They get defensive.
They shut down.
They argue.
Now it's no longer about the work, it's about protecting feelings.
This is why no one wants to be accountable.
In this episode, Shane Jacob teaches the Separation Skill, a core part of the Worth Work System.
The problem is simple:
Nearly all of us believe our behavior defines our value.
So when you correct behavior, people hear:
“There is something wrong with me.”
That belief is what creates defensiveness, conflict, and wasted management time.
The Separation Skill changes that.
You will learn how to:
When this skill is applied:
We all struggle with feedback, accountability, or defensiveness.
This is how you fix behavior without creating more problems.
Welcome to this episode of Solving People Problems in the Workplace. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. I'm coming to you with a perspective from behind bars, locked up in a prison, and the dynamic there. Coming to you with 30 plus years of training and working with horses and the perspective that that gave me on relationships, and coming to you with over 30 years of dealing with employees and managers and customers in my own companies.
So today we're talking about the Worth Work System, and that is the system that I designed. And I want to tell you, just as a recap, the Worth Work System, the purpose, this is important to know: the purpose is designed to increase productivity, increase performance, employee performance, and create higher performing teams, have more alignment, create psychological safety, which, according to me, means the feeling, it's trusting that you're safe from value judgment.
In the workplace, so it's trusting that you're safe from value judgment. More on that to come, but that's psychological safety. The Worth Work System is designed and meant to, and will, reduce the amount of time that managers need to spend managing people problems instead of moving work forward, instead of managing the work. A lot of times we're stuck managing people problems.
And the goal of the Worth Work System is that employees become more self-reliant. And what I mean by that is that people and teams, our people, the people that we lead, require less management around people problems. They have more clarity, more alignment, more cooperation, and more unity. That is the purpose of the Worth Work System. Managers still need to manage the work, but be able to do it with less interference and less emotional disruption.
And when I talk about being self-reliant, I'm not talking about self-directed. We still need to have good communication, we still need to follow systems, we all need to be on board together, and we still need to have a structure of who's in charge and who's responsible and all that. I'm more talking about emotionally self-reliant. And that just means that you being more emotionally self-reliant means that you have less conflict in the workplace. You handle your own emotions better and your own reactions. So we have more cooperation.
And we have less time your manager needs to spend managing people problems and managing all the emotional disruption and all the stuff that goes on with people, as opposed to, I mean, it's enough just to try to manage work and move it forward.
Okay, the focus of this episode, this focus of today's discussion in the Worth Work System, one piece of that is today. What today is about is what I call the separation skill. And what I mean by that is separating behavior from value. Value meaning the worth of an individual.
Okay, so there's two steps to that, and the two steps are: first of all, accepting the idea that it's possible to separate behavior from value, and then learning the skill and practicing it and implementing the separation skill.
So what exactly does all that mean? And I'll just tell you to start out with, this is difficult, because this idea is the total opposite of normal thinking. We're taught that what we do determines our value. We're taught and conditioned: hey, if you get good grades, you're a good kid. If you behave, you're good. And if you don't, you're bad.
And then we go into adulthood and we see that money equals value. And I don't mean dollars in value, but the amount of money or the amount of success you have determines how good of a person you are, how much value that you have, how much worth you have as a human being, how much success. Your appearance, the kind of car you drive, the kind of house you have, the kind of clothes you have, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things, right, determine your worth as a human being.
And what this results in is just constant value judgments about people. And that's kind of how we roll in the world. We don't do it on purpose. And we hear things like, don't judge me. There's a lot of confusion about what that means, and I'm going to try to clear it up for you today.
Because we automatically assign worth. In other words, you are this kind of a person, or you are that, or you're this or you're that, based on what you do. We believe that some people are worth more, some people are worth less, based on what they do, their results, their status. And all this just becomes the operating system for how we treat people. How we value people becomes how we treat people.
So what I'm suggesting is a whole new belief system, a whole new belief system that says, this is what I'm asking you to consider adopting, to consider accepting. Because this is the first step: to agree with, and agree to develop, the belief that behavior has absolutely no effect on a human being's value. None whatsoever. Zero, nada. Nothing can change a human being's worth.
We are all inherently perfectly valuable, 100% valuable, regardless of what a person does, regardless of what a person doesn't do, and regardless of what has been done to a person. So we all have perfect worth, and imperfect behavior. That's the idea.
Now, I say that, and it's like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. But you can't just hear this idea and automatically accept it, because we've had lifetimes of conditioning, not necessarily intentional and purposeful conditioning, but lifetimes of conditioning. And there's all this automaticity, all this that's just happening automatically. It's playing in the background, and we believe that if a person does a certain thing, then that determines them. That's the kind of person they are. That's kind of a less-than person, and this is kind of a more-than person.
This is a big shift. I'm actually asking you to really think about the idea that every human being, regardless of what they do, including you and me, has the same perfect value. 100%. Not 99, not 101.
If you fully buy into that, that means that there's no bad people. None. Regardless of what people do. Now, people do horrendous, horrible things to each other, right? I've done a lot of things that I regret in my life, to people. And that includes everything.
So a lot of times people say to me, well, what about this and that and the other? What about a person who does all these horrible things to each other, they're horrible things that human beings do, like I said. What about somebody who, whatever, pick a, you know, rapes or murders somebody? What about them?
And I got this from Brooke Castillo, and it makes sense to me, and maybe it'll make sense to you. And that is that when everybody is born, they're just a little baby, and we don't value them. We just look at them and we just say, wow, you're just this perfect little soul. And if that changes from the time that they're a baby to the time that they get older, then that means that behavior equals the worth of that individual, that human being. I'm suggesting that it does not.
Now, I'm not suggesting that behavior doesn't matter, by any means. That's not what I'm talking about at all. What I'm talking about is that even though people do things that are just horrendous, it doesn't affect their worth as a human being. And I'm just asking you to consider that idea, because I don't believe it's ours to make those judgments anyway. I think that's where the confusion comes from.
A lot of us try to live right and do right. And a lot of us are Christians, and we buy into the idea that thou shalt not judge, and that it's up to God, that judgment is his, right? But yet we have to make judgments. So how does that work? And it can be confusing, right? Because we're making judgments all day long.
And I believe what the confusion is, is this: that what we need to do, and what we must do, is judge behavior. And behavior is important. What we do matters. It matters. But it's not for us to judge a person's worth.
A person's value, even based on what they do or don't do, I think that's not for us. I think that's God's. And I think when they say don't judge, that's what they're talking about. I firmly believe that. And that goes for you, the way that you view yourself, also.
So this is a pretty big concept. It's kind of hard to take in all at once, that what you do doesn't affect who you are. The kind of person you are doesn't make you a little bit less than. It doesn't make you a little bit deficient. It doesn't make you a little bit not enough, and that person a little bit more, and you're a little bit less. It doesn't make any of that.
And if you can buy into the idea, if you choose to buy into this idea, let me come back to the people. Let me finish the thought about the people that do these horrendous acts.
It reminds me of a story in a book called The Bible, where, back in that time, during the time of this story, if a woman would have committed adultery, it was a big horrendous thing. It was just unbelievably horrible. So what they would do at this time is they would gather together and gather up a bunch of rocks, and they'd pelt them, throw them at this lady until she died. That's the way they rolled back then.
Then this guy came along, Jesus, they called him. Anyway, he comes along one day and he's like, hey, hold on, fellas, time out here. Let's, give me a second here before you start chucking your rocks. And he says, if any of you haven't ever sinned, then go ahead and start throwing your rocks. But they'd all sinned. So they just put their stones down and they left, because well, there was none of them that had not sinned.
And then he told the lady, he said, go your way, and sin no more. So there were consequences, and this guy Jesus didn't say, hey, it's okay, and it was a good idea that you committed adultery. He just said, no more of that, go your own way.
The message that I took from that was that he's telling us, human beings, that we don't get to judge the value, we judge the behavior. But as far as what happens with, I don't want to get into religious beliefs and stuff like that, but the same principle is here: that we only judge the behavior. We judge the behavior and we have consequences for behavior. But we don't judge to the extent that we devalue the person enough to take their life for what they've done. So it's the idea that what we do doesn't determine who we are.
Now, this is also not an argument about capital punishment. I'm not even talking about that right now. What I'm talking about is that I believe people come into this world perfectly perfect, and we leave perfectly perfect, all of us, no matter what we've done. And some of us do absolutely ugly, terrible things to each other, and we also do amazingly kind and beautiful things in this lifetime. And that is called the human experience. And it's not for us to determine a human being's value based on what we did. We only judge the work, but we always protect the person.
Now this goes for you too. This is very important, because if you're a leader, this thought process begins with you. It must begin inside of you. You must accept the idea that you, to start with, regardless of what you have done, regardless of what you will do, regardless of what you haven't done and what you won't do, and regardless of what has been done to you, that nothing can change your perfect worth.
Now, I didn't know that and I didn't believe that for a long period of time. And during that period of time, I mentioned when I opened this podcast that I'd spent some time at the Crowbar Motel, in jail, in prison, as a matter of fact, both, actually, for crimes that I had committed.
And because of the things that I had done, I devalued myself. I thought something's wrong with me, I'm less than the rest of the world because of what I'd done. They call that shame, where you are a certain kind of way because of what you've done. So I lived with this shame. And as a result of that shame, I had a negative impact on my life and everybody that I influenced during that period of time.
So the reason I'm telling you this is that I thought, because I had done something that I regretted, something that I was ashamed of, that it made me less than. I devalued me. I based my worth on what I had done. And because I did that, I had a massive negative impact on my life. And it also had a massive negative impact on everyone that I was around. My family, my friends, all my acquaintances, were affected by my thinking, by that thought.
And what I've noticed, and you will notice too, if you choose to consider and buy into this idea, is that as you accept the idea that you have perfect worth regardless of what you do, a lot of things change. One of the things that changes is you do less things that you regret. So that's a pretty big one right there. You would think that this doesn't mean that what you do doesn't matter, we're still responsible for what we do. We're accountable for everything that we do. And we must judge our own behavior and everybody and other people's behavior, just not the worth of our personal worth, or other people's personal worth or value.
I've noticed that I, and other people, as we accept and internalize this idea, do less things that we regret. We actually have less of what I consider my own negative behavior than I did before, when I was living in shame.
The other thing that I see happens, and this is, by the way, this is all documented by decades of psychological research. One in particular I can think of is Kristen Neff's research on self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. Anyway, another thing that happens is that as we internalize that belief, that's the way we begin to relate to other people. And we see people in a different way. We also begin to see them in a way where what they do, we don't make that mean something about their value.
In other words, we just look at them and we say, wow, that was something that you did that was negative, you did something that I'll bet you really regret. But you can look at the other person and not make that mean that they're less than because they did it.
I gave some examples, and this happens all day, every day at work. Here's an example. It happened two days ago, here in my own company. My manager didn't show up for work. The yard manager didn't show up to work in my hay company. He just wasn't there. Yeah, it turns out he was just hungover and didn't come to work.
Now, most of us would look at that and just say, well, his drinking's out of control, he doesn't care, he's not accountable, he's irresponsible, he doesn't handle his alcohol, he parties too much, he's not committed to his job. You could make this mean a thousand things about the individual. These are called value judgments. It's what I'm making this mean about that person, all the negative things that I can make that mean about the person.
Or, I can look at that person and say, you did a negative thing, and you're still a perfect person. You're still 100% valuable and worthy, and I still have perfect regard and respect for you. And that doesn't mean that I'm not going to judge, there's going to be a consequence for his behavior at his company.
And I'm sure in life in other ways. So it doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. It just means that it doesn't affect his value. I can still look at him without disgust, and I can still look at him kindly, with respect, even with love, as a fellow human being who sometimes does things poorly, does things bad, makes bad decisions, and sometimes does things amazing and makes incredibly great decisions, and operates in integrity, and sometimes doesn't, and sometimes does.
And that's how I choose to look at myself and the world. And this is the key. It's overriding and changing the belief system that we were taught, not intentionally taught, but that we just accepted because that's the way things were. What people do makes them a certain way. Behavior equals judgment. We say what you do determines who you are, and things like this. That's the way that we roll. Nobody said not to do it that way till today. Or maybe this isn't the first time, but I'm suggesting the separation skill is separating what we do from who we are. It's separating behavior from worth.
Now, I didn't always believe this. What I did was my identity. It made me feel not good enough, like something was wrong with me. And when I internally believed that, it had a negative impact on not only myself, but everybody around me.
Now, what difference does this make in the workplace? If I can accept this idea, and by the way, it takes some work, it's not going to just happen overnight. There's steps in belief creation that are necessary. I'm going to give you just a couple of them. That's for another podcast.
But first of all, I need to understand, I need to recognize and have the awareness of what I currently believe about what people do and what that means about them. I need to recognize my current belief, what I currently believe is true about behavior when it comes to a person's worth. Okay, that's one.
Second of all, the second step is to choose what I want to believe. The next step is to ask myself, is what I want to believe, could that be possible? In other words, if I want to believe that no matter what I do, nothing can affect my value, can I accept that that could be true? In other words, is that not too far of a stretch for me to believe? And if I say to myself that there's no way that's true, I mean, I'd like to believe it, it's just not true, then I have to back it down and do what we call a ladder thought, which is somewhere in between what you currently believe and what you want to believe. And then you ladder it, you change the thought as you accept the new thought, and then you get closer to the ideal thought.
The final step is then you practice thinking it. When you practice thinking the thought that you want to believe, your brain is constantly looking for evidence that it's true. And as you constantly think that, as you repetitively think the thought that you want to believe, and you consistently are proving it to be true, it doesn't take very long for your brain to accept it as truth, and then it becomes a belief, or what you consider to be a fact.
And I consider what I'm talking about here, the separation skill, I consider it a fact. I believe it 100% that what people do has no effect on their value, on their worth.
Why this matters in the workplace, why am I talking about all this? Because it will change your life. It will turn it upside down, it will make it, these are foundational changes.
Now, we've all done something in our lifetime that we're ashamed of, that we feel shame. We want to hide and hunker down. We don't want to talk about that thing that we did. And we all experience shame. And what shame is, is that because of what I have done, I make that mean that I am less than somehow. I devalue myself. That is making a bad decision mean that I am a bad person. That's what shame is.
And shame doesn't feel good and it doesn't have a good result. If it was just that it felt bad and it was a good way to inspire good behavior, then I'd be all for shame. But the thing of it is, none of that's true. It doesn't work. It inspires more bad behavior and has a negative impact on yourself and everyone.
So if you can accept the idea that no matter what you do or don't do, or what's been done to you, that it doesn't have any effect on your value, now you're in a position to move forward and to make progress. And things start changing in a positive way.
And here's why it matters in the workplace. Because when, for example, somebody needs to correct you or give you feedback about what's happening, you will make that mean that something's wrong with you. So you get defensive, and then we have problems like that in the workplace. So much defensiveness. And my motto is: defensive is expensive. It takes so much time, and you can't make progress in the workplace. Conversations break down, it leads to conflict, misalignment, loss of productivity. Managers are spending all their time trying to manage people's emotions and get people to get along, instead of moving the work forward.
The separation skill, when you separate behavior from worth, you can strictly focus on the behavior, or judge the work, without attacking the person. Protect the person.
Now, if you've been very judgmental, if you let your frustration and your anger, and when you let all that come out, when people feel the judgment because of the way that they've been treated, you can't just say what you do doesn't matter anymore. I'm going to always protect the person, judge the work, and only protect the person. We need to say that so people know that that's what we're going for, but they don't immediately always buy in, particularly if we haven't been too good at it in the past.
If we've let frustration and how could you do this, you're this and that and the other, if we're constantly making value judgments in the past, it's going to take a little bit of time for people to be able to accept the idea. But when we say it and when we live it, then people start to buy into it and the trust starts to go up.
And what we have is when that happens, when human beings, and this must, we must believe it in our heart and soul about ourselves first, because the way that we relate to ourselves is the way that we relate to the world. And when we believe that in our heart and soul first, that's why I talked about us individually first as leaders. Then it's so much easier to come out.
Now I can look at somebody who doesn't show up for work and say, and I can't be just mad and make him, he's such an idiot and he's this and he's that and all the things that I can do. I can just look at him with compassion, even love, with kindness and with respect. I don't respect what he did. I just need to respect him.
And when I can do that with myself to begin with, it makes it so much easier to do it with other people. And when I can do that with other people, they begin to trust me. The defensiveness goes down, the respect goes up. And guess what else goes up? We have more openness, we have more engagement. People are willing to participate more and help and make recommendations. We have more innovation, we have faster correction, we have better conversations, even things like less turnover.
I mean, Google's research on Project Aristotle says the number one thing in high performing teams, the number one factor, is psychological safety. And psychological safety shoots up because you've created the environment for people to trust that they're safe from value judgment.
And psychological safety, I said earlier, I'll come back to this, here I'm coming back to it. Psychological safety, I'm going to say it again. My definition is that people feel, in the group, whatever the group is, the team, the workplace, the between you and the boss, your group, people feel safe. They trust that they are safe from value judgment. That means that they know that if they screw up, if they make a bad decision, that they're not going to have a value judgment. Somebody's not going to think they're a total idiot, or that they're this, or that they're that, or anything, because of what they've done.
Because in this group, we separate who we are, we separate what we do from who we are. So we can still have, there's still accountability, because what we do is important. That's why we're there. We're there to do what we're there to do and to be as successful, and to consistently improve what we're working on, so that we can be more productive and more profitable and more efficient and all that.
Really, it comes down to being more profitable, so that if the organization that we're at is more successful, then we're all going to get more of why we showed up. And that includes the dollars, but it also includes how we feel and how we get along with each other in the group, which is part of what we get out of our work.
So when we can strictly focus on the work, and people know that it's not about them, they're not defensive, they're open to look at the work and judge the work when they know it's not going to have a negative impact, we're not going to have negative feelings about them. When people feel safe from value judgment, everything just becomes more stable. We have more alignment, we're more productive.
The bottom line is that most people operate with a basic operating system that says that what we do equals our worth. The Worth Work System, the premise is that your worth is non-negotiable, it is solid, it is fixed, and nothing can change it. Behavior is what we need to change and work on and adjust.
And the separation skill, judge the work, protect the person, says that we do judge the work and it is important. And we always respect and regard the person. We always protect the person. That is the key. That is the principle of the Worth Work System. Judge the work, protect the person.
This changes the response that we get, it changes how people engage in the workplace, it changes how leaders lead. And this just attacks and reduces people problems at the root, at its core, because that is where they're coming from. Just about everything that we do or don't do is guided, or at the root of it, we are guided by what we believe to be true about ourselves.
And in the workplace, we're constantly, the stakes are high, because it's our money, it's our survival, everything's very important. And so we're constantly looking around, measuring what do people think about us, what does that mean about this and that, about my job, how much security do I have here, how much safety. The stakes are high.
When I can come into a workplace and I know that, regardless of what I do, I'm always going to be respected and regarded highly, and nothing can affect my worth in this group, that's an incredible place to work. And that is when the results start to happen.
It doesn't take that long, it just takes a focused effort. It takes a focused, consistent effort. First of all, like I said, the steps are: is to develop the belief. And in order to develop the belief for yourself, you've got to recognize what you currently believe. You've got to recognize what you would want to believe instead. And then you would want to ask yourself, if you the new belief, could you accept it as could be true. Could is the new belief, could it be true? If it is, go for it. If it's not, ratchet it down to something that you believe that could be true. Work on that one, and then adjust it up again.
And how we adjust it up again, and how we work on it, is by practicing thinking the same thought. So when something happens and I feel myself getting stressed, frustrated, and thinking thoughts about people, which I do all the time, right? When I see myself doing that, I ask myself, is that the way I want to think about this? And then I come back and I practice thinking my thoughts.
Hey, what's happening here, the behavior, is not good. But that doesn't mean that the people are not good. It just means that the behavior is not good. We need to focus on the behavior. And that mindset changes how my interactions with people, and they feel it. And as they start to feel it, they know what we're going for, judge the work, protect the person, because that's what we say our culture is about. When they know that, and when we live it, that's when the incredible results start to happen.
I've seen it in my lifetime, I've seen it in my company, and I know it to be true. And I also know that, regardless of what you do and or don't do, or what's been done to you, nothing can change your perfect worth. Your value is non-negotiable.
Stay with me.
Shane Jacob explains why most workplace conflicts start with one hidden belief: that what a person does determines what they're worth. In this episode of the Worth Work System, Shane uses a real example a manager who missed work after drinking too much to show the difference between judging behavior and judging a person's value. He shares his own experience with prison and shame to explain why this belief matters, and gives leaders a practical way to build psychological safety, reduce defensiveness, and hold people accountable without attacking who they are. Ideal for business owners, executives, HR leaders, and operations leaders who want fewer people problems and more productive teams.
The Separation Skill helps leaders fix workplace behavior without creating defensiveness. Many employees struggle with feedback because they believe their actions determine their value. When leaders separate behavior from worth, they can hold people accountable while protecting the person. The Worth Work System teaches leaders to judge the work, protect the person, and create an environment where people can accept feedback, correct mistakes, and improve.
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