212: How Introverts Flourish at Work with Morra Aarons-Mele

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Hi Pete, I’m so excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to have you, and I was intrigued at your disclosure that you could be a crazy cat lady.  Tell me the story here.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh great, thanks for leading with that one.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it.

Morra Aarons-Mele
If people are still listening after this, then they are truly intrepid fans of your show.  I am a crazy cat lady.  I find great kinship with cats.  I actually just gave away the family dog two weeks ago, which I wrote about and got a lot of really interesting feedback about what a bad person I was, but I’m not a dog person.  I’m a cat person, and I love cats and I think they’re really underrated.  And I work at home, I’ve worked at home for 11 years and my cats are always with me, they’re my coworkers.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many cats are there?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Only two right now.  It’s a low water mark.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you expect it to expand?  So when I hear “crazy cat lady”, I think of Hoarders, is what I imagine.  So, there is some wiggle room in between.

Morra Aarons-Mele
No, Pete, here’s the thing.  And I can tell you are sort of a perfectionist as well.  Cats are messy and smelly, so there has to be a limit.  I’m a Virgo – my need for order overcomes my need for more cats.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood.  So you also have a great brand – speaking about smelly potentially – oh, I don’t know.  Not that the work is smelly, but the bathroom could be a place where there are smells.  So, you’ve got a bit of a brand here – book, podcast – Hiding in the Bathroom.  What’s all this about?

Morra Aarons-Mele
So, Hiding in the Bathroom, first of all it’s an amazing test between introverts and extroverts.  I can tell whether someone’s an introvert or an extrovert by the way they answer the question “When’s the last time you hid in the bathroom?”  So an extrovert – someone who, unlike me, sort of loves to be with other people and goes about their day connecting and being out there and being on – they’ll say, “Oh man, I hid in the bathroom ’cause I really had to text during a flight and I wasn’t supposed to be on my WiFi.”  Or they’ll say, “Oh, my kids were driving me crazy so I just hid in the bathroom and did work.”  They have very sort of practical, situational hiding in the bathroom stories.

Ask an introvert the last time they hid in the bathroom – first of all, it’s probably daily, and second of all, it’s about when you just need a break, or you need a little confidence booster, or you just need a moment to sort of reset.  “Hiding in the bathroom” is my shorthand for what we – introverts, hermits, socially-anxious people who are still really ambitions and push ourselves to be out there and to succeed at work – need to just take a minute.  I may be giving a speech or pitching to a new client or going to a meeting or at an off-site, and you will find me hiding in the bathroom in a break, just getting a moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  And now, within this hiding in the bathroom, taking the moment, what are you doing?  Just absolutely nothing, or breathing, or look at your phone?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Absolutely nothing …  No, I’m probably not looking at my phone.  I may be literally hiding, counting down, trying to busy myself so that… Say it’s a cocktail party.  I don’t know how many of your listeners as part of their career trajectory they go to networking events, they go to professional conferences.  I bet it’s a lot because the professional conference industry alone is like a 3.7 billion dollar industry in the US alone, and there’s like 135 professional conferences a day.  So chances are no matter what you’re doing, you’re going to some.

And you sometimes just need to get away from people, you need to take a break.  If I’m having an anxiety attack, which I often am, and we can talk about that later, I might be checking flights home or ways to find an excuse to leave early, but I’m basically trying not to talk to strangers and taking a minute to be by myself.  I’m not necessarily proud of it, although I have met really wonderful people also in the ladies’ room.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad to hear it.  So you may not be proud of it, but you’ve disclosed it kind of openly and publicly and shared it, so that’s cool.  And so then, what’s the book Hiding in the Bathroom all about?

Morra Aarons-Mele
So Hiding in the Bathroom is an introvert’s road map to getting out there when you’d rather stay home.  If I have one dream – and thanks to the wonderful Susan Cain and her work on Quiet, and she blurred my book, which is a huge, huge wonderful day for me – I think we’re much more comfortable accepting that people have different temperaments in the workplace, and some people love to go work a crowd and some people are a little bit more reserved.

But I, as an introvert and someone who is a little more open about these things, would always get stories from people.  A recent one is a woman who was a really highly skilled chef; she trained for years and her dream was to open a restaurant.  But because she was introverted, she was shy, she felt incapable of raising money, getting investors, bossing people around in the kitchen everyday – she just felt like it would clash with her personality –  she became a private home chef.  She lost her dream.

I have met so many people in the corporate world, non-profit, politics and small business who have given up on their dreams because they don’t feel like they meet the criteria for this crazy thing that we call “success” in this country.  I mean we live in an age of success and achievement porn, right?  We are fed this narrative that someone who is successful looks like frankly usually an alpha man.

Pete Mockaitis
Mark Zuckerberg.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, he is like the nerd version of success.  If you’re a genius coder, you get a pass on the charming and selling bit, which I think is interesting.  But Mark Cuban, right?  Or someone who is up there selling, sort of this alpha male, super extroverted, almost circus-like – very extroverted, very garrulous character.  And think about the messages we get around success: “Never eat lunch alone”, “Always be on”, “Just say ‘Yes’”, “Get out there.”  The entrepreneurship and the business literature is full of these messages that are just, “Go, go, go.  Never stop, never breathe.  Certainly never admit that you want to be alone, that you would like to eat lunch by yourself.”

And so, I think that that’s really daunting to a lot of people, and I think that that is criminal.  Think about how much talent we’re losing because people might think, “Well, I don’t want to be out there, I really would need some quiet time at home.”  Or, “I want to be able to sleep.”  Does that mean I can’t be successful?  Or, “I get really anxious before I have to go speak before a crowd.”

Success is a skill, and we all learn it.  You’re not born knowing how to do Excel, you’re also probably not born knowing how to give a pitch or work a room.  And if you’re an introvert these things are really hard.  So in the book I lay out really practical and I hope very helpful ways for really ambitious introverts to learn these skills that we all need to succeed in business, whether it’s networking, building an online brand, closing a sale, giving a pitch, negotiating, etcetera.

Pete Mockaitis
Well now, that’s what I want to hear all about.  So, I’m thinking about two audiences here: One – the ambitious introvert, and two – the extroverts who love them.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m married to one.

Pete Mockaitis
[laugh] And how they should accommodate or collaborate or just sort of synergize optimally with what the ambitious introvert is bringing to the table.  So, let’s start with the ambitious introvert side of things.  If a listener finds himself or herself in those shoes, what are some of the immediate things to remember or do that you recommend?

Morra Aarons-Mele
First you have to be in touch with it.  I think that a lot of us… I was just texting with a friend last night who said, “It wasn’t until I was 35 that I accepted I was an introvert and that I could still be good at my job”, because her job is primarily sales-driven.  She had literally been pushed by her mentors to change her personality, because she was in a sales role, and she just couldn’t.  And it took her until she was 35 years old to learn how to sell like herself.

So I think the first thing is to understand why you’re feeling sort of at odds with your work, because chances are you’re giving yourself signals, if you’re in sort of a mismatched either role or personality zone.  I don’t know how many of your listeners sort of sit in an office and look up at fluorescent lights and have to be at their desks and think, “Oh man, I think I’d be so much more productive if I could just be in a coffee shop or in my home office, where I could actually think.”

Or how many people have to go to a “networking event” or they have to go on sales calls that really demand, let’s face it, a lot of energy – you’re putting a lot out there – and they think, “This is a waste of time.  I’m only doing this because my boss wants me to.  I would be so much more successful if I could check in with this person three times a year, send them an email or talk to them on the phone.  Maybe they don’t want to go out to dinner either.”

And so I think first of all is coming to terms with who you are and separating that from the work.  I quit like nine jobs; I was a serial quitter because I would always show up at a job and hope that I would be happier under those fluorescent lights with all of those office politics and demands and need for socializing and business development, and I would quit because it never got better.  And it wasn’t until I actually quit for good and went out on my own and actually went to graduate school and studied work, that I realized it wasn’t the work I didn’t like; it was how I had to do it.

So, I actually ask people to start with trying to really do some deep examining, noticing their behavior, tuning in – our psychologist friends call it – to what sets them off at work, what makes them really upset, when are they happy at work?  If they get a morning to work from home because there was a computer outage at the office and they do their best work and they feel totally different – that’s a clue.  If you’re sitting at your desk all day in your big office and you literally feel like your body is under siege, like your muscles are tight and you’re slouching – that’s also a clue.  That means that you feel like you need to close in, so tune in.  Try to figure out what makes your ideal day, when you do your best work.  When were the times that you felt like you could do your best work?  And see if you can separate how you do your work with the actual work you’re doing, because it might actually not be the work you’re doing you don’t like.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really like that notion that we say, “Understand why you’re feeling at odds.”  I remember I had a really interesting opportunity.  So, I’m a Myers-Briggs practitioner, so introversion / extroversion shows up a lot.

Morra Aarons-Mele
What are you, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Extroversion, Intuition, Feeling and Judging, or ENFJ.  And how about you?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m an INFP.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Morra Aarons-Mele
But it was a long time ago; I think I was in denial back then.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, because I remember when I was doing strategy consulting at Bain and we did it, I showed up for a moment as a Thinker, a T, instead of a Feeler.  And I think we talk about feeling at odds – it’s that notion like, “Well here – logic and spreadsheets and compelling insights conveyed in chart format are going to be what rule the day.”  And that message was received, and I still dig a lot of that stuff, but I’m more values-driven, I’m very core for making decisions.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think you’re a perfect podcast host persona.

Pete Mockaitis
Aw, shucks.  Thank you!  I’ll take it.  But you talk about feeling at odds – it was so interesting.  I once had the privilege of doing some coaching for a lot of rising executives at… Well, client confidentiality – at one of the world’s largest beverage companies, who will remain nameless.  And it was so intriguing how time and time again they kept showing up Extroversion, and all the more so Extroversion, Sensing, Thinking and Judging.  And then there were only just a couple of introverts.  And it was so interesting – I was just chatting through some stuff with the extroverts, I’d say, “Okay, so just as a means of sort of understanding opposing personality preferences and implications of that”, I said, “So can you think of someone you work with who prefers introversion?”  And many of them were like, “Well, nobody is coming to mind.” [laugh]

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, here’s my question for you.  I remember taking the Myers-Briggs and desperately wanting to be an extrovert, and trying to fake it, because I wanted to be successful and bring in business.  And I felt – I was younger – “Oh my God, if I’m an introvert…” I’ve heard stories.  I actually met a partner in a law firm who said introverted female partner-track lawyers do not make partner, because people think they don’t want it bad enough, they’re not going to schmooze hard enough, and they’re too quiet, they’re too reserved.  Again, what is up?  That’s a crime.  Introverts can be the best sales people you’ve got, but we have such a cultural bias, and especially in sales.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.  So let’s unpack a little bit of some of the advantages, the power there.  You said those who prefer introversion can be some of the best sales people.  And so they have a different style or approach.  How does it go down in a way that can be devastatingly effective or even really uniquely advantaged?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I like that, “devastatingly effective”.  Again, I don’t want to talk too much in generalities, because I think the other thing is that this stuff is not binary.  One of the things I always get from people when they hear about my book, they’re like, “But you talk so much, you can’t be an introvert.”  No, that’s not true.  That has nothing to do with the perception of being quiet.  But I think that there are a few things that make introverts really fabulous secret weapons at work.

First of all, I’d definitely rather work for an introvert and to be led by one, because I think that introverts are excellent managers and we’re really good.  Again, coming back to sales and negotiating and client services – we tune in because we’re a little self-conscious, we’re trying to figure out usually how to insert ourselves into a conversation, how to negotiate social situations.  I also have social anxiety, so that gives me a whole other layer of empathy and tuning in.

But I think that if you’re an introvert and you’re good at listening and you’re good at figuring out people’s motivations, you can be a great manager.  A wise colleague once told me that most sales are driven by the customer needing to solve a problem.  And first of all, I think that’s a fabulous truism no matter what you do – whether you’re selling a car or you’re selling branding services or marketing.  But I think that if you are a listener and you’re accustomed to stepping back and tuning in, you’re much better at knowing the true problem that your customer, your client wants to solve, than sort of being a little bit of a – no offense to many people I’ve met – blowhard and telling them how smart you are.

And I think that actually it’s a true power, both in managing people and tuning in, and in selling.  I think that introverts are happy to step back and sort of look at the whole picture.  We don’t always need to be the center of attention, which is really helpful in a company.  I’ve had some leaders who have been open enough to share their anxieties with me, and their fears almost, in a work setting, and that has been so empowering.

In my book I interview Arvind Rajan, who was a VP, very senior guy at LinkedIn and now runs a health startup.  And he has social anxiety.  And for a successful man in Silicon Valley to talk openly about his anxiety, I think is wonderful.  And he says, “I spent so many years going to cocktail parties and sweating and shaking people’s hands with a sweaty palm and wanting to hide in the bathroom, until I sort of got to a point where I realized I’m not good at this.  I’m never going to be good at this, I’m never going to be comfortable with this.  Why am I focusing on this?  I need to focus on what I’m good at.”  He’s an empathetic leader, he’s really good at solving problems, and he’s really smart.  So he sort of flipped the script.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good.  Well, any other pro tips, like if you find yourself as an ambitions introvert you’re going to follow some of these steps associated with understanding why you’re feeling at odds, tuning in, playing to your strengths, retreating as necessary, embracing what’s fantastic about the way you work it, which could be uniquely advantaged.  Any other top recommendations?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think that sometimes people assume… Actually I used to be a blurter, so I would overcome my nerves in a meeting or a business setting by talking too much.  I would blurt, because I was anxious, but a lot of introverts, we step back, we need time to think.  And again, in our sort of “always on” salesy culture people could assume that we’re less enthusiastic or less ambitious or even less intelligent than we are, simply because we might need more time to process ideas.  We’re less sort of “on” in a brainstorm session or a client dinner.  And if you work in an office where face time is valued, and verbal gymnastics are valued, that can be tough.  But I think, again, finding role models who absolutely know how to read a situation and work a room…

I’ll give you two examples from my own life.  When I was very young, my boss – one of my first bosses – her name was Betty Hudson, and she was a legend in communications and media in New York City.  And she was 6’2” and she had been a cheerleader at the University of Georgia; she was beautiful.  I’m 6’1”, and so I worshiped her because she had such grace and I felt so awkward about my personal presence.  And Betty told me two things.  She said, one, “You can defuse any situation with humor.”  And she said, “Just get your pitch down in 30 seconds or less, and the rest will work.”

And this is actually a really good psychological technique – if you have anxiety or if you’re nervous about entering a conversation or picking up the phone for an important call or doing that thing at work that you need to do but makes you nervous – get your pitch down, practice and know that you can do anything in 30 seconds or even 10 seconds.  It’s that sort of practicing and working the muscle of being able to open up a conversation, open up a pitch.  And Betty, she taught me.  She sort of had the same pattern, actually I learned.  It was actually a well-practiced, not routine, but it was a shtick that she had developed over the years that made her so comfortable and she knew it made other people comfortable, and I learned from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Can we hear the shtick?

Morra Aarons-Mele
It was like 15-20 years ago.  But it was always self-deprecating – that was the other thing that was really brilliant about it.  She never felt like she had to be the smartest person in the room, and that leads me to my second piece, and this is another brilliant tip for introverts.  And this is a hard one because I always want to pretend like I’m the smartest person in the room; I want people to know how much I know.  But I know that I can get really anxious if I talk too much and step out beyond my comfort zone.

So I’ve also learned to sort of take a step back, let other people talk, and I don’t play dumb because that’s a patriarchal and non-feminist thing to do.  But I also tell myself, “You don’t need to sound like the smartest person in the room.  Give yourself a minute.  Talk when it’s right.”  These are basic tactics, but again, I have learned from watching really powerful leaders that they’re not the ones who talk the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you.  And so now when I think about the flipside of this – you mentioned that sometimes extroverts might make incorrect assumptions about introverts, in terms of, they’re not as smart or not as engaged, enthusiastic, with it.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Ambitious.

Pete Mockaitis
Ambitious, yeah.  So what are some of the best practices for extroverts who are engaging with introverts to really have the best sorts of exchanges and collaborations possible?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Again, I think it’s open conversation, and I think that the biggest thing we can do… I’m obsessed with time and money, because let’s face it – at work, what else is there, right?  Time and money.  And so, how this comes into play with extroverts and introverts is that, in our system.

They may assume that their most ambitious and best employees are the ones who spend the most time not just in the office, but who want to spend the most time with the leader or with the clients, who want to go golfing, who want to go out to dinner.  I never want to go out to dinner, I don’t golf, but I always joke I’d be so much more successful if I actually liked socializing more.

And so, leadership may assume that an introvert who doesn’t want to hang out is less ambitious or doesn’t deserve it as much or doesn’t want it as bad.  That is a really, really toxic assumption.  So first I would ask the leader to think about people that they’ve been impressed by, and it could be someone in their personal life, at work, who may not be the life of the party, but who does a really great job.  Expand your thinking; don’t equate presence, face time, being “on” and schmoozing and all that jazz, with ambition.

Find out who the introverts in your office are and what they need to do their best work.  And that may come down to time, it may come down to the fact that the introvert might need a little more time – I call it “being able to control the pace, place and space” at which you work.  So many talented people feel over-stimulated and drained by a modern office.  I laugh because I have three kids and every time I was traveling and I had a baby and I was pumping breast milk, I would go sort of knock on the lactation room at a client’s site, and it would always be busy.  But it wouldn’t be busy with a pumping mother; it would be busy with someone who just desperately needed some quiet and some space.

I think that leaders and extroverts need to understand that the beloved introverts are hermits.  That’s an even deeper level – I’m a hermit, I work at home.  My perfect day is when I talk on the phone to folks, but I have a lot of alone time and thinking time – that they may need that time to function.  Actually frankly, we all need more time, right?  How many of us frankly want to go to another meeting?  Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could have three hours alone just to work and think?  So it’s about sort of being creative in the office and understanding what makes each other tick.

And the last thing I’ll say is I think a lot of times the HR leader might get caught in the middle.  You might have a very extroverted CEO or head of sales or VP of marketing, who expects the things that we’ve just been talking about –  face time, socializing, all that.  And you may have an introverted team member who’s really bucking against that and who just desperately wants a morning to work at home or to not have to go to that happy hour or to not have to get on a plane and go to that sales conference, because frankly she knows that she didn’t get leads from it.

And the HR person is in the middle – they’re negotiating between these two poles.  And I would also like for HR and talent people to feel like they had a toolkit to sort of negotiate these areas of tension.  I actually get asked that question a lot: “I have a really extroverted sales manager, and one of my most talented young people, I can just tell she needs a little more time, she doesn’t talk as much in meetings or she asked to work from home when she needs to write a presentation.  How do I negotiate that?”  That’s where work is going, right?  You see the big firms, especially the big accounting firms like E&Y and Deloitte, really thinking about work style.  And you know this, of course, having been a consultant yourself.  You have six different work styles on a team.  How do you create the best work product?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  This is so much good stuff.  Thank you.  Tell me, Morra – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think also one thing that I want to talk about is limits and boundaries.  I’m a compromiser and I think that one of the other messages in our culture of success, and certainly in the business literature, is that true success requires giving your all.  And you can’t sleep, you can’t ever compromise, you’ve always got to give 110% – these messages are so instilled in us.  And I actually can’t 100% disagree with that.  I accepted a long time ago I was never going to be Sheryl Sandberg.  I actually had a rocket ship career in marketing.  I should be a CMO of a large corporation at 41; instead I run a small business and I work from my home.

I have made a lot of compromises in my life, because I knew that otherwise I would be so depressed, so anxious, so zoned out, I wouldn’t stand a job anyway.  But it’s meant having less power, earning less money, having a very different kind of success.  And this isn’t about gender, it’s not about picking up your kids; I really think it’s not a mommy issue – I want to say that.  Sometimes to find the work-life fit that is truly going to make you happy and have you do your best work, means changing some expectations.  And if you’re a really ambitious overachiever, that is a process that’s hard to do.

So I don’t want to leave you on a down note, but I also think that you have to have a really great vision.  Your vision doesn’t have to be, “I’m going to be VP of sales by the time I’m 35.”  It could be, “I’m going to really love my job, I’m going to work from home one day a week, and I’m going to go to graduate school at night.  And that’s going to be my success.”  Or not go to graduate school, ’cause you don’t have to be an overachiever.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
I just had this funny quote that popped into my head, but I’m going to share it with you anyway ’cause it’s actually one of my favorites.  And it seems counter-intuitive, but it’s in the book when it comes to building a fabulous online professional brand and finding your niche, which are really good tools for the ambitious introvert.  And it’s, “Does what it says on the tin.”

This is an old British saying that I learned when I was working in marketing in London many years ago and our ad agency… We were trying to name a new product and we kept coming up with all these fancy names.  Think about all the Internet names – you never know what the hell they mean.  And the marketing guy said, “It has to do what it says on the tin.”  And I think it comes from literally probably it was a shoe polish that said right on the tin, “We’ll make your shoes look like new.”

And so I’m a big believer, sort of, in pulling back the hyperbole and thinking really clearly: Is the product I’m offering, is what I’m writing, is the memo I’m writing, is the blog I’m starting – does it do what it says on the tin?  Is it true to the skills that I offer that only I offer, and is it clear to people?  Will it rank well in search engines?  ‘Cause let’s be honest, that’s very important.  And will people know what I’m offering the minute I say it?  So, “Does what it says on the tin.”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’ve lots of favorite books, but a book that I talk about in my book frankly, that one of my earliest mentors gave to me, and she actually was on the wonderful podcast and PR show On Being a few weeks ago.  Mary Catherine Bateson wrote a book called Composing a Life, which I think is a must-read, because she’s an anthropologist, and she looked at successful women’s lives in midlife.

And when these women looked back on their lives, their careers weren’t ladders, they weren’t linear.  It wasn’t, “I went to a great college, then I went to a great grad school, then I had a prestigious starting job, then I had a second prestigious job…”  No.  They had adventures, they had illnesses, they got fired, a few of them even left the workforce for a while.  Their lives were not linear; they were made up of different patches, like a quilt.  Their lives were composed like a quilt.  And so, I always think about that, especially if I do feel frustrated by some of the compromises I’ve made or the limits I’ve put on myself and my schedule, that your career’s not a ladder – that’s a myth.  Your career is a quilt that you piece together.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite tool?

Morra Aarons-Mele
A favorite tool, like a hammer?

Pete Mockaitis
Like a hammer, or whatever tool you use.

Morra Aarons-Mele
My boys have a Woodshop, so all day long I hear them hammering and sawing and I worry they’re going to cut off a finger.  My favorite tool – this is sort of lame, but again, coming back to time.  I use the G Suite, the Google Suite, for every aspect of my life.  And that may be scheduling with my husband, it may be scheduling personal time, my company – we run on Google Suite, Google Apps.

And so, I’m a huge believer in having a calendaring system, and many people have different ones that work for you, and for claiming your calendar.  It sounds so lame, but how can you control your life if you can’t control your calendar, right?  And so, every day I sit down and I love it – I print out a page and I write on it, and I go through it, and I clean it up, and it’s just the sort of little action that makes me feel in charge.  And so my favorite tool is my Google Calendar.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite habit?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I have a lot of bad habits.  I think that my favorite habit is that I’m habituated to discipline.  And again, I think that this comes from having set up a very intentional work life.  I was given six months to write my book, and I knew I was going to do it – I had a plan, I’m a preparer.  And I got in the habit every day.  I had a special candle – and I’m not such a woo-woo person – but I did find that this candle, if I lit it, it would get me in a sort of writing mood.  I had my habit, I had my schedule, and I got it done.  And so I’m just a big fan of good old-fashioned discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget or piece that you share that seems to resonate extra strongly with readers, listeners?

Morra Aarons-Mele
It’s so funny – I think that one of the pieces that does resonate very strongly is “Decoupling face time and sociability with ambition”.  Because there are so many of us working away in the quiet, who are equally ambitious, but we just express it in a different way.  We need to work in a different way.  And so I think that people really feel like that is empowering, whether they’re leaders or they’re on the way up.

And then something that I just sort of came up with at the last minute, and as someone asked me during a Facebook Live, “What do I do if I’m an introvert and I’m not so good off the cuff, and I need to give an answer now where I’m in a meeting?”  And I said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Can I have a minute to think about that’?”  And she felt like, “Oh my God, it sounds so stupid.”  But again, it’s okay to take a minute.  It’s okay to say, “I’m going to get back to you.”  You don’t have to respond to an email in 20 seconds just because your colleagues do.  Speed is not always akin to excellence, and so I think that that’s important too.

Pete Mockaitis
That story reminds me of, I was once working and there’s a woman, and she was a manager at Bain.  And we had posed a question to her and she was just silent for about, I don’t know, 15 seconds.  It was like, “What’s going on?”  And she’s like, “I’m thinking.”  It made an impression for me; it was like, “Now here’s a person who doesn’t just shoot their month off, but is carefully considering all the implications of what I just said and where we should go.”  And I thought that was pretty cool.

Morra Aarons-Mele
But it made you uncomfortable, right?  It felt sort of radical.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, in the moment it was new and different, but I will tell you that this extrovert walked away from the exchange with a whole extra level of respect for her.

Morra Aarons-Mele
That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so take the minute.  It’s all good.  I’m all for it.

Morra Aarons-Mele
That’s right.  In negotiating you never want to offer the first price because you’re anchoring yourself.  So I actually think it’s very similar.  Silence is power, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.  And Morra, do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, first – please order my book.  Sorry for the plug.  I think the challenge is to remind yourself that you are awesome at your job.  And actually to do the exercise – to figure out if you’re feeling a bit itchy or like, “Oh God, I just can not show up at the office from 8:30 to 6:30 every day.  Okay, is it because I don’t want to show up at the office, or because I really don’t like my job?  I don’t want to be doing this; I want to be off teaching instead of being a lawyer.”

Figure out what’s motivating you, and then remember also, your boss doesn’t want to fire you.  You’re awesome at your job; your boss doesn’t want to fire you.  If you need more flexibility in your schedule, if you need something different, ask for it; you’re a grown up.  This is inspired by the wonderful Cali Yost, who’s all over my book.  She has data on this – if you’re good at your job, which I know you are if you’re listening – your boss is not going to fire you because you want to work from home one day a week.  I promise you.  So, remember that you’re a grown up, you are awesome, and ask for what you need.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good, thank you.  Well Morra, this has been a real treat.  I wish you and the book tons of luck in all that you’re up to, and keep on rocking!

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh, you too, Pete!  Thanks again!