be called an objective, maybe, or something to achieve. Yeah, the moment we call it a purpose, it means what was I put on this planet to achieve? And this is where, in order to find that answer, we need to look into the genetic blueprint.
Garry Schleifer:Now, okay, the percentage is smaller. It's smaller, right, but can you imagine how, like and I've always said this and that's what got me excited when I first met you is that I wish that there was something that would have been available for me as a teenager or a young adult before I started going down certain paths? Like, does my DNA suggest that I was entrepreneurial? Because I struggled to get into it, but once I was in it, I love it. I'm also feel that I have a thing about being very organized, but is that a nature or nurture kind of thing? Like, I still use that, those simple terms. Sorry, I know it's much more scientific than that, but you know. So, thank you.
Garry Schleifer:I've done the test. I'm still working through it and evolving and finding out the stuff. But what I want to do is, because most of our people are coaches, I want to bring it back to the coachee - coach conversation and so okay. So, not having done the test, how can you work with a client knowing that there's a genetic aspect of them that's important? How do you work with that? Like? How do you figure it out?
Antoine Eid:Well, there are different coaching, as you know, different coaching methodologies, and they mostly are focused on discovery and understanding a client by probing and helping them find answers. Now, this is a great approach. However, it is slightly biased because the coachee does not always have the accurate perception of themselves or situations. So, the moment you ask, anytime you ask someone a question, they're giving you their knowledge of the situation or their knowledge of themselves, and that's usually, in psychology, it is a biased view on the situation or the person. Going back to their motivators and here I do not only want to label that as their genetics there's also the thinking motivators, which is our brain's preferred ways of thinking. These are hidden to the coach and they're hidden to anybody interacting with the coachee. They're in their genetics, they're in their mind right, and somehow they trigger certain behaviors or certain motivation or desire towards certain behaviors. Knowing these, these will provide a lot of answers about why certain behaviors happen.
Antoine Eid:So the behavior isn't always in what we've learned, and because we're amazing at learning as human beings, we end up labeling ourselves in terms of what we know, what we don't know, and what we do well and what we do not do well. Ask anybody hello, how are you? Can you introduce yourself? Most people say hello, my name is Amar and I'm a speaker. We label ourselves immediately by the thing we do, but we're more than this. There's a lot more hidden behind, and the moment the coach knows these things, they can actually reveal some brilliance, some uniqueness and some value that that coachee can offer and focus to guide them in their areas of strength, instead of focusing on areas of what is lacking, what am I not good at and how can I become good enough?
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, well, you said, spoke really well about that or wrote really well about that, because I really clicked on that. One of the companies I do coaching for uses a strengths-based assessment, and so it's all about that. And then what you wrote was so there's a strength, but what are the other things that will support that strength that you can work on? And they're not weaknesses, they're just strengths that are not as strong as maybe the core strength, and I really love seeing that written in there. You said how do people introduce themselves? So how do you introduce yourself?
Antoine Eid:Well, I would say that I'm intuitive, both by my genetics and by my skills, and my purpose in life is to help others find their potential.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, that's a way better conversation than you're a scientist.
Antoine Eid:I truly believe that this world can become a much better place, right If people are living within their talents and within their areas of strength.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, if you can without mentioning names, can you give us a success story like somebody who was like way over here and then realized they were way over here and acted on it.
Antoine Eid:Oh, I've got thousands of examples.
Antoine Eid:If you visit my LinkedIn, you'll see people posting a lot of testimonials after having spoken to me about discovering something that they always felt that motivated them, but that they had left behind since they were children and because of family pressure, social pressure and now work pressure, we found ourselves learning all these other things and we might be really good at these.
Antoine Eid:So, to give examples, let me think. Okay, I'm not going to name names or say anything specific, but I can tell you the two most common cases that I see. One is people telling me I do not trust people and trust others. I prefer to be cautious about other people. And then, the moment they look at their genetic profile, they find that they actually have a high or developed social nature and they instantly remember how much they loved being around other people when they were younger. But all of these emotional, social experiences, painful experiences they've been subjected to, taught them the need to develop these analytical skills that serve to protect us, and they've silenced that social nature of theirs. And they've let they've silenced that social nature of theirs. The other common case that I see a lot is I don't have imagination.
Antoine Eid:And then every time I ask why do you say that? Guess what the most common answer I get? It's either my husband says that I don't have it.
Garry Schleifer:Oh, somebody else says it.
Antoine Eid:Somebody else says that. And then they look at their genetics and they see that actually they have a high propensity towards creativity, imagination and innovation. And they immediately remember that yes, I do have the ideas. I just learned to keep them to myself and wait for instructions from someone else.
Garry Schleifer:It's like me waiting for permission. No, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing those examples. See, that gives some amazing insights into that. I'm shifting gears a little bit here. You've mentioned a lot about motivators. So give us a distinction between motivators and competencies and then why it's important to separate them for your coachee.
Antoine Eid:Definitely. So, as I said, they were made of these three components, two of which are under motivators. So our genetic motivators and our thinking motivators are hidden, but they define our talents, potentials and thinking inclinations and I will give an example. And our competencies are the expressed part of us. I'll give you an example.
Antoine Eid:s might say I love being around other people. I get this high energy or desire being around other people. I want to make friends, but then when you put them with other people, you find them shy. They lack confidence, they don't know how to speak or how to talk. So I love being around other people. That's a motivator, but the sociability skills are low social skills. And the other way also applies. You may find someone who's amazing at connecting and talking, communication et cetera, but they might actually not be social by nature. They might only have learned that in a social context, this is how I should behave, and in order to know whether they're socially motivated, you need to follow them to see what happens after they leave that party or that conference and you actually see that they're locking themselves in, staying by themselves, not wanting to talk to anyone for a while until their energy rises again, so in that case is high social competency, low social motivated.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, oh great. Thanks for making that distinction. Go ahead.
Antoine Eid:Absolutely and you asked me why is it important? It is very important. Actually, in my point of view, this is what defines good leadership from mediocre leadership. When a leader sees that one team member is actually good at something, their natural reaction to this is let me give them more and more of the tasks, because if they're good at it, obviously they enjoy it. But if there isn't the same motivator behind it, they don't know that this person is actually hating their job more every day and they're actually getting demotivated the more they're getting more of that task. So what you want in your people is to help them have a career that aligns with their purpose, so that they are having this sense of fulfillment, that happiness, and that is going to reflect on their work in the office.
Garry Schleifer:Good point. Yeah, why not right? When it comes from the heart versus just the brain, that's the picture I'm kind of getting right.
Antoine Eid:Absolutely. If you're listening to two people playing music, you're just listening on the radio. It's the same piece. One has talent, the other one does not have talent. If you're only listening and not watching, you will hear the same music, but if you're watching them, you will see that the one with the talent, that only difference between them is you feel their soul is there. You can feel the passion. So competency can be the same, but if we add the talent to it, if we add the motivation to it, this is where it's going to last much longer.
Garry Schleifer:Wow and you know what? You don't have to see them, you can hear the one that's more motivated. Yeah we know that. What a great example. I can picture it. I'm picturing like two piano players playing the same piece of music and one's more clunk, clunk, clunk the competent, but execution, not emotion.
Antoine Eid:Yes, that emotion comes from talent and that talent is in their genetics.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, wow, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. I'm going to, again, I love switching gears, but what do you think about AI and what you're doing? How's that going to impact the work that you're doing, the work that people are doing, and genetics and motivators?
Antoine Eid:Well, I'm getting that question almost on every podcast I'm on and I thought I totally understand why this is an important question right now. Two things are happening here. There's can AI help us become more human? And two is how can we make sure that it doesn't become mechanical and humans are still able to be themselves?
Antoine Eid:I have included an AI component in Meet Yourself, so we have trained an engine, an open AI engine, so far with 372,000 words to think like a coach, like a trainer, like a scientist. It understands the science, it understands the different person, motivators and competencies. It can actually talk to the participant and answer any question related to their personality. So in this case, we've used AI for the betterment of humanity, to help humans better understand themselves and the value they can bring. So this is where I'm totally supportive of the exponential power that AI can have in helping us understand human personality.
Antoine Eid:Let me give you a specific example. When I was building the algorithm years ago, that happened totally by coincidence. I've been doing this for almost 15 years, and then, during the corona pandemic, during the lockdown, I decided to start putting what's in my brain, put it on a computer. So, just by analyzing 54 different genetic motivators, mapping them with our four thinking motivators and mapping them with 14, only 14 behavior or 14 competencies, I ended up with trillions of combinations, and we needed some super brain to be able to do all these computations. Without AI, it was very difficult to get to understand each one of these combinations fully.
Garry Schleifer:That's great.
Garry Schleifer:Well, thank goodness, we got that information out of your brain and out into the world, and thank you so much for writing about it and telling us all about this, and I hope people appreciate this. I don't know, it just to me sounds like a no brainer, brilliant combination of neuroscience, behavioral and genetics. So thank you very much. Now this is called Beyond the Page, so you couldn't fit everything into 1400 words. What else would you like our audience to do or know about as a result of this article and this conversation?
Antoine Eid:Well, I would like to offer to your audience a free assessment called The rain Print. What if we can help you identify your brain superpower hidden in your thinking motivators in less than 10 minutes? So go to meetyourself. me. Just put your name, email and start the eight-minute assessment, and you'll immediately receive your own thinking motivators with a two-page report that tells you what is your brain superpower.
Garry Schleifer:Oh, that's very generous. Thank you very much. Yeah, and is that also a place where they can reach you, or what's the best way to reach you?
Antoine Eid:I'm not on social media, only active on LinkedIn, so if we can put in my LinkedIn page there. I'm there a few hours per day, yeah, and I get a lot of message and I answer them as quick as possible. Otherwise, meet yourself. me is the website. There's a nice list of seven short videos there that explain about the science and about how the product works. This product needs to be in the hands of every coach, every business leader and, eventually, every parent and teacher.
Garry Schleifer:True, I truly am so in support of that, and to speak to your videos, I watched all of them. They're great, they really did help me with an understanding and I have completed the assessment and I'm going through the post-assessment review and finding out what are my motivators and competencies, etc. So thank you for that opportunity as well.
Antoine Eid:Thank you for hosting me here and allowing me to talk about this.
Garry Schleifer:No problem, thank you. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber to choice magazine, you can sign up for free by clicking the QR code in the corner or by going to choice-online. com and clicking the sign up now button. Thanks again, Antoine.
Antoine Eid:Thank you, Garry.
Garry Schleifer:I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.