Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
Imagine waking up one day after decades of achievement in the military and corporate world and realizing that you don’t even know what you want. That’s when Matt Pepzel hit a wall. In 2020, he pulled the Ask Hard questions lever. Who am I really? Where do I belong? What difference am I making? And rather than lean into his external success, which he had plenty of, he paused, he looked back, and he reconstructed what leadership in life meant for him. And in this episode, we’re going to uncover how Matt deconstructed his career, rewired his identity, and emerged with a purpose that transcends accolades and titles. Matt, welcome to the Life Fulfilled podcast.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:00:50]:
Thank you so much, Bernie. I’m honored to be here.
Bernie Borges [00:00:52]:
Well, I’m honored to have you. And I want to give a brief background on your background. You began your professional journey as a United States Marine. Thank you for your service. After you completed deployments and you transitioned into the civilian world, you earned not one, but two advanced degrees, an MBA and a PhD in psychology. And then you climbed the ranks in software product leadership. And now, Matt, today you are known as a talent optimization expert.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:01:23]:
And.
Bernie Borges [00:01:23]:
And you’re author of the book Expand the Circle, where the mission of that book is to help leaders break free of outdated patterns and cultivate enlightened leadership. So, really impressive background, Matt, and you know where I’d like to begin. I don’t think this is going to surprise you. I’d like to take you back to 2020. I almost said 1920, but no, 2020. That wall moment that you. You speak of. Tell us about that wall moment.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:01:51]:
Okay, so, Matt, you probably know that my approach to everything that I do on the Life Fulfilled podcast in my business at Fulfill the Work academies, based on what I call the five life pillars. Health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy. And the whole idea behind that is just for all of us to take a holistic view of our lives and not just get all wrapped up in one dimension of it and then feel the weight of whatever we’re feeling. So I say that as context in my follow up question is this, did you, were you thinking that way whether or not you were using those five pillars? That’s really not what I’m asking. What I’m asking is, were you thinking holistically or were you more sort of compartmentalized, you know, in that career journey?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:02:57]:
And what I came to find out is that it was really feeling the limitations of my own self interest. And so that’s really how that wall felt to me, is it felt very foreign. I felt like I was in free fall and I was not completely in a. In a depression kind of state or anything, but just feeling like everything was muted. Everything was just a little bit lacking the vitality that I had known by, by pursuing so many achievements that just that that same joy and that same spark just wasn’t there. And I knew I had to make a change.
Bernie Borges [00:03:31]:
Okay, so, Matt, you probably know that my approach to everything that I do on the Life Fulfilled podcast in my business at Fulfill the Work academies, based on what I call the five life pillars. Health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy. And the whole idea behind that is just for all of us to take a holistic view of our lives and not just get all wrapped up in one dimension of it and then feel the weight of whatever we’re feeling. So I say that as context in my follow up question is this, did you, were you thinking that way whether or not you were using those five pillars? That’s really not what I’m asking. What I’m asking is, were you thinking holistically or were you more sort of compartmentalized, you know, in that career journey?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:04:17]:
I think I was definitely in a career phase, you know, based on my age, my mindset, these types of things. But I’ve always taken a little bit of a holistic approach. I’ve always tried to be well rounded. I have had an eclectic set of interests and passions. And I am a consummate frameworker, Bernie. I always like to think through and be holistic in my approach and look at systems kind of at a high level. But in that regard, I didn’t feel like there was. I knew I wanted to stay focused on doing meaningful work because I enjoy work.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:04:48]:
I look at work as something that has a chance for me to make a contribution to potentially help others create value. Certainly at the time that I was experiencing this, I enjoyed the company I worked for. I just didn’t necessarily enjoy the work I was doing there. And so I would say that it was probably an overemphasis, as happens to us at different phases of our lives where we may over index on something you can imagine. Like, I’ve had different times in my life where I’ve had to require, like, a minor surgery or something. Well, shoulders tend to be problematic for me. For example, I’ve had three different shoulder surgeries during those moments. Yeah, I’m much more focused on physical recovery and fitness.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:05:23]:
For example, work is kind of one of those things that I’ve had show up more prevalently than others. But I’ve definitely taken a holistic approach, and I’ve enjoyed everything from certainly my family, my learning, even outside of kind of work subjects and things too. But in that moment, it all seemed a little bit flat.
Bernie Borges [00:05:43]:
So, Matt, you and I are both in the same professional circles that I’ll just characterize at a very high level around the word leadership. And with your early career, beginning in the United States Marines and then in the corporate life, you’ve been exposed to leadership in many facets, and you have embraced what you call enlightened leadership. And I’d love for you to unpack that. What do you mean by enlightened leadership?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:06:13]:
Yeah, I think that a lot of what passes for leadership today was really informed by models of hierarchical organizations. The Industrial Revolution leadership theory that was developed in the 60s and 70s, you know, you’re talking about 50, 60 years ago. And to me, an enlightened form is one that is willing to move past those limited in those historically defined contexts, if you will, when it comes to leadership. And so basically, what happens is that we have to remember that everything is changing when it comes to the technology landscape, the social landscape, generational differences, the nature of life that we experience it today. And that’s a good thing, that things have continued to evolve. It’s our tendency to want to keep things as they are, or to even want to go backwards in some cases, to an earlier, simpler time. That’s where the trouble sets in. There’s a fluidity to life, and there’s a fluidity toward our environments that we operate in.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:07:13]:
And I find that while everything around us has changed and we pretty clearly understand that our leadership hasn’t. And so, to me, the journey of exploring what enlightened leadership can look like was really born of that willingness to just take a blank sheet of paper and say, how do we need to lead in the modern frame? And I found it deliciously ironic that mindfulness practices and contemplative traditions from thousands of years ago may just hold the clue to a better way of operating in the modern frame.
Bernie Borges [00:07:44]:
Okay, well, you said a lot there, and I love that deliciously ironic statement. So I want to drill down a little bit on that because you really got my brain cycles going. You know, you’re saying that a lot of the leadership principles are outdated, based on decades old practices and premises. And, and, and boy, I think you would agree, Matt, that even in the last one or two or three years that we’re living in, things have been evolving so rapidly. A lot of it is technology, some of it is geopolitical, social. I mean, it’s just all of these ingredients that are coming together that kind of make the world kind of crazy and moving really fast. And so how does enlightened leadership then evolve, you know, with the current set of events, circumstances, climate, etc.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:08:37]:
Yeah, I think that at the fundamental level, when we start ripping away sort of things that appear to us to be true are more stories that we tell ourselves or meaning that we infer as opposed to what’s actually there. I think that this is where the wisdom traditions help us kind of take a fresh look at these things. And when you start to think about an enlightened approach, one that basically says, let’s look at intentionality, what I try to teach today is that when it comes to intentions, we should work from the outside in. We should think about the mission, we should think about the people around us and eventually, and only eventually make it to our own self interest. So much of what I hit in that wall was the exhaustion of self interest and realizing that it was distinctly limited. When you think about billions of people on the planet, or you think about the entire world and universe out there, when you’re focused on your own narrow slice of your self interest, it’s microscopically small compared to what’s possible in terms of the leadership impact we can have. So I find that intention works best outside in. But when it comes to accountability and taking action, then we need to work inside out.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:09:42]:
We need to ask, what can I do? How can I show up? What sort of discernment and judgment do I need to practice? What self awareness do I need that I don’t have right now? And then how can I expand that out to my team and to other parts of my function or my entire organization or even beyond that? So I find that we tend to do leadership backwards. The intentionality often starts from within. We teach leaders to be lone wolves, to think about themselves and to really fixate on their own sort of needs and their own self interest as opposed to the opposite. And when it comes to accountability, we teach them to hold other people accountable. And to have them take responsibility or to, you know, work on those things that are kind of as opposed to working inside out. So I find that this enlightened approach, and one that basically was born of some meditation practices I discovered, really helps us to understand, like, can you start with yourself when it comes to your attention and awareness, but then can you expand that circle, which became the name of the book when it comes to thinking about people, for example, in your immediate family or your immediate, you know, co workers, for example. And then can you expand that out a little further to people who maybe you don’t work with quite as often in a work context, and then all the way out into your customers, your stakeholders, your suppliers, and just keep going out into the broader society. It’s a very powerful practice to go through to recognize your place in all this.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:11:01]:
And for someone like myself, realizing that I had exhausted my own self interest and saying that the amount of need and the impact that I can potentially have through my leadership is effectively limitless if I’m willing to work from the outside in. So to me, that was just a real breakthrough and one that didn’t come a moment too soon, I would say.
Bernie Borges [00:11:21]:
I. I have a hunch that a lot of what you said is in your book, because you said it from the heart and you said it as if you not only know it intuitively, but you. You know it emotionally and rationally. So, and I want to, again, I want to unpack something that you said that really resonates with me, Matt, because it’s something that I talk about a lot. It’s part of my own leadership training program, and that’s self awareness. You mentioned that leaders need to be self aware. I find in my work that that is a huge area of attention that is needed in leadership. That in fact, I recently came across a statistic from Harvard, a Harvard study, and I’ve been citing this statistic, and it says that only 10 to 15% of us are sufficiently self aware.
Bernie Borges [00:12:11]:
Only 10 to 15% of us. And if you translate that into leadership and you do the inverse on the math, that means that 85% of us are not sufficiently self aware. So how do you deal with that or tackle that, you know, in the context of your own leadership work?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:12:29]:
It’s a great point. And I think that it’s something that is absolutely essential for the highest levels of leadership and even everything in between. As a result of writing the book, I was contacted by Boston College and they asked me to come and teach. And now I teach at the Graduate level Self Awareness in Leadership. That’s a class that I teach every semester and it’s very, very well attended, as you can imagine, because people instinctively know, I think they feel that self awareness is easy to talk about, but it’s harder to practice. And the work that you’re citing from Tasha Urich is so true. I mean, we feel that we’re self aware, but when you find out that you’re actually not as aware as you might think, how can we bridge that gap? And there are techniques, everything from assessments and exercises. There’s a deep emotional intelligence.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:13:13]:
We teach things around mindfulness, around resonant leadership, different styles, et cetera, growth, mindset, emotional agility, all this great stuff. And it really comes down to being willing to sort of look in the mirror, call timeout, go a little deeper, understand what shows up for you, doing that uncomfortable thing for leaders, which is to not be so busy that we are just bobbing along the surface of the water, but allow ourselves to deepen into that sense of what’s going on for me, what’s showing up for me in terms of my beliefs and my thoughts and my emotions and how do these combine to affect my outward behaviors. I feel like it’s such a great service that you’re doing for everyone through your framework to be able to emphasize self awareness because it’s something not take for granted. I see too many leaders who get surprised when top performer on their team quits because they were not having a great experience on their team or they get passed over for promotion. And when the example of the performance review comes back, they’re like, I had no idea. You’re like, well, how would you? You have extremely low self awareness. So this is something that we can avoid, but only through self study. And by combining self awareness, yes, but also with self acceptance, we’re inevitably going to find things that we don’t love about what we see when we look in that mirror, so to speak.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:14:32]:
And that’s okay. None of us are perfect. I’ve been in rooms with thousands of leaders who are practicing at the highest level, for example at executive education programs at Harvard Business School. And guess what? There wasn’t a perfect leader in that room. Right. And so it comes down to this willingness to practice some level of humility and acceptance to take accountability for those areas that we need to work on when we don’t like what we see. But also to accept the fact that awareness is this unfolding, never ending journey again. We’re not fixed, we’re fluid.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:15:01]:
And we have to Remember that?
Bernie Borges [00:15:03]:
Yeah, I like that. I like that. You know, the other thing that I say on this is that we have to give ourselves permission to go through the exercise of building and creating a level of self awareness beyond where we are today. And I say that intentionally, Matt, because if I’m a leader working in corporate and I get a calendar invite to a leadership training event that has been purchased and basically I just have to show up, right? It’s like I don’t have a choice. This is something the company is doing and I’m just one of the people going through. I still have to give myself permission to go through whatever self awareness exercises in that leadership training because I could show up and emotionally put up a wall and fake it and go through the motions and, and not do the exercise. So I only say that to really put an exclamation point on how important it is for leaders to be willing to go through that self awareness exercise. Would you agree?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:16:02]:
Yeah, 100%. And I feel like, you know, I feel my. I feel very fortunate that my career really began with military service because leadership was not something we just assumed would happen or just take for granted. So to me, in those high stakes environments like military service, in the emergency response services, in sports, and whatever you want to pick, I think there’s always been this notion that leadership matters, that the way we conduct ourselves, that self awareness is important, that we need to also borrow the eyes of others in terms of receiving feedback. I think we teach leaders how to give feedback reasonably well, but we almost never teach them how to receive feedback. And I think that’s something that we have to fix if we’re going to have high levels of self awareness. What’s happened though, since Bernie, as you know, is that we’ve seen such tremendous change and such rapid change in our workforces when it comes to everything from generational evolution to the rise of AI and technology, the geopolitical strife you described a little bit earlier. And so what happens now is they’re all high stakes environments.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:17:07]:
When we’re seeing the levels of burnout and stress and chronic challenges, the lack of trust in leadership that plagues so many companies today, it’s. It’s hard out there right now. And so every environment’s a high stakes environment. All the more reason to look to those high stakes industries and traditions like the military, like emergency response, and basically say, like, how do you do leadership well in those extreme environments? And I think that you’re going to find exactly what you shared, which is that the willingness to be self aware and to have a training exercise that somebody’s invested in. When you go to don’t just go through the motions. That’s an opportunity, that’s a chance to go deep, that’s a chance to work on the craft. Leadership is a, is a discipline. It’s a craft that we have to work on and we have to study it, we have to practice it, we have to reflect on it both when it goes well and when it doesn’t go so well.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:17:58]:
It’s something we have to work to master constantly. Constantly.
Bernie Borges [00:18:02]:
So you know the concept of foresight versus hindsight, right? And so I, I say that in the context of this question that I have for you, man. And that is, you know, you started your career as a Marine, you entered civilian life and then you got two advanced degrees, an MBA, a PhD and then you became a talent optimization architect and expert author, speaker, and probably other things that I don’t even know about. So what was the foresight? To what extent was there foresight as you were going through this journey versus the hindsight of going through the journey and then arriving at a, at a place where you felt like you had purpose and you’re doing really what you have a passion for?
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:18:50]:
Yeah, I think there was always a bit of foresight in that I would feed good energy that felt very authentic. So from the time I was in fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a Marine because I just heard about them, I was told they were the toughest, so I wanted to be tough. So at a very young age I kind of made that decision. And as the opportunity, opportunity presented itself as I got older, then I went ahead and took advantage of that. And then when I got in the service, I said, okay, I’m a Marine now. What’s the toughest thing I can do within my field? And they’re like, well, Special Forces. I said, great, I’m going to do that too. So I always had that sort of follow, that energy.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:19:24]:
When something really grabs me deeply, then I have the good sense to honor it, so to speak. The same happened to me on a PhD program. I actually made the phone call to learn about how the program works and enrolled the same day. Six year program. And I’m just like, yeah, I’m doing it just feels right. Not a lot of consideration about the realities of how you’re going to pull it off. Many years later, when I heard about Ironman, I thought, that’s a big triathlon, I’m going to go ahead and try it. And then you could look at that and say, well, you’re a slow runner, you can’t swim the length of a pool, you don’t own a bike.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:19:57]:
Like, why are you signing up for this ridiculous race? I don’t know. It grabbed me and it’s something I’m going to do. Four years later, I finished it. So all those things I’m saying is that the foresight is always in the short term. Even looking at a four, five, six year sort of achievement window to train for something that doesn’t ever. It never scared me if I was grabbed, you know, deeply by the fit and the nature of that achievement. In hindsight, what has showed up for me is something that I did not anticipate, which is I had considered myself a lifelong learner. And so I’ve always done my best to consume, to pay attention, to apply lessons.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:20:35]:
I’ve studied business and technology and psychology and all these things, and I’ve just truly enjoyed it. I love being in the classroom. I love informal learning. I just love it all. Love it all. What I didn’t realize, though, Bernie, is that as I got older, that love of learning has kind of grown and shifted into also a love of teaching. So now I’m still learning every day. But I’m also, as an elder states person, I think, suppose with my gray whiskers, I’ve gotten to a stage in my career where I was able to start to teach a bit.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:21:06]:
And so now, whether I’m writing on LinkedIn very informally, or whether I’m in a literal classroom on campus at Boston College teaching or anything in between, I’m very, very comfortable with that teaching role. And so that’s something that I had not anticipated or even put, you know, the, the pieces together all that quickly. So I, I think both are delightful in the sense of, of knowing when you’re grabbed and you’re intentional about something, also when you’re surprised, you know, pleasantly by something. I think we just have to open ourselves to those both types of possibilities.
Bernie Borges [00:21:39]:
Yeah, and I share that passion, Matt. I, I love to teach myself and, and, and likewise, I consider myself a, a lifelong learner. You know, fun little.
Bernie Borges [00:21:52]:
Many years ago I thought about going for a Ph.D. and I just, I didn’t bite the bullet. I didn’t make the commitment. It was just something that I just saw as a, as a tall mountain. So I have great respect and admiration for someone like yourself who did it. Because it’s not like you took time off, right? I mean, you were still working and doing life and also pursuing your PhD, and it was a long journey, as you said. I think you said six years. So just tremendous admiration for that.
Bernie Borges [00:22:24]:
Where I want to go next and probably last in this conversation is part of my describing you and kind of going through your bio is describing you as a talent optimization architect. What is that? Matt? Unpack that for us.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:22:40]:
Yeah, if you think about what happens in organizations when it comes to the people practices, we don’t really always have language for what that is. If we think about traditional HR functions like performance management, yeah, that has place. But what’s the way that we describe the discipline of how to get the people part right, for lack of better term. So in about 2018, we put our heads together and came up with this notion of talent optimization just as a way of describing what is it that every organization must do in terms of its people practices. And ended up, I can summarize it by saying we have to design winning teams, we have to hire top talent, inspire our people to greatness, and diagnose people problems that inevitably crop up. So when you think about those four main disciplines or different practices, everything that we do kind of fits into them in one way or another. So today what I find is that we tend to approach business in this dual mindset of are we talking about business or are we talking about people? When in reality, the two are more integrated and blended than we could ever really fully appreciate. So to me, they’re two sides of the same coin.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:23:43]:
And I say, what’s the work to be done and who’s doing the work? And when we blend those two together, we get better business outcomes. So at the end of the day, what you want to basically hold your leaders accountable for? And if you’re the senior most executive, what you want to hold yourself accountable for is, are we producing the highest possible levels, the optimal levels, I say, of performance and engagement, well being, career growth and impact. And so we’re climbing that ladder. Well, unfortunately, many organizations get stuck on that first rung performance, thinking that the others don’t quite matter. So let’s just force people to return to office. Let’s just jam productivity tools like AI down their throats and everything’s going to be okay because we’ll hit our number. And the answer is like, it’s so much more complicated than that. When we actually hold ourselves to a higher standard and we realize that these things aren’t disconnected, that the people’s welfare or something I now call performance, people and purpose are all fully integrated, that’s where our businesses really shift toward flourishing.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:24:43]:
When it comes to yes, the bottom line, we have to run profitable businesses, but at the same time, the people, outcomes, and even the broader impact of purpose and meaning and fulfillment, as you say, these things are possible for us if we take an optimal approach. So talent optimization gives us the mechanism, the architecture to actually do that, using a combination of data and science and techniques and lessons and learning and training and application and everything in between.
Bernie Borges [00:25:09]:
Love it.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:25:10]:
Love it.
Bernie Borges [00:25:11]:
Totally aligned with everything that I stand for and everything that I’m doing and fulfilled the work academy. So thank you for that explanation. Well, Matt, why don’t we wrap here? And of course, I invite you to share with my listener where people can connect with you, get into your world, learn more. You’ve got a lot going on. You’ve got a podcast yourself. So tell us, tell my listener where they can just connect with you.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:25:32]:
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is a great place. I love to hang out on LinkedIn. I love to share tips over there. I love to make new connections over there. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I welcome that. If you are a podcast lover, which obviously you are. Sure. My podcast Lead the People is something I do every week.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:25:46]:
Enjoy that as well. Those are two great places to learn more about me and to help us have those happy collisions.
Bernie Borges [00:25:54]:
Terrific. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Life With Full Podcast. I have enjoyed this conversation thoroughly and look forward to continuing it.
Matt Poepsel, PhD [00:26:03]:
Thank you, Bernie.
