180: How to Conquer Stress, Freak-Outs, and the Fear of Failure with Joe Sanok

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Joseph Sanok
Thanks so much, Pete, for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really looking forward to digging into your perspectives here. And first, I kind of want to hear just about your quick take on your path because you say that you had no idea what you were doing when you started your counseling practice, and now you are helping other people with their counseling practices. That’s a quick learning curve. Can you give us a quick background on how this came to be?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. So I had kind of your traditional counseling path. When I graduated from grad school, I worked at a nonprofit for a while and tried to be awesome at those jobs, just like all of your audience is trying to do, and then got kind of the ideal gig working at a community college and state pension. None of those even exist anymore, it seems like. And I wanted to pay off student loan debt and was like, “I want to do this faster.” And it was before we had kids.
And so I launched this counseling practice on the side. And I had no idea how to build a website. I had no idea how to do billing or anything, and just kind of learned from friends and pieced it together. And that started to grow, and I decided I was going to start a blog just talking about what I was learning. So I’d read a book and I’d write a blog post about it. And counselors started really kind of digging it, and so, after a year, I launched a podcast also. And then in 2014, my income working five hours to ten hours a week matched mine at my full time job.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Joseph Sanok
And I was saying to myself, “You know, I really like this job. I think I’m good at it. But 40 hours versus 10 hours, I think I could do more.” And so, a couple of years ago, I ended up leaving my full time job and doing counseling at my counseling practice and doing the consulting full time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s cool. Congratulations. And one thing I really like about your site and your vibe is that kind of openness, the transparency, the zeal for learning. All that stuff is really cool, so I thought it would be great to have you in the same kind of transparency, like behind the curtain, if you will, of course respecting confidentiality and all that. I want to know, as a counselor, what are the sorts of needs, be they stress, imposter syndrome, whatever, that you see pop up most often amongst your ambitious professionals?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I love that question because I think even ambitious professionals still have their own hang-ups. And there’s a lot of common ones we see. I think one of them is definitely that fear of failure, especially when you’re an ambitious person. You want to rock it out and be awesome all the time, and that can actually stand in the way of your success. I tend to look at things and try to help my clients look at things as experiments, where you’re going to experiment with something, see if it works, see what sticks, and then if it doesn’t work, move on to the next thing. Don’t see it as a failure. See it as a learning experience.
And so what happens then is people stop getting paralyzed by perfection and they actually start getting things done in their jobs and in their roles, and they can take those risks because it’s not so much about pass/fail, like “Did I actually achieve this?” It’s much as “I’m going to learn a lot whether or not I pass or fail this. And through that process, I’m going to become better at my job and better at my role.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is a fantastic reframe right there. So well-put, coming from experience there, in terms of fear of failure is there, but if you just think about it like an experiment, then there is no failure. It’s just sort of like “Okay, now we know something.”

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. And I think that if you think about our traditional education system, if you go to college, or even if you went just to high school, you’re supposed to write a paper and draft and polish it, and then turn in this final draft when you think it’s about as good as it can be, unless you slacked and did it the night before. But most people, when they take their education seriously, it is pass/fail. You get one shot at it. But that’s really not how the business world is anymore. That’s not how most jobs are, where you’re learning on the job. You’re growing on the job. You’re hopefully pushing yourself to develop skills that your peers maybe aren’t looking to develop. And through that, you start to stand out more and more over time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Thank you. All right, so with the fear of failure, it’s stuff that shows up again and again, and one fantastic reframe is to look at an upcoming challenge or opportunity, not so much as a thing that will define you or determine if you’re good or worthwhile or worthy of love, but rather, an interesting experimental learning opportunity. That’s awesome. Do you have any other tools or approaches to tackle that fear of failure issue?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I think what you just kind of said in talking about that kind of goes into something else. It’s something that in the psychology world we call cognitive distortions, and it’s ways of thinking about the world that just aren’t accurate. And one of those is that black and white thinking that “If I don’t pass this test, then I will never graduate college,” or “If I don’t rock out this one presentation, I will never move up in the company.”
More times than not, that is not true. We do have a couple of those things in our life. If you’re taking some GRE or the LSATs, you probably get a couple of shots at that. But for the most part, you can redo and change a lot of different things. And so I think that when you start to address those cognitive distortions, that really helps you to identify them first and then to combat them because really just the awareness that “Okay, this is some black and white thinking here. I am doing worst case scenario thinking right now.” And that doesn’t mean that that’s guaranteed to come true.
And then we want to start to look at what are some habits of successful people that we see happen over and over. And it’s people that are looking for those opportunities to stretch themselves, to get opportunities that go beyond what the expectations of their role are, as well as finding ways to kind of pivot within a company or within a role. And for me, for example, in the counseling world, I get really into design and making things look cool. And so when I launched a group at the nonprofit I worked at, my brochures looked like they were for a band or something. And I was trying to attract teenagers, so I got more teenagers that came to my stuff because it looked really cool. And so finding those little kind of ways that you can expand on your job, expand on your role, and bring in new things that aren’t expected, I think that that’s where I see people be highly successful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. Thank you. I want to dig a little bit deeper into the cognitive distortion piece. You said, and I think that’s a great way that you articulated it, almost like a piece of computer programming. If this, then that. It’s sort of like you have ascribed meaning to something which could be wildly erroneous. So could you maybe first give us a couple of examples of these common cognitive distortions folks have in a professional context? And then secondly, tell us, how do we gain that awareness, like “This is what’s going on in our background.”?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I think a common one I see in professionals is a fear of a networking event. “If I go here, people are going to think that I just want to sell (whatever it is that you do).” Say you are an insurance agent and your company has you go to this networking event. “They all are going to know that I don’t want to be here. They’re going to know that I just want to sell insurance. They’re going to know all these things, and they’re going to think that I’m just a total fraud.”
Well, in reality, most people are thinking their own things about themselves, and they aren’t worrying about you. And so that cognitive distortion that everyone cares about you, that the world revolves around you, when you can go into a situation like that and say, “What can I do for myself to enjoy this? And what can I do to stretch myself a little bit, too?”
In counseling, I often talk about how there’s three different zones we kind of all fall in. We’ve got our comfort zone, those things that they don’t stretch us at all. That’s hanging out, watching Netflix with your partner, and having a glass of wine. We’ve got our growth zone, things that we know are really good for us. They stretch us. They kind of freak us out, but we know it’s really good for us. And then we’ve got our panic zone, and that’s the zone where we flip out. Our brains get to the point where it’s almost fight or flight, and we just can’t function. And we know that if our heart rate goes above 100, then oftentimes, that oxygen is not going into our brain.
So we want that sweet spot in the middle, of the growth zone. And so when professionals go to, say, a networking event, if they start to think through, “What’s going to help me be at my best here, so that I can calm down, that I can be my true self, that I can use some good positive self-talk to say ‘Nobody is thinking that you’re terrible at your job’?” and then you’re there and then you say, “I’m going to find one person that I can have an interesting conversation with. And if I do that, it’s going to feel like a success.”
So then setting some sort of small micro goal that to you would make that feel that it was a successful event, those are all strategies that are going to help you take small steps in the right direction. And then we also know with the brain that the more you do something, the easier it is. And so it turns from this brand new thing that freaks you out to an ongoing habit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, when you start talking brain, I sort of get extra interested. You mentioned an intriguing fact there. When the heart rate exceeds 100 beats per minute, then less oxygen is getting to the brain. That’s kind of just a physiological fact of the human condition?

Joseph Sanok
It is. So Dr. John Gottman who is a marriage researcher…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I thought of Gottman.

Joseph Sanok
Good, good. He has done 40 years of research on marriage, couples, what keeps people together. And one thing they discovered that’s applicable across the board is that 100 beats per minute. And so if you picture kind of a highway, if you’re going 75 miles an hour down a highway, and then you have to get off on the exit and you keep going 75 miles an hour, you’re going to get in an accident. On our brains, the way the blood goes through it, if it’s going 100 beats per minute, it can’t get off on the exit route to get into our brain.
So if you and your partner are in a fight and you each have 100 beats per minute going on, you’re literally getting dumber every moment you keep fighting. And the same thing is absolutely true when you’re in a business situation, if you don’t keep track of “Okay, I am freaked out right now. I need to calm myself down.” There’s some really simple techniques, like having a pulse oximeter. I have these in my office where it can take your pulse. You can quickly take your pulse before you go into a big meeting and be like, “I need to do some meditation right now. I need to take some deep breaths because I’m freaking out and I’m not going to be my best.” Those are really simple things people can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say pulse oximeter. Is that what I have in my Fitbit?

Joseph Sanok
So in your Fitbit, it does keep track of your beats per minute, but it doesn’t keep track of the oxygen. And so there’s two factors they’ve discovered. You can totally just use a Fitbit, and if you’re over 100, that’s going to be a pretty quick gauge. So you could totally keep doing that, or a pulse oximeter. It’s going to also look at the oxygen. So some people, their pulse doesn’t go up, but what happens is they’re not breathing as much. When they’re panicked, they just kind of hold their breath. And so if their oxygen level also goes below 90%, that’s sort of an alarm as well. We don’t want the oxygen in your blood to go down. If your pulse is normal, we want to also make sure there’s enough oxygen in the blood as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so I’m with you. The pulse oximeter is what folks in hospital beds often have attached to their finger that gives us the oxygen reading there?

Joseph Sanok
Yep, absolutely. And they sell ones that are like 15 bucks on Amazon. They do your pulse and your oxygen levels. And so I have it set for couples, so that if they start fighting during a session of counseling, automatically the alarm will go off if their beats per minute are above 100 or if their oxygen drops below… I think I have it at 95%, if it’s below 95%. Just so they can learn, “This is what it feels like when I’m flooded, when I’m freaking out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Joe, I love it that you bring in technology into that practice. That’s pretty cool stuff.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. One quick other thing that we use also is we use the biofeedback headband. It’s called Muse, and it teaches people how to meditate. It’s an awesome… Whether you’re in counseling or whether you just want to learn how to meditate and calm your brain down quicker, it’s a great resource that’s out there, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you offered a couple of thoughts with regard to your breathing and meditation when you get into that zone and approaches to de-stress. Can you give us maybe a couple more in terms of either right there in the moment, the heat of battle, or kind of as a long term practice?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. So something you can do right in the heat of battle is called progressive muscle relaxation. And so the longer version of it, you think of each of your muscle groups and you tighten them up. So you would tighten up your feet and then release them, and then take a deep breath and think to yourself, “My feet are completely relaxed.” You then point your toes towards your knees, just stretch out your calves, then relax them. Take a deep breath and think, “My calves are completely relaxed,” working your way, all the way up your entire body. So if you do that, it’s going to take you a few minutes to kind of walk through that.
Now, if you’re in a meeting, you can just kind of tighten up parts of your body underneath the table or something like that, and then take just a deep breath when someone is not looking. What that does is it’s tightening up and loosening up the strands of your muscles to help oxygen get to parts of your body that oftentimes it doesn’t get to. We know that when we have all that tension in our shoulders and neck that the oxygen hasn’t gotten to those parts of our body. So that’s a quick, in the moment type thing.
And then I think being aware in general of what your triggers are. We all have different triggers that set us off into these kind of mental escapes where we’re like freaking out because the boss said this or that. If you can start to identify those, keep track of those, maybe journal about them so that you just have that awareness, you can then combat that a lot more if you’re able to identify it.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve shared so many fantastic bite-sized tips here. I’d love it if maybe you could expand in terms of if you can call to mind, anonymously of course, a professional who had a problem, they did something kind of along the lines of what we talked about, and then they saw cool results on the back end. Could you maybe bring it to life for us?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I actually have a client that has given me permission to share this story publicly because it made such an impact on him. I can’t share his name, but he was really having a hard time in his corporate job. He was kind of upper middle management and was having a hard time with being able to accept failure and really wanted to be a people-pleaser. And so we came up with an experiment for him to try between our sessions. And his experiment was to drive two miles an hour under the speed limit for a week. And the idea was to get people frustrated with him.
And it was mind-blowing for him and for me to just see what happened. And he went through these really interesting stages. So at first, his first stage was like he’s driving and he’s like, “Oh, man, I’m so anxious. People are going to be so mad at me.” He was so worried about what people thought. And then the next stage was “Why aren’t people going mad at me? I kind of want people to be mad at me.” They just kind of passed him. He didn’t get the middle finger. Nobody really honked at him.
So it was like, “Wait.” And so then he thought, “I’m going to drive a little bit slower, just to see if I can get people a little more mad at me, because I want to feel the feeling of disappointing people.” And it really game-ified it for him where he then had these stages that then we were able to identify and apply to actual work situations. And so finding those things of “Okay, I don’t want to disappoint people. What would be the equivalent of that that I could game-ify in my life? I’m going to just drive a little under the speed limit and see how I can handle making a lot of people mad at me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. I’m getting a real kick out of it, just imagining that. I’m also imagining the arguing, 100 beats per minute, getting dumber, and the first thing that comes to mind is the cast of Jersey Shore.

Joseph Sanok
They’re always above 100 beats per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like they don’t seem to make a lot of sense, as I recall in their arguments. But it’s like, “That makes sense.” Over time, they’re getting less blood and oxygen to the brain, and so that’s unfolding there.

Joseph Sanok
And you think you’re making sense because you’re like, “I’m so mad at you,” and you just aren’t. And actually, the Gottmans figured out that one of the quickest ways to reduce your beats per minute and get that oxygen back into your body is to read a magazine because it’s really hard to read a magazine and to also be mad at another person because your brain can’t really keep track of all those different things. The worst thing is to take a break, go for a walk, and then keep mulling it over. You can go for a walk, but you don’t want to keep mulling over the frustrating situation with your boss or with your spouse or with whoever it is that you’re frustrated with.

Pete Mockaitis
And is a magazine superior to a blog post or a novel, or is it kind of just anything that will grab your brain’s attention elsewhere?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I think that they’re pretty equivalent. There is a study that they looked at people that were really stressed out in, like, a high-rise building. And what they did is they gave one group just a break where they would sit and read a magazine. They gave another group a break where they went into like a Central Park type of situation. And then they gave another group a break sitting, watching traffic. And the magazine group and the park group did almost exactly the same, and the traffic group did not. They didn’t recover at all.
And so really you want to ask yourself, “What’s going to help me recover here?” So if you’re going to go read the news and all the crazy stuff that’s happening today in our world, that may not slow you back down, whereas if you read a novel for a couple of pages and go disappear and take some deep breaths, that’s probably going to be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. Thank you.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joe, tell me. We’ve gone at a rapid pace here. Folks who are accustomed to listen to their podcast at 1 ½ speed probably had to bring it back down to 1. So thanks for bringing it. Tell me, is there anything you wanted to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Joseph Sanok
I think just the big thing is remembering that you’re the person that’s most hard on yourself. And you may think that everyone else is the hardest on you, and I know that you probably have a boss in your mind that you’re like, “No. Here she is, harder on me,” but our internal dialogue almost always is the hardest judge of our character. And the more that you can develop a healthy internal dialogue, it’s going to help you kind of divide out those people in your life that are unhealthy that you should probably not be around as much and those people that are healthy that you probably should spend more time with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I can’t let that go. So developing a healthy internal dialogue, we talked about a few of those things that would impact that in terms of looking at things as experiments, watching out for the cognitive distortions. But are there any other actionable tidbits you really want to make sure we hit for that internal dialogue piece?

Joseph Sanok
I think that just kind of some quick bullet points would be when do you hear your parents’ voice in your head, and do you want that voice in your head? Because you naturally go back to those parts of your brain that are most primitive, most early. And for some of us, that was very healthy. For some of us, that was very unhealthy. And for a lot of us, that was somewhere in the middle. And so, whether it’s in parenting, being a partner romantically, or at your job, that’s probably one of the areas that I see come up the most. Those early adults in your life, do their voices come out and do you like what those voices are saying? And if not, then rewire your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well said.

Joseph Sanok
It’s that simple. Just rewire your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Just do that. And so, in order to do so, we talked about a couple of things, but any other tidbits?

Joseph Sanok
Yes. So the basics of the brain, I’m not going to go super in-depth, is it’s similar to a road where the things that are reinforced are the roads that really are strongest. And so if you are told your whole life something very negative about yourself, that’s like a highway that has cement. It’s four or six lanes wide. And if you want to change that, it’s like you’re building a two-track that’s going to compete with that. And so you have to keep repaving that new road while letting that old road fall apart, get potholes in it, get ignored.
And so the more you keep going back to that old thinking and reinforcing it, it makes it harder to build those new roads in your brain. So if you genuinely do want to rewire your brain, you have to intentionally say, “What are habits and behaviors that I can do that are going to reinforce the type of life, the type of messages I hear from my friends and my family that’s going to help this part of my brain and this new road grow? And what do I need to start setting boundaries around to let that old voice start to die in my head?”

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now let’s hear. Do you have a favorite quote, something that you find inspiring?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. I don’t remember who first said it. I’ve heard it kind of rephrased from a bunch of different people. But it’s “When you say no to one thing, you say yes to something else.” And that has been so helpful in setting boundaries and to just be able to say no to things.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. There was this study that was done on what’s called vigilance decrement. Vigilance meaning how well you can pay attention; decrement meaning breaking down over time. And they did this study where people went into this room and they said, “Here’s your four-digit code, 4210. Every time 4210 comes up, hit the spacebar. And every time another number comes up, just ignore it.” And so people sat there for a half an hour doing that. And over time, their vigilance, their ability to pay attention went down over time.
But then they had a different group where, 10 minutes into it, they said, “I’m sorry. We put you on the wrong computer. Will you go sit in the lobby for a minute, and then we’ll get you set up on a different computer for you?” So then they had them sit for one minute. They then put them on a new computer for 10 minutes. And then, at the end of that 10 minutes, they said, “You know what? Actually, that original computer, that’s the one you were supposed to be on. Can I just switch you? Just hang on for a minute. Let me get this set up.” And then they moved them back. So same 30 minutes, but the vigilance, by taking those two one-minute breaks, the amount that they could pay attention was two to three times more than if they just powered through for 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Two to three times?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. It’s incredible. And so I think that when you think about just “We’ve just got to hustle. We’ve got to run full tilt. We’ve got to work through the weekend,” when you hear that message, that should be a red flag that that team is probably going to burn out and go down pretty quickly. You need those breaks, even if they’re short, so that you can sprint during other times.

Pete Mockaitis
One minute can give you a doubling.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s amazing.

Joseph Sanok
So take those breaks. Enjoy the weekend. Don’t check your email every moment.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Joseph Sanok
I would have to say “The One Thing.” I interviewed Jay Papasan on my podcast, and just such an awesome approach to focusing on the thing that’s really going to make everything easier. That’s my go-to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we had Jay as well, and it’s so good. Funny, talking about mental health stuff, reading books like “The One Thing” or “Essentialism” or “The 80/20 Principle” just makes me feel calmer as I read them. I go, “Ah. I don’t have to do it all. Okay.”

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. And when you do it all, it usually doesn’t help you move forward as fast also.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Awesome. And how about a favorite tool?

Joseph Sanok
Lately, I’ve been using Meet Edgar a lot for my social media. And I think that that, for me, has been one of my recent favorite tools. I’d say also, if I can have a second, that Muse for the biofeedback headband in regards to meditation and learning, that to me has been really helpful in my own personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fantastic. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that you find helpful?

Joseph Sanok
Almost every weekend, we have our friends Paul and Diane over, and we make a meal with them, and we play a board game. And even though we have kids, and they don’t have kids, we do that almost every weekend if we can. And that’s just a very centering thing for me to just have time that I’m not looking at a screen and that I’m hanging out with friends.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. And now I’ve got to know. Favorite board games?

Joseph Sanok
Oh, man. We’ve been discovering quite a few. What got me into board games was Settlers of Catan. But there’s this new one called Tikal. It’s not new. It’s been out for a while, but it’s very similar. And then there’s this other one that’s called… We just got it, that I’ve been enjoying. Carcassonne is good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah. Paul and Diane, they will find these new games and then we’ll play them. It’s so fun.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Have you played Pandemic?

Joseph Sanok
Yes. I love Pandemic.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. It was bad news for me when I learned it was also available on iPhone.

Joseph Sanok
Oh no!

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s a totally different dimension because what’s cool about the game is you are cooperating with your people instead of trying to defeat them.

Joseph Sanok
Yes. I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Now, tell me, is there something that you find that when you share with folks that really seems to resonate with them, get some nod in their heads and taking notes?

Joseph Sanok
It really depends on whether they’re a counselor in private practice or whether they’re kind of the general public. Counselors in private practice, I have a one-year infographic on Pinterest that’s been repinned a whole bunch of times. People really seem to like that one. It walks you through your first year of owning a business and just the logistics, the marketing, and month by month. So that’s one that people really dig. I think that for kind of the general public, I have a free 19-minute e-course that’s all about how to move from being paralyzed by perfection to getting things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Nineteen minutes?

Joseph Sanok
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a pretty good timeframe to move away from paralysis.

Joseph Sanok
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice work.

Joseph Sanok
As part of it, I show my website in its first draft using the Wayback Machine to just show we’ve all grown and developed. Stop being paralyzed by perfection. And then there’s a 19-page handbook that goes with it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And, Joe, tell me, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them to?

Joseph Sanok
I would say my website, practiceofthepractice.com. It’s aimed at counselors in private practice, but really it’s applicable to any business. I also do consulting with upper management in businesses as well for visioning and bringing usually the chief executive officers together.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. And, Joe, is there a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joseph Sanok
I would say keep taking steps forward. The worst thing you can do is stop. Even if it’s small, incremental steps, micro goals, keep moving forward. And maybe that’s because my two-year-old is really into Dory right now and it’s like “Just keep swimming.” But I feel like it’s so true. Just keep moving forward. Keep taking steps to make your job better and stand out amongst your peers.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Joe, this has been a real treat. Thank you for this, and good luck in all you’re up to.

Joseph Sanok
Thanks, Pete. This was great.