996: Tackling Work Stressors and Transitions with Dr. Tessa West

Pete Mockaitis
Tessa, welcome back.

Tessa West
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m super excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to talk about your book, Job Therapy, and I just think we’ve got to hear of a job story you had at a Hollywood Video. Lay it on us.

Tessa West
All right. When I was in high school, I worked at Hollywood Video, which for you, young people, is a place where you would actually physically go to rent a movie in VHS format, which I don’t think even exists anymore. And I had this amazing manager who was dealing coke from the back room.

Pete Mockaitis
Cocaine. Illegal drug.

Tessa West
Yeah, cocaine. Cocaine from the back room, and, also, was probably stealing from the cash register. And we all got fired one day, corporate came in and axed us all. And this was a little bit of a problem for me because when I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, I was just blacklisted from all Hollywood Videos, and that was kind of the only video rental store in the neighborhood where I lived. And so, I could never rent from them again. I not only lost my job because of the cocaine-dealing boss, but I also could never open an account in a Hollywood Video ever again, and that just totally cramped my style for, like, the four years I was in college.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m imagining you like hanging out outside the Hollywood Video, it’s like, “Hey, hey, Mister, can you rent me a movie?”

Tessa West
Totally. I’m like, “I’ll pay you an extra dollar. You give me, like, the latest new release wall,” whatever came out. I think it was “The Negotiator” came out, and I was pretty bummed. Yeah, it was not great.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they thought you were involved in these illegal activities, but you were just around him.

Tessa West
I was 16. I mean, I knew some shady stuff was going on in the back room. There were times I wasn’t allowed back there. But it’s a minimum-wage teenager job, and it was just much easier for corporate to just come in, clean house, fire all of us, instead of sort of interrogating who was involved and who wasn’t.

And I think a lot of people kind of end up getting caught in these situations at work where there’s a baddie and they get sucked into all that drama, and it’s just much easier to fire all 20 employees and just start fresh than to figure out who’s guilty of dealing the cocaine, or aiding and abetting in the cocaine dealing, or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You know, it’s amazing that last time we talked about bad bosses and toxic coworkers, and this didn’t even come up.

Tessa West
I know. This isn’t even my worst boss. This is like my 10th worst boss. The weird part was I didn’t even really care until I couldn’t rent there anymore. That’s when I got pissed.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we’re talking now about your book Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. So, I guess that’s one tip, avoid Hollywood Video and cocaine-dealing bosses as a first piece on the checklist. But you have much more wisdom, I know, than that to share with us. Could you kick us off with anything that’s particularly surprising that you’ve discovered here?

Tessa West
Yes, I think a lot of us have really mixed feelings about our jobs. I was surprised when I interviewed people for this book at how ambivalent people feel. It was a lot kind of in the air with people being really miserable at work, tons of Gallup polls, all that business of everyone wants to quit, no one’s happy. But when I actually sat down with people, they would talk out of both sides of their mouth, “I love this job.” “I hate this job.”

“I’m totally committed to this job. It’s what defines me. It’s my identity. But I fantasize about doing this other thing that’s completely different from that. But just to remind you, Tessa, during this interview, I really do love this job. I promise.” And so, you see kind of those mixed emotions you see when people are thinking about any kind of relationship they have, even if that’s with a parent that they have a fraught relationship with, or a romantic relationship.

It’s kind of this love, hate, back and forth, hot, cold business that I think a lot of us are actually struggling with, which is much more realistic than just people loving or hating something or wanting to quit. I think there’s just a lot of kind of ambivalence out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that really resonates and hits home with regard to, it is a mixed bag, every job, every relationship. I’m reminded of a comedian who talked about the city of Chicago, which is like, “The long, cold, miserable winters,” and say, “What are you doing here? You should just leave. You should just leave,” like a bad relationship. He’s like, “No, you should see how Chicago treats me in the summer.”

Tessa West
Yeah, New Yorkers are the same, we’re like, “I hate this place but I really couldn’t live anywhere else because every other place I would hate even more, but I really do hate it here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what a complicated relationship we have then with our jobs. How do we even begin to unpack then whether we are in our New York of a job or we really do need to get out of here?

Tessa West
I really think the only way to really unpack this is to measure your feelings for a while. I’m a scientist, so I’m a huge fan of collecting data on yourself, and really doing it, not just trying to recall how you feel, or how you felt over the past month, because I think a lot of us fall victim to some of the basic biases that we fall victim to when we’re falling out of love with a person.

So, we’re super sensitive to things like intermittent reinforcement. When we’re questioning our careers, if your boss is really nice to you, or maybe you just get an added bonus you didn’t expect. That actually makes you feel a hundred times better about your job than it probably should because you’re in this fragile place, and so you don’t actually realize that you’re falling victim to these kinds of things, that you’re overly-sensitive to reinforcement when you’re questioning your career, that you’re misremembering how you were treated or how you felt.

The only way to really get a handle on that is to look for consistency in how you feel and to measure yourself for a couple of weeks, or even up to a month, and really look for those patterns. And so, in this book, I just put a ton of questionnaires that have been vetted and created by psychologists, and really try to help people play scientists to their own experience so that they can understand it from almost like a third-party perspective, from an objective observer’s perspective, to kind of remove some of those biases that we’re all going to fall victim to when we start questioning something, when we start falling out of love with something.

Pete Mockaitis
Very intriguing. So then, as we measure things, well, I’m tempted to go into all kinds of detail about how we do that, and let’s do some of that. I’m thinking about dating again, in terms of, there are folks, it’s like, yes, they would love to date the super-rich, super brilliant, super gorgeous, super hilarious, super kind, whatever mythical human that doesn’t actually exist. And if that person did, they’d probably wouldn’t want to be with you. No offense. No offense, Tessa. You’re delightful.

But I mean, when I hear people, sometimes I’ve heard those who are single and not yet settled down, it’s like, “Well, you know, I just haven’t met the person.” “Well, what are you looking for?” It’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t think that person is real or exists.” I think, likewise, we can do that with our jobs, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I just haven’t really found the perfect job yet or the one of a job yet.”

So can you just maybe give us some very rough guidelines in terms of, “If you’re in this kind of zone, probably wrong job, get out of there. If you’re in this kind of zone, you got it pretty good, you know. And if you’re in if you’re looking for this kind of zone, I’m sorry that’s not real”? Can you just kindly orient us to reality for a bit?

Tessa West
Yes, I’m happy to do that. I studied dating and relationships, too, so you will hear all those metaphors come out of my mouth today. So, I think the first thing is, you need to really think seriously about what stresses you out at work, and how much you can anticipate those stressors. The number one reason why people are actually miserable at work is because they, (a), can’t anticipate stressors, or they’re doing a bad job at it. Most of the time, we actually can, if we write it down, see it coming.

And, (b), they’re very bad at bouncing back from how those stressful situations impact their productivity, their sleep, and their other relationships. And so, if you are in a job where, if you say in the morning, think about what’s going to stress you out, in the evening, write down what actually stressed you out, and you can’t predict that.

And those unanticipated stressors screw up your communication with your spouse, make you task-switch too much, make you self-interrupt, interfere with your ability to communicate, all these kinds of distal outcomes, you’re in a bad place. I don’t care how great the job is on paper, unanticipated stressors, and your inability to kind of put stopgaps in place and prevent the bleed from that stressful event to your productivity and to your other aspects of your life that you care about, you’re in trouble.

And that’s different for everyone. For some people, that’s being interrupted all the time. They can’t control the flow of work. For other people, it’s just being late. They can’t stand it when they can’t control how long it’s going to take them to drive to work and where they’re going to park. So, you have to figure out what those triggers are. And I think most of us don’t actually put enough weight on low-level daily stressors and how much they impact us, but they really can screw you up because they can affect your sleep, how often you get colds, your diet, and all of this other stuff that has nothing to do with work, that then feeds back into work.

So, I’d say measure those things. That’s kind of, you know, it really comes down to control over those things. I’d say the other dimension that really matters is how identified you want to be with your career, how much you want it to define you, and how much that career is loving you back. And if there’s a huge mismatch, if you are, like, in love with this career, it’s everything to you, when it’s going well, you feel good, when it’s going poorly, you feel terrible, and it’s just not giving you those signs that it’s loving you as much as you want to love it, it’s an unrequited love situation. That’s a bad place to be.

I think, and, again, all of us can be, we can find that match in different places. Anchoring just on income and things like that, I think is a mistake, as you talked about, you know, finding the model who’s funny and rich, there’s going to be a mismatch there because you’re going to fall in love with that person and they’re not going to love you back.

So, I’d say that identity match and control over your stressors, those are the main things. I think if you have those things in check, you can kind of play around with those other dimensions and find happiness at work. But those are really those things that are kind of deal breakers, I think, for most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really intriguing to zero in on these elements. Because it sounds like, is it fair to say, in your research, these trump the other things in terms of, I say, “Hey, you know what? I find my job meaningful. I find it challenging. I enjoy my co-workers. I feel like I’m learning and growing and attaining mastery. Like, I’ve got a lot of good things that make this job good”? But, if the stressor situation and the identity situation isn’t working for me, is that enough to just outweigh it and say, “I should probably get out of here”?

Tessa West
Definitely the stressors are. I think the things you just mentioned feed into the identity. So, if your colleagues love you, if you’re finding purpose in the work, the job is probably loving you back as much as you’re loving it. And so, I’d see those as sort of like an outcome of that identity match, “You know, I feel highly identified with this job and it’s bringing me satisfaction.” Both pieces of identity are important. You need to feel satisfied with that identity and also feel like you’re getting something from it.

And then when you have those pieces, you love your coworkers, you’re willing to kind of step in at 10:00 p.m. and do the extra thing because you feel like the job is loving you back, so those are outcomes of those things. Stressors are like throwing wrenches into all of those things, “I have great communication at work, but I never know how long it’s going to take me to get there. And some days I get there an hour early, and it’s great. Other times, I get there an hour late and I’m sweating and stressed the rest of the day.” Those things absolutely throw a wrench in the relationship with your career.

So, I think you just really have to pay attention to those things, and don’t let yourself be talked out of them because the income is good, because the comp package is good, and people do this with relationships, “I’m dating a rich guy. Who cares if he treats me like crap.” It does, it matters. You’re not going to care about the money when he’s yelling at you or calling you ugly. You’re just not. And the same is true at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us a rundown of some of these unanticipated stressors that pack a big punch and show up all the time for folks?

Tessa West
I think the main ones are things like your boss shows up and puts a meeting on your calendar that you didn’t plan for. Commute is another huge one that people can’t stand. Senior leadership showing up. Absorbing the roles of other people. So, I did a study for this book based on an NPR kind of short called “Nobody Told Me That,” where I asked people what are the biggest surprises they encountered at work.

And it’s almost always, “I was hired to do X and now I’m doing Y. I was hired to showcase art in a gallery but really all I do is lift 120-pound boxes of art, but no one told me that like lifting heavy objects was part of the job.” And those kinds of, like, tack-on tasks are super common at work. I think 80% of us are doing them, but they take away from your job. They often have nothing to do with what gets you promoted, and they’re super stressful because you don’t know how to fit them into your job.

And so, you have to do a lot of digging to kind of figure out if those are going to crop up. But those unanticipated extra roles or jobs of the person who called in sick, or they fire the person who’s in charge of that, those are huge, and they tend to be small asks, 10-, 20-minute asks, not heavy lifts, but they really eat into people’s wellbeing. And you can feel your blood pressure going up when you’re in the middle of something and someone comes and asks you to do one of these things, like lifting a heavy box for them that you did not sign up for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, these are the kinds of stressors. And then, I’m curious, just how much is too much? I mean, it sounds like every job is going to have a little bit of ebb and flow and unpredictability. How do we make that determination?

Tessa West
The best way to do this isn’t to ask yourself, “Have I hit my wall?” It’s to actually map out what the outcomes of those stressors are. And so, our instinct is to think about the things that stress us out and then try to kind of reframe them in a positive way, “Yes, I had to lift that heavy box, but this is part of what it takes to climb up at work.”

I urge you not to try to do that kind of reframing exercise. Instead, measure how often you’re lifting those heavy boxes, and measure your sleep every night. If what you find is, if you have three days in a row of, say, an unexpected stressor, a late commute, a calendar invite with no notice, a heavy box, and then you can see that, say, for the next five days your sleep is screwed up, this is what happens to me, my unanticipated stressors are cumulative.

One, I’m fine; two or more, I don’t sleep for a week, that’s when you know you’re in trouble, and so you really have to see those associations. Don’t assume you know what they are because they’re often a little bit distal. The way stressors work is they tend to not impact us immediately. They tend to be cumulative and distal.

So, if you’re stressed out right now, you’re going to get a cold in two weeks. That’s how long it takes for your immune system to take the hit, for it to get down, for you to get infected with something, for you to be symptomatic. So, we often don’t see the connection between the stressor and the outcome. The only way to know is to measure it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s talk about these measurings. So, one is sleep, and I’m sporting an Oura ring right now, and that’s cool. Or you could have a Fitbit or Apple Watch or something or just notice, “Hey, that sleep was short. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. against my will. What’s that about?” Or, “I went to bed at 11:00, and somehow didn’t end up actually falling asleep until much later.”

So, you just sort of, you notice. Sleep is worse, outside my control. It’s not like I was having the time of my life partying somewhere and I got to bed late. But rather, my body just did not comply with my sleep request. So, there’s one indicator. What are some of the other things we should be observing and tracking?

Tessa West
Weird diet, skipping meals, eating junk food, eating your feelings, drinking, those types of things. Low-level conflict is another one that we often see. So, if you have, say, two or three days of low-level stressors at work, you’re going to end up fighting more with your kids, with your spouse. You’re going to yell at your kid for watching too much iPad, those kinds of things, which in the moment, you have a reason, “My kid was really grinding me. He refused to put down the iPad, so I yelled at him.”

The real reason is, “You know, I had a fight with my boss this morning, and I never came down from that kind of cortisol boost, and now I’m exhausted. I have no ability to sort of cognitively override that,” so low-level conflict at home. And then the other kind of unanticipated one is self-interruptions at work. So, I have a chapter in my book called “The Torn Between Places,” where I figured out that most of the time when we are interrupted at work, we do it to ourselves.

We self-distract. We check our phones. We minimize windows to open other windows. We shop on Zoom calls. And we often do this when we are cognitively depleted, meaning like we’re out of mental resources to not do it. And when you’re stressed, you tend to kind of eat away at those resources, and so you find yourself texting, checking your phone constantly at work. That’s another outcome of feeling kind of chronic low-level stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing and good to flag because if we’re stressed, tired, out of cognitive resources, sometimes you might assume, “Well, the thing you’re going to do is immediately go to sleep.” And yet, it’s funny, it’s like the suppression power of being depleted means that, “No, what we do is just what we really want to do and have been suppressing.”

I remember back in the pandemic days, there was a time my wife was sick and it was all me. Full, 100% childcare, it’s Pete, the dad’s time to shine, and it’s like, “Okay.” And so, I thought it’s always kind of intense and kind of exhausting, and I always also try to keep a few things in the air, a little bit with work in terms of, like, respond to a few things and whatnot. Just not totally dropping the ball there.

And it was so funny, you would think that after those days, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just going to just collapse immediately into bed.” And what I found myself doing, it was so weird, it was like, I went and played video games, and I don’t do much of that in general, but it’s just like, “This just really is what needs to happen right now.”

And so, you’re highlighting an interesting phenomenon in the human experience. I don’t think I’ve heard someone articulate quite this way before, is when that’s happening, that’s a sign that we are mentally depleted and/or stressed.

Tessa West
I think if you find yourself seeking out alone time at weird hours to do weird things that you never used to do, and you’re sort of justifying that as alone time, “I went through this as a new parent,” “I went through this in the pandemic,” and not because you really don’t get any alone time but because you’re too depleted to do any work, and your cortisol hasn’t dropped enough so you can’t fall asleep. So, there’s kind of this, like, bottom-up top-down problem of like physiologically your body can’t actually relax enough to sleep.

You know, things like cortisol, they peak in the morning, they peak in the afternoon, and then they’re supposed to go down, so that by the time you’re ready to go to sleep, you don’t have all this, like, adrenaline and all this cort in your body. But when you’ve been stressed, you break out of that cycle and so your brain can’t do anything, but it wants to play video games, it wants to watch Netflix, it wants to do something distracting that isn’t sleep but doesn’t involve social interaction, which is kind of depleting.

So, if you find yourself wanting to play video games at 2:00 o’clock in the morning or watching TV instead of sleep, that’s usually a sign that your body is too physiologically strained to sleep, but your mind is too exhausted to do anything real, and I think that’s just a red flag a lot of us aren’t really trained to look out for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, thanks for flagging that one. Flag of the flag. Anything else we should be observing?

Tessa West
In terms of stress, I think anything with disrupted patterns. If you usually exercise and then, all of a sudden, you’re not motivated to. If you want to disengage socially, that’s a huge kind of red flag that you’re probably pretty stressed out. Social interactions tend to be depleting for most people in some way, even if they’re good, even if they’re engaging. Those are the kinds of things we tend to be a little bit withdrawing from.

And then I think the other thing you should be really attuned to is stress contagion. So, I do a lot of research on how the stress we feel spreads to other people, and how, when we’re really stressed, we’re actually hyper-attuned to the stress cues of others. So, if I’m stressed and then I interact with a co-worker whose voice is a little bit hyper, who’s really fidgety, who is avoiding eye contact, I’m going to be like super sensitive to those cues and even more susceptible to catching that person’s stress.

So, if you find yourself getting ramped up when you’re around a hyper or stressed-out colleague, you can feel your heart rate going up, you can feel your palms sweating, you’re probably already kind of at a disadvantage. You’re a little bit stressed out, and you’re going to be super susceptible to catching the stress of other people around you, and so you kind of have to regulate that and take yourself out of those social contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’re also talking about some assessments and questions that you can ask yourself and record answers to regularly. What are some of the potentially insightful items on those assessments?

Tessa West
I think if you want to go at this really simply, the easiest thing you can do is, in the morning, ask yourself what you’re the most worried about going into the day, and how your sleep was that night. And in the evening, ask yourself was that thing that you were worried about actually that stressful and what unanticipated stressors you faced?

What I find in my book is that about 50% of the time, the things we’re the most worried about in the morning tend to not actually be that bad, mostly because we can put steps in place to make ourselves feel better, to prepare for them mentally so that we are challenged, we’re not threatened. But when we looked at people’s so-called unanticipated stressors, they were things that they actually encounter really regularly.

So, the irony is they’re not actually that unanticipated when they thought about it. They just didn’t anticipate them in the moment. And those are those things I talked about, like a commute running late, or that calendar invite, that in the moment you didn’t anticipate, but if I asked you, “How often has this happened?” most people say, “Oh, it actually happens pretty frequently.”

So, they’re not actually processing these things as frequent stressors. They’re processing them as unanticipated until I tell them to write them down, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, actually, I actually deal with this like once a week.” So, I think that’s the simplest thing you can do is kind of measure those patterns.

And then I think the key reason why you should do this, not only just to learn about your own body, your own experiences, but if you are to look for a new job, if you’re to start networking with people, you know exactly sort of what to ask for, what red flags are going to spike your blood pressure. So, you can ask questions like, “How often does the boss put unanticipated meetings on the calendar?”

If you’ve identified that as something that really stresses you out, you want to avoid that in your next job. But you really have to be like very kind of systematic and learning your own triggers so that you know exactly what to ask and when during those networking conversations during those job interviews.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it sounds like merely identifying the patterns and anticipating the stressors prior to them occurring is useful and powerful for your own resilience in and of itself. So that’s cool. Great.

Tessa West
Yeah, absolutely. We got to learn what makes us not sleep, and, surprisingly, people don’t actually know. Scientists know. We can run statistics on you and tell you, but if I was to ask you, “Why didn’t you sleep last night?” You’re going to make up all kinds of things, from the room was too hot, to this or that, and it probably has very little to do with those things. You just don’t know because it’s something that happened three days ago that’s impacting your sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then I’m curious, one thing that’s in our control is to say, “Oh, this job has a ton of the things that trigger me. It’s time for another job.” So that’s one thing we could do, is make the switch. I’m curious about what are some of the things we might be able to do to, since you’re highlighting here, that stress can be a sneaky little bugger who has negative impacts days and weeks later than the actual inciting incident occurred? So that seems to suggest that it would be in our interest to proactively do some things about how we are handling stress so as to flourish all the better. So, lay it on us, what should we do there?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think here’s the good news. You have a lot more control over the impact of stress and how frequently you encounter these things than you realize. I think the good news is most of the stressors that are actually anticipated are things you can control to some degree. So, if you figure out, for instance, that your boss tends to put those unanticipated meetings on your calendar, once you sort of track the data, you realize it’s occurring every other Thursday or something like that, or you can figure out what that pattern is with your boss, then you can kind of put those blocks in your day.

I think one of the main things that stress people out is not getting their list of things done in the day, but if they actually figure out why, it’s through self-interruptions. There are things you can do to kind of prevent self-interruptions. If you’re being interrupted by other people, I talk in this book about how you can look around the environment and figure out sort of who’s interrupting you and when. Is it because their office is close? Is it because their office is not close, and they don’t know how to systematically interrupt you?

So, tracking these things, learning your own environment, and then putting stopgaps in place is huge. I think once I figured out what stressed me out, which was disappointing people, not getting them something done in time, and then I was thinking, “Okay, why am I disappointing them? Am I taking on too much? Sure, maybe I’m taking on too much,” but that wasn’t actually the reason. The real reason was, during my smart time every day, which was from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m., I was interrupting myself up to 15 times to check my LinkedIn to see who liked a post.

This is embarrassing, but I will admit that this happened. And once I started tracking my own behaviors, I realized I have this weird tick where I want to see how popular I am on LinkedIn, and it’s usually in the morning and that’s conflicting with my smart time, and when I don’t get my smart time, and I don’t get the thing done, that then leads me to disappoint people. So, if I’m 100% honest with myself, I have complete control over that daisy chain of events that’s leading to the stressor.

It took me a really long time to figure out what it was. But once I did, all I did was put away LinkedIn for those two hours, and it totally solved the problem. And that’s kind of a simple example, but I think, once you are honest with yourself about what you’re actually doing, what situations you’re putting yourself in to potentially exacerbate these triggers or allow them to happen, if you have a commute, you just have to plan for the max. You know, if it’s between 30 and 60 minutes, just always assume 60 minutes.

Things like that, I think we have a lot more control over, but you do have to play detective of your own behaviors, of your own triggers, of your own weaknesses, and admit that you have them, and then instead of band-aiding problems, my sleep deprivation, I bought all those cold sheets that they tell you, “Okay, well, it’s probably too warm in your room.” So, I bought those.

That wasn’t really the issue. It was conflict with someone at work that had happened like up to two days before that. Once I figured that out, I didn’t need the cold sheets and my sleep was fine. But you do have to do the homework and do the digging, but most people can actually figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s really cool how sometimes, when you do the detective work, you’re on the case and you see, “Aha, it’s because of this, and I can make this shift. And then as a result, things will things be hunky-dory.” So that’s super. I’m curious, if you discover some stuff that is less in your control, sort of like no matter what you do, this colleague is going to critique your work.

And not that they’re being a total jerk about it, but they’re just going to be like, “Oh, you know, you should do this. Oh, why didn’t you do that? You know, and that’s just, okay.” That’s just kind of the way they are. Maybe you’ve even asked them, “Hey, you know, I’d really appreciate it. You know, I work best under these kinds of collaborative conditions.” Okay, whatever. You’ve done all you could do and still, stuff happens, and it’s being served at you. How do we best deal with those pieces?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think, you know, my first book is called Jerks at Work, and it’s like, try all those strategies, and if it doesn’t work, then you need to go into Job Therapy and learn how to network to find a new job. I do think, I don’t want to be Pollyannish and think you can solve all your problems. I do think controllability is a huge piece.

Once you figure out what needs to be controlled, what the problem is, if you can’t control that in much the same way that you can’t fix a marriage by yourself, if your partner is like, “Screw this, I’m not interested in therapy. I’m not interested in doing any reparative work,” that’s when you have to start exploring new things.

What I don’t want people to do is think that that means quit and then start applying. I think you need to start having those kind of 15-minute conversations with strangers while you’re still employed, because a lot of us have a grass-is-greener idea, and we don’t actually know whether we’re going to face the same thing in another job that we’re facing now.

And I think the easiest thing you can do is reach out to people who are in your organization or outside of it, or in your industry, and I know people don’t like networking, but I think of networking conversations more about information-seeking and asking them about their jobs and less about talking about yourself, just to get a feel for what the day-in-the-life is of other jobs, and that should be your only goal, “What is the day in the life like of this job, at this company, at this role?”

Really simple mundane questions about, “What do you do every day? What does it look like? How loud is it? Who are your colleagues? How much control do you have over how you see them?” Those kinds of low-level things. You want to reach out to as many people as you can to have those conversations to see what it’s like on the other side, instead of assuming that it’s going to be better because often it’s actually not so great on the other side, and you kind of have to bide your time a little bit before you start reaching out or you start applying for new things.

But I think that that very first step is just talking to people in those companies, and just saying, “Hey, can you tell me, like, what your day-to-day is? What do you do like from 9:00 to 5:00, from 9:00 to 10:00, 10:00 to 11:00? What’s that look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that specificity there. And I’m curious, while we’re biding our time, we’re doing our research, we’re talking to some people, are there any sort of like first-aid strategies you recommend for, we’re getting blasted by work stressors all the time? How do we just kind of deal and cope better? You suggested not reframing, “Well, this is just part of what you have to do to get ahead.” So, if that’s something that we don’t want to do, what’s something we do want to do?

Tessa West
I think the easiest thing you can do to kind of regulate, and this, actually, this is going to sound like a weird connection, but it comes out of the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature. So, how do you get from ten to one on, like, that anger scale? Is just taking yourself out of the situation, going for a walk, or shutting yourself in your office for ten minutes alone? Don’t interact with anyone. Don’t go complain immediately to a colleague if you’re stressed.

Our instinct is to want to sort of, like, explode our negative emotions onto others in an effort to get them to regulate it for us, to get them to make us feel better, to complain. And I think that instinct is fine for maybe later on, but at first just take a couple minutes, I think, and go for a walk, or have a cup of coffee. I think the best emotion regulation strategy in the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature is count to 100 alone in a room. That’s the best predictor of getting people to, like, not want to punch someone because it actually helps downregulate emotions at the basic physiologic level.

So, your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate goes down. You need to do the things to get your body to change before your mind can. And I think for some people, they’re good at meditating, I’m not. But I can take 10 minutes to, like, listen to music or something like that. Just do that a couple of times, I think, is the easiest and the best strategy people can do.

And I think building your physical space in a way that’s comfortable is also really important. And temperature matters, sound matters, so as much control over your little environmental, you know, whatever kind of makes you happy in your environment, those creature comforts is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
You talk about “Intimate Partner Violence” literature, I guess I’m just thinking about, like, children and their emotional regulation pieces. It seems like many of these really do still apply to us.

Tessa West
Yeah, timeout, self-induced time out. It’s the same. When it comes to emotion regulation, there’s only so many ways to skin a cat, and you don’t actually need to be that complicated about it. It really just comes down to taking deep breaths and getting your heart rate down. Once your body is calm, then your mind will follow.

But I think we often want to do something immediately that feels good, that feels like a release, and that usually means word vomiting to our colleague. And that’s the thing I would avoid because that leads to stress contagion and all that kind of yucky business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve immediately managed our stresses, we’re doing some research. What are some of the other key steps you recommend that we undergo when we’ve determined, “Yep, it’s time to make a switch”?

Tessa West
I think that kind of the number one thing is talking to strangers. I think 15-minute conversations are key. In the book, I talk about how you can reach, how you can write a cold email to someone and get them to actually write you back. I had to do this for the book. I was shocked at how much people were willing to talk about themselves. What they weren’t willing to do is have a conversation where I sold myself to them for no reason, you know, like, “I’m on the job market, I’m looking for something, and I’m going to tell you how great I am.”

No one would reply to emails like that. Not that I was doing that, but people often reach out in an effort to impress. And I think, instead, you want to reach out and say, “I have these three questions about before you started this job, nobody told me that. How would you answer that?” I think little things like that. I think the job interview process is a place where we often have terrible communication. We don’t have honest interviews, like we don’t have first dates.

I think it’s really important to remind yourself that, during that early kind of sourcing stage where you’re learning about a job, you’re talking to a hiring manager, you need a little bit of tension in those conversations where you’re asking tough questions. People avoid that because they think it makes them look bad or ungrateful, but you can onlDy kind of build intimacy with some tension in close relationships, and I think that’s true with job interviews.

You want to ask those tough questions. People like it. It turns out it looks like you’re looking for long-term fit. So, I think asking some difficult questions to assess fit, to find red flags. My favorite question is, “What does it look like to fail at this job?” People always can answer that one because they’ve seen it a million times. It’s better than asking, “What does it look like to succeed?” because that tends to be vague. Failure tends to be specific. So, questions like that. I think you just have to be willing to have like super honest conversations and listen to people and not sell yourself. At least, that’s not your initial goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Any other tips as we’re all walking this journey?

Tessa West
Don’t feel afraid to get rejected when you’re reaching out to people you don’t know. People are very nervous these days about looking awkward. I study social awkwardness, and it largely lives in our heads more than how it manifests behaviorally. And we’re a little out of practice with talking to people we don’t know, and I think that’s why people aren’t dating as much. It’s why they are afraid to have coffee or a Zoom call with a stranger. But everyone’s in the same boat, so it’s okay.

Do not think that you can learn about a job by sitting on your couch and reading websites and Glassdoor stuff, or even and getting those LinkedIn certifications, or whatever. You really can only learn about it through interpersonal communication and talking to people. I’m convinced that websites and passive learning, video watching, can only get you so far. You need to get in there and learn about the hidden curriculum and all that juicy stuff that people don’t advertise about jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say the hidden curriculum, what do you mean by this?

Tessa West
This is all the stuff that leads you to succeed at work that nobody talks about. Sometimes that means that company policies go against what it takes to actually succeed. The dark side is like taking maternity leave is a bad idea because someone else will take your job. That’s a piece of hidden curriculum. Sometimes it’s weird norms.

So I asked people, I did a study where I asked them about all the weird norms they encountered at work, and sometimes it’s like where you’re allowed to sit, who you can email to ask questions, whose orange juice you can drink from the office fridge, little things like that, but also things like knowledge transfer, which is a complex concept of, like, “If I know something from my old job, do people give a crap in my new job? Are they interested in learning about that? Or do they have their own set of rules here that contradict that?”

And I think a lot of us have a hard time getting over a newcomer hump at work because we assume the knowledge from our old job will carry over to a new one, when in reality there’s like a whole new set of norms and rules and even jargon. That’s another thing that we don’t like at work, but it’s super common. Everyone has their own terms, their own acronyms they use at work. They tend to be pretty idiosyncratic to companies. So, the ones you know now at your job now are going to be different than the ones that the new company uses.

So, just like, “How much of that do I have to learn? How steep is that hill to climb?” And what I think will I need to succeed, is that really what the people who’ve succeeded have? I’ll say one more thing which is job ads often have a list of requirements that are not the real requirements needed. And the reason why is because it’s for the sourcing for hiring managers. They want to cast a wide net so they tend to sort of underwrite ads, but what they’re really looking for is often not written in that ad.

And so, you have to do some digging to figure out, “Okay, they actually left out this really important thing that everyone who’s ever gotten this job had but it’s not in the ad because if they put it there, they’d only get three applicants,” or something like that. There’s lots of kind of mundane reasons but even at the level of the job ad, there’s a hidden curriculum of like what’s missing from that that you really do need to land the job and to succeed at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s really nice, and it’s pretty substantial just how much is hidden, and just how skewed and inaccurate a picture we could get if we only rely on what’s published.

Tessa West
Yeah, think about it like a dating app. Imagine that you meet someone based on their app profile. Would you think that that app is 100% accurate and representative of the person? Most of us would laugh and say, “Of course not. That photo is 15 years old. They overestimated their height and their income and all this other stuff.” We know that, right? We intuitively know that our dating profile is not representative of us, so why do we think a job ad is representative of a job?

It’s the same kind of logic that I think you should apply. And when you meet someone on a first date, you want to do a little bit of digging to see how accurate that profile was. A lot of us are feeling catfished. We show up and we’re like, “That’s not you.” And I think that can happen with jobs, but we’re feeling much more vulnerable than when we’re dating, where we’re afraid to kind of dig for the truth because we want to get to the next stage.

So, we don’t ask those questions like, “Who wrote the ad?” and “Has my future boss even seen this ad?” Most of the time the answer is no. Some hiring manager wrote it, scraping from Indeed. And so, we have to treat it with that same level of kind of circumspect perspective that we would a dating app.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Tessa, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Tessa West
I’m a professor so I give you a lot of homework. It’s going to feel like a lot, but once you get the hang of kind of measuring yourself and learning about yourself by collecting these data, you’re going to be, hopefully, pleasantly surprised at the new things you’re going to uncover. And I think don’t be afraid to reach out to people and have those conversations. That’d be the one piece of advice I give people.

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

Tessa West
Probably “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is one of my favorite quotes. I think that it just kind of encompasses this idea that workplace vibes, culture, zeitgeist can really override anything that we do to plan. I think that is something that I kind of like live by. Don’t ask me who said it. I can’t remember.

Pete Mockaitis
I think Drucker.

Tessa West
Drucker, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study.

Tessa West
Probably be something on morality and norms. I’m doing a lot of research these days on how we interact with people who make us incredibly uncomfortable. So, one of my favorite studies in this space is by Wendy Mendez on the brittle smiles effect.

So the more uncomfortable we are interacting with someone who’s different from us, the more likely we are to smile, be nice, engage in friendly overtures, let them win negotiations, but at the same time our physiology suggests we’re incredibly stressed out. And so, I love that because it’s this juxtaposition between what our bodies are saying, which is stress, and what our minds are trying to override, which is overt friendliness in an effort to compensate for that. And I think that can explain why we often suck at giving feedback because it’s uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Tessa West
I only read fantasy novels these days, “Shadow Daddies,” that kind of thing, Sarah J. Maas.

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

Tessa West
Noise-canceling headphones.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love noise-canceling headphones. Which one are you working with?

Tessa West
These are not it but I use Bose headphones because my office is all glass walls, and I can hear everything around me all the time, and I’m one of those noise-sensitive people, so I can’t concentrate if I can hear a conversation going on. So, I live by the noise. Sometimes I layer them on with wireless headphones. I’m going to sound totally crazy. Wireless headphones underneath with a noise machine going on on my iPhone, like a fan, and then the noise-canceling headphones over those so I really can’t hear anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I love it. I would put earplugs in and then headphones over the earplugs.

Tessa West
I do that too, but it’s not enough. You got to get the fan sound on the earbuds, and then the noise cancelling over that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Tessa West
Getting a latte four times a day.

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?

Tessa West
Keep it real. Just say the thing. At the end of the day, you’re going to get it out. It’s going to take you a while, so just say the thing.

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

Tessa West
You can check out TessaWestAuthor.com, which has all the quizzes for my book. There’s also going to be just a whole bunch of downloadable materials, little guides on how to do the stress test, how to measure yourself, how to network, all that fun business. If you’re interested in my research, you can check me out at TessaWestLab.com.

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

Tessa West
Yeah, reach out to five strangers this weekend and set up chats. Just cold reach out, follow the guide I give you, and just frame up three questions that you want to ask them, where you want to learn about their job. They can be completely outside of your industry. You’re just looking to learn new things.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Tessa, thank you. This is awesome.

Tessa West
Thank you so much.