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Aug 29
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991: Mastering the Five Tiers of Career Development with Andrew LaCivita

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Andrew LaCivita discusses the most important career investment you can make: your skill development.

You’ll Learn

  1. The biggest assumption that’s hurting your career 
  2. How to pinpoint what skills you need to develop 
  3. Three easy ways to build your confidence 

About Andrew

Andrew LaCivita, a globally-renowned career and leadership coach, is the founder of the milewalk Academy®. During his career, he has impacted over 350 companies, more than 100,000 individuals, and spanned nearly 200 countries, helping them unlock their full potential. He is the best-selling author of four books including Interview Intervention, The Hiring Prophecies, and The Zebra Code. You can join him on Thursdays for live, complimentary career coaching at his Live Office Hours on YouTube.

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Andrew LaCivita Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, welcome.

Andrew LaCivita
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, I would love to hear, you’re a renowned career coach, you’ve seen a lot of clients, learned a lot of things in your day, could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us professionals and what we got to do to really stand out and advance?

Andrew LaCivita
One of the things that I’ve noticed as a consultant, as a recruiter, and now as a career coach, I would tell people, and most people don’t…I don’t know that we’ve ever wired to think this way. “We’re wired to go to our jobs, do a great job, learn how to do your trade do, it well, and you will have a good career if you can do your job well. But if you want to have a great career, like you really want to stand out, you want to be the best of the best, or the happiest of the happiest, it’s working more on yourself.”

And in order to work more on yourself, you have to, it’s just like building your bank account. When you get paid, the first thing that, what we hope you do if you want to save money or invest it, is to actually take money out of your check and then put it into your savings account so that it builds over time. It’s the same thing with your career, is that working on yourself, it needs to be planned first or at least a non-negotiable.

What I do every week, which I think is an odd habit that people would think is counterintuitive, is when I plan my week, I actually plan my skill-building time first. So, I pay myself first, I work on myself first, and then everything else gets planned in, but it gets planned in after that. So, I would say that’s kind of a counterintuitive habit that I have, and I just I think it’s really a key to being successful and enjoying your career. And I think that way you will always feel like you’re growing as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s very resonant. We’ve had a couple guests hit that point in terms of someone asking the question, “Well, how much time are you spending working on you?” And for some, it’s like, “Uh, I guess none. Oops.” Or folks will say, “You know, the time you spend in this strategic, skill-building stuff is the most rewarding ROI time there is if you want to be the best of the best in terms of advancement and financially, income, salary stuff,” or I love the way you said it, “or the happiest of the happy, that it takes some development just to feel great in the midst of challenges and stuff going on.”

Andrew LaCivita
So my company, milewalk, during the period between 2004 and 2019, so 15 years or so, we would run surveys every year and we probably totaled up maybe about 20,000 people over the course of the 15 years, had contributed data, and we would always ask them, “Why did you leave your current job? Why are you unhappy in your current position?” things of that nature. There were a variety of questions, but one of the top three reasons was, “I’m not learning anything.”

And I think a big part of that is people expect their organizations to teach them. And while the best organizations will teach them, you can outsource a lot of things but your own career is not one of them. So, if you truly want to develop, you have to take accountability, which means creating space in your life to do that. And I coach a lot of people on a high-performance basis.

And those individuals who want to become the best at their craft, when they enlist my help for how to go about, “What skills do I need to build? How do I build them?” we work together on this stuff, one of the first things I ask them is, “Can you show me your calendar?”

And, inevitably, a lot of them say, “Why, do you want to schedule our future sessions?” I say, “No, I want to see on your calendar where you’ve actually planned time in order to build those skills to achieve those goals that you just told me about.” And inevitably, they don’t have any. They just assume that they’re going to get it on the 9:00 to 5:00 job. And I said, “Well, everybody’s got the playbook. Everybody can learn how to build their widget or provide their service. It’s all those other skills you need to become better,” and like you said, live the more rewarding career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, we are speaking the same language. It’s pretty essential to take ownership of your career and your skills, otherwise, you’re just rolling the dice, you’re gambling. You may or may not have fantastic coaches and mentors present in your workplace who say, “Hey, Andy, tell me, what are you working on? Where do you want to go? What are your strengths? How can we make sure we can build your development plan into what you’re up to, and the assignments that you’re getting, and reflecting, and mentoring, and turning everything into wisdom-generating stuff?”

Some people have that, and it’s a dream come true and it’s precious if you do. Heads up, that’s very special and you may want to stick around. But a lot of people sure don’t. Could you maybe guesstimate, for us in terms of the state of the world of work in the United States in the 2020s, what proportion of us have a phenomenal work, learning culture system, versus what proportion of us really better get proactive in a hurry if we want to get where we’re going?

Andrew LaCivita
I’ll give you kind of what I think the stats are. Interestingly, we all go to work thinking our companies are going to have these career development plans for us, “We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to teach us. We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to care for us, let us know what we need to do so we can get promoted and get paid more and be happier and so on.” I would bet, and by the way, I don’t like at my fingertips have this stat, but I’m going to give you my feel based on, now I want to tell you where I’m drawing the data from.

I was an information technology and management consultant from 1988 to 2004, so a long time, and at that time I’d coached and consulted to 150 companies. Between 2004 and 2019 with milewalk, that’s another 200 companies, so 350 companies. I’ve seen tens of thousands of people working individually with them. Looking at the organizations that I consulted to or recruited for, looking at the individuals I coach in all the companies they work for, knowing statistically that most people in the United States work for a small- to medium-sized company, so not a lot of people work for Coca-Cola, IBM, and these largest of companies. Most people work for small- to mid-sized companies, just statistically more than half.

So, when you think about how many organizations actually have a structured, well-thought-out career development model, I would probably say 90% do not. Meaning, one in ten are probably fortunate enough to actually have some type of structured career development model in place that says, “You’re this level. These are the skillsets we expect you to have, the level of proficiency we expect you to have them. If you want to go to the next level here’s what you need to work on. We have succession planning processes, career development processes, coaching and mentoring processes.” I would 1 in 10 would be my swag, so that is not a statistic I can claim to know.

But I would say that’s the state, and I would guess it’s worldwide.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, that’s powerful. And you’re bringing me back some memories on a couple of the these. One, you said management consulting, and I worked at Bain for a while.

Andrew LaCivita
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And then when you talk about the structured situation, boy, you’re right, I haven’t seen it anywhere else in my own career and talking to many other people in terms of like, “Okay, are you an associate consultant six months into your career? Well, at this point, we now expect for you to conduct zero-defect analysis.

It’s like, “Okay, so six months in, we expect for you to stop making visible mistakes in the data,” which is pretty intimidating, frankly. The nightmare of many an associate consultant, having dreams of waking up in a spreadsheet, has happened to me before. But that’s very clear. So, we have a table there, I thought it was very impressive. It’s like, “These are all the skills as rows, and then the degree to which we expect them developed as columns over the course of time.” And then we can very clearly say, “Hey, how is your zero-defect analysis? Is that up to snuff or is it not?”

And most of us, because our jobs are so fluid, and we don’t have thousands of associate consultants who are kind of doing the same thing, but for different clients and business challenges, it’s really hard to know. It’s like, “Hey, are you great at digital marketing?” I mean, I can’t tell you, “Yeah, in nine months, I expect for you to be able to run a Facebook ads campaign with zero supervision and create a return on investment of a cash-on-cash basis for 70% of new clients.” Like, we don’t have that level of clarity and specificity. And so, you kind of got to go invent that for yourself.

Andrew LaCivita
It’s true. Interesting you talk about Bain. I started my career at Anderson Consulting. So, I was looking at career development models and grids and things like that. It was very clearly spelled out. Now, it probably was over-engineered, but at least we had the guideposts. But most people don’t have that these days.

And the other thing, you asked kind of about the state of things, but we live in a much more mobile time right now, meaning it’s rare that somebody would spend that much time in an organization and have the time to evolve. So, people, they’re more mobile, which is creating even more confusion because you’re going to different companies, different companies have different internal vocabulary and what they call things. It’s different now, which means you need to be more organized.

Pete Mockaitis
It is, yes. Well, fortunately, our pal, Andy, here, yes, you, organized some handy pieces in your book The Zebra Code. So, first, tell us why is it called The Zebra Code? That reminds me of the TV show “Ghost Rider” from the 1990s, but I don’t imagine that’s what you had in mind.

Andrew LaCivita
No, it isn’t. So, I have a weekly live show on YouTube, so I teach every Thursday, people come to the show, I teach them, and then they ask me questions.

In the question-and-asking period of the show, one of the gentlemen asked me, about standing out in a job interview, and I told this story about how, when I go out for a run out of my house, I run down the street. And on one side I got the goats, on the other side I got the horses, on another side I got the horses, and since I got all these farms around me, and I said, “Whenever I whenever I hear hoof beats, while I do not technically rule out the possibility that it can be a zebra, I’m thinking horses.” Employers are the same way.

When you’re in a job interview, you’re talking and talking and talking they’re thinking, “Oh, man, this sounds like everyone else that has ever interviewed for this job or anybody else that’s come from Bain or Accenture or whatever.” And people, the interviewers, they need to draw conclusions very quickly, they need to stereotype. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, meaning they have to draw on their own experiences with the limited amount of time that they have in order to figure out and extrapolate whether you’re going to do a good job in their company. It’s a function of the interviewing system, not the individual, him or herself.

So, when I said, “You need to be able to stand out.” Now that was five years ago. I told this little story and I never really thought about it. But when I was thinking about this career development book that I wanted to write, I said, “There’s a big problem in the world that, in this post-academic era, we don’t have that career syllabus.” You and I went to college. The professor hands you the career syllabus, you knew a few things. You knew what you were going to be studying on what given day, what the homework assignments were, when you were going to take the tests, what the tests were going to entail. You had some faith that the individual who was teaching you, at least was well credentialed, should have known his or her stuff. You had some faith in this.

But in our professional world now, the minute you throw your hat and tassel in the air, you don’t have that. That’s gone. And then the journey you take is it’s very difficult, as we go back to that kind of those jokes we were talking about the career development models, people don’t have that. And so, I wanted to solve that problem by saying, “Okay, if I had to rewind my clock 36 years, and I was walking out of school, how does somebody go through their evolution? And what skills would I learn? And what would I learn first so that the higher-level skills that I wanted to learn, I would learn them faster and more easily?”

And so, I put this structure together, this methodology that’s based on expertise in tiers as we go through our professional lives. So, there’s five tiers in the way that I see somebody evolving. They’re a producer, so, basically, you’re managing your own self. Then you become a communicator, which is from an interactional standpoint, “I need to develop communication skills that allow me to support others, be a team player, and so on.” But then as you evolve, you become more of an influencer where you’re using those communication skills to actually draw positive outcomes from people, motivate them, influence them, get results through them or on their behalf.

And then the developers, the fourth tier, which is really the individuals who can actually coach, manage people, but in units, but also build the systems upon which everybody operates. And then, ultimately, the fifth tier, you’re a visionary, where you are creating the new ideas, generating of the new products, the new solutions. And so, as I teach my leadership groups, I teach them these career skills, I don’t call them soft skills. I call them career skills because I actually think these are essential and harder to build than our trade skills, whatever your profession is, that is.

And so, as I looked at what I was teaching and how I was working with them and the issues they were facing, it became clear to me that there were 46 or so vital skills, that if you were able to build them, you would evolve through these tiers as I’ve laid out. So, The Zebra Code book is really this leadership coaching program in a book where I teach you how to put your skill-building plan together and operate it so that you’re not overwhelmed. You know what you should be working on based on your profession, your goals and aspirations, as well as incorporating in your regular old work assignments, “Are there things that you do on a day in and day out, or week in and week out basis where you want to get better?” And so that’s the problem the book addresses, that it’s like a maze.

Professional development is a maze, and people waste a lot of time because they don’t know what skills to work on, or they’re working on the wrong skills, or they’re working on skills but they’re not working on them the right way, or they’re not working on them in the most efficient manner. So, I tried to address all those skills in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, I think that five tiers is very excellently done, as you think about, if you really zoom out, like, “Okay, no, really, where am I in the course of this career?” It’s, like, “Okay, fresh out of school, a first job, all right we’re squarely in the producer zone.” And then I can see, “Okay, yeah,” and then I’m doing the communicator, then the influencer, then the developer, then the visionary.

And if I may, sometimes these lines can get a little blurry in terms of we have someone without direct reports but has been around for a while and is quite highly paid, and senior executives are truly counting on some visionary levels of insight and expertise that they’re bringing to the table. So, not to jack up your model, Andy, but how do you think about those kinds of situations?

Andrew LaCivita
Well, one of the things I didn’t mention, and it’s something good for anybody who is interested to know. Inside the book, there’s also a leadership and skill-building assessment. So, the example you gave was great, because you say, “Hey, I could be a junior person generating great ideas, or I could be a very senior person who has lots of ideas, but I’m not really great at developing people.”

So, when you look at all the skill sets that really, I feel, go into each of these layers, I have an assessment for you to take, literally, a quantitative assessment that’s based on subjective questions that I’ve highlighted for you to see where you have opportunities to improve.

And so, what the model does is, it’s agnostic regarding who you are, your age, your profession. This is what I would say, in general, is the methodology shows you how to pick and choose skills at different levels that you need more help with and figuring out when the right time is to work on those. So, as an example, some of the some of the skillsets, to give you an idea, in the producer level are about self-awareness. We’re talking about your ability to focus. We’re talking about habit-building. We’re talking about planning and running your day, or confidence.

I know a lot of 40- and 50-year-olds that aren’t confident. I know a lot of 60-year-olds that don’t know how to run their day. I know a lot of executives who are creative thinkers who are ineffective at running their day. So, even the most senior people could benefit from building the producer-level skill sets. So, it isn’t a cookie cutter, “Hey, everybody at this level or at this stage start here and only work these.”

It’s taking you from that blank sheet of paper, to giving you some organization, to letting you pick and choose based on your current state. So, what you might find is if you’re a, let’s say you’re in your early 40s, give or take, you got a team of six people you’re trying to manage. Well, I can teach you things about how to better run your day. That’s producer-level stuff. And I could teach you also all of the components that go into motivating, coaching, developing, understanding somebody’s feedback language. How do you determine how to get the best results out of somebody?

So, the skills, it’s really there’s a compounding effect, and the earlier you start the more effective you’ll be at building habits, running your day, and so on because learning how to motivate somebody is a more complicated skill to build. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. It sure does. So, this assessment, can you take it online for free somewhere?

Andrew LaCivita

I have a 47-page booklet that introduces all The Zebra Code methodology, these tiers we’ve been talking about, this assessment you can take, and also all the instruction to build your career plan, that’s free. So, if you just head to the milewalk Academy website, you can check out the leadership card. It’ll take you to a page where there’s a button there and you can download it for free. So, thank you for asking me that.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, yeah, so we’ll definitely link that. But let’s just go ahead and say, you mentioned focus and confidence, and those are things that a lot of my listeners a lot of times have said, “Yeah, we’d love that.” So, let’s just say we did that, we looked through all the skills, we said, “Boy, you know what, focus and confidence are the things. Now what?”

Andrew LaCivita

Okay. So, I don’t have any children but I don’t know if you have kids, but I know a lot of people have kids. But have you ever told your kid, “Hey, listen to me. Concentrate, focus on this, give me your attention.”?

Pete Mockaitis

“Get your shoes.”

Andrew LaCivita

“Get your shoes,” whatever. That’s not focus. The kid’s never been taught how to focus. They’ve been told how to focus. And we, as adults, have never been taught “How do we get complete command of our mind at any moment in time so that I can, at this moment in time, have the capacity and the ability to concentrate on only one thing?”

So, you ask me a question, right now I need to use muscles to be able to focus on that one thing. So that’s what I mean when I say focus. And what I tell people is, “You cannot possibly have the muscles to do that if you are not continually building those muscles. And in order to build those muscles, you need to be practicing building those muscles throughout the day, all day, every day.”

And what a lot of people do is they, I don’t want to say they practice distraction, but they are so distracted. The phone beeps. What do you do? You look at it. You are now distracted, which means you’re not concentrating on whatever it was that you were doing. Maybe you were having dinner with a friend. Maybe you were working on writing an email to your boss. The phone beeps. Boom. You don’t have the muscle to not look at it.

So, what I do is I concentrate on creating a kind of a lifestyle system that enables me at any moment in time to focus. So, what I do is, there’s basically six or seven things that I go through. Every night, the night before, the next day, I plan my next day, and you might say, “Well, how’s planning your next day helping you with focus?”

Well, number one, I’m getting ready for the day. I know what the day entails. I know that on this day, you and I are recording this on a Tuesday at 10:45 in the morning Central, we started. I knew yesterday that we were going to be meeting. I had everything set up. I knew where I needed to go, what information I needed for you, and so on.

So, I unloaded all of that, which freed up my mind for the evening, for my sleep. I woke up the next day, the next thing I did when I got out of bed and I went through my morning routine is I literally practiced focusing for 10 minutes on one thing, which is moving energy through my body. It’s just a way for me to practice concentration in an ideal environment where I know I will not have any interruptions. So, think of this focusing exercise as, “I’m going to do a warm-up for the day in the most ideal conditions.”

Because now we’re going to go into a day that has a lot of things associated with it, I did seven or eight things before our 10:45 appointment this morning. Well, I thought about everything that I was going to do for the day. I call it considering my day.

So, after I do my focus practice, before I get into my work day, I actually look at my whole day and I think about “What would an ideal day look like? What are the other outputs I’m going to have? What might I do if something goes wrong? What happens if I get interrupted?” And I’m thinking through all this. And what this is doing is it’s enabling me to let go of things that I need to, making sure that I can foresee what I wanted to happen, and then in the event any surprises happen or anything like that, I’m more equipped at any moment in time to be able to concentrate on it. And then I actually practice building my willpower muscles throughout the day.

And this is a great tip I got from Dandapani. So, I don’t want to take credit for this when it comes to willpower. But part of building your focus muscle is building your willpower. Your willpower is your ability to exert control to complete something. So, one of the things that I do as I go through, whether it’s a work deliverable or any household chores, or anything that I do, he’s got this three-step process. He says, “Finish what you start. Do it a little better than you thought you would. And then do a little more.”

And what that does is, if you go start to finish without taking your mind off it, you’re practicing staying in order. And what this is doing is it’s building willpower, and willpower is really your mind being able to concentrate at any moment of time, so that helps. And then as I work throughout my day, when I go from one thing to the next, again, everything I’m doing is aimed at creating free space in my mind so it’s not cluttered, so I can concentrate. 

So whenever I transition, so right before I started with you, I packed up what I was doing at 10:30, I made some notes, I let the dogs out, I thought about you, I thought about what a fun podcast will look like, and I was going through wrapping up what I was doing, thinking forward to what I’m about to do so that I don’t have anything hanging over my head from the prior hour.

Even if I spent an hour writing a great chapter in a book, and even though it was fun for me, I still accumulated stress in my forearms, in my fingers, even just thinking, maybe in my neck. So, I want to let go of that. And so, imagine not letting go of any of that throughout the day. People go from Zoom meeting to a phone call, to doing something, and they just keep accumulating that stress, which again makes it harder for them to concentrate on anything at any moment in time.

And so, these things along with kind of the last point is really the reflection and being able to think back about what happened, wrapping up your day, I do this as part of my nightly practice, but all of these things that I do are aimed at keeping a free mind so that at any moment in time I can focus and I can concentrate. And it takes all of these things and other things but it’s just like a diet.

I always say, “Look, if you eat a healthy breakfast and you think eating pizza and burgers for the rest of the day for lunch and dinner where you’re going to lose weight, it isn’t going to happen.” Well, it’s the same kind of thing. If you meditate for 10 minutes in the morning and then run harried all day, you’re still not going to be able to focus. There’s a lot of things I think it takes to be able to concentrate. So that’s focusing.

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s helpful in terms of, so those are some things associated with focus. So, maybe I’m just going to zoom out a smidge in terms of the first step is we’ve identified, “This is a necessary skill that I need to build.” And then we’ve also determined, “It ain’t just going to happen. I have to actually schedule some time in my calendar to work on me in order to make it happen.”

And then there are a number of practices, protocols, interventions, the stuff you do to build those skills. And you’ve selected a few, I guess based upon your research and your experience and what has worked for your clients, and then you go do them. And so, it seems like there’s just naturally a bit of commitment, discipline, consistency, habit-building that’s associated with making it happen.

Andrew LaCivita

That’s right. Wait, you nailed it. So, number one, that was a fantastic recap because the things that you’re saying about, look, what I just said, while it might sound long-winded, think about everything that you need to do to condition yourself and how, what you said, consistent you need to be in that you need to make the time to do it.

Now, people think, “Well, I don’t have 10 minutes in the morning.” If you don’t have 10 minutes in the morning to work on you, I think you need to rethink your life. You got to figure out if this is important to you, and it isn’t just about work. I mean, don’t you want to have better conversations with your spouses, your partners, your friends, your children? I mean, there are various reasons people don’t achieve their goals, but one of the biggest reasons that I would say most people don’t achieve them is they’re not willing to sacrifice what they need to sacrifice to create the free space in their life to work on whatever it is they want to work on.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so applying these same kinds of fundamental principles, let’s say, now we’re zeroing in on competence, and that’s the skill we want to develop, how might we go about doing that?

Andrew LaCivita

I love that one because I think this is one of the most misunderstood skills ever because people think, “Okay, I need to see myself do it, and then once I’m successful I’ll have confidence,” but confidence, your ability to be confident has a lot more to do with your relationship with failure than it is success. What I say to people is, “Generally, recognize there are multiple reasons why you’re not confident.” It’s you have an activity that you’re reluctant to do, so there’s a task or something that, “I don’t know how to do, so I’m not confident that I can do it.” There’s a big project and you don’t know all the steps that you need to take, therefore, you’re not confident because you don’t know how.

Or the third thing, which is really a misnomer, where people are not confident because it’s something like, “Hey, I don’t want to speak. I feel like I have stage fright, and I’m not confident getting in front of a bunch of people,” when it really has more to do with the fact that you are worried about how you look rather than the performance that you’re actually going to help them with or how to serve them. And so, there are a variety of things that you need to think about.

When I help people with building confidence, the first thing that I say to them is, “Recognize that, as you do these things, you’re always trying to increase your level of performance. And in order to do that, you’re going to fail initially. Build failure into the process so that you become more comfortable with taking attempts at things.”

So, if it’s an activity that you’re reluctant to do, let’s say I’m reluctant to send a cold email to ask somebody for a job, or I’m reluctant to do that cold sales call, or whatever it might be, in these cases, I want you to add repetitions. If you’ve got to make 10 calls, make 20. The more you do, the more comfortable you’ll become, and even if you’re not getting the results you want, what are you getting? Have better metrics for evaluating your performance. Did you make the call? Boom, that’s good. That’s in your control. Did you practice your sales script? Great, that was in your control. Did you learn how the customer might object. Okay, now you’re going to be better armed the next time.

And so, what you’re doing is you’re constantly repping something because the conditioning itself will make it less scary.

And I say when you’ve got these big projects that you want to take on where you’re a little reluctant, it’s like my wife is in marathon training right now. She’s going to run her first marathon. You don’t think about running 26.2 miles. You think about “What does your plan say today?” It says, “Go run six miles.” You could do that. Go do it. So, you’re always thinking a few moves ahead, but not trying to eat the entire elephant in one bite.

And then when it comes to kind of that third aspect where people find themselves usually losing confidence, like the stage fright example I gave, is oftentimes it’s your success in life is going to have a lot more to do with is where you place your attention than your ability. And never is that more true than if you get stage fright or something of that nature. The reason that you don’t have confidence to go give a speech in public or talk at the round table or give the status update or whatever it is, is because you’re thinking about how you’re looking instead of the service you’re providing to whomever it is you’re providing.

If you’re giving a status report to your management team, you’re helping them understand what it is they need to know in order to decide something that they need to decide for the direction of the company. If you’re giving a speech, and that you obviously have something to offer, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing up there on the stage giving it, think about how you’re helping the people. And what this does is it has a way of diffusing that, I don’t want to call it imposter syndrome, maybe it’s imposter syndrome, maybe it’s your reluctance or hesitation or whatever it might be.

So, there are a number of things and tactics that you can do, but confidence, like I said, has a lot more to do with getting comfortable with failure than it does with successes, because that’s easier to be confident when things are going well.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, Andy, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things I would tell people that is near and dear to my heart, because this is something I had to live through, and it’s something really hard for people to wrestle with, but I always say, “Don’t let what you can do prevent you from doing what you were meant to do.”

And the reason that I want to share that, I guess if you gave me an open invitation to share something, would be because a lot of us, and I’m sure you went through this too. You talked about working for Bain. At some point, you’re making a nice paycheck, you got to save for the kid’s college tuition, you got to pay for the cars, the houses, the whatever, and people, they know they can do it, they know they can be the engineer, they know they can be the accountant, but they really have an aspiration of doing something else.

I knew I could be an IT consultant, but I had aspirations of helping people. How do I do that? I felt like that was what I was meant to do, is really helping people in their careers. And one of the things that that takes is you need to, number one, you need to want it more than you’re afraid of it, and you need to have faith that there is a way to make a living doing what you want to do.

And there are a lot of people out there, and I’m speaking to anybody who’s listening who wants to make that change, there are people that are out there that need you to do what you’re aching to do. Don’t disappoint them by feeling like, “There’s no way to make a living” or, “It’s too late for me.”

I changed careers at 50, at 38 and 50. You can do it. So, I’d say The Zebra Code is all about that because it’s about building the skills that are enabling you to go after what you want. So, I would end with that, at least before you go on to your next sentence.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I was going to ask about a favorite quote, but we already got it. So now, give us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research.

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things that I do, and I don’t say it’s like a piece of research as much as it is ongoing research. We get fed through the media things like unemployment numbers, let’s talk jobs here, or industries that are doing well, or industries that are hiring, or those that are tanking, or thriving, or whatever, or what consumers are buying.

I am always interested in looking at the details behind what’s being shared, and what I do every month is look for signals as to what’s happening. And then I spend time trying to draw conclusions from the data.

So, as an example, all last year, and even this year, there are markets that are thriving. Well, the three top that were hiring are healthcare, construction, and the government. So, if the government is hiring a lot of people, from a jobs’ perspective that’s good, but from a gross domestic product perspective, that doesn’t contribute anything to retail sales or any contribution for economic growth. So that has to be evaluated when you start looking at, “Well, is hiring good? Is hiring bad? Which way is the employment market going?”

So, I would say in general, anytime you’re looking at data, just make sure you’re interpreting it and then draw conclusions based on what you think will happen, based on what’s under the covers rather than the headline that we tend to glance at.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. How about a favorite book?

Andrew LaCivita

I’m a huge fan of Wayne Dyer. So, rather than just say all his books, one of my absolute favorite books is You’ll See It When You Believe It.

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

Andrew LaCivita

I’ll plug the names here for these companies because I love their platform so much.

We use Kajabi for our online training program. So, I’m able to distribute all of our programs, our video-based online programs, I use Kajabi to do that. We have a community that we run. So, we don’t run the milewalk Academy community on public sites like Facebook. We run it on a private platform called Circle. That’s fantastic. So, think your own private Facebook. So, not Facebook, but Circle does that.

But my newest shiny toy is Andy AI, which is literally an Andy clone of all of my teaching, all of my videos. This podcast will probably get loaded in there, and everything that I’ve taught, all the books that I’ve written, all my YouTube videos, all the podcasts, everything that I’ve created, there’s something like, at the time we’re talking 12 million words of my teaching in the tool that trained it to answer you, like, so it’s AndyGPT, so to speak. So, like ChatGPT, but it’s all my teaching, and that is a product that’s on the Delphi platform, and it’s rather new. It’s very new.

And so, my job-seeking clients and my leadership development clients can access, well, most of them anyway, can access Andy AI and ask it questions and get my instruction. It’s the coolest thing, and obviously you can see how that scales my time. And so, there’s thousands of people around the world that can ask me questions whenever they want and get answers immediately. Pete, that’s got to be that’s the new shiny new tool.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Andrew LaCivita

Yeah, those are great.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Andrew LaCivita

So, I’d say go to the milewalk Academy, just like it sounds, milewalkacademy.com. And from there you can find my blog, you can find my YouTube channel, my tips for working, my podcast, there’s a lot of free downloads, you can get that leadership assessment, there’s premium programs if you’re interested. I’m everywhere on the social channels as well. If you just Google Andrew LaCivita, it’ll pop up. But the milewalk Academy is the home base.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Andrew LaCivita

Figure out what skills are going to pay the most dividends in the short and long term, and then put a plan together that’s going to help you develop those skills. And the other thing that you’re absolutely going to need to do is create space in your calendar to do that. And as a bonus, if you can pay yourself first in time with skill development, you won’t just have a good career, you’ll have an epic career.

Pete Mockaitis

Andy, this has been beautiful. Thank you. I wish you many Zebra moments.

Andrew LaCivita

Pete, I appreciate it, man. Thanks to you. Thank Marco, too, for doing all this for us and bringing us together. It’s been a thrill. I’ve enjoyed your podcast as a listener. It’s been, you know, it just tickles me pink, that you invited me to be a guest.

Aug 26
0

990: How to Advocate for Yourself and Get Noticed at Work with Jessica Chen

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Jessica Chen discusses how to get noticed even if you’re not the loudest voice in the room.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top misconception about career advancement 
  2. How to ensure your message always lands 
  3. The five elements that make your voice resonate 

About Jessica

Jessica Chen is an Emmy-Award winner, top virtual keynote speaker, and CEO of Soulcast Media, a global business communication training agency. Her client list includes Google, LinkedIn, the CDC, Medtronic, Mattel, HP, DraftKings, and many more. Prior to starting Soulcast Media, Jessica was a broadcast television journalist. She is also an internationally recognized top LinkedIn Learning Instructor where her communication courses have been watched by over 2 million learners and featured in Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. She lives in Los Angeles.

Resources Mentioned

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Jessica Chen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jessica, welcome.

Jessica Chen
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom. And I would love to kick us off by hearing something super surprising and counterintuitive you’ve learned over your years of studying how we can get noticed at work for the right reasons.

Jessica Chen
Well, I have to reference back to when I first started working. My thinking was, “As long as you work hard and you’re smart, you’ll get recognized, right? Your opportunities will open up. You’ll get that promotion. People will know about you.” But, funny enough, that’s not how the world works. And it was counterintuitive to many of the things I was taught growing up in a very traditional and conservative household, where it really was just about studying and putting your head down.

And so, when I began my career, which, at the time, was as a broadcast journalist, I really figured out quickly that I had to learn some new skills because it wasn’t just about being smart or being hardworking. It’s being able to communicate, put yourself out there, and advocate for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious, we’ve got to talk about the Emmy in particular. Congratulations. Not very many Emmy Award winners on the show. So, tell us, that’s sort of a very concrete, discrete achievement, accomplishment, which seems to suggest, “Hey, you’ve been noticed for your work. It is outstanding as recognized by the powers that be.” Was that also something that you had to advocate for? Are we to understand that awards are not granted just for being outstanding? What’s behind the scenes here?

Jessica Chen
So, the Emmy Award, as many of you know, is considered the most prestigious award in television and it was something that didn’t happen absolutely overnight. It took me about 10 years to actually win that award, and this was when I was at the ABC station in San Diego, California. And it’s funny because, and I think, you know, if we’re talking about awards and things like that, I never feel like it’s something that you are aspiring or trying to get. You just do good work and hopefully people will begin to notice it. But there is an element to you have to be able to talk about the work so people know about it.

So, I remember for this Emmy award, this was actually a culmination of, it really was a team effort, and I have to say that, where the story that got us that award was, so this was, gosh, this was when San Diego was experiencing a lot of wildfires. I’m here in California, and many people know California is quite dry. And so, in San Diego, during that particular year that we won that award, there were a lot of wildfires happening.

And so, for us, in journalism, and for me particularly as a journalist, as a reporter, when you have, like, for example, a fire breaking out, your job isn’t to run away. Your job is to run towards the fire, which is also counterintuitive to everything. And so, I just remember our entire team did such a great job in covering the fire, safety, what was going on, where do residents have to go, where did they have to evacuate.

And just the seamlessness in the execution of how everybody operated, how everybody communicated, it actually ended up being one of the, well, the reason why I won was because it was actually a really well-produced news story and newscast. And so, again, it wasn’t just about working hard, which, of course, you got to do, but after we finished that, it was about, “How can we make sure that we get the visibility for this amazing coverage that we had?”

And, of course, we submitted it to get nominated, and it got picked as the award winner and whatnot. But I think that Emmy Award is a good symbolization of, “Yes, execution is important, but being able to put yourself out there and talk about it is also very key.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really dig that story because I think it’s possible that you’re doing a ton of stories, you’re cranking them out day after day, and it is sort of special for y’all to step back and realize, “Oh, wait. This one was really particularly excellent. Let’s make sure that we put our best foot forward,” and pick your moment and rock and roll there.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think one of the, you know, a lot of things that I talk about, one of them is being able to celebrate your wins, and at the same time it’s not about always talking about the work that you do but it’s being judicious about, “Okay, I know this one I did particularly well in. How can I make sure to maximize the opportunity and ensure other people know it?” Because, yes, you don’t need to do it for every single project, every single thing that you do, but for the ones that really stand out to you, it’s thinking about how you can take that and leverage it for perhaps more opportunities, more recognition.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, your book is called Smart, Not Loud. Can you hammer home the main idea or distinction we should be thinking about here with that?

Jessica Chen
So, the thesis of this book, and I really wrote this book for those who were raised in what I call a quiet culture. So, people who are raised in a quiet culture were taught principles like valuing humility, modesty, not seeking the spotlight, avoiding conflict, for example. And I teased this earlier where, growing up in a very traditional and conservative family, my parents taught me to embody these quiet culture traits.

But when you go out into the working world, especially in many Western and corporate workplaces, you start to see that it’s the people who are able to speak, be the first one to speak, put themselves out there, talk about their wins. These are the things that people notice, which is what I call loud-culture traits. So, the question is, “For somebody who was raised to embody and value these traits, how can you still get noticed at work without necessarily changing who you are as a person?”

Because my whole thing is, if you naturally tend to be on the quieter side, or if being assertive, dominant, loud, and extroverted, if that’s not your style, I don’t think that’s necessarily what you should do because that feels quite inauthentic. But how can you still show up in a way for you to get noticed and still unlock those bigger opportunities?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds handy. Maybe before we get into the particulars of how that’s done, could you share with us a cool success story of someone who made a transformation doing this kind of stuff?

Jessica Chen
I’ll share my own story, because this is a personal journey for me too, and like I mentioned, that was how I was raised, and I experienced a lot of friction. I call it communications friction in the workplace. And, in many ways, when I started working, it was this culture shock.

So, I was trying to find this balance that I was talking about earlier of like, “Well, if it seems like the people who are loud get recognized, but that’s not necessarily my style, how can I do that?” And at the end of the day, a lot of it actually came down to one thing. It was communications.

It was learning how to be an effective communicator. And we know communications is a very broad topic, and there’s actually a lot to learn.

It’s about, for example, public speaking, getting comfortable standing up and presenting an idea. I think, for many of us, this is not something that we are naturally born with. It certainly wasn’t something that I naturally was comfortable with, or even finding that moment to communicate your idea in a meeting. I used to remember sitting in a meeting and being like, “Oh, gosh, I have an idea. I want to say it.” But instead, I’m in my own head creating this narrative of like, “Is it a good idea? Is it not a good idea?” And then before you know it, the conversation has moved on, right?

And so, it’s funny because I always joke, even though communications was something I struggled with, because I started out as a broadcast television journalist, there was no better industry for me to learn how to become an effective communicator. And so, this is to say, when you asked about the journey, like a person who had that transformation, I think, in many ways, it was for me being introspective, identifying these points of friction, and then really doubling down on leveling up my communication skills, because once I did that, I felt like opportunities, visibility, all that completely changed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to talk about some of the particulars of communicating well and sort of getting past these friction points. But could you first share with us what is it that we want to communicate? How might we go about identifying key things worth highlighting before we figure out the how, specifically, to execute that communication?

Jessica Chen
The number one most important thing anybody has to think about if they’re thinking, “How do I make sure my message comes across the way I want it to come across?” is to always ask yourself this question, “Who am I speaking with and what do they care about?” I think, for many of us, it’s not instinctive for us to think about that first question because many times we’re thinking about, “I have this idea. I’m excited about this idea. I’ve been working on this project and I know I want to talk about it in this meeting.” And a lot of it is coming from your own perspective.

And I always say you can be presenting or talking about one topic to this group. You’re at a next meeting, same topic, but different group of people. Even though your topic is the same, how you communicate and how you tailor that needs to be different because maybe the people in group A, the things that they care about might be a little bit different than the people in group B.

And here’s an example. Let’s say in group A, you’re talking to your immediate team, and your immediate team are people who just need to know what’s going on, the execution, the nitty-gritty details. But let’s say in Group B, you’re talking to senior-level executives. They probably don’t want all the nitty-gritty details. They just want to know the high-level key points and perhaps your recommendation.

Because if you boggle them down with all the details, they might go, “Okay, so what’s the point you’re trying to say, Jessica?” And I think, as an effective communicator, we’ve got to be really in tuned with our audience, what they care about, and tailoring our message to them. That can be our guiding light and our North Star.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about any number of times I’ve received an intriguing enough cold email that got me to hop on a call for a demo of something. And I’ve been amazed at how fairly often folks will walk me through a slide deck, this is just like a one-on-one kind of sales conversation, but walk me through a slide deck.

And I’m thinking, “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about your founder, or the history of the company, or your story, where the idea came from, like the inspiration.” It’s like, “I just want to know, can you really do the thing that you’re saying you can do? Is that going to make big results happen for me? And could you show me a cool case study or how this unfolded in practice with some charts or graphs or numbers?”

But help us out with that. So, we tend to get stuck in a world where we just think, “Okay, this is my presentation, so I’m supposed to give it,” or “I’m fired up about this, so I’m going to go for it.” What’s sort of the habit or practice or ritual we should use to stop and check in and get that audience info we need first?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because the story that you just mentioned, that experience you have, a lot of it is because this person is presenting you a canned presentation that they’ve created. It’s like, “Okay, getting on a call with Pete. Let me just pull up the presentation that I always give.” And here’s the thing, and let’s be real, nobody has time to recreate a presentation every single time they’re meeting somebody new.

But I do think the first few minutes of, and let’s just use the example of presentations, the first few minutes of you giving a presentation, that is the most critical time because, like you said, Pete, you’re ready to listen, you’re like, “Okay, you got me on this call. I am intrigued enough to talk to you, so I’m paying attention.”

And so, for folks who are thinking about, for example, leveling up their presentation skills, yes, we’re not talking about changing your entire presentation because nobody has time for that. But thinking about how you can tailor just even the first few minutes, “Okay, I’m getting on this call with Pete. What do I know about him? What is it that I feel, like, he cares about? And I can make sure that I start off with that because I want to capture his attention and get him really interested.”

And like you said, for you, you’re like, “I don’t really care to know about, like, the founders or, like, whatever, that kind of stuff,” but maybe to somebody else that is important to them. So, for the person who is engaging with you, for them to think about “How can I be strategic?” it’s being able to identify, “Okay, what are the things you care about? And how can I start it off to capture your attention?”

Pete Mockaitis
And it seems like it would be totally fair in a small environment where you can, like if it’s one or two or three people you’re speaking to, as opposed to hundreds, to just ask, “Hey, so where do you want to start first? What do you find most interesting? What made you intrigued to have this conversation?” And I suppose you can simply ask.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think a good way is to ask open-ended questions at the beginning, and this is kind of where like the art of small talk happens. Before you even dive into the presentation itself, before you even pull it up and start sharing your screen with somebody, it’s just kind of getting a temperature check of, like, this person. Maybe asking a few questions, and then that can give you some pretty key insight of like, “Oh, I know this,” or “Pete said this, so maybe I can kind of, like…”

And this can even be not just content. It can just be even tone and the vibe of how you present it. If you notice somebody is, like, pretty formal and pretty, let’s say, they just want to get straight to it, then you’re like, “Okay, I got to get straight into it.” Or, if you’re like, “Oh, in this small talk, I found that this person likes to chit-chat. They’re a little bit more casual,” then maybe in your presentation style, you now tailor it to that. It’s always basically meeting people where they’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you could intuit based on your observations of how things seem to be. That’s super. Are there any explicit questions you recommend just straight-up putting out there?

Jessica Chen
Well, I mean, I’m trying to think about very specific, but I mean, even just when we think about small talk, it’s just thinking about, like, “What have you been working on?” or, like, “Kind of what’s exciting?” And I think that can give you insight of who the person is, what they’re interested in, and then using that information, whether it’s in the beginning of your meeting or later on in the meeting, but using that bit of insight to make it feel like, “Oh, I heard what this person said.”

And so, in the middle of the conversation, you can even bring it back up. You can say, “Oh, yeah, and, Pete, when you mentioned that earlier, when we first jumped on that call, this point that I’m about to make actually relates to that.” So, it’s really making sure that you’re asking questions that provide insight into this person, but then also maybe even leveraging it during your conversation to show the other person that, hey, you’re listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am listening, Jessica, and it sounds, like, you’re kind of touching on some of the stuff associated with your 4A Sequence for speaking up at meetings. Can you lay this on us?

Jessica Chen
I have found that for some of us, being the first one to speak up in a meeting is not the most natural thing. Some of us tend to want to get a temperature check of the meeting first, or not the first one to speak, or they tend to just want to think about their ideas before they say something, versus some people are very much about they’re processing their ideas in real time as they’re communicating.

However, there is this 4A Sequence, and this is a communication strategy specifically for people who tend to have a hard time finding that moment to speak because, what we don’t want is for somebody to have a brilliant idea and they’re just keeping it in their mind, and they’re trying to figure out when’s the right time to speak, and before they know it, the conversation has moved on.

So, the 4A Sequence is a way of basically seamlessly inserting yourself into the conversation, and I’ll walk you through the 4A. It’s four As basically. The first A is active listening. The opposite of active listening is passive listening which is think about when you’re sitting on your couch watching Netflix. You’re passively listening and watching what’s but you have no intention to chime in. And I think this is a very important mindset shift, because when you go into a meeting with the intention of saying at least one or two things, it completely changes how you even sit in a meeting, whether you’re leaning in, and how you’re paying attention. So, going in with A, active listening.

Once you found that opportune time to chime in, whether it’s because of a pause or because somebody said something that is relevant to what you want to say, the next is you want to acknowledge. Acknowledging is you simply saying, “Hey, Pete, that was actually a really interesting point you just made,” or “What you just said made me think of…” You’re acknowledging the person by saying, “I hear you.” And you can even say those words, “I hear what you’re saying.”

But what is great about this is you’re allowing the person who just spoke to not feel like you’re cutting them off necessarily. Because when people feel like they’re getting cut off, or this is even more important to do if you have an opposing idea, is you want them to feel acknowledged so that they can go, “Okay, at least I was heard.” You acknowledge. And, by the way, acknowledging is not agreeing, it’s just letting the person know that you heard them.

Then the third A is anchor. Anchoring is repeating one or two words the person said right before you as a way to connect your point to their point, “Hey, Pete, that was a really interesting point you just made. And when you said the word data, it made me think of A, B, and C.” You said data, I repeated your word, data, and that creates a connection.

And then, finally, the fourth is answer. Now you make your answer, your pointed statement, or whatever it is you want to say. And I have found that when you can, like, present this acronym of the 4A Sequence, it’s especially helpful for people who tend to figure out, like chiming in and how to do it. So, it’s active listening, it’s acknowledging, anchoring, and answering.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like those little examples there. Could you give us a full demonstration in terms of we’re chatting, and, well, I guess I need to say something first that you can actively listen to. So, we’ll say, we’re chatting, “I’m really excited about the opportunity to put forward this content. I think it’ll be like testimonials on steroids when we interview our clients in this context.”

Jessica Chen
“So, you mentioned the word content and I know, Pete, you’ve been producing a lot of different content on this, and so it made me think of the next few episodes you’re going to be creating.” So, this is just kind of me using and repeating the word that you said. I was anchoring it to the word you said, which was content. I mean, I don’t really have a follow-up question to what you have to say, but if I did, I’d be like, “Okay, Pete, okay, content, oh, I did have a question about content.” So, this is how I would essentially seamlessly insert myself back into the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I think I’ve found is that when you’re anchoring and repeating a word or phrase someone said, if that word or phrase is somewhat unique, distinctive, original, fresh in some way, the person who said those words that you anchor to feels a little dose of, like, a pat on the back, or a high five, or a good job for saying that clever thing. So, I just get the impression that it increases your likability or maybe that’s just me and I’m super susceptible to this kind of flattery.

Jessica Chen
No, you’re totally right, and I think some of it can be very subtle. It could be also very unconscious. Like, if I had repeated something that you said, it kind of makes you feel, “Oh, wow, Jessica actually heard me.” And it’s not like I’m explicitly saying it, like, “Oh, amazing idea,” but it’s just like, yeah, it’s just kind of like a little like, “Hey, wink, wink, like I heard you.”

And when we think about being an effective communicator, I think we have to think about making sure we are capturing people when they’re most receptive to listen. And when they’re most receptive to listen, it’s generally when they are feeling validated, feeling acknowledged, feeling like they’re being heard. So, I think, yes, these subtle communication tactics, which we’re talking about right now, is the anchoring, repeating one or two words that person said, it can actually achieve that for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Chris Voss on the show, the FBI negotiation dude, and he talked about that very concept of repeating the last few words they said is almost magical, even if you’re doing it sort of as though you’re thinking it in, like, a soft thinking processing kind of a voice. It’s like, “Okay, you’re really considering what I’m putting forward, and I appreciate that. Thank you.”

Jessica Chen
Exactly. So, I think when we think about being an effective communicator, it’s leveraging things that are also, yes, explicit but also very implicit too, but it’s still getting the other person to feel, like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Well, me hear what Jessica has to say next.”

Pete Mockaitis
And you highlight five different elements of voice which I think is so cool. Can you walk us through these five things? But, first, tell us why do we want to pay attention to our voice and what it sounds like? Is it just sort of like our voice is our voice, and that’s fine? Or just how much of an impact does it make tinkering with these variables?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because I think, whenever I talk about tone of voice specifically, a lot of times people go, “Well, it’s just the sound of my voice, right?” Yes, but there’s actually way more we can do with our voice than we think. And the five elements, which I will go through, are, I mean, this is not something that I produced. It’s actually based off research and study and research.

And I remember, just for me, when I was a broadcast journalist, I remember we would have consultants come in and they would critique us on television, and they would say, “Do this, do that, change this, change that,” just like as consultants, that’s what they do. And I remember one time I had the consultant come in, and we’re watching me talk on camera, doing whatever story, and she kept commenting, at least for me specifically, like, the rate, the pace of my speaking.

Now, when I get excited, when I’m happy, I tend to talk very fast. I think that’s just kind of like who I am, like I’m just excited, so I talk fast, especially if I’m maybe doing a story that’s more upbeat. And I remember her saying, “Jessica, you got to slow down.” And, in my mind, I was like, “I actually thought I was talking much slower than I would normally do,” because I know being and talking fast is my one weakness. And she was like, “No, no, no, Jessica, if you really want to be impactful, you got to speak way slower.”

And that’s when I realized, your tone of voice has many different elements, and, yes, how fast you speak is the first one. So, I’m going to walk through the five right now. So, number one, your tone of voice, the first element is really what we call your rate, how fast you’re speaking. And that’s kind of like the one that we think of the most because when people are nervous or excited, which is in my case, we talk fast. So, the key is you can actually control and change it. In fact, you do want to have a variety.

The second one is what we call your pitch, and that is basically how high or how low your voice is. Now, we know men tend to have lower pitches, women tend to have higher pitches, but here’s the thing, we all have a range. If we’re maybe talking about something serious, something that we want people to understand the urgency, then we might want to modulate our pitch so it’s a little lower. But it’s not doing it in this unnatural way. It’s, again, knowing that we all have a range.

The second one or the third one is thinking about your intensity. So, intensity, essentially, is how loud or how soft your voice is. Now, typically, when we are mad or angry, we will raise our voice but sometimes when people are shy and timid, they might speak in a lower tone of voice. And the idea is you want to have variety.

And I think this is like very strategic if you’re thinking about, let’s say, you’re giving a presentation and you’re speaking, you’re speaking maybe in a louder voice, and then suddenly you want to get people to know that this point is the most important. So maybe you’ll slow down your rate, lower your voice because that gets people to lean into what you have to say.

The next one is what we call inflection, and that is essentially what words you want emphasized. So, as you’re speaking, you have a choice of, “This is the word that I want people to know.” Like, even I’m just kind of doing it right now, “This is the word I want people to know is the most important.” And that is part of your tone of voice. It’s that inflection on that word.

And then, finally, it’s what we call the quality, and that is inherently, “What does your voice sound like?” When somebody calls you, they’re like, “Oh, that’s Pete,” “Oh, that’s Jessica.” And we say, of the five, the first four, you can control. In fact, you should change and have variety, but you can’t really change what’s inherent, which for some people, it might be that squeaky voice, that hoarse voice, that raspy voice. That’s just inherently who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
In a way, I’m thinking about sort of like recipes. If I want someone to receive a message more, like, thoughtfully, “Let’s reflect on this thing here, and really kind of mellow out and be calm,” we’re going to have a slower rate and a softer volume intensity. And that sort of produces that, which is very different than, “Rally the troops! Onward!” It’s like we’ve got more volume and rate in that zone.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I don’t know if you’ve ever even, like, thought so intently about tone. Maybe this is the first time you’re really thinking about it because we’re talking about it, but you’re right, and I feel like because you’re, like, “I have a specific intention, then I need to talk and modulate my tone in this way.” And even when you were just doing those two different modulations, my feeling right now, as a person listening, like I felt a certain way. And that’s the thing, you controlled it, you kind of did that with your tone of voice.

Pete Mockaitis
And not to get on a rant, but people are amazed at AI speech-to-text these days, and it’s very impressive technology, I’ll give you that. Like, that’s pretty cool and that wasn’t around nearly as robustly and beautifully six years ago because I’ve tried over the years. But at the same time, boy, when I watch a YouTube video and it has an AI narrator, I can tell, I get irritated.

Because it’s, yes, you are saying the words, bravo. Bravo, robot. But it’s not giving me all the emotional things with words that are part of what make a video lovely. So, I don’t know, that’s my take for what that’s worth. What’s your take on how AI plays into all this, Jessica?

Jessica Chen
Honestly, it’s just going to get better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, over time.

Jessica Chen
It’s just going to get better. It’s going to get better over time. It’s going to sound so realistic and it’s going to be scary, in my opinion. But where it is right now, I think many of us can tell it’s very artificial. It doesn’t sound very natural. And, as humans, like, I think that’s actually a good thing right now. It does kind of scare me a little bit once you cannot differentiate between, “Is this AI talking or is this a human talking?” But right now, for us, as humans to humans, that is how we connect. It’s the emotion behind the words, the language that we’re using. That’s how it builds connection, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And then you got me thinking about news broadcasters, in particular, and connection. What do I call that, the down pitch, in terms of like at the end of things? And some folks, let’s see, for an example, I might say, “And Starbucks revenue has increased by 18%.” It’s like the “Do-do,” at the end. And so, sometimes I get the vibes, it’s like, “Okay, you’re done. That’s what you’re communicating with that, is that we’re done, we’re over with this.” But kind of my thought is, from like a connection building perspective, that makes me feel like the broadcaster is more robotic and artificial and less connectable. So, what’s your take? You’ve been in it.

Jessica Chen
Oh, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. And I have a lot of thoughts because I had to also get out of that broadcast mentality myself. Having worked in broadcast, you start to develop a “broadcasting voice.” And, in some ways, it’s good for maybe more of, like, the nightly news, where, really, it’s just telling you exactly, like, what’s going on.

But if you watch morning shows, for example, on television, it’s way more casual, way more conversational, and that’s the intent. Because in a morning show, the vibe is really to like connect with the audience versus, I think, in my opinion, when you’re watching the nightly news, it’s really about, “This is serious stuff we’re talking about. Like, this is what’s going on. This is breaking news, or whatever politics and crime, whatever’s happening.”

And I think, for most of us listening right now, we’re not trying to talk in that broadcast voice. Actually, a lot of people say, like, “I want to speak like the people who talk on television.” And I’m like, “Actually, you don’t. Yes, maybe in the sense where they’re talking very clearly, they’re enunciating the words, yeah, those are all really good things. But when you’re talking about just everyday speak, you really want to not talk as if you’re talking to a person. You want to talk as if you’re just having a conversation.”

And, honestly, Pete, I think you do a good job with this too. Even though we’re doing this recording together, and in some ways it’s “broadcasting,” but it’s really like we’re having a conversation, and I think that’s really the approach and mentality for everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Jessica, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Jessica Chen
I would say the number one most important thing that I want people to know is whether you grew up in a quiet culture, or a loud culture, or you find yourself a mix of both, where sometimes it’s easy to speak up, or sometimes it feels a bit harder, I think what we can do for ourselves is know that we actually can control our career brand.

And our career brand is the perception people have of us in the office. So, the real kind of takeaway point is when you go into work every day and you’re thinking about communications, for example, or you’re thinking about tone of voice, or any of those things that we’re just talking about today, ultimately though, what can really accelerate any of our careers in the corporate environment or whatever industry that you’re in is knowing how you can take the work that you have to do, things that people assign you to do, and how can you use it to really leverage it for more opportunities.

Of course, communications plays a huge role in that, but if there’s any kind of, like, one golden nugget, I want people to feel empowered when it comes to their work, and knowing that they have control. Otherwise, if you don’t control the narrative of your own career brand, other people are going to start controlling it for you, and then you start to be boxed into, like, this person who just does this one thing. And I think all of us are way more dynamic than that.

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

Jessica Chen
It’s the one where it’s about when you think about communicating, it’s not always about focusing on the words that you say. It’s really about how you’re making other people feel with that.

And I think that’s kind of the essence of why I do what I do. And when people ask me, like, “Oh, can you help me become a more strategic communicator?” a lot of times, I’m like, “Yes, the words that you say matter, of course, are really important, but let’s talk about delivery and how you’re saying it because that’s really what matters at the end.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jessica Chen
I recently read a good one by Tessa West, it’s called Job Therapy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Jessica Chen
And I actually really enjoyed that book. I mean, granted, I will be biased, we share the same editor, but I really liked her book because it’s similar to kind of, like, how I think about career. It’s a very proactive way of finding a career that makes you happy instead of the other way around, essentially.

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

Jessica Chen
On my desk, I have a cup heater and love it because it just keeps my coffee hot all day. 

But, honestly, in all seriousness, I will say, and this is, they don’t pay me to say this but I do use this one app quite a bit to schedule meetings. It’s called Motion, and that has been huge for me. I’ve been using that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people seem to really connect and resonate with and quote back to you often, and say, “Jessica, that was brilliant. Thank you”?

Jessica Chen
I would say you got to be your own best cheerleader. I think, for a lot of us who are smart, hardworking, we do good work, sometimes we can just do the thing and then move on. And I think it’s important to remind ourselves that, from time to time, we got to celebrate ourselves, be our own best cheerleader, and it could be even like small little things.

And one quick tip that I love to share with people is if you get an email from somebody, and they’re saying, “Congratulations. Good job. Awesome work,” create what I call a “Yay” folder. Drag that email into your “Yay” folder, and that will effectively become the one place where you can find all the good work that you’re doing, which is very helpful for performance review season.

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

Jessica Chen
I’m most active on LinkedIn, so do connect with me on LinkedIn, Jessica Chen. But I’m also on Instagram, so same thing, Jessica Chen, Jessica Chen page. Otherwise, our website, SoulCastMedia.com. That’s, like, another way to get in contact me and find out about the communications work that we do.

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

Jessica Chen
Yeah, find something to celebrate this week because you are going to be your own best cheerleader. So, think back to the last week, put something small that you did that you’re pretty proud of, and how can you highlight it so other people know about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Jessica, this is fun. Thank you and best of luck.

Jessica Chen
Thank you, Pete.

Aug 22
0

989: Training Your Brain for Maximum Efficiency with Dr. Mithu Storoni

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Mithu Storoni goes behind the science of how focus works to use your brain to its maximum capacity.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify and get into the best mental gear for your work
  2. What to do when work gets either boring or overwhelming 
  3. The trick to resetting your brain 

About Mithu

Dr. Mithu Storoni is a University of Cambridge-trained physician, neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon. She advises multinational corporations on mental performance and stress management. She is the author of the forthcoming book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, out on September 17, 2024.

Resources Mentioned

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Mithu Storoni Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mithu, welcome.

Mithu Storoni
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited to chat about becoming hyper-efficient. And I’m imagining, well, it’s in London where you are, so it’s been a few hours in the day. Have you hyper-efficiently already taking care of tons of tasks today, Mithu?

Mithu Storoni
I’ve tried to be as hyper-efficient as I can. Every day is a different one. If you have a different kind of day, depending on the kind of day you have, it’s all about tailoring your tasks and fitting them around your own rhythm. So, every day I do different things, and so every day I have a certain different timetable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m so intrigued to hear about that, and I understand that’s one of your core theses here, is we want to align our work with our natural rhythms of our brain as opposed to trying to contort ourselves to what is externally imposed upon us. Is that a fair synopsis?

Mithu Storoni
That’s absolutely fair. And if you want a little bit of background, so I wrote the book when I realized how the way we work today is very much a hangover from the era of assembly lines. So, when we had the Industrial Revolution quite a long time ago, we had assembly lines, we were producing quantities of things, of refrigerators, of cars, of hair dryers. And during that time, the number of items you produced decided how productive you were, and the longer you stayed on the assembly line, the more productive you were, because the more items you assembled.

When we then had the shift into knowledge work, post-Second World War, around the 1950s, where the majority of the work became office work, became sort of what we used to call white-collar, we actually changed the work but we didn’t change the way we did the work. So, our work hours, the way we measured work, continued in pretty much the same way. We still looked at how many hours we were sitting on the seat, we get paid on overtime, productivity is all about targets.

We then had another shift, which is the kind of shift we still have now, where we started producing intangible goods rather than tangible refrigerators. And so, when intangible goods, such as a software solution, such as other solutions, ideas, it created the bottom line, so they become principle. The principle thing you try to make a difference to your company, to your organization, you need to think about the quality, not the quantity.

So, it no longer matters how many software solutions you manufacture, or how many software solutions you think of, or how many ideas you think of, you could have a thousand mediocre ideas, they will be just as unproductive as having one mediocre idea. We now need to shift to thinking extremely well, so producing one exceptional quality solution, exceptionally creative idea, rather than a hundred bad ones.

In order to do that, the brain can no longer sit and work continuously as if it were producing, or assembling its idea parts on an assembly line. How long you sit on your chair and the way you sit influences how well your mind performs. But we have created a template around that, which is a hangover from the past.

Now we have technology doing all the monotonous, the routine, the sort of quantity-heavy jobs aspects of knowledge work, so now we need to be even better at creating ideas, at forming solutions. And in order to do that, we need to change the way we work in a radically different way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. That all seems to check out in terms of the way the world used to work and the way things are working currently. I’m curious, when it comes to us working at our finest to come up with these exceptional ideas and solutions, is there anything really striking or surprising you’ve discovered about what holds us back and what unleashes us to this greatness?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, I approached this subject from my background, which is in neuro-ophthalmology and neuroscience, and I’m very aware of the very, very exciting research field at the moment, looking at the brain’s dynamics. What we know is that the brain is a complex system, it changes state, and there is a network in the brain called the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network, which influences how alert you are, it influences how you pay attention. That’s one angle of the story.

We have uncovered quite a lot of data about this network and how the faster it fires, the more alert, the more sort of wired you become; the slower it fires, the calmer you become. If you take that, I’m diluting it a little bit, but if you take that you add in the cholinergic network, you add in the dopaminergic network, you know, you create the whole map. You realize that when you are performing mental work, knowledge work of any kind, your brain has to be, or your mind has to be, in a certain configuration in order to perform one particular type of task particularly well.

So, for instance, let’s take two examples of knowledge work. Let’s take creative idea generation and let’s take a different kind where you are focusing on something. So, if you imagine an organization, it has lots of teams but it has two sub-teams, one focusing on innovation, the other focusing on implementation. The team focusing on innovation is going to focus on coming up with ideas, original ideas. What do we know about how the brain works or what is optimal for the brain when this happens?

Well, we know that if you make the brain focus on one single target in front of you, such as a computer screen, your brain state is not going to be optimal to come up with those “aha” ideas because of the temporary structure of the brain at the time. Focusing is not conducive to gentle mind-wandering.

It’s not conducive to letting your attention wander and pick up fragments of data, fragments of thoughts wandering in your head, which you then assemble, or to just waiting for aha moments, for moments of insight to spring up inside your head. That’s one angle to it. So, detaching your attention is important. Not focusing is important.

The second angle to it is there is data that the time of day you work influences how well you work when you’re doing creative work. So creative insights, creative idea generation seems to be better first thing in the day and last thing in the day, not in the middle of the morning, and not in the middle or late in the afternoon. So, in order to really, really optimize idea generation, creative idea generation, perhaps working in a slightly different way for this particular sub-team is going to be more suited for their performance.

Similarly, if you take the second sub-team, which is working on logistics implementation, there they need to zone in, converge on ideas. Now if you are converging on ideas, focusing does help. So, their focused attention is going to be absolutely pivotal. We know focused attention, similar in the opposite way to creativity, focused attention, there seem to be some peak hours for that during the day. The middle morning, middle to late morning is one of them. Immediately after lunch is not one of them and later on in the day is a second slot.

When you’re doing focused attention, when you’re paying focused attention or doing work that involves focused attention, you have to, it helps to sit undisturbed, sit in a very, very attentive state of mind and get that work done. So, if you also think about how your mind is, when you’re creative, your mind is sort of very gently, slowly mind-wandering. When you’re focusing, you want to be sharp, you want to really zone in to what’s in front of you.

These two states of mind are very, very different. So, if you put all of that together, it shows you how you need to be in a certain state of mind that you can tell by looking at how well you focus, how well your mind can, or how easy your attention can wander, a particular time of day is also helpful. And the third thing we haven’t talked about is, as soon as you work continuously, and you measure this as time on task when you measure this aspect in psychological experiments, when your brain works continuously on some kind of intense work, it becomes tired.

When it becomes tired, its information-processing pathways inside your head become inefficient. And when they become inefficient, you can actually measurably or you can visibly see the effect that has on mental output. So rather than coming up with lots of original ideas, you’re much more likely to come up with ideas but they’re not going to be original. So how long you work for is a huge factor here, which is why you also have to put in this 90-minute, 90- or 100-minute ultradian rhythm where you work in slots, and even within those segments of work you pace how you work. That’s a very long answer to your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really beautiful and it matches my own experience in terms of the groove, the flow, the rhythms, the vibe of work. And you talked about the creative and innovative side of things versus the implementation side of things, and sometimes I think of this as creating versus destroying. And I don’t know if it’s just my raw kind of attitude, but it’s like, “I’m going to destroy my inbox,” and by that, I mean I’m going to process it with vigorous speed. We’re going to do a three-second sweep per message, a 20-second sweep per message, and we’re going to watch that baby shrink from 200 to 20 in short order, and that’s good, and that’s kind of fun for me.

But sure enough, that does require that I’m not distracted by other things, and my mind isn’t wandering to interesting, fun things to pursue that’s counterproductive to what I’m after, is shrinking this inbox in a hurry and dispatching messages so people would get what they need from me, etc. Which is totally different than the vibe is like, “Oh, this would be kind of cool if we tried this thing. And here’s a fun idea. And, oh, that sort of connects to this thing I’m hearing on a podcast over there.” And so, those are very different vibes. So, tell me, just to make this contrast all the more crisp and clear for us, do you have a name that you apply to each of these modes of brain operation?

Mithu Storoni
I have. So, in my book, I have created a metaphor, which is very helpful, and I describe the mind as being in three states in the specific context of knowledge work. And these are, I call them three gears: one, two and three. And in a very easy way of imagining them is slow, medium and fast. The mind-wandering state, so the seek and destroy that you just described, which is going through your inbox – I love that analogy, I think it’s a great way of describing it, creating and destroying – that state would be right in the middle of gear two, which is the middle zone.

Gear one – is the kind of state of mind you have when you are really daydreamy. So, maybe the first thing in the morning after you’ve woken up after a deep night’s sleep, you haven’t quite reached that sort of sharpness, you haven’t reached for your coffee yet, you are kind of in a slight daydreamy zone, there’s a sunrise in front of you, you’re sort of halfway, halfway, and your mind feels quite slow. Your attention is floating a lot. You don’t have the ability to make it focus. It’s very, very floaty. You think of thoughts, they come, they go.

Gear two is when you can focus. This is the middle zone. As soon as you reach gear two, you’re able to focus. Within gear two, you have a kind of a slow pace and you have a fast pace. The slow pace gear two is when you can both focus and you can let your attention wander alternately however you want. That is optimal for creativity where you can just detach from what you’re doing, let your attention wander a little bit, but soon as you come up with an idea, with an insight, you can quickly zone your attention spotlight on there, focus on it and bring it to fruition. That is gear two, a slow gear two.

And then you have middle gear two, which is what you described as really intense, powerful focus. And then you have, you leave gear two and you go into gear three. And gear three has, correlates with what is sometimes termed sort of a hyperarousal state. So, in gear three, your thoughts are faster, your actions are faster, but you can’t perform analytical difficult thinking and you cannot focus as well.

So, these are the three gears: gear one is where you just wander; gear three where your mind is very fast and you can’t focus; gear two is right in the middle. And in gear two you can navigate by playing with your attention, detaching it, letting it wander around to go into kind of a light, creative gear two or a really deep focused gear two.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say hyperarousal gear three, just to make sure I’m understanding this, I’m thinking about, is this like I’m enraged at a situation? Or what are some of the scenarios or illustrations of hyperarousal?

Mithu Storoni
We are diluting these into single terms, but these are all scales. These all have a range. So, if you look inside the brain, people in a state of hyperarousal, this particular network in the brain is firing very fast, and the faster it fires, the more your physiological arousal increases. But just outside this zone where you can focus, the moment, so let’s just say you’re sitting there, you’re focusing on your email, you’re doing really well, and then a colleague keeps making herself or himself a cup of coffee, and every time they do this, they come and give you one because they’re really kind, and so you inadvertently just keep sipping those espressos while you work, just because they happen to be there.

After one espresso, it’s great, your focus is even better. But after another five, which you don’t realize you’ve had, suddenly, the noise that you heard behind you, the noise of the drilling outside, or the traffic outside, or someone speaking on their phone, suddenly seems really sharp. You couldn’t hear it a minute ago, but after five espressos you suddenly can, and so your threshold for being distracted is suddenly lowered, so you can become easily distracted.

Then, by this time, you haven’t realized you’ve had those five espressos, some more espressos appear and you keep drinking those. And as you drink them, eventually, you reach a point where your focus is completely gone, and you’re simply just reacting to the situation. You’re doing very low-level cognitive stuff, and every sort of small distraction around you is grabbing your attention away.

And as you increase that, you can eventually get into the stage that we do term that falls under the canopy of the banner of rage. But that sort of gear-three state is where you become easily distractible, subtle things become amplified. You become more anxious, more vigilant, so it’s a hyper-vigilant state. And the more, the faster this network fires, the more you go into this state, the more amplified it becomes. So, it’s a scale. This whole thing is a scale. Gear one itself is a scale, gear two is a scale, gear three is a scale, and within those, you’re modulating yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. It’s like we just got one very long continuum. It’s like the entirety of human experience, and we’re segmenting it into three-thirds to make it a little bit more workable to discuss and interact with. So, I guess I’m wondering now, this might be dangerous talking to neuroscience about this, but you mentioned, so we got some choline, some dopamine.

What is the, shall we call them biomarkers, or biochemical things, or heart rate, or brainwave frequency? What’s the stuff going down at our brain-body level within each of these three things in terms of it’s like a little bit in one, a medium amount in two, and a whole lot in three of these fundamental ingredients?

Mithu Storoni
So, very basically, let’s look at norepinephrine. So, norepinephrine, many of you will have heard of it, it’s associated with exercise. We talk about how we’ve got to get that adrenaline pumping or get that norepinephrine. 

And very, very loosely, these three gear states describe or correlate with three ways, patterns of firing of this, of a network in the brain, that is the brain’s headquarter of norepinephrine. So, in a very simple way of saying that, as norepinephrine levels vary in your brain, there’s a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that sits right behind your forehead. The prefrontal cortex is your brain’s seat for focus, attention, any kind of higher-level cognitive work. Analysis, thinking, remembering, working memory, you name it, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher thinking, okay? This entire region of the brain, prefrontal cortex, it’s absolutely pivotal for knowledge work and it becomes very, very active at middle levels of norepinephrine.

So, when you’re in gear two, it’s the Goldilocks zone of norepinephrine that brings your prefrontal cortex completely online. When you have too much norepinephrine, when you enter gear three, your prefrontal cortex goes partly offline, and this is why being in gear two is ideal and essential for focused work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is cool, and so I’m curious. So, putting it in these terms, I can see that if you’re in gear one, yeah, that’ll bring you to gear two or gear three, the jumping up and down, the smacking your chest, you’re screaming, “Yes, yes, yes.” That’ll do it. Go for it.

Mithu Storoni
I was just going to say, so I think the three gears are a metaphor of three different mental states. But I would not think of it like a racing car. So, when you’re in gear one, it’s simply a description of a different state. So, when you’re in gear one, and you’re in this kind of slow, mind-wandering state, you can’t focus because you are just not sort of awake enough to focus then. Gear two is when there is more norepinephrine, your prefrontal cortex is engaged, you can focus, you can do high-level cognitive work. And gear three is when there is more norepinephrine, you can think faster, but you can’t do high-level cognitive work because your prefrontal cortex is partly offline. Now, when you’re doing any kind of knowledge work, you’re actually shuttling between these three states, in the sense that, for instance, if you are solving a problem, you have to be mainly in a state of focus, all right?

But as soon as you hit a wall, or your mental slate gets crammed with data, you have to briefly move out of that state into gear one to wipe your slate clean and to refresh the angle that you’re taking. So, if you’ve hit a wall, your brain needs to step back and look at the problem from afar, or from a different angle, that’s when you need to briefly foray into gear one to do that, and then you might see something you were missing, you might feel a little bit more refreshed, then you go back into gear two.

So, although your baseline is gear two, you’re going to keep coming back into gear one every now and again to change your mental state in order to overcome a wall or to just refresh your mind. So, it’s not like you are getting into these fast, high-powered, kind of racing track scenarios. It’s very much a way of your brain is mainly in gear two, but gear one is essential. And that’s why gear one is the mental state you have when you take a break.

So, as an example, if you’re focusing on your inbox, in your email inbox and you’re working through it, every time you close your eyes, your brain immediately goes into gear one for a bit. And then when you open your eyes, you’re back into gear two. What I’m describing here is the baseline you’re in for the majority of time.

The whole thing isn’t a flat line, and that’s how the brain is but the overall general state of the brain when you’re in a mode of focus versus when you’re in a mode of gentle daydreaming are very different, and these are the states I describe with gear one, two, and three.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, then I imagine one of the things you want to do in order to accomplish a whole lot of stuff is to just schedule the kinds of activities when things are naturally going to be great for that. If I need to have some brilliant epiphany, aha, eureka moments, well, then let’s schedule some thinking, daydreaming, wandering time in the early morning or late at night, etc. So, there’s kind of working with our schedules and our rhythms and, you know, 90- to 100-minute cycles of stuff. That’s cool. And then, I’m curious, if the situation calls for us to be in a bit of a different gear than we find ourselves in, what do you recommend we do?

Mithu Storoni
So, if I give you a typical day, so just say you are a writer, you are looking for an idea. So, if that’s your job, if that’s your task for the day, what you would do is you’d wake up probably in the morning quite early, and once you’re up in the morning, you would tackle the creative aspect of things there and then. You wouldn’t wait for later in the morning. You’d use the kind of very gentle, relaxed, not quite committed state of mind you have, which would be perfect for that kind of work, that kind of idea generation.

And then once you have your idea, later on in the morning, you’d find you feel a little more alert, you can focus a little bit more and your mind is wandering a lot less. You’re kind of much less in that kind of gentle daydreamy more. There, you sit down, you focus and write or type. And then you continue that pattern as I describe. It changes slightly for the rest of the day.

So, if you’re entering one of those sessions, one of those work sessions, and you’re in the wrong gear, so let’s say you are doing focused work, you’re starting at 9:00 o’clock in the morning, and you are still in that kind of distracted, mind-wandering state of mind. If that’s the case, there are a couple of ways you can use your body’s physiology to make your mind think differently. So, for instance, we know that if you make your body active and alert, your mind becomes active and alert too. Intuitively, you know that to be true.

Physiologically, we know that if you do, for instance, a few sprints before you sit down, when you are feeling a little bit kind of slow and lethargic, that immediately wakes you up. It doesn’t have to be sprints. Any kind of exercise will wake you up. We know that intuitively. And when we say wake you up, it also changes your mental state. You go from feeling lethargic to feeling more alert, much more able to focus.

Conversely, we know that you can also use your body to relax your mind. So, if you are feeling very, very wired, if you’re working in an office where things are very, very, sort of deadlines are very frequent, activity is very fast, everything is very hectic, and you really need to calm down and you need to focus and you need to think about something, in that sort of situation you can use your body, you can use three elements actually, you can use your environment to calm you down.

So, we know that if you bring elements of your environment to be slow, low and soft and dark, your mind also climbs down. So, if you have, for instance, a background music or background sounds which have low frequency beats, sounds which are low pitch, not high pitch, like very slow drum beats or like ocean sounds. There’s a reason why we’re attracted to ocean sounds. So, slow beats, slow rhythms, low frequency, low pitch around you.

So, as an obvious example, if you listen to radio shows or breakfast shows first thing in the morning, people will be speaking very fast at a higher pitch. If you listen to radio shows very late at night, people will be speaking slower with slightly lower pitch, and that is to really match the viewer’s state of mind, but in the morning it’s to really draw the viewer into a more alerting state of mind to wake them up essentially. So, your environment can change in this way.

Colors and intensity of light also have a role to play. There is data that shows that warm, so redder, reddish tones, soft, warm hues are better for creative idea generation, whereas blue light or blue dominant white light, the kind of light you get in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning even in most latitudes, that’s conducive to being focused and alert. So, if you’re doing a night shift and you really, really need to focus, then using light can help you be in the right state of mind.

So light, sound, your physiology, so muscle. When you contract muscle, you feel more alert, but when you release it, you feel more relaxed. Similarly, when you stretch muscle and release it, you feel more relaxed, and we know that people seek this kind of activity, whether PMR, whether yoga, any sort of stretching-relaxation activity also relaxes the mind.

We also have a third thing, which are breathing exercises, and there is now a lot of data to show that if you breathe at a frequency of around five breaths a minute with long exhalations, and Mara Mather, in California, has done amazing work on this with her team, you can also lower this, the gear, of your mind. So, bring your mind back to an optimal state.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is beautiful. So, then I’m thinking then, if we’re in a state where it’s just like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing anything,” that’s sort of like the sleepy state, and so more arousal would be helpful if what needs to happen is some smart focused work. And if, likewise, it’s like, “I’m freaking out about this thing,” you know, well, then we want to maybe do with some more of the stretching, the slow breathing, the low lights, etc.

Mithu Storoni
Adjust your environment. Modulate your environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me wondering, it’s so funny, I’m thinking about mindfulness meditation stuff, and there are times when it feels so amazingly wonderful, like, “Yes, this is just delightful.” And there are times in which my brain is just furious, which is like, “This is so boring! I can’t stand it!” And so, it seems like, is this kind of the fundamental dynamic at work? Or do you think there are some other dimensions to be considered in this context as well?

Mithu Storoni
So, I’m so happy you brought up the word “boring” because this is really, really important. Now when you’re working on something, when you’re doing knowledge work, you’re working on something, you can, in gear two, you’re in peak focus, you’re engaged, all right? But if what you’re doing is boring, then a little while through, a little while along, 10, 15 minutes, whatever, you suddenly feel your mind wandering and your focus slipping off, slipping away. Not because you’re tired, the work isn’t tiring at all, or let’s imagine the work isn’t tiring at all. You’re just noticing your focus just slip away.

In that sort of scenario, you’re sliding into gear one because you are bored, and there you need more stimulation or a bigger load to get you back into gear two. So, one way is, as you say, you need more stimulation, so maybe change the environment, go to a place that wakes you up. But you can also do it through the work, through the work you’re doing. So, for instance, multitasking gets bad press, but if what you’re doing is boring and you’re sliding into gear one, multitasking can actually keep you in gear two.

Because any form, anything that engages your mind, engages your brain, causes you to put in cognitive effort, will raise you back, will raise your gear. And it’s for the same reason that if you’re working very well, but you have an enormous workload, or you’re getting information you don’t want and you’re being forced to process it while you’re doing the work that you’re doing, you’re having to put in, you’re having to really step on the pedal.

You’re putting in more cognitive effort, and that requires norepinephrine, and there you’re shifting up to gear three to be able to cope. So, actually, you can modulate your gear with the work you are doing. So, if your work is very boring, actually multitasking and doing something in parallel can put you back into the right frame of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, I guess I’m wondering if we don’t have the option of changing the thing that we’re doing, maybe we’re in a meeting and we think it’s boring, I suppose, internally, in our own brains we would maybe make up a game. Or what do you recommend there in terms of if it’s like here we are, we’re in a meeting, we’re supposed to be polite, and not whip out our laptops or phones or something? Any pro-tips there?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you’re in a meeting and you just have to attend the meeting, but not contribute or not take anything away from the meeting, then it’s a great opportunity to get into a creative state of mind, be in gear one, let your mind wander, and just use that as a break. So let your mind wander, let your attention wander, try not to dwell on anything, and just use that as a refresher, as a refresher palette for your mind.

If you have to stay awake during a meeting, and simply stay awake and not necessarily contribute, then doing something while you are in that meeting, so solving a problem with pen and paper discreetly while you’re there is another way of dealing with it. So, you add your workload, you increase your cognitive load to stay in the right state of mind.

So, the bottom line of all of this is really that we all function the best. We don’t just work the best when we do knowledge work. We actually function and we feel the best when we’re in this kind of middle speed, is a good way of imagining it, in this kind of middle speed, Goldilocks speed. And in order for the brain to put itself into that middle speed, you need, the brain needs, first of all, some kind of external stimulation, or the external urge to raise its own gear for some other reason.

So, for instance, if it’s receiving a lot of load the brain is going to work harder to cope with it. If cognitive load is very low, it’s going to get very bored and slip out of gear two. So, if that happens, then you can bring in extra cognitive load or bring in extra stimulation to keep the brain in this middle zone. Your mind, your brain is really an information-processing machine, and its optimal pace of processing that information is gear two. So, you need to give it enough information to keep it there. And if you swing over, if you overshoot, you end up in gear three.

So, if you’re going down from gear three to gear two, another way to look at it is you’re going down from gear three to gear two, then reduce the number of tasks you’re doing, reduce the difficulty of the task you’re doing, remove time pressure, remove uncertainty, and then adjust your environment to make it lower, slower, slower-paced, and then, of course, you can add in these physiological buttons through your muscle relaxation, through your autonomic nervous system.

So, ultimately, your brain, your mind is most efficient when it’s moving ahead at this middle speed of processing information. And the key, the art of being able to navigate yourself and stay in that zone while you’re doing knowledge work is a secret to hyper-efficiency because when you’re in that zone, the kind of work you’ll be doing will be the best you can do.

You can still do a lot of work while you’re bored. You can also do a lot of work while you’re in gear three. You can type hundreds of emails. You can even type them faster. But you won’t be able to solve a difficult differential equation in gear three, or plan a killer chess move in gear three. You’ll be able to play chess, but you’ll probably lose in the first 15 moves.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-second bullet games.

Mithu Storoni
Exactly. Exactly. In gear one, you’re not engaged enough to think, to analyze either. But in gear two, in this middle zone, when your brain is just awake enough, alert enough, but not too wired, that’s when it processes information the fastest, and hence, it does it in the best possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
You said the word “refresh” earlier, and I’m curious, if we’re doing these 90- to 100-minute bouts, a break is just necessary. Do you have any suggestions on what is a supremely, or hyper-efficient, or excellent means of breaking to restore our brains’ capacity and capabilities quickly?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, when you’re thinking of a break, just to give you a little bit of background, we now know through some very elegant forms of brain imaging that when you’re doing intense mental work, something that requires you to pay attention, something like solving math equations, as your brain cells work, they produce byproducts because they have little factories in them, they need energy to work, they break, they use ATP. They produce byproducts.

And as you’re working, these byproducts accumulate and then they get cleaned away. Now there is some evidence, and I mention where this data comes from, in the book, that one reason for fatigue may well be that the rate at which you’re producing these toxic byproducts is faster than your ability to clear them away. And so, when you take a break and you stop the intensity of work, you’re immediately giving your mind, your brain an opportunity to recover. So that’s a bottom line.

Now how should that break be? So, in this context, think of the difference between the brain and muscle. So, if you’re lifting weights in a gym, the moment you stop lifting weights, your muscle relaxes. So, when you stop working your muscle, your muscle rests. But when your mind is working on its office chair, as soon as you move from the office chair and you even go and sit on a beach, your mind has not moved one inch. It carries on working. There is no stop switch on your mind.

And so, the kind of break you take has to be tailored to the state of mind you are in when you were working. So, if your work was just very, very tiring, it wasn’t in any way emotionally draining, emotionally triggering, just very, very tiring, and as soon as you stop, imagine you’re having to read a hundred boring emails that don’t really mean anything, but they’re just, your eyes are glazing over, that sort of state. If that’s the case, then as soon as you take a break, as soon as you stop what you’re doing, your mind will be able to relax.

So, in that sort of scenario, you can break and just do nothing. Just relax, you don’t have to do anything actively. But if your work was, or is, in a situation where you have a lot of emotional tension, you have a deadline you’re working for, you have a problem you really can’t solve you’re still struggling with, the moment your break approaches, you’re very likely to be what I call tired and wired, which means you are tired, you’re physically tired, you’re mentally tired, but your mind is still trying to process that information, so it has stepped on the accelerator, taking you right up to gear three to work through and your gear just won’t slide back.

And, intuitively, your listeners and you will realize what this is because it’s the kind of feeling you have at the end of a day when you’ve just really pushed yourself to keep working beyond when you were tired by having coffee, by carrying on. And so, by the time you get home, you can’t really switch off. You feel tired, but your mind is still buzzing. That’s what I describe as tired and wired.

If that’s the case, and you’re taking a break in the middle of the day, and you’re feeling like that, then for the first few moments of your break, it’s much more helpful to do something really absorbing that distracts you completely from the work you are working on. So, play a game on your phone. Something like Tetris has been shown to be very effective in this sort of context, other games like Tetris. Play a game on your phone or watch a video, watch something immersive, until you momentarily forget the work you were just doing. As soon as you do, stop and then you relax.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, first, we get into the forget zone and then we stop and relax. Is there any way to relax better or should we just chill?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you are in that forget zone, you can relax. I mentioned two kinds of breaks in the book. So, I mentioned a break at the end of 90 minutes when you just need to refuel. I also mentioned a type of break, which I call a kind of a reset break, and this is the kind of break you would take within your work segment. So, if you’re doing a 90-minute block of work and your work is really intense, you would probably need to pause for a little while every 20 minutes or so, if your work is really, really intense.

Or if your work is really, really boring, you will be forced to just kind of take a step back every 20 minutes or so and just be like, “Okay, I need to kind of wire my mind back up to cope with this.” When you’re taking a break in that context, what you’re trying to do during the break is put your mind back into gear one.

So, as an example, imagine you are just watching paint dry, okay, you’re doing some kind of work, which is really, really boring. Your mind, you’re in the right zone when you started that work. But about 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the work, your attention just floats away. You cannot bring it back and everything just gets very slow, lethargic. At that point, take a quick five-minute break and do something to bring you back into that zone. So that can be something physical. Physical is usually the easiest.

So, at that point, doing a quick bout of exercise will put you back in the best kind of mental zone where you can go back to doing that work focusing. So, an applicable real-world scenario of this is anything that requires you to keep monitoring something. So, monitoring a camera, monitoring other machines working, monitoring a system. Every 20 minutes or so, your attention is going to float, melt away, and there you take a very quick break to actually not relax you but to actually excite you back into the right mental zone.

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

Mithu Storoni
Certainly. So, another aspect of work today, as well as these three gears, is the idea of how everything we’ve always used to motivate us in the past are changing because the whole map of knowledge work is drastically changing at the moment. We are having to retrain, we’re having to reskill, we’re having to learn on the job, so there’s a huge amount of change taking place, and so this is a really great time to bring in the idea that has long been known as intrinsic motivation, and kind of repackage it and rework it for our era.

Because right now, we are working and living at a time where your job might not be guaranteed, the goal that you’re working towards might change tomorrow, a new LLM might come about tomorrow, a new version of the existing one might come about tomorrow, and everything you’ve been learning suddenly becomes obsolete the next day.

So, in this sort of landscape, you have to work with a different kind of motivation. So, we have to learn and we have to tailor and curate our jobs. Managers should be curating workflows, workloads, to generate as much as much of this intrinsic motivation as possible. And one way that seems to be a pretty powerful way of deriving it in any context, and intrinsic motivation is notoriously difficult to create, is by this phenomenon called learning progress.

It’s called learning progress mechanism. And one of the researchers behind Pierre-Yves Oudeyer from Paris, who is working with artificial agents, and his team has found how, whenever you’re working, you’re doing any kind of work, it’s really, really important to have physically kind of something that you can really physically, tangibly feel, obvious progress.

So, you have to be making rapid progress in something towards a goal and improving through skill or knowledge yourself in some way as fast as you can, as regularly and as solidly as you can, while you work. If you can engineer an element of this into one what you’re doing, you will have sufficient intrinsic motivation in your work, and that is going to be key in the workplace moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that rings true. That gets me fired up, no doubt. Well said. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mithu Storoni
What I would say is my book was really heavily influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan, who looked at technology and the effect it is having on our brains. One of the quotes that I really love, is that we have had a way of working all this time, where we’ve really been working like a marching soldier. We’ve been moving forward in regular steps in order. We need to change, and we need to now add flair to the way we work because that will help us get into these unique brain states and produce our best.

And he describes that as a transition from a marching soldier to working, spinning like a dancing ballerina. And that is really a metaphor for how our work needs to change in this new AI-assisted age of the knowledge age.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mithu Storoni
So, The Medium is the Message is a great book that really gives you a wonderful overview of technology.

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

Mithu Storoni
So, I have a website, my name, www.MithuStoroni.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Mithu Storoni. I’m also on Twitter/X as @MithuStoroni.

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

Mithu Storoni
Tomorrow, whatever your routine is, just think about this conversation and tailor your day completely differently, adjust it to your routine, and then give us a feedback the day after as to how it went.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Mithu, this is fun. I wish you much hyper-efficiency.

Mithu Storoni
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.