Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn and to understand so that we can make our highest contribution in the world.
Have you ever had an experience where you were able to get out of your head and into the head of another person and discover the richness that is possible, the relationship that follows, and the depth of connection? In today’s episode, we have part one of a two-part conversation with Nate Walkingshaw. He’s a passionate investor and a serial entrepreneur. He’s been tremendously successful with an obsession with solving systemic problems. He began his life as an EMT, and while responding to life-threatening emergencies, he recognized the need for a safer, faster patient transport system. And the products he helped to create in that first startup are now used by 70% of the world’s hospitals. He went on to become the chief experience officer of Pluralsight and totally transformed the way that that whole organization thinks about people, listening, understanding each other, and being able to work together in a deep and connected way. By the end of today’s episode, you will have a clearer sense of the rich opportunity you have to be able to enter the world of another. Let’s get to it.
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Thank you, Nate. Welcome to the podcast.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really cool. I’m glad to be here.
Greg McKeown:
Can you just start out with your own origin story?
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah, the origin story is awesome. I had two full-time working parents. I had really great mentorship, really great leadership. My dad is a very hardworking person. My mom is a very powerful woman, a very hardworking person who really taught me the core or the basis of just phenomenal leadership skills. And I think my dad was really great at building an engineering process. Like he’s very specific, very thoughtful person who thinks about things well in advance of them needing to happen. And that really helped me around vision and future casting; really great at execution. And then my mom was just great at helping me find my voice and being able to lead through really challenging situations.
So I’ve really enjoyed my upbringing. Still super close with my parents. My parents are still very close with my family. Sarah’s family’s very similar, and our boys, I have four sons, Ab, and Eli, Miles, and Ryder, and they’re very close to their grandparents as well. I do think that helps when you have a big tribe around you to manage really tough things.
Greg McKeown:
You just said something interesting; you said your mother helped you find your voice. What has your professional voice been?
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah, I think it’s a really great question, and I think for me to answer this question and hopefully, the listeners can really identify with this, every single person is raised differently. So most of the neurological pathways and emotional pathways that we build, they happen at a very young age, right? Most of those things are developed from the moment that we’re born, and then they’re really forged in neurological still around 18, 19, and 20. And then we spend the rest of our lives like unpacking like those really difficult ruts that are forged in there.
And I would say when I was coming up through grade school around a traditional Western philosophical approach to education, I was a spatial thinker. And having me sit down in a classroom, being taught subjects from left to right, was extremely challenging for me. And my mom and my dad were fantastic at helping me navigate and not feeling just a ton of guilt and shame around the neurological diversity that my brain had in most classrooms. I knew that I was underperforming. When you get excused in a math class and head to the resource center like, you know what’s going on. You eventually figure out what the whole game is here. And my mom was just fantastic at, like, Hey, this is a very different set of skills that you have. And one of the big pieces for me around this was them sending me to a liberal arts, middle and high school.
This liberal arts, middle and high school really developed kind of the art side of my brain along with the science side. And that was a huge piece of their; it was a game-time decision through my adolescence to sacrifice and send me to a school that would really help with cognitive diversity. And that helped me really understand what my superpower powers are as a person.
But then, when I went out into the real world, it was like, how do I apply this? I don’t really even know how to apply maybe some of the set of skills that I have. And then, when I went to college, I was a five-year MBA, international business minor in German, really focused around that. And maybe two years into that, I knew that was not going to be my path. And so I had a cousin, his name was Andy Walkingshaw, he was involved in the fire and emergency medical services space. And sure enough, Andy’s like, Hey, come on a ride along. And I went into the back of the ambulance with him. I went out for a day’s worth of calls. I came out of that ambulance, and I’m like, that is what my future looks like. It was just so hard to describe to another person on what you experienced as a frontline emergency response worker.
So I dropped out of college, went to EMT basic school, went to EMT Intermediate, ACLS, PALS, and went and got through all the certifications just as fast as I possibly could to spend my time in the fire and mess space. And that’s really where it’s, you’ll love it because Greg, it’s full circle, right? They, I ended up back in entrepreneurship, back in business, back in execution. But I took a totally different, I think, uncharted path in order to get there. And that was just because I had to navigate what my strong suits were. And I can tell you paramedicine was a massive strong suit. I always tell people it was the purest work I’ve ever done in my career. It’s the most aligned I’ve ever felt as a person. I feel like I was truly giving contribution. And I think because the incentive structure in the fire and EMS space is aligned, like when I started as a paramedic, it was $7.14 an hour. As an EMT basic, you are not paid really anything, and amazing.
Greg McKeown:
Really low.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah. And you’re doing that work because you love it. I was obsessed with patient care. And so it wasn’t about the money that I was going to make. It was really about the impact that I was going to make. And you get to use a very wide set of skills with a very diverse population of humans. And you’ve got to use it in very short windows of time. You know, response times are eight minutes, and then you’re on scene in less than eight minutes with a very complicated set of things that are happening. And so you get, you get sharpened very quickly in that space.
Greg McKeown:
So many places to go here. That ride-along sounds like it awakened in you something like your true self, like a truly transformational moment. But then it continued to transform you in the day-to-day work itself that the experience in totality made you.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah, and I’d say maybe to build on it just a tiny bit is what ultimately happened back there. And I, we could talk for hours around the different types of people that end up in the back of your ambulance and how that makes you look at the world. Like you look at humans from a very fair and equal place because you see every person from every walk of life. If they’re straight or gay or African-American or white, you get to see everything. There’s everything happening back there, and you get to see people in their rawest form of vulnerability. And I will tell you that the second that you begin to put this connected interstate around the human condition and the way people are brought up and the circumstances they’re left within, and those are, some of those are afflictions that were never intended just should have never happened, and they happened, or they’re just people’s choices and repeated choices over and over again.
But you learn to love them and care for them in any capacity that you see happening out there. We could go very deep on that. If we’re just talking about what happened to Nate back there. It was confidence. I gained my cognitive and emotional confidence in the back of an ambulance. You have to learn like drug cards, for instance. You have to learn the difference between different drugs. You have to understand the grams per kilogram of an individual, and then you have to be able to draw a syringe and push different types of things to help save people’s lives. You have to look at cardio rhythms and understand what bigeminy and trigeminy means. And you really have to fundamentally understand very difficult and complex things and very quick moments, and you begin to build this confidence of your knowledge, and that allowed me the opportunity to take risk. It allowed me the ability to try new things that I didn’t know anything about but did create the space for me to fail without caring what I looked like. My commitment to looking good was very low once they got out of there.
Greg McKeown:
I want to go back to this point. You said about we could go very deep, and I am curious about that. You didn’t just go through the motions of a job. You didn’t just become competent, even though I think that’s what you just described happening. You had, let’s say, a core transformation from being self-oriented as just about every person is as they’re born. As they’re a teenager, to being really other-oriented. And in a very intense and repeated and rigorous way that you’re going, okay, here’s another person, let’s see their life in and serve them in their literal emergency. And I wonder if you could share more about what you learned in that extremity.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah. I’ll cover two things that I think are valuable for folks. The very first thing is every single person that we meet has their own truth, their own world, and their own experience. When we as humans like we are, a lot of our cognitive thoughts are very internal. Like I, I find myself all the time, did I actually say that out loud, or was I just thinking it?
So the other thing that’s just so cool to juxtapose against this is that the reality or the perception of another human being is the experience they produce for someone else. So I’m not actually in Greg’s head. I don’t know what you’re thinking right now. I don’t know your world. I don’t know your truth, I don’t know your experience. So I might have a really bad experience from Greg, but I actually, in your mind, you think you’re producing a neutral or pretty good experience, and I don’t know why I’m experiencing you the way that I’m experiencing you.
What we have to know as humans is that is my reality of someone else. And so as soon as you wake two people up to the fact that, hey, our upbringing and the experiences that we produce are creating other people’s reality, you begin to really think about intention, which is body language and oral communication because that’s how people are experiencing us as people.
So you immediately in the, what was taught to me in the back of this ambulance was I’m experiencing something from someone in the raw form of their most vulnerable state. And as soon as you begin to ask questions into their world, their truth, and their experience, that’s where empathy lies. It lies right there. And if we want to co-create or fundamentally understand someone from that place, we have to be willing to let go of our truth, our world, and our experience to fully understand or as close as we can to, and this doesn’t need to happen for a long time, right? This happens in 30 seconds, a minute, or five minutes, just long enough for us to really seek someone’s context. And then you hope that through another person’s desire to want to get to know you, they would wanna ask you the same questions around your truth, your world, and your experience. And if you do that, then that’s where co-creation happens. That’s where you can build things together and create and form agreements with each other and really decide to, I think, have a very productive and very high performant based experiences. If you spend the time doing that upfront and basically being in the back of the ambulance is a one-sided version of that. And what I like about it is that it’s a selfless version. Like it’s nothing in the back of an ambulance is about you. You have to completely surrender your truth world and experience if you want to grant someone else’s trust to treat them.
And so you have to learn to build a social contract of trust with someone that you’re caring for very quickly. And those answers live in questions to the person that you’re treating. And it is a beautiful thing. You get so good at being able to unpack what’s going on with someone so that you can treat them with the things that they need. And a little side tangent, right? You have people that you put back there that are nonverbal. So like psych patients, for instance. Like some people can’t communicate. So all it is body language, all it is maybe someone raising their eyebrows or flicking their eyelids for you like to communicate yes, no. Or like the shift of their body language. So you start to like really get connected to oral communication and body language through these patients from all these different walks of life.
Here’s the cool thing, and this is what I, this is what I loved about the space. So you have a partner, so you, let’s say you, and I were partners, and you and I get to ride in the back of an ambulance. You spend so much time with this person like Greg, you could look at me and give me a glance, and I’d know exactly what you mean, you know, where you know either things are not going well or hey, like I need you to, we’re not lights and sirens. You look in the rearview mirror, you look back at me, and I give you a look, and it’ll go 1039, it’ll go with lights and sirens. Get us to the hospital as fast as we can because things are going bad. Like they, there are these really amazing nuances between working between two people in these circumstances where you know, the feel of the relationship, the look of the relationship is just like symbiotic. It’s just amazing to work with people. And so I got obsessed with that. Like that’s why teams were a really big deal. Highly performant teams were a really big deal; wanting to build really high, highly performant teams, to really get super connected.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so much to unpack here. Let’s go back for a second to what I’m going to describe as this matrix moment where there’s like a moment that either happens for people or doesn’t where they, I either wake up to the discovery, I live in my own head and other people are in a completely different head, and my job is to get out of my head and into their head. And as simple as that sounds, I am really struck by how often I meet someone, and the sensation I have is that they do not live in that way. That they really do live inside their own head. That they’ve really hardly considered and certainly rarely experienced how it looks for the other person in a serious way. That they’re still just in this idea of the way I see the world is the way the world is and that if you challenge what they think, you are challenging their core identity because they’re just oneself wide, oneself deep still in terms of their thinking. I’m just struck by where you really learned that and experienced that in such an extreme way in the back of an ambulance. Your thoughts or reactions to that?
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah, I think you’ve said this, I think you framed it beautifully. Like the literal expression of this is even listening to you speak to me right now, I have to be aware that as it enters my ears, it’s getting processed through the way that I was raised. I have to be awake enough to know that, hey, I’m listening to these things this way, and then when I decide to communicate back out to you, I need to be really intentional around what my next set of sentences or paragraphs are going to be. And that is the beauty that kind of got unpacked for me.
I’ll tell you why. I think there are things that happen in the fire and emergency medical space that are given terms, and a term is a frequent flyer. So this is the context of, hey, I continue to go on this same person who continues to repeat these same set of characteristics that on a four-day pack, you know, shift. I will see this person around these three streets doing these same things over and over again. You can decide to go on that patient over and over again and get extremely frustrated, hardened cold, bitter, and judgmental. You can do a lot of things here. Or you could spend time seeking context with what is actually going on.
And I’ll give you a good example of this as a lived example, I’ve had several frequent flyers where if you did this on just a four-pack of shifts, you’re going to get untruths for maybe weeks, maybe even months, maybe even six months of what’s really going on. You’re not really going to get the truth, the reality, and the experience. And I think that’s because this person may be in different states every single time you pick them up. There might be different circumstances there. There really is like all of these really interesting things that happen.
But at some point, Greg, it, like, it comes over the top of the hill, and you understand the neurological kind of interaction or games that are happening between this person and you. Then their granted trust starts to drop mostly because, and again we’re like, we’re talking at a very high-level cause I want to really protect the moment because the moment is just so precious when this happens, right? But what happens is, they could have perceived me as someone that’s a threat, like a law enforcement agent, right? Is someone that is a user, a drug user over and over again, right? There’s certain consequences that wouldn’t want them to be truthful with me because of circumstances. But once they figure out, hey, like I’m a person that’s not going to be threatening or going to, then all of a sudden they, they start to really unpack what’s happened, and you get really honest and authentic vulnerable windows into that.
And we’re really talking about strong corner cases out here. This happens way faster with somebody that’s been in a motor vehicle accident. The wall of context is super low, they’re very vulnerable, and they’re just delivering like all of these facts around what’s happened in their life. And, but on a harder case, this could take a very long time. Like you, you have to be super committed.
And the reason why I want to use this as a use case is this ends up in any relationship that you care about. People think there’s like a point of departure and a point of arrival in the art of relating with another human. And if you’re married to someone, or you’re raising kids, or you’re working with somebody, how committed are you to the relationship to seek context when somebody’s really asleep? That could take years. People could be in marriages for years before somebody feels safe enough to really unpack what’s happening in their world, in their truth, and their experiences.
And that’s what happened in the back of this ambulance is that the commitment on a frequent flyer perspective, it was not a day, it was not a four-pack shift. It was weeks, months, sometimes six months or longer until I got to the bottom of root cause of, like, okay, so we can start to really help this person physically or emotionally maybe when we drop them back off, or they get dropped back off, they don’t end back up in an environment again so that they can actually be given an opportunity to succeed. And there’s granted trust between us and another individual. You start to learn those things the more and more that you have interactions with more and more people that that are, I would call, asleep around giving you their world, their truth, and their experience.
Greg McKeown:
That’s a very interesting description. I was really intrigued by the moment in which you said, I’m going to keep this at a high level because basically, that moment of pure connection between you and the person that you were trying to help was so sacred to you. You don’t even want to put that into words for other people, generally.
Nate Walkingshaw:
You don’t wanna violate it.
Greg McKeown:
You don’t want to violate it. And without asking you to share more details, I wonder if you can just share why that moment is so deeply important, so precious.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah. The challenge is there’s probably a whole slew of listeners that are asleep, and so the words that come out of my mouth relative to this description may land in certain ways. And I want to honor that not only for the person that I’m talking about, but I also want to honor it for the person that I don’t know that’s listening to this that may maybe may land very strongly or think that it’s a bunch of hogwash. And for me, the reason why I loved main-stage presentations versus a podcast like this, you’re actually pulling on great threads. I’m now, I’m like reflecting on what’s being unpacked here, and it’s, it’s so cool. Like this really is a part of my core belief system. So when you stand on, when I work for Pluralsight, there’ll be five or 8,000 people in the, but what I enjoy the very most about public speaking is you’re basically if it’s 20 minutes, I’m basically having very intimate one-minute conversations for 20 minutes with individuals, and you get to look out into these audiences, and you can see the whites of the eyes of these people, and we get to exchange this connection, this energy between us and it is beautiful.
It is absolutely beautiful to watch these exchanges happen. And that was really forged in the fiery EMS space is that there’s social contracts that are given. I always laugh about non-disclosure agreements and these massive service level agreement contracts, but at the end of the day, a person that is only as good as their word. Really, we’re navigating the whole world through social contracts, and that is through oral communication and through physical body language.
At the end of the day, I really, I think it’s a really one of the most important things we could talk about, especially in today’s society. Where I do feel like we are so divided as society. Like, it’s almost like society is forcing us to pick sides, and I just want people to know there’s a third option. Like the third option is core values and aligning our interests around a set of values that are good for humans. That look at humans from a set of core values that, you know, insights good from folks versus just trying to find the angle of attack from a position that that’s, it’s gonna be really tough for society to get along if we’re creating a stance or a position from an angle of our own perspective.
Greg McKeown:
You are worried that we are losing the art of understanding each other.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah. The art of relating like our ability to relate with another human from any walk of life, from any circumstance, from a fair and authentic place. I worry about that. That is something that really, yeah, that I’m really concerned for. I think humanity, we really need to get back to center here.
Greg McKeown:
So much again to unpack from this. Let me just go back for a moment to what you were saying about speaking at Pluralsight versus speaking in a podcast or in a way where you can’t see who is hearing. And so you can’t adjust or think through their very specific set of challenges. And it reminds me that one of the original philosophers, I think Socrates, who believed that writing was a form of educational prostitution because you put your sacred words down and then you have no control as to who will read it or how they’ll read it. And so the whole second side of the conversation is not one that you can participate de directly in. And so your words can easily get strained and stretched out of their original meaning because of their filters and so on. So what you said there reminded me of that. And that you take that seriously. That means a lot to you.
Okay. Another thing I want to connect to is something that you said earlier; it made me think that the very beginning of this shift between being in our own heads versus being able to be in someone else’s head is the moment we suspend judgment.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
If we’re full of judgment, there is no space for understanding there. There’s no space for even attempting to see it from their point of view and what they’re really going through.
Nate Walkingshaw:
So I’ll respond kind of on the initial thing that you just said, and then we can move on from that. So I think, you know, we as people need to be aware that we are just engineered with unconscious bias, and as soon as you are self-aware that you’re engineered with unconscious bias, then that should automatically trigger the holding judgment and withholding judgment and allowing yourself to get to know somebody’s world truth and experience.
So I think that’s just good hygiene, like good interaction design is good interaction thinking with any other person is in order for you to suspend judgment, you really have to put your unconscious bias in check and be awake to that and not like people are like, what is that? Give me an example of that. Like expediency bias. Like a lot of people make decisions because, you know, they feel pressed for time.
A lot of people have familiarity bias. So people tend to give decisions to people that they know because they’re close to them, because they’re familiar because they trust them because there’s granted trust. But, that might be problematic because they might not be the best person suited for a role in a job or a top performer. But we hire the person that is the most familiar to us.
Those are kind of just like inherently engineered things into human beings that we just, we need to know, and we actually need to build practices within our own psychology to combat those. So good practices in hiring people at a job, for instance, is to make sure that your recruiters give you a very diverse pallet of people even though you think you wanna hire this candidate or, in fact, that candidate is the most familiar and is the most competent and best suited, it’s still just good practice to run other folks through the process to keep yourself honest and to provide you and your company the very best shot at it. It’s just things that matter. These are like little nuances, but they matter so much in the large scheme of things.
Greg McKeown:
I love that. And it reminds me of the 10th man rule, which is the idea that if nine individuals in a group of 10 receive the same information and agree on the resolution, it’s the responsibility of the 10th person to argue the case for the unlikely scenarios.
Nate Walkingshaw:
A hundred percent. Yeah. And that, and those are, those are good ideas for boardroom practices, by the way. Like when you’re in a boardroom, and everyone is excited about going the one direction, I’ve had to play this role a ton of times where it’s okay, gosh dang it, like I have to be the antithesis now. So I love where we’re going. I actually want this idea too, but now I’m going to have to go ahead and reverse basically every idea that we think is a good one, I’m going to turn them into the unhappy path or the bad idea or hey, let’s, what happens if this goes wrong? And the room is like, what are you doing? Mm. Like we have momentum. This is already over the hill.
Greg McKeown:
It’s just so uncomfortable for us all now. It’s so awkward. We don’t really want to deal with conflict here.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Exactly.
Greg McKeown:
I had an interesting experience with that as a facilitator, where everyone in the room but one person. It was like a natural ninth man; let’s say it was a woman; the principal is, of course, the same. And so what I asked everyone to do is, okay, stop for a second. We’re gonna have everyone write down the opposite argument. So whatever your opposition was before, you now complete the reverse it. And what was amazing and actually stunned the group into silence, let’s say about an hour later, was that after they had wrestled with the other side and they then presented that case, they actually changed their view. And it was completely reversed. So I’m not saying it always happens that way, but in this instance, every yes before was now a no every no was a yes. And they sat there, actually shocked at what just happened; what, how is it? We were so sure before and now was so sure now, and I thought it was a really important moment for the group. It was like a meta moment as they learn about their own way of decision-making, the limits of their own thinking in the past, how sure they can be, and how important it is to get it right rather than to be right.
Nate Walkingshaw:
That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I think it’s amazing.
Greg McKeown:
Tell me now about these experiences that you had where you had wordless patients in the ambulance.
Nate Walkingshaw:
Yeah, I’ve had a couple of these experiences throughout my career. Not only did I work in the fire and emergency medical space, but I also worked for a company in Salt Lake City, Utah, called CT, a Community treatment alternative. Everyone that I interacted with was either high-functioning or low-functioning autistic, and what was great about that is you had a non-verbal and verbal and really the ambulance prepared me for being able to work, like to be able to do this work. And you very quickly understand that the social contracts that are happening between two people, the vast majority of the time, they’re not happening through oral communication. Like even in the middle of our interview, like when you and I are talking, I’m looking at eye movement, I’m looking at repositioning of yourself and your seat. I’m looking at you, pulling your glasses on and off, right to go research; you’re constantly purveying the body language of another person. And I’m tuning my responses based off of your, and I’s interaction design here. Not through really oral communication but really through you and I having this experience together through video, and that’s happening. That happened for me. I learned the value proposition of that just based off of how I would engage or disengage a patient or how I’d engage or disengage someone at, you know, at a group home when you decide to lean into a situation and get involved because things are getting too intense or we or you need to redirect a situation all based off of somebody getting physically agitated. And then how do you figure out how to disarm that situation to create safety or to create an opportunity to learn something that all happened through those nuanced experiences.
So when you get that package, and then you get to go transport that into the professional world, and you get to go work with teams, and you get to go build teams, it’s super useful to build product for customers to work with teams who have to build products for through customers so that you can look at the seams or the nuances or the cracks to make those products ultimately connect with a person.
And like, really, that was the mashing up of the healthcare experience and then turning that into an entrepreneurial experience that goes and builds human-centered products. That was like the proving ground, if you will, for that.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s a wrap for part one of this conversation with Nate Walkingshaw. What is one thing that stood out for you today? What is one thing you can do immediately to put this into action? And who is somebody that you can share this episode with so that they can be part of the conversation, they can subscribe and help you to be able to continue in this journey towards your highest contribution. Thank you. Really thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
