KF #3. Manages Ambiguity Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Maggie, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Maggie Jackson
Oh, wonderful to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about your wisdom you’ve put forth in your book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. But first, I need to hear about you swimming in the Atlantic Ocean almost every day. What’s the story here?

Maggie Jackson
Well, it’s a pandemic story. I used to be a pool swimmer, and I’ve increasingly loved swimming the older I’ve gotten. And then I moved out to the countryside in Rhode Island from New York City during the pandemic, and got kind of really into swimming all the time in the ocean, increasingly in the fall, and then all winter, and spring. I absolutely love it. Being there at dawn, it’s beautiful and feels a whole exercise you can’t beat.

But then it’s sort of interesting because it also offers a great deal, kind of a daily dose of uncertainty. So, I finally began to realize that part of the joy and the daunting nature of what I’m doing is that swimming is never the same twice. When you’re open water, four seasons swimming, it’s never the same twice. So, it’s a great little lesson in uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And I have recently been getting into cold water immersion. Fun things. And I’m thinking, wow, fall and winter, you’re getting that in spades. You know what the temperature in the water is like during these times?

Maggie Jackson
Oh, yes. Yes, we all keep track of the temperature quite carefully because I do wear some gear, so I adjust my gear. But the temperature is about the low is 36 Fahrenheit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Maggie Jackson
And a lot depends on it could be 20 Fahrenheit in air, and it can be the wind, and then you can be in the snow. It’s all really beautiful and it’s just so much fun. And they’re now doing studies, trying to augment people’s kind of understanding or capability with uncertainty in order to boost resilience. So, we could talk about that. But that, I feel as though, I’ve gained resilience by doing this.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is it your experience, as it is mine, that just the sheer cold alone is invigorating and mood-boosting over the long term?

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. I find that the colder it is, the more joyful it is. The deep dark winter when my little band of swimmers is going at it, we’re actually laughing out loud and sort of hooting and hollering, and I find that the summer is beautiful, it’s relaxing, it’s wonderful, but it’s not quite as exhilarating. So, it completely represents what we might call good stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now let’s hear a little bit about uncertainty in your book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Have you encountered any particularly surprising, or extra-fascinating, or counterintuitive discoveries about us humans and uncertainty while putting this together?

Maggie Jackson
Sure. A long list of surprising discoveries related to uncertainty. We mostly think of uncertainty as being, what psychologists call aversive. We don’t like it. Humans don’t like it. And there’s a reason for that. We’re naturally made to survive by getting answers. Like, we can’t exist in the state of not knowing. However, it’s really interesting because when humans encounter something new, it might be your first day at the job, it might be a six-month roadblock on your highway and you got to adjust, you actually undergo all of these kinds of stress changes in your body.

You might sweat a little, your heart might race, but at the same time, there are changes in the brain that are extremely beneficial when you are in this uncertain, this unsettling state of uncertainty. Actually, your working memory is bolstered, your focus broadens, the brain is more receptive to new information, so you’re basically on your toes. So, what seems unsettling and sort of this uncertainty that we dislike is actually priming us to be able to learn.

So, as one neuroscientist told me, “When you’re in that moment of so-called arousal due to uncertainty, the brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.” And so, I think it’s really important on the job, or on the restive life, not to squander that moment. Move forward into uncertainty. Don’t run from it or deny it or hide it. I think it’s really important that we don’t cut short that opportunity to learn that uncertainty offers.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we are more able to learn with these sorts of emotional stress response things going on, and that just sort of fits. It makes sense because, well, yes, there’s something that needs learning here because, by definition, it’s uncertain what’s going on.

Maggie Jackson
Yup, you walk into the meeting and there’s a surprise, or your boss hands you a project you didn’t really think you’re going to have to do. And it’s not emotion, really. It’s cognition. So, your brain is actually going on alert. It’s being aroused, as scientists say. And that puts you in a state where you can take advantage of that.

And so, I think the myth-busting one we have to do first about uncertainty is to realize that uncertainty is unsettling, yes, but that is its precise gift. It bumps us off the routine. It’s telling us. When you’re uncertain, that’s basically your brain telling you that you have to stop your automatic behavior. The status quo doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to be ready to update your understanding of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is you say that we tend to not like uncertainty, and yet there are some contexts where we, humans, proactively go for it. We want to play card games, or videogames, or go to the casino, and that’s the whole draw of these things, is we don’t quite know how things are going to turn out. There’s an element of chance.

Maggie Jackson
Oh, I think that’s a very, very good point. It’s sort of uncertainty by another name. We might call it suspense, or just the kind of not knowing that’s playful or entertainment form that, I think, as uncertainty has grown, or I would say unpredictability in the world has grown, and, really, studies do show that economics, business world, climate, etc., there are a lot of aspects of the life that are more volatile. Uncertainty has become kind of a lament. You see it in the headlines. You hear people talk about it.

People just equate uncertainty with something bad. And that’s not moving us forward. That’s actually keeping us. Uncertainty is not the paralysis that we think. The human uncertainty, the unsureness, the not knowing, it’s not that all, as research shows. It’s actually something that’s highly dynamic and active, and something that moves us forward. Uncertainty is a lot more than we know.

And, actually, for decades and decades, this state of mind, it’s a mindset, basically, wasn’t studied. It wasn’t studied even in psychology because the onus and the emphasis was on what the human can do, what’s the task that you accomplish. It’s not sort of in between time when people are pausing and unsure, or they don’t know what to do. The scientists wanted to study what they could get accomplished.

And so, I think this puts human thinking, and even what it means to know what it means to be successful, it puts it in a whole new plane because if we can add not knowing to our skillset, as well as knowing, well, we’re suddenly really opening up to the world in ways that we weren’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, not knowing as a skillset that benefits us. Could you perhaps give us a story, an example, of someone who upgraded that skill and saw cool results as a result?

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of stories, but one little story came from a friend of mine who was calling me up, and saying, “Oh, there’s a merger and acquisition at my pharmaceutical company,” and she’s a scientist, and she was moaning and groaning. And in the next breath, she was talking about how she’s brushing up her resume, and she’s looking around for an internal job.

And I was sort of amused inside, having been steeped in uncertainty research, so I realized that she was actually doing precisely what, through her uncertainty, she was actually taking hold of the situation, and she was propelled to investigate further. And you can see this in many, many great figures. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was basically borne of uncertainty. He was a leader who was very humble. He wasn’t opposed to saying, “I don’t know,” and he really led the movement through conviction but also with adaptability.

And when it came to that incredibly important speech that day in 1963, The March on Washington, first of all, he had asked for opinions from many, many advisers. The night of the speech, he didn’t know quite what he would say. He had elements but he didn’t really know. He was actually still working on the speech right up on the podium that day.

And what that shows is that he was in tuned with a very divisive, very difficult moment in history. He was wakeful to all the different influences and patterns and sort of things that were going on in that moment, and he, of course, pulled off one of the greatest speeches of all time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Let’s have another example.

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say a more modern example is I’ve been studying the work style of the new Nobel Prize winner in medicine, the co-winner, Kati Kariko, who was originally from Hungary, and she worked for decades on mRNA, which, of course, was the sort of her work on mRNA led to the breakthrough that gave us the COVID vaccines and saved hundreds of millions of lives perhaps.

And she was incredibly dogged and incredibly persistent, and she saw the capacity of this aspect of biology when no one else was. She was terminated from UPenn, but this is not just a story of persistence. As she puts it in one Nobel Prize interview, one of her coworkers said, “Oh, Kati, you’re always zigzagging.” In other words, she didn’t always work in a straight line. And she said, “By zigzagging, I learned so much.”

And this is what it means to inhabit uncertainty. You’re not shutting down on that space of possibility that uncertainty is. And one of the most interesting things about curiosity is that scientists have been finally studying this topic, too, and they’re beginning to kind of understand that one of the most key components of curiosity, of the curious disposition, is the ability to work with or tolerate the stress of inhabiting the unknown.

So, when you’re curious about something, anything, painting or what you’re curious about, something you’re doing at work, or curious about what this Nobel Prize winner did, you are actually having to kind of understand, or withstand, or kind of leverage that uncertainty in order to get to the answer. And that she really represents that. She really does. She spent so much energy on doing things that were denigrated, devalued in every sense of the word. She kept going and she basically exemplifies the willingness to stay in that liminal space, which is to not know, to not know in order to get the better answer.

If she had raced to the first answer, well, she might’ve discovered something but she never would’ve put the pieces together. She had to go down a lot of dead ends, and that, to me, is that entirely what uncertainty is about, productive uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you elaborate on the distinction between working in a zigzag fashion versus linear fashion? What are those different modes look, sound, feel like by contrast?

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say that the linear fashion         of working would be to work from one logical point to another, to be focused on outcome. Outcome orientation is a really hot topic in business circles today. Whereas, a zigzag, a nonlinear, that is something that Leonardo da Vinci was famous for. “Confusion rouses the mind to invention,” he once said.

And the zigzagging that she was referring to would be the dead ends. Many times, mRNA was actually toxic to the body when introduced in mice, etc. It didn’t do them any good. And so, basically, she could’ve quit there but instead she zagged, or zigged, over to a different type of thing. So, that’s what I mean.

Eighty percent of strategic business decisions are made after considering just one option. And, yet, if people actually go to the root of the problem and consider multiple reasons for the problem, multiple roots of the problem, then they’re actually four times more likely to have a successful decision.

So, again and again, we hear that we should widen our options but the other point of that is what I call widening and deepening, and that is testing and evaluating. So, again, that’s where you’re leveraging uncertainty. This is leveraging what Kahneman calls the slow mind. It’s what I also call take two. Rather than just leap to a solution, or go to what’s obvious, or try to shoot for that outcome, you’re willing to explore many avenues, and not forever.

Sometimes this can happen just in a few minutes in the operating room with a surgeon in crisis. They just take a minute to do take two, or to dwell in uncertainty, and then they find the better answer, or the hidden answer. And so, that’s what I mean by zigzag.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And so, if folks do have this attitude or fear of uncertainty, do you have any recommended first steps in terms of, “Hey, if that’s where you’re at right now, here’s what I recommend you do or think about”?

Maggie Jackson
Yes, that’s a great question. And it’s really important, and I get asked that all the time now, “How can I get better at dealing with uncertainty?” And, actually, I’ll talk a little bit about what I found, but also there’s some new research on this, a great deal of research. There are scientists now planning a new study, an intervention, in Columbus, Ohio, to help stressed high schoolers gain resilience by teaching them how to better tolerate, which is not such a great word, but to manage uncertainty, to actually, it means lean into uncertainty. That’s the term I prefer.

And how are they doing that? Well, scientists, clinical psychologists, and others were developing these interventions, are now, they’re basically importing some lessons from exposure to therapy, so that makes sense. If you are fearful of uncertainty, if you’re the type who’s intolerant of surprises, you need to overprepare for the presentation, you need to pack not just your bag for the family vacation but the entire family’s bag because you don’t trust them to do it, those are kind of signs that you might be a little bit intolerant of uncertainty.

And so, trying new things, trying to, in effect, seek a little bit of surprise in your life, will show you not that it’s always the perfect solution. You might delegate at work, and it might not actually work out better every single time. But, at the same time, if you never delegate at work, you will never know the other possibilities that that person, that the hidden talents of that person shows. The person who works for you might show hidden talents when you allow them to work on that project a little more than before.

So, what you’re doing is expanding your perspectives, expanding your range of experience, and one of the ways in which clinical psychologists are now teaching people, especially people with anxiety, to get better at handling uncertainty, to stop denying and avoiding it, are tiny little things like, for instance, “Answer your cellphone without caller ID.” And that seems so simple but, at the same time, it’s just injecting a little bit of mystery.

And some scientists actually surmised that phones, because they provide instant answers all the time, and we’re checking 150 times a day, that’s what they call certainty-seeking behavior. So, some part of this is just sort of lifting up your head and kind of contending with what’s happening, not trying to control every little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. This reminds me of a recent camping trip in which we were…I don’t even remember what we’re talking about but it was some sort of factual question that could be readily Googled, and we weren’t sure, it’s like, “Oh, I think it’s this way.” “Well, no, I think it might be this because what about that?” And it was funny, we’re like, “Huh, here we are all not being quite sure about this thing,” which, on ordinary circumstances, when we had cellphone reception, someone would’ve Googled it within about five seconds, and then that would be that.

Maggie Jackson
Right. And, actually, what you were doing, by collectively or individually kind of cogitating, you were reaching into your memory, which is not something we do when we’re turned to the phone all the time. You’re actually reaching deep into your memory. And even if you don’t come up with the answer, it strengthens your brain to do so.

It’s really quite amazing but just searching around in your memory, something that we just don’t do today, is actually great for the brain. And why is that? Because, say, you’re trying to think of a painter. I’m trying madly to think of Degas, and all I can think of is Monet. And, really, if you’re looking around in your brain, internally searching, in other words, you’re looking through different knowledge networks because our minds and our experiences, they’re varied associations. They’re networked. They say they’re branching trees of knowledge.

And what you’re doing is going along those paths, and you’re saying, “Oh, well, maybe an impressionist, or I guess French,” so you’re strengthening by utilizing those synapses, you’re strengthening other areas of the brain, and that’s really great for greater wisdom. Our minds are not computers, information is not downloadable and upload-able. It’s really sort of an organic shifting thing. And that’s another reason why not knowing is really important because it kind of blows away that idea that our minds are computers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are fun practices. Tell me, Maggie, anymore?

Maggie Jackson
Yes. Well, I would say one very, very important practice is it involves teamwork. So, uncertainty has a social side to it. And the upshot is that, basically, one of the best fuels of collaboration is conflict, and I mean judicious, mild, respectful conflict. But study after study shows that teams and groups that have mutual criticism, conflict, dissent are better performing. They actually have deeper discussions, they’re more creative, they surface hidden information that isn’t usually discussed, etc. Now, why is that?

Well, a lot of people think that, basically, when you have a disagreement or even when you just have diversity on a team, diversity of opinions, that diverse or dissenting opinion is just giving you the right answer, but that’s not true because a dissenting opinion, even if wrong, also bolsters performance. Why is it? It’s because uncertainty has rousted you from that kind of complacency of being in agreement. And the neuroscience on that is pretty amazing. The brain in agreement is a really lazy animal, believe me.

So, basically, if you can keep cultivating disagreement, then you get on what I call uncommon ground. It’s really important to be uncertain, and then you can do a whole host of things. You’re basically finding out what the team doesn’t know, which is really important for growth. You basically deepen and intensify the discussion. Now, studies have shown this in supreme courts, in the Supreme Courts, in juries, in financial trading, even on Mount Everest.

They did studies where teams that were very diverse, had a lot of different kinds of knowledge on climbing Mount Everest, but who emphasized all for one kind of mentality, so a kind of collective mentality, actually were more likely to have a depth on the team, and that’s really serious business. So, one flexible work consultant told me a wonderful story to illustrate this.

Cali Williams Yost was at a law firm where she was helping the firm institute flexible work for the legal team. I’m sorry, it was the legal team of an energy company. So, the legal team was all set to go, the bosses were on board, they were going to work remotely part time, etc. Well, one executive stood up and said he was completely opposed, at a meeting, and there was going to be a lot of knowledge left on the table because people weren’t meeting in the morning to coffee clap, etc.

Well, the bosses were angry, and everyone was shocked, they were all set. And what Cali Williams Yost wisely told me is that, basically, he was wrong to oppose flexible work but he was right, something was missing. And so, his dissent actually sparked a younger person in the room to, later in the afternoon, stand up, and say, “Well, I can create a virtual knowledge platform, and we can go remote and still have that time to coffee clap, so to speak.” So, that’s a perfect example of how dissent threw everyone into uncertainty, and then they were able to actually kind of find a third way to meet the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny how, as I imagine that scene, the emotional reaction is just as you’ve described, it’s like folks are annoyed, like, “Oh, come on, man. Just, like, shut up and get in line. We’re almost done. Why you gotta be difficult and cause problems, and not be a team player?” Like, all of these negative associations. And yet, it really is an asset to have folks who have unique perspective and the courage to share it and go against the grain, it really does enrich the whole team, and yet so rarely do we say, “Thank you, dear colleague, for disagreeing with all of us. This is very helpful.”

Maggie Jackson
Oh, you’re so right. And you put it so well, and I’m so glad you used that word courage because I was just thinking of a quote by William James, a great psychology philosopher in the 19th century, who talked about the courage of a maybe. He basically talked about how no human achievement can be created without the “courage of a maybe.” And that’s exactly what’s happening.

I think one tip for people who want to try this, and I would advise, throw in a no, a gentle no, or maybe just a maybe. And what you’re doing with the word maybe is actually using something called hedge words. And so, those are really, really important. Hedge words are maybe, sometimes, those sorts of words, as opposed to more…there’s no alternative word for hedge words, but anyhow, non-hedge words, which are, “You’re wrong,” or, “Therefore.” Those are not hedge words.

And what hedge words do is signal your receptiveness to another opinion. They also signal that there’s something that’s not known. So, if you say, “Maybe we should consider something,” or, “Maybe we haven’t thought of…” etc., you’re actually smoothing the way for others to pick up on that. And it’s a wonderful kind of linguistic flag that you’re waving, saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be so sure,” and that’s where then the disagreement can be fueled, and the uncertainty. And then people can be in the space of uncommon ground, and then go deeper and explore multiple perspectives.

Another study I really loved, which brings this all to life, was basically a CEO who’s in Europe, a few years ago when the European Union was being widely expanded, so quite a bit of Eastern Europe was being inducted into the EU. And so, it was a time of great unknowns for business leaders on that continent. And so, two professors, one in Germany, one in the US, went and studied German CEOs for an entire year, and they asked them whether they’re for this expansion or were they against it, and what would happen, was it good for their company or was it bad for their company.

Well, when they got the results back, they found this third group. To their surprise, 25% or more of the CEOs were ambivalent, they didn’t really know, “Well, we’re not really sure this is going to expand the markets. Is it going to take our customers away? We’re not sure.” And it’s amazing to me that the professors were surprised.

Well, a year later, fast forward, the result was the people who were sure that it would be either good for their company or bad for their company, basically didn’t do very much. Those who were ambivalent were more resourceful, they came up with more products, they opened new factories, they actually were more inclusive, they asked for different opinions. They weren’t sure so that propelled them to do more.

And I think there was an award-winning study, and it just perfectly underscores not just what we’re talking about, about dissent, but also about the power of uncertainty. And it certainly is an overlooked unsung power.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. They’re not sure and, thusly, they do more. They’re not sure, so it was like, “Uh-oh, I don’t know so I better hustle. I better figure it out and do the research, do the work, do the investigation, talk to people, and get the info.” And this reminds me of, I don’t know if this has been coined somewhere before, but I might’ve made this up. I call it second time syndrome.

Like, the second time you do something, you might get worse results than the first time because you’re more confident, like, “Oh, I know how this goes,” versus the first time, you’re like, “Oh, boy, I’m a little scared, a little intimidated, a little overwhelmed. I better really hustle and figure this out.” Like, I remember, I was, at one point, a leadership seminar chair, or HOBY daddy for these HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership event, so there’s a bunch of folks assembled for a three-day thing, and I’m kind of like the guy in charge of everything.

And so, the first time, I was like, “Wow, this is intimidating. I really want to make sure I’m on top of everything,” and it went very well. And the second time, I thought, “Oh, we got this. It’s fine.” And it was still good but it was not as excellent as the first one. I could see this event now years later. And it’s because I was more certain and more comfortable and less effortful the second time around.

Maggie Jackson
I think that’s so true and that’s such a good point. Because uncertainty, and confronting something new, is actually putting you at the edge of your knowledge, and that’s exactly when we want to retreat. There’s a term called the routine expert. The routine expert is someone, we’ve seen it everywhere. We see it in medicine. We see it in accounting. We see it in reporting. I’m a journalist. But people who have accrued years of experience, they’re really good at what they do, but everything has become routine. They have this sort of honed automaticity, so the heuristic thinking, “Chest pain equals heart attack” that is predominant.

But when the routine expert hits something that’s really new, they just retreat into the same old solutions, and they’re then not doing well. They fail. Whereas, adaptive experts are the people who can utilize that uncertainty, to do the kind of deliberative work, and also to be flexible about using their knowledge. And so, adaptive experts are nimble. And that’s exactly what we want.

When something goes wrong in the operating room, I witnessed multiple operations up in Toronto while researching this book, and one of the senior surgeons who epitomizes our ideal of the expert, he was quick, he was sure, really sure, well, he then, in a moment, in a terrifying moment in the operating room, he thought he had done something nearly lethal to the patient during a liver operation. Everything fell silent, there was sweat on his cap.

Well, he was just too sure. He carried his certainty into that operation like a badge of honor. And then he was able to, “It was not a lethal error,” but, at the same time, he epitomizes what we loved in experts. And we really are venerating the wrong type of experts. What we want to really emulate and respect the people who ask the questions, the people who say, “I don’t know,” whether it’s medicine or not, and the leaders who are willing to pause and deliberate.

And other study shows that those leaders, who when confronting a new problem, actually, are deemed in experimental studies anyhow as being less influential. But we’ve got it all wrong. We’ve got it all wrong. We need to be really promoting people who ask questions, who don’t mind hesitating for productive uses, who don’t mind being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Indeed, we tend to favor, like, trust the confident-sounding voice but there are studies that reveal that there is almost no correlation between the confidence someone exerts and how right or good they are at the thing, so that’s dangerous and some ways it’s like we’d be better off if we trusted or valued more the nuanced person, it’s like, “Well, you know, under these circumstances, it’s probably best for A, but, however, given the variables X, Y, Z, I’m leaning towards B.”

Like, that doesn’t sound as commanding and inspiring, like, “Yes, you know what you’re doing. I’ll follow you unto death” That doesn’t give you the that emotional charge. And yet, it’s likely much closer to true, and there’s much higher probability, it seems, of finding great wisdom there worth following.

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. Adaptive wisdom, the kind of person who sees the world as it is, not as they wish it to be or assume it to be. And that takes time, it takes effort, it takes unease, etc. but it’s really important that we change our views on what a leader is, that we change our views on what a student or a pundit or a presidential candidate is, because the cost of our certainty are certainly rising, and we can see it everywhere in terms of the polarization, narrowmindedness, etc., the anxiety levels.

I see that uncertainty, if we begin to understand it, to study it, to learn how to use it skillfully, can really change humanity, and give me great hope. They’re even trying to, there’s a movement by leaders in AI today to instill uncertainty in models, in robots, that is to make AI unsure. Now, there is some uncertainty in a robot. It couldn’t traverse the factory floor without some degree of being open to what’s unpredictable in its environment.

But what they’re trying to do, and this is picking up steam, and it’s really quite important, is to make on a robot that’s unsure in its aims. So, say, you have a housekeeper robot, and it’s fetching your coffee, well, today’s AI is built to carry out a task because the rationalist’s definition of intelligence is fulfilling your goals no matter what. And, therefore, that’s both the danger and the wisdom of today’s AI.

Well, an unsure robot, and what I call the “I don’t know” robot, will actually ask you how you want your coffee, or which room across the kitchen, or, “Do you want something?” It’s teachable and it’s more honest. It’s not just doing what it was initially programmed to do. It’s more flexible. And in that very vision of “I don’t know” robot, we can see something a little bit that we should be striving for, too.

Pete Mockaitis
The quote that comes to mind thinking about these notions of certainty is this quote, I come back to it again and again, I just got to have him on the show. Robert Rubin said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I can totally relate, it’s like, “Are you sure?” And I think about all these scenarios when the experts tell me the opposite of each other, and they do so very confidently.

Like, roofers. You get multiple bids on a roof project, it’s like, “Wow, that guy said we had to tear it off, and the other guy said we could just put another layer on. And they were both very sure. And they’re the roof experts, and I’m not. What the heck am I supposed to do here?” And I think that if most of us took the time to solicit multiple perspectives from multiple angles, we would see a lot of that, “Wow, these people are very certain of the exact opposite thing. Well, now I have to do some hard thinking.”

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. And we think of uncertainty as being sort of lost, adrift, etc., some of the metaphors used with uncertainty or lostness and wandering, etc., but it’s a form of exploration. It’s kind of a wonderful way to buy time, in a sense, so that you can explore the possibilities and uncover the complexities that are already there.

You’re not creating complexities when you do a little bit more pondering. You’re actually uncovering what’s already there. And it’s not that it’s an endless kind of pursuit but it has its place, and we haven’t given enough due to being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Maggie, tell me, any final things you want to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Maggie Jackson
No, I think we covered a lot of great ground.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, it’s actually a quote from my book, and there are many but I’ll start the quote, “’I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew.’” That’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Maggie Jackson
Well, there are lots. Yeah, I’ll tell one little one. And you probably heard of the candle problem. This was a psychological experiment developed in the 1920s in which people were asked to tack a candle to the wall using just a box of matches, some thumbtacks, and then just the candle. Well, people made a real mess of it, and they tried to melt the candle, glue it to the wall, etc.

Well, the answer lies in making a platform out of the matchbox. But the point of this story is that people only see what an object is meant to do, not what it can do, because they’re so sure that matchboxes are there just to hold the matches. They cannot see any further. And what’s wonderful about this study is that if you take a bunch of five-year-olds and give them a similar study, but without the matches, with toys on a shelf, the five-year-olds don’t have any problem with this. Their knowledge doesn’t get in their way of their problem-solving.

Whereas, at age seven and up, they’re beginning to act like adults. They only see what it’s made to do. They don’t ask what it can do. And that’s a miniature example of the beauty of being unsure. And uncertainty is basically another word for open-mindedness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Maggie Jackson
I would have to say Pride and Prejudice, kind of an old classic but it’s really about two people, Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, whose certainty got in the way of their love. And, finally, when they were a little bit less sure, they were able to get together and understand one another despite their differences. I already loved that book before I became an uncertainty junkie, so to speak. But now I kind of see it through the prism of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Maggie Jackson
It definitely has to be just plain old paper pad. I’m completely adoring of the technology of paper. By writing, I don’t write everything in the longhand, but I do drafts of what I work on that I call sketches, literally, because I can draw arrows and make circles out of what it is. It’s all over the map. And I find that, by putting something immediately onto a computer, I’m forcing my thoughts onto the template of another person’s design. And so, I find that the legal pads, I go through so many, and they’ve been a huge help to me in my writing.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Maggie Jackson
Well, in order to get in the focus that I need, there’s a kind of boundary-making, focuses literally a boundary-making, a type of attention that creates boundaries around what you want to be doing, I use alarm clocks and I use distance from my phone. So, if I really have to concentrate, I’ll put my phone on another level of my office, downstairs, basically. If I’m able to take a phone call, it’ll be nearer to me, but it changes how you think, etc. So, I really curate where the phone is.

I also use alarm clocks. So, if I have an appointment in an hour, I’ll put the alarm clock on, and then I don’t have to spend my mental resources thinking about when I have to do this. I then am able to drift off, inhabit the uncertainty, focus on what I need to do, and completely within the new you of what I need to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Maggie Jackson
I’d say that the quote from my book that resonates most with people is “Uncertainty is unsettling, and that is its gift.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Maggie Jackson
I would say my website would be a great one to stop and shop. I’m also on Twitter, LinkedIn, but the website is a great resource for my articles, my events, etc., what’s going on with my books.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Maggie Jackson
I think that if you realized that at any one moment you might not know, you’ll be giving yourself the power of an open mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maggie, this has been a treat. Well, Maggie, thank you for this. I wish you much fun uncertainty in the years to come.

Maggie Jackson
Thank you, Pete. It’s been a pleasure. You, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Laura Gassner Otting
Hey, Pete, I’m glad to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom of your latest work Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It. Whoa, that’s a big concept. Laura, what even made you think this is a thing you want to write?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, I think a lot of personal development and self-help authors write the books that they needed but they couldn’t find. So, when my last book Limitless that I talked about on your show last time came out, I suddenly found myself in this place where I was like, “Oh, that book did okay. It did pretty good. I wonder what pretty great would feel like?” And I saw this potential that I had in me, that I didn’t even have a mailing list when the book came out, and it debuted as a bestseller, and it was, like, “Pretty amazing. But how do I make it even bigger? Like, how do I do the next thing?”

And in that moment of success, well, I thought I was at the end of the line, I thought I was done, I was finished, I published the book, great, I suddenly realized that success wasn’t an endpoint but it was a waypoint. It became this portal that showed me that there was even more inside of me. And so, I had this moment where I realized, like it’s exciting, it’s humbling, it’s amazing, it’s wonderful, but also now I have this burden of potential that’s sitting on my shoulders, and I’m filled with anxiety, and fear, and dread, and uncertainty, and doubt, and impostor syndrome, and exhaustion, and burnout.

It’s wonderful but it’s kind of hell. It’s sort of Wonderhell. And so, I went about reading all the self-help books that were out there, like I 10X’d, and I crushed it, and I leaned in, and I washed my face, and I apologized, and all the things I was supposed to do, and, Pete, none of them worked. And so, finally, I was like, “All right. Well, there got to be people who know.”

So, I just started talking to other people who have been super successful people.

And it turns out that there are no answers, that we don’t actually get through these moments of Wonderhell but we just learn how to get more comfortable in them because on the other side of this Wonderhell is just the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that. And so, the book really talks about everything I learned from these people and how they learned not just to try to survive these moments but how to look forward to them, and thrive in them instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then let’s capture the main idea here. So, we achieve a success, a goal, a victory, something cool, and maybe it exceeds your expectations, like, “Whoa, all right, there we go.” And so then, you’re suggesting the common emotional experience for such achievers goes like what?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, so what happens is every time we experience success, whether it’s a huge success, like, “I just sold my first company,” or a small success, like, “I just sold my first consulting contract,” or, “My first tube of lipstick.” Like, it doesn’t have to be like this huge massive thing. We think we’re like, okay, we’ve been sold this bill of goods, like, once we succeed everything gets easier. Like, once you just get to the other side of this project, this potential, this committee, this promotion, everything will get easier.

And what I learned from my own experience and from all the people that I talked to is that it actually doesn’t get easier. In fact, it gets harder because every time we achieve something, we realize that there’s more inside of us. Like, the success becomes a portal to everything else we could be. And so, we feel this faster pace, this bigger hunger, this drive to see what else is out there and what else we could be. And because of that, success never feels as good as we think it’s going to feel because it’s never the endpoint. It’s just a waypoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued, Laura, when you said bigger hunger, I think sometimes, I’ve heard tales – I’ve experienced a touch this myself – that instead of a bigger hunger, it’s just like, “Okay, well, I’ve been chasing this thing for a long time, and I got it, and that’s really cool, but now what? I don’t really have a new big dream or goal or thing I’m after.” And, in a way, it could be sort of a downer, I think there’s less hunger. So, do you see that as well? Or, how do you think about this vibe?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, absolutely. And for a lot of those people, there’s this moment that feels almost a little bit like burnout. So, the book, I wrote the book, it sort of emulates an amusement park, where, like, you go to an amusement park, you think it’s going to be fun. You can go to all the towns, you can go to all the rides, you can eat all the food. It’s going to be great.

And then it’s like 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re a little sunburned and you’re a lot dehydrated, and that corndog in your stomach is not so happy, and you’re in line for the rollercoaster, and you’re like, “Do I really want to go on this? Like, I was told this was going to be fun. I thought this was going to be fun.”

So, success is kind of the same way, where you get to that goal, and you’re like, “I thought this was supposed to be fun. Like, why do I just feel kind of blah? Like, why doesn’t it feel better when I’m here?” So, the book is sort of organized around an amusement park, and there’s three towns: there’s Impostor Town, there’s Doubtsville, and there’s Burnout City.

So, burnout city, the first ride, like all the chapters are rides, the first ride of burnout city is the merry go round, which is that moment where you just say no hustle porn, you’re like, “I’ve done the thing, I’ve crested the mountain, and maybe right now, like, I’m okay where I am. Like, I achieved the big work thing, and now I want to spend time focusing on other parts of my life.”

So, we’re told that we need to keep going, like bigger, better, faster, more. As soon as you achieve something, you need to be “What’s the next thing you want to achieve?” And so, for a lot of the people that I spoke to, they saw their lives sort of in these seasons, where there’s a time for them to be building their businesses, there’s a time for them to be growing in their jobs, but then there are also times when they’re like, “You know what, maybe I don’t want to take on the next big thing, the next big promotion. And maybe I don’t want to syndicate my podcast. Maybe I don’t want to take on the job that’s going to put me on the road all the time because I’ve got small kids.”

So, it’s not even necessarily a case of “I don’t know what the next big thing is.” It can also be a case of, like, “Even if I do know what the next big thing is, maybe I don’t want to do that. Like, I don’t need to keep bigger, better, faster, more growing. I just want to expose other parts of my life right now because I’ve already done that thing over there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hey, since we’re in Burnout Town, let’s complete our tour, and then visit the other two towns. And so, yeah, if folks find themselves in this kind of a spot, are there some cool stories or best practices you recommend for dealing with that effectively?

Laura Gassner Otting
So, one of the stories that I actually talk about in Burnout Town is the story of Jordan Harbinger, who is of the Jordan Harbinger Show, a very popular podcast, and he was approached to syndicate his podcast, a very successful podcast, people approached him to 10X the thing.

And he looked around, and he said, “You know, I spend all day long talking to incredibly successful humans who are all coming on my show at the time when they’re like launching a book, or a launching a course, or launching a mastermind, or some sort of thing.” And he goes, “And I interview them, and they’re like, ‘This is the part that sucks. This is the part where I’m on the road all the time. This is the part where I don’t see my kids. This is the part where I’m spending money out the wazoo and I don’t even know if I’m going to get it back. This is the part that sucks.”

“And then, afterwards, they’re like, ‘Hey, so, Jordan, when are you going to write your book? When are you going to have your mastermind?’” And he’s like, “No, it sounds terrible. Why would I want to do it?” So, when he got approached to syndicate his show, he looked around and he said, “Everybody I know who is doing the thing, everybody I know with a private jet is miserable. All they do is tell me about how expensive the private jet is.”

“And so, I looked around and I thought, ‘Why did I get into this in the first place?’ I got in this the first place because I want a ton of flexibility in my life. And he said, “Now, I’m married, I’ve got a baby, I’ve got another baby on the way,” and he’s like, “There’s only so many days I could say to my kids, like, ‘Hey, it’s Tuesday afternoon, your dad has got a super flexible job, let’s go to Disney World today so we can avoid the long lines on the weekend.’”

He’s like, “There’s only so many years I could do that before my kids are, like, “You, you old fart. We don’t want to hang out with you. We want to hang out with our friends and go play XBOX or something.” So, he was, like, “When I got approached for that, I thought about all the people that I talk to who are hustling, and who were exhausted, and who were miserable, and I looked at my little babies and I thought, ‘Nah, I’m good. I’m going to stay right here for a little while, and then, the syndication thing, it’ll be there later.’”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And as I think about Jordan’s example, because I sort of follow his podcast world, and he’s done quite well for the show, I guess, without taking that pathway, and is, in fact, really a leader in this space, specifically, of smartly purchasing – not to get too much in the weeds and minutiae of the podcast industry – but smartly purchasing promo spots for his own show on other podcasts, which he recoups via just audience growth and then selling ads on his show in a beautiful replicable kind of scaling way, which is, like, “Oh, maybe that’s my future, too.” Thank you for sharing us the pathway to that. So, he’s still hustling, in a way, but on his own terms, it seems.

Laura Gassner Otting
On his own terms. And, speaking of podcasts, there’s another podcaster I interviewed for the show is Jonathan Fields, a dear friend of mine. And Jonathan talked about his own experiences with burnout, and his really were focused around this question of perfection. So, when he was younger, when he was a teenager, his grandfather just passed away, and they were cleaning out his grandfather’s house.

And he said, “Well, I went down to the basement and I found this pile of old paint and an old doorframe, and I stuck the door on a bunch of cement blocks, and I just started painting. And I lost myself for hours in the painting. And it was the first experience I ever had of being in flow about something. So, I decided I wanted to start painting album covers on jean jackets. And, in my mind, I had this vision of what the album covers would look like on the jean jackets, and then I would try to paint them. And I was not able to produce what I saw in my mind, the thing in my mind that I, literally, had no right to expect because I had no experience painting.”

And he said, “And then I would take these terrible jean jackets, and I would destroy them, and I was so filled with self-hatred about the fact that I wasn’t perfect at this thing, that the self-punishing behavior became super damaging.” And he said, “I took that perfectionist drive, and I took that through law school, through an early career in law. And so, one day I realized that I was, literally, putting myself in the hospital because I was so stressed about the perfectionism.”

And he said that he learned much later, and I learned this through my research, that there are three different types of perfectionism, and there’s only one which is like self-oriented, like wanting more from ourselves, which is even remotely good for us. But what he said was, now, he’s older, he’s in his 50s, he looks back and he says, “The truth is I just released my last book. It debuted as a US Today instant bestseller.”

He said, “I’m not that proud of that.” He goes, “I’m proud of it but I’m prouder of the fact that on page 34 or the third chapter, or the third paragraph of chapter four, there’s a paragraph that I couldn’t have written five years ago. I wasn’t capable of doing it. And now I know that when I see something that’s hard, I don’t go, ‘God, I can’t do it. I’m not perfect.’ I think isn’t it amazing that I get so spend the next 10 years getting better at that thing?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, from the stories of Jordan Harbinger and Jonathan Fields, and your other research, any sort of key prescriptive to-dos you’d recommend if folks are in that space of, “Hey, just had a big success, and now having some burnout”? What’s to be done?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. Well, I think that there are a lot of different ways that we can define success, and I think that when we finish one thing, we assume that the next success should be something else in that vein, like, either we’re going to build the next bigger business, we’re going to get the next bigger job, or we’re just going to just keep going on the same path.

And I think, based on 20 years on executive search and interviewing the most successful people in the world, I called all of them because they were super successful. They all called me back because, despite that success, they weren’t very happy. So, they were like, “Oh, is there another job, another promotion, another title, another organization out there?” Like, we think we’ll be happy when.

So, what I learned in that work in two decades in executive search is that we start our careers thinking that success is defined a very specific way. Like, whatever somebody told us at some point, whether it was a teacher, or a parent, or a boss, or an internet celebrity, or a guidance counselor before we had a frontal lobe, we were 17 years old, we start our career with a certain definition of success, and then we follow our entire career with this same one.

And I would say, like a specific tactic would be to ask yourself, “What actually makes you happy? How do you define success?” For some people, that success may be, “I want to make a bajillion dollars.” For other people, it may be, “I want to make just enough money but I want to be at home every night and have dinner with my kids.” For other people, it might be, “I want to cure cancer.” But everybody has different definitions. And even as we change, the world around us changes also.

So, my tactic for people is to check in with yourself. Don’t just blindly keep doing the same thing you did before just because it’s now. Like, keep thinking about it. And I think the pandemic is actually a perfect time to do this because I think a lot of us woke up in the middle of the pandemic, and we’re like, “You know, when life goes back to normal, is the normal I’m going back to really the life I want?” And I think, for a lot of people, the answer was “Not really.”

I don’t know anybody that came out of 2020, 2021, even 2022, not thinking that there were some changes that they wanted to make in some way. And so, I just think it’s a perfect time right now to reassess and to reprioritize.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you take us to another town within Wonderhell and share with us what that’s about?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. So, why don’t we go to the beginning? Let’s go to Impostor Town.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Gassner Otting
So, Impostor Town is every time we figure out that there is something in us, something more that’s in us, something that we’re capable of doing. There’s also a voice inside of our head that goes, “Are you sure you should be doing this? Are you sure this is for you? Are you sure that nobody’s going to figure out that you’re a fraud, that you don’t belong here?”

And so, Impostor Town is there’s this great moment of, “This is exciting. This is something I want to do.” But then we hear these voices that go, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before. Don’t do it. You’re going to get hurt. It’s going to be a problem.” And I think we have to turn those voices around and hear them not as limitations but as invitations.

So, it’s not, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before,” it’s, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before. What an opportunity.” So, with the people that I spoke to, and I thought, Pete, let me tell you, I thought I was going to talk to these incredible people, like I said, glass ceiling shatterers, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, and they were going to tell me how they got through impostor syndrome, like how did they finally get through it.

And much to my chagrin, it turns out that there’s no way to get through it. Like, everybody, each one of them at every stage, at every age, at every level, had impostor syndrome because each time they were going into a room, they were going into an opportunity, they were going into an office, they were going into a possibility that they did not think was available to them before. Like, every time we succeed and we look to the doors of success to what else is out there, there’s other doors behind it that we don’t know are available to us, even if we know they exist.

So, this impostor syndrome, the people who were able to thrive in wonderhell didn’t see the impostor syndrome as a limitation, but they saw them as actually these incredibly helpful allies that told them if they were on the right track. And I thought that that was a pretty great way to turn that idea around because if you just think about impostor syndrome alone, like the gall of the term impostor syndrome, like, “Oh, you’re an impostor. Maybe you should leave. You have a syndrome. You’re sick. Maybe you should lay down.”

So, if we think about impostor syndrome and we think about ourselves as the impostor, we’re the ones that are wrong, when, in fact, most of the people who feel impostor syndrome are trying to operate in an environment that wasn’t built by them, wasn’t built for them. Like, unless you’re the madman of the 1950s, too female, too gay, too black or brown. We’re trying to get into rooms that were not built for us, that don’t accommodate us.

And so, the impostor tries to change the shape of themselves to fit into a room that wasn’t built for them, when, in fact, we should be demanding that the rooms themselves change shape. So, this idea, this notion of sort of turning this around and not saying impostor syndrome where something is wrong with me, but impostor syndrome is actually telling me that I’ve gotten to a place that I never knew I could get to, and isn’t that awesome, was a really interesting mindset shift for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Okay. And can we visit the final town?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yup, so the final town is Doubtsville. And Doubtsville is when you are starting, you’re there, and you’re like toes over the edge of incompetence, which, honestly, is the most fun place to be. Like, the only things I’ve ever done in my life that I was excited about were things that I didn’t know how to do. Like, it’s not that interesting to do the puzzle again. You want to do a new puzzle. You want to do something different.

So, Doubtsville is really, like, you found yourself in this place, you don’t quite know what to do, and you’ve got to figure it out, you’ve got to find your own way, you’ve got to realize that you are flying without a net, that there’s maybe never been a net there ever, and you’ve got to figure out who you want to have around you, who belongs in the sidecar with you, and, frankly, who doesn’t.

And, also, how do you manage uncertainty, how do you figure out when everything in the world is completely brand-new and unknown. So, in these moments when we don’t quite know who we are, or where we are, and how we should be, these are the stories that I learned about, about how to get us through those moments.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are some of the top things to do?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. So, some of the stories that I love were, first of all, I did an interview with Jen Welter who was the first female coach of the NFL, and before she became a coach, she actually played for a very short while. And when she was at the training camp, she said to the coach, she was like, “Listen, you’re either going to have to cut me or kill me because I’m not quitting.” She stands of all of 5’4” I think.

But what she did is she decided she was going to break down all of the plays, all of the moves into their component parts. And when she did that, she began to understand the game in a way that, actually, made her into a really good coach. She didn’t know it at the time, but it made her into a really good coach, and so, she became a coach for the NFL.

And when she became a coach for the NFL, she had this moment where she realized, like, “There’s no roadmap, there’s no safety net, there’s no buddy who’s done this before me. I’m going to be the first girl but I’m dead set on not being the last girl.” So, she knew she had to do well by all the women who could come after her.

And she said, “If I decided to do what everybody else did, and I tried to go toe-to-toe with these giant football players and yell at them, I’d be toe-to-toe but I’d also be, like, eyeball to bellybutton. Like, I wasn’t going to be able to do the thing the way everyone else had.” So, she said, “I became the master of the lean-in, of the pull-aside, and I pulled the players aside, and I would whisper because everyone can lean in for a whisper.”

“I became the queen of the pull-aside, the strong pull-aside, and I would whisper, and I would tell the players what they should do. And I was so good at it, and they could tell that I knew the game, and I loved the game, and I understood each component part, that when I finished, they were like, ‘That’s great, coach. What else you got for me?’” People respected her.

So, she could’ve done it the way everybody else did it, and failed. Like, in this moment of doubt, a lot of times we go, “Who else is out there? How are they doing it? Let me do exactly how they’re doing it.” Or, she could say, “I have to do it my way. I have to learn to do it my way. And if I do it my way, and I’m the very best at my way, then I can succeed.” And so, I think a lot of times we forget that what got us there, it might not be enough to get us where we want to go but it certainly is enough to build on a foundation of where we’re going from there.

Another story I’ll tell you from that section is a story of Dorie Clark. And Dorie, she’s an author who I know, she’s written a lot of great personal development books, and she’s a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. She’s one of the top business thinkers in the world, but she also wants to become a Broadway producer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. She mentioned this.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes. Yes. So, this is one fun little thing. One of her books is called Reinventing You and it’s all about how to reinvent yourself. And so, she’s reinventing herself as a someone who’s going to score Broadway musicals. And so, she decides she wants to do this, and she applies and gets rejected from it, and applies again after some coaching, and finally gets into one of the top Broadway musical scoring programs in the world.

And so, she’s there on the first day, and everybody is going around the room talking about what they’ve done, and this one’s won a Tony, and that one scored six musicals, and she’s like, “I’ve scored three whole songs. And I could either have, in that moment, put up my hoodie and shrunk back into my sweatshirt, and left the room, or I could’ve said, ‘You know, Dorie, you’ve been really successful in other parts of your life, in areas where you didn’t know what you were doing, but you knew how to become better. You don’t know how to do this. It’s not that you’re not good. You’re just not good yet.’”

“So, everything that got me to here was what I was able to do, the habits I was able to build, the network I was able to create, the grit, the tenacity, the hunger, the weight, all of those things, that was enough to get me here. And all I can build on all of those things to get me to where I want to get to. So, it’s not that I’m not good, I’m just not good yet.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. That’s really good. And I’ve heard it said, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you need to find some other rooms.”

Laura Gassner Otting
I say that all the time, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe you told me that, Laura.

Laura Gassner Otting
If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Pete Mockaitis
And Dorie often is the smartest person in a lot of rooms, and so it’s pretty cool to be able to step into that spot. And I think it’s actually quite endearing if someone said, “Hey, you know what, you guys have wisdom and experience far beyond mine, and I’m really excited to learn from you all.” As someone who is more experienced in that room, I get excited to be with that person, and say, “Ooh, here’s someone who’s eager and they’re not…I guess, they’re opposite of stuck up, inflexible, un-coachable. It’s exciting to say, ‘Ooh, someone’s about to have a transformation here, and I get to have a little role in it.’”

And, well, I guess, that’s kind of my thing. But even if it’s not, even if you’re not a podcaster, or in the personal development world, it’s just a good human feeling to be a part of that.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. It’s funny, people always ask me, like, who’s in my inner circle, and I say, “I have three types of people in my inner circle.” I have aspirationals, like people who I want to be when I grow up, people who are way more successful than I am in the thing that I want to do, my aspirationals. They are the ones that I call for advice, they are the ones who give me these mentoring moments, they are the ones who give me, like, a kick in the ass when I need it. They don’t let me settle for mediocrity. My aspirationals.

Then I have my peers. And my peers are the ones who are like, they’re in the foxhole with me. They’re on the same track as me, and we complain about stuff together, we whine about stuff together, we celebrate together, we learn from each other because they’re learning one thing about what we’re doing, I’m learning another thing so we can power of two. So, the peers are really great.

And then there are the mentees. And having people come to me for advice, I have found, is the greatest way to get rid of my impostor syndrome ever. It’s the greatest way for me to get rid of my doubt ever because if I’m teaching somebody something that I know, I might not even remember that I know the thing. Like, it’s a great reminder of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, how hard I fought, and I think that if you can, on a regular basis, be part of somebody else’s transformation, it continues to build your own transformation because it reminds you that you actually do know a thing or two.

Pete Mockaitis
That is perfectly said, and that’s been my experience a number of times when folks are asking for advice, or, “Hey, Pete, could you do a talk on this thing?” And I thought, “If I were in your shoes, and you want to talk about productivity, I’d probably book David Allen or Greg McKeown, or if you want to talk about effective presenting, I’d probably go to Nick Morgan.” I’m thinking of the super luminaries in the field, and they’re like, “Yeah, Pete, but we don’t got that kind of budget.” I was like, “All right, fair enough.”

Or, it’s like, “I just want to have a quick chat because we’re buds. Just tell me what you know.” I was like, “Well, okay, I guess, sure.” And then I just get on a roll, and then it’s like been an hour, and they say, “Okay. Well, I want to be respectful of your time,” and I’m thinking, “No, I’m having fun and actually I have a lot more to say apparently about this thing.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess you got to go, so I guess just take those 12 points and five experts and six books, and, hopefully, that’ll do something for you.” It’s like, “Huh, I guess I know a lot about that thing.”

Laura Gassner Otting
I know but isn’t that great, though? Don’t you find that in those moments that you’re like, “Oh, okay, maybe I am myself becoming a luminary?” And that’s pretty cool. I think it’s pretty amazing because, look, like you are a professional student, I think that’s pretty cool. Your job is to learn all day long, is to read books, and to watch talks, and to talk to people about big ideas. That’s pretty special. So, yeah, I think people would be really lucky to be able to bend your ear for some advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Well, thank you, and it really is a dream come true, and I appreciate, it just feels nice personally to be reminded of that. And so, when people say, “So, Pete, what’s next for your career?” it’s funny, part of me thinks, “Well, this is kind of everything. Does there need to be a next? I’m not sure.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, I can’t tell you how many podcasts, how many journalists, how many just friends that I’ve talked to, like, “What’s your next book is going to be about?” And I’m like, “My next book? Can I just have this book right now? Can I have this one?” Yeah, but I think that’s a thing. I think people need to put us in a box. Everybody likes to have shortcuts.

So, when I sold my last business, I sold my last business to the woman who helped me build it, and I ran into an old friend at Starbucks who I hadn’t seen in years, and she was, like, “So, what are you going to do now?” And I looked at her, and I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out.” And she just did not know what to do, she had this look of fear, of horror, of uncertainty.

I think part of her was, like, jealous that I suddenly had freedom to figure it out. I think part of her was questioning whether or not she should leave her job so that she can do something else. I think part of her was like, “I don’t know who you are when you’re not LGO CEO of the search firm. Like, where do I refile you?” I was like a hanging chad, like she didn’t know what to do with me, and I think people want that shortcut.

So, I think a lot of times when we ask people for advice, they rush us to solution because they’re uncomfortable sitting in the discomfort with us. In 2021, I was very, very ill, like I didn’t know if I was going to see 2022. Like, ten months of chemotherapy. It was a bad year. And I had so many people that were like, “Oh, you’re going to be just fine. You’re going to get through it.” And as soon as I was through it in remission, it was like, “It’s behind you. It’s never coming back.”

And, finally, I had to turn to some of those people and say, “You know, when you tell me in the middle of it, or just after it when I’m still processing it, that it’s all fine and it’s over, you’re actually discounting me and my emotions, and needing to actually understand what happened. And I understand that you’re not comfortable with me saying, ‘Yeah, I’m a little worried that maybe it’ll come back.’ But just because you’re not comfortable, doesn’t mean you get to steal that away from me. Like, if you’re not comfortable sitting in my discomfort with me, you can go. It’s fine. You can leave.”

But that people feel the same way, whether it’s about health, whether it’s about divorce, whether it’s about unemployment, like whatever the sticky thing is, it’s kind of I just want to say to people, “You can just say, ‘Oh, that seems really hard. I’m sorry you’re going through that,’ or, ‘That seems an adventure. I can’t wait to see what you do next.’”

Like, it’s okay to be in the unknown. Wonderhell is all about that. It’s, like, “How do you sit in the discomfort of not knowing where this is leading to, knowing that it could lead somewhere amazing, or you could fall really short?” And I just think we all have to get a little more comfortable being uncomfortable sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, that’s powerful stuff. I’m tearing up over here.

Laura Gassner Otting
That was a lot. That was heavy.

Pete Mockaitis
One, you’re just such a gift to the world, and I’m glad you made it. And so, that’s great. And, two, I’m thinking about my mom when… she’ll share some things, “Oh, hey, Pete, so-and-so from hometown Danville, well, yeah, I saw on Facebook there are some tough stuff going on. Like, her son had really dramatic burns from a fire, and they’re in the hospital and they’re not quite sure what’s going to happen,” or, “So-and-so’s child has cancer and so there’s photos of this precious six-year-old who’s bald and it’s tough stuff.” And then my mom, she’ll say that, “I really don’t like it when people on Facebook say, ‘You got this.’”

Laura Gassner Otting
Oh, God, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, one, it’s just sort of an annoying phraseology, like she was an English teacher.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes, that’s not grammar.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, but much more deeply, it’s like, “Okay, you have no idea, like, what I got and what I don’t got. And you saying, ‘You got this’ is I get you try to be supportive, like that’s some encouragement.”

Laura Gassner Otting
It comes from a beautiful place but it is misfired.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it often doesn’t feel great to receive that because exactly what you put your finger on is, like, we’re kind of rushing past the fact that this is a hard struggle with some suffering, and it’d be cool if you could be there with me, and maybe provide some practical support.

Laura Gassner Otting
So, I will say this, like it was beautiful to see how many people showed up for me, how many people did give me the “You got this” messages. It was wonderful to know and yet, also, it was hard. At the end of the whole thing, I didn’t even tell my family, like my husband and my kids, just how hard things had gotten for me because I didn’t have the energy to take care of them and their fear and their worry, and them wanting to take care of me.

And so, it’s a very interesting thing because you really do have no idea what somebody is going through. So, even the people living in my own house had no idea just how dark things had gotten inside. And I just think, I have a friend who he knows that I’m doing all these podcasts in advance of the book coming out, and he knows that I have this cold that you can hear so well right now. My apologies for that.

And he sent me a message, and he said, “How can I support you in this moment?” And I thought, “What a great question.” It’s not like, “You’re fine. You’ll be great. Power through.” He’s like, “How can I support you in this moment?” I was like it’s just somebody who is there to just keep you company. Sometimes you just need somebody to keep you company in your misery.

And to bring this back to work stuff, which is what the podcast is about, I think a lot of times in the work environment, we’ll have somebody who’s dealing with something that’s hard, and we want to fix it, we want to help them, we want to get through it because it’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable. But I think sometimes just saying, “What do you need right now? How can we support you in this moment? What do you need right now?”

And I think that really changes everything from “We need you to get better and solve the problem so you can get back to dealing with the work,” to, like, “You can be a full person here. You can be who you are and we respect that because we know you’re coming back stronger.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really beautiful, Laura. And in terms of providing support, whether someone is going through the unique situation of Wonderhell in one of those three flavors, or in any number of other things. I remember when I was 15 years old, and my dad died suddenly, he was bicycling, he was hit by a truck.

Laura Gassner Otting
Oh, goodness.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that was tragic, and my mom said some of the most meaningful supports people offered, and it was that kind of a question. And what came about was, I was 15 years old, and someone said, “How can I support you?” and she said, “You know what, hey, you were a former driver, Zed,” props to my mom, she’s awesome. She just was able to identify and claim it, and so no, “Oh, no, no, I don’t want to be a bother or a burden.” It’s like, “No, you need it and take it in your time of need.”

She’s like, “Hey, my son is 15 years old, we got to get those state of Illinois 25 hours of driving to get a driver’s license. It’s very high stress for me, and you’re a pro, so could you please do some hours with him?” And he said yes, and so I spent some time driving with the dude, and that was super helpful. And then someone else, my mom said, “You know what, my kids love swimming, and you’ve got a cool pool. Like, would it be okay if, from time to time, they went there.” He’s like, “Absolutely. You could come anytime. I’ll let my family know and the neighbors know, and you just drop on in.” And that’s just really cool to have those little bits of support in that tough time.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, think about how much more that meant to you than somebody dropping off teddy bears and fruit baskets at your house. I think about that all the time. Thank you for sharing that story, by the way. I’m honored that you shared that with me. There was a funeral in my neighborhood about three days ago. I was driving through the neighborhood and I don’t know the family.

But I was watching all these people walking up with baskets of food, and I was thinking to myself, “They’re probably going to throw out so much food at this house. The last thing somebody needs is somebody else’s homemade banana bread.

And I was thinking, “God, what would be great is to know, ‘What’s happening inside that house. Who are the kids? What do they need?’” The fact that your mom was able to ask that, I say to people all the time when they have newborn babies, I’m like, “Everybody’s going to come and be like, ‘What can I do for you?’ hand them the baby, and take a shower. Do whatever you need to do. When somebody asks, don’t be like, ‘No, no, it’s fine. Let me make you some lunch.’” You’re not there to entertain people, “Here’s the baby. I’ve done the entertaining. I had nine months of it. I made this baby. You can look at it while I take a shower.”

But I think we have to get better at asking, especially if people don’t know how to ask us. Think about how good that guy felt being able to take you to drive. Think about how good that person felt letting you use their pool. Like, it wasn’t hard for them. Think about the last time you helped somebody do anything. Think about how good you felt when you helped that person. Like, why are we stealing the gifts of helping from other people? I think we should look at it that way and not be so embarrassed to ask.

Now, I say that being here, sitting here on the edge of my book launch, and just dying and I’m asking people nonstop, “Please buy my book. Please buy my book. Please buy my book.” But every time somebody asks me to buy their book, I love it. I’m so excited to help them. So, I don’t know, I think we have to really be okay knowing that the person who is dropping in and trying to help us, even if they don’t know how they can help us just because they’re uncomfortable in the discomfort, not because they’re offering the thing that they want to offer. They’re just like stabbing in the dark.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. And that’s hitting me in terms of I remember, I’m 15 years old and people, the first person who showed up with those aluminum foil casserole dishes at the door and just handed it to me.

Laura Gassner Otting
Mystery casseroles.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s, like, I was 15 and didn’t have lots of experiences with some of it, I didn’t even know what was happening. I was like, “Mom, someone came by and they gave us this food. So, I guess we’re having…”

Laura Gassner Otting
Very heavy mystery tin foil.

Pete Mockaitis
She had to explain, “Well, yes, Pete, when someone passes away, that’s the way people try to show support so that we don’t have to worry about cooking and stuff.” I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess that makes some sense.” And then a few days later, I was like, “Well, our freeze is sort of full so I don’t really know what we’re going to do with this.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Like, it really does come out of the best part of them, like it is the best sign of humanity that I know that people surround people in crises. We just have to be okay saying, “You know what would be better than that mystery casserole? Like, if you could just take my dog for a walk while I just sit in my living room and cry for a few minutes.” Sometimes that’s what we need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That is perfect. And when you talked about books, I’m thinking about a mentor of mine in my episode one, Mawi Asgedom. He understood, he’d done books, he’s like, “All right, Pete, so here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to buy ten of these books, and I’m going to send each of these to someone who I think could really be into this book and want to buy more and maybe book you for some speaking as you’re kind of entering this next phase.” I was like, “Well, that’s awesome. I could not have imagined or had the audacity to ask for that, but that is perfection. So, thank you for that, Mawi.”

Cool. Well, that’s an interesting little detour we’ve taken, Laura, how to be helpful and how to ask whether we’re in the midst of a Wonderhell or any number of needs that you or someone else has. That’s powerful stuff. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, I would just say that Wonderhell is a sneaky little bastard that only presents itself to people who are worthy of it. So, if you’ve achieved something in your life, cool, I’m happy, and none of this is resonating with you, you’re probably where you are at the top of your potential, and that’s awesome. But my guess is that as you’re hearing it, you’re like, “Yeah, I have felt that.” And if you have felt a little bit of it, it’s because you are made of more. So, if you are feeling Wonderhell, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just a sign that you are capable of the thing that you can envision.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote?

Laura Gassner Otting
There’s a Henry Rollins quote, and I don’t remember exactly what it is, but it goes something like, “There’s no down time, there’s no up time, there’s no work time, there’s no life time, there’s just time. So, get on with it.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Laura Gassner Otting
So, my favorite piece of research right now is one that I actually quote in the book that says that, “People who flip a coin, and the coin flip tells them go, like do the thing, leave the marriage, take the new job, move across country, whatever the thing is, they are happier months and years later, regardless of the outcome of how that decision turned out than people who flipped the coin, and the coin told them to just stay where they are and not do something different.” So, this idea that action beats stagnation is fascinating to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Gassner Otting
I think one of my favorite books is Ursula Hegi’s book Stones from the River. It’s a fiction book. And the reason I love it is that it’s a story of this woman named Trudy, she’s a zwerg, which is dwarf in German, and it’s a story of the history of the small town during World War II. And Trudy is one of those people who could be easily ignored because she’s a dwarf, and she’s not usual from everybody else.

And throughout the book, she actually is able to hide Jews in her attic, she’s able to hear German soldiers talking about what they’re going to be up to, and then get that information to the British resistance. Like, the whole book is about how she has overcome what the world thinks of her and defined for herself what her life is going to be, and created this big rich life out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Laura Gassner Otting
I love Notion. I love Notion. Notion is where I organize everything. But if you can look back there on my bookshelf, there’s a hammer that I won as being the fastest lightweight 40- to 49-year-old woman on an indoor rowing competition, a 2K competition. And the trophy that you get for it is a hammer because you’re supposed to drop the hammer. So, if we’re really literally, like, your mom would be proud talking about tools, that hammer.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Gassner Otting
My favorite habit is having accountability buddies in everything that I do. I’m a motivational speaker but I will tell you that I think motivation is BS because if it’s 5:00 in the morning, and it’s 40 degrees outside, and I have to go for a 10-mile run, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to roll over, and I’m going to turn off my alarm because I am lazy, and I am girl from Miami who likes the warmth.

But if it is 4:00 in the morning and it is 20 degrees outside, and I told I was going to meet you for a 10-mile run, I will be there every single day of the week because I will always break a promise to myself, but I will never break a promise to you. So, my favorite habit is finding accountability buddies for everything that I want to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, people quote back to me all the time, “Stop giving voice in your life to people who shouldn’t even have voices.” Like, all those people in our lives who we let give us all their opinions about who we should be and what we should be in, and how we should be in, and God forbid, what we can’t be, and we listen to all of them with equal volume when, in fact, most of them don’t know us, and they don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes. So, my name is Laura Gassner Otting. All my good friends call me LGO, so you can find me on all the socials at heyLGO, and heyLGO.com is a shortcut to my website. You can also find out much more about Wonderhell at WonderHell.com or pick it up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, anywhere fine books are sold.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, my final call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs is to figure out whether or not everything that’s on your calendar, on your to-do list, in your email box is stuff that is furthering your goals and your callings or it’s furthering someone else’s. I would ask people to figure out whose dreams are you working for. And if those dreams are not your own, think about whether or not you should be doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, this has been a treat. I wish you, the book, all the success.

Laura Gassner Otting
Thank you so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Jackie, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Jacqueline Brassey
Hi, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to be chatting about your latest book here, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World. Can you kick us off with a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made while putting this together?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, the discovery I’ve made may be a bit more boring than you just introduced, but what I really love about this topic is that, and it has become a lifestyle for me, is that it can be learnt. It is something you can master if you put in enough time and energy in it, and that is absolutely amazing. And, in addition, it’s actually applicable to all aspects of life. So, this book is written for leaders in a business context, but it is applicable to anyone in any job but also in personal situations, private situations in whatever role you play in life.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say it could be learned, what is it?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, it is deliberate calm, that’s a set of skills, and the secret is in the title. Deliberate means that you are a choice, to choose in a specific moment how to respond. That choice is often better if you remain calm.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I can learn a set of skills to become deliberately calm anytime and every time I desire.

Jacqueline Brassey
Exactly. Even though you may not feel it…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, superpower.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yes, superpower. Even though you may not feel it, but it’s about the response. So, at the heart of this lies also the power to become comfortable with discomfort, basically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so maybe could you kick us off then by sharing a particularly inspiring story of someone who’s able to learn this and summon it to great effect?

Jacqueline Brassey
Sure. One example that we used when we kick off Chapter one in our book is the very famous story of Captain Sullenberger who lands the plane on the Hudson River after the plane was struck by a flock of birds.

He decided, in the milliseconds, that he was going to ignore the traffic tower and he made a different decision. He did not go to his default response. He has landed the plane, any plane, so many times but now he had to decide to actually choose something different than what was told to him in the moment. And everybody may know that story, you can read about it, but there was a high-stakes unfamiliar moment.

And people may think, “Well, that doesn’t resonate with me because that’s very exceptional.” But I have a couple of stories, how this actually can be also translated to day-to-day life because it doesn’t always need to be a similar extreme crisis situation, as that example of Captain Sullenberger. But we have, in our day-to-day lives, smaller or larger versions of this.

And so, let me tell you another story of someone I met recently, actually. His name is Flavio Gianotti, and I met him a couple of weeks ago in a radio interview. He’s an Olympian fencer. And it’s very interesting because he has been told that he is very talented, and he knows he’s talented. He’s a good fencer. He has all the skills he needs to actually play at this high level of skills and high-level sports. But what holds him back, nine of out of ten, is his brain, his mind.

And we chatted off the radio interview and he had a game that weekend, and a lot was at stake for him. His family was there, it was very visible, and it was important that he had a good game. And he texted me afterwards with a nice picture. He was number one on stage, very happy, so, clearly, he won. And he said, literally, “Today, I made it. I made a difference with my head.”

And I called him, I said, “Gosh, what did you do?” And he said, “Well, I remembered a lot of the stories that you told me and the conversation that we had.” And he said, “In the moment that I was fencing, I actually was noticing, I became aware that I was not winning.” And he then decided to actually consciously enjoy the game and focus on what he does best, which is fencing, and he was able to disconnect from his worries. He could let them be there but he could focus on the game, and he said, “That changed everything.”

And, long story short, he won, which is an example of high-stakes familiar zone, which is very different from Captain Sullenberger’s example because Flavio was also trained to do this game. The game was not unfamiliar territory but was highly stressful. In those moments, the best thing you can do is manage your stress and focus on the skills that you have, and focus on performing.

But if you go into a different situation, which is unfamiliar, that’s where deliberate calm comes in, then you need to learn and adapt on the fly. The key, Pete, is though, that in those situations, it’s hard for us to do. We default to what we know. And that’s what we call the adaptability paradox in our book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how do we define the adaptability paradox?

Jacqueline Brassey
The adaptability paradox is basically when you most need to learn, change, and adapt, it’s the hardest to do. I say it in a free translation. And the reason is, in high-stakes unfamiliar territory, we feel the stress of the high stakes but we also don’t have the skills to respond in the right way, so we need to actually adjust our behavior, and we need to adjust what we know.

And in those situations, our brains are wired to actually experience stress because we lack predictability. We also lack certainty, and so we will experience extreme stress. And learning and changing on the go is then very hard to do but that is what you learn in deliberate calm. First, you need to learn, actually, to become aware, “What situation am I in? What’s going on for me?” But then, also, you use a lot of the tools to respond in the right way in the situation that you’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I guess that’s the paradox part, is what we need to do is change, and that is stressful, and, thus, it’s harder to change, so that is what’s needed, hence the paradox. Okay. So, then lay it on us, Jackie, what are the skills or the tools, the approach, the top do’s and don’ts so that we can get this going for ourselves?

Jacqueline Brassey
At the heart of this book is what we call, and it sounds a bit fluffy but it isn’t at all, we call the dual awareness. And dual awareness means you need to become aware of the circumstances that you’re in and also aware of what it means for you and what’s going on for you.

So, in the book, we teach people a set of tools, and we have a protocol also in the back of the book that helps you start recognizing moments that you get triggered and that you feel stressed, for example, and that you feel pressure. And those moments matter to you, and why do they matter, and what does it mean.

So, by going through the protocol, you become more aware of moments of stress, also when it happens so you start recognizing what’s going on in your brain and body, but you also start realizing what the situation calls for. And sometimes we feel stressed in situations that’s absolutely, you know, may not be stressful at all but it is something that we do because we interpret the situation as such.

Sometimes we become aware that, indeed, this is a situation that requires a pause. And a big example is, Pete, the pandemic that we’ve been through the last couple of years. We didn’t know what was happening, so it eventually turned into a high-stakes unfamiliar territory where everybody was defaulting to what we knew best, trying to wait for when it was over and trying to get back to normal as soon as possible but we had to learn that that was not possible anywhere, and we had to change a lot of what we normally did in the way we worked, in the way we dealt with situations, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you walk us through an example of an individual who is practicing some awareness and gaining that dual awareness, and then responding in a way that they bring about the calm?

Jacqueline Brassey
I will give an example of a story that I experienced myself a couple of years ago. That was about two years ago, just after George Floyd was killed, which was also very much discussed in the organization where I worked and I was heading learning and development for a topic including diversity and inclusion.

And one of the things that I was asked to do immediately thereafter was to train out 32,000 people in anti-racism. And I had to do that, I was asked to do that in a very short amount of time with a team that I had not yet put together. And so, there we are, hugely purposeful but high stakes because a lot of visibility, sensitive topic, and something we’ve never done before. It’s already difficult to do that in one country, let alone do it around the globe, 32,000 people.

And my default response to things like that, to asks like that, projects like that, is I want to control everything. So, I want to have a perfect project plan, I want every step detailed out and very clear, very sequential, but that was not possible because it’s quite a challenging topic and everybody had also an opinion about it, and we were basically building a plane whilst flying already, right?

I didn’t write about Deliberate Calm in those days yet but I’ve been a resilience researcher, and stress researcher, and authentic confidence researcher for many years, so I applied a couple of tools that we also integrated within Deliberate Calm. It was really to become aware, first of all, of that situation. This was a new situation which would not be served with my standard approach.

And so, taking a break, taking a step back, and re-looking at what was needed in the moment was one thing that I did because I was panicking a bit, and I thought, “Well, if I don’t change and if I don’t learn and adapt, then nothing is going to happen in the right way.” And another step was that I also, and I’ve done that for many years, I took good care of myself because this project takes a lot of energy away, and, for a long time, it will ask a lot from me. And if I worked harder and harder, and if I don’t sleep, and if I don’t take care of myself, then it won’t be sustainable, so I put an operating model in place to support this work that we had to do.

And then within the team, I focused on creating safety and security, and also speaking about discomfort. We all actually felt the stress, and bringing that in the room, putting a great team together but also agreeing that we’re all in this together, and it’s better to get all the problems on the table than to hide them was usually successful because it was a bit messy but, by doing that, we actually all could shoulder that stress. But also, what it helped was that we didn’t all go into default, and we call that protection mode, in the book, when you are in high stress.

But we went into a state of learning, and that gave us the creativity, the stamina, and the solution space that we needed to go into. So, there were a lot of elements that come together, Pete, in practicing deliberate calm. It’s not just one golden nugget. It’s actually a lifestyle, I call it sometimes, and sometimes I say it comes in three different layers.

The one layer is the foundation, having a good base to work from, taking good care of yourself, making sure it’s almost like you sometimes have to be a top athlete in the work that we do. Take good care of yourself because then you are more resilient to any curve balls and stress. And then set yourself up for success during the day, and have a couple of tools, that we also teach in the book, that deal you with moments in the day when you really need them, those SOS moments, when you get a curve ball, and when you have to respond in a calm way, which includes, one tool is breathing, for example. How do you breathe? And how do you breathe in such a way that you can immediately calm yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s talk about a couple of those tracks then, both the taking good care of yourself like you’re a top athlete, and then the specific SOS moments. So, I guess sleep, nutrition, hydration. What are some of the top things that make a world of difference in taking care of ourselves? Are any of them, shall I say, non-obvious? Because I think we’ve heard of a few, like, “Oh, yeah, you should sleep.” Like, “Yes, we know that.”

But, maybe, if you have any nuances, like, “Did you know that complete darkness actually makes all the difference for sleep as opposed to 98% darkness?” Or, give us the secret insight or info, Jackie, in terms of self-care and SOS tactics that make all the difference.

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, self-care, as you said, most people know it but they don’t do it. So, I would say, indeed, all of them that you mentioned, and I would also refer to Andrew Huberman’s podcast, who knows all the tools, who brings a lot of these amazing tools.

Pete Mockaitis
I love his stuff.

Jacqueline Brassey
Oh, me, too. I’m a big fan of his work. He also talks about daylights in the morning. He talks about the physiological side. And then there’s another friend of mine, Alexander Helm, who does a lot in sleep. Indeed, all of them matter. How we bring that together in our book is actually you have to be intentional. So we bring that together in a tool that we call your personal operating model.

And your personal operating model has a couple of elements, including energy management, and that changes also with circumstances when they change. So, what is relevant for me today may be different. So, just take a simple situation, family without kids, family with kids. Different operating models and different way of managing this intention and this energy. So, we provide tools for that.

But what many people forget is they know it’s important to sleep but it’s really critical to act like Captain Sullenberger in stressful moments, to act like Flavio in moments of peak sports. Sleep is important for your overall health, but if you do not sleep well, you become much more susceptible to stress and also to anxiety. And we have an epidemic of stress and anxiety, as also all the research that I’ve been doing through the McKinsey Health Institute has showed.

So, that’s one, no big secrets there. I would say just apply it. But there are also moments in the moment, applying this in moments of stress, there are tons. One favorite of mine, apart from the obvious ones that you just mentioned, is also the use of voice. So, how you actually leverage your voice in the moment, and how you become aware that if you are stressed, you start breathing more from your chest rather than your belly.

And if you become aware, so the key in this book is also about becoming aware, “What is happening for me in the moment?” and then you can catch the arrow, is another way of talking about it, basically, because then you can change, and then you can respond in the right way. And most people actually respond way too late.

The voice is all about calming it down a couple of notches, making a warmer voice, which is the voice is related to the larynx and our vagus nerve, which is also related to our parasympathetic nervous system, and that calms us down when we actually also calm our voice down, and others too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us some example demonstrations here in terms of, “Okay, I’m feeling stressed. Something happened, I’m freaking out. So, I’m stressed, how do I use voice to calm down?

Jacqueline Brassey
I just had one, actually, Pete.

Jacqueline Brassey
In the middle of this podcast, I think my husband tried to call me, and I actually stressed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Jacqueline Brassey
No, I had many. I’m talking a lot on stage and I’m talking a lot in workshops as well, and always in moments that I need to focus and concentrate, something happens. But it’s little moments that everybody also will recognize is that the doorbell may go, or everything comes together and it’s very difficult to stay calm.

I once had a workshop where I absolutely had to perform and I started to feel very unwell in the moment, and I wanted to stay calm because I wanted it to be successful. I can, of course, say that I’m sick and I walk out of it, but I really was not well, but too much was depending on it for me, so I made the choice that I actually was going to try to apply my own tools in that very moment, and I did not tell the group.

But a couple of things that I did is basically noticing what I feel in my body, and allowing that, taking a deep breath before I started the workshop, allowing it to be there, and being with that pain that I felt while still delivering the content in front of the group, which, eventually, became a bit hard, and then I decided to actually also bring it into the workshop, and I decided to talk about it, and to share it with people, and to say, “Listen, this is what’s going on for me. We’ll try to keep going as much as we can, but if it doesn’t work out, we have to take a break for a moment.”

But what happened…so, there are different tools. This is one tool which is really about becoming comfortable with discomfort, and it was clearly not comfortable for me. And the reaction that you immediately feel is stress and you want to get away from it. But what we then do, what I teach also in a lot of the work that I do is stay with it and try to actually, with kindness and compassion, observe it and see if you can stay with it. And that builds resilience, which is a story that may sound weird.

But the interesting thing that happened for me in that moment that, eventually, it went away, and I was able to deliver whilst starting with discomfort. So, that’s just one version. Another version of this is getting close to a panic attack where I had to speak in public. And what happens for me is when I feel very stressed, I start shaking.

And so, there was a public presentation where I was. At the end, we were all able to ask questions, and I had a good question, I thought, and so I said I’ll put my hand up. And the man with the microphone was coming to me, and I started to feel nervous but I was ready to ask the question. But, halfway through, somebody else actually put their hand up and they also had a question, and he said, “You know what, I’ll come to you next, but I’ll first answer, I’ll first take this question.”

In that moment, I started to become very nervous and my heart started to beat faster. The trick in those moments is basically to be with it and to learn how to breathe well and not to push it away. Because the moment you do not want to feel the discomfort, it becomes worse. And that has everything to do with how our biology works, how our brain works. And if you dare to start accepting and embracing it, you will calm down.

And that’s exactly what happened. So, I could still be there. So, I was still able to be there and perform, yet on the inside, I wasn’t 100% calm. So, this is also what deliberate calm is about. It’s not always about feeling calm, but it is about being comfortable with this discomfort and then still being able to perform in a calm way, which is what you do.

We call that in the book, you pivot from a state of protection, which is the increased sympathetic nervous system arousal, to learning, which is still increased arousal but with an open brain and with an open space where you can be curious and still effective and adaptive and change your behavior in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, with this observation of kindness and compassion, can you tell us what that sounds like in terms of an internal dialogue? Let’s say I’m thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to do this thing. Aargh,” I’ve got some procrastination urges, and then there’s a number of approaches, like, “Come on, we’ve just got to power through. We’ve got make it happen. Buckle down.” It’s like, “We’re just getting started. We need to do a little pit,” like coaxing one’s self. But what is the internal dialogue of observation, kindness, compassion, embracing sound like in such a moment?

Jacqueline Brassey
I think the most important one in those moments is really about getting in touch with why this matter to you. Why is it important that you actually go through this challenge? Because if there’s no reason for it, why would you go through that discomfort? So, the reason why I do difficult things is because there’s a purpose for me. The reason why I talk about the topics that I find meaningful, also about I have a lot of work done in confidence and the confidence crisis and the anxiety that I have gone through in my life, and I do that because it’s meaningful for me to share and to help other people understand that they’re not alone.

So, doing difficult things for a reason helps a lot. So, the dialogue in my brain is really all about, “Why does this matter to me?” and I focus on what I will achieve by doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s say it doesn’t matter to you but it’s, I don’t know, mandatory, compulsory, it’s for someone else, you’re kind of on the hook.

Jacqueline Brassey
Okay. Yeah, well, when you’re on the hook, you can always find a meaning. You’re on the hook for a reason. And can you give me an example of what you’re thinking of?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say taxes. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s not fun, it’s not meaningful. You just kind of got to do them.

Jacqueline Brassey
I don’t think you’d get into high-stakes unfamiliar territory with taxes. I think it’s high stakes definitely. Maybe. But the thing is, with taxes, you have the time to do that, and you can find the help to do that. It’s not fun but if you don’t do it, so it’s meaningful to do it because you will suffer if you don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, meaningful in the negative point then.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah. Well, you can also think of it, “With taxes, I contribute to this country and I can make a difference,” but that’s maybe for a whole different podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Jacqueline Brassey
It totally depends, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay. Well, I think we drifted a little bit away from using voice. Can you give us a demonstration for how we use voice to get those soothing benefits?

Jacqueline Brassey
Absolutely. What happens when you feel stressed, you can start noticing that with yourself, if you try to actually control a situation. And maybe if you have kids, this may resonate. I have amazing kids but sometimes you feel like you’re out of control when it’s a mess in the house and they’re not doing exactly what they need to do, and you feel already tired, and you try to control the situation but your voice comes out in a different way. It becomes this squeaking type of voice, which is the sign of you feel powerless but also you feel stressed and you have a higher pitch. Often that is happening. Or, you start crackling, you’ve got a crackling voice.

The only way to change things, and that’s why this is part of deliberate calm, is, of course, being aware that this happens because, then, you can intervene. That’s why, in this book also, work so much on awareness and awareness in the moment, picking up the signs that you go into a state of distress or in state of protection, we call it, that can be picking of voices in your head but also physical cues or behavioral cues.

And one is your voice when it crackles or where you breathe from, and also when you notice that you do not have…you feel out of control, basically. So, when you notice that, take a deep breath, and I would absolutely recommend people to do Breathwork, which I do a lot. It helps me a ton. There are different versions, different ways of doing that. The most basic version if, of course, breathing from your diaphragm, from your belly, and try to calm your voice down, and go slightly lower than where you are at that moment. Don’t go too deep but you will learn actually by practicing what is a comfortable tone because you start noticing that if you do it, it calms yourself down.

Now, when that happens, it will have an effect on other people. It will have an effect on your children as well because there will be a different response when you shout and you feel out of control, or whether you stay calm and you have a different mindset about the situation. And that’s better for you and that’s better for another, so it’s a very simple tool. So, learning how to control that is super strong and powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Jackie. I’m thinking about Bob Ross right now.

Jacqueline Brassey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that kind of what it might sound like or could you give us a demo for what that tone is like?

Jacqueline Brassey
I’m calming down. Totally. Well, I have used my soft voice the whole podcast already so I’m not going any lower. I think the version that you just gave us was maybe a little bit too smooth but…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, actually, I’m kind of having fun, Jackie. I might just keep it going. Can you tell us about, we talked about athletes a couple of times, you also have some work on flow. How, do tell us, can we enter flow?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, there is a lot of research, of course, on flow, and going there on demand is not always easy because that feels almost like you have to, when you want something, that’s not when you get it. But the circumstances for flow are also often determined by, “Do you feel you have space to focus? Are you working on something that you really care about, that is meaningful for you?”

So, for example, in my case, I can go totally in flow when I focus on my research topic and I have the space to research, and to deep dive in the area, and to write. When I get out of that is, I get out of that if I’m distracted and if I am, well, not feeling well, when I’m very tired, but also when I don’t have the space to go into flow. So, there’s also circumstances, of course, that you need to create to get into flow, and sometimes you can make it happen, sometimes it also happens because of the situation you’re in. You can be in a flow with a team, for example, and it all comes together.

The key is though, in all of that, is the sense of safety and enjoyment. There’s a lot of research on flow, and that is not, per se, being in a hugely stressful situation but it is an increased activity of performance where you feel a sense that what you do is really meaningful and you really enjoy and you feel safe. You feel also the space where you’re also not distracted. So, I guess that is different for everybody but you can create that, I’m convinced, by creating the right circumstances.

Do you remember moments that you have been in flow?

Pete Mockaitis
I do. I’m thinking about a time I was doing an analysis on top-performing episodes, and I was so immersed that I totally forgot I had to go pick up my son from preschool.

Jacqueline Brassey
Goodness.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “Whoa, check out these indicators.” And so, it was like, “How might I do a weighted average in terms of, like, scoring them in terms of given all these interesting data signals from Spotify and Apple Podcast and the emails?” And so, I was really just kind of playing with that and iterating and getting some ideas and moving forward, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I really should’ve left over half an hour ago.” And so, that’s what leaps to mind, it’s because, well, it was painful because then I had to do all sorts of apologizing and felt very silly.

Jacqueline Brassey
Was he safe?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, he was totally safe. He was just chilling with the assistant principal, and they’re like, “Hey.” It’s just like, “Oh, Pete, you owe us some money.” It’s like, “Yes, I do. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

Jacqueline Brassey
So, what happened there? Why did you go in flow? Because you love the topic, you were fascinated by what you saw.

Pete Mockaitis
It was. It was fascinating and there were elements of surprise, like, “Huh, I wouldn’t have expected that.” And then it was sort of they’re like little bite-sized mini questions and challenges that I was tackling, like, “Well, hey, what about this? Oh, I can just do that. Oh, that works. Oh, that doesn’t work. Hmm, maybe I can do it a little bit differently.”

And so, I cared about it and it was, I guess, I’m thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was in that right zone of it’s not crazily overwhelming, like, “I have no idea how I would even begin to do this.” And it wasn’t just a snooze, boring chore I can do in my sleep. It was pushing me but not overwhelming in the amount of push.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah. In a way, it’s low stakes but unfamiliar new territory where you use a lot of curiosity. It’s a wonderful experience. It resonates with me. I often go there. But, yeah, the danger is you forget about the rest of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Certainly. So, then what are the, perhaps, top do’s and don’ts if you are trying to set the stage to maximize the odds of entering flow? So, you care about the thing, you have the opportunity to focus, and maybe, you said it varies by a person. How about for you personally? What might you do?

Jacqueline Brassey
I actually enter often in flow when I’m on holidays or even in my free time because I love browsing, I love learning, and I love browsing on the internet, and I love jumping from one to the next. And so, at the core, for me, is really deep-diving in a topic that matters a lot, and learning new things, and getting up to speed on the latest insights. And I can totally spend hours and hours just going from one to the next. It’s so much like hopping from one island to the other island, and it’s amazing.

So, yeah, it’s in a space when I have not a lot of stressful things to do, and there’s not a lot of autopilot stuff that you need to do, but there is really space for creating new things. And, in a way, that is in between, if you talk about deliberate calm, we really also focus on the crisis of uncertainty. It’s not what this is about. And it’s also not completely in your comfort zone. It is, indeed, as you said, a little bit of that excitement and that focus, so it is the effort, but you need to have the space for it to happen.

And, for me, that often happens on holidays and in my free time. It doesn’t happen on a normal day where there’s always a lot of stuff coming into the inbox and phones that ring, and things that need to happen that take me out of flow.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Jackie, any final top tips on some of this stuff before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, a top tip for me, I would say this not really a quick fix. This is a set of skills and, as I said, this is a lifestyle and something that you can learn, and absolutely worth it. It’s also a set of skills that do not go out of date because you take them with you for the rest of your life, but I would give it a try. So, this was just the last reflection. Think about why, actually, what is more important, why would you do it, why does it matter to you. And why it matters to me, Pete, is it’s really about it really has brought me so much opportunity but also reaching my full potential, and enjoying life much more than before.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jacqueline Brassey
Oh, yes, my favorite quote is actually from a math teacher from my high school, who I remember very well. He said, “You can do much more than you think.” And that was in a discussion that we had, I think I was 14 years old, in the class, where people were talking about, “Are you born with talent for math or can you learn it?” And he said, “You can do much more than you think if you put the effort in.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, I mentioned it already. A couple of favorite people that I study is… Andrew Huberman from Stanford. His podcast is amazing, also the work that he does. But I also like the work from Stanford’s Alia Crum, Adam Grant, Francesca Gino. Absolutely my favorites. And what excites me a lot is bringing insights from neuroscience and business together and leadership development. So, cross-disciplinary research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jacqueline Brassey
One of my all-time favorites is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jacqueline Brassey
My favorite tools, a couple of my favorite tools are Breathwork, I walk every day, and I run. So, movement, cardio movement, which brings me in a state of creativity, and it’s also good physically. And voice techniques, I just mentioned one. And also, embodiments experience with really being and feeling situations. So, instead of being in my brain, I just try to feel the stress or the positive stress in my body.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Jacqueline Brassey
I‘m not sure if I noticed it, that you do that as well, but a favorite habit or a favorite feedback tool that I use are biofeedback, one of the tools. And I cannot recommend one over the other but one of the tools that I have is an Oura Ring.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. You saw mine.

Jacqueline Brassey
I think I saw yours. And I try more tools, actually, than only this, but I really love it. I think there’s a huge potential in it. And it helps also to be more aware and to take care of yourself. But I love the improving science around it and also the power and potential of these tools.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jacqueline Brassey
I’m actually very active on LinkedIn. I post a lot, interact a lot there on social, also on other, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And if people want to find more about Deliberate Calm and our work at McKinsey and at McKinsey Health Institute, they can find that very easily by just Googling Jackie Brassey and McKinsey.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah, I would love to ask people to really think through why it matters what they do. Think about the purpose and think what really is important for them. Life is too short to focus your time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jackie, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and deliberate calm.

Jacqueline Brassey
Thank you so much, Pete. It was lovely being here with you. A lot of fun.