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Ida del Mundo

Sep 12
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993: How to Boost Your Focus by Streamlining Your Priorities with Marcey Rader

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Marcey Rader helps us discover how to declutter work and life to make time for the things that truly matter.

You’ll Learn

  1. A key belief that pushes us to burn out 
  2. Top tips that make achieving your goals easier 
  3. The magic number of priorities to stay on track 

About Marcey

Marcey Rader is an award-winning keynote speaker, trainer, coach, and author focused on health-powered™ productivity after a preventable medical diagnosis shifted her relentless pursuit of more.

As the founder of RaderCo, she’s inspired over 100,000 people across five continents. As a Certified Speaking Professional®, Virtual Master Presenter®, and TEDx speaker, Marcey helps individuals and companies discover what truly matters, fostering sustainable habits to work well and play more!

Resources Mentioned

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Marcey Rader Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marcey, welcome.

Marcey Rader
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be on your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting about stuff, productivity, feeling good, working well. That’s a lot of stuff we’d like to chat about here. I’d love to kick us off if we could, could you share any particularly extra surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made over your years of researching and teaching about this stuff?

Marcey Rader
I would say that the theme that I see among high achievers, high performers, and I would think that would be people that listen to your podcast, if you’re listening to a podcast called How to be Awesome at Your Job, then you’re trying to achieve something that we tend to think that we will always have time, and that if we get X promotion, then we’ll have time to focus on our health; if we make this amount of money, then we can relax; if we hit this milestone, then we’ll pay more attention to our family. Like, there’s always something that we’re striving for instead of just living in the present.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing, this notion of “If this unfolds then Y will be the case.” Tell me, is that true?

Marcey Rader
Well, in my circumstances, I would say no. I’m almost 50, I’ll be 50 in September, and my 20s and 30s, I would say to early 40s, I was always chasing more and I actually have a TEDx Talk that I released in April called “The Relentless Pursuit of More” and I lived my whole life that way. It was always waiting for something. My husband and I had been married 26 years, and on our 25th anniversary, we went back and read all of our love letters that we had ever written to each other. And I could not believe that even starting in my 20s, I was always saying things like, “When I get my graduate degree, I’ll be home more,” “When I get this promotion…”

I mean, I was saying that back then and it was such a theme. And reading them all at once, I’m seeing that I had this notion throughout the years of always thinking that if I achieved something else, then I could actually focus on what should have been the most important thing to me, my health and my relationships, it really just hit me over the head. And it wasn’t the first thing to hit me over the head, but it might’ve been one of the last things to make me kind of wake up and smell the coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is rich and juicy and I think worth lingering upon a bit in terms of like the thoughts we believe, the things we say to ourselves here before we get into your beautiful lineup of many swell tactics in your book, Work Well, Play More. So, yeah, this notion is, like, after this happens, then that will be how things will be different. Let’s see, I’m not even crystallizing this so well, but is there a shorthand version we would say to this lie we tell ourselves, like, “After this, after X, then Y”?

Marcey Rader
It’s almost like that app, If This Then That. And it’s just like that. And, as an example, a lot of people will think this as, I’ll give an example from a work perspective, an example from a health perspective. So, with work, if I throw myself into my work and I really prove myself now, I work late, I work weekends, I’m the fastest to respond to emails, and I show them that I can do this, I get the promotion, then everything in my life will be great, because I’ve gotten the promotion.

But I’ve now trained people that this is how I work. I’ve trained people that I work at night, I work on the weekends, I get to inbox zero, I’m there all the time and nothing’s really changed. I’m still on the hamster wheel. From a health perspective, and when you’re in your 20s and 30s, we’ve all heard this, like, “Oh, take care of yourself now. It’ll catch up with you,” but you’re never going to believe it. You’re never going to believe it.

And it absolutely caught up with me. I was probably looked at as one of the healthiest people in the room. I was a triathlete. I competed in over 100 ultra and endurance races throughout my 20s and 30s. I even have a degree in Exercise Science, a Master’s in Health and Exercise Management, but it’s hard to look at yourself with a discerning eye, and I actually triggered Hashimoto’s disease, which is an autoimmune disease.

I also put myself into what’s called hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is where you stop having a menstrual cycle, and affects about 1.6 million American women, and it took 12 years for my body to recover from it, 12 years. And I always thought I had time to fix it, to fix myself. And when I talk to anyone that is experiencing burnout or overwhelm, or they are just kind of pushing, pushing, pushing because they think, “If I get to this, then that will happen and everything will be okay,” there are no guarantees that the that that you’re looking for is going to turn out the way you think it will.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s a powerful story. So, these health conditions, you say you triggered it like. Is it just like the sheer intense effort of work and endurance, exercise feats, triggered these ill health effects inside your body?

Marcey Rader
Yes. So, I traveled 48 weeks a year for almost a decade, and so it was a very high-stress lifestyle traveling all the time, and never went to bed at night until I was at zero inbox, didn’t sleep well, exercised a lot, and it also took a real toll on my relationship with my husband. I’m fortunate that we are still together. And it’s funny, I love the book, The Power of Regret.

And he talks about how when people say things like, “No regrets. No regrets,” we really shouldn’t think about it that way because when we do things that we regret, it means that we have failed at something, that we pushed ourselves, we’ve gone outside of our comfort zone, and things like that. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t learn from something or that you wish you hadn’t even done it. But my biggest regret is pushing myself in those areas so much and losing the focus in my relationships with my friends and with my husband.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and it seems this foundational lie is something that gets in a lot of our heads, “If this, then that.” And I’d love, since you’re on the other side of this now, having gained some wisdom from having been there, how do we prudently discern if we’re fooling ourselves? Because some things are accurate, “If this, then that.” Like, “Hey, if I get a promotion and salary increase, we will be able to afford moving to a better neighborhood or a school district or whatever.”

Like, sometimes that’s really true, “This cause does lead to that effect,” and that’s made perhaps a sensible goal we could feel great about pursuing. But there’s other times we’re just chasing a ghost and it’s to our detriment, we’re like, “What have I been doing with my life here?”

Marcey Rader
Yeah, that is an excellent point, and you are right. If you make X amount of money, then maybe you can move to a better neighborhood, you can buy a different home, you can hire a house cleaner even to help take some of your daily tasks off your plate. You can hire a personal trainer, you can hire an assistant, whatever that is.

And one thing that I work on with my clients is reviewing those goals that we’ve set for ourselves because sometimes those goals are completely arbitrary, they’re not even our goals, and they may have been something that we always thought, like, when we were 25 years old, like, “I need to make six figures,” or, “I need to make this level. I need to make director level” and so on. And we get there, and then for some people, it’s like, “Well, that’s not enough. So, then I need to get more and more and more and more.”

And I’m not saying to not shoot for higher dreams or for higher goals, but it’s just really thinking about, are these your goals, and revisiting them regularly, and thinking through what those are going to get for you, or bring for you. Because, like, I had one client that I worked with that she had a director position, and she was offered a job at a smaller company, and she wouldn’t take it because it was a decrease in title, and she said, “My goal was always be, you know, I want to be a director, and this would be an associate director, maybe even a senior manager.”

And so, she didn’t take it. And two years later, that company had doubled in size, they were sold to another company. The person who she knew, she knew the person that took the job that she interviewed for, cashed out big time, and it was all because of the title that she didn’t want to lose, which was really just arbitrary in the end, and she would’ve gone much further in that smaller company if she would’ve really thought through and not just been stuck on, “I have to have that title.”

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, yeah, this is good. And you’re bringing me back to, I think, maybe high school is one of the first times I thought I had fallen for this myself. And I think I told myself that if I had six-pack abs then I could get the ladies I was interested in in high school.

Marcey Rader

Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so off because, well, one, apparently, as I’ve kind of learned, most women there didn’t really care about men’s physiques as the selection criterion for their romantic boyfriends. So, there’s that. Just totally misguided.

But it’s funny, it’s sort of like we have a desire, we have some motivation, and there’s something I think natural in the human person, the human psyche, to want to achieve more, to do more, to have more, to be more, and winning. And I love my little competitive in some domains. Winning, in general, is just kind of fun, and in growing and improving just sort of feels good, and so we just kind of go after it. But somehow along the lines we get tricked into thinking that this is much more important and impactful than it truly is.

Marcey Rader
Yes. I had a business coach once that her mantra almost on all of the group coaching calls were, “You’re just not that special.” And it was really funny because her message to us was we’re thinking that people care about us so much more than they actually do. And so, are we doing something for ourselves or because we care about what people think about it so much, and about that title? Like, “What is it going to look like if I have now a title of senior manager instead of director?”

But one of the questions that was posed to me, and I use this all the time now with my clients, I use this in my TEDx, and I actually just released a podcast episode about just this very question, was, “If a journalist were to be following you around all day, writing a story about a day in the life of you, would they say that you are living in alignment with your priorities?” So, if you tell the journalist that, “Oh, my priority is that my health, that I exercise and eat healthy every day, that I’m present with my two young kids, and that I’m very present at work. And maybe I’m a manager, and that during my one-to-ones, I’m very focused on the person. Those are my priorities.”

And then this journalist is following you around, and they see that you sleep in, and you grab a Nutri-Grain bar on your way out the door, and you eat your lunch in front of a screen, you’re sitting there all day, during your one-to-one, you’re multitasking, and you’re also reading emails, or during your meetings, you’re also reading emails.

And then at the end of the day, during dinner, you’re also checking your phone every few minutes. That journalist would not be writing a story about your priorities. And so that’s something that I ask myself, that question, multiple times through the week, “If they’re writing about me right now, would they say I’m living what I say my priorities are?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a handy way to cut through it, indeed. 

So, it’s sort of like we assess the potential arbitrariness of a thing rather than just put the blinders on and chase after it full-steam my head. A title, it’s like, “Okay, that’s the goal,” and goals are fun. Pursuing them and growing and learning and improving and getting closer feels good. But, really, what does the title mean? What does it get you? What is its foundational relevance and importance in your life? And it sounds like when you said values, it sounds like that’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s how we, ultimately, assess the worthwhileness of anything.

Marcey Rader
Yes. And to be clear, I am not saying don’t have goals because I absolutely have goals and milestones. And if anybody out there has done StrengthsFinders, I’m number one, Learner, so I am always getting some kind of certification, and I’m reading books, and I’m learning about new things. It’s just I don’t feel like, in my experience with the people that I’ve worked with and then also with myself, that we can really define why we want some of those goals.

And when we look at what we think we’re going to get from them, is that really true? And then also, what do we need to sacrifice to get to those goals? Because sometimes we’re not thinking about that either. And for every yes, every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. But also, the reverse is true. If you say, “No, I’m not going to go to another party on Friday night because I need to get my sleep,” but you’re saying yes to going to bed early and waking up on Saturday feeling better. So, there’s always a yes and no, and give and take.

And knowing what you might have to sacrifice, and this is an easy one. A lot of people might say like, “I want to get up early and exercise every day, and that’s my goal,” but they’re not morning people, so they already have one strike against them. They’re getting up early, they’re exercising, but now they’re drinking coffee all day long, which is also not good, and they’re going to bed earlier, which means maybe less time with their partner. And so, really thinking through, “What are the sacrifices that I would need to make? And is it worth it for those changes that will come about from that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And any pro tips on how we can do a masterful job of making these considerations and evaluations?

Marcey Rader
Well, I’ve been doing something for the last 11 years, and I only have three priorities at a time from a work perspective and a health perspective. And I call them, like, spaceship view are my annual priorities, and airplane view are my quarterly, and then I have three for my monthly, that’s like my skyscraper view, and then I have my weekly three, and that’s what I call my treetop view, and then I have my daily, and that’s just the three total, and that’s where I’m in the weeds, like, in the daily types of tasks.

And I write them down. I actually have a playbook that I write them down in. And continually revisiting those, I’m actually looking at them on my whiteboard right now, I have my annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, keeps it top of mind for me. It’s like that journalist looking at me, writing that story, me making sure that I’m staying on track. But the biggest piece of that is I do reflections on these every, at the end of the week. I reflect on my week at the end of the month. I reflect on the month, quarter, and year.

But quarterly, I do this with three other people and I talk about my lessons earned, my smartest decisions, what worked well, what didn’t work well. I get feedback from them, they share theirs, and then I give them feedback. And so, I’m getting an outsider’s perspective, and that really helps me to kind of stay aligned with what I say my priorities are so that I don’t get kind of tunnel vision sometimes on what it is that I’m shooting for without seeing the big picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well, so we spent some good time there. Now, tell us what’s the big idea behind your book, Work Well, Play More?

Marcey Rader
So, the subtitle is “Productive Clutter-Free, Healthy Living – One Step at a Time,” and it goes through the course of 12 months, and every month there is a behavior in the area of productivity, the area of clutter, which could include digital, physical, or mental clutter, and then health.

And in each of those categories, there are novice, pro, and master levels. So, if you think of something like James Clear’s Atomic Habits book, awesome book. It’s very conceptual and theory-based, and with a little bit of how. It’s a lot of why and a little bit of how, and mine is a little bit of why but a lot of how. And so, it’s really like a step-by-step and kind of a choose-your-own-adventure book. And I’ve had teams use it in book clubs. I’ve had several groups use it as book clubs, actually, and it’s just really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so why don’t we just get a taste there. Month one, productivity, is about notification distractions and handling those. And I love this because, well, I’ve seen research that suggests when people try this ever so briefly, they sometimes stick with it forever. So, lay it on us, Marcey, the why and the how.

Marcey Rader
The number one thing you can do to help with your focus and attention is to turn off your notifications as many as possible, because they are not on to help you be more productive. They’re on to get you to use the tool or the app more. So that is why they’re on as the default. And every time we get one, there is a dopamine response in our brain, and we start to get used to it, and we like it. And dopamine is that anticipation, and it’s the same one that gamblers get.

And so, by turning those off, one, I have never had anybody in over a decade turn them off and turn them back on again. If they did, I don’t know about it. And if you think about your email, like when you get the little pop-up in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, and you’re in the middle of another email, think about your emails like conversations. If I’m talking to you and somebody came up to me and poked me on the shoulder, and said one line and walked away, that would be really distracting, right? But that’s exactly what is happening when we let the notifications come through.

The other thing to think about is you’re not going to forget to check your email. Nobody forgets to check their email. And so, if you worry that you’re going to miss something, are you missing it for a minute, five minutes, an hour? There’s a difference between being reactive and being responsive. And what we want to be is responsive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then in practice, how do we deal with this, we just straight up get in our phones and say, “No, no, no, no,” on all of the apps and the notifications? Or what do you recommend?

Marcey Rader
I definitely recommend email notifications off, but for your phone, I recommend anything that, any kind of social media, we don’t need to see that somebody liked our post immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, they liked your post, Marcey?”

Marcey Rader
They liked, and that’s dopamine, like, “Oh, somebody likes me. Somebody likes me.” And so, we don’t need to see that right away. You’re probably not going to forget to go to Instagram. Email, we don’t need. One thing you could, you know, you might want to consider it’s like keeping your phone notification, like your voicemail notification, maybe your text, something like that, but things like Target ads, Target sales, or ESPN or The Weather Channel, we don’t need all of those alerts and banners that come through.

And what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can set hours, focus modes, in your phone, and this is what I love about the iPhone because I actually don’t have badges on my phone, the little bubbles with the numbers even for text. I just check it every once in a while. For voicemail, I do. I do have the badge on because people don’t call anymore. And when somebody calls me, it’s usually important. But the thing with any kind of badge or banner coming across is that you could have it at focus mode that, only during certain times, those come through.

As an example, I don’t get any notifications between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. and that’s because in the morning I’m working out, that’s my time, I don’t want to be interrupted. After 8:00 p.m., that’s when I’m hanging out with my husband. I don’t want to be interrupted. So, you could have different zones for, like, maybe you see badges during work hours but not in the evenings so then you’re not tempted to look.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super, and, yes, I live my life this way. I do not receive any beeps or buzzes whatsoever with text messages, unless I know, “Oh, I’m in a zone where I need to hear from people right away and reply to them right away.” So, it’s, like, I will shift out of “Do not disturb” ever so temporarily, and then shift right back into it.

And it’s really interesting when you talk about training other people, like people will know, they say, “Oh, hey, we haven’t heard from Pete yet. Oh, yeah, he doesn’t get buzzed on his text messages, so I’m actually going to call him twice so that we could get the update, ‘Hey, we changed the lunch location,’” because I would, I probably would drive to the old lunch location and then oopsies. But so that happens quite rarely, and other people are aware and adapt, and I’d say that the rareness that it does happen is so worth it in terms of what I’ve gained from my attention being reclaimed.

Marcey Rader
I’m so glad you said that, Pete, because when people are so worried that they’re going to miss something, I’m like, “So maybe you miss something once in three months, but you’ve had three months of not being interrupted, like daily, hourly, sometimes every 10 minutes or whatever.” And how you use it is exactly how I recommend using it. Like, when I’m out and I’m meeting friends or whatever, or I’m expecting a call, I will turn it off. Like, it’s so easy to toggle it on and off. It’s just a little tap with your fingers to turn that zone off and be able to get them.

Pete Mockaitis
And we talked about all the settings you can do, and there are so many. I’m still learning more and more about them and they keep updating them with each new version of the software. But I get a kick out of using the Screen Time app and the downtime feature, this is my new discovery, although it’s been around, like, forever, in terms of it’ll just say, “Hey, no, we’re shut down now because you should be sleeping,” basically, it just sort of says.

And you can override it if you want to but it’s kind of nice that, oh, you’re scrolling something, and then your phone is like, “Oh, no, now you’re on downtime.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re probably right, phone. All right. I guess we’re done.”

Marcey Rader
Yeah, it’s just a little reminder. It’s a good nudge. It’s a good nudge to remind you, like, “Yeah, all right. All right, do you really need to be scrolling right now?” And that is one thing, because we’re talking about phones. Really think hard about whether or not you want to take your company to bed with you. Because when you look at your email in bed, or if you wake up, and before you ever get out of bed, you’re looking at your emails, you’re sleeping with your manager, you’re sleeping with your coworkers.

Like, you’re taking them into your sacred space. Do you really want your company in bed with you? I don’t. I don’t. So, now that I’ve given that visual to all of your listeners, they’ll be like, “Eww!” throw their phone across the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Marcey. So, removing notifications is one simple thing we can do that has just a tremendous outsized results for that effort. So, that’s the kind of stuff we love hearing about, Marcey. Could you lay on us another one or two things that’s pretty low amount of effort yet just exceptionally high levels of good benefits returned to us?

Marcey Rader
Yes. So, there is nothing magical about a 60-minute meeting, but that is the default and everybody schedules 60-minute meetings, but you can’t get off the meeting and on a meeting in the same minute. It’s very hard. And we all need biology breaks, right? We all go to the bathroom. We have to drink water. We have to step away. We have to take some notes. So, you can go into your settings, for Gmail it’s called Speedy Meetings; for Outlook, you can go into your File options, Calendar, and change all of your meetings to either be 50 minutes or 45 minutes or 25 minutes or 15 minutes, and then you don’t have to think about it.

Because I am all about systematizing everything and not having to think about too much. And so, if you do that, then any meeting you schedule is automatically going to be shorter. And you need that time for your brain especially if you are on back-to-back video meetings, because they actually have done brain scans and they show stress, how stress builds up in the brain with back-to-back meetings.

Because as that meeting that you’re on now is starting to get towards the end, you’re already starting to be stressed, “Am I going to get off in time to get on to my new meeting?” So that would be another one that I would say just make it simple for yourself. Go in, change your settings, and make your meeting shorter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And tell me, if we do have five minutes in between meetings, do you have any pro tips on what are the best means to recover energy, de-stress, motivation boost in a jiffy?

Marcey Rader
Look away from your screen, get up if you can. And the reason why it’s important to look away from your screen is that it’s drying our eyes out, we blink less when we’re staring at a screen. If it’s a TV far on a wall, we tend not to do it. But when we’re staring up close to a monitor, we blink less so it makes our eyes dry. But also, when we’re staring at a screen that’s close, we can get what’s called screen apnea, like sleep apnea, but screen apnea, and we actually are breathing shallow.

And when you know this, I’ll have a lot of people say like, “Oh, my gosh, I caught myself breathing really shallow,” and you might find yourself even holding your breath. And people tend to do this even more when they’re doing things like social media or checking email. And so, when we’re breathing shallow, it creates tension in our shoulders, our neck. It can also cause headaches, but it even affects our digestion because we’re not taking deep breaths or our diaphragm isn’t moving up and down as it should.

So even though you might think, “Oh, I’m going to use these five minutes just to check my email real quick,” it’s best to actually get up and just move around a little bit and look away from the screen, and then come back to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then so, each month, we got the productivity piece, we got the declutter piece, we got the health piece. Can you likewise share with us, what’s a top practice that you have found in yourself and your clients is just transformational in terms of the amount of energy, attention, focus, good moods that we can bring with us to everything we do?

Marcey Rader
It’s hard for me to narrow it down to one, but I’m going to just choose this one, and that is narrowing down your priorities to no more than three. And, Pete, most people now are just overloaded with work. I hear that everybody’s under-resourced and “I have eight priorities,” “I have ten priorities.” You can’t. I’m only going to give you three. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have eight tasks to do, but it is, you know, you have no more than three priorities.

And the way to think about, like, “Well, how do I choose which are my priorities?” There’s a couple of ways. One, if I were to go on vacation tomorrow, what would I absolutely have to get done today? Because that’s everyone’s most important or most productive day, the day before they go on vacation because you’re not going to mess around doing silly stuff. Or if you think about it, like, you took your laptop to a coffee shop, and you only have 30 minutes of juice, or an hour of juice because you forgot your cord, what would you work on? And thinking through it that way, and then prioritizing your day around those top tasks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we prioritize our day around the top tasks, what does that look like in practice?

Marcey Rader
Well, for most people, doing at least one of those top tasks first before you hit your inbox is how I would say to start your day, because your inbox is another person’s agenda. And so, if you go there first, then your whole day can be derailed right then. And so, doing at least one of your priorities to at least feel accomplished and check the box for something that is just for you is really important to have that feeling that you’ve done something, and you’ve accomplished, and you’re more likely to stay on task the rest of the day.

The reason why I say for most people is that, if you are like a night person, like a night owl, then you actually need to warm up a little bit first, and doing more like admin type tasks in the first part of your day might be better for you. But because that’s a minority of people that are night owls, that’s why I say for most people.

The other thing about going to your inbox first is that so many people are remote, and if you start work at 8:00 or 8:30 or 7:30, most people don’t know exactly when you start work for the day. So, if you feel like, “I have to check my email first, I have to check my email first,” and it’s 8:00 o’clock, well, how are they going to know that you started at 8:00 if you end up processing your email at 8:30? So, spend that first 30 minutes on something for you instead of another person’s agenda.

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

Marcey Rader
I love the quote, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” It’s a Chinese proverb, and I’ve had a T-shirt, I say it all the time, because I’m a very action person. If I say it, it’s going to happen. And so, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.”

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

Marcey Rader
This is something that I just learned from a neuroscientist, and I never knew why, so now I know the why, and it’s called the cathedral effect. So, if we want to be creative, or we’re trying to solve a problem, you want to go outside, that’s best. But if not, be somewhere with a very high ceiling in a big room. But if you want to get really focused on a certain project or just get stuff done, then you want to be in a room with low ceilings and more closed in.

I used to belong to a co-working space, and I would go and stand in the telephone booth for two, three hours there. But I would get so much done standing in this little tiny booth, and I didn’t know the words why, and it’s because of the cathedral effect. And that is something I just find fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so what’s the neuroscience behind it? Like, I’m in a tiny room and then it’s, like, I just make it happen.

Marcey Rader

It’s something about, like, the low ceiling and the closed-in space makes you stay more on task and focused. And when we’re outside or in a room with really high ceilings, we’re more likely to come up with creative solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think Walt Disney, allegedly, the legend goes, would have his people in different rooms based on the task. If they were dreaming big thoughts and stories, they’d be in one space versus if they were really editing down and drawing hundreds of images, then they were in a much less beautiful, more cramped contained space. I don’t know if that’s true but that is the legend.

Marcey Rader

Well, I want to look that up because that would be a good example for me to use.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Marcey Rader

Yeah, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And Rina Raphael is a journalist, and she did such an amazing job. 

But she just debunks so many myths in the book from marketing of wellness products and so on, but also how marketing towards health, wellness, and cleaning products and different things like that, have affected women, and goes into like medical research and how women are.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Marcey Rader

ClickUp. So, our company uses ClickUp project management system, and we hardly ever email each other internally. Every bit of communication is within ClickUp.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quoted back to you often?

Marcey Rader

I talk a lot about movement opportunities and finding opportunities, or movement snacks during the day. And so, a lot of people will say, after they hear me speak, because I talk about movement opportunities from a productivity perspective, not just from a health perspective, but how it can affect your creativity and make you more alert in the afternoons and so on. And so, a lot of people will message me after presentations that I give, and talk about movement opportunities that they found.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marcey Rader

HelloRaderCo.com, H-E-L-L-O-R-A-D-E-R-C-O.com, or the book website WorkWellPlayMore.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marcey Rader

I have a gift.

Pete Mockaitis

Please.

Marcey Rader
If people want to go to HelloRaderCo.com/gift, the first chapter of the book, the whole month one, with the productivity and turning off notifications, the clutter, and also the health habits for novice, pro, and master are in there, and they can download that for free.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Thank you. Well, Marcey, this has been lovely. I wish you much fun, work and play.

Marcey Rader
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sep 05
0

992: How to Break Free from Cynicism and Reclaim Hope with Jamil Zaki

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Jamil Zaki shows you that there’s much reason to hope–even for the most hardened cynics.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why hope equals success
  2. Why to be skeptical of your own cynicism 
  3. How your gut instincts can lead you astray 

About Jamil

Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the Director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better.

Resources Mentioned

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Jamil Zaki Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jamil, welcome.

Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most fascinating, surprising, and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and hope and cynicism?

Jamil Zaki
Sure. One of the, I think, counterintuitive discoveries is that when we think of hope, believing that the future can be better, thinking about how it could turn out well, what we want, we often imagine that that frame of mind is naive, like putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses. But it turns out that probably most of us are wearing a pair of mud-colored glasses already. We actually tend not to focus on the best things that could happen or the best parts of human nature.

We’re hyper-focused on the worst things that people do and all the untrustworthy and harmful events that we read about in the news. So, if anything, we’re biased away from hope, and being hopeful is not a matter of being naïve or sticking our head in the sand, or putting on glasses. It’s a matter of taking off those mud-colored glasses and seeing the world more clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Jamil, I love it. Right from the get-go, we’re getting meta and your perspectives on hope are hopeful in and of themselves right away. So, tell us, if we’re skeptical, like, “Hmm, I’m not so sure that’s true, Jamil,” is there evidence, is there proof that, in fact, hope is more of an accurate, realistic view of what is and what is likely to be than our default mode?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, first I want to jump on this great term that you just used, “skeptical,” and a lot of people think that being skeptical and being cynical are the same thing. They’re not. So, cynicism is this blanket assumption about people, that, overall, we are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Skepticism is, instead, a more scientific way of thinking where you kind of don’t have blanket assumptions about everybody. Instead, you let the evidence guide you. You let people show you who they are and you learn from your experiences.

And it turns out that being skeptical is terrific. I mean, in no way am I saying that being hopeful should mean trusting everybody or ignoring all the people out there who really are cheating or doing harm in some other way. But, to your point, there’s lots of evidence that, when we become skeptical, cynicism actually falls apart.

So, for instance, people in study after study underestimate how trustworthy, generous, open-minded, and friendly other people are. That’s not to say that there aren’t jerks out there. Of course, there are, but the average person underestimates the average person. I’ll give you one example, Pete. So, in Toronto, there was a social experiment where researchers dropped wallets all over the city, and these wallets had money in them, and they had an ID card so that if the person who found them wanted to be a good Samaritan, they could return the wallet.

And the question that was asked of lots of people in Toronto was, “What percentage of these wallets do you think will come back?” And I wonder what you would guess. I know you’ve probably read the answer, but what you would have guessed before knowing?

Pete Mockaitis
Percent of the wallets? That’s so funny. Jamil, I’m a sucker for hypothetical scenarios because it’s like I’m solving a case study. I want all the details. So, there are some cash and some goodies in this wallet?

Jamil Zaki
There’s cash and there’s an ID card, so you can run away with it and make some money, or you can give it back to the person who clearly lost it.

Pete Mockaitis
Toronto. So, because I’ve heard that this could really vary by city, and Canadians are very polite and friendly, just a blanket stereotype. I guess you could do that if it’s good. So, I’m going to, say in Canada, let’s go with 55% return it.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, 55, pretty bullish. I love it. You’re more optimistic than Canadians themselves. So, people in Toronto expected the return rate would be 25%. In fact, it was 80%.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, okay, even better.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, and this experiment has been repeated all around the world, and the general trend is that most wallets are returned, and return rates reach 80% in several different countries. And also, that we don’t know that, that if you ask people for their forecasts, their expectations, they’re way bleaker than that. And this is true, again, all over the scientific landscape. It’s not just hypothetical situations. Real people underestimate what real people are like, in part because we are so captured by hyper-negative and, I suppose, yeah, hyper-negative and troubling portrayals of people in the media.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this reminds me, and I’ve shared this story a couple times on the show, but I remember one day, I got a random LinkedIn message from someone who said they wanted to talk to me about careers in consulting. I said, “Okay, I mean, sure.” I didn’t have that much to do at the time, and he was local. I could just meet him at a coffee shop, a short walk from my apartment. And so, we chatted, and I had no connection to him. We were in a LinkedIn group that had many thousands of people in it.

And so, we chatted, and I noticed he had this notebook of all the people that he talked to, and I was like, “Wow, looks like you’ve talked to a lot of people. Are you just reaching out totally cold to total strangers like me?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, how often do people actually talk to you?”

And so, he had these detailed records in his notebook, and it was about 28% of total strangers, more than one in four, said, “You know, sure. I’ll take some time to chat with you about some career stuff.” And I thought that was exceptional because that’s a decent chunk of time for someone you don’t know at all, and again and again and again, folks were doing it. It was awesome.

Jamil Zaki
I love this story, and it rings so true. There’s a bunch of research where people are asked to predict, “If you try to talk with a stranger, or even deepen a conversation with an acquaintance, open up about something you’re going through, ask for a favor, try to provide support, how will it go?” And people inevitably think it will be awful, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this is going to be so cringe. People will put on their headphones and try to ignore me. There’ll be awkward silence.”

We think about the worst possible outcome of trying to connect with somebody because we don’t really have enough faith in each other. And it turns out that if these same experimenters ask people to go ahead and try that conversation with the stranger, try connecting deeper with a friend, it goes extremely well, far better than we think. So, our cynicism isn’t just clouding our judgment about what people are like, it’s directly standing in the way of opportunities to build new connections and deepen old ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. And then just that experience, experiencing that directly, I think probably packs a much bigger punch, Jamil, is my guess, than us sharing these cool studies, and trust us, humans are actually pretty good. And I recall that there’s some therapists, they’ll do homework, in which they’ll assign them, it’s like, “Hey, go ask women.”

I recall this from the Feeling Good Podcast. This therapist gave some homework, “Go ask women if any of them would ever be interested in dating a person who has once checked into an in-patient psychiatric facility for depression,” because he thought, “No one would ever want to be with me.” And when he did, what he heard most often back was, “Well, is he rich?”

And so, it was eye-opening, like, “Huh, okay, so this is not an immediate disqualify or deal-breaker for me. Aha!” So, we’ve got some evidence, and if you go out and do it for yourself, you’ll see even more potently and feel that. That’s cool.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, this is a great poll and a really important connection because I think depression is a story that we tell about ourselves often, “I’m worthless. Nobody likes me,” and that story can become its own kind of prison because you don’t then collect the data. You don’t then reach out and have those conversations that could disprove the very story that you’re living with, so you end up in this situation where your depressive stories become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And cynicism is kind of like that, except it’s not about ourselves. It’s stories about other people, about humanity. So, if you think that most people are only out for themselves, well, then you start to treat people that way. You start to kind of micromanage them, and monitor them, and even threaten them to make sure that they don’t run away with your money or betray you. You start to just act in an untrusting manner.

And guess what? That brings out the worst in other people. People reciprocate our kindness, generosity, and trust, and they retaliate against our selfishness, callousness, and mistrust. So, cynics, because they believe so little in people, treat people poorly, end up getting treated poorly in response, and then decide, “Aha, I was right all along.”

So, the way to break that cycle is exactly like you’re saying, this therapist’s homework from the Feeling Good Podcast, is to instead treat your life a little bit more like an experiment, to give yourself homework, to get out of your comfort zone, and try something new, whether it’s talking to a stranger or trusting somebody in your life in a new way, and don’t just do it.

As you do it, try to mark down, like this person did with his networking opportunities, mark down, “How did it go?” I call this encounter counting. Count and really record how these conversations go because, if you’re like most people, there will be pleasant surprises everywhere. And the goal is not to be surprised all the time, but rather, to learn from those surprises until we can update our expectations to be both more hopeful and more accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. Well, Jamil, it feels like we’ve already got our money’s worth for this in terms of this is powerful, enriching stuff. I already feel good and more hopeful myself. So, thank you for that treat. So, I’m curious then, could you share with us one of your favorite stories of someone who made the leap from a lot of cynicism to some more hope and saw some cool results? And if I could really put you on the spot, let’s have that be in the workplace.

Jamil Zaki
Oh, sure. I want to make it a type of workplace that’s a little bit unusual. So, this is the principal of a middle school. So, this is this great person, LaJuan White, she was a principal in schools around Brooklyn, and then decided she wanted to move out of the city. And when you’re in this public school system, you can’t decide the school that you go to.

And so, she was assigned this place called Lincoln Middle School in Syracuse, New York. York. She looked it up and it seemed terrifying. It was on a list of persistently dangerous schools, meaning that there was more than one violent incident per 100 kids per year. It was one of the least resourced schools in the state, and it had spit out four principals in the previous six years. So, this was not a workplace that you necessarily wanted to be in. She was being tapped to act as its leader.

And so, she showed up there, and immediately realized that it wasn’t that the kids at this school were awful people. It’s that the culture around them was bringing out their worst. So, teachers, for instance, were really quick to punish kids, to suspend them, even expel them if they did anything wrong, and they had this hair trigger to see the worst in the kids at the school. And White realized, “Wait a minute, we’re not putting any faith in these kids, so it’s no wonder that they’re retaliating.”

As I said earlier, people become the folks we expect them to be. And so, what White did was, she said, “We’re going to replace this punishment culture with one where we try to treat these kids like the children that we hope they are.” So instead of focusing on punishment, they focused on opportunities and incentives for kids who did the right thing, who made good decisions.

And, over time, and not much time, by the way, we’re talking the course of one academic year, this school was pulled up. The kids started to relate more with each other and with their teachers, suspension rates fell, and the school ended up off of the dangerous list for good. White managed to reform this culture by focusing on trust, even and especially when things were difficult.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that. Thank you. I was going to put you on the spot in terms of, “Okay, what are we looking at for crime, what are we looking for data in terms of performance?” So, we got the crime reduction, we got the suspension rates improvement. Beautiful. And could you zoom way in, in terms of what would be some examples of practices or ways of treating, interacting students, that speak to the low trust versus some of the new enhanced better ways teachers were interacting with students every day?

Jamil Zaki
White talks about two models of justice. One is punitive justice, where the idea is the person who’s done something wrong is the enemy, and my goal as a teacher is to protect the rest of the classroom from that negative element. So, that is exclusionary. Basically, if a kid does something wrong, you try to get them out of there, you try to send them to detention, suspension, or expulsion.

White replaced that with restorative justice, where the idea is, if a kid does something wrong, yes, they should be punished, but there should also be curiosity and compassion. We want to know why they did that. We want to treat them as a member of our community who we want to keep in our community. So, we want to ask more about what’s happening with them. We want to be curious.

White visited the homes of many troubled students and found out what a harsh and difficult home life they had. So, she had much more context to understand that a lot of these kids were acting out because they were struggling. And also, instead of just kicking kids out of the classroom, teachers were equipped with this new set of restorative justice practices, where when a kid acted out, they tried to pull them aside for conversations, “What’s going on with you? What do you need right now?”

This is still in the context of protecting other kids, and kids would still have to face consequences, but it was much more empathic. And it turns out that, especially when things are difficult, it matters how you take on that situation, how you treat somebody. And so, even in the context of a kid acting out, treating that kid kindly, treating them like they still deserve your respect, is a huge part of the change that they made within, at the micro level in the classroom.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. All right, Jamil, so thinking about the workplace, hope, one, just feels good. Two, it helps other folks step up and live out their best selves and rise to expectations in a good way. Are there any other key benefits or results we might see in terms of work and being awesome at your job when we have less cynicism and more hope?

Jamil Zaki
A hundred percent. So, let’s focus first on individual contributors. I talk with a lot of people who tell me, “Yeah, you know, cynicism, it doesn’t feel good, but I need it to survive and to succeed because, guess what, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and we got to compete. We got to duke it out. If you want to succeed, you need to step over or on your colleagues.” And it turns out that that’s a terrible strategy for success in most places.

So, there’s research from tens of thousands of people that finds that over a 10-year span, cynics earn less money than non-cynics, even if they start out at the same point. Now, why would that be? Well, cynics try to win at work to be awesome at their job by dominating other people. They try to outperform and outshine folks because they think in zero-sum terms. They think that “Anything you get, I lose, and anything you lose, I get.” But it turns out that that dominant attitude to work isn’t really how most people get ahead.

Most people get ahead by collaborating, by working together, doing things that none of them could do alone. And cynics, because they’re trapped in this sort of zero-sum mindset, don’t take advantage of those really important ways of succeeding. And this is where hope and trust and connection matter. In workplaces, yeah, all of those qualities feel good. People, when they feel connected and trusting toward their colleagues, they have greater mental health and resilience, but they also do better.

They’re more willing to take creative risks with their work because they know that their colleagues have their back. They’re more willing to share information, knowledge, and perspective, which aligns people and allows them to, again, collaborate more creatively and they’re more productive. So, it’s not an either/or. It’s not that you have to choose between hope or success. Actually, they go hand in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I think about this study, I know how we measure earnings. That’s pretty straightforward. How do I measure whether or not someone qualifies as a “cynical person” versus a “non-cynical person”?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, there’s a big questionnaire, a very famous one. I can give you just a couple of questions from it. So, I’m going to ask, I’m going to give you a couple of statements, and you tell me whether you agree in general or not, okay? Here’s one, “Most people can be trusted.”

Pete Mockaitis
Mostly agree.

Jamil Zaki
Okay. “People are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.”

Pete Mockaitis
Mostly disagree.

Jamil Zaki
Okay. And “People generally don’t like helping one another.”

Pete Mockaitis
Disagree.

Jamil Zaki
Well, you’ve scored very anti-cynical on this test. That’s 0 for three, right? And there’s 50 questions like this, and you can score yourself if you want. There are cynicism tests online. This is called the Cook-Medley Cynical Hostility Scale for those folks who want to try it out themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just imagining, it’s like, “Oh, hey, how was your podcast, honey?” “Well, I just took a score. I took a test and it proved that I’m a cynic.” Like, “I already knew that.” I’m just imagining how that unfolds in people’s relationships and work. Well, so that’s handy. All right. Well, then, so let us know. So, let’s say we do have that, we got a heaping pile of cynicism, and we recognize, “Huh, I’d rather not have that. It doesn’t feel so good. Jamil is making a case that I’ve got benefits associated with ditching that. But personality transplants are not available at the local hospital,” so what’s a person to do?

Jamil Zaki
You brought up something that I think is a great starting point, which is the way that therapists operate, the way that they challenge people with depression or anxiety. I think that personality transplants are not available, as you said, but we are all works in progress. People’s personalities do change over the course of their lives. Events in our life can change our personality and we can change ourselves on purpose, therapy being the primary way that most people do this.

But I’m, personally, a recovering cynic. I deal with this all the time, and I’ve used tools from cognitive therapy on myself. I call it being skeptical of my cynicism. So, when I find myself suspicious of a person that I’ve never met, or over-generalizing and saying, “This politician did something corrupt, therefore, all politicians are fundamentally corrupt,” I ask myself, “Okay, Zaki, wait a minute. What evidence do you have for that claim?”

I’m a scientist. I can challenge myself to defend a position from a scientific perspective. And, oftentimes, I find myself saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not something that I have evidence for. That’s just my bias. That’s just my intuition.” And I don’t have to believe my intuition all the time. In fact, oftentimes our intuitions are dead wrong. So, I think that’s the first step, is to audit your inner experiences, to ask yourself whether you’re jumping to conclusions or whether you have enough evidence.

If you have enough evidence, great. Go for it. You’re not being cynical, you’re being skeptical. If you don’t have enough evidence, try to do an experiment. Try to take a leap of faith on somebody. Now, I’m not saying you have to share your bank information with a prince who’s going to wire you $14 million or anything like that, but try to take small, growing, calculated risks on other people.

Now, that doesn’t just help you learn about them, “Who can I trust and who can’t I trust?” based on evidence. It also changes other people for the better. Economists call this “earned trust.” When we put faith in other people, they’re more likely to step up and meet our expectations because they’re honored that we believe in them. So, that’s something really powerful that we can do to restructure our own thinking and also to bring out the best in the people around us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any other potential approaches or fun ways to get started right away?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, I think that there’s two things that I could add to this, which are ways that we communicate with other people. One is, if you decide to trust somebody, don’t be quiet about it. I do something called trusting loudly, and I think this is especially important for supervisors, managers, leaders of any type, because we often put our faith in somebody. We give them a new responsibility, for instance, at work because we think they’re capable of it, but we don’t tell them, “Hey, I’m doing this because I believe in you.”

And it turns out that that simple message, just being upfront and clear. about the trust that we put in other people can intensify that act of earned trust. It can make that – the power of our trust, the gift of our trust – more clear and more impactful. The second thing that I would add when it comes to sharing or communicating differently is what I would call positive gossip. A lot of us are not just cynical in what we think, we’re cynical in what we say. We go around giving one-star Yelp reviews to life and everybody in it, and we can choose to do the opposite.

One thing that I try to do with my kids is share with them something kind that I saw somebody do each day, and, A, that helps me fight cynicism in them and help them stay attuned to the goodness of others, but it also changes how I think. Because if you are getting ready to tell somebody something, you’ve got to notice it. If I want to tell my kids about somebody who’s been helpful, I have an antenna up in my mind to spot helpers who are super easy to find when you’re looking. So, a habit of speech in this case, can become a habit of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Anything you recommend we stop doing right away?

Jamil Zaki
Oh, interesting. I would say we can stop jumping to conclusions, first of all, and trusting our instincts. This is one thing that people tell me a lot. It’s like, “I don’t know, man. I’ve just got this gut instinct that this person is not trustworthy, and I trust my gut.” And it’s like, “Well, okay, but your gut also tells you all sorts of other things that are probably wrong.”

Our gut instincts include, for instance, focusing on the negative over the positive, trusting people who look like us more than people who don’t, bias around race and gender and identity. Our gut instincts include being meaner when we’re hungry than when we’re full, being hangry. I mean, we don’t trust those instincts because they’re not right. They’re a poor match for the data. So, I would say one thing to stop doing is to credulously, naively trust our gut instincts because those gut instincts are very biased.

Another thing that I think we should stop doing is thinking of trust only in terms of the risk that we’re putting in. I think, again, a lot of leaders and managers lead like they’re trying not to lose, like they expect other people to shirk and try to take advantage of them, and their job is to police that, to stop people from doing something wrong. Well, if you treat people that way and show them how little you trust them, they’re going to actually act in ways that are less trustworthy.

There’s one story from the Boston Fire Department that I share in the book where the Boston Fire Chief, a new chief, actually, came in around the year 2000, and he realized that more sick days were being taken by firefighters on Fridays than any other day of the week. Now until then, firefighters had had unlimited sick days and been treated in a pretty trusting fashion because of their role. But this new chief said, “Nah, I don’t think so. These people are cheaters, and I’m going to make sure that they don’t do it anymore on my watch.”

So, he capped the number of sick days that firefighters could take at 15 a year. You had to get a doctor’s note if you went above that, you would get your pay docked. There’s all sorts of draconian policies where he was just trying to stop people from taking advantage of him and the city. Now, I wonder, Pete, whether you have a guess as to what the effects of that untrusting policy might have been.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I feel my own internal, I don’t know what I want to call it, the big word is pusillanimous, small-hearted, like, “Well, oh, so it’s going to be like that, then. Oh, well, I got a doctor buddy who’s going to write all kinds of notes.” So, it’s like, “It’s going to be like that? All right, then. I’m going to…” It stokes the lower part of me that I don’t aspire to be, and, hopefully, I will be able to breathe and think through and say, “Okay, hey, you know what, I’m going to be as honest as possible and be sick when I’m sick, but my immediate desire is to stick it to them.”

Jamil Zaki
It’s beautifully put, and that’s exactly the desire that firefighters felt. So, the overall number of sick days taken by the entire city’s fire department in the year after that policy was rolled out was more than twice as high as it was before. And the number of firefighters who took exactly 15 sick days increased by 1,000%, ten times.

And it’s exactly as you said, that when you treat people cynically, when you choose to not trust them, you’re trying to cover your own butt. But actually, what you’re doing is you’re bringing out the worst side of these people. You’re appealing to their smallness, their pusillanimous side, where you’re saying, “I think you’re a cheater,” and people say, “Oh, you think I’m a cheater? I’ll show you a cheater.” And it turns out that this occurs all over our lives, and so people, in an attempt to protect themselves, harm each other and relationships, and then harm themselves as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I think we’re really getting into it in terms of decisions, policies, systems, processes, the stuff that you’re doing, in terms of how you’re running your team and your organization. In some ways, I’m feeling this tension because there are those who take advantage, and yet you want to extend trust to encourage the goodness in folks, and I guess to trust them loudly. That’s a good turn of a phrase.

So, help us out, what would be the optimal way? Let’s go with the same fire chief example. So okay, I’ve got firefighters. It looks like there’s a level, there may be, we don’t know, it could be statistically just happened that way. We suspect there’s a bit of abuse, that many Friday-sick days are not so much sick, so much as early weekend starts.

So, that’s what we suspect. We’d like to curb that, getting all bean counter-y in terms of, “This is how many days you get in the policies, and don’t you dare violate them.” It’s counterproductive. So, what’s your take, knowing all you know, what might be an optimal approach to address that matter?

Jamil Zaki
So, a mindset in general, that I recommend and sort of champion in the book, is being a hopeful skeptic. That is, paying very close attention to the data, being really evidence-based, but also the hopeful piece is understanding that our defaults, our factory settings as human beings, are probably too negative. So, basically saying, “Okay, let me be as scientific as I can in my interactions, but also let me curb and understand and audit my knee-jerk negativity.”

So, the fire chief here, he saw the statistic and his knee-jerk negativity took over. He said, “I’m going to take it out on my entire staff.” Well, probably if he had looked more closely at the data, he would find that maybe, I don’t know, 5% of firefighters were overrepresented in these Friday sick days. So, instead of making a blanket assumption about his entire team, his entire department, he could have asked, “Well, what’s up with these 5% of people?” and ask them some more questions, say, “Hey, I noticed that you’ve taken four Fridays off and no Tuesdays off. Are you getting sick in an unusual way? Can you tell me more about this?”

And sometimes just a little bit of curiosity, showing that, “Hey, I’m paying attention to this,” could probably curb that behavior. And the 5% statistic, by the way, I’m just hypothesizing here, but he could have also looked at the 95% of his staff who were not taking extra sick days on Friday, and said, “Wow, we’ve got such an honorable group of people here. You’ve got unlimited sick days and yet you’re only taking a pretty reasonable amount in a pretty reasonable way. This speaks to the spirit and the values that you all have as firefighters to protect your community.”

This is the thing that, I think, we do way too often as leaders is we focus on the 5%, 10%, 2% of people in our organization who we’re scared of, or who we feel like are threatening the organization, and not on the 90% or 92% or 98% of people who are upholding our values and probably all want the same thing. So, I would say, if I was in the fire chief’s seat, I would focus on the supermajority and try to develop policies and practices for them, and also extol their positive values as opposed to hyper-focusing on the two or five percent of folks who are not playing by the rules.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that and I think that’s just a great practice, in general, in organizations to celebrate the cool stuff that’s happening that you’re noticing, that you’re doing. I’m in a team and we have in the meetings a one minute of awesome in which we folks share, “Hey, this is a cool thing that happened,” and it speaks to the values and remind us, “Oh, yeah, this is why we do this. This is cool. All right. Good deal.”

So, yeah, and to trust loudly when you’re seeing cool things, to speak to it, as opposed to I get this sense and, huh, boy, this is a whole another conversation maybe, good doctor, that as humans, it seems like when good things happen regularly, we just become habituated to them and expect them, and that’s the baseline. Even though it’s amazing, it’s a blessing, it’s so good, we’re so lucky, it’s so privileged and delightful, we just get accustomed to it, take it for granted. That’s what normal is.

And then if we suddenly don’t have that, then, “Oh, this is an injustice, and it’s bad, and my expectations are being violated, and I’m cranky about it,” as opposed to realizing, “Hey, well, you know what? I’ve had it pretty good. I’ve been pretty lucky for a really long time. I guess I could just appreciate how, in this absence, how so often I am blessed with this thing,” usually isn’t how we respond to these deprivations. Is that just how we’re wired, neuroscience doctor? Can anything be done about this?

Jamil Zaki
Yes, and yes. So, what you’re describing is called hedonic adaptation, sometimes also known as the hedonic treadmill, which is that we get used to whatever is going on in our lives. We have a set point that’s related to our personal baseline. So, my baseline and your baseline in terms of what we’re used to in life might be totally different.

If we switched places, we would feel intensely the differences between how we live, but we don’t feel those differences now. The same way that when you put on clothes in the morning, you feel them for about five seconds and then you kind of forget that they’re there and you stop feeling them. We get used to stuff and that’s good. That is a form of adaptation, but it also means, as you’re saying, we get used to all the good stuff and forget how lucky we are, forget how good we have it.

Is there anything we can do about it? Yeah, there is. There’s a great practice called savoring. I think gratitude practice is really well known. You think about all the good things that have happened to you today or in your life in general. Savoring is much more physical and palpable. It’s about enjoying the good stuff as it happens.

Kurt Vonnegut has a terrific quote that I love, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, where he says, “Sometimes you got to stop and say, ‘If this isn’t good, I don’t know what is.’” And savoring is in essence that. It’s pausing and noticing what’s happening, and especially noticing the things that you are happy about right now in the moment.

I think that one version of this that we don’t do enough is what I would call social savoring. That is stopping to notice the good in other people and the wonderful things that they do for each other, for us, for everybody, for the world all the time. And I mean constantly millions of people are doing good things every minute of every day, and we have grown adapted to that the same way that we’ve adapted to all the other good things in our lives.

But when we notice, there’s so much to be gained. My friend, Dacher Keltner, studies the emotion of awe, the idea of something that is vast and makes us feel small in a good way, like we’re part of something greater than ourselves. And when I think of awe, I think about, I don’t know, seeing the Milky Way, or the Aurora Borealis, or a grove of redwood trees, and those things all produce awe. But in a study of tens of thousands of people, Dacher asked them, “What made you feel awe today?”

And the most common response, the most common thing that made people feel awe, this beautiful experience, was what he calls “moral beauty.” That is the everyday acts of goodness, kindness, generosity, and compassion that people around us are performing all the time. So, when you start to notice that and savor the goodness of others, you have access to really, I mean, I know I’m sounding hyperbolic and maybe a little bit warm and fuzzy, but I mean it. I really do think that people do beautiful things. And to open ourselves to that beauty is a really powerful way to stop hedonic adaptation, to get off the treadmill and actually enjoy our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. I love it. Can you tell us what are some things you savor?

Jamil Zaki
Oh, well, I savor my children first and foremost. I feel wonder and awe at their new developments and hobbies and interests, and just the way they treat people all the time. I savor the work of people who fight through adversity. A special type of person to me is what I would call the wounded healer, the person who struggles mightily with something, and then turns around and helps other people.

So, this is veterans who help other veterans with PTSD, survivors of assault who become assault counselors, people who have suffered addiction who then join the recovery community and become sponsors. That’s a type of beauty to me that it never gets old. I find that those folks to be incredible. inspiring as well. How about you?

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. You know, it’s funny, when you say savor, the first thing that comes to mind, well, two things, is washing my hands, just enjoying that warm water and my favorite soap.

Jamil Zaki
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
And then, in my back porch, I’ve got these sliding wood cedar doors, which just look really cool and kind of unique. We just lucked out, the house had it. And I like to, whenever I open or close those doors, to take just a good whiff of that cedar smell and appreciate the home and the setting that I’m in. So, that’s what I savor.

Jamil Zaki
I love that. I love that. Those are beautiful everyday experiences, right? And I think that that’s the thing is, you could have gotten used to those things. Washing your hands, the smell of cedar, these are easy things to fall into the background of our minds, to relegate to the landfill of lost memories, but you’ve chosen to keep your attention open, to keep your mind open to those experiences. And I think that’s really the good fight. That’s what I think we need to do to retain a hopeful and skeptical mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jamil, tell me, anything else we should cover before we hear about your favorite things?

Jamil Zaki
No, I think this has been great. I hope that all this is useful to your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d say I’m feeling good, so I hope they are, too. How about a favorite quote?

Jamil Zaki
Okay, I got to go Vonnegut again. Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” And to me, that speaks to everything that we’ve been talking about. Our beliefs about the world are self-fulfilling prophecies. We create the version of the world that we live in, and that, in turn, shapes the type of life that we go through. So, it’s, to me, critical to mind our minds because they’re so powerful in structuring who we become.

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

Jamil Zaki
I’ll share one again that speaks to workplaces and how they shape us. Unusual workplaces for most of us, there are two fishing villages in southeastern Brazil, separated by about 40 miles, similar in economic status, religion, and so forth, but one of them sits on the ocean. And it turns out that if you’re going to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment. You need to work together. You can’t do it alone.

The other village is on a lake. So, fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and the only time they see each other is when they’re competing. Economists went to these villages about 10 years ago and had these people play a series of social games to assess how trustworthy and how generous they were. And it turns out that when you started out in your career in one of these fishing villages, you’re not different from each other. People on the ocean and people on the lake equally trusting, equally trustworthy, equally generous.

But over time, working in a co-operative setting made people more trusting and more generous. I mean, we’re talking over the course of decades, and over the course of decades working in a competitive cutthroat environment made people less trusting and less generous. So, choose your workplaces carefully because they shape you into the version of yourself you will become.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jamil Zaki
I just finished Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, which I found absolutely fascinating, an account of why so many of us do work for most of our waking hours that we don’t think creates any good in the world, so that’s one. But here’s a more hopeful one, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit is a book about disasters over the course of the last century or so. So, the earthquakes here in San Francisco in 1906 and 1989, the bombing of London in World War II, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina.

And in all of these, Solnit asks the question, “What do disasters teach us about ourselves?” And there’s a stereotype that when disaster strikes, people show their true colors, which is that we are selfish and awful and social order falls apart. By looking at the history, Solnit finds that the exact opposite is true, that when disaster strikes, people band together, they help one another, and they find solidarity. So, there’s a lot more goodness in even the hardest times than most of us realize.

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

Jamil Zaki
Yes, I use, well, a bunch of tools that I love, but one is a type of notebook, and I’m of course now blanking on the brand name, but I use it when I interview people for journalistic parts of my writing. And it’s this pen that has a recording device in it, and the paper has sort of sensors on it. So, as you write, it records what time it is that you were writing, and you can then later press down on any note that you took, and it will play back the recording from the pen of that moment that you were writing that particular note. It’s incredibly useful for interviews and for recording stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Jamil Zaki
Savoring, the one that we just talked about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget you share that folks really connect and resonate with, and quote back to you often?

Jamil Zaki
From this book, not yet because it’s not out yet, but I think that, oftentimes, I think people are simply happy and relieved and surprised to learn the statistics on helping and kindness. I think that people really are fundamentally underestimating one another. And the freedom to stop doing that is enlivening for folks.

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

Jamil Zaki
Well, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is available wherever books are sold. And my lab, the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, is at ssnl.stanford.edu.

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

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, take a leap of faith on somebody today or tomorrow, this week at the latest, and write down what you think will happen, and then write down what actually happens. And if your predictions are different from reality, try to remember that and ask yourself why the difference is there.

Pete Mockaitis
Jamil, this has been a real treat. Thank you. I wish you much hope and joy.

Jamil Zaki
Thank you so much. This has been delightful.