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Marco Bartolome

Jan 25
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931: How to Overcome Obstacles and Kickstart Change with R. Michael Anderson

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R. Michael Anderson shares how vulnerability can be your greatest strength as a leader.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why to be more open about your struggles
  2. The drivers behind your worst decisions
  3. The key relationship that everyone overlooks

About Michael

Michael Anderson, MBA, MA has a striking combination that creates truly impactful transformation in leaders – he has the real-life business success of founding, scaling and exiting three software companies, plus the educational background of a Masters Degree in Psychology.

 This combination gives him the unique ability to connect to other leaders as a peer, then teaches evidence-based leadership skills that genuinely drive behaviour and performance. 

With his background in psychology and neuroscience, he transforms managers into true leaders with high-performing teams in high-growth companies. He’s written two best-selling business leadership books, contributes to Entrepreneur.com, and is a former radio-show host. 

Resources Mentioned

R. Michael Anderson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

R. Michael Anderson
Pete, good to be here again. It’s been forever.

Pete Mockaitis
It has. And I was looking at our last conversation, and we moved pretty quickly past your story, which I really want to dig into, into some detail, to hear about your dramatic rise and fall, and rise again, and what was happening on the outside, as well as what was happening on the inside because, I think, when it comes to a Leadership Mindset 2.0, and impostor syndrome, all this stuff, I think there’s gold lessons along your journey if you’re ready to go there.

R. Michael Anderson
I am, Pete. I share it very freely, and it’s nice to be here with you and have some time and I appreciate you asking about the outside and the inside because, as we all know, they’re related but, often when I share this, a lot of people will say that it really resonates. And a lot of times, it’s nice to know that other people go through some of the crazy stuff that we all go through as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, start us, how about you just wrapped your semi pro basketball – that’s a whole another conversation, another story and you’re getting in the business game? Let’s start from that beginning.

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then I moved out to California. I joined a software company. They moved me around the world. And then I moved back to California in my mid-30s. There was a gap in the marketplace, and I don’t want to say by accident, but a couple of my old clients asked me to come help them.

I come from enterprise software, so Microsoft Dynamics and SAP, and so there were some big, large former clients that just needed help because the company that I used to be with that got bought out wasn’t giving a good service, and so I started servicing these clients. And then, a lot of the other clients found out that had this software, and next thing you know I had a proper business, I had to deal with offices, there’s these $100-million-dollar companies that used our software to run their business, and was being all managed by little me, and I was not emotionally ready to do all this.

And what happened is, all of a sudden, we have a payroll in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, million, per month, and I was a good business person, I understood management, I understood the industry, but I didn’t understand leadership. And I never knew what emotional intelligence was, and I didn’t have a lot of great leaders to look up to. So, you can imagine, Pete, it was really difficult around those years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m intrigued. Now, your success was driven just because, well, by golly, there was a gap in the market, and you have exactly what these folks need. And word spread, and, bada-bing, bada-boom, a lot of revenue, a lot of responsibility, a lot of clients, a lot of employees real quick, and you were not feeling so great on the inside in the midst of this external success.

R. Michael Anderson
That’s so right. Because the funny thing is, from the outside, everything looked great. We were so successful, I was on the frontpage of the newspaper.

Pete Mockaitis
Congrats.

R. Michael Anderson
To be quite honest, I had some substance abuse issues around in the early part of my life, and the pressure made them get worse. My father was an alcoholic, I had alcohol problems, I was doing hard drugs. And as this pressure mounted, that became more of a crutch, and so that was getting worse, not getting better, by any means.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you zoom actually way in on the alcohol and hard drugs? What were you thinking and feeling? And what did the alcohol and drugs do for you in those moments?

R. Michael Anderson
That’s a great question. I think I did that to not think because I didn’t have any, I’d say, tools. Like, I didn’t know who I was, and all this stuff was happening so fast. And I was working, like, crazy hours. I would bill my own. I was a consultant so I would bill myself out for eight or ten hours, and go home and do the administration or any or all of it. A couple off hours I’d do sales, and then I hired my friends from the industry.

And it’s, like, there was so much going on. And, Pete, I remember back then, my only goal was to get to the end of the day, get to the end of the week. I was so stressed out and burnt out. I wasn’t even burnt out. I could work massive hours. Burnt out is not the right word. It’s like life was just happening around me, and I was doing my best to hold on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, there’s that sensation of, “Boy, just got to get to the end of the day. It’s tough. Life is happening.” And then what did the drugs and alcohol do for you?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, I think it just gave me a little respite. It’s like stuff was out of control, and my personality really likes to control. And with the substances, it was like I would have a little bit of time that would just numb everything because I couldn’t take everything that was going on, so it was like a little oasis. As bad as that sound, in a way, like I needed it because I didn’t have any other tools.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I totally resonate with that, and I haven’t used illegal drugs much in my life to resonate, but I think there are other times we seek out some kind of oasis, retreat, respite in a way that’s not so helpful, whether it’s overeating, or Netflix bingeing, or whatever. It seems like a break, but then, unfortunately, it doesn’t really satisfy, as my experience, and that of many others.

So, tell us, back on the outer world, you’ve got a lot of busyness, a lot of revenue, a lot of employees, and a lot of drugs, what happens now?

R. Michael Anderson
That’s it. That’s where it ends now. No, I was joking. Well, of course, like anything else, not like anything else, but it started just everything got worse. And I had a key employee who I gave some equity to, pretty much just out of my insecurity. He was doing a good job, and he was taking on some responsibility, but I felt so lonely, and we worked a lot of extra hours together so I gave him some equity, and he had some substance abuse issues, too.

And we ended up getting into an argument one day. It was Wednesday, it was 10:00 a.m., he came in my office, he asked me a question, and tensions were high because I wanted to keep growing the business, and he wanted to just have a bit of a lifestyle business. There was a couple things that we didn’t agree on, so tensions were high.

And he asked me, just like an everyday customer question, an operational question, I don’t remember what it was. And I gave an answer he wasn’t expecting, and he didn’t really want, and so we started to get into an argument. I’m pretty cool, I was just watching him get angrier and angrier. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen when somebody gets so angry, they get red and start shaking and yelling. That’s what he started to do.

And I said, “Look, it’s Wednesday, 10:00 a.m., there’s employees around. Why don’t you go back to your office. Let’s talk about this after everybody leaves.” And I thought that was the end of it. He went away down the hall back to his office, but then he popped his head back in, and he goes, “I’m going to wipe that smile off your face.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy.

R. Michael Anderson
And then I watched him come around my desk, and he cocks back, and, with all his might, he hits me.

Pete Mockaitis
Whoa!

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah. I saw it coming, so I turned away but I felt the blow on my shoulder, and then we just sort of looked at each other, and then he left. And I got up and shut my door. And people asked me, like, “What were you thinking back? What were you feeling?” I’m like, “I think I was a bit in shock.” If you’ve ever had something so crazy happen to you, and you know there’s going to be big repercussions, I think that what was going on.

And I kept asking myself, “Did this really happen?” because I knew if it did, that there was going to have to be some major things going on, obviously, and I didn’t want to go down that path, so I was trying to do a reality check to see if what just happened really happened.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. You know, Michael, by crazy coincidence, I, too, was, one time, punched completely unexpectedly but it was by a total stranger in Chicago, at the Chipotle in Belmont and Broadway. And I had to say, it was so weird, I, too, had the same response. I was, like, looking at other people, just like, “Did that just happen?” And I’m okay, thank goodness, but it is.

When something that crazy happens, you doubt your own senses. Like, I’m pretty sure that just happened, but I would like some kind of a confirmation from somewhere that that really did occur. So, I hear you, it is wild. It’s out there.

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, that’s a good phrase you used that I never heard before – doubt your own senses. That’s what I was doing. And then I called up a business owner who I met recently, closest thing that I had to a mentor, and I’m like, “This just happened. What do I do?” because I was, like, “Nothing prepared me for this moment.” He was like, “Dude, if this happened once, this is going to happen again. You got to address this. You can’t blow this off.”

So, I went down to the police station, I go, “I’m here to report an assault.” They’re looking at me, they’re like, “What?” I’m like, “Well, my business partner just assaulted me.” And they said, “Oh, do you want us to arrest him?” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. No, I don’t think so. What else can I do?” They’re like, “Well, you can’t do much else. You can write…”

And so, I logged it, so I wrote it in a book, the date and time and what happened, just so there’s a record of it. And then the next day, I called my attorney, and then the next day, when he came to the office, I had an armed guard hand him a restraining order, a termination letter because I still owned the majority of the company, and then a copy of the lawsuit.

And then, as each one of my employees came up, I had to sit them down and tell them, “My COO, my business partner, so and so, is no longer here because he hit me.” And most of the people reported to him, and then I had to call all of our customers, and he was the executive project manager on a lot of the big projects, and I said, “Hey, the guy you’ve been working with every day for a year, on your multimillion-dollar project, he’s no longer here, and I can’t tell you why.” So, that was a crappy day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so then, shifting into the internal game, like what were you thinking in the midst of having to share this news with your clients and employees?

R. Michael Anderson
I don’t even know how I got through it. I do remember I joined a peer group of entrepreneurs around that time, and when they found out this happened, because I think it happened, I had the weekend to, like, prepare all that stuff. But one guy called me every morning, he’s like, “How are you feeling?” I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap.” He’s like, “Get out of bed,” because I’m basically in depression at that point, that everything just came crashing down.

And, luckily, I had some people that really helped me think through things because I think, often, that happened during a crisis where the most important things you need to do, or within the first 24, 48 hours, and, luckily, Pete, I had a couple people around me that really, really helped me and supported me in that time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Okay. Well, so then what happens next?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, you talked about the internal, so that evening after I got through that day, I’m sitting on my couch, and I was about to go in my normal methodology of escape, and smoke some weed, do some coke, and drink some whiskey. But I just paused, and I started reflecting on my life, and I’m like, “What’s going on? I’ve always wanted to own a business. And I own a business, and I hate it. It sucks. It’s not fun at all.”

And it’s not becoming more fun as it gets larger, and I’m like, “Maybe I should just go back to being a programmer. I’m good at that. And it’s easy. I made good money, etc.” And I’m like, “No, no way. I did the hard part. I got a successful company. I got to figure out what’s missing.” And I realized I was a good doer.” When I saw other people successful and happy, and I’m like, “Am I broken? Is something wrong with me?” I think I got angry at God and I didn’t even know if I believed in God. It was a really weird self-reflection but really deep and really powerful.

And then I’m like, “Look, I’m a good doer. Why don’t I change my goals? My goals must be wrong. Why don’t I set my sight on becoming happy and becoming a successful business owner?” And I made two life changing decisions that day. Instead of self-medicating, I went for a jog so I went away from my escape, and I met things head on, and I did something healthy for myself, and I made a commitment to myself that I’m going to figure this life thing and this business thing out. That was a turning point in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, you went for a jog, then you just made the firm decision. All right. So, often, in such moments, things are easier thought or said than done. Tell us, what did you have to go do to get in a healthy groove with your responsibilities?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, right around that time, I briefly mentioned earlier that I joined a group of entrepreneurs, and two of the entrepreneurs had just a real peace and calmness about them. And until that part of my life, I’ve achieved a lot but I’d never achieved any peace or calmness. And I got to know them, and both of them went through a really unique program, and I found out about it and I signed up for it, basically, because I know I needed to do something or I was going end up dead.

It was a Master’s in Spiritual Psychology. And when I say spiritual psychology, it had nothing to do with religion. We learned six different psychoanalysis techniques from a place of pure compassion, and that’s the “spiritual” part of it. And we take the assumption that we’re all loving beings, and if we have behaviors that aren’t loving, like we get jealous or angry or sad, which we all do, that’s part of the human experience, we don’t judge it, but we say, “There’s an opportunity for healing.” And we use psychology to go in and heal that part of us so that we are more in line in with our true selves, or our soul, if we choose to believe we have a soul.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you share with us, perhaps, some of the most effective practices, interventions, approaches that came forth from that?

R. Michael Anderson
One thing we had to do was, we call it history of loving, so we start with a genogram, which is a family tree, but then we do the family tree, but then we mark down all the alcoholism, the substance abuse, divorces, enmeshments, re-marriages, etc. So, it’s like a whole map of your family.

R. Michael Anderson
And so, once we did that, and there’s a way based on a book called Family Secrets by John Bradshaw. There are ways to follow it up. And, for me, I go after my father’s unresolved issue. He goes after his own father’s unresolved issues. So, my grandfather, his dad, was a failed entrepreneur, multiple marriages, alcoholic. My dad was a failed entrepreneur, multiple marriages, alcoholic. I was getting divorced, alcoholic, and owning a business, so my story wasn’t written yet.

But, Pete, just to see the patterns so obvious in my past, in a way, I knew that, but once I wrote them down and saw how specific these patterns were, it really stopped me in my tracks.

So, then the question is, “I know what the pattern is. How do I heal it?” So, in this case, what I did, and, again, this was over a little bit of a period of time with some great guidance. My father was, when I went through this, about 10, 12 years ago, he’d already been passed away for over a decade. So, what I did was I wrote a letter from my younger self to him, and then I wrote a letter from him back to me on his behalf.

R. Michael Anderson
And just to give you some context, my dad, he had a corporate job, and then he started his business when he was married to my mom and had me and my sister, and the business didn’t go well. And as the business didn’t go well, he started to drink more and more, and disconnect from my family, and just not be available. And then they got divorced, he left, and he really wasn’t in my family much after that at all.

And I know, intellectually, he didn’t leave because of me but I realized it deep down, like, there was unfinished business. And so, I got into this really, I guess, meditative place, and I wrote a letter to him. And the letter said, “Dad, can you help me understand? I really am confused because we had the family with my mom and, Amy, my sister, and it seemed like we’re doing okay, but then, all of a sudden, you left.”

“You never told me you love me. You never told me you’re proud of me. And I don’t understand, is there something that I did wrong? Is there something I could’ve done? Is there something? What happened there? Why weren’t you affectionate? Why didn’t you give me love the way I was looking for? It was really difficult growing up without you and having no relationship. I just wanted to understand more about it.” And it was very, very emotional getting that out.

And then, again, me writing the letter from my dad to me was amazing because he wrote, he said, “Hey, Mike, you don’t understand. I love you so much. I’m so proud of you. And I love your sister. I even love your mom so much. But the fact is, I’m the male, I’m supposed to be the breadwinner. I’m supposed to provide for my family, and I failed in that.”

“And as the business went bankrupt, and I got into tax problems, etc., I just was so disappointed in myself whenever I was around you and the whole family that I figured you all were better off without me, and so that’s why I left because I knew you all were better off without me. And I’m so sorry, and I love you so much, and I’m so proud of you. And I see what you’re doing now, and you’re really amazing.”

And, after that process, I quit alcohol and drugs, Pete, because I had a belief that, deep down, I had this belief that my dad didn’t love me. And I realized in this process, which I know is the truth, in my heart, that he did love us so much that he actually made, I think, a pretty stupid…it wouldn’t be what I ask for, but he made a sacrifice, and he thought he was doing what he thought was best for the family. It wouldn’t be what I chose but he did love us, and he loved us a lot. So, I had a belief that I wasn’t lovable, and then I realized that I was lovable, and my dad did love me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And so then, I’m curious, thinking about how that could be applied in their domains, I suppose it might be we zero in on a wound, a challenge, a difficulty from an earlier time, and then write the letters both ways. Have you seen this manifest in other ways? Is it usually the parents or could it also be to, I don’t know, former lovers, or siblings, or business partners? What else have you seen in application here?

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, that’s a great thing to bring up like that. And what comes to me is that this a lot about unfinished business. And when we have unfinished business, it’s because, internally, we’ve made different agreements, or we made assumptions, or we made decisions. And part of all of us know what that decision is but it’s subconscious so we have to get to it.

So, this two-way writing can get to it, and you can do this two-way writing with your ego, with a part of you that feels scared, and maybe you do two-way writing with the part of you that feels scared. And maybe you do two-way writing with the part of you that feels scared and then Superman, or somebody who has great empathy or compassion or strength, so there’s some creativity that can go into this. but what you really want to do is make sure you’re in, like, I want to say meditative, like a very present state, maybe you go to somewhere special to do this because your mindset, your presence is going to really affect whether this is successful or not.

And then really find out, and the big question is who you have to talk to, or what needs to be healed or released, and then that can be a really, really therapeutic process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Thank you. Okay, Michael, so you did that exercise and it was super powerful. What happened next?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, that’s what people do. Some people ask me, like, “How would you describe your…?” and this is how we’ll bring it back to people in their careers and their leadership, for example. If people ask me, “How would you describe the changes that happened during that?” because I went for the Master’s and then went another two years over this, four years.

And I say that, “I really got to know who I am, know, like, and trust myself,” because I realized back then I was so insecure and I really wanted to be liked, and I wanted to be respected, I wanted to be looked up to that I was spending all my time being the person I thought people would like and trust and respect, and all those things, which wasn’t authentic, and it was taking a lot of my energy to be that person.

And then through this process, I really got to understand, know who I am, and like who that person is, and have the trust to show that. And when we talk about leadership, and this is why I work with leaders, and the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is once I started applying what I learned there, and knowing who I am, and bringing them to my businesses, because one time I owned three, two in California, one in Singapore, then we really started to thrive.

We’re on the Inc. 5000 list a couple years in a row, we won the Number One Best Place to Work, and I won Social Entrepreneur of the Year. That was externally but internally I was finally having fun as a leader because I was bringing my full self to that leadership position. I was showing people who I am and what my values are, and then people would get energized by that.

And then I was creating great relationships with them. We’re creating great value to our clients. And we were giving back to the community, which I think we all want to do but sometimes we get off track. And that switch, Pete, was so instrumental to my life that, if I had to summarize it, that’s really what I help leaders do now in the workplace and in their personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. So, the core there is you have a deep, clear, profound conviction of who you are and you’re able to just sort of step in that, and own it, and feel it, and love it, and believe it. Is that accurate?

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. Yes. And I’m actually okay when I make mistakes or if people don’t like me because it’s like, “Look, here I am. You may like me. You may not like me. You may like part of me. You may not like part of me.” And sometimes there’s parts of myself that may not be ideal but I have this massive compassion for myself, and this acceptance, that sort of trumps everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Massive compassion and acceptance. Okay. Well, so now you got the Master’s Degree, you did some exercises with the letter-writing. Can you illuminate for us, are there any other particularly powerful interventions or things you did that got you to that place?

R. Michael Anderson
There’s tons. I’ll give you a quick bite-sized one. So, I learned what a judgment is, because a lot of people don’t. They heard the word judgment but they don’t really know what that is. And the way it was defined to me is a judgment is assigning a positive or a negative thing to something, so I judge something is good or I judge something is bad.

Now, the Buddhist, they say there’s only one truth in this world, that something is, it is. There’s no good or bad. That’s something that humans assign. And the example I give is, say, I’m dating a girl and she breaks up with me. And the only truth is she broke up with me. I could judge it as bad, like, “Oh, I’m a loser. Nobody likes me. I’m never going to get married,” or I can judge it as positive, “Oh, great. She wasn’t the right person for me anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But those are both human-created, the plus or the negative. The only truth there is that it happened.

And I come from a bit of a judgmental family, to be honest, so once I realized what a judgment is, and let’s say it’s just healthier not to judge, I realized that, through the work day, my life was just one big judgment to the next, like, I’d have a good call with a prospect, and be, “Oh, my gosh, we’re going to get this deal.” And then somebody would come in, and they’d say, “Hey, I’m going to take next week off,” and I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, how are we going to survive without them?” It would just be a real rollercoaster of emotions the whole day, and so by the end of the day, I’d be exhausted.

So, for about two months, I really, really worked on just looking at things as they are, just like data, like not this plus or minus, and it was amazing, Pete, because, the end of the day, I would have so much more energy because I wouldn’t go on this rollercoaster, but my decision-making skyrocketed because I wasn’t making emotional-based decisions. I was just looking at what happened and taking it in a very calm, collected, rational way. Because, I don’t know about you, but all my bad decisions were made when I was in a real emotional state.

And by just keeping that level head, and just realizing any time I’d say, “Oh, this is bad,” or, “This is good,” that that’s a judgment. Look, we’re humans, we’re actually, in a way, naturally make judgments here or there. But the more that we can be aware of that, and just take things as information, that can help our mental health, that can help our leadership abilities, that can help our decision-making, and that can help how people will see us as a calm, cool, collected person.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, for everybody, if I can give one message for everybody, it’s just to give yourself a break. I know, Pete, we talked before. I know there’s a lot of high-achievers and people that are really driven listening to this who want to get ahead in their career and everything, and chances are, you’re like me, listener, that you’re your own hardest critic, and just give yourself a break. You do so many amazing things. Just focus on them. And when you mess up here or there, because you probably will because you’re a risk-taker, just give yourself some slack.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. So, a guy named Viktor Frankl, you’re familiar with him, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, Man’s Search for Meaning.

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. And for listeners out there, he was a psychiatrist during World War II, a Jewish one in the concentration camps. And he learned, he says that the only thing that people can’t take away from you is the ability to choose. So, we all have the ability to choose, and nobody can take that away, and that’s the most powerful thing we have. So, him just reminding me that we have the power to choose is something that I find very inspiring.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Well, what they’re finding now is our DNA can be changed. So, what that means is when we live, for example, a more conscious life, that changes our actual DNA. So, there’s this whole thing about how we’re wired. Nothing is that hardwired, so we can change anything we want in our personalities and our life.

Pete Mockaitis
So, are we talking about epigenetics here?

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Which I think is one of the coolest things ever. So, can you expand on that just a smidge in terms of, like, what’s a thing we might do that would change how a gene is expressed in a means that is helpful for us?

R. Michael Anderson
Whoa.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the name of the gene, the letters, and the numbers.

R. Michael Anderson
I’d just say something like pessimism. I think a lot of us can be brought up in a very pessimistic environments and households and things, and we can be very critical to ourselves and others. And with work, we can be rationally optimistic. So, I don’t mean painting a blue sky when things are difficult. Also, finding the good in things and focusing on everything that we have.

Our grandparents came out of a lot of world wars and things, and brought up in depressions, and that went to our parents, so I see just a lot of criticalness and negativity. And I really believe that, with some mindfulness, we can really change ourselves to really live a much more peaceful positive life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

R. Michael Anderson
Favorite book. I like Mindset by Carol Dweck is one. That might be one you get a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think Mindset is excellent. And maybe, since you talk a lot about this kind of thing, I want to give you a follow-up on Mindset. Okay. So, I think listeners may have heard it before. Hey, you’ve got a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And the fixed mindset is you believe that your strength, your skills, your abilities are locked in, like, “I’m smart,” or, “I’m not smart,” “I’m good at this. I’m creative,” “I’m not good at this. I’m not creative.”

Versus growth mindset, “Hey, I’m always capable of learning, growing, developing.” And all sorts of good things happen when you have a growth mindset in terms of the effort you exert and all that. So, I’ve heard that a few times, and I’m all about it. What I find interesting, though – help me out with this, Michael – is sometimes, even though I know that’s true, and I want to have a growth mindset, I have fixed mindset stuff creeps in a little bit, like, “Ugh, I just suck at this.”

And so, my alarm bells go off, like, “Oh, no, that’s wrong, Pete. That’s not the most productive helpful thought,” but, nonetheless, it pops up. What do you do in those moments?

R. Michael Anderson
It’s interesting because I was trying to think, because I caught myself. The funny thing about this is we can learn and understand, and learn it really well, but then there’s parts of our life where it hides, and then later you’d be like, “Oh, I’m doing it there.” I was trying to think if I found a couple lately. And the big thing is awareness.

Pete, I think once you have awareness, you’re halfway there because it’s where these things hide, and we don’t know they’re there, and that’s why it’s so hard. We’ve got to keep looking at ourselves. But, again, we want to learn at ourselves compassionately, not, “We’ve got to fix ourselves. We’ve got to fix ourselves,” because that’s just gets us right back to the non-compassionate view of ourselves, and back in that downward spiral.

I’ll give you an answer, Pete. You want to laugh at yourself. That is it. You want to chuckle, and be like, “Ah, there I go again. It’s going to happen again because you’re never going to be fixed to that.” But if you can take it with a little bit of humor, and instead of, like, “Gosh, darn it. There it is again,” you can just be like, “Huh, there it is again,” and bring a lightness to it. That’s, by far, the best thing you can do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can you share with us a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

R. Michael Anderson
My favorite tool is going to be simplistic, but just listening and listen to your intuition. As a leader, I work almost exclusively with leaders that have teams, and I’m telling them, if they’re talking more than a third in a meeting, even if it’s a one-on-one meeting, they’re talking too much. And, over the years, I feel that I’ve become very wise, and the wise is my intuition, and I access my intuition by listening and really tuning into people.

And we’re all back-to-back meetings, and we’re all running around, but when I can take some time out, and if I have a big meeting, I’ll go for a half an hour walk before it, for example. So, when the meeting starts, I can be tuned in. And I like to be the person in a meeting that doesn’t say anything through an hour meeting, except for 10 minutes left. I say the one question, or the one statement, that brings everything together. I want to be that person that brings the powerful question or statement out, but potentially says the least.

And we do that by really listening and tuning in. And so, that’s my tool, is really tuning and just listening to everybody, seeing what’s not being said, maybe having the courage to say what’s not being said, but to do that in service to really getting the team forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

R. Michael Anderson
Again, it’s going to be common, but meditation. That’s probably changed my life. It’s the single thing that’s changed my life more than anything because it helps everything slow down. And when I don’t meditate, I realize how grouchy I can get and easily upset.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say meditation, what specifically are you doing?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, I’m a big silent meditator so I go on silent Buddhist meditation retreats, more normally twice a year. But every morning, for 22 minutes, I kneel down on a meditation cushion and do silent meditation. Guided meditation is good but nothing beats silent meditation. And people say, “Oh, I can’t meditate.” I’m like, “I don’t understand.” And they’re like, “Well, my mind wanders.” I’m like, “Well, that’s like saying ‘I’m trying to jog but I get tired.’” It’s like that’s going to happen. That’s a byproduct of trying to quiet your mind.

And the goal of meditation is not to have a quiet mind. It’s to have the awareness. I meditated this morning, and probably 30, 40 times I caught my mind wandering. I just brought it back to center but that’s the muscle you need to strengthen, it’s that one that has the awareness and brings it back to being present. So, I think there’s a lot of confusion about that, and guided meditation is good but I don’t think it’s a replacement for silent meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

R. Michael Anderson
So, once they hear it two or three times, they get it, but your relationship with yourself, your leadership mirrors relationship with yourself. So, your leadership mirrors the relationship with yourself. And what that means is all I really help leaders do is work on that relationship with themselves, make them really understand who they are, make them know, like, and trust that person, make them have compassion with that person.

And leadership is a lot about putting yourself out there, and it’s really about trusting yourself. You have to have this inner confidence. Confidence isn’t that you know things are going to work out, whether you know it all. The confidence is, no matter what’s going to happen, that you and the team are going to be okay, and you’ll solve it, but that means being okay with the unknown. And the only way you have that is to really trust yourself.

So, what I do is I work with leaders to develop that relationship with yourself, because, if you talk about impostor syndrome, that’s not having faith in yourself. And, look, when I say we all, pretty much everybody runs through impostor syndrome. I even get it every couple of weeks, but the thing is I have the tools now that I know what to do with it. So, it’s about coming back to yourself. And if you don’t have trust in yourself, it’s about building that trust up with the relationship. So, your leadership is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.

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

R. Michael Anderson
So, my name is RMichaelAnderson.com. And my new book, Leadership Mindset 2.0 is at LeadershipMindsetTheBook.com.

Or if people find me on LinkedIn, drop me. Tell you what, if anybody finds me on LinkedIn, R. Michael Anderson, and says, “I’m connecting with you from Pete’s podcast,” I’m going to send you a free gift. So, there you go.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, I tell you what. Everybody listening, think about how you were five years ago, like, as a leader. Look at where you are now, and compare yourself five years ago. Chances are you’re calmer, you make better decisions, you trust yourself more, you have better confidence, etc. Now, that just goes to show you that leadership can be learned. It’s a learned skill.

And so, if you want to progress in some of those areas, whatever it is, you got to work on them, and that’s really what I like teaching. So, it’s that confidence, it’s that presence, it’s having difficult conversations earlier and better. It’s all those helping people overcome their impostor syndrome and step into their true powerful selves. All that stuff is learnable.

So, just like we talked about, epigenetics or whatever, set your sight, if you want to move ahead in your career, and that’s what’s stopping you, go out and learn those tools.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Michael, thank you. This is a lot of fun. I wish you much luck.

R. Michael Anderson
Pete, you got have me back in another six years.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it.

Dec 10
0

922: How to Reinvent Yourself and Your Career with Herminia Ibarra

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Herminia Ibarra shares counter-intuitive perspectives on how to make successful career transitions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to craft and execute your “identity experiments”
  2. How to figure out your next best option in two questions
  3. How to reach out and build your network

About Herminia

Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties.

An authority on leadership and career development, Thinkers 50 ranks Herminia among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award for her research’s contribution to management practice.

Herminia is the author of two bestselling books, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity. 

A native of Cuba, Herminia received her MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.

Resources Mentioned

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Herminia Ibarra Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Herminia, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Herminia Ibarra
Hi, how are you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I’m excited to talk career transitions and your latest edition of the book Working Identity. But to kick us off, I’d love it if you could tell us a couple stories of any particularly memorable career transitions that you’ve had the pleasure of studying or working with. And maybe for funsies, let’s have one be amazingly delightful and one totally disastrous.

Herminia Ibarra
All right. Let me try. Delightful and disastrous, all of them have an aspect of delightful and all of them have their challenges. The one that’s coming to mind is a really fun one was a very straight-laced mid-career person who felt that he had always done what he was supposed to do, got really thinking about what he himself wanted.

And so, at some point, he decided to explore. He took a sabbatical and started to explore. And in his head, one of his big ideas was he loves scuba diving, and, “Could I do this for a living?” And so, one of the things that he did was to take the sabbatical and to get certified, and to explore the financials for buying a scuba diving operation.

And, very fortunately for him, as the sabbatical played out over a couple of months, he realized towards the end of it that it might not be so much fun to spend his whole life doing that, and that the salary he would take relative to the business work that he was doing was probably not worth it. But he was able to say, “I explored this to the hilt, and now I know it’s not what I want but at least I gave it a go.” And so, he was very happy to be able to cross that off his list.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And do you have another side?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah. Well, a disastrous one, I’ll tell you a disastrous one that eventually worked out. The disastrous one was a woman who was leading the change leadership practice of a consulting firm, and she wanted more balance, she wanted to run something, there were a lot of things that were wrong with it.

Pete Mockaitis
She needed to lead a change in her own career, it seems.

Herminia Ibarra

Yeah, and she did not have time to explore other possibilities. This is a challenge a lot of people face, “I work too much. I don’t have the time or the energy.” So, she saved up, she really planned, and got ready to start exploring but, in no time at all, was feeling, like, “Oh, my gosh, what do I do? And what’s going to happen? And what next?” And she would notice that in her networking, that since she was out of job, people didn’t want to network with her. She wasn’t especially useful.

And so, as she got nervous, she ended up taking a role that a headhunter brought her, which was to do something similar in a company to be heading up strategy. And she thought, “Okay, here’s a change,” and she thought she had negotiated more that work-life balance she was seeking, but as soon as she started the job, it became obvious that it was worse from a trial and work-life balance point of view. And not only that, as a newcomer, she hadn’t built up any capital to be able to kind of work around it.

And so, she felt really, really stuck, and came to the conclusion that she had to quit before it really took off because it was just, really, she wouldn’t be able to extricate herself for a couple of years. So, she quit and then really found herself with nothing at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds disastrous. Shucks! Well, I hope she’s okay. Do we know what happened after that?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it ended happily ever after, in the sense that she said, “All right. I obviously am not trusting my instincts here. Let me try to do a bunch of different things.” She set up kind of a freelance advisory that allowed her to pay the bills, which she was able to do because she was very good and she had a great network.

But this time, she set aside a little bit of time to kind of play around with things that she was interested in. She did some nonprofit volunteering. She did a bunch of stuff. And over time, she made her way towards developing a whole new career in the space around consulting for nonprofits, which she was very happy about but it took a while for that to materialize. It really started out as a kind of, “Here’s a hobby. Here’s a thing I enjoy doing. And let me do that. Just stay sane.” And it became her next career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, good news. Thank you for sharing how that unfolded there. Well, these stories are awesome because they’re already pointing to some key points associated with doing this career transition thing effectively, is having the opportunity to try some things out, to get a taste of things in advance, and sometimes you learn, “Oh, wow, cross that off the list. Scuba diving is not the thing,” and that’s valuable.

And that reminds me. I had a conversation, this was funny. There was a period of time in my career in which I did thousands of case interview coaching sessions for aspiring consultants wanting to prepare for those interviews. And one of my favorite sessions, this happened only once, was I worked through the case, and I said, “Okay. Well, hey, here’s some feedback. So, kind of what I was looking for is for you to put forward a hypothesis and then a structure, and then you game plan for what sorts of things you were going to investigate in order to assess whether or not that’s what’s going on, and to drill down into the more relevant issues.”

And he said, “Oh, wow, my brain doesn’t go that way at all. I guess I don’t want to be a consultant.” And it was awesome.

Herminia Ibarra
That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
He paid for the session, and I was a little worried, like, “Uh-oh, did he get what he paid for?” And he was thrilled, he’s like, “Wow, in one hour, I have determined that I am going to not pursue consulting at all, and look at these other opportunities instead. Thank you so much, Pete.” I was like, “Well, thank you. I’m so glad we had a positive exchange here.”

Herminia Ibarra

See, that’s fantastic because one of the things that I have found is that people have all kinds of ideas in their heads of what they like and they don’t like, and they often don’t check out in reality. Just last week, I was talking to a reporter, a journalist from the Wall Street Journal, and she told me that she had dreamed forever of being able to write for a living, to just write books.

And she gave it a try and she couldn’t stand it. She got her book but jumped right back into a journalism job because she just did not want to do that exclusively. She realized it wasn’t for her. And so, the big lesson is really to try as actively as you can, especially before making any kind of big leap, because we don’t really know whether we would really enjoy these things or not. All we know really well is what we don’t like anymore or what we don’t like about our current job, but we don’t know what we’d like to do instead. And so, exploring and experimenting is really vital.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And that seems to be a real theme associated with the book Working Identity is that we’ve got to try and do things, we have to experiment, get a taste and see how it fits, how it feels. Can you share with us what are some of the alternative viewpoints in terms of doing a career transition? Like, what would you say, Herminia, is what not to do when you’re making a career transition?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, the conventional approach is to figure out what you want and then create a plan to execute it. You know the answer, “Where do you want to be five years from now? And then what are the steps? And then what class do I have to take? Or, who do I need to meet?” And then just kind put it all in place. It works quite well when you do know what you want. And it also works quite well earlier in your career where you’re more likely to go into kind of, like, a structured setup.

It works less well, or not at all, when you don’t know what you want, as is the case for most of the people that I talk to who, for mid-career on, they know what they don’t want, but they do not know what they want instead. And it works less well also when you’re more experienced because there’s just more pathways from A to Z, or from A to D. There’s more different approaches that you could take to get to where you want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
So, figure out what you want is perhaps easier said than done, or folks have a misunderstanding of what they thought they wanted. Or, can you unpack this for us?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, see, there’s all kinds of things. We pigeonhole ourselves, you say, “Oh, I’m not a creative person,” or, “I’m not an entrepreneurial person,” or whatever. We pigeonhole ourselves. There’s all kinds of things we’ve never been exposed to before. Sometimes you meet somebody by serendipity, discover what they’re doing, think, “Gosh, this would be fascinating.”

So, there’s lots of reasons, you haven’t seen it before, you don’t know it exists. It wasn’t necessarily what you were thinking about. Whereas, we get fixated on this one thing, and the problem is that stresses people up because they don’t know what that one thing might be, and then they think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do anything at all because I’m not very self-aware, or I don’t know myself. I need to introspect and discover who I really am.”

But that doesn’t really help either because the only thing that really gets us going is to get exposed to possibilities that are real, and to get into contact with people who do those things, who can help us investigate them further and learn more about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Herminia Ibarra
And serendipity happens, too. I’ll tell you another quick story. This is someone who was in the financial world, and had always dreamed of doing something in interior design, something more artsy, and it just wasn’t going to happen because the financials didn’t work out. And so, she got to stay doing what she was doing.

Kind of out the blue, one of her clients, who had really appreciated her financial savvy, said, “As you know, I have this film company, and I’d really like you to be my chief financial officer and COO. I’d like you to run this.” She’d never thought, “I’d like to be in film.” She’d never thought, “I’d like to run a company.” But this was a relationship that worked very well for her, it was a way of doing something more creative, she knew the person. She took the leap, did it, and has really found it to be a fantastic move for her.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful.

Herminia Ibarra
How could you extract that out of your head? Never.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, lay it on us then, you’ve got some concepts associated with the possible selves and doing some identity experiments to explore the possible selves. Can you define or unpack these terms for us?

Herminia Ibarra
Yes, of course. So, the conventional approach, which I call an implement is you start out with the right answer and then you follow the steps. The less conventional approach, which is what I have found tends to happen when people make career change, I call experiment and learn. And the way that unfolds is you start to envision what I call possible selves.

Possible selves are ideas about who you might become in the future. They could be anything. They could be a very clear idea you have. They could be what other people think you want to do. They could be your feared possible self who you don’t want to become. They could be very nascent, very vague and fuzzy possibilities, “I think I’d like to do something more creative,” for example. So, you start with that, with some hunches. And what I always recommend to people is to not be afraid to make the list long and divergent, kind of the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is “Focus. Know what you want.” This is not. Brainstorm with yourself. What are they? And then start somewhere. Now, for some people, this is pretty organic, and that is they’re working their day job and they’ve started on a project, maybe they were helping a friend who had a startup, maybe they had a side hustle on Etsy, maybe they took a course. Somebody I know took a course in – what’s it called – gemology, having to do with stones and jewelry, and that kind of led her on a path.

So, for a lot of people, you have this side activity that you’re interested in and it leads you on a path towards where you realize this could be your next job and career. And once it’s developed enough, you leave and you take it on. And so, it’s a possible self that is nascent that’s been developing, “Oh, maybe this might be my next career,” “Oh, maybe this could be a good thing to do.”

For other people, they don’t have that. They don’t have that. They’re kind of stuck, “I know I don’t like what I’m doing,” or, “I’ve lost my job,” that happens more and more today, “What should I do instead?” Brainstorm a list of possibilities. Don’t be afraid to have things that are a little bit more conventional or a little bit less conventional.

My friend, the scuba diver who I told you about, he had a three-pronged list. One list was conventional jobs that he talked to headhunters about, kind of his line. Another one was kind more of artsy, folkloric kind of things, the scuba dive, the wine business, a BNB business. And a third was identifying entrepreneurs that he found interesting, and tried to see if he could get a role working with them to learn from them. So, three-pronged kind of approach.

But the idea is to generate a bunch of possibilities and then start exploring one. Maybe you take a course in that area. Maybe some people want to have at least as a side hustle, being on boards of directors so they’ll a course on being a non-executive director. Or, some people, a very popular thing, is to become a coach, an executive coach, a business coach. People will take a course, and they’ll take the course. If they’re still in their job, they take it on the side. If they’re not working, they take it and they practice it.

And that’s a possibility that they’re exploring. It may not be the thing that you move into, but it has the advantage of getting you going. If it’s not it, it makes you understand why not. If it’s promising and it allows you to explore more, it gets you in touch with other people who are also in the process of making changes, and that’s always helpful because you don’t want to be alone in your head, thinking, “I’m the only one who’s taking forever, who’s unsure about what to do.”

It creates a sense of kinship with other people who are going through a journey as well, and it creates a context in which you have to explain yourself all the time, which is also helpful because the more you have to explain yourself, the clearer you become about what you’re trying to do and why. So, any action, basically, is helpful. If you know, follow your nose. If you don’t, take any action and get started on a path.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, I’d love it if we could generate just a big list of experiments and approaches for getting a taste of things. And so, volunteering, taking a course, maybe going to events and meeting the people at the events. I guess there’s even more passive stuff in the earliest of steps, like, “Well, let’s listen to a podcast about artificial intelligence…” if that’s the thing you think you’re into, “…and let’s start having some conversations with people who are there.” Like, “Hey, I read your thing. I listened to your episode,” and sort of step-by-step we get a taste for what’s going on.

What are some of your other favorite experiments or approaches you found really yield a boatload of insight for effort that you put into it?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, you’ve got the basics of the list there – take a course, volunteer, start up a business on the side, do advisory, get on a board, get class, give a class, all those things, all of those things. And one side is what you do, the activity. The other side is the new networks that gets you into. And the two of those things together help you understand, “Do I want to take the next step or do I not?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that and it’s much less intimidating in terms of all at once, one giant leap, yes or no, launch, don’t launch versus, “Huh, okay. That was cool. How about another step?” I suppose at some points there are big old milestones, like, “No, for real. Like, I got to decide if I’ve got to pursue a doctorate in order to do the science thingy that I think sounds cool, or I’m not.” So, I’m curious, are there any particular questions, either for the internal reflection or for your new network, that you think are supremely useful and insightful as you’re navigating your experiments?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, there’s basically two questions you’re asking yourself, “Is this an attractive option? Yes. No.” “Is this feasible in terms of my need to make a living in the world? Yes. No.” And you are kind of inching your way through those questions, “Is it attractive? Is it feasible?” And feasible is not just only in terms of the money. It’s also in terms of, “Will I be able to develop the skill set necessary to truly plant a foot in that world?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, the consultant in me is creating a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye. I can’t help myself. Let’s hear some examples of things that might be in each of those quadrants. And I guess it’ll be super individually specific, like, what’s attractive to one person is totally repulsive to another. But I guess in terms of not feasible, like, I could probably not be an Olympic gymnast now as a 40-year-old man who has not trained in that domain. But I guess I’m such a big dreamer, I think almost anything is possible.

So, maybe you could ground us. You be the dream-killer for a moment, what are some areas where you’ve had to gently encourage folks, like, “You know what, maybe back off or rethink that a little bit. That’s probably highly risky and not quite feasible in its current incarnation”?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, that doesn’t really happen. Nobody does to themselves, “At age 45, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a rocket scientist.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, in a way, I’m a little sad.

Herminia Ibarra
Although, you do have people. You do have people. This is not somebody that I studied but I ran across, somebody told me a story recently of somebody, you know how they tell people, “What did you want to do when you were a kid?” and this person had always wanted to be an astronaut, and he ended up, I don’t know, either training astronauts or coaching astronauts, but kind of found his way into the aerospace industry via some things that he had done before and some things he was able to acquire as skills, and found himself delighted to be in that kind of atmosphere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I love about that is you may have a desire to be an astronaut, and I guess the right answer is not to dismiss that, “That’s ridiculous. Let’s throw that away,” but rather to dig a little deeper, it’s like, “Well, what is it about being astronaut that seems cool?” It’s like, “I like the idea of being in a rocket going superfast.” Like, okay, maybe you can just start flying small planes as a hobby or something, and you can scratch that itch.”

Or, maybe it’s, “Space is so fascinating.” “Well, there’s many space-adjacent sorts of opportunities that you can go for.” Or, “I always admire the astronauts themselves, their stories and their heroism and their bravery.” It’s like, “Oh, well, then you could train astronauts and get close to them even if you’re not going out into outer space.” So, I think that’s pretty cool that those initial seeds can grow in some handy directions.

Herminia Ibarra
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious on the networking side of things, do you have any pro tips on how you recommend reaching out, asking for help or guidance or input or conversations as you’re navigating these experiments?

Herminia Ibarra
So, the first is start right away. A lot of people don’t start because they say to themselves, “I don’t know what I want. I’m going to sound confused so I’m going to kind of blow a good contact and I’m not going to make a good impression.” However, if you don’t start, you’re not going to figure it out. And so, by this point, everybody is familiar with the informational interview and kind of the exploratory coffee.

Maybe reach out to people who are not the CEO of the company you’d like to work for until you’ve had a little bit of practice. But the most important thing is to start right away and to contact a lot of people. Most people don’t realize how many conversations it takes, how many coffees, how many times reaching out on LinkedIn.

Just recently, I did a webinar online for people who are interested in career change, and we asked them, we did a survey ahead of time, and we asked them, “How confident are you in your ability to make this change, to make a change successfully?” And we also asked them about their networks, we asked them how many conversations they’ve had already about career change, and it varied wildly from hundreds of them, or hundred something, to very few. And there was a very strong correlation.

The more people you talk to, the more confident you felt about the possibility because, as you talk to people, first of all, you find out everybody has got a story about career change. Lots of people do. It’s very reassuring to hear that other people with a similar background as you ended up doing something very different, and successfully so, and happily so. And they’ll encourage you, and you’ll get more ideas about what to do, let alone than actually find leads and referrals for specific positions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Herminia Ibarra
So, start, reach out, be honest. At first, you might be saying, “I’m exploring the possibility of a change. I’m looking into different options. I’m trying to kind of brainstorm some possibilities.” Afterwards, you might say, “I’m really interested in this sector and I’m trying to figure out which way to position myself in or which way to go in it.” After that, “I’m trying to get a foot in this door.” It’s a progression.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. I like those questions. Any particularly magical turns of phrases that you’re fond of?

Herminia Ibarra
No, there’s no magic. Yeah, the magic is, “I’d like your help. I’d like your input. I’d like to hear your story.” It’s very simple things.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose what I found, and what I really like about your answer, “No, there’s no magic,” is that I have witnessed before, I think there’s one guy in particular, he reached out to me, wants some career advice, and he was a total stranger. I think we were in the same LinkedIn Group, so about the weakest of connections that there can exists, so I had no idea who this person was but, what the heck, I chat with them.

 

And then, I asked him out of curiosity, “Hey, so you just kind of found me out of the blue and in the cold on LinkedIn, like have you been reaching out to other people? And how often do people say yes?” And, to my delight, he had a very detailed notebook of everybody he reached out to, and the results of those reach-outs, and I believe the number was something like 28% of total strangers were willing to have a chat with him. And I thought that was cool.

And his message wasn’t magical. It was short. It was direct. It was clear. He made it easy for me, it’s like, “Hey, I’d love to come get coffee with you wherever it’s convenient, perhaps A, B, C times to hear more about this and that.” And I was like, “Okay, sure.” And I thought that was pretty encouraging.

Herminia Ibarra
That’s it. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. All right. Well, Herminia, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, on that note about the weakest of ties, we know that those are the ones that are the most helpful, in fact, because friends and family and close colleagues, they have the same information you do. And when it comes to career change, they’re more apt to worry that you’re going to do something foolish. Whereas, perfect strangers might think that your kookiest plans are actually wonderful.

And LinkedIn studied this directly because there’s this famous theory about the strength of weak ties, how we tend to get our next job through people we don’t know so well or don’t see that often. And there was an experiment with LinkedIn in which they manipulated what people you were fed as people you might know, and in some cases, they gave you closer connections, and in another case, more distant. And the more distance were indeed the ones that were the most productive for figuring out a next job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, a favorite study is the original strength of weak ties research in which researchers studied how people found jobs and what were the contacts that led them to leads that became their next jobs. And it was all personal contacts by and large. This was before LinkedIn, which is not quite can be personal but also a bit institutionalized. But it was mostly personal contacts that led people to their next job, but the surprising thing was that it was not close colleagues. It was distant acquaintances.

And the reason was not people always think, “It’s because your close colleagues know your fatal flaws.” That’s not it. The reason was that they have the same information you do because they circulate in the same circles and the same waters. Whereas, more distant acquaintances are more likely to be working somewhere else and to be seeing different things, and, therefore, are more likely to suggest something novel to you.

But it’s a wonderful study because it’s counterintuitive, and I see this over and over again. People get started, trying to make a career change, and they turn to friends and family because it’s more reassuring, because they don’t want everybody to know, but it is really these weak ties, these more distant acquaintances that really make a difference. People we used to work with, for example, are huge in terms of generating leads for next possible things to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Herminia Ibarra
A favorite book. I’m just looking at my bookshelf. I’ve always loved the old classic, William Bridges’ Transitions, about beginnings. No, he goes, endings, middles, and beginnings about the phases of transition and why it’s so difficult. That’s a favorite.

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

Herminia Ibarra
Well, now I use ChatGPT for everything, not to write anything for me but for some basic research and ideas.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now I’ve been playing with it myself. Tell me, what are some of your favorite use cases where you think this thing really shines?

Herminia Ibarra

Well, I had, for example, a bunch of open-ended answers to a survey. It was kind of a long number. And I asked it to code them for me into categories, and then do counts of different categories. So, that’s kind of like a research assistant. It’s very good at outlining things. I’d never taken care of my Wikipedia entry. If somebody had written it, it was not accurate. And so, I asked it to write it for me, and it outlined it very well. It did hallucinate articles I had never written but that’s okay. I knew which ones to put in but it was perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s flattering. The robot assumed that you must’ve written that because of your notoriety and wit and insight. So, with the coding of results, that’s intriguing. Did you just straight up drag and drop a spreadsheet file into it? Or, how did that work in terms of tactical execution?

Herminia Ibarra
When I first did it, yeah, I just entered all the…I don’t remember now if it was in the spreadsheet. Then my research assistant took over, and she did use it with Excel, but I think I just dropped everything in. And it got a little bit overwhelmed, and so we had to work it in some batches but, yeah, it did a pretty good job. And then we kind of negotiated on the categories a bit. You have to work with it but it did a great job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And could you share a favorite habit, something you do that supports you in being awesome at your job?

Herminia Ibarra
No, this is actually a real thing. My habit is to work from home as long as possible in the morning, which is when my brain is at its best. And so, I try to do any kind of writing or course development that I need to get done at that time, and then go into the office later, or go into the other things later.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular you share that really seems to connect and resonate with people and they quote it back to you often?

Herminia Ibarra

It’s this idea that we tend to know what we don’t want but we don’t know what we want instead, but the only way that we figure it out is by going out and exploring as opposed to waiting until we figure it out in our head. That resonates with people. The other thing that resonates a lot is that when people read Working Identity, one of the things they always come back to me on is, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not the only one. It gave me relief I’m not the only one that was so confused or nonlinear.”

And the nugget is that no matter how clear you are in your head about what you want next, career transitions always take longer and are messier than anyone ever imagined, and that’s just part of the process.

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

Herminia Ibarra
HerminiaIbarra.com, Herminia Ibarra at LinkedIn, and Herminia Ibarra at X.

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

Herminia Ibarra
Well, the funny thing is that my subject is not so much about being awesome at your job but being awesome at extricating yourself from that job. But I guess what I would say is if it’s not been awesome for some time, it is really a good moment to start dabbling on the side with other ideas and possibilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Herminia, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.

Herminia Ibarra
Thanks so much, Pete. I really enjoyed it.

Aug 24
0

893: How to Help Your Team Beat Distraction and Unleash Their Productivity with Maura Thomas

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Maura Thomas shows you how to create a distraction-free work environment to make time for the tasks that matter most.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The underlying cause of derailed productivity
  2. How multitasking hurts your productivity and attention
  3. The two questions that will help you eliminate distractions

About Maura

Maura Nevel Thomas is an award-winning international speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance, and the most widely-cited authority on attention management. Her proprietary Empowered Productivity™ System has been embraced by the likes of NASA, Dyson, and Google. She is a TEDx Speaker, founder of Regain Your Time, author of six bestselling books, and was named a Top Leadership Speaker in Inc. Magazine. 

Maura is frequently featured in major business outlets including Business Insider, Fast Company, and Washington Post, and she’s also a regular contributor to both Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, with articles there viewed over a million times.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Maura Thomas Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Maura, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Maura Thomas
Pete, I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the wisdom of your latest book, Everyone Wants to Work Here: Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and Be the Leader in Your Market.That sounds like cool stuff, we all want that. But first, I need to understand, between the last time we spoke and now, you’ve adopted a pickleball habit. Is this accurate?

Maura Thomas
It is accurate. I’m so addicted. I play every chance I get. It’s so fun and I’m getting to the point where I’m just north of horrible, so it’s a little more fun. It’s not embarrassing anymore. It’s only slightly uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. One of the very first speakers I remember was named Fran Kick. Shoutout to Fran Kick. We’ll link to him. I think he’s still kickin’. He made a lot of kick jokes, and he talked about this concept of when you get good at something, it becomes more fun, and then you want to work at it some more. And then you become better at that thing, and so it’s a nice little virtuous cycle between work, fun, good. And I was like, “Fran, this makes a whole lot of sense.” I remembered it from high school. So, a powerful message.

Maura Thomas
It is. And one of the most important things I learned, I trained in martial arts years ago, and I keep finding this theme happening in my life. My sensei told me that once you hit black belt level, that’s when your training begins. And what I’m learning about, any time I try to tackle something new, it’s like once you have…like you can’t be a good writer until you know the alphabet.

And you think that knowing the alphabet is your goal but that’s not your goal. The goal is really to write and to write well. But you can’t write well until you know the alphabet. It’s like you can’t do a thing until you are at least competent at the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that could be really a period of entry. I’ve never really gotten into golf because I had so many painful embarrassing moments when starting. Maybe in the future I’ll go to it. But pickleball, it’s trendy right now, right? Like, I remember playing pickleball in high school PE class over the summer, and I never heard of it before then, and very rarely after it. But then the last couple of years, I guess there’s pickleball courts sprouting up everywhere.

Maura Thomas
They are sprouting up everywhere. They are, because I think it’s more accessible. It’s a little less impact than tennis. It’s a little easier. Yeah, it’s very accessible. You see people, I mean, today, I was in a game with, like, a 12-year-old and a guy. It was easier, easily early ‘70s. And we all had a game and it was great. It was super fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now let’s hear a little about some other team insights from your book Everyone Wants to Work Here. Any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries when putting together this work here?

Maura Thomas
A lot. A lot. So, in the book, I talk a lot about unconscious calculations. And I call unconscious calculations things that we behave in a way that suggests that we believe a thing but we’ve never actually examined that thing to know if that’s really true or if we even really believe that that is true. So, one of those unconscious calculations is that, “I am not being good at my job,” or, “I’m not providing good service to my customers,” or, “I’m not being a good team player unless I’m responding to all communication immediately.”

And people behave as if that is true but I think we all kind of know that isn’t really true. You can service your clients really, really well even if you don’t respond to them every minute. And you can help your team members even if you take time for yourself. We put this weight on, “Being available to other people is part of my job, so I have to do that.”

But what we forget is that your colleagues depend on you to get all the millions of things that are on your to-do list done, and you can’t do both. You can’t be constantly responding to incoming communication and also be making progress on your to-do list at the same time. We try but that’s not super effective. So, one of many, many sort of counterintuitive things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Maura, this is, I think, we can talk for hours about this alone. Unconscious calculations. I love the way you’ve articulated that, and this reminds me of some other concepts. We’ve heard maybe Ramit Sethi talk about invisible scripts a lot or Vishen Lakhiani talks about “brules,” which stands for bull crap rules.

Maura Thomas
Ooh, I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
We keep a clean rating here. But, yes, this unconscious calculation, I like the vibe because it does connotate analytical numerical judgment evaluation side of the brain, which I think is a very real nuanced part of that. I know I’ve experienced it, and it can be sometimes damaging to mental health, like, “I’m not a good parent unless I…” A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And those things, they are unconscious, and until you bring those to the surface, which practices like self-reflection, and therapy, etc., can help do, it can really drain folks’ energy and capabilities.

Maura Thomas
Yeah, it really can. As those other people have articulated as well, we really need to look at what we believe. And a lot of times, I see my job as just shining a light on how people are operating so that they can just ask. Sometimes somebody says something to you, and you’re like, “Ahh.” They say, “Why are you doing that?” and you’re like, “You’re right. That’s totally stupid. What? What was I thinking?”

The story that comes to mind, for me, is when I redid my kitchen, and my aunt came over, and she’s in the new kitchen, she’s standing at the stove, and she opens the drawer beside the stove. And in the drawer beside the stove, there’s silverware. And she looks at me, and she said, “Where are your potholders?”

And I point across the kitchen, and I’m like, “My potholders are over there.” And she looked at me, waiting for me to catch up, like, “Potholders should be beside the stove, right?” I was like, “Oh, you’re totally right. You’re totally right. I never thought about that before.” “Move the potholders so that they are near the stove.”

But once she said that to me, I was like, “Oh, and the spices should be near the olive oil. And, oh, the spatula should be near the frying pans.” And I had a whole new outlook on everything as soon as she just sort of shone that light on, “Does this make sense the way you’re doing this?” But I never even thought of it until she said that.

And I think a lot of the things that I sort of do with my clients is really just shining a light, “Does this make sense the way you’re doing this? And wouldn’t you like to do it a little easier?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s already a fantastic tidbit. Can we maybe zoom out a little bit and hear what’s sort of the big idea or main theme of the book here?

Maura Thomas
I outline a lot of problems that are happening inside companies that are making people go home at the end of the day, and say, “Oh, my gosh, I was busy all day, and somehow I got nothing done.” Instead of going home at the end of the day, and saying, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a good day. I got so much done.”

There are many, many sorts of culture, corporate culture, and leadership behavior problems that are contributing to this, but underlying all of them is distraction. Distraction is what prevents us from going home at the end of the day, and saying, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a good day. I got so much done.” Distraction in the way that we communicate, distraction in all of those unconscious calculations.

Another unconscious calculation that people make is, “Well, people are interrupting me all day but I have to do that. I have to deal with that. That’s part of my job. So, the only way I can get stuff done is when people aren’t bothering me.” Well, the only time people aren’t bothering you is when you’re not supposed to be working – nights, weekends, early mornings.

So, we behave as if we have just accepted that we will work all day at work, and then we will go home and do our most important work, “I’ll just deal with everybody bothering me all day long, but then I’ll do the really important stuff tonight, or Saturday, or Christmas eve, or whenever people aren’t bothering me.” And that’s just, I don’t think anybody wakes up on Monday mornings, and says, “Ooh, I can’t wait to work 60 hours this week.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah. And then I heard recently, it said almost universally CEOs and executives do work before they get to work just almost out of necessity, it’s like, “I’m going to do half an hour, or one hour, or two hours of super important stuff early in the morning before I am even on the premises and can be accessed.”

Maura Thomas
“Yeah, because that’s the only way that I can get it done.” And I believe that leaders and people, anybody, whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, you need to own the fact that you need to get your important work done at work, and you do need to be available to other people but you can’t do that to the exclusion of getting the important work done. So, you have to carve out the opportunity in your work day to both be available to people but also be unavailable so that you can get important work done.

And I talk a lot about that in Attention Management, which is the book that I was on with you before about, and in Everyone Wants to Work Here, I talk about how leaders can really make it easier for the team to do that because people think that they can’t do that because their boss is going to get mad at them if they do.

And another unconscious calculation, usually, because usually it’s not true, I can’t imagine a rational boss saying to someone, “No you can’t have any time while you’re undistracted. I need you to be distracted all day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I have led workshops where lightbulb moments go on, and this is a wildly held unconscious calculation that they need to respond right away, and it is wild. I might have a team of a dozen folks, and we discuss some norms associated with email response times, and maybe half of them are like, “Oh, wow, really? It’d be okay if I didn’t reply for 24 hours, and if you needed it faster, you’d drop by or call me or text me or something? Oh, wow.” And so, it’s just beautiful. I feel like, “Oh, my work here is done. That’s all we had to do was have this one conversation and we got a great ROI on this training here.”

Maura Thomas
Well, yeah, and it does start people thinking but then when I talk about, and I’m sure you do as well, you need a bat signal. Like, “I have a million things to tell you all day, and I’m going to shoot you some emails, but if I really need something,” bat signal. What’s your bat signal at your company? Because if every email might be an emergency, then you have to treat every email as if it is an emergency until you know that it isn’t. So, you can’t use the same communication device for emergencies that you use also for non-emergencies, so there needs to be a bat signal.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, I’m enjoying we’re already getting on some of the tactical goodness, which I love. But first, I want to maybe address what’s the prevalence of this distraction? Or, do you have some stats on the widespread-ness, the cost in terms of dollars or hours per week? Like, I have a sense it’s a big one, a big problem. Can you make it a little bit more precise just how big we’re talking here?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, there’s a ton of research. So, Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, I read a lot about her research. And her research, her older research said that we switch what we’re doing at work, on average, about every three minutes. And her latest research shows that that three minutes have gone down to about 47 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Maura Thomas
I think a lot of the people listening here are people who use a computer to do their work, primarily folks who need to solve problems, and communicate, and generate ideas, and write things. Some people call them knowledge workers. If you work primarily at computer for your job, then, really, your job is to think, and you can’t think clearly, you can’t make any good decisions, you can’t have your best ideas in 47-second increments. And yet that’s pretty much all we give ourselves throughout the day.

And so, how are we supposed to be good at our jobs? Because if you’ve ever been in a meeting, and at the end of the meeting, you’re like, “Hmm, I shouldn’t have said that,” or if you’ve ever said, “Oh, my gosh, I should’ve said that,” after you’ve had a chance to think about it, you have a much better answer than you did that you just blurted out when somebody asked you a question.

And so, we’re not our best selves in these tiny little increments. I talk about brain power momentum. We need time to really muster the full range of not only our talents, and our wisdom, and our skills, and our abilities, but also our diplomacy, and our tact, and our kindness, and our humor, and our empathy so that we can be the best version of ourselves, and we’re not the best version of ourselves in 47-second increments.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that absolutely rings true. And so, is it your sense that the majority of knowledge workers have the majority of their work day gobbled up by distractable environment time? Or, just how big are we talking here?

Maura Thomas
I do think that. There is some research, it really depends on what’s the average salary and how many people are in the organization.But for an organization that has about 50 employees, making about $50 an hour on average, the average distraction, and this is with the old research, that the distraction is costing somewhere around $1.2 million a year for that organization. So, again, the numbers depend on a whole bunch of different things, but it’s a lot. We all know it’s a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, understood. That is a meaningful fraction of everybody’s week. So, then tell us, what are the primary culprits of this distraction environment?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, so part of the problem is that we are habituated to distraction. Most people who use technology today have a habit of distraction, and that is on purpose. Our technology has created in us a habit of distraction. So, we’ve gotten to the point where, most people are at the point where doing only one thing at time is really hard and really boring.

And I even find it in myself when I’m watching a TV show or something, or when I’m cooking dinner. Watching TV, I have the itch to scroll my phone, and when I’m cooking dinner, I have an itch to listen to a podcast, or put a book on. I try, and my husband and I have come to this place where we have a commitment we fail a lot, but we have a commitment to being a single-tasking household because the more distracted you are, the more distracted you will be, the more you do multiple things at a time, the harder it will be for you to do only one thing at a time.

But the reverse is also true. So, the more you practice doing one thing at a time, the better you get at doing one thing at a time, and the less itchy you feel about, “Oh, I need to do something else.” And when we’re doing one thing at a time, that’s when we can put our best out into the world.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. So, this makes me think of analogs of any sorts of training. Like, you do a thing, you get better at a thing, the muscle gets stronger, the legs get faster, the heart and lungs are able to process more oxygen, and endure longer. It’s sort of like a training effect or adaptation is unfolding. So, I’m curious, do you have a suggested protocol or routine or workout that we might engage in, in order to strengthen that capability of doing one thing at a time and being less itchy?

Maura Thomas
Well, because for most of us it’s a habit, we have a habit of distraction, and so the first step in changing any habit is really the awareness. So, recognizing when you get that itch to do something else, then sort of making the conscious calculation. Probably doing both isn’t a good thing, “So, do I want to just do this thing? Or, do I want to just do that thing?”

And bringing more awareness of when we have the urge to be distracted is the first step in changing any habits. But I would say the practice is start out doing only one thing. If you’re going to watch TV, put your phone in a different room. Try to make it easy for yourself to do only one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And then, likewise, I’m thinking I guess there’s all sorts of layers or levels or variations of this. Like, with your eating, don’t be eating and watching TV or listening to a podcast.

Maura Thomas
Yeah, there are different ways to multitask, and some are better than others. So, one physical thing and one cognitive thing is better than two cognitive things. So, scrolling your phone while watching TV is probably worse for your multitasking than heating up something in the microwave while you listen to a podcast, because one physical thing and one cognitive thing.

Now, if you are a chef, then you might not want to listen to a podcast while you are creating your meal because that is kind of an artform to you. But if you are not a chef, like me, and you’re just making something that doesn’t require a lot of thought, practicing single-tasking is good but there are also some kinds of multitasking that are worse than other kinds of multitasking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good for our download numbers. Thank you, Maura. Understood, there is a distinction there. Okay. So, that’s first, like within us, individually, that’s something we can all do, and that really does sound swell in terms of the impact that can make and the muscle you build.

One of my favorites, I actually have a sheet right here, one my favorite approaches is I make a list of what I did do and what I wanted to do during a phase of work, because I’ll have all these ideas, like, “I want to check the news. I want to check social media. I’m curious about this thing, hmm. I wonder if you can buy a thing that does that. Let’s put it on Amazon.”

And so, all these things pop up, and so I just write them down. And it feels fun because then, after the work session, I get to behold it, and say, “Ooh, look at all these victories I racked up. Each of these was a distraction I did not engage in,” and so I feel a sense of accomplishment there. And when it’s time to indulge these distractions, “Ooh, I’ve got a bunch of things I was curious about and want to play with already cued up for me to go binge and tour.”

Maura Thomas
I love that idea. I love that. I think that’s a great idea. The thing that I try to keep in mind, so there’s a quote I’m told. I went looking for it and I couldn’t find it. Somebody, one of my keynotes told me that it comes from the movie “Hitch.” But the line is “It’s not the moments in your life that matter. It’s the life in your moments that matter.”

And my belief about that is that if you are not present when you’re doing a thing, then you miss both the moments in your life and the life in your moments. And we only get a finite number of moments in our life, and I really would like to be present for every single one of them, cognitively present, not just physical present.

And so, to me, we all need to find the motivation that works because somebody tells you something is good for you, that might not be sufficient motivation, “Yeah, a lot of things are good for me that I don’t do.” But I think each individual has to find the thing that is this the sufficient motivation for them. So, you like your victories, and I like thinking about…I like yours though, I might try that too. But I like thinking about, “How many moments today was I really present for? How much of my life was I just not cognitively there for?” And when the answer is too many, it makes my heart hurt, so.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s powerful. And I love the way you’ve described that in terms of these are different flavors of motivation or why that resonate differently. And a heart hurting versus a victory has very different vibes to them, and there could very well be many others that are custom and unique, and for each individual that are really powerfully resonant.

Maura Thomas
And a different day could mean a different thing. On one day, looking at your list might feel amazing, and another day it might be more about the moments. It really depends on the day, too, right? So, we can employ all of them. All of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Well, so we talked about some approaches that the individual can use. Tell us, if we are in a position of management or leadership and have some influence with the team and the culture, what are some best and worst practices that we should be considering?

Maura Thomas
Yes. There’s a whole chapter in the book about how much leaders underestimate the influence they have. So, I think it’s really important if you do have people who are on your team for whom you are the leader, at least at work, or really anywhere else, if you are the leader, then you need to realize that you have a lot of influence.

I think that it’s clear that a leader has influence during the work day on somebody who works for them. But I think what they forget, for example, is that how that person feels about their work day, they’re going to carry that home with them and interact with their family in a way that reflects how they felt about their work day.

So, if they had a work day where they said, “Oh, my gosh, that was a great day. I got so much done,” they’re going to go home and be with their family, and they’re going to show up very differently than if they go home, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, another day where I’m exhausted, I was busy all day, and still I got nothing done,” they’re going to interact with their family in a very different way.

Also, if you are, for example, sending emails to your team after hours, that’s going to impact the family because I think we’ve all been in a situation, either as the grownup in this situation, or maybe as the child in this situation, where it was like, “Yeah, we’re all going to sit down to dinner, oh, but mom just got the phone call or the email from work, and now mom says, ‘Start dinner without me. I’ll catch up as soon as I can,’” or, “Go to the park. I’ll be there later. Go ahead, do that without me,” or they show up, they’re at the park but they’re really just sitting on the bench on the phone, and not really present in the park.

So, leaders just underestimate so much how much influence they have not only on their team members but on their families. And if you influence families, then you influence communities. And if you influence communities, you influence the whole world. And so, modeling behaviors is really, really important in thinking about people as whole people who have lives outside of work. And when you send that email at night, it doesn’t matter if you say, “Oh, this isn’t important. Don’t worry about it,” your team is going to check it. They’re going to check it, and there’s all kinds of research about that, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. So, yeah, just wait, put in drafts, we can schedule it, software will do that for you. Certainly, you’re setting the model.

Maura Thomas
All of that, yes, but also act in a way that is good for your team. Downtime is as important for leaders as it is for everybody who works on their team. And I know a lot of leaders who think it’s such a good example by being the first one in, the last one to leave. I think that’s such a horrible example. It just makes your team want to work more and more and more and more and more.

So, take time off, don’t check in, be away, go on vacation and be on vacation. There are so many different ways that you can model healthy ways to engage at work. And when people, leaders and individual contributors, when people take better care of themselves and they disconnect from work, then they’re actually better at work the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Can you share with us some other behaviors you recommend modeling and some new thinking? I really love your example there associated with, “Oh, I got to set an example by being there early and staying late.” And I guess, maybe, if your problem is you have a bunch of loafers who are slacking, that might be the example that you need to set for them.

But it seems like, often, these days, we have the opposite problem in terms of working nonstop and being distracted and not getting awesome things accomplished with the time that we do spend. So, having some more leisure does the trick, so model that instead. Any other reframes or paradigm shifts you want to put forward here?

Maura Thomas
Yes. What you just said reminded me, having a team of loafers, I’m sure that there are lazy people but I work with thousands of people in a year, not tens of thousands, not to mention everybody I know and people in my professional network at, I don’t really know a lot of slackers. So, I just want to put out there this idea that, I really want to put this idea of quiet quitting to bed. It was never a thing. It was never a thing.

Some guy on TikTok thought he would get some attention by saying, “I’m going to do the bare minimum at work and see what I can get away with,” and then that turned into this business propaganda that would have leaders, trying to scare leaders into thinking that they have a team full of lazy people, and they need to be careful about their employees are slacking off all the time, and that’s why hybrid and remote work doesn’t work because if you can’t see them, they won’t be working. It’s not a thing.

Everybody wants to show up at work and do the best job that they can. Everybody wants to feel productive and satisfied and accomplished at the end of the day. It’s not a thing. I wrote an article for Forbes called “Why you should want your employees to quiet-quit?” I covered it in the book as well. quiet quitting is just about, “There’s more to life than work.” Maybe.

And maybe I’ll have some better boundaries now than I did before. And maybe I won’t always be checking my email on the weekends. And maybe when I go away on vacation, I’ll actually be on vacation and be present with my family so that I can show up better at the end of my vacation. That’s all that is, it’s boundaries. It’s not lazy people trying to get away with stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well said.

Maura Thomas
Sorry, I feel a little passionate about that.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I think it’s good. And in my experience about the folks I know, when they engage in something that resembles quiet quitting, it’s usually because they keep asking for good meaningful work to be done, and they keep not getting it, and they’re like, “All right, fine. If I’m just going to get minimum amount of stuff that doesn’t actually matter, then I’m going to enjoy myself.” And so, it’s not a matter of, like, “I’m sticking it to you. I’m going lazy mode,” but rather it’s like, “I guess it’s sort of like a consolation price. If I can’t do meaningful work, I guess I’ll just chill a little bit.”

Maura Thomas
Yeah. Well, then address the culture. Address the culture and help people do the meaningful work so that they can enjoy those days. Here’s another sort of contrarian thing or another unconscious calculation. People talk a lot about open-door policy, “We have an open-door policy here.” Well, that word maybe doesn’t mean what you think it means. What do you mean when you say open-door policy?

What I think most people think when they hear open-door policy, they think anyone can drop in on anyone else for any reason at any time. And I don’t think that’s really what we ever intended open-door policy to mean. And some people even think it means, “We are not allowed to close doors here.” And if you’re going to use the phrase open-door policy, you really need to explicitly define it for your team. Otherwise, you’re setting up the company to have a culture of distraction where everybody does drop in on everyone at any moment at any time for any reason, and that’s not a place that is conducive to high-quality knowledge work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s well said. I always thought, because I do, I love my quiet time, and to be able to just go deep work, focus mode, and make things happen. And so, I always thought that that was an odd phrasing, “My door is always open,” and I thought, “Always? Really?” “My door is always open between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. and when you schedule an appointment,” is sort of like how I think that sentence ought to be finished because that’s sort of silly.

Maura Thomas
My metaphorical door, meaning, “I will be here to help you if you need some help,” but open-door policy is not a good way to say that. “My door is always open” is not a good way to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fun, Maura. How about you just keep giving us hot takes? What else do you got for us?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, I think, again, it comes back to distraction is the problem. And if you start looking for distraction in the way that you operate, and in the way that your company operates, all of these, it’s the shining light, and you just start to see, “Oh, my gosh, if I just…that is so distracting. And the way we do this is so distracting, and it’s taking away from our ability to really do meaningful work.”

Now, not to say that collaboration isn’t important. It absolutely is but it needs to be intentional, and it needs to have a purpose, not just, “Hey, I just thought of a random thing, so I’m going to drop this half-formed thought on your lap just because it just popped into my head.” That’s not the best way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could maybe wrap us up by sharing a cool story of an organization, a team, an environment, a culture, where distraction was just causing all sorts of consternation, and then a couple key things folks did, some changes made, and the nifty results that came out on the other side?

Maura Thomas
Yeah. So, what my clients tell me a lot is that they get the unconscious calculations really were interfering so much more than they thought. They really thought that their required 60 hours. And when they managed their distractions, and when they had a conversation with their boss about, “I’m going to be offline occasionally not for hours at a time, but maybe 60 minutes, 90 minutes, maybe even just 20 minutes throughout the day,” it turns out I can get a lot more done in less time, and the quality of my work is higher.

And so, I could name client names, but that’s like the common refrain that I hear. Unconscious calculation, job requires 60 hours. When you really shine a light, when you realize all of the areas of distraction, when you really look at how your work is getting done during the day, you realize you could do so much more.

And if you can get your work done in fewer hours, then how much room does that open up for you to do other things, to learn about other things, to think about other parts of your life, to take up a new hobby, to spend more time with the people that you care about? It just opens the door because people feel like they have space, and they have breathing room, and they can think about other things. And it’s game-changing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful. And so, the action step there, it sounds like the big one is simply to have that conversation. And maybe it sounds something, like, “Hey, boss,” “Hey, colleague,” “Hey, teammates, I’ve noticed that my whole day is inundated with distraction, and I think I could do much better work more effectively and efficiently if I want to give you a heads up that there’ll be zones of the day, maybe 20 minutes, maybe 90 minutes at a time, in which I am entering a tunnel of focus, deep work mode, whatever you want to call it, and you won’t be hearing from me because I’m doing important stuff, but I’ll reach back out to you soon.”

I’m trying to use my best words. Do you have any suggested verbiage?

Maura Thomas
Yeah. So, here are two specific examples that the words come out of, “In order for this to work, we need to look at two important things. One, how does work flow through our department and get done.” Most people, I find, show up at work and do whatever happens to them. There are just communication coming in, it could be from colleagues, it could be from vendors, it could be from customers, and I’m just dealing with all of that.

And so, work isn’t flowing through me, through the department, through the company, in a systematic logical way. This happens first, and then this happens, and then we do this, and then we do this. And in between that, yeah, we communicate with each other. But you focus on the way the work moves through the organization. That’s the first thing.

Shining a light on that, if you’re not a leader, then just look at the way work comes to you, and look at the things that you are truly getting evaluated on, and really what’s in your…ultimately, in your job description, the thing that you are hired for, and how much of your day do you actually get to spend doing that. So, that piece is the really important thing.

And the second thing to think about is, “How do we communicate as a team?” We have lots of ways to communicate, and, usually, as a team, we don’t create any guidelines. I have a whole chapter in the book about communication guidelines. So, we have 17 different ways to communicate but we use this one in this situation, in general. There are exceptions, right? But this one in this situation, and this one in this situation, and this one in this situation.

Because without that, it really just defaults to personal preference, “Well, you seem to like chat, and Joe seems to like email, and Lisa likes to have meetings, and Marty always likes to call me. And I don’t know, I can’t remember how you all like to do this. So, I’m just going to send everything I need to send in all the ways. I’m going to leave you a voicemail, I’m going to put it on the chat, I’m going to send you an email, and we’ll talk about it in the meeting just for good measure.”

And so, the volume of communication in organizations is way too high, and the efficiency of communication is way too low.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, Maura, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Maura Thomas
Yes, just the last thought I will leave you with is I teach people two primary things. Number one, how to manage their attention, and, number two, how to manage their work, bigger picture. Nobody can do that except you. Nobody can manage your attention except you. No one can manage how your work gets done except you. You get to decide, so it is entirely up to you.

Now, if you’re a leader, yes, you have to help. But bottom line is no one is going to do this for you. If you would like to have days that feel more accomplished, more productive, more satisfying, if you would like to feel less frazzled and flustered, if you would like to have more space in your life to do other things, that is 100% up to you. And I know that many people feel like it isn’t but I’m here to tell you, it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. I guess even in, like, the worst-case scenario, it’s like, ain’t nobody in your whole organization budging whatsoever when you raise these things to them. You still have the agency and the ability to make a change, like, “Hey, this is not the organization for me at this time of my life. All right.”

Maura Thomas
Either that or maybe it’s just like, “You know what, I’m going to work differently, and I’m going to see how everybody else around me reacts to that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Maura Thomas
“But I’m going to work in the way that makes the biggest difference for me, that helps me get the most done, that I can put the best of myself out into the organization and into the world, and let’s just see what happens with that because, I bet, the results are going to be better than you think.”

Pete Mockaitis
That really does ring true. I remember I was at a wedding, and I was chatting with a friend, Kelsey, catching up, and she was working in a consulting firm, which could be notorious in terms of demanding clients, and managers and partners, and all that stuff. And I said, “Oh, man, so you just must be working really…” and she said, “Oh, it’s not too bad.”

And it blew my mind. She basically just established boundaries for herself, and I was like almost…my mouth was agape, I was like, “I don’t think I even knew you could do that in that environment.” She said, “Well, I just told them that, ‘Hey, it’s really important to me that I train for this Ironman, I’m bonding with my brother doing that thing, and so I’m probably not going to be working during these times but I’ll give you my best focus and attention during these times, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.’”

And I said, “And they went for that?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, and I got promoted.” It is what you say is true. It may feel impossible or scary, and yet if you give it a shot, it just might work out way better than you think.

Maura Thomas
Yes. Yes. And I’m a control freak so that means a lot to me.

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

Maura Thomas
Yeah, so a couple. One I already gave you, “It’s not the moments in your life that matter. It’s the life in your moments.” Another one that has always kind of resonated with me is kind of two ways to say the same thing, I guess, “Don’t wait for your ship to come in. Swim out to it.” Another way to say that, I have it hanging on my…a little quote I cut it out of a magazine. It’s hanging right on my desk, it says, “Ask for what you want 100% of the time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Maura Thomas
It can’t hurt to ask. You might not get what you want but it can’t hurt to ask. It never hurts to ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Maura Thomas
Yes, I think that I’m really fascinated by Gloria Mark’s research, and how technology is affecting us, and how much it’s costing us not just financially but in all parts of our life because, I think, again, when we’re not present in our moments, then we rob some of the richness from our lives. And when I read Dr. Mark’s research, it just feels…I don’t know why, I should call her Dr. Mark, but I feel like I know her because I am so steeped in her work. But it just smacks me in the face, and just it’s such a good reminder for me about what it’s costing us.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Maura Thomas
I have two. One, I think, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich because that’s where I learned the idea of mastermind groups, and mastermind groups have changed my life. And then, personally, it’s by Gavin de Becker, it’s called The Gift of Fear. And it’s about listening to that. It’s about really how to keep yourself safe. But the reason that the book is so great is because it reads like a thriller, it reads like a mystery thriller, but it’s really about practical life advice. And I’ve given it as a gift to a million people.

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

Maura Thomas
I don’t know how I would get my life done without Todoist, task manager. I’m a big fan of the folks over at Todoist. We also use their other tool called Twist, which is an alternative to chat tools, it’s a different kind of chat tool, but it is based on asynchronous communication, and I’m a big fan of the folks over at Doist.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Maura Thomas
So, we talked earlier about finding that motivation, and I guess this goes along with the book idea. But I read a book that I guess has been out for a long time, but I just stumbled upon it, and it’s called Younger Next Year. And that book really gave me…everybody knows you’re supposed to exercise and how to take care of yourself, and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to exercise. I know.” It wasn’t enough to get me to exercise. The information in this book made me go, “Oh, oh, oh, now I get it. Now, I understand why I really…why it matters every single day,” and it really has had an impact. So, favorite habit is exercise.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes. The thing I hear that resonates most is the way that I reframe. I don’t think I said it specifically this way today but how you manage your time really doesn’t matter unless you also manage your attention. So, what matters more than time management is attention management.

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

Maura Thomas
MauraThomas.com is the best place to learn all the things.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes, try to be more present more often. Manage your attention and make the most of your moments.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maura, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and well-managed attention.

Maura Thomas
Thanks for having me, Pete. It’s been a pleasure.