All Posts By

Marco Bartolome

Jul 23
0

1169: Tapping into the Transformative Power of Sabbaticals with DJ DiDonna

By | Podcasts | No Comments

DJ DiDonna makes the case for why taking more extended time off helps professionals get further in their careers–and shares tricks for actually snagging that time.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to convince your boss to let you take a sabbatical
  2. How sabbaticals act as “regret insurance”
  3. How to plan a truly fulfilling sabbatical

About DJ

DJ DiDonna is a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches MBA courses on entrepreneurship and building meaningful professional and personal lives. He has spent his career translating social science research into real-world tools for positive change. In 2019, DiDonna founded The Sabbatical Project to define, explore, and research the role of sabbaticals in modern life. He has helped organizations around the world—from nonprofits to Fortune 50 companies—design and implement sabbatical policies.

His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Time, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Previously, DiDonna cofounded EFL Global, a fintech company that enabled more than $2 billion in capital to underbanked businesses and individuals across twenty countries before its acquisition in 2018. DiDonna earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. On his sabbatical, DiDonna walked nine hundred miles on pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan, helped lead the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at his undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame, and unskillfully remodeled his kitchen. Outside work, you can find him plotting how to be in the Big Outdoors.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

DJ DiDonna Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
DJ, welcome!

DJ DiDonna
How are ya? Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Doing well. Doing well. I’m excited to talk sabbaticals. First of all, we’re going to use that word a lot, what are we talking about here?

DJ DiDonna
So it’s funny, when I first took my sabbatical, I instinctively called it a sabbatical and I didn’t know what that meant. I think a lot of people use it because it lends this prestige from academia. It lends this prestige of, like, here’s an identity that you can have when you’re doing something very uncertain and you’re oftentimes giving up your identity.

And so, you know, I created one, take it or leave it, but intentional extended leave from your job. So, “When you’re away from your job, are you not looking for another job?” which is what we tend to fill in the space with. “Is it a time that’s hopefully measured in months, not days or weeks?”

And you can do work, but it can’t resemble your routine job. So no little consulting projects, nothing similar, but people will do things like try to write a book or get certified in yoga or scuba. I remodeled a kitchen, which might sound like work to folks, but it’s like intrinsic work of your own choosing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds nice, and we’re going to get into the practicals and the pushbacks and the constraints and the difficulties soon enough. But, first, let’s hear, tell us, I mean, they sound like a swell time. Can you share with us any surprising discoveries or key benefits that we should know about?

DJ DiDonna
I think anyone who’s been on a vacation knows that vacations are great and you can easily imagine that a longer vacation would be even better. The reason I set out to do this research and write this book was because the profundity of the kind of changes that I experienced, identity changes, life changes, the joy, the density of memories from that time were such that I was like, “Okay, something very different is going on here.”

And so when I spoke to other people for the research, I realized that there’s something deeper on a personal identity, “Who are you? What do you value?” that is changing in a way that just is not happening with shorter breaks. So that was surprising that it wasn’t just, you know, my personal experience, but universal across everyone that I spoke to.

But the other thing I think that’s counterintuitive based on how you framed it is that sabbaticals can be really tough. I think, a lot of times, you’re getting to sabbatical land burnt out or it’s catalyzed by some crisis, like a personal crisis, a work crisis, a relationship crisis, a health crisis. And so you’re having to work out a lot of stuff, and the vacuum of your responsibilities and how you spend your normal day allows a lot of big thoughts to come in.

And so people will look and say, “Oh, my gosh, you’re off for three months. You must be having the time of your life.” But, oftentimes, personal development and identity change is hard work and it’s difficult and uncomfortable. So that’s what I would say some of the surprising things were.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, identity change sounds big and it sounds like that can go in very many, many directions. Could you give us an example? And is that a good thing? Maybe I love my identity. I don’t want to change it.

DJ DiDonna
I think that the most important thing is that you are looking at who you are and what your identity is from the perspective of someone that can change it and is in charge, right? I think one of the things you see in the research is that there are some debate about whether you have like a fixed identity.

And so you want to return back, you know, to your identity that might have been obfuscated by, like, hard work or stress or taking a job you didn’t want or being in a relationship you didn’t want. Or is your identity constantly shifting and it’s your job to kind of guide your life towards how you change and shift as a person?

And so I think, in sabbatical, what is being offered is you’re stepping away from your life long enough. People have talked about it as like a near-death experience. You’re zooming out from your life. You’re looking back at how you’ve lived it and how you feel living it now, and what you would like for your life between now and when you die, and getting to say, like, “Do I want to make changes or not?”

And some people are like, “Love my life. Love my work. It gives me meaning. I don’t love going in every day, but that’s a job. But I would like to have stronger boundaries between work and life.” And that can be enough to change your identity, right?

Like, do you see yourself as someone who is a super committed father that picks their kids up every day and coaches the teams? Or do you see yourself primarily as a person that’s doing work and not really of your choosing?

So I think that’s the invitation is just to say, you know, really pick yourself out and say, “What am I doing? And how does that align with who I am and who I’ve wanted to be?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s intriguing as you describe it in this way. It’s like the sabbatical provides a context or fertile soil for epiphany or revelation, and we sort of have the time for it, as opposed to, a lot of times, epiphanies, even the word implies, “All at once, I realized, ‘What am I doing?’ Or, ‘I had a panic attack and I… no, no more of this.’”

So with the sabbatical, it seems like we don’t have to get lucky or have a strike of divine inspiration in order to come to these major realizations that perhaps we would really benefit from coming to.

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I mean, I would think about it also as imagine if you could manufacture a scenario that would produce an insight that would change your life forever, right? So if you look at what’s called peak life experiences, like a lot of those are fomented by negative things that happen.

So a health crisis, you know, we’ve all heard about “The Bucket List” or seen it. Like, a health crisis makes you think, like, “What have I been doing and how do I want to change?” And what a sabbatical says is, you know, you can basically carve out time, you know, six months off in the scale of a 40- to 50-year career is like 1% of your working life.

And you can carve out 1% percent and say, “I want to try something on that I’ve always wanted to do. I want to write a book. I want to, like, become fluent in a foreign language or live in a foreign country with my family.” And then just have that experience as opposed to it being an emergency or something that happens to you.

I mean, another surprising thing from the research is that we found that about two-thirds of sabbatical takers, a sabbatical takes them, right? And so it is this fomented by a crisis as opposed to something that’s regularly planned.

And my intention is to identify these kind of inflection points across your life, from gap year early on in your education, to like a twilight career where you can take a pause and figure out if you’re heading in the right direction or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I think, already, brains are firing off, it’s like, “Oh, it sounds nice, DJ, but no way that I could pull that off.” But even before we dig into some of those particular practicalities, I’d like to get a sense for some examples of these identity-shifting perspectives, insights. Like what kinds of things have popped up for people and how does it go down?

DJ DiDonna
You know, Pete, for the skeptics, just to make sure they get through the episode, right, like take the word sabbatical away and just think about it from the perspective of you, upon retirement, or upon your deathbed, or with your grandchildren, you know, bopping up and down on your knees, like, what is something that you would like to do in your life that doesn’t fit neatly into vacations, that certainly you’ve thought is important so far, but you clearly haven’t made time for?

And so it takes this, like, grandiosity around, like, “Taking a sabbatical is difficult,” and makes it more personal around, like, “I want to go on a road trip with my family to see the national parks.” Right? That’s an often one I hear. Like, how are you going to do that without a bigger container of time?

So I think I would encourage folks to think about, actually, what’s passionate for them as opposed to getting hung up on the term or the amount of time. Because, I think, once you start having this idea and it becomes concrete, it grows and germinates.

As far as the actual tangible outcomes, what we saw is an increase in confidence. So people come back having done a thing that is pretty rare. It’s certainly not the typical story of how we work, you know, at least in the States. And they come back stronger, you know, having healed personally and mental health-wise. And found out a little bit more about their capabilities outside of work.

A lot of people will do some sort of physical expedition, right, like a long hike or get in shape for a marathon or something like that. And that lends confidence about what’s possible. Creativity, so one of the cool things about a sabbatical is instead of doing like a vacation, you’re just being yourself. You’re just being.

And a lot of times that means you’re picking up some hobby that you used to have, you’re tinkering with something that is just for fun, there’s no purpose. And that kind of spurs our creative brands. Like, you’ve heard about the creative process where there’s no bad ideas and let’s get everything out there first and collaborate.

The other thing I mentioned earlier is just about perspective. So because you’ve disengaged from your work identity being governed by your calendar, that kind of thing, for long enough, and people will say it takes about six to eight weeks to fully disconnect, you’re able to get perspective about who you are, where you want to be going and whether how you’re allocating your time and resources is getting you there or not.

Pete Mockaitis
And so could you share some stories of some folks who did this and the realizations that they had?

DJ DiDonna
A couple of my favorite stories, one, there was a family that took a sabbatical on an island off the coast of Norway. So the father had been working in tech, had kind of burnt out, and his wife had taken a few years off from teaching in order to stay at home and raise the kids, right?

So she had wanted to get back into the workforce, he had wanted to take some time off, and so they spent a month above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway. She was, like, one of two teachers in kind of a one-room schoolhouse type situation for the island, and he was just experimenting, spending afternoons with his kids, doing little projects and hobbies.

He learned how to fish, learned how to smoke fish, learned how to catch fish, things that just aren’t that seemingly productive. But then he also wanted to go back to his hobby of being a computer developer. He was at management level, and so you’re not really down in the weeds.

And so mobile app development was coming out, this was about 10 years ago, and what he did was he created just a simple kind of text-to-speech app. His father had done work with kind of vision-impaired folks, and so it gave him the idea.

And as a result, he created something, published it on the app store, and it actually started gathering some steam, you know, people paying ten bucks a year. And when they came back to Boston, not only had they completely changed their relationship to money, because they had lived on a relatively meager teacher’s salary in Norway, it gave him the confidence that he could spend another year, a year and a half, building it up to support the family.

He designed the business such that he could take summers off because he was like, “Why would I not spend summers aligned with my wife’s calendar, spending summers adventuring with my kids being present?” And it gave his wife things on the resume and experience to get back into the workforce in the States. I love that story.

I think on the opposite side, it’s also important to know what you don’t want to do. So a lot of people use sabbaticals to test, like, “What’s the counterfactual to the life that I’m living?” There was someone, in the book, who was a career trial lawyer. He studied English in college, always wanted to write a novel, but kind of found himself starting a family early on, wanting to support the family.

And so after 25 years, he took six months off to write. And it allowed him to walk his kids to school, cook them dinner at night, be more present with the family, which his job hadn’t before. But, more importantly, he wrote for about two months and then he printed the manuscript out, tore it into pieces, put it in the trash, and was like, “Actually, I want to go back to being a lawyer.”

And so this concept that, like, part of navigating through life and navigating your identity is, “What are you good at? What are you not good at? What do you like? What do you not like?” And I think about sabbaticals as regret insurance, because you get to try things on for size that you would have regretted not doing at the end of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. And I’m thinking about, well, first of all, I believe that’s Winston Chin, right, who made the Voice Dream Reader, an app that I use and love. And Kwame Christian did, like, a whole episode about how that’s a key part of his life.

DJ DiDonna
Oh, funny.

Pete Mockaitis
He could see, but he likes having notes read back to him at rapid speed while he’s doing other things. So that’s pretty cool. Hey, sabbatical enriching all of us.

DJ DiDonna
Developed over the winter, you know, dark, dark winter in Norway.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So that’s really cool. And then you’re right, the regret insurance thing is resonating. I’m thinking about, I remember at Bain, they had a program, and they might still have it, they called it Take Two, which is basically this.

It’s, like, you could take two months off, I believe it was unpaid, but you keep your health insurance benefits, and you could just do whatever. And what was interesting is it was a real win-win for the consultants trying something else, like, “I always thought I wanted to work in sports.”

And so then they work in sports for two months, like, “You know what? I like consulting better.” So they come on back and they have that retention of an employee for longer because they could scratch the itch, they could take a look, and they come back and say, “Actually, this is really a pretty sweet gig. Let’s keep doing this.”

And it’s great for the people because, you know, sometimes they do discover just the thing, or they put to rest that lingering doubt. Regret insurance is well put, it’s like, “Ah, I wonder what would have happened if I worked in sports? Well, I know. I tried two months and it wasn’t all I hoped it would be.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I have a fair amount of examples from the consulting field because, as you know, it’s project-based and so when you’re on, you’re on, and you’re on like 11 out of 10. And then when you’re off, you’re totally off.

Like, you’ve finished the engagement and so there’s not work to do that lingers. And I think that the economy is heading more towards this, like, cyclical project-based, like you see it in tech product development cycles.

And so I think, as the economy heads more towards natural inflection points every four or five, however many years, I think it gives you these opportunities to say, “Okay, let me step back and recharge. Let me maybe, right now, right, like let me step back and learn AI from a curiosity standpoint. Like, build something that’s interesting to me,” as opposed to, like, trying to fit it in in everything else that you have to do with life.

And then you’re actually training yourself for the next job. So I like the consulting example and a lot of consultants in the study would use that time off. You know, McKenzie has Take Time, Bain has Take Two, where you would run an experiment.

Someone in the study thought that they wanted to own an eco resort when they retired. Sounds idyllic, right? You live in a beautiful place, and he worked in Costa Rica and in Hawaii over the course of his sabbatical, you know, in the kitchen, in the front office, and he was like, “This is miserable.”

And so it’s this, like, just how can you test different hypotheses about your life so that you’re more fulfilled in the life you choose or the next life you choose?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, if folks think, “Yeah, that’s great, but…” where do we go from there?

DJ DiDonna
You know, I think the first step is nurturing that seed of an idea, as kind of woo-woo as that might sound. Like, you really have to think about something concrete. Go to a cafe for an hour, no phone, no music, no friends, and just think, like, “What are things I want to do before I die?”

And I think that’s important because it just makes it more tangible because I think, then, you start to build this intuition, like, “Wait a minute, why can’t I? I’ve always wanted to do this. I’m X years into my life. Like, why have I not done this?”

For me, it was about the spiritual search, right? I felt like I was spiritual. I grew up in a religious household. I wanted to, like, nurture and investigate that side. I felt like it was important, but I wasn’t allotting time to it. And I think it’s something that takes a fair amount of time. So find that thing that is so important that you start to realize, like, “This is not fair. I will not be happy with life if I don’t get a chance to do it.”

The next thing is, I think, take your time scale away from the next 90 days, the next year, and put it into, like, a five-year plan. Of course, a sabbatical is out of reach for almost everybody. If you don’t have a company supporting it with a policy, if you’re talking about taking off three months from now.

But what are you doing in 2032, right? And kind of like plant a flag somewhere in the future that sounds impossibly far away, and say, “I’m taking the summer off with my family in 2032. We’re going to align schedules, we’re going to tell our bosses three years in advance, and it’s just part of how we live our life,” as opposed to waiting until some emergency kind of, you know, clutches you and takes you out of routine life.

Once you do that, then you can financially save 5, 10% a year. You can work out the logistics. Put it far enough in advance that it becomes logistically feasible. Dream and understand what your what the stakes are. Like what does it cost you not to do this over the course of your life?

And then the other thing that’s important, in our research we found that one of the most enabling factors of taking a sabbatical is having an example in your life of someone who has taken it. So ask far and wide, “Is there anyone in my network who has taken extended leave, who has taken a sabbatical?”

I mean, don’t be afraid to post it on LinkedIn. There’s a career break feature on LinkedIn that was rolled out in 2022, and millions of people use it. So that, like, norm around like work devotion, I think, is disintegrating pretty quickly.

But once you can get some advice and some proof and permission that it’s okay to take extended leave from someone you know, the barriers start to break down a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the career break feature on LinkedIn.

DJ DiDonna
So when you’re putting in the employer that you have and how long you worked for them, there’s a career break employer. And then you can kind of say, career break, skills development, personal needs, whatever, whatever.

I thought it’s pretty revolutionary, like, to have every person who’s displaying their resume online include career breaks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you, in terms of the normative piece, because I think there’s some old career resume advice somewhere, like, “Oh, make sure there’s no gaps in that resume. That’s a big red flag.” I don’t personally evaluate any candidate or talent in such a way at all.

I don’t know if maybe you could demystify some of that for us. If we have these fears about, “What will others say or think or do? Or how will this impact how I’m judged or viewed or evaluated, assessed?” What’s the scoop there?

DJ DiDonna
I think, first of all, like flipping that on its head, if you’re looking at a few different resumes, and one person says something about their life that’s interesting, right, it shows that, so there’s this concept called the red sneaker effect.

That if you have the confidence to dress unlike other people in an interview, or if you have the confidence to say, like, “You know, I took six months off to sail across the Pacific, or to take care of my parents,” that actually sends a signal that, like, “My work will kind of stand for itself. This is who I am as a person. Here’s a tiny glimpse on the resume.” So I would encourage people to think about it like that.

And then, on the negative side, if someone is going to screen you out for taking three months off to care for a loved one, probably not a good fit. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re looking for a signal that the company doesn’t value you as a human being, I think there it is.

And we know that younger generations are more likely to trade autonomy and mission and purpose and flexibility for compensation. And so it’s bubbling up within the economy anyway, as you said, outdated story. And so you can either be a part of this and encourage it and support it, or you can be kind of left behind and, you know, working two jobs and sleeping under your desk.

Pete Mockaitis
And, likewise, with regard to the, “What do other people think?” situation, if you give the boss a heads up, “Hey, three, four years from now, I want you to know I’ve got this sabbatical on the calendar,” how do those conversations tend to go?

DJ DiDonna
I mean, listen, you have to compare apples to apples, right? So in Silicon Valley, the average tenure at a company is, like, two years. And so I think if you’re saying to someone, “I want to stay at this company. I view my tenure here to be long. I like it. I want to grow here. And in four years, I want to take two months off with my family to live in Spain,” I think that’s totally manageable.

Like, people are leaving their jobs. And when people leave their jobs, managers have to scramble and hire someone else. They have to, like, train that new person. People go on parental leave. Like, you have a bit more notice, but maybe five, six months notice.

And so what you’re doing is you’re helping the organization build resilience around, “Can you survive when someone leaves the company?” You’re being super purposeful about, “Here are my tasks. Here’s who I kind of delegate them off to. Here’s how I onboard them back.”

And I think, most importantly from an employer standpoint, it’s an equitable benefit. Like, if you’re carrying water for someone else because they’re on sabbatical, and then you can take a sabbatical, that’s very different than if you’re carrying water because the staffing needs were messed up, you couldn’t hire a replacement, you’re working way more, or someone else goes on parental leave but you’re not planning on having a kid.

So I think it creates this world where, like, our humanity is honored outside of work, as opposed to just pretending like no one ever quits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right. If you’re hearing that, it might actually be very appreciated by your employer. Like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were planning on being here for four plus years. Most people don’t. That’s pretty cool. Okay. Well, we could probably figure that out. Sure. Thanks for the heads up.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, every company can figure that out, right? Like, companies have to figure out when people leave. They have to figure out when people go on parental leave. And so it’s not easy, right? This is not easy at the current state where there aren’t enabling policies for everyone. It’s not financially feasible for everyone.

But, again, like, looking at the trajectory of the paid parental leave movement, and the US is still the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t have, like, government-supported paid parental leave, but it’s increased over time. I think 40 states offer paid parental leave. And then if you apply to a job that doesn’t, it’s a bit of a head scratcher.

So I think the evolution of sabbaticals and sabbatical policies, I see taking that same trajectory, which is just, “Wait, I can’t take three months off every four years?” Like, it’s not a lot of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any pro tips, top do’s and don’ts to keep in mind as we start walking down this path?

DJ DiDonna
I think the first thing is to make sure that you are sufficiently disconnected from your routine life. So if you’re stepping away from work, and you’re coming back to your job, making sure that auto-away messages, emails are being deleted, like, “I will return on X date,” making sure you have support inside the organization to say, like, what’s the break-the-glass moment where, like, “If someone reaches out about this, like, here’s my phone number, but otherwise, no.”

If you’re leaving a job, I think the way to be disconnected is, like, don’t post about it on LinkedIn, don’t tell people you’re taking time off. Just do it. You can post at the end and say, “Here’s what I learned, and many of you might have noticed,” but no one notices. Like, everyone is focused on their own life.

Most often, you’ll hear, like, “You were gone for six months? Like, oh, my gosh, it felt like you were just here yesterday.” People are busy. And that second aspect of disconnection is making sure you’re gone long enough, right?

So, again, best practice, if you can take three months or more, awesome. If you can’t, take as much as you can. I think that it’s like a gateway drug where you take a month off, and you’re like, “That really flew by, and I didn’t get to do 90% of what I wanted to do. Maybe next time in five years, I’ll take more time off.” But just start to experiment with, like, why it’s so different to take extended leave off.

And the other thing, I would encourage people to take that time to get a coach, right? A coach or a therapist to try to, like, process who you are, and use that opportunity to grow as a person. And then, finally, a lot of people shift directly from, like, work-productivity mode into, like, life-productivity mode, and they’re like, “All right, I’m done with work. Now I need to become fluent in Portuguese,” or, “Now I need to do this project I’ve always wanted to do,” which is understandable.

But I encourage people to take a beat. Take a couple weeks, just heal. Get out of your head into your body. Do things like ceramics or yoga, like things that don’t just, like, swap out one brain thing for another, or one laptop thing for another. Like, return to kind of being human again, return to body movement, all that kind of stuff, music, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what you’re saying about the gateway drug and our beliefs and associations, I think, somewhere inside of us, I think we have kind of a belief that, “If I disappear for a while, you know, disaster will strike,” or, “If I can disappear for a while, then I guess I’m not all that essential.”

And so I’ve heard, talked to people who are taking paternity leave who have said such things. And I remember, I, one time, went on an eight-day silent retreat. And so my phone was totally off, and so I had this extensive email autoreply, as well as voicemail.

And it’s like, “Hey, if you need this, ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. If you really need something and it can’t wait, you know, here is the number of the retreat house.”

And I guess you can already guess, DJ, how many people felt the need to call the retreat house over eight days? Zero. And so, yeah, the world continues, and yet, we are also missed at the same time, you know?

DJ DiDonna
Yeah. I think that, listen, silver lining from COVID was that we all, especially knowledge workers, right, we found out that you actually don’t have to be in the office to get most of the work done. We had the technology to do it before that, but this kind of, like, forced us to say like, “Oh, my gosh, we can’t be in the same room. How do we get the work done?”

And so I think taking time off can be the same thing. It’s like, “How do we get this done when they’re not here?” Like, what changes when you step away from the office? I think we’re scared of change, we’re scared of uncertainty, you know, understandably, especially this kind of like age of AI.

But at the end of the day, like, you’re replaceable anyway. Like, no company, at least not any good ones, fail because one person leaves, right? And in America, you know, you are employed at will, right? And so you can be fired, for the most part, for no reason.

And so I think you have to, like, lean into that and be courageous, and say, like, “How can I arm myself? How can I improve myself in this age of uncertainty?” And in order to do that, it’s making sure you’re healthy and whole, right, you’re not burnt out, you have energy to kind of persist.

Making sure you have creative ideas for yourself and what you want to do in the future, and making sure you have confidence about what value you offer, like, “Oh, I got fired,” or, “That company shut down, like, I can find another job,” because you you have to, and that’s how the world of work is now. Like, no one is watching out for you and saving up for your retirement for you, unfortunately.

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

DJ DiDonna
A quote that I have in the book that really stuck with me is Wordsworth who says, “To begin, begin,” right? If you want to have the life that you’re not going to regret, if you want to check things off your bucket list before it’s too late, you got to begin.

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

DJ DiDonna
I think this concept of how you rest and recover. So I think everyone thinks that the best way to rest and recover is by doing nothing. And what we found in kind of drafting off other research is that, actually, engaging in activity that’s intrinsically chosen is a great way to recover.

So you don’t have to just sip coconuts on the beach. Many type A achiever people are, like, concerned, like, “What would I do on sabbatical? I’m going to be so bored.” You can do work, but it’s work of your own choosing. It’s intrinsically motivated. It’s something that matters to you. I thought that was a pretty empowering study to read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

DJ DiDonna
Anything by Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity is a really good one. And I think anything by Johann Hari, I think, does really good kind of journalistic investigative work. I’m reading The Three-Body Problem right now, which has been on my shelf forever. So I’m a sci-fi person as well.

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

DJ DiDonna
I don’t want to say what everyone says about using Claude Code, but it’s been pretty incredible to go through all of my notes over the ten years kind of investigating sabbaticals and help surface and identify people that I’ve spoken to who might be interested in the book. It’s been really nice to have like an assistant through the process.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

DJ DiDonna
It’s honestly doing the dishes in the morning. That sounds really lame, but I actually learned to love it on a meditation retreat. We should circle up on our meditation retreat experiences afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear a smidge more. Learning to love it in what sense?

DJ DiDonna
I think appreciating something like washing dishes as, like, work for the household that adds value, and also work where you can just focus on nothing else. There’s, like, a Nintendo Switch game which is about power washing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s a top seller.

DJ DiDonna
Which is crazy, but I get it, right? I mean, you wash dishes, you kind of give that gift to your family, you leave the kitchen better off. It’s the most kind of mid-40s dad thing to say possible, but there it is.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

DJ DiDonna
I think people talk about the cost of a sabbatical, the price, you know, “Does it affect your retirement?” I think it’s, “What’s the cost not to?” So, really, asking people, like, “What is the cost of living your life without pursuing your dreams, without identifying things on your bucket list, and going after it?”

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

DJ DiDonna
TheSabbaticalProject.org. If you search sabbaticals and DJ, I’m all over the internet. This is not the identity that I thought I would have, but here we are. And I am on LinkedIn a lot as well.

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

DJ DiDonna
I think, even outside of sabbaticals, this annual reflection of really looking back and saying, like, “How was my year? What do I want the next year to look like?” But I think one thing that people don’t do, you know, I teach at a grad school, and when you apply to college, when you apply to grad school, you have to fill out these applications and these essays, “What are three things, three mistakes, three successes? What do I want to do after I graduate from this place?”

I think, often enough, we don’t apply to the next four or five years of our life. So I kind of encourage my students, I’ve created a template where it’s like, “All right, four years from now, like what life are you applying to? Like, no one’s going to read the essays,” but as opposed to just like a one year frame, I like that four year apply to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, DJ, thank you.

DJ DiDonna
Great to meet you.

Jul 20
0

1168: How to Thrive When You Don’t Know What’s Next with Simone Stolzoff

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Simone Stolzoff shows you that it’s possible to turn uncertainty into your advantage. 

You’ll Learn

  1. How to build your uncertainty tolerance
  2. What to ask when you face indecision
  3. Why curiosity is the antidote to fear

About Simone

Simone Stolzoff is an author and journalist who explores big questions about work, meaning, and identity. A former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO, he is the author of two books: The Good Enough Job and How To Not Know. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on the TED stage. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Simone Stolzoff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Simone, welcome!

Simone Stolzoff
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn, once and for all, how to not know, and we’re all about sharpening the universal skills here. So it sounds like not knowing is, in fact, a skill that needs to be sharpened. Explain.

Simone Stolzoff
I definitely think that we live in an age where certainty is prized. You turn on the TV or you open social media and there’s someone telling you exactly when the market is going to crash or who’s going to win the election.

But the truth is, particularly with things that haven’t happened yet, certainty is a fallacy. And so in this age where the world is becoming more uncertain and our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline, being able to tolerate what we don’t know, to be okay with not knowing, to admit what we can’t or don’t know is an increasingly vital skill.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Our tolerance for uncertainty has gotten worse. Well, Simone, I would imagine we’ve had so much more practice in recent years or decades than before, I’d imagine our uncertainty skills muscles would be enhanced, would be strengthened, but it’s worse. Tell us the data, the research, the tale behind this.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, so there’s two things going on. One is that the world is becoming more uncertain. So there’s this researcher from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom, who’s been tracking global uncertainty over time. And what he’s found is the five highest measurements of uncertainty since he began collecting data in the ‘80s have all occurred in the last five years.

So between the pandemic, we have these wars overseas, economic precarity, AI, etc. But the other thing that’s less often talked about that I mentioned is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. Now, if you were comparing sort of apples to apples, you can’t necessarily take someone who was a hand-bloom weaver in the Industrial Revolution or someone who was living in Florence during the bubonic plague, and compare that feeling of uncertainty to our current moment.

But what we can do is look at how the internet and mobile phones, in particular, has affected our ability to sit with what we don’t know. And there’s another researcher named Nicholas Carleton out of the University of Regina who’s found that the rise of mobile phones has correlated with a rise in our intolerance for uncertainty.

I think phones do a few things. One is they create the expectation that answers should be readily available. I think this is even more pronounced when you think about chatbots or some of these AI tools that can give you a definitive answer for every single question you ask.

But the other thing is that it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don’t know. Building a tolerance for uncertainty is built through exposure. And when we can always reach into our phone to either distract ourselves or get a pseudo answer about what might be on the horizon, we no longer have to build that tolerance or build that muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay. So while we have more practice at being surprised by the upheaval in the world, we have less practice in the small daily things of not knowing because it’s, well, hey, I guess there’s been quite the evolution from, okay, the internet made it faster than going to the library, then the mobile phone made it faster than going to there, and then you had Google in the mix.

I remember when my teachers were excited about, “Wow, this Google thing is really handy.” It’s like, “You know what? It really is.” And now with the AI chatbots, which, occasionally, end your uncertainty but tell you the wrong answer, which is a bummer at times. So, understood. And how are we, I guess, fundamentally measuring uncertainty tolerance?

Simone Stolzoff
So there’s a few different ways to measure it. There is a diagnostic test that was devised by this psychologist named Michel Dugas that is, basically, answering 20 questions and it measures your uncertainty tolerance.

There are other ways to look at it in more of a high-level way. So, for example, one of the ways that a lot of the economics professors and researchers measure uncertainty in the world is through some proxy metrics, like looking at the mentions of uncertainty in newspapers or in earnings reports, etc.

But it’s also just a felt experience. Whereas, ten years ago, maybe, I would’ve been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. Now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out right away. And that’s a little bit of a lighter example.

But when it comes to things like what my career will look like, or how the war overseas will impact my business’ future investments, or how I think about the prospect of owning a home, these are the types of macro uncertainties that so many, particularly young people, are having to deal with right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, we’re feeling it. I resonate with that. And so I’d like to know, with all of your research and putting this book together, any really striking, surprising, and fascinating discoveries you’ve made with regard to us humans and the state of uncertainty?

Simone Stolzoff
Well, for one thing, we often would rather a certain bad outcome than have to deal with the ambiguity of not being sure. So there’s a few really interesting studies that have brought this to light. One was from the University of College London, where they broke research participants up into two groups.

And one group was given a 50% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock. And the other group was given a 100% chance, they were definitely going to get shocked. And, somehow, the group with the 50% chance were far more anxious and stressed than those with the 100% chance.

Another example comes from the healthcare space where there was a big study of breast cancer patients. And what they found is that women going through a breast cancer journey often found the period between getting a biopsy, getting a test, and getting the results of that test, as the most stressful part of the entire experience, more stressful than chemo or any surgeries.

And so our brains have this natural aversion to uncertainty, to ambiguity. And in some ways, this is biologically wired within us. If you think about an ancestor of ours in the jungle and there’s a rustling in the bushes and they’re not sure the source of that noise, that uncertainty could be lethal. And so our brains are trained to, when faced with an uncertain situation, try to get out of it as quickly as possible. We enter the fight, flight, or freeze response.

But the problem is that the fastest way out or the quickest or the safest way out isn’t always the best way out. And so I think about the sort of upside of building an uncertainty tolerance as being able to discover the possibilities that are sitting on the other side of our discomfort.

So maybe you have a friend who’s stuck in a job that they know isn’t quite right for them, or stuck in a relationship that they know isn’t quite right for them, but they would rather stay in this sort of low-grade suffering than have to deal with the ambiguity or the uncertainty of leaving that relationship or job and figuring out what’s on the other side.

We might know someone who is a creative, an artist or an entrepreneur. And unless they’re willing to tolerate their uncertainty of getting to the precipice of what they know and persisting, they’re likely to reach for derivative answers or things that look like other things that have been created before.

And so the argument of the book is that if we are able to develop more tolerance for uncertainty, we can more gracefully adapt to whatever the future holds and be able to create things that are beyond our imagination of what could exist today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking about my low uncertainty tolerance, which is funny because, you know, I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got businesses and it’s uncertain what my income will be month to month. Wildly so. And yet, there are a couple of times, I’m thinking about, like, early COVID in terms of it’s like, okay, there’s all kinds of uncertainty.

“What I want to know is, Is this a big deal? Are we going to be locked down for a long time or a short time? I want to know.” And so I would keep going to news and it would be it, well, it’s unknowable, right?

And I would just keep going. It’s like, “Well, some doctors being interviewed, so he might know a thing, and some analyst is being interviewed, okay. And someone who’s studied pandemics historically so he might know a thing.”

Or, right now, I’m in it, in terms of like, “Okay, so are we, in this AI business, is it going to take all of our jobs? Or is this bubble going to burst? Or is it not?” And so I’ll go to these YouTube videos, like, “Okay, this is a computer science genius who’s looked at a lot of technology.” He’s, like, “Absolutely it is, you know? And it’s underhyped.”

And then someone else says, “No, these things are…they don’t know anything. They’re just statistical models. They hallucinate left and right, you know? Look at all these people who’ve embarrassed themselves when they relied on the AI.” And it’s like, “Okay, but I kind of need to know. Like, do I need to go learn plumbing? Or should I pull my money out of the stock market?” And it’s unknowable, but we want to know.

And so we can go into, I’ve done this, a dangerous loop of repeatedly seeking information that’s not going to do anything. And I recall, like, CNN and the other news organizations during COVID, or like elections, like, “Who’s going to win this thing?” Like, it really peaks because everyone’s seeking that information again and again and again.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, it’s a survival instinct. When we think we know exactly what the future holds, it allows us to plan for that future and it makes us feel like we can survive. It’s the same reason why we like music that’s based on repeating patterns. When prediction is easy, we feel safe and secure.

The problem is, so often, we looked for certainty where there is no certainty to be found. So whether it’s, you know, “How long will this pandemic last?” or, “What will my job look like in ten years?” Or, one personal example, there was this moment in my own career where I was writing for The Atlantic, working for a magazine, I got a job offer to leave journalism to go join this design firm called IDEO. And I could not make up my mind for the life of me.

On one hand, it’s like, “Oh, woe is me,” you know, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. On the other hand, it didn’t feel like I was choosing between two jobs. It felt like I was choosing between two versions of me. It felt like my identity was so wrapped up in my job, which was the topic of my first book.

But, in many ways, I thought that if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, or if I talked to my Uber driver or yoga teacher, I would know exactly what is the perfect job for me. When, in actuality, when you’re at these career crossroads or at a moment in your life where there’s sort of path A and path B, you can’t know for certain which path will be better for you, ultimately. You have to be able to make choices in spite of the uncertainty.

And so, in many ways, this book, How to Not Know, is my own sort of existential balm for that younger version of me that couldn’t decide. And, hopefully, by helping people get more comfortable, more tolerant of uncertainty, they can be able to make decisions, live their lives in spite of not knowing exactly what is to come.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing there when you said you can’t know with certainty. And that’s true, you can’t know with certainty. And yet, on the flip side, it’s possible that there are some things that are knowable. And if you go know them, you’re like, “Oh, wow, I have to do that as an IDEO consultant? Forget it. Whoa, good thing I asked. No way.” Although that sounds like one of the coolest jobs ever for the record, so I’m a fan.

So there are some things that are knowable and it’s almost like, for me, as a pathologically curious person, it’s kind of dangerous. It’s, like, I have a false belief that, “Well, if I just ask the right questions of the right source, then I will know the right path.” And what’s so tricky is that’s often true and other times not at all true.

And other times this thing in the middle, like, “Yeah, you can learn a good chunk, but, yeah, it’s still going to be a mystery. What kind of project are you on? What’s your team like? You know, what’s the office culture like?” You you don’t know it till you’re in it.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, the psychologist who I mentioned, Michel Dugas, who was the first to link uncertainty intolerance with a lot of these anxiety disorders, the guy who came up with the diagnostic test, told me that when his patients are particularly intolerant of uncertainty, he tends to see one of two behaviors.

The first is they become obsessive information gatherers. So these are the people that need to, say, read three hundred reviews for a plastic water bottle before they buy something on Amazon. And the other is people become extremely impulsive. They just sort of take the first option they can because they don’t want to have to grapple or sit with that uncertainty.

And the truth is there’s a middle path between them. Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is things that you can do to gather more information about the decisions that you’re making, but, often, there are diminishing returns. And you can’t know exactly what a job will be like until you actually do the job.

And so, sort of in the idea parlance, you need to be able to run the prototype. You need to be able to treat your life a little bit more experimentally and provisionally and be able to actually take action rather than thinking that you can just work out every decision as a thought experiment and then know with a 100% certainty that you’ve made the right choice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, walk us through some of that then. In terms of in a world full of uncertainty and a human biology that doesn’t care for it, if we’re at risk for doing things impulsively or over-researching or spending too much of our life on CNN or YouTube and feeling our energy sucked away by these worries, information-seeking, etc., what are the most impactful moves, strategies, practices that we should take on?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we can talk through a few. I mean, one distinction that I like to make is between more acute uncertainty. So this is uncertainty about something that will be resolved, like, “Will I get this job?” “What will be the results of this test?” versus the more ambient uncertainty of, like, the existential threat of AI, things that we’re living underneath.

So when it comes to that first category of things that will actually be resolved, let’s use an example of a high school student who is uncertain about where they’re going to go to college. The first question I’d ask is, “Is there anything that you can do to control the outcome?”

So, say, the student hasn’t submitted their applications yet. There are things that they can do to actually control that outcome. They can try to get good grades, they can try to build good relationships with professors, they can try to write great essays and submit their application. So those are things that you can do to actually control the outcome.

If you’ve done all of those things and the answer is, “Okay, I’ve done what I can to control the outcome,” the next step on the decision tree is, “Can you prepare for multiple potential outcomes?” So often, when we are seeking certainty, we’re trying to resolve this internal dissonance that we feel. And so we fix our mind to one potential path or one potential outcome, and say, “I really want to go to UCLA. If I don’t go to UCLA, my life is ruined.”

But, in actuality, a more adaptive approach is to think about multiple potential outcomes. Think about maybe the pros and cons of these different choices rather than tying your entire identity to one particular path. And so if you can prepare for multiple contingencies is what the social scientists often say.

Then after that, once you’ve done what you can to prepare for multiple outcomes and do what you can to control the outcome, it really comes back to being able to regulate your nervous system, to be able to develop a level of acceptance for the uncertainty that you face. And so there are things that you can do, like yoga or meditation has been proven to help people get better at waiting.

Distraction. There’s a really fascinating study where they were measuring students’ stress levels as they’re waiting to receive the results of a test, and they gave the students three different types of Tetris games, and the first was very hard, the second was very easy, and the third was right at the threshold of their difficulty.

And they found that the first two groups had similar levels of stress and anxiety, whereas, the third group who were immersed in this flow state as they were playing this challenging game were able to better cope with the waiting period.

You can also look for silver linings in potential bad news. So this is what’s often called bracing for the worst or emotionally preparing for potential negative outcomes. But, at the end of the day, it comes to accepting the uncertainty of any sort of decision, like where to go to college.

And so you can apply this to applying for jobs or other sort of questions that you may be facing in your life. And I’ll stop there because I’ve been talking for a while, but we can also talk about some strategies that might be helpful with the more sort of ambient uncertainty that many of us are living underneath today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, it’s so funny, even as you were describing the situation with the, you know, picking a college, I thought my brain immediately went to information sources, “Oh, well, there’s websites such as Unibuddy and ZeeMee which allow you to speak with a student on the campus to get an inside perspective of blah blah blah.”

And so, it’s funny how hardwired and instinctual that is. And, certainly, I think that, and maybe this is where I’m in a bit stuck, in a bit of a loop. It’s like there’s, often getting more information is a great move.

And often there is some creativity to be exercised, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know those websites existed where I could talk to a real student and get the low down, the real dirt, you know, on the campus.” And then there comes a point in which it’s like, you know, paralysis analysis, spinning your wheels, just amplifying your uncertainty.

Do you have any good pro tips in terms of, like, “This is where to draw the line.” Like, “Okay, we’ve done enough information gathering and now we’re moving on”?

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I mean there’s no hard and fast rules. One thing I think about is, if you’re having conversations and not learning anything new, that might be a sign that you’ve sort of exhausted your information gathering.

Jeff Bezos and other people have made arguments that you should transact when you’re 70% ready, for example, because if you wait until you’re a 100% ready, you might miss the opportunity or it might never come.

There’s a great passage from the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath that I really love, where she’s describing this young girl who’s sitting underneath a fig tree. And each fig, in her mind, represents a different potential life path for herself.

She could marry this person or marry that person, or she could, you know, become an Olympic swimmer, or she could move to Paris, etc. And she’s going through this thought experiment of all these different potential figs that she could pick off the tree. And as she sits there, the figs are slowly ripening, and then over-ripening, and then rotting, and then falling off the tree.

And it’s this beautiful image because, you know, so often, if we’re in that information-gathering space, we might do it as an excuse or its own sort of form of comfort because we think, “Oh, we’re gathering information. We don’t need to make a choice yet.” When, in actuality, not making a choice is a choice in and of itself. And some of these opportunities that we think might be there forever are more time-bound that we think.

So, for the book, I talked to this professional poker player and former decision scientist, and her name is Annie Duke, and she gave me a few kind of nice proxies for when you can go fast versus go slow. Often, with these decisions, it’s not about sort of whether or not you can be certain about making the right choice. It’s about whether you can move quickly in making the decision or whether they require a more deliberative, slowed-down analytical thought process.

One of them that she taught me that I really like is called the only option test. And so imagine if you have two choices: go on a vacation to Paris or go on a vacation to Rome. You might think that the choice is really high stakes because it’s a costly vacation. You might not be able to take very many trips like that in your lifetime. And so you spend all of this time gathering information and creating spreadsheets and having pro and con lists.

But she asks a question that I think cuts through the noise, which is, “Imagine your only option was to go to Rome. Would you be happy? And then imagine your only option was to go to Paris. Would you be happy? And if the answer is yes to both of those questions, you can probably make the decision more quickly than you think.”

That’s not to say that things can’t go wrong, but the likelihood that you get swindled by an Italian cab driver or a Parisian cab driver or get food poisoning from undercooked escargot or, you know, undercooked pasta carbonara, or whatever, are probably equally likely. And because the answer is yes to both of the situations, you can imagine, “Okay, if it were my only option, I’d be happy with it. So maybe the decision matters a little bit less than I think.”

So there’s certain sort of like proxy rules or tricks that might be helpful in those sorts of situations of whether gathering more information is actually in service of making a better decision, or it’s just something that you’re doing because there’s a certain comfort in being able to feel like you’re making progress where you have control over an outcome, even if the outcome isn’t necessarily in your control.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot as a shortcut. And I’m thinking about, so, you know, I have a company, Cashflow Podcasting, we launch podcasts for people. And sometimes, and I’ve been through it myself, agonizing over the microphone choice because it feels so consequential, and yet it’s really not.

People have their preferences, you know, about what they like to wear. And that is also, you know, not all that consequential. But people will speak intensely on reviews of microphones about how one is better than the other or whatever. And it’s like, “Yeah, that one’s fine, too. That one’s also fine. That one was also fine.” And so I love that.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, one thing I like to think about is, like, the difference between one-way door and two-way door decisions as well. So one-way door decisions are decisions that are hard to reverse, things like, “Who should I marry?” “Should I buy this house?”

But the majority of decisions that we make in our day-to-day life are two-way door decisions. They’re decisions that, even if you buy the microphone that is not ideal, it’s probably a lower-stakes decision than you think. You could return it, you can get another microphone, you could eat the $150 or whatever the microphone costs.

And the problem is so many of us take the analytical frameworks of one-way door decisions and apply them to these reversible decisions, these two-way door decisions that we make every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good. That’s good. More of these, please. Give us the tricks.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, there’s this ethicist I spoke to, who I really liked a lot, named Ira Bedzow. And so he’s an ethicist, he works for Emory University, so he both works as the ethicist in the hospital and he consults with college students as they’re about to embark on their careers.

And whenever someone comes to him with a predicament or, you know, a question where they’re trying to decide between multiple paths, he always asks them the same three questions. The first is, “What do you want?” And the idea here is to try to get out of your head and into sort of an embodied felt experience out of your brain and into your body.

And the second question is, “Do you want to want that?” which is a little bit heady, but it taps into what philosophers often call our second-order desires. So, “Do I want a cigarette? Sure. Do I want to want a cigarette? Maybe not.”

And then the third question is the one that I think is the most important, which is, “What does that choice say about who you are as a person?” And the reason why I like that third question is because it ties our decisions to our values and our identity.

Because when you’re at a point of indecision, often you can’t know at that moment how that decision or how that choice will actually work out. But if you make a choice that’s in alignment in with the person that you want to be or your value systems, what you believe in, hopefully, you can stand by that choice even if you don’t get the outcome that you desire.

And so I like those sort of three questions as a framework to help someone work through a moment of indecision, “What do you want? Do you want to want that thing? And what does that choice say about who you are?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice trio there. And what’s fun about the last question is, sometimes, the answer to the last question is, “What does it say about who I am? Like, nothing. It’s really pretty minor, actually, now that I think about it. Huh? Okay.” So I guess in such scenarios, what’s your take on just like flipping a coin or rolling a die?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, there’s a chapter about this in the book where I profiled this guy named Max Hawkins, who basically flipped a coin for every decision in his life. He created an algorithm that would make all of his life decisions on his behalf.

So it started with tapping into the Uber API and creating an app that would call an Uber to his house and bring him to a location in the city known only to the driver to try and randomize his existence and get outside of his bubble. And then he started doing it with Facebook events where he would, you know, roll the dice and go to a random public Facebook event chosen by this algorithm.

And at its most extreme, he created an app to tell him where he should live around the world. And he quit his job and, for two years, every month or two, he would pick up and leave and go to Gortina, Slovenia, or Dubai, or Hong Kong, or Ho Chi Minh City, depending on where this app told him to live. And, you know, it’s an extreme case of randomization or rolling the dice.

But I do think that having some aspect of rolling the dice or flipping the coin can be helpful. There’s a study out of the University of Basel in Switzerland where they had people flip coins when making big decisions about their life. And what they found is, even if you don’t go with whatever the coin tells you to do, having that as a data point can be really helpful information.

You flip a coin, you say, “Oh, thank you. Finally. It gave me the answer that I actually wanted.” Or you flip a coin and it tells you to do something, you say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that.” It can be really revealing of what your actual true preferences are.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, I’ve done that with my kids. It’s, like, flip a coin and then it’s like before we reveal, it’s like, “Well, which side do you really want it to be? Well, then how about we just do that?”

Simone Stolzoff
That’s great. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“And we don’t even need to look.” And then they’re like, “No, we have to see.” “Okay, here it is.”

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I have a friend, Jordan, who, whenever someone comes to him with, like, life advice or whatever, he always comes out of the gate super strong, and says, “Okay, you should definitely do this.” And, by being so strong, it gives his, you know, mentee or his patient or whatever, something to react to, and often that reaction can be really telling.

Because, often, when we’re gathering information or flipping the proverbial coin in our heads, we are really good at playing our own devil’s advocate. We can sort of make the bear case to whatever we might be inclined to choose. But, often, life is about transacting. It’s about being able to make choices in spite of not knowing, in spite of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, any everyday pro tips for professionals making the decisions that pop up regularly?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, one principle that I talk about in the book is about finding your anchors. So when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So, professionally, maybe you are dealing with some of the anxiety or stress of not knowing whether your job will be made redundant in the next few years because of AI, or whether you’re working in the right industry, or whether the economic future of your organization is sound.

One thing that I often say is, “How can you bring some certainty to that equation?” So when you find those anchors, whether they are your commitment to live in a particular place, or to be married to a particular person, or your commitment to a set of values, those anchors become the steady sort of rocks that will remain amidst all of the changing winds around you.

The second thing that I often tell people is that you have to be willing to trust in your future self. And so I had this friend named Emily Anhalt, who is a fellow author. She wrote this book called Flex Your Feelings, and she’s a psychotherapist.

And she had this moment when she was in her early 20s. Her mom was given a potentially terminal diagnosis, and she spent week after week in the hospital by her mom’s bedside, and she was really struggling to cope. She was riding this sort of anticipatory roller coaster of fear and anxiety.

And one day, a family friend of hers named Bill came by to visit. And Bill is an oncology doctor, so he has a lot of experience with people at the end of their lives. And he said, “Emily, how are you doing?” And she said, “Honestly, I’m not doing so well. I’m really struggling to cope and I don’t know what I’ll do if my mom dies.”

And Bill said something very wise. He said, “Emily, the version of you that will handle that tragic event if or when it takes place will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more context, more information, and be better equipped to handle it than you are today. You have to be willing to trust in your future self’s ability to handle your future problems.”

And I love this idea of sort of trusting in your future self because, so often, we rush out and meet our suffering. We think, “Oh, if this thing happens, it’s going to be bad for X, Y, and Z reason.” And in Emily’s case, she’s really glad that she got this advice because her mom ended up making it out of the hospital and she didn’t needlessly have to suffer about something that never came to pass.

And then the last sort of piece of advice that I’ll just give to people in facing uncertainty is to try to choose curiosity over fear. As we talked about in the beginning of our chat, our natural tendency when faced with uncertainty is to perceive it as a threat, to see it as something that might be, you know, at odds with our survival.

But, in actuality, there are so many great things that can come from the other side of uncertainty. And curiosity has this magical power to alchemize uncertain situations from things that are just the source of fear into being able to see the possibilities or the opportunities that may emerge. So find your anchors, trust in your future self, and try to choose curiosity over fear.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like about that notion of your future self being born into being able to handle it is that if we look to our past selves, we can see, like, “Oh, I’ve been dealt some challenging circumstances, like this thing happened. Remember when we had to deal with this, this, and this all at once? Remember when this person died? Remember when I was broke?”

Like, there are elements in our past. It’s like the past self managed to deal with that more or less fine. And so, too, we may expect the future self to do likewise.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we all suffer from what social psychologists often call the end of history illusion, which is this idea that when we look backwards, when we look at our past, we see all of the different ways that we’ve changed and evolved and been able to handle adversity.

But when we think about the future, we often think the person that we are today will be fixed forever. We think that, you know, we’re fully baked. And what I like about understanding this sort of cognitive bias or this, you know, illusion is that we are going to continue to change. And, in some ways, that might take some of the pressure off.

Your preferences in 10 years might be very different from your preferences today, because your preferences 10 years ago are probably different from what they are today, your desires, the person you want to be, what you need from your life.

And so rather than think that you need to know exactly what the future holds or have it all figured out, you can have a little bit more humility. You can trade some of that pride or hubris for a sense of openness and, hopefully, accept that you don’t know exactly what is to come, but in some ways, that’s what gives life its texture. That’s what brings serendipity and surprise and some of the magic.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, well, you know, related to what we were saying, there’s this quote I have in the book from this psychologist named Rollo May, and he says that, “Commitment is healthiest not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt.”

And I love that because he’s basically saying that you don’t need to be a 100% sure before you commit. And, actually, committing, even if you hold a little bit of doubt, can be a great way for you to build your character.

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

Simone Stolzoff
There’s another study that I like from the book from Northwestern University, where they had a big group of students who were all associated with the Greek life. So they were in fraternities and sororities. And they had different groups solve a murder mystery.

And some of the groups were all people from the same organization, so people that were all in the same frat or same sorority, and other groups were heterogeneous, so they had a mix of people from different groups. And what they found is when people were in groups where they were only with people from their organization, they came to a decision much faster.

They were more confident in the decision that they came to, and they were more often wrong. Whereas, when there was a mix of people from different organizations, there was more friction and they felt less good about the process of coming to a conclusion, but they were much more accurate.

And I like this because it talks about, you know, the value of diverse perspectives and decision-making, but also that, you know, part of what makes group-think so attractive is that it’s the friction-free path to certainty, when you can just sort of all agree and outsource your decision-making to maybe the loudest person in the room or the highest paid person in the room.

But, in actuality, when multiple people are able to voice their perspectives, you come to a better decision, even if it doesn’t feel as good while you’re coming to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Simone Stolzoff
It’s called London Falling. It’s by this reporter from The New Yorker, and it chronicles this family in London whose son tragically committed suicide and sort of why and how.

And it’s this incredibly well-reported, deep research, page-turning read about how a family where everything seemed to be fine on paper was torn apart.

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

Simone Stolzoff
I always carry around a back-pocket notebook. And I find that, like, when I have my mole skin, it’s, you know, like, wallet, keys, cellphone, mole skin, I am more open to the ideas that the world holds.

And I like that it’s analog. I like that I don’t get distracted by it because there’s no other apps besides just the ability to write things down. And so having just a really accessible way to jot down ideas or to make observations as I have them has been an invaluable tool for me as a writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Simone Stolzoff
I listen to the radio every morning. This is a relatively new habit. But my wife and I, as we’re cooking breakfast for our son, always turn on this radio station called KEXP that’s based in Seattle. And it’s a sort of a college radio station for adults. It’s this really eclectic music sourcing. And it’s really nice not to rely on an algorithm or to rely on my own preferences, and let these experts in music curation sort of take us into the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate, folks quote it back to you often?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, from my first book, The Good Enough Job, the big idea is about the value of diversifying your identity. And I think the quote that really resonates with people the most is that, “Some people do what they love for work. Others do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they’re not working, and neither is more noble.”

And I think that’s particularly relevant to a show like this where, you know, yes, we want to be awesome at our jobs, but also that being awesome at your job or having a great job is in service of, hopefully, having a great life and to not confuse the two, I think, is very important.

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, my website has all my socials, etc. It’s just SimoneStolzoff.com or you can go to HowToNotKnow.com, which might be a little bit easier to find. I also have a Substack called “The Article Book Club,” where I just send out one great article written by someone else every other week. And so if you’re into long-form journalism or just reading the best of what the internet has to offer, I would suggest “The ABC.”

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I think, as we talked about building tolerance for uncertainty, one of the best ways to do so is through exposure, through microdosing uncertainty. So if there’s a way this week, whether it’s taking a new route to work, or striking up a conversation with a new colleague, or trying to do things a little bit differently than how you might have done things in the past, being able to expose yourself consciously to that uncertainty will do two things.

One, it might expose a better way of working or a better way of doing things. And, two, it’ll cognitively prepare you for other uncertainties that you may face in the future. So how can you shake up the routine? How can you choose to expose yourself to uncertainty so that you might be better equipped to face the uncertainty that you’ll face without choosing in the future?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Simone, thank you.

Simone Stolzoff
Thanks for having me, Pete. Cheers.

Jul 16
0

1167: Mastering the Three Elements of Charisma with Olivia Fox Cabane

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Olivia Fox Cabane reveals the behaviors and practices that help develop your personal charisma.

You’ll Learn

  1. The number one myth surrounding charisma
  2. How to amplify your presence in just a few seconds
  3. The master key to looking and feeling more powerful

About Olivia

Olivia Fox Cabane is a leading authority on the science of charisma and the bestselling author of The Charisma Myth and The Net And The Butterfly, translated into 36 languages. 

Formerly Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX, she has lectured on charisma, leadership, and innovation at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Marine War College, and the United Nations. As cofounder of the KindEarth.Tech Foundation, she supports foodtech companies advancing environmental sustainability. 

Her clients include the leadership of Apple, Google, TikTok, Deloitte, UBS, and JP Morgan as well as founders of Airbnb, Brex, Paradigm, and Presight. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Olivia Fox Cabane Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Olivia, welcome!

Olivia Fox Cabane
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you about charisma. And, in fact, I mentioned earlier you’ve been on our list for a full decade. And now here we come. Your Charisma Myth book got its second edition now. And I’d love it if you could hit us with it straight up, what is the charisma myth or kind of the main thing people misunderstand about charisma?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The single biggest myth about charisma is that it’s this innate magical quality that you either have it or you don’t. And, in fact, as researchers have shown in controlled laboratory experiments, they were able to raise and lower people’s level of charisma as if they were turning a dial.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, I think many of us would say, “Hmm, I would enjoy turning up my charisma dial from time to time.” Can you share with us what went down in these experiments and what were the results?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It turns out that charisma is nothing but behaviors. And the reason that we think that it’s innate is because, usually, the “naturals” at charisma learn these behaviors so early that by the time we meet them, usually in early adulthood at the earliest, it looks as if they’ve always had them.

But, in fact, there are people who consciously learn charisma step by step, and Steve Jobs is one of the most public examples. You can see, if you look at his videos from 1983 to 2011, he learned each of the three elements of charisma, presence, then power, then warmth, one at a time. And it’s fascinating to see his charisma grow over the years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s a fun fact. I was unaware Steve Jobs was originally not so charismatic. Can you unpack the story for us?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So if you look at Steve Jobs in the ‘80s, he really is coming across as nerdy, as having trouble with eye contact, for example. And if you look at it from a charisma science perspective, he is low on all three of the measures. He’s low on presence, he’s low on power, he’s low on warmth.

And the first thing he learns is presence. You can see him being able to be more still, more focused on the audience. He fidgets less. He then gradually learns power where you can see how much more space he takes on stage. You can hear in his voice the way his inflection drops in the right places.

And, eventually, the last piece that he learns is warmth. And what’s interesting with Jobs is that it’s not warmth towards the audience, it’s enthusiasm towards the product that he is presenting and the topic he’s speaking about. Steve Jobs, as Carmine Gallo once said, “Steve Jobs doesn’t sell computers. He sells the promise of a better world. He spoke like a prophet.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Okay, so you’ve observed this by viewing the evolution of his performances in keynote speeches and presentations over time?

Olivia Fox Cabane
I have, yeah, but one of the fascinating things with the new edition is that I was lucky enough to have Dr. Oliver Niebuhr, who’s the guy in vocal and digital charisma. And he and his team actually analyzed the vocal charisma of CEOs, and they just compared Steve Jobs to, for example, Mark Zuckerberg.

And in the later years, you can see Steve Jobs clocking in at 93% on their formula of the elements of charisma. Zuck, his max was 57% on the charisma metric.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’ve got these three components, and could you share with us perhaps a story of someone you’ve seen up close and personal go through a transformation in their own charisma levels?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, one of the most interesting areas where I’ve seen this personally has been in Silicon Valley, where you see young founders who have to learn charisma because it really is the number one investment criteria. In fact, not in theory, people always think that investors fund the right idea, the right product.

Personally, what I’ve witnessed is that investors fund the right person. And one of the best studies on that was actually in 2008 when the MIT Media Lab was able to predict with over 80% accuracy the outcome of negotiations, sales calls, and business plan pitches without listening to a single word of content.

They were analyzing the ratio of speaking to listening, they were analyzing the voice fluctuation, and they were analyzing the emotions that were emitted. And so this is something that, when I was at StartX, I had to teach the young founders of, “Listen, if you are agonizing over every single word in your PowerPoint, it’s going to be a great PowerPoint, but realize how little impact it’s going to have compared to your body language.”

And one of the most vivid examples of that was actually the story of Marilyn Monroe, who took a photographer and a reporter one day to Grand Central Station because she wanted to prove that she could flip from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe at will.

And so it was fascinating to hear from the reporter that she was first Norma Jeane, and she went down into Grand Central Station, boarded the subway car, and even though there was a camera clicking the whole time, no one noticed her.

Then she emerges back onto the street, and the reporter said there wasn’t a grand gesture, “It was just she fluffed up her hair, struck her pose, but gradually, it was as if she transformed into Marilyn under our very eyes, and the crowd went nuts within a few minutes.” They had to shove people to help her escape the growing crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
This is after she was famous?

Olivia Fox Cabane
This was after she was famous. She was able to go down into Grand Central and not be noticed by anyone just by turning off her charisma, then re-emerged onto the streets and show herself as Marilyn just by a conscious effort, because Marilyn wanted to prove that the Marilyn persona was something that she could turn on and off.

And this is just an illustrative example of what the studies have shown that charisma is nothing but behaviors, and that in these lab experiments, the researchers, by instructing the participants to display certain behaviors, were able to get them to be more or less charismatic.

Pete Mockaitis
This is mind blowing in so many ways. And so, well, let’s really get into the nitty-gritty here then. So, all right, we’ll start with Marilyn Monroe. What are the key levers or switches or moves that transform one from Norma Jeane Baker into Marilyn Monroe?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So here we’re operating on guesswork because we, unfortunately, don’t have a video recording of that episode. But my best guess would be that what she was doing in the subway was making herself look small, and it was emanating the “I’m no one, don’t look at me.” So this is a question of how you keep your eyes down. It’s a question of how little space you take up, versus if you are going to make yourself the big gorilla in the room.

And one of the really interesting practices that I’ve seen really help with students, particularly for women, is when they start doing martial arts because that will genuinely change the way that they move through space.

And it was really interesting when Stanford’s boxing coach, at one point, gave his students the exercise of walking through crowded areas, learning how to display a body language such that other people would move out of their way, because he was explaining that the ability to portray dominance was one of the keys in pre-games.

And so if you look at studies, the power component is sometimes called power, sometimes confidence, sometimes dominance, sometimes assertiveness. It’s all a component of power. It isn’t actually the real power to command an army because, as humans, because we evaluate people in just so few instances, we’re always inferring.

And so we infer that someone who is displaying confidence must have something that they are confident about, must have a reason to be confident. And that is why, if you look at the cues from which we read dominance, assertiveness, social status, they, really, a lot of them come down to how much confidence your body language displays.

Here’s the irony. Have you ever had a conversation when you say something and your brain goes, “Ooh, that was stupid?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure.

Olivia Fox Cabane
What happens to your face?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe a wince. It’s just kind of like a “Yikes!” kind of a face, yeah.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah. So two things happen at that moment. First, one piece that might be obvious is that the human brain, being terrible at understanding the difference between imagination and reality, which is the reason why when you watch a scary movie, even though you know it’s just a movie, your brain sees blood and guts on the screen, sends you straight into fight or flight mode, adrenaline rushing through your system.

And the sympathetic nervous system sends the body’s resources to the important survive-the-next-10-seconds things, like muscles, vision acuity, etc., shuts down the unnecessary parts like digestion, immune system, and cognitive reasoning, the expensive part of the brain.

When you attack yourself in that way, what’s really interesting is that the brain isn’t great at understanding that that is a self-attack, that there’s not a real saber-toothed tiger. But here’s the other thing. Even though that was a self-directed criticism, self-directed coldness or judgment, the other person doesn’t know that.

All they know is that, while you were looking at them, listening to them, talking to them, and, therefore, presumably thinking about them, they accurately read coldness, criticism, and judgment on your face. So, naturally, they’re going to assume it’s about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think that that is deep inside of us, just associations. And just yesterday, I was in a physical therapy appointment, and someone was, she seemed perfectly charming, friendly. We did some strength testing, and then she used this device called a shockwave on me. And it hurt, and I actually yelled. I was surprised.

And it was so funny, I had, generally, positive associations with this person, like, “Oh, what a friendly professional.” And then after this, it’s just like, “I don’t like this person.”

And I knew this is not rational. But because she caused me physical pain in an intense, surprising fashion, I was just like, “I don’t really feel like chit-chatting with you anymore.” It’s just there. We just associate and we can’t help ourselves.

Olivia Fox Cabane
One of the absolute truths of charisma is that it’s not just how you make people feel about you, it’s also how you make them feel about themselves. If you make them feel good about themselves, they will associate that feeling to you. If you make them feel bad about themselves, same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so Olivia, please, lay it on us, in terms of what are these behaviors that are going to make us super duper charismatic, persuasive, and funded and sold and all the good things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So presence, power, and warmth. With presence, the interesting thing is that this is where, in today’s day and age, you can gain the biggest bang for your buck, if you will, because presence really comes down to being able to stay fully focused on the other person in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
And with an increasing amount of us distracted every minute by our phones, watches, rings, whatever it is, if you can be one of the few people who can stay fully focused on the other person, you would be amazed at the outsized impact that just a small increase in presence has.

And my favorite trick here is, if you ever notice that you’re in a conversation, but only half your brain present and the other half was busy doing something else, realize that that has a real cost, because there’s a good chance that your eyes glazed over, your facial reactions were a split second delayed, and people can catch that so fast. It’ll come across as an incongruence and you’ll come across as not quite authentic.

Instead, if you can focus on your toes for a split second, that’ll get your brain to scan your whole body from head to, of course, toes and get you very physically present back in the moment, get back in the conversation right after that. So presence, that’s step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, my toes. And I’m also curious about eye contact? Is there optimal amount, approach, style?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so eye contact is an interesting one. If you’ll notice in conversations, often the speaker is the one who will look away while they’re constructing their sentences, or halfway through a sentence, whereas, the listener will tend to have more sustained eye contact.

Now, this is where, of course, neurodiversity comes in, and for people for whom eye contact is less comfortable, you can try looking between the eyes, sometimes at the forehead. But eye contact has one particularly interesting effect, which is deep sustained eye contact can send phenethylamine, the same chemical that is known for producing the phenomenon we know as love at first sight.

Pete Mockaitis
So sustained eye contact can produce love at first sight chemicals. Interesting. Can sustained eye contact also feel weird, uncomfortable, jarring, threatening, off putting?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It can, depending on what other signals are happening at the same time. Sustained eye contact with an aggressive body language can absolutely create a feeling of belligerence. Sustained eye contact with a warm, accepting Dalai Lama kind of body language can get people to melt into a puddle of tears. So it’s just one element.

But one of the most hilarious studies was one in which participants were asked to look at each other and count the number of blinks while they were…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right? And after the research, it turns out the researchers didn’t actually care about the number of blinks. They just wanted people staring at each other without feeling self-conscious. And a staggering number of participants reported increased affection, and some even passionate feelings for one another. It happened fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, so with presence, not so much fidgeting, fully focusing on the person. If your mind is elsewhere, you’re probably sending that message somehow through your face or something. So a quick thought to the toes can get you back in the groove. Maintained eye contact in a warm, Dalai Lama-ish non-threatening format is handy. Anything else we should cover on presence before moving on?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The honest answer is that mindfulness is the single best training for presence. There just is no better way, and mindfulness is hard. If you’ve ever gone on a silent retreat, I’ve always found that the silence is the easy part. The solitude, honestly, you don’t get enough of it. The stillness in the mind, that’s the challenge. So being able to keep your mind centered is a very difficult but a very worthy challenge.

The good news is that even a small increase in your level of presence can really have a big difference. And one of the fastest ways to get that is when you’re saying goodbye to someone in person, pay attention to the way you’re ending the conversation. Are you already, in your mind and with your body language, focused on something else as you, for example, shake their hand and turn away?

Or can you, in the last couple of seconds, while you’re shaking their hand, sustain eye contact, hold their hand for a minute longer with full eye contact, and then turn away? It’s really just one second’s difference. That’s all it is. But it’s the difference between giving the feeling that you were fully focused on them the whole time and the feeling that you were already moving into your next phase of whatever you’re focusing on while still officially looking at them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, with the listening, assuming you got the right body language, posture, curiosity, warmth, etc., going for you, can we overdo it? Do we know how much is too much?

Olivia Fox Cabane
You can overdo it. There’s a couple of downsides. So people usually don’t believe me when I tell them that there’s real downsides to being charismatic. They often think that I’m talking about, “Oh, you can become very powerful and do bad things.” Yeah, sure, that’s obvious.

The less obvious one is that people genuinely can become addicted to your presence. Charisma is a high that people can become addicted to. But the bigger one is that, with the intensity of attention, you kind of create a cocoon within which people can end up spilling their guts.

And then, afterwards, when they realize just how much they’ve shared, comes the ego backlash of, “Oh, God, what have I said?” And that’s when they can associate with you the shame, embarrassment of what they said, the resentment that you somehow got them to spill their guts.

So there are some real downsides to too much charisma and to too focused a state of listening. It can turn into therapy if you’re not cautious, which is where it can be useful to, occasionally, interject your own stories to give them a sense of, “Here’s what you’ve shared. Here’s what I’m sharing.” That can give them a sense of just how much they’ve been self-revealing, and also it can give them a chance to back off if they want to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super thank you. All right. So that’s presence. Let’s talk about power.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, with power, as we were saying, the interesting thing about power is, because it’s read through confidence, the counterintuitive point is that the way to confidence is usually less about building yourself up, and it’s usually more about learning how to remove the obstacles, such as self-criticism and self-doubt.

Because self-criticism is so powerful, because the brain reads it as a real attack, ironically, strength, and power will often come from self-compassion and self-forgiveness. Because the ability to move on quickly when you’ve just decided that you messed up, that is one of the most important routes to sustained confidence and strength in your body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. The ability to move on quickly when you discover you’ve messed up, How do we get that skill of that quick rebound?

Olivia Fox Cabane
A couple of steps. The first thing is de-stigmatize. Whatever it is that is happening, let’s say you’re getting an attack of the imposter syndrome. So with the imposter syndrome, we know now that it’s a fairly common phenomenon, that the vast majority of people experience it at some point or another, that even though it feels like you’re an imposter, it’s just a matter of time before people expose you as a fraud. This is really just a normal experience. De-stigmatize that feeling.

Or if it is the feeling of having failed, it can help to remember that some of the best baseball players or soccer players have occasionally failed eight times out of ten, in some cases nine times out of ten. De-stigmatizing to detaching. The brain, as we’ve just said, does its best to present us with an accurate view of reality but it can’t because there’s just too much going on.

So our brain is almost always going to present us with a distorted view of reality. Sometimes it’s a little distorted, it’s pretty accurate, sometimes it’s widely distorted. So just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true. So de-stigmatize normal experience. Detach, just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true.

Your brain’s job is to make up thoughts. Just because you have an ugly thought doesn’t mean that you are a terrible person. So de-stigmatize, detach, and then rewrite.

So the most useful tool for me of all in this is cognitive re-framing. So imagine that you’re driving to a key pitch, a presentation, and you’re focused, you’re locked in, you know your stuff, you’re on the freeway. All of a sudden, a huge black SUV cuts you off, waves in front of you, almost runs you off the freeway, and then exits. How does that make you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Mad, scared, disoriented.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right. You completely have lost your focus, you might have your sympathetic nervous system activated, adrenaline. But you need to get back into a good state. Now, what if through a total fluke coincidence, you learned that the driver of that big black SUV wasn’t an asshole driver?

It was a distraught mother whose baby was choking in the back seat. And it was all she could do to even keep the car on the freeway while trying to save her baby’s life. Would that immediately change how you feel about the event?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so anger disappears in terms of like, “Okay, I am not wronged by a jerk. But, rather, I unfortunately, was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the midst of this situation.” So the anger goes away. I could still be kind of shaken up and scared, but the anger’s gone.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Sure. But the anger is gone, and then it is much easier to get back into a state of focus if you don’t feel that you have been personally attacked by. And so in most situations in life, you’ll never find out whether it’s an idiot driver or a distraught mother. Choose the version of reality that gets you into the best mental state.

And the reason this is critical is because there is so much body language emanating every second that you cannot control it consciously. The best and really the only way to emanate charisma is to control your mind. Charisma originates in the mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Choose your version of reality. What’s funny is, sometimes, it can be a little far-fetched. And as long as it’s remotely plausible, it does work. So, for example, I know this is not likely to be true, and yet, it does wonders for me.

There have been a couple of times I was disappointed that I wasn’t invited to a wedding. It’s like, “Oh, I thought we were kind of close. I thought we were pals. Well, what’s this about?”

And I say, “Well, Pete, the bride doesn’t want to be seeing you on her wedding day and be filled with regret that she doesn’t get to marry you. That’s going to put a damper on the day. So, of course, she’s not going to invite you to her wedding.”

So now that is so far-fetched, and I’m not that narcissistic to believe that, you know, every woman wishes they could marry me. And yet, I’ll tell you what, in the moment, I feel so much better about not being invited to the wedding. I chose that version of reality, rather far-fetched, but it got the job done for me emotionally.

Olivia Fox Cabane
If it can make you laugh, and if it can get your brain to entertain a different possibility, even for a few minutes, you’ll get the neurochemical change in your brain, and that will get you the body language change you need. So from my perspective, it’s really whatever is the most adaptive, whatever works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, let’s talk about warmth.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So warmth is another one of those you can’t fake it, you have to genuinely feel it. And so sometimes it’s easy because these are people you like. But sometimes it’s harder because sometimes you’re dealing with difficult people.

So with people that you like or people who are just strangers, it’s the fairly easier route of the best way to make a great first impression is, before you walk into the room, knowing that first impressions happen so fast, they happen in just a few seconds, imagining that the person you’re about to meet is a long-lost best friend.

And, really, to make it real, learn from Olympic athletes. Visualization works best when you get the five senses involved. So taste the s’mores that you ate together around the campfire, hear the songs they sung so badly off key. Imagine it vividly.

And then you walk into the room with all that warm and friendly body language. And because, “Hey, thanks, mirror neurons,” one of whose jobs it is to replicate in them what they see in you, they will, in general, people will accept whatever you project.

If you’re projecting confidence, presence, and we’ve been friends for ages, subconsciously, some part of them is going to be feeling, “Oh, this is a warm and confident guy, and it feels like I’ve known him forever.” Why? Because that’s the body language you’re emitting, right?

What if it’s a total jerk or someone with whom you have a long history, or someone who’s really difficult? There’s a couple different ways here. If it’s in the moment, go nuclear. I don’t care what you have to imagine.

You think that your example with the bride was far-fetched. I want you to imagine that they got a terminal illness diagnosis, their dog got run over, their spouse asked for a divorce, whatever you have to imagine, just for a few seconds to get a biochemical shift to get you the right body language.

But if this is a long-term situation, again, let’s use the ability to hijack the brain, the best tool I’ve ever seen, and it works extraordinarily, you wanted to know what has worked the best with the students, this is the one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, first, you write a letter from you to this person, longhand, with all the things you ever wished that you’d ever said to that person. This is not surprising, you may have done this already. Second, you write their answer to you with everything you ever wished they had said to you, recognizing how wrong they were, anything you wish they had said.

That’s the letter that you read every night for a week. Night one, it’s going to feel weird and awkward. Night seven, you’ll be stunned at how a part of your brain says, “Oh, well, I know I got emotional satisfaction. I know they admitted they were wrong.” The brain is so hijack-able, use it to your advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is striking! I believe it. It’s taken me a while to come around to these principles. I think I have no doubt now that they are effective. I guess I’m wondering, is it dangerous or wrong in some way to be flirting with falsehood in this fashion, Olivia?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes to both possibly. And that’s why I always want to be upfront with when people ask me, “But is it manipulation?” Yes, it is. But then from my perspective, anytime you are trying to convince someone of something, you’re literally trying to change the inside of someone else’s head. How is that not manipulation?

From my perspective, the two guardrails that I look at are intent and impact. Is your intent good? And is your impact good? If the answer to these two is yes, go for it.

Pete Mockaitis
In some ways, like the lies we tell to ourselves for our benefit, I guess there’s another moral distinction there, as opposed to lying to them in terms of like, “Oh, this product can absolutely do that thing that you want,” when you know that it can’t. It’s like, “No, bad move.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, though I do want to give a caution, as many others have said about visualization. It is important, when you are using them for a future outcome for yourself, that if you’re visualizing the outcome, this will only change things if you previously didn’t believe it was possible and if that belief was key.

So, for example, you can visualize yourself winning the lottery all you want. That is not going to change anything. It is the visualization of the behaviors. Visualizing yourself. You know, the studies that were fascinating, when people were actually strengthening muscles by just visualizing themselves, playing the piano, for example, or doing certain motions, and not just the brain changes, but actually the body change.

So visualizing the behavior is key if the behavior has to change. Visualizing the outcome is great, but only has an impact if the belief about the outcome is what was holding you back before.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So that could shift belief, it’s like, “Oh, it’s impossible that I could ever start my own business.” But then you visualize it many times, it’s like, “Well, now it’s suddenly I don’t believe it’s impossible because I’ve had the practice of the visualization.”

And so I guess what you were saying is the transformation that is occurring here is an internal one as opposed to The Secret. We are secreting and manifesting to the universe to bring into our whatever.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, sorry, no. You can visualize yourself marrying whoever it is, becoming king of whatever you want, and winning whichever lottery you want, all you want, that will not actually happen just through your believing enough.

And this is something that, honestly, pisses me off quite a bit because there’s so much of a, “Well, if it hasn’t happened, it’s because you didn’t believe hard enough.” No, it’s not. You also have to look at the actual real-world data.

Visualizing and using the brain’s shortcuts to your advantage is really useful, really key when those limitations are what were holding you back. If what was holding you back from being a prima ballerina was not being six foot three, you can visualize it all you want, you’re not going to grow taller through visualization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So these bits operate in the real world. And so tell us what we know digitally, because in some ways I’m thinking the game must be changed insofar as subconscious signaling things like pheromones, whatever, in our fear sweat or our tears, or, you know, there’s fasting studies on this that we pick up on that.

So when you’re, you know, hundreds of miles away, working on a Google Meet or a Zoom or whatnot, those aren’t in the mix. So tell us, what do we have to keep in mind in this context?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so, indeed, when you’re online, because of the limitations of telecommunication, you’re going to lose so much of the smells of pheromones, but also the microexpressions, which, to the best of my knowledge, aside from Cisco Telepresence, no online video conferencing system can catch.

And so what people don’t realize is that your voice has a much bigger impact than it would offline. And the problem here is one of the key findings that Oliver Niebuhr’s team had was that, if there is too high a rate of compression, there is a risk of emotional confusion, with emotions like excitement being read as impatience or even anger.

And so their conclusion was, whenever there’s a risk of compression, turn off your camera, because your voice is so important that that is what must be first.

Pete Mockaitis
Very, very practical tip. And I’ve been there. So I love it. You’re increasing the bar, not just, “Are my words audible to you?” but, “Is there compression occurring?” And I guess then there’s also some basics, like, on your side, make sure you have, you know, good, strong, reliable internet connectivity bandwidth, working in your favor so it’s not tempted to do the compression.

In terms of specific media, tech tools, are some more prone to compression than others?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So I’m going to have to pull up the actual data here because we’re going to get very technical. All right. “Specifically, at high compression rates, MP3 and Speex codecs demonstrate a higher rate of emotional misclassification and a reduction in perceived charisma, particularly for female speakers.”

So women’s voices are more affected by the negative effects of compression, which is one of the two pieces of bad news that his team had found, along with the fact that women are more impacted by the rate of how formal or informal their clothing is and how impressive their titles are.

So to simplify things, a male founder can show up in a hoodie and be fine. And a female founder, to get the same level of respect, will have to dress a lot more formally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, duly noted. I guess I’m also wondering, okay, so MP3 compression, I don’t know if there’s a difference between Google Meet versus Zoom versus Teams on default compression settings. Or is that a setting that we can readily change in the platforms? You and I are using Riverside right now, which is, podcasters love for this very reason. We have local recording, full fidelity, no compression.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you’d have to ask Oliver. His recommendation is usually use the high fidelity or music mode if it’s available.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, music. Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Choose the original tone function, if that’s available. And, of course, the quality of your mic is really, really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. What I’m thinking about, and echo cancellation is sometimes a thing or reduce background noise, sometimes those, well, now we’re getting deep into, I also own a podcast production company, into my dork down here.

But with regard to equipment, I mean, you can go wild here. There are so many microphones that I’ve spent, literally, dozens of hours of my life listening to Bandrew over at Podcastage review different microphones, so no need to do that. But any quick tips from your perspective on microphones?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So a key feature of the microphone’s transmission quality is the frequency response. And what you are looking for, ideally, is a large diaphragm condenser microphone. And what you’re looking for is a mic with a curve that is as flat as possible, as unbiased as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, totally. And I would say my favorite, this is, well, I’ll just go and name a specific one. This is the microphone we send to podcasts guests who don’t already have a microphone, is the Maono HD something, which we’ll link in the show notes. And that’s a nice one, you know?

It’s under a hundred bucks. It includes a stand and a pop filter, and you can get nice and close. It eliminates background noise. It’s not built to last for a decade like some of our nice little Sennheiser goodies that we’re playing with right now. But, yeah, it’ll get you done.

And then, on the camera side of things, I’ve got to believe that has an impact in terms of what we’re seeing less visually. And what I love is I’m working with, and again, not that to go, no one has to set up a whole podcast studio, but I’ve got an SLR, like a wedding photographer camera camera behind a teleprompter situation, the Elgato prompter, which I love because, Olivia, I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but the lens is right behind the prompter, which is also a screen.

So as I look at you, I am looking at the camera, which is also the display at the same time. So I think that’s really cool. And some people have mentioned, “Wow, I really feel like you’re talking to me.” So for that eye contact presence stuff, I imagine that’d be a little bit of a boost.

But lay it on us, in terms of any do’s and don’ts in your web conferencing situation? Good microphone, dress appropriately, don’t get compressed, watch your tone, mute the video if necessary. What are some other do’s and don’ts here?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So gestures, even if they’re not picked up by the camera, are worth doing because they impact the fluctuation of your voice. And to give a broad generalization, more fluctuation better. But in addition, you’re completely right about the eye contact.

And Oliver’s suggestion was tape either the photo of someone you like or even a stuffed animal above your camera and speak to that because that will automatically give you a warmer, more present, and better focused eye contact.

You do want to be as close to the camera as is comfortable, because, in general, the larger your face appears on screen, the more people will feel that you are present and attentive to them. And, finally, this was, for me, one of the most fascinating discoveries is, in the new edition, I had assumed, along with everyone else, that lower voices are more charismatic. And the signs prove me wrong.

And one of the best examples, I’m going to say a sentence, and I’m going to ask you to pay attention to your emotions while I say it, okay?

“The key for most people’s level of happiness is absolutely the color of their toilet paper. And if only they changed from pink to blue, their problems would be over.” So, eventually, your brain kicks in and says, “Hang on.” But it takes a while.

Meanwhile, your emotions are like, “Oh, sounds credible, authoritative. Yes, this is someone who knows what she’s talking about.” And if you pay close attention, the specific piece that has this impact, which in terms of presence and power especially, is a determining factor.

The one that communicates confidence, competence, authority, and trust is the rate and the speed of the drop, “It’s toilet paper. It’s blue.” Instead of, as unfortunately so many teenagers these days have, you know how their voice goes up even when it’s not a question, the up talk? That’s a killer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I see. So a quick drop is what brings it.

Olivia Fox Cabane
A quick drop. The speed and the depth of the drop turns out is what has the key in how much authority and confidence you convey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I do that now, I feel kind of silly. Like, I’ve got a voice modulator. Is that like within reason or am I overdoing it or is it all good? Just lay it on.

Olivia Fox Cabane
The way I always recommend it is, listen, when you’re trying a new behavior, do it in situations when it doesn’t matter, like when you’re ordering coffee or when you’re chatting with an Uber driver. And stay close to home in the moments when it’s high stakes.

But by practicing new behaviors in low-stakes environment, you can see what feels natural and what doesn’t and, gradually, slightly expand your comfort zone.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, when you were doing those drops, what I felt was, “Whoa! Intensity.” And so I think that could be good or bad, insofar as, so it seems powerfully awesome in the sense that it’s, like, “Whoa! This person really, really means what she’s saying about this toilet paper.”

And I guess it’s about congruity again, in terms of it’s, like, “Why on earth would anyone have such intense feelings about toilet paper? This is odd,” then that’s off as opposed to, if you say, “When our clients implement this technology, they tend to see an 80-90% impact on sales.” It’s like, “Oh, shoot, he really was serious about that impact on sales.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
For example, but also think about politics. What if instead of toilet paper, for which I chose a deliberately ridiculous example, what if I’m saying, “And, really, the problem here is redheaded people. And just getting rid of these redheads would solve all our issues”? That’s when it gets into danger territory.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, and I think that what’s so funny then is, not funny to endanger the lives of redheads there. They’re very precious. I’ve got some in the family. We love them. What’s funny is when those shades of gray, the danger zone, in terms of, like, if you already like a politician or speaker or whatever, you’ll be inclined to give them all kinds of grace.

Like, “Well, obviously, he was just joking.” It was like, “But, no, seriously, if you look at the research on redheads, it’s kind of concerning,” you know, versus someone who already dislikes that speaker is, like, “Can you believe this? This is a call to violence. This is outrageous.”

And then folks who are in the middle, I think, may very well be curious and potentially persuaded, like, “Huh, what’s the deal with the redheads? Maybe I should look into this.” Is that a fair reading or am I making stuff up?

Olivia Fox Cabane
That’s an excellent reading, and that is exactly the danger of humans going along with things emotionally, and their reason kicking in belatedly, sometimes honestly, if at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I also have to get your take on 80% predicted that folks would get sold or funded or whatever based on a few variables. And we’ve mentioned a few of them. I want to cover any that we didn’t, because one you mentioned briefly was the ratio of speaking to listening. What’s ideal there?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So this is really just confirming the idea that charisma is even more how you make people feel about themselves than it is how you make them feel about you. And, for me, the best illustrative story for that is when Benjamin Disraeli was running against William Gladstone for the post of Prime Minister to the British Empire.

And one young lady who happened to be the future mother of Winston Churchill just happened to go to dinner on consecutive evenings with both men. And so the British press asked her afterwards what impressions they’d made, and she said, “After dining with Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. After dining with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I were the cleverest woman in England.”

And, of course, Disraeli won because he had the ability to make her feel interesting and intelligent. And so what I desperately try to get into students’ heads is, “Stop trying to impress people. Let them impress you, and they will love you for it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny, it’s so true. I’m thinking about, well, back to this physical therapy yesterday. When I asked a question, and when the doctor said to me, “That’s a really important question,” it was like I felt great.

And so it’s like I like him more because of it. And it wasn’t because he said something brilliant. It was because he just, you know, said something that… I like to think I asked good questions as a podcaster, so you know, he struck a nerve, like, “Yeah, good. That’s nice.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
It’s the tiny things, like saying, “You know…?” or if ever you need to get them a feeling of impact, it’s saying, “You know, I’d never thought of it that way.” Now, of course, as we said, because humans are so good at catching up on incongruence, if you don’t actually believe what you say, one, you’re going to pay a penalty because incongruence is expensive in the brain.

And two, there’s a good chance that your macro and micro expressions will clash and then you’ll come across as inauthentic. So this is one of the cases where, again, charisma begins in the mind. You have to believe what you’re saying. And this is where I want to be upfront and frank. There’s a reason why there’s a positive correlation between charisma and narcissism.

It’s not necessarily that charisma makes you narcissistic, but it is a reason that narcissists do sometimes have an easier time being charismatic because they’re genuinely convinced that they are the best, most interesting, most fascinating, and, therefore, that is what their body language absolutely genuinely and congruently communicates.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous point there. So with listening, the overall idea is to make them feel special and important and clever and wonderful. But is there a number? Is there a ratio of listening to speaking that the science says is pretty good?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The point at which they say, “Am I talking too much?” is when you know you’ve done it right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the other side. Okay. So plenty, I mean, it sounds like.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So plenty. So for the second edition, we had the book reviewed by a Gen Z panel, and one of them was a founder and he said, “You know, I’ve noticed every time when we were selling customers that if they had spent 80% of the time speaking and we had spoken for less than 20%, we were going to close.” That was his ratio, 80-20.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Olivia, this is so good. I could talk for another hour. But, tell me, anything critically powerful that we got to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
In terms of the best practices to increase charisma, one of the most uncomfortable, but one of the most impactful is improv, improv theater, because it is a fabulous way in which to practice different modes of being, different ways of body language, different characters, in a way.

This is one of the best and fastest ways to increase your comfort zone socially. So even though it can feel really uncomfortable at first, improv theater is one of the best investments you can make in your own professional development.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay. I’ve done an improv course. I thought it was so cool. Agreed. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research we haven’t talked about already?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Well, the research that changed everything, the first study that in 1989 showed that charisma was nothing but behavior, I think I’d have to choose because it was the turning point when charisma started becoming a science.

But in 2011, when Antonakis and his team showed that not only was charisma behavior, but that behavior was teachable, that’s when charisma became an applied science. And that’s when people realized that charisma can be learned.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you don’t actually need charisma to succeed. You don’t even need charisma to get people to do what you want them to do. If all you’re looking for is compliance, read Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is the Bible of mind manipulation.

The limitation is that those compliance methods really only work while they are in play. And what you don’t get is the ability to inspire people, the ability to lift whole teams. In an almost radically opposite direction, because one of the most transformative paths to charisma is actually self-acceptance.

As we’ve seen, the path to more self-confidence is often through self-forgiveness and self-compassion, is Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. So on diametrical opposite pieces of the scale, you would have Cialdini on influence and Brach on acceptance and self-compassion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And a favorite habit?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, it’s incredibly uncomfortable. But if you’re willing to, Metta meditation, M-E-T-T-A, especially self-metta, which is the self-compassion meditation. And I think there’s actually an audio recording on my YouTube channel of a short metta meditation.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
AskOlivia.com.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
For job interviews, use the visualization techniques to imagine that the interviewer is a long-lost friend. That will change the first few seconds of the interview. And because of the primacy effect, everything that happens afterwards will be filtered through that first impression. And you never get a second chance to make a good first impression so you might as well get it right the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Olivia, thank you.

Olivia Fox Cabane
My pleasure. It was great being here.