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1053: How to Create Win-Win Workplaces with Dr. Angela Jackson

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Dr. Angela Jackson reveals how practices that help employees thrive translate into enhanced business results.

You’ll Learn

  1. What’s really driving disengagement at work
  2. How the social contract of work has changed
  3. The best way to get your boss’ support 

About Angela

Dr. Angela Jackson, a Workplace Futurist and ESG expert, is at the forefront of reshaping the future of work. As a lecturer at Harvard University on leadership and organizational change and as the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labor market intelligence and strategy firm, she collaborates with Fortune 500 companies, growth-stage startups, and policymakers, offering valuable research and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of work.

As a subject matter expert in the future of work and learning, Dr. Jackson is widely published in leading journals, including Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, and has spoken at numerous conferences, including the Economist, Wall Street Journal, and TED conferences. Her forthcoming book, The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom-Line Success, releases on March 11, 2025. 

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Angela Jackson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Angela, welcome.

Angela Jackson
Hey, Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom, talking about “The Win-Win Workplace.” And I’d like for you to kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans at work during the course of you putting this together.

Angela Jackson
So, the research that I do at Harvard University that really undergirds this book is really around what helps people thrive in the workplace. And just a simple one-liner that came out for me that was really surprising, that won’t be surprising to others, that at its base, people just want to know that they matter.

And that can be realized and seen in many different ways. And what we tried to do in “The Win-Win Workplace” book was to identify nine ways that, when people experience these strategies, these behaviors, that they feel like they matter at work.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel like we could talk for 40-ish minutes about that sentence alone, “We just want to feel like we matter.” So, can you maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of what are some work experiences that just say, “Wow, I feel like I matter a whole lot” versus some work experiences that are like, “Wow, I feel like I absolutely do not matter”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and I just want to be clear. A lot of my work, and I’ve looked at over 1700 companies, I’ve never met a CEO or a leadership team who said they don’t care about their employees. But what’s so fascinating is that when you go and ask rank-and-file employees, does the company care about them, you have upwards of 60% saying that they don’t. So, there’s this huge disconnect in between what employers, management teams, leaders, executive leaders think that they’re doing and what’s being actually felt.

And so, when we talk to like actual everyday workers, things that they said mattered to them was that, one, that there’s a recognition from their manager or from the company that they have a life outside of work, and that their life outside of work, their lived realities, really impacts their ability to show up engaged in work.

So, being very specific, if you think about, like, we’re all in this sandwich generation today where we have kids of our own, we have parents who are elderly, and we know the numbers of boomers who are retiring. And so, because of that, what we’re seeing more and more are that workers are asking for flexibility, not because they want to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs. It’s because they’re playing defense at all levels.

You know, how are you there for your parents, how are you there for your kids and showing up. And so, a bit of flexibility in saying to people, “Can I adjust your hours by coming in maybe a little bit late? Is there a one or two days that you can work from home?” To them, to employees, they told me that means that their employer actually sees them as a full human.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. What’s intriguing is, with regard to the senior folks, you said they don’t say, “Our people don’t matter.” And yet, it is felt at 60% perhaps that it feels that way, that as though, “We don’t matter,” or, “They don’t care.” And it’s intriguing in terms of just like the mental processes at work. What’s behind that? Is it perhaps that the senior folks are just so fixated on the results and the pressure and bottom line and delivering, delivering, delivering, or what do you think is at the root of this?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, Pete, I think about this a lot and I talk about, in the book, we’ve got these win-win workplaces and we have this other phenomenon that I call zero-sum workplaces. And how I describe a zero-sum workplace are these are very traditional workplaces. They’re the ones that say, “You have to come into the office because I came in the office. And when I came in the office, this is the way I was mentored.”

So, it’s really anchoring what that leadership’s experience was. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been 20 or 30 years out of the rank and file. And so, it’s what we’re asking for is like a re-questioning and a re-imagining of the workplaces for this moment. And so, one is a lot of leaders are tied to nostalgia. They’ll tell you the great ways that they’ve been mentored and invested in and how they rose through the ranks. And so, it’s hard for them to reimagine how mentoring could happen, how development could happen at distance.

I was very fortunate early in my career. I worked for Nokia and we were a global firm, and I led teams that were based in Singapore, I had colleagues that were in the UK. I worked remotely 50% of the time and, because of the distance, because of the time zones, you really had to put trust in your people. And what I found as a manager is that if people weren’t doing their job, it became evident really quickly. But we shouldn’t penalize everyone because there are some people that might take advantage of a policy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you said there really resonated in terms of, “Well, when I did this, it worked like this. Like, I had to hustle, to stay till midnight, to be abused verbally by higher-ups.” And it reminds me, we had a conversation with Rahaf Harfoush, who used the turn of phrase, performative suffering, which I thought was just perfect in terms of, like, “Whoa, well, we did it, and so look how much we suffered and we experienced the hardship and so, too, you must. And if not, something is going wrong, or it’s unfair, or I was cheated, or there’s something that ain’t right here.”

Angela Jackson
And people today have a different type of social contract with work. I’m Gen X, and I would think about what I was taught to do is you go into work, you put your head down, you get in before your boss, you leave later. And what you get in exchange for that is a good paycheck, right? Hopefully, a good paycheck.

What we’re seeing now when we’re looking at this next generation of workforce, many of them report, 42% said that they would take a pay cut if they could maybe work remotely, if they could have more flexibility. And what we’re seeing with all of the research is that people want purpose in their work. They’re willing to take less. Some of people want to go away from the big cities and want to be closer to home.

What I’m saying is there’s a very different calculation today than it was in previous generations. Gen X, the Boomers, you know, if we were born and raised like I was in Chicago, I was willing to go out to LA and go out to New York. Like, we’re willing to run and go wherever for that next milestone. And what we’re seeing with today’s generation, they’re not doing that.

The second thing is, I think about my grandfather who worked at a Chrysler factory, he was there for 40 years, he was part of a union, I was able to go to college because of that. That’s not the same social contract we have today.

So, you have everyday workers who are watching, mass layoffs, when we see that with government jobs that are typically the safest, people immediately think, “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me to work at a job that could lay me off and I haven’t seen my kids in seven days because I’ve been traveling, because I’ve been going in late?”

And so, really, today when we think about employers and CEOs, they’re really thinking about, “What’s the value proposition that’s going to resonate most to employees today? That is how we’re going to keep people. That’s how we’re going to attract people.” And they’re actually putting a number on that.

So, by meeting their needs, reimagining their benefits, reimagining how people are trained and placed in their positions, they’re seeing lift on the financial side by implementing these practices. And I just think they’re going to be ever needed when we think about the climate now where no one’s hiring, right? Everyone is trying to do more with their incumbent workforce. Well, it becomes, “How do we keep them and keep them engaged, they’re not quiet-quitting?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, there’s so much to dig into here. Let’s talk about the social contract in terms of just really articulating that in terms of the old world versus the new world.

You highlighted that job security is no longer a thing, that’s just kind of not around, and so that changes the calculus. Could you elaborate on your articulation of the social contract between executives and lower-level employees in the olden times versus the now times?

Angela Jackson
So, one, you would have, and I think about my parents, your parents, people would stay at their job 20 or 30 years, right? There was loyalty. There were pensions at the time. There was sharing in the success of the company. It was beneficial for people to stay. They were getting bonuses at that time. They had factories and unions that were looking out and making sure that people had benefits and that they could pay for the latest hospital bill or emergency bill.

And what we’re seeing today is that people still expect those things, when I say people, everyday workers. For example, there was this Edelman Trust Barometer that came out, and it said that when people think about where they should be up-skilled for the future or learn these new future work skills, generative AI, they’re looking to their employer for that.

Typically, in the past, employers did invest in training their people. What we’re seeing now is the shift that people are left on their own. And so, what does that mean when you are thinking that you’re a cog in the wheel, at any time your job could be eliminated? And maybe that’s not because sales are down, maybe sales are great. And we’ve seen that with a lot of the tech companies, but they want their share price to rise. So, they’ll just, again, let people go as a signal to the market that they’re being more efficient.

Those are things we didn’t hear about in the past when we talk about that social contract. You were let go because typically you were underperforming. Someone had, whether you disagreed or disagreed, they had a real rationale. It wasn’t because we’re trying to manipulate the stock market, for example. And also thinking about that social contract, the other thing was the stability that you had raises. And you know, there was more employee ownership. There were more pensions.

Right now, when you negotiate your wage, that’s the best that you’re going to do when you’re going in the door. Most people know that. And so, to get that next raise, right, even if you are awesome at your job, you have to go somewhere else. And what we’re seeing now are companies who are letting their best people go because of small things.

This return to office is becoming a big thing. We have A-players, and there was research by colleagues out of MIT, where companies are losing their A-players because there’s inflexibility. And what I always say to CEOs are, “A-players always have optionality. So, it may not be just in this moment, but they’ll have one foot out the door.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, as you sort of lay out the social contract before versus now, it seems kind of like the employee’s contract is just worse now than it was then, and the “compensation” to keep it fair-ish, is that it’s like, “Well, loyalty is no longer something employees bring to the table.” And it just seems like, “Why would they? That’s normal.” So, is that a fair characterization? If the social contract is worse, what are the employees…are they just kind of out of luck or is there a counterbalance on their side?

Angela Jackson
I absolutely think it’s a counterbalance. There’s a set of employers who are still interested in that contract, and they’re interested in centering what employees want. I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Spotify put a billboard in Times Square, and it said in substance, “We let our people work remote because we hire adults.” And some would say, “Okay, that’s cheeky and it’s cute, but why did they do that in Times Square?”

Well, if you look down the street from Times Square, you have JP Morgan Chase that is requiring people to come back in the office. And they know some of those people will leave. And what Spotify is trying to do is say, “We’re different.” And they’re using that to actually attract talent, get A-talent. And they’re seeing a tangible benefit.

When I connected with their CEO, he was saying, “We attribute our flexibility and our policies and our people policies with keeping our teams. We let them work from wherever they want in the world. We want them to pursue their passions. Why? Because we know that if they’re excited in their lives, that they’ll bring that excitement to work, if we can sustain that.”

And so, while it’s broken with certain companies, there are a set of these companies that I write about in that I call win-win workplaces are actually using this as their competitive advantage, this moment and this differentiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, so in this new contract, Spotify is bringing some things to the table with regard to flexibility, etc. They will still fire you readily because they’ve had rounds of layoffs and such, but they’re bringing some other goodies, such as the flexibility. And any other key things you’d highlight there?

Angela Jackson
I think it’s flexibility. I think it’s passion. When you talk to their employees, they’re passionate about what they do. And what gets exciting about that piece, is when you’ve got employees who are passionate about the mission, that they feel supported, what you’re building towards is what I call an ownership mindset.

And those are the employees, my research shows, are the stickiest, the most loyal. Like, they feel bought into what the company is doing and they want to go the extra mile. And it’s not just about the paycheck. It’s because that company matches up with their values, the way that they live their life. There’s not that gap, that air in between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It seems like there’s got to be something going on in terms of bought into the mission or purpose, or we’re having fun solving problems, or there are colleagues that were just a blast to be around who inspire and are fun. Are there any other key bits of value on the employee side that are really getting accentuated these days?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, the big one is around agency. And so, we have a number of companies, the most famous one is we think about Google and their 20% time off to pursue an interest or an innovation. We’re seeing more and more companies actually give their people time to tinker. And by that, I mean some of them are doing it in different ways.

They may bring a problem of practice to an ERG group or a group of employees, and say, “If you can come up with the ideas, all ideas are welcome.” And giving people funding and budget to actually work on some of these ideas. Coca-Cola bottlers, in North Carolina, is doing something very similar. They had a challenge around frontline workers and how we retain them. And so, they challenged a group of rank-and-file employees to come together and solve that problem.

And that was an acknowledgment that these people are closest to the problem. So, of course, they might have some loose solutions to solve it. And so, it’s innovations like that where people are bringing rank and file into the thinking of the company, into the challenges, and also giving them the agency to begin solving some of these problems.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot in terms of, like, the Coca-Cola bottling example, with the solving of the problems, because when I think about purpose, and maybe I just have too high a standard, but I don’t imagine, I guess it depends on how you define purpose, and I’d love for you to expand on this, that folks are saying, “I am deeply inspired at my core by the mission of getting sugar water into the hands of more and more people and growing the market share,” right?

Like, I don’t think that purpose sense in the Coca-Cola context specifically is resonating. So, when you say purpose, are you thinking about something with more, broader, with additional facets, or maybe it’s like, “Hey, know what, purpose isn’t going to be so much of a motivator in certain organizations. So instead, hopefully, we’ve got some of that autonomous problem-solving goodness to offer”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I love that. And I love your push on this too, Pete. Purpose means different things to different people. And so, say you’re at a Coca-Cola bottlers, for example. For them, the purpose is, “At my job, can I be really good at it? And do I have a company that’s investing in me? And do I feel like my work matters?”

So, that’s having purpose versus being at the front line and you’re feeling, you’re just a number. No one knows your name and what you do. You don’t know what you do, how that connects to the overall vision of the company. And that’s hard sometimes when you’re at the front lines. How do you connect that to the overall strategy and show that through line? So that’s one set of purpose.

Then you have the other set of purpose where, you use a Spotify, or I even use my job at Harvard. I love the research I do. It gives me a sense of purpose that I can work on research around workplaces that help connect people to better companies that are willing to invest in them. And so, really thinking about, like, this is something I’d probably do for free, that I would talk about. And you have a set of people who are just really connected to what the business is delivering, and they find deep value in that.

And I believe if you go to some of those employees, they’ll tell you why they’re excited to get up every day and go to work, what they’re learning, how they’re growing, being an international company. They’re doing a lot of exciting things within the company to keep their people engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you could share perhaps a favorite story of an organization you’ve seen really make a transformation or an about-face in terms of getting with the program to creating more of a win-win workplace?

Angela Jackson
One that just came to mind was a CEO of a fast casual restaurant. He brought in me and my research team because, again, with their frontline workers, they were having a challenge around getting them to take advantage of the benefits that the company offered.

And the CEO, he was so excited and proud of himself because he offered rank-and-file employees, access to the 401k plans, but he was perplexed because no one took advantage of it. And so, he called me in, and he’s like, “Dr. Angela, tell me, what does your research say about this? Like, I would have killed for a benefit like that.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” “Have you asked them?” And he hadn’t asked them.

And to his credit, fast forward, he did end up asking them. And what he learned from his rank-and-file kind of employees is that the 401k was great, people appreciated it, but they had more present-day issues that they needed help with.

Pete Mockaitis
That was my guess, it’s like, “I’m paycheck to paycheck. Saving for retirement would be nice, but that feels more like a luxury at the moment.”

Angela Jackson
“Will I be able to retire,” right? And that was it. And so, to his credit, he acknowledged that. We did the listening, and what he did was the money they had allocated for that, they put into a flexible fund so that employees would have choice about how they wanted to spend those dollars. So, they could spend it on caregiving. They could spend it on transportation. They could spend it on a massage for themselves in the area.

But what he was able to acknowledge, and when we went back and talked to employees, one thing that they told us when we asked that same question, “Do you think your employer cares about or give us some examples?” they start citing that they had some agency over how these funds were spent. And everyone spent them differently.

And what was so interesting that we found after we tracked where they spent the dollars, many of them spent them in their local community, with local small- and medium-sized businesses. So, not only was it great for these employees and giving a sense that this company was actually shoulder to shoulder with them in what they need today, they also felt good that this was money being driven in the community where the business does business.

And I’d say one thing is, when we talk to actual employees, they would say, “We’re appreciative for the 401k, but I’m so happy that I actually get choice. I feel like they really see me and understand me.” And again, all of this is around perception, when we talk about how we feel at work.

So, there’s intentions, and then there’s like how those intentions are received. And what I’m seeing with these win-win companies are they’re really keen on tracking how it’s being felt and experienced by the rank-and-file employees so that they actually get it right and not assuming that they know what’s best and what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, that is, in my entrepreneurial journey, I have made that mistake numerous times, like, “People should want this because it’s cool,” as opposed to, “Well, do they actually?” and “You must ask.” So that’s handy. So, you lay out, in your book, “The Win-Win Workplace,” nine strategies for creating better workplaces. Could you share with us a favorite in terms of it just being tremendously transformational and high ROI? Like, “This is not that hard and yet it makes a world of a difference. So, come on, workplaces, everyone should just go ahead and do this.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah. And I have to say, a lot of this book, and what pleased me about it, is these are common sense things. And what we noticed with our conversations with leadership is that it’s harder to put them into place because what it really takes is, one, intention; two, and what we write about this in the book is a commitment to measuring this.

We do lots of things for people. We don’t ask their feedback on them. The second thing is we don’t measure if it’s effective. And this is a problem with a lot of the plans and trainings that we do in the world and, again, billions of dollars spent, but the outcomes, we’re not really seeing any of them. And so, what we’re asking companies to do in this moment is to reevaluate how you’re training people, how you’re developing people, and really think about what’s adding value for them and making sure that it’s actually adding value for the bottom line.

And these nine practices, in particular, they show a correlation to output, a lift on the financial side, and that’s really important because what we’re trying to do is move conversations around investing in people just as an expense or the charitable thing to do to, one, actually seeing it as a revenue driver.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I totally buy it in terms of, maybe if you could just specify the mechanism of action here, because it kind of seems like the extent to which people, human beings, are feeling good things, and able to take care of themselves, their lives, that which is important to them, their health, they are able to show up and be smart and creative and engaged and rocking and rolling. And so, that just seems intuitively commonsensically true, but it is kind of a trickier thing to measure.

Angela Jackson
It is and it isn’t. So, the one way that we’ve mapped out, and for this case study, we talk about the private equity firm Blackstone. They have hundreds of portfolio companies, and one thing that they did is they did their research across their portfolio companies. They saw that, investments in talent, they were able to map out an ROI.

And so, what we found were, and what they found were, investing in actually training people to manage people had an ROI. And how they mapped that was amongst retention. They did pulse surveys about frontline, “How did they feel about their managers? Would they recommend their managers?” And then what they were able to do in terms of some of the financial institutions that they looked at, they had measures, for example, on like cash on hand and assets under management.

They noticed that people, when the employees were happier and that they felt great about their manager, that some of their businesses had more assets under management and they had higher sales. And so, they were able to disaggregate that. And so, we tell employers, “Find two to three metrics that you think are key, that you think would show you the health of your employees.”

“Have those metrics on the same dashboard that you’re thinking about, ‘What’s our sales over this quarter? How many products have we produced? What services have we put out?’ And have those same three metrics? So, you should be looking at them. So, one, get a baseline. Two, think about the problem of practice or opportunity you see with your talent. Is it around training? Is it around training managers? Is it about reimagining benefits? Is it about like building your deep pipeline? And just think about what those two to three measurements are, and begin to measure them quarter over quarter.”

And again, it’s going to vary from company to company, but just once you have those three metrics, you’re going to have two measurements that you’d say, “If this is going right, this is how we know. This is the effect that it will have on the bottom line.”

So, it’s an art and a science, but it’s absolutely doable and it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. We’re not saying measure 20 different things. We’re saying, “What are the two to three people metrics that are most important to your business and the business model and the bottom line?”

Pete Mockaitis
This brings me back to one of my favorite consulting projects in which we were trying to reduce attrition at some call centers. And so, as a lowly analyst, my job was to create an actual tool that actually measured real attrition.

And so, I was creating this spreadsheet, and it was so fun because, like, every day or a couple days, more people said, “Oh, hey, can you add me to that daily list?” And so, it’s like I was the keeper of the real attrition numbers. And I had, I guess, my first professional audience, the email list was growing and growing and growing. And, sure enough, once they got engaged, there was real numbers, the excuses disappeared, and we got real about the interventions.

And we could see, in terms of more experienced representatives have a lower average handle time on the phone, resulting in more cost-effective solutions and answers to customers. And so, we could sort of see that line very clearly and it’s cool. Can you share with us, in terms of you mentioned higher sales or assets under management, can you connect the dots a little bit between “We did a thing and it made people happier, and somehow dollars came out the other side”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. So, there was a healthcare system, and what they were having issues with, with all healthcare systems across the country, is retaining talent. You have nursing shortage. You have frontline kind of worker shortage in healthcare. And so, what they did was implement two things that they did were great. One was a flexibility around scheduling.

So, many people who are listening and know healthcare, it’s one of those tenured issues. Like, if you’re the new nurse in, you get the worst shift. If you’re tenured, you get the better shift. They tried to, one, is just reimagine that, and be more equitable, and fair in their scheduling so that new nurses don’t always get the most terrible shifts, because what they found out through measuring it, that was actually burning them out.

They were able to reduce turnover with nurses by 10%. That was really significant because the average turnover they said of a nurse cost them $180,000. So, when you think about that across 3,000 nurses, that’s real dollars and cents that they were able just, by tweaking the schedule and understanding they started with listening, trying to understand “What were the barriers? Why were people leaving? And what would make them stay?”

Two, they knew what their baseline is. And then, three, they got real about what you said, the cost of attrition. I was surprised with my number of companies that how many of them didn’t have a real grasp on the cost of attrition. So, most people might think attrition is just the person leaving their job. Attrition is also the time that you spent finding that person, the time that you spent training them over the years, the value that they had.

And now it’s the cost you need to find someone else and to train them, and they’re not going to be as good as the person who’s been there for four or five years because it takes that onboarding time and getting up to productive speed.

The second thing this healthcare center did, and we found, they found that one thing in common is that people wanted training. And so, what they begin doing is offering training benefits. If it was anything related to a person’s job that they wanted to learn, or if they wanted to go back to get their degree, they were giving them a pool of funds. And they watched, of the people who took advantage of this training, how longer they stayed versus others.

The people who took advantage of training stayed 30% longer. And, again, in a healthcare field where tenure actually really matters, people get better at their jobs and costs are going up when you’re trying to replace talent, like 30% longer became very substantial to their bottom line. And so, they reinvested those dollars into more training, more internship, and just doubling down on what the nurses and other healthcare providers said they needed.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Angela, I’d love your take, if we could shift gears for a moment away from the executive strategic level, to, let’s say you are an individual contributor listening to this and saying, “Okay, that sounds really cool. I’d like some of these goodies,” do you have any pro tips on how we can make the case for whatever it is that we think would help us to flourish?

It sounds like we’ve got a clear situation along the lines of getting some numbers and a financial ROI case to be made? What are some of your other pro tips for folks who find themselves in that position?

Angela Jackson
I think the biggest thing you can do to be awesome at your job is to know your value. You need to understand how you add value in ways that line up with the business and the business strategy.

So, for one, every company that I’m out talking to now, they’re thinking about their generative AI strategy. This is new for everyone. And what a rank-and-file person who’s working, you know your job intimately, you’re an expert at your job, you should be thinking about how do you add value with the new technology? How are you saving money? How are you saving time? How are you being more productive? And have an analysis on that.

When you go in and you’re talking to your manager, the second thing you need to do is speak their language. And so, going in and knowing how you’ve been more productive, what you’ve added in your value, and talking about that in terms, starting with that, and then telling your manager or leadership who you’re in front of, what they can do to help you be even more efficient.

So, you’re really couching it in it’s in their best interest to do this. You’re saying, “I’m an A player. This is what I’ve delivered. And from my job, I’ve noticed if I could get XYZ support, I could be even more productive.”

So, for example, I’m in Boston. We have the worst traffic in the country. And so, what I saw one employee do, she went in and instead of saying, “I want more flexibility to work,” she’d say, “You know, this is what I produced last year, but I did notice that I spent four hours,” her commute was two hours back and forth, “in traffic.”

“I think that if I could leave and show up to work either flexible 6:00 a.m. and get off earlier, come in late, that I could be more productive. I could also be more productive if I could have one day of non-commute time.” Laying it out like that, she got a great response because you’re leading on with curiosity, you’re coming in with data, and again, you’re centering what matters most to them and helping you, you’re helping them help you help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that a movie, “Help me help you help them”? That’s good. Well, Angela, tell me any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and I just want to just double down on the point I just made, in this time and in this moment, particularly, we have to advocate for ourselves. I think about people who are in jobs today who have ideas on how to improve the company, how they can be more productive. Make sure you’re communicating those to your direct manager. Make sure that you’re getting face time with a more senior management. Make it your business to do that. People need to know you exist.

I’ll give you an example. I have a very dear friend that was in DC and she was part of the latest rounds and cuts at the IRS, and she’s a tax attorney. And she goes, “You know, for a time I didn’t even have a manager for months.” And I told her, “I wish I would have known, because if you can’t find the person who manages you, or if they’re not paying attention, you need to find the next person up the rung to do that.”

And then, two, these strategies give you that economic case and argument. And so, once you make it to your employer, they may respond favorably, they may not. I always say that’s data. If they’re not giving you what you need, there’s a host of employers who are looking for people like you, who are adding value, and who are thinking differently. So, I’d say be on the lookout for those employers and also bring the ways that you’ve been adding. Lead with the ways that you’re adding value when you speak to them.

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

Angela Jackson
“Whatever you can, do, and whatever you do, do it to the best.” And that’s one of the Goethe quotes. And then I love this other one by Howard Thurman, and I actually just write it in my book.

It says, “Whatever you want to do in the world, do something that lights you up because the world needs more people who are lit up.”

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

Angela Jackson
Oh, gosh, my favorite one was putting up a worker advisory board. We had 200 workers from across the U.S., red states, blue states, across different sectors, and really worked with them to help place them in jobs that were impacted by the pandemic, and we’re able to study what happened to them once they were placed in the jobs.

And that actually became the research that undergirds the book. You know, we found somewhere in these, what we now call win-win workplaces, and the others were in what we call a zero-sum where people didn’t want to work there. They were quitting. They weren’t staying. They had regular turnover. And just really understood that the difference between the workplaces were these nine strategies, how they were investing in their people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as we contrast a win-win workplace versus a zero-sum workplace, could you give us a couple telltale signs, maybe it’s a number or a metric, or maybe it’s a vibe that’s like, “Okay, yeah, this sounds like what a win-win workplace is versus this sounds like what a zero-sum workplace is”?

Angela Jackson
So, I’ll give you an example of one and it just popped in my mind. So, a few weeks ago, some of your listeners may have seen Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. They had a town hall meeting. They invited all of their employees to ask questions.

One brave soul, he stood up, and he asked this question around the return-to-work policy to Jamie Diamond. I think Jamie would say it wasn’t his best day. He totally went off. And then the person went back to their desk, and their direct manager said, “I can’t believe you asked that question. You’re fired.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Angela Jackson
Oh, really.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know that part of the story. Okay.

Angela Jackson
Yeah, let me tell you more about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep going.

Angela Jackson
So, Jamie Dimon didn’t, I’m sure, and I’m certain that Jamie didn’t say to that manager, “Fire him for asking that question,” but what that manager was operating on is that zero-sum workplace. That zero-sum workplace means if you say anything that ticks off the big boss, you are gone. No questions asked. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right?

And what that did in that moment, you know, they subsequently told him he could keep his job. And so, the person stayed there, but you have to think about all of the thousands of people who were watching that moment. We say centering worker voice and these town halls are important, but as leaders, how we show up in those spaces really matter and it builds or decreases psychological safety. Like, who’s going to ask the next question that they think, might think, might tick off Jamie? Probably it’s not coming anytime soon.

The second is, “How do we train our managers differently,” right? This manager had an old-school frame, and if he had been actually trained, knew the policies and procedures, had talked to someone and got advice, that person wouldn’t have lost their job, and I wouldn’t be able to tell this story today, which is not the best shining example of JP Morgan Chase.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just…I am shocked at that notion. It’s about as antithetical to psychological safety as you can get, “You said a thing we didn’t like, so you’re fired.” It’s like, “Okay, well, good luck getting any kind of creativity or quality constructive friction in conversation that leads to goodness if that’s the vibe that we’re all keenly aware of here.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and you’re being invited into a town hall, right? And so, this is why we talked about that disconnect. Companies spend billions of dollars on saying that they listen to their people, but it’s not felt. Those are just one of those moments, “You invite me in to listen. You ask for my advice and then you blow up.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Angela Jackson
And so, that’s a classic. There’s many more samples and flavors of that zero-sum workplace. I’m sure what your listeners can listen and lean in on how that looks like. Like, we’ve all had the bad bosses, but it becomes the norm, right? And that’s really unfortunate because instead of operating out of creativity, there’s a lot of fear. And in general, there’s a lot of anxiety in the world today. When you’re bringing that in the world of work, it just becomes closer to home.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Angela Jackson
I think my biggest one is “Outrageous Openness” And it’s just around being open to what’s happening in the world, being curious and outreaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Angela Jackson
Right now, my favorite tool, honestly, is ChatGPT. And can I tell you why?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Angela Jackson
When we talk about being productive, some people have zero inbox, I’ve not gotten there yet. But it helps me be more productive with my responses and doing it in a more timely fashion.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a huge fan of the Superhuman email app, and they’ve incorporated some AI features that I’m genuinely impressed. It can now clearly label podcast pitch in all of my incoming emails. And so, I can just very quickly go, “Hmm, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, so my producers get those fast.” It’s like, “Okay, well, that’s 90 emails out of my inbox in about three minutes. That felt pretty productive. What else?”

Angela Jackson
And don’t you feel good at the end of the day? You’re like, “I’ve done my job. I’m not the bottleneck.” It’s like playing tennis, you know, get the ball over the net.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite habit?

Angela Jackson
My favorite habit is meditating. Every morning, I don’t do it for long, I’m not one of those gurus. I do about five minutes. I get clear on the day. I say what I’m grateful for from the day before and it actually centers me to have a better day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks that you’re known for?

Angela Jackson
The time to make friends is before you need them.

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

Angela Jackson
So, they can go more in the book, they can go to ReadWinWinWorkplace.com. Also, I’d love to share with your listeners. We’re doing our first summit on “The Win-Win Workplace.” We’ve got 80 employers who are actually practicing these principles and using these strategies to see their ROI. We’re doing that in Chicago on May 5th and 6th, and it’s open to everyone. I say employers, managers come, but even people who are looking for their next opportunity, these are the employers you want to be in front of. They’ll be in that room. And you can go to WinWinSummit.org for that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Angela, this is fun. Thank you.

Angela Jackson
Pete, thank you again for having me. I appreciate it.

1052: Building Better Relationships through Radical Listening with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener shares powerful insights on how to listen well and deepen your connections.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hidden barriers to listening
  2. Why we should interrupt more
  3. The secret to handling disagreements better

About Robert

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a researcher, author, and consultant with 75 peer-reviewed academic articles and has over 27,000 citations. His previous books include The Upside of Your Dark Side (New York Times Bestseller, 2014), and the 2007 PROSE Award winner, Happiness. He has presented keynotes to Lululemon, Deloitte, Humana, AARP, The World Bank, and others. In 2024, Thinkers50 named Robert one of the “50 Most Influential Executive Coaches in the World.” He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he enjoys drawing and rock climbing.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, welcome.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Thank you, Pete, so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear about your wisdom. And you’ve got the coolest nickname ever, one I think I would like for myself. You’re known as the Indiana Jones of positive psychology. So, I’m imagining rolling boulders, whips, all kinds of adventures. Tell me, what’s the source of this nickname? And can you give us an amazing adventure and discovery to back it up?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Like all nicknames, I did not give it to myself. That is important for everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
“They call me T-Bone.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Everyone should know that right up front. One of my colleagues said this about me because, unlike other psychologists, I wasn’t just running studies in the laboratory with college students. I was going out in the field, and pretty far field. I was studying happiness, among other things, with the Amish, for example, with Maasai tribal people. I stayed in the very Northern tip of Greenland where I was working with Inuit hunters. So, I spent several years, almost five years sort of traveling the world and studying happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Thank you. So, we’re talking about your book, Radical Listening, and I’d love to get to kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who upgraded their listening game and saw phenomenal results coming from that.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. There is a woman I interviewed, in fact, for this book, she’s a very senior leader, works in an international organization. In fact, they own a bunch of subsidiaries, which means their footprint is across industry, across linguistic groups, across cultures, across national boundaries.

And she always thought of herself as a fantastic listener, but then she realized, “I really can’t even understand the language of some of these people. I don’t understand the cultural fabric or context of many of the people I’m trying to listen to. And perhaps most importantly, my role suggests that I’m not even interested in what they’re interested in.”

So, she’s thinking big strategic ideas, and they’re often looking at just sort of day-to-day operations. And she realized that she kind of just fundamentally can’t understand them, that her role is an obstacle to listening. And one of the things she did was recruited listening ambassadors to listen on her behalf and become sort of like Rosetta Stones or translators of the line worker up to the senior leadership.

And so, the thing I think is so remarkable about that is not just that she recruited these ambassadors, which is kind of a cool idea, but that she recognized the limits in her own listening and moved to correct it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a fun thought, a listening ambassador, and, in some ways, it feels a lot more wholesome and upright than, I guess, the non-consensual listening ambassadors called a spy. It’s like, “Spy on people and gather the information,” as opposed to a listening ambassador is like, “Oh, we all know what’s going on here. And I feel appreciated because you have made an investment to have someone gather my perspective when it may be difficult because of a language barrier or geographic barrier or something to see what’s going on.”

So, that’s a fun idea in and of itself in its specificity, but also, in terms of a general concept of, “Let’s take listening seriously. Let’s invest in it. Let’s build some infrastructure and acknowledge how valuable this is and get after it.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let me just say that I’m very tickled that you used spy as an example. My co-author and I on Radical Listening used loads of examples of professional listeners, psychotherapists, managers, all sorts of people who listen for a living. And we did not include espionage as an industry among it, but only through oversight. As soon as you said it, I wish that we would have included that in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe the sequel, we’ll see. But I’m sure you’ve got boatloads of insights for us and we want to dig into it. Tell us, is there a key message or big idea that you capture in your book, Radical Listening, that folks who want to be awesome at their jobs should know?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. It is time for listening to have a refresh. Let’s start there. All of us grew up with or have been trained in so-called active listening. And active listening is a good start, you know, make eye contact, summarize what the person says, check for clarification, “Am I reading you right?” It really emphasizes comprehension and it positions listening as if it’s just about understanding.

And what we do to extend that is suggest that there are many intentions for listening, that you might listen in order to entertain a group, you might listen to just appreciate someone, you might listen to influence, you might listen to learn something, you might listen to argue or rebut. And whatever your intention is, that’s going to direct your attention. And it’s a very, very efficient form of listening. So, a courtroom litigator, for example, is not listening to validate opposing counsel. They don’t care how…

Pete Mockaitis
“It must be really hard for you, plaintiff. It must be really difficult.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
That’s exactly right. Just like, “Ah, I can really see that this must be difficult,” or, “Wow, even trying this case must be such a burden. I’m sure you had to stay up late,” all those types of things. That’s out the window. And you don’t even have to worry about what’s the emotional state of the opposition. Instead, you’re just focused on the things that are goal-oriented for you. So, weak evidence, spurious arguments, logical fallacies, inconsistencies, and that’s what you’re listening for.

And it turns out that whatever your intention, if you want to listen to validate someone, you are going to listen for their emotions. If you want to listen to learn, you’re going to listen, pay attention to key words, to connections between what they’re saying and your own web of knowledge. So, just the idea that there are multiple intentions, you should know your intention, and your intention guides your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Robert, is it fair to say that our limited human brain capacity can’t have it all, we can’t get all the logic and all the learning and all the education and all the emotion at once?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. I’m glad that you’re bringing that up because I do think it’s a common belief, and I certainly have held this belief in the past, that, “Oh, I’m a great listener, and I can just sort of sponge all of it up. I’m getting everything. I’m getting the motive behind what you’re saying. I’m noticing what you’re not saying. I’m noticing your tone of voice. I’m noticing everything.” And it’s just not the way that attention works. So, being a bit more judicious with this limited resource can be, I think, very productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s lay out the flavors of intention, just make sure we have the full menu documented here.

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, broadly speaking, you might think of there are sort of three umbrellas that we could put these intentions under. One is sort of pro-social motives for listening, so, “I’m listening to appreciate you. I’m listening to connect with you. I’m listening to partner with you to solve a problem.” Those would be three pro-social motives.

Three anti-social motives, “I’m listening to find fault. I’m listening to undermine you.” Those are kind of related. And, thirdly, “I’m listening to defend myself against you.” And then we also have three, kind of, we call them self-focused, although I’m not sure, to be honest, that’s the best way to look at it. But these are just three things that sort of help me. And that is, “I’m just listening to learn something new. I’m listening for comprehension,” that’s sort of the classic act of listening. And those are kind of the two big motives that are helpful to me as the listener.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a distinction between listening to learn something new and listening for comprehension?

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, listening for comprehension is, “Do I understand what I’m hearing?” Learning is, “Now that I understand it, can I integrate it? Can I find use for it? Can I synthesize it with my own existing body of knowledge and skill in usable ways?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then I suppose the implication of this is to thoughtfully choose your intention upfront in advance of the conversation, as opposed to just showing up in whatever brain state you happen to be wearing at the moment.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And where you see this go wrong, imagine a team meeting, for example, where you’ve got a pretty funny person on the team and they just keep cracking jokes. And it’s nice when it works because it cuts through tension, it lightens the mood, but maybe they default to it too often. And it’s because that’s just sort of a default listening mode for them, like, “I’m just listening to entertain people.”

So, those kinds of people listen for pauses because pauses are where you insert jokes. They’re listening for themes because themes are what you’re going to riff on. But it might not be helpful because that might not be what is needed. So, you also need some alignment with sort of what is contextually or situationally appropriate.

If someone wants feedback on a presentation, you should be directing your attention towards that, “I want to listen with a critical ear and see what works, what doesn’t. What do I know about you in terms of your ability to take feedback? How much do I need to sugarcoat it?” those types of things. So, a little bit of matching your listening intention with what’s being asked for.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s interesting how we may very well have that default mode. You mentioned entertainment, which I guess wasn’t on the menu. So, I guess there’s many flavors beyond the eight you’ve suggested is my takeaway there, is that we may very well have a default state all the time in terms of– I remember I had a sweet friend and mentor, Marilyn, and she just knew this guy who was a billionaire, and she just thought that was cool.

And she was working with some students and she just thought, “Hey, these students have an entrepreneurial interest. They might just have fun, you know, dinner with this guy. I know him, I know the students, let’s just do this.” And so, she’s talking to with the person, and he just says immediately, “Okay, so what do you want?” because that’s what he’s accustomed to. It’s like, “People tap on me to make requests of my resources.”

And she said, “Well, I’m sorry that this is just how life goes for you. We just think it’d be fun to hang out and get to know you and learn a little bit about your world.” And he’s like, “Oh, well, that sounds really nice. Let’s set it up.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And one of the things I like about that story is that what they’re trying to do in a very explicit way is just make sure that they’re aligned, “What is it you’re asking for? What is it I want?” We all know times that someone sort of complains to you and really all they want is a bit of validation.

They just want you to say, “I get it. You’re a victim. You’ve been done wrong here. I’m so sorry. You’ve put on a brave face. You’re doing great.” And instead, what we give them is a bunch of advice and try and solve their problem. And when that misalignment happens, it actually is a bit destructive to the relationship. It feels off and disconnecting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like a key benefit just right there. It’s like when you’re matching the intention appropriately, relationships are enriched because this folk, is like, “Oh, this is beautiful. This person is giving me just what I need in this moment, and it just feels good. And I like them more and I am less annoyed and frustrated with them.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And, look, I want to be cautious and honest. I’m not one of these people that writes a book, like, “Oh, I wrote a book on listening. And guess what? I happen to think that listening is the thing that’s going to cure the world and all the problems.” I don’t think that. I think listening is sort of like opening the door, but then you still have to walk through it and do some exploration. I think listening is a good start.

I think listening, in the way that you just mentioned, where you kind of listen with positive intent, you have respect, you both feel aligned, that’s a great place then to build a relationship, then to cooperate, then to engage in teamwork or change or whatever it is you’re going to do. So, I think it starts with listening, but I don’t think listening by itself is the whole picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s say we’re all in, Robert. That sounds great. I would like to do that and I would like to do that well and I could see the benefits. And yet, you also highlight a few internal barriers to listening. Can you lay these out for us?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. In all honesty, this is one of my favorite parts of everything my co-author and I have put down on the page. Some of the barriers, everyone’s going to already have an intuition about, “Oh, let me guess, distraction, technology, your phone.” Sure. All of those are barriers. But the ones that I think are really kind of almost the insidious ones are the ones that you may be less aware of.

So, for example, feeling that you’re right about something is a barrier to learn, “I mean, why listen, because I already know? I already have made up my mind and foreclosed on my own rightness about this.” Politeness can be a barrier to listening. Like, instead of really paying attention to you, I’ve just sort of dismissed in my mind what you’re saying and I’m just nodding along and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” even though I don’t mean it, and I’ve just checked out, but politeness is sort of this cloth that I’m swaddled in that protects me from real listening.

One that I find really interesting, I call it walk with me. In the book, we call it time urgency. And it’s this idea that you go to someone and you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got something I need to speak with you about,” and they say something along the lines of, “Walk with me. I’ve got a meeting here, it’s going to start in eight minutes, but come with me, walk with me.”

And it’s so well-intentioned. To the listener, the person saying “Walk with me,” it’s this idea that, “Oh, look at me, how gracious I am. I’m making time for you.” But it can really feel awful to the person who has this urgent request. They’re sort of saying, “There’s something very important.”

And you’re saying, “My mind is already to the next thing. At best, I’m wedging you in. I am already a bit distracted. I’m giving you a limited amount of time and we’re catering to my needs rather than your needs. In fact, you’re going somewhere you hadn’t even intended to go.”
And so, although it’s well-intentioned, I think it runs the risk. And there’s a whole bunch of these that are well-intentioned, but run the risk of just standing in the way of great listening.

Pete Mockaitis
More of those, please. Lay them on us.

Robert Biswas-Diener
These are cousins, conceptually speaking. One is comparing. And we’ve all done this. Comparing is when someone mentions an experience and then you’re like, “Hey, I’ve also had that experience.” And so, you share that with them. They say, “Oh, yeah, I went to Hong Kong last summer.” You’re like, “Oh, wow, you know what? I went to Hong Kong last summer, too.”

And again, it’s well intentioned because what you’re trying to communicate is, “Look, we have this common ground. We have a shared experience. Like, we’re cut from the same cloth.” And yet, what it does is it sort of shifts the spotlight away from them. It often does work, which is why we do it. But when it doesn’t work, it’s sort of like saying, “Enough about you and your Hong Kong stories. Let’s talk about me and my Hong Kong stories.”

And the cousin to it is competing. And this happens when, often in a complaint scenario, when someone will say something like, “I was up till 2:00 working on that report last night. I only got six hours of sleep, so I’m a little tired today.” And as a rejoinder, you say, “Six hours of sleep? I only got three hours of sleep.”

Again, it’s well-intentioned. You’re not trying to put them down or invalidate them. You’re trying to say, “We’re cut from the same cloth. We’re both people who are sleep-deprived,” but it comes across, oftentimes, as being dismissive.

So, there’s many of these things that are intuitively appealing to us as conversationalists that I think serve as these kinds of murky barriers that we might not even be aware of that, that often sort of burst the bubble of connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what seems the underlying theme of all of these is, “To what extent are we allowing our conversational counterpart, our interlocutor…” I’m thinking Plato, “…to take center stage?” versus, “Does it need to be about me?”

Robert Biswas-Diener
One hundred percent. And I think that is the core of Radical Listening is the idea that, “When I interact with you, I want you to feel like you do have a spotlight on you, that I do have genuine concern for what you’re talking about, that you do have the space to articulate your thoughts, agenda, ideas, opinions, whatever it is that you want to share.” And whenever we sort of grab the podium away, that’s where things get problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m reminded of, I had just a fun conversation with a midwife who said that she used to work in hospice, and she was amazed when the family arrived in the final days before someone was about to pass away. And she said, “I was astounded at everyone’s ability to make the dying person about them. It’s like, ‘You know, I just got the call. I had to change my flight.” Like all these things, like, as the hustle and bustle, as they get into the hospital room, like in the final days, because they’re like, “Hey, you better get here because they don’t have much time left.”

And she said, “I was amazed at how this happened again and again and again.” And I think it’s really telling because it’s an extreme situation and it highlights that, for many of us, I mean, it sounds bad, but I guess it’s maybe accurate language. We have such a self-centered preoccupation running in our brains, we don’t even realize how off-putting it can be. And that happens maybe, I don’t know, for some of us all the time and for some of us, you know, occasionally. But it’s sort of spooky how common this blind spot is.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And it’s all of us. It’s me. It’s probably you to some extent. We are the protagonists in the plays of our own lives, right? And if someone said, “Oh, by the way, do you know you’re actually just a supporting character?” That’s kind of an unsettling way of thinking. One of the things I noticed about you, Pete, I mean, as a professional listener, right, you’re listening to guests all the time, but you’re sort of doing this balance of it’s not only about the guest.

I mean, if you were just silent and then the guest spoke the entire time, that wouldn’t be very gratifying either. So, there is this sort of dance between you inserting key moments, but giving sort of the lion’s share to the guests. And, in general, I think that’s kind of how conversations go, that if you listen with respect, you really make the person feel valued in what they’re saying, then it will come back around to you and you will get to be the main character for a time. But then you also have to be ready to relinquish that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, Robert, it’s an interesting situation here because, I mean you no disrespect, but the most important stakeholder in this conversation isn’t here and it’s the listener and it’s all in service of them. And so, it just happens to work out nicely that we’re both fascinated by this topic that we’re in, because I get tons of pitches and we reject the vast majority of them.

So, the fact that we’re here means I’m into it, you’re into it, and that’s just good, and that’s good content for a listener. But, yeah, it’s interesting because that’s the game, is if you have the coolest story, but it’s not in service of the listener, I’m going to try to move us on and then the audio editors will remove it later. And that’s kind of the game we’re playing right now.

Robert Biswas-Diener
It’s so interesting. I never, in a million years, would admit to what I’m about to admit to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m into it.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, but I’m going to because of the direction that this conversation just took. During this conversation that we have been having, in my mind, because I’m also monitoring what I’m saying, a thought popped into my head and it was, “Be careful not to give away all the content of the book, Robert, right, because you want the listeners out there to be hungry for more and to go buy the book.”

And as soon as I had that thought, I thought of that as a disservice to the listener. And I thought, “Really, this is in the service of the listener. What we want is to give them as much usable content, as many fresh ideas as possible. And whether they buy the book, don’t buy the book, should not be my primary concern because that is that egotistical bias. But instead, I really should be doing this in service of them. Can I just tell you as much information as possible and you, the listener, can decide what’s useful for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re riffing on these things, that reminds me of, I’ve been reflecting lately. I think it was by this book by Marcus, somebody, called They Ask, You Answer, and it’s about content marketing. And so, he says, “Consumers find it very frustrating,” and I agree. If I’m on a website and I want to know, say, “Hey, what’s this thing costs?” and they will not give me a price, or even like a guideline of what the price might be, it’s frustrating.

Because, as consumer, it’s like, “You know the price or the price range, and I know that you know it, and you know that I know that you know it, but you’re choosing not to give it to me,” especially on a frequently asked questions, an FAQ, “Really the price is not one of the frequently asked questions? That seems like among the most frequently of asked questions.”

And so, likewise, there are some YouTube channels or podcasts, and I won’t, you know, poo-poo them by name, but it sits a little bit wrong with me when I know. I’m all about building curiosity and teasing and being intriguing. But if they say, you know, for example, if we were to tease this interview and we started with you with a clip saying, “And the number one most transformational key to listening is…” and it like bleeps it out and it like blurs it.

It’s like I, as a listener, a consumer, I find that troubling because like, “You know it, I know it, you’re deliberately withholding it from me. And I don’t like that. And in order to get me to listen, to watch more, to view the ads, or whatever. And I think it’s counterproductive. Because if you give me something mind-blowing, I’m like, ‘Whoa, Robert, this guy has got insights. I better listen to more of him.’” So that’s just my take on that practice.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I absolutely love your take. And I love the direction that this conversation has taken because it’s like a real moment of authenticity in, otherwise, what could feel scripted. You ask me some questions about the book. I’ve been on lots of podcasts. I give you lots of answers that I’m pretty practiced at. But here, suddenly, we’re getting into, I think, a very real example of listening and all the foibles around listening, which is sometimes I have my own agenda and it interferes with another agenda. Sometimes I’m not sure what to do. Sometimes I don’t have a clear intention.

And all of this is happening within us while we’re trying to be good listeners. And that just feels very realistic to me. So, I’m not a person that’s like, “Oh, go buy the book, learn these five steps, and I promise you, you’re going to be a transformed, perfect listener.” You won’t. I mean, I think that you’ll learn more about listening. You might appreciate listening more. You might experiment with some things. People might notice that you’re listening a bit better. And I think there is some mileage to be had in that kind of realism.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand that you cannot give us the magical spells, the super five things that will cure all listening foibles but, nonetheless, I do want some of your actionable tips. Do we have some big dos and don’ts that just make a tremendous difference in your listening and all the relationship goodness that unfolds with great listening?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. So, we present six skills and, again, let’s be honest, there could be eight skills, there could be five skills. We chose six. Three of them we think of are internal. They’re things that would be invisible to your interlocutor. They’re just happening within you mentally. And three of them are behavioral, things that your conversational partner would notice.

So, I’ll just give you one that’s a little counterintuitive about what you would notice, one of the behavioral ones. We say that interjecting, or if you prefer, interrupting, is a highly engaged form of listening. And for most people that’s pretty counterintuitive. Most people have learned that politeness equals turn-based conversation, you speak, I speak, you speak, I speak, back and forth. And yet there are excellent reasons to interrupt.

So, I’ll just start by saying that if interruption is just overlapping speech, if that just means two people are speaking simultaneously, we’re all doing it all the time. So, if I say, “Mm-hmm,” while you’re talking, that’s a short interruption. If I say, “Oh, wow,” while you’re talking, that’s a bigger interruption. If I say, “What? Wait, I can’t believe it. No way,“ while you’re talking, that’s an even bigger interruption.

If I jump in and say, “Wait a minute. Say that again. What?” those are all forms of interruptions, and those are excellent because they show the person, “I care about what’s happening. I’m right here with you.” And the alternative is letting the person prattle on for 10 minutes. And then in return, you say, “There’s something you said 10 minutes ago that I’d like to go back to.” And that can feel really kind of dismissive to the person because they’re like, “Why did you just let me talk for 10 minutes if the thing that was interesting to you happened 10 minutes ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really strong perspective. But, again, following that principle of your conversation partner is taking center stage, the interruptions are in service of them and your understanding, like, “Wait a minute. He said what? But didn’t he just say the opposite?” Or we could go, “Yes, he did. And that’s why this is a big deal.”

And so, you could see how the conversational vibe goes into a very connected place with that interruption as opposed to waiting, and just makes sure you clarify. It’s like, “Wait, Robert? Oh, no, that Robert. Oh, okay, now I’m tracking with you. I’m on the same page.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And that clarification, that’s a perfect example, and we do these all the time. Another type is called an alert. So, let’s say you and I are both talking about that Robert, and here comes Robert, but you can’t see him because your back is to him. And I might say, “Pete, shut up. Here he comes.” That’s an alert and that’s an interruption, but you never think that’s rude because you think it’s in the service of you. So, anytime that I’m essentially jumping in, but then returning the turn to speak to you, people just don’t even clock it as rude at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, interruptions can be helpful. What else you got?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let’s do one on the other side of the fence. One of the internal skills. Let’s start with just, I think, a tough one, and that’s acceptance. This is probably the toughest skill we have, and I just say it like, “Oh, just accept the other person and what they’re saying.” But anyone who’s been alive for five minutes knows that that’s really, really a hard pill to swallow.

So, what we mean when we say acceptance is not that you are agreeing with the point of view. You’re welcome to present counter evidence, alternatives but, at some point, you have to sort of understand that the person you’re speaking with has a right to a point of view. And to do this, it requires some personal intellectual humility. And intellectual humility is like a cousin to actual humility.

Humility is thinking that you have no more fundamental worth than another person. But intellectual humility is a recognition that you are limited, that you haven’t figured it all out, that you do have some natural biases, that you do have a skewed vision, that your personal experience colors your vision of life. And it’s fine for you to come up with moral reasoning or professional expertise, but it’s equally fine for another person. And you can’t just assume, you’re wiser, you’re smarter, and you happen to have landed on the truth, lucky you.

You should think, “You know what, that person may have different values, they’ve had different experiences, they have a different professional role, and so they’re going to arrive at slightly different conclusions. I don’t ever have to agree with them, but I always have to respect their right to have them.” And that takes some work, but when you engage in that, you have more types of conversations and you open a door to conversations that you might otherwise avoid that can ultimately be productive conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I think, day to day, this happens at work all the time. And it’s just, you know, one person wants to greenlight a project and the other person says, “No, I don’t think we have capacity for it right now,” or, “I don’t think it’s fleshed out well enough,” or, “I don’t think the strategy is in place for it.”

And you have two totally opposing views. And often what happens is the two parties are embattled and they simply aren’t listening. It becomes this sort of feat of who can bully the other into getting their way, “If only I can lob so much evidence at you, so much passion at you, I’ll convince you that my chosen direction is the right direction.”

But it gets back to the kind of that seven habits idea, you know, first seek to understand and then be understood. Kind of like, “Look, I already know what I think, but I am curious what you think. What is it you’re looking at? What is it you’re seeing that I’m not seeing?” And when you do that, every once in a while, you’re surprised. It helps you retain a more positive view of the person you’re talking about.

They’re not just some, you know, bumbling dolt that that happen to arrive at something, that they actually are pretty thoughtful and pretty intentional in their approach. And you may or may not get what you want out of that, but it is going to lead to a better team dynamic in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Robert, tell me anything else you want to make sure to put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I’ll just mention that this applies, to some degree, across cultures, but culture is kind of interesting. We learn cultural scripts for interacting with one another. I’ve recently been traveling with someone. I’m American, and the person I was traveling with was not American. And I just realized that they didn’t have a script for some basic conversations.

Like, “How does this coffee shop banter work? The person asked me how I was, not just what I wanted to order. And I don’t know the level of depth I should be answering that question in, how much honesty I should be giving them.” Things that we would just take for granted because we have a good intuitive sense for those kinds of answers.

I was in the elevator with him and I was speaking to strangers on the elevator, and he’s like, “How did you know you could do that? What were you taking into account that made it okay for you to speak with strangers?” And I just started realizing, “Wow, this is really, really different across cultures.” And some of the things that listening does across cultures is, for example, the role of silence.

People interpret silence differently across cultures. So, for example, in Japan, just to use one instance, silence is often considered respectful. It is a sign of thoughtfulness and it’s usually perceived as something, not the absence of something, and you are kind of paying attention to silences. So, like, if people aren’t talking, maybe it means they don’t agree, but they don’t want to say it. And so, you are kind of trying to read the silence a bit.

Whereas, you imagine in the United States, silence is often felt as awkward and we rush to fill it in. So, some of these kind of communication exchanges, some of the communication technology is going to shift a little bit based on people’s cultural script.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Robert Biswas-Diener
It comes from George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Julius Caesar,” and it is, “Forgive him, Theodotus, for he is a barbarian, and thinks the ways of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” And I just love the idea of kind of intellectual humility built into that.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
One of my colleagues, Shige Oishi, had people shoot basketballs or shoot darts, and he saw how well they did at each. And he invited them back the next week and said, “Take your choice. Do you want to do baskets or darts?” And the Americans who did well at one wanted to stay with it and keep doing the one because they wanted, wanted to stay with the thing that they felt good about.

And the Asians and Asian Americans in his study, if they did well on one, they wanted to shift and do the opposite one because they were more inclined to want to master something new. And I’ve always just felt like that was a very clever methodology and a very interesting cultural study.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Robert Biswas-Diener
This is a recency effect, but I just finished Dracula and I loved it.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
A pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Any particular brand or type or features?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I do a lot of drawing also, so I like anything that doesn’t smear, but I just use a lot of Bic roller balls.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, my favorite habit is to wake up extraordinarily early and draw for one hour before I start the day. I always prioritize my wellbeing so that I feel strong and centered before embarking on everything else I’m going to do.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, a recent one, and I stole this actually from my co-author, but just the idea that you should remember that everyone is in the middle of something. And if you just approach everyone all the time with, “You know what, they’re in the middle of something. I’m in the middle of something. They’re in the middle of something,” it can make you a little bit more forgiving and a little bit more patient.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
I would point them to my website, IntentionalHappiness.com. And I’d love to hear from people.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. And let’s keep it thematically aligned with listening. I would pay attention to times that you, this coming week, feel really listened to, and note what the other person is doing. What’s happening that makes you feel so heard, so validated? And see then if that’s what you can do to pay it forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, thank you.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, thanks so much. This was super fun.

1051: Channeling Optimism as a Superpower with Sumit Paul-Choudhury

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Sumit Paul-Choudhury shares the science behind optimism and why it gives people an advantage in the long term.

You’ll Learn

  1. The case for optimism
  2. How to train your brain to become an optimist
  3. How to direct your optimism to where you need it most

About Sumit

Sumit Paul-Choudhury writes, thinks, and dreams about science, technology, and the future. A former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist, he trained as an astrophysicist, has worked as a financial journalist, and, at the London Business School, received a Sloan Fellowship in strategy and leadership. Currently, he devotes most of his time to his creative studio Alternity, which puts the ideas in this book into scientific and artistic practice. He lives and works in London.

Resources Mentioned

Sumit Paul-Choudhury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sumit, welcome.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hi, glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m feeling optimistic about this interview.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Me too, hopefully, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would like to kick it off. You’ve got a pretty dramatic story in terms of you share that you became an optimist on the night of tragedy. Can you tell us the story and how you came to this position?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah. So, well, it’s not so much that I became an optimist as I realized I was one starting at that point. So, some time ago now, my first wife died of cancer, or complications of cancer. And, obviously, this was a pretty bad time for me. But one of the things I did, or the main thing I did, actually, was in the aftermath, I was to think, “Well, how am going to get through this?” And I thought, “Well, the present is not great, obviously, but I have to believe that the future is going to be better. It’s going to be brighter than today is.”

And so, I started, more or less, kind of like a coping mechanism, really. I sort of declared myself to be an optimist. I said, “I’m going to be an optimist. I’m going to believe that the future is going to be better. And, in that way, maybe it will be.” And so, I started to do things that I thought might help me along that goal. And as I kind of did them, I realized a couple of things.

One was I realized that, actually, it was helping, and something that I kind of thought was frivolous. I thought optimism is kind of a fairly naive way to go about your life. I realized there was more power there than I had realized previously. And the other thing I realized was that, actually, I thought, “Well, this is coming at a very bleak time in my life.”

And then I thought, “Well, I’ve always been an optimist. This is something I’ve always assumed that things will get better. And even now in this darkest of moments, I still think things are going to get better.” And then realizing that I was an optimist and appeared to be quite strongly optimistic was quite difficult because I thought it was frivolous. I thought this was something that if you didn’t really want to think much about life, you’d just say, “Oh, I’m an optimist. Things will work out.” And that’s how you proceed.

So, both of those things came as something of a surprise to me, that optimism wasn’t this kind of throwaway thing, and that I’d always been one, which wasn’t something I identified with myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s powerful. Thank you for sharing. And I really relate to that. I remember, when I was 15, my dad died in a bicycling accident.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Oh, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was terrible and very sad. And, at the same time, in the mix of my thoughts, I remember thinking, “Boy, I’m so grateful that I had him for this long.” Because I just imagined, like, if he had left me three years earlier, I probably could have gotten into some real trouble, really, because I had some, I don’t know, wild rebelliousness within me.

And so, I was grateful for what could have been, that was not looking to the past, and you’re looking to the future, like, you believe the future will be better than today. Well, tell us, you know a lot of reason, fact-based, evidence-based things, is optimism rational, true, believable, defensible for the skeptic?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Well, I’m a science journalist, I should say. And that was one of the reasons I found optimism, or identifying as an optimist, to be difficult, because I kind of prided myself on being a critical thinker, or being someone who made all these decisions on the basis of evidence. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing, right? And then I became a journalist. And, similarly, in journalism, you’re supposed to be a detached critical thinker.

You view things objectively, try and come up with the most accurate possible assessment of a situation, or of what you’re being told. And that doesn’t sit very well with the idea of optimism as this kind of belief that things will turn out for the better. And, actually, the more I kind of dug into it, the more I realized that actually optimism is kind of irrational, actually. I mean, people kind of often try and turn it into a rational kind of way of looking at the world.

And there are arguments for it and there are ways that you can kind of make it more rigorous. But at its core, optimism in the psychological sense is irrational. Psychologists refer to it as unrealistically positive expectations. It’s kind of believing that good things will happen more often than the numbers suggest or the experience of your peers suggest. And bad things will happen less often than the numbers suggest. So, it is basically irrational.

But having said that, you can make a good case for it. You can make a case for the fact that this irrational belief, nonetheless, helps us to get ahead in life. And when you kind of do the kind of research that psychologists have done, you discover that, actually, people who score as more strongly optimistic up to a point also seem to have better lives in many respects. Longer lives, healthier lives, happier lives, and more successful lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to dig into that. And I guess, with that strict definition of optimism, in terms of the belief that things will be better than they, statistically, are likely to be, I guess I’m curious, though, sometimes just having–we had Jamil Zaki on the show, and he was talking about hope, and that often our default assumptions are more cynical and more doubtful than the reality on the ground.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right, exactly. And I think that’s where optimism comes into its own, essentially. So, the reason that it’s irrational is because we don’t have the evidence to hand to say, “I believe this thing will work out.” We don’t have the evidence for that, you know, “I think I’m going to get this promotion,” say. You can’t say ahead of time that that’s definitely going to happen. Almost never in the real world are you in a position where you can say, “With 100% certainty, I know what’s going to happen,” or, “I know that things aren’t going to work out.” That’s just not the way the world works.

Most of the time you have to kind of try and make your best guess, and you know that your best guess is not going to be entirely correct. The difference between being an optimist and a pessimist in that situation is that as an optimist, you recognize that there are positive possibilities that you don’t see. There are positive outcomes that you’re not necessarily aware of.

As a pessimist, you kind of write those off. As an optimist, you think, “Well, there are positives. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what those further solutions, those further opportunities might be,” but you make the effort to keep yourself open to them, to keep looking for them. And so, if they do exist, you’ll find them, right?

If you’re a pessimist, on the other hand, you don’t do anything. And so, you don’t kind of realize those opportunities. So, basically, I mean, you start off in this position where, whatever your best assessment is, it’s going to be wrong. If you assume it’s wrong and there’s no upside, then that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume it’s wrong, but there are positive outcomes out there that you haven’t foreseen, then you’ve got a better chance of achieving them.

Pete Mockaitis
This kind of reminds me of Pascal’s Wager.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah, it is very much like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Except we’re not talking about death and eternity, so much as life and the immediate weeks, months, years ahead.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right. Right, it is like that. Actually, I mean, it’s like optimism in its origins is actually a philosophical argument, not a psychological one. So, it actually doesn’t really come from, it’s become this kind of, you know, word for the way that we look at the world, and that’s essentially what it means to us today. And it has always meant that to some extent.

But once upon a time, it was a much deeper, more philosophical point about, “What way does the world skew?” You know, at a time when the kind of language of probability and risk and that sort of thing was not as evolved as it is today, you had to explain why bad things happened. And optimism was one way that you explained how that good things were more likely to happen than bad things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, the universe of statistics and probability and risk today is wild. I’m thinking about markets such as Polymarket and predicted and Kalshi, it’s like, wow, we’ve got a number of people putting money on the probabilities of all sorts of things. So, yeah, what an environment we find ourselves in.

So, well, could you share then a few of the biggest discoveries, the most fascinating tidbits you’ve uncovered within psychology that you share in your book, The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main kind of thing about this, as I say, is that you can make a good argument for why you should be an optimist even though being optimistic is not rational. And the way that pans out is that, essentially, by going after opportunities you don’t necessarily know exist, you tend to realize them in due course. And that kind of helps you to kind of benefit from the upside, from benefits from upsides that you don’t necessarily see at the outset.

And where this kind of shows up, in day-to-day life, essentially, is that it makes you better at coping. I mean, as I kind of talked about with my own experience at the beginning of this, I was doing this inadvertently, but it makes you better at coping with setbacks. It makes you more able to kind of bounce back when you hit a roadblock. You don’t kind of think, “That roadblock is absolute and total and I’ve gotten nowhere around it.” You think, “Well, actually there are probably are ways around this even if I can’t see them.”

And that translates not just like to the decisions you make about your own personal life in terms of what might be happening to you in your family life or whatever, as my example goes. But it also translates to the area of relationships. So, optimists tend to work harder at their relationships, both kind of your social relationships and your professional ones. And so, that means that you tend to kind of persevere more. You tend to try a bit harder to get past whatever your current problem is.

And that, over the long term, tends to mean that things work out. But there is kind of a caveat in here, which is that it does have to be something that you kind of do on a routine, regular basis. If you just get wildly optimistic about a particular thing, a particular event, let’s say you are going for a promotion. If you get massively optimistic about that particular event, that doesn’t necessarily help because it doesn’t–you can’t change the odds in your favor all that dramatically.

If, however, you kind of take every opportunity you have to advance yourself, and you take each of those individually with an optimistic stance, that’s what tends to pan out over the long term because, sure, you’ll be wrong sometimes and some things won’t work out, but sometimes they do. And over time that accumulates.

So, optimism is not a short thing. It’s not a one-off, you know, wild overestimation of how likely you are to get lucky in a particular time. It’s a game for the long term. It’s something you have to keep trying and keep trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is really juicy stuff, and it reminds me of some of Dr. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy, in terms of the beliefs we have about what is possible for ourselves really do translate into different results, not so much in a mystical law of attraction, universe bringing things into your life kind of a way, but rather a, “Well, hey, if you believe that it’s going to work out this way, or that you have the power to do a thing, then you’re going to go ahead and make an effort, and you get the results more often when you go ahead and make the effort than when you don’t.”

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Exactly. I mean, I think there are other ways in which this pays off. It pays off in terms of your relationships, I say, because people like optimists. People like people who are willing. And this is not difficult to understand, but, I mean, clearly, who’s going to kind of want to hang out with someone who tells you things are going to be terrible, right? I mean, you want to hang out with someone who says, “Things are going to be good. If you follow me, things are going to work out well.”

But if you kind of adopt that stance and you put in that little bit of extra effort, then you tend to kind of reinforce those relationships. And it works both ways, right? I mean, if you develop a stronger relationship, that then becomes a status resource, as it’s called, that you can then draw upon.

It means that when you kind of come to a point when you need something down the line, you’re more able to ring up that person you have that relationship with. You’re more able to kind of ask for a favor. You’re more able to ask for advice. And those are all the kind of things that, gradually, over time, add up to real material changes in your ability to achieve what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, could you share some fun stories that bring this all to life?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, I think the easiest place to see optimism at work at the moment, and you can take this however you like, really, is in the Valley. So, optimism is very strongly associated with entrepreneurship and with innovation. I say entrepreneurship, but I mean, essentially, anyone who wants to take a chance on doing something new or different requires a certain level of optimism because, at the outset, you can’t know that it’s going to work out.

So, whether you’re within a company or an organization, and you’re trying to do something differently or you’re trying to do something on your own, you need some degree of optimism to make it work. And I think there’s no kind of more successful example of optimism than the people we see who run the big tech companies at the moment and where they came from.

If you take someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he started out coding in his dorm room with a project with what eventually became Facebook. There was no kind of realistic way that you might think at that point in time that this was going to become one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the most powerful companies in the world, and that he would still be single-handedly in charge of that now. That this would be kind of his pet project.

Zuckerberg talks about this in terms of that language of the self-fulfilling prophecy. So, he talks about, you know, this is one of his favorite phrases that optimists tend to be successful, pessimists tend to be right. And this is the kind of thing about, so if you’re a pessimist, you can always kind of justify this to yourself. You can always say, “I was correct about that,” because you go and look for the evidence that supports your point of view.

You don’t do anything to confound it and, therefore, you end up being correct that something doesn’t work out. If you’re an optimist, you tend to ignore that and you build the thing, you build the multimillion, the multibillion-dollar company, and you go ahead and do it even though that’s not what conventional wisdom says you can do, even though that’s not something that someone working out of a dorm room is supposed to be able to achieve. That’s kind of where the power of optimism comes in.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. Could I have another story?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, in the story I tell in the book, I tell the story of how I eventually got my job at New Scientists. And it started off, when I was a kid, I was in my dad’s office. He took me to work when we were on vacation, when I was on vacation rather, from school, and I found a stack of magazines, New Scientists magazines, so science magazine.

I kind of thought at the time that writing in science were not very compatible occupations, which they, by and large, are not supposed to be. And so, I kind of looked at these, the stack of magazines and asked my dad, like, “Who looks after this magazine?” And he said, “The editor does that,” and I kind of, “All right. Fine.” And this is when I was about eight, and I thought, “That’s the job I want, basically. I like writing. I like science. That’s something I can do.”

And, obviously, at the age of eight, you don’t have any expectation that you’re going to be able to make that work, right, or what that means, essentially. But I clung onto that idea. And so, when I kind of went to school, I had to make my choices, I decided, “I still had this kind of thing in the back of my mind. This is the ultimate job for me, essentially.” It wasn’t that I necessarily thought I was going to get it tomorrow, but that was what I was aiming for.

So, when I came to having to choose between writing and science, initially I chose science because I thought you needed to be a scientist. And I thought that you could be a writer even if you didn’t have the training for that. So, I studied science, I studied astrophysics, I did all of that. And then I decided that I would switch to writing, which was kind of this leap into the unknown, essentially, at that point.

And it was kind of a, that was pure unbridled optimism. I thought I could make that work. I had no evidence for it. I had no background in writing. I had no track records. I had no particular expertise in that field. But I thought I’d give it a go. So, I did. And as it turns out, I did turn out to be able to make a career in writing.

But the most important thing, really, wasn’t that I was necessarily good at that. It was that by looking for ways to advance that career, I eventually lucked into a position where the physics background was very useful, which was in covering finance. From there, I kind of did that for quite a long time. I started a publication through a random opportunity, through someone I met through networking, carried on doing this.

And, eventually, after doing that for about a decade, I wrote back to New Scientist, and said, “Can I have a job?” And they said, you know, at that point, they kind of said, “Well, you know, maybe later, maybe if you get some more experience.” So, I got a bit more experience. I wrote back to them. And, ultimately, they gave me a job, a part-time position. It was a two-day a week position that I started out with.

And then, over time, I built up from there and, eventually, I became the editor in chief. And the kind of point I was trying to make here is that, really, I mean, there are a number of ways you can think about this. This was not a case of me saying at the beginning of this, I had the very naive, optimistic view that, you know, if I just went out there and did like, you know, wrote for a couple of years, I would somehow end up at New Scientist and end up in charge.

What it turned out to be was that much longer game, but every step along the way required me to take kind of optimistic leaps into the dark, essentially. It meant I have to kind of accept, I had to be optimistic about my chances of being a writer. I had to be optimistic about my chances of, once I’ve been a writer, of being able to run a publication.

And then I’d to be optimistic about my chances of getting into New Scientist. And once I was there, I had to be optimistic about my chances of progressing there. And so, there’s a succession of steps, each of them involved being open to possibilities that were not obvious at the outset. Each of them is kind of optimistic journey, a step down this line, that, eventually, ended up with me getting the job that I kind of set out to do, you know, 25 odd years earlier. And that’s kind how I got to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Congratulations.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. So, if we think, “Yes, that’s good. I would like some more of that,” but it doesn’t come so naturally to us, what do we do?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, there are a few things you can do, and some of these are given in the book. They’re not actually particularly complicated. The main thing is that we don’t take the time to do them. So, there are a bunch of exercises that people have suggested for how you can make yourself more dispositionally optimistic. So, the very specific optimism, I think we kind of know how to make ourselves optimistic about how to kind of G ourselves up for a specific challenge.

So, if we’re going for a job interview, or we’ve got a big project to pull off, whatever, I think we kind of all have an idea about how we kind of build our morale for that. But the bigger challenge is being optimistic in that longer term sense, in that persistent sense. And there are a couple of things that people suggest for that, or psychologists have suggested for that.

One of them, which I think is kind of something that has to become second nature, is called disputation. And this is the idea that when something happens, you need to try and explain it to yourself in a way that doesn’t kind of make it entirely an issue, you know, it doesn’t make it an inevitability. So, the idea is that we have different explanatory styles.

And one explanatory style is to say, “Well, I didn’t get that job,” or that promotion, or, “This project didn’t work because it was always doomed to happen that way,” “I wasn’t qualified,” “I’m not ready,” “I don’t have the right kind of skillset for it,” or whatever else, and to really internalize that. And, obviously, there’s always going to be some truth to that and you always need to reflect on the components of that that might have led to whatever situation you end up in.

But the other way of doing it is to think about, is to kind of to challenge that, and think about the other factors that were involved and how you might have controlled those, to think about whether there are external factors, whether you had a bad day, whether you had a personality clash with the person you’re talking to, whether there was a failure in the environment that meant you couldn’t deliver against whatever you’re trying to deliver against. So, with that, you have to keep doing it. It’s not something you can do once and then move on from.

It’s like having a little post-mortem every time something happens, and thinking about it and trying to come up with a constructive frame. And if you do that over and over and over again, you eventually become good at kind of coming up with an optimistic interpretation of what’s happened. And that then makes you better at coming up with optimistic interpretations of what’s going to happen, of the challenges that you face. It makes you better able to frame your challenges, your problems in ways that are amenable to solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can we dig it out into some particular questions or prompts or ways we might point our brain in the direction that gets there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So there are a few different ways you can do this. One is there’s a model called the best-possible-self exercise, which is kind of you sit down and you, essentially, spend 15 minutes talking about the best possible version of you. So, you try and you can do this in whichever way makes sense to you. You can do it as a written description.

So, one of the things I did when I was in my bereavement was, I did this as a blog posting exercise, essentially. I wrote down what I thought my life could be like. But you can do it that way, you can do it in terms of the things that you want to achieve over various timeframes. You can ask yourself what success looks like to you.

And the idea is to try and do that on a regular basis, to do it something like daily. You spend something like 15 minutes a day doing this for as long as you can manage, essentially. Initially, it helps to kind of do it over a short-term period, so do it for like two weeks or so. And then you can do it less frequently over time because it’s a lot of time commitment.

The thing about that is not something that we never do, but we don’t tend to do it very often. We only tend to do it when we have a particular decision to make. Whereas, doing it on a regular basis means that you keep kind of front and center in your mind what it is that you’re trying to achieve, what it is that you want to do, essentially, rather than being, getting lost in the fog of the moment or of the everyday.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about being lost in the fog of the moment or the everyday, if you do find yourself in that zone of sweeping condemnation or despair, do you have any kind of go-to tactics to lift yourself up out of there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the one thing that’s useful there is to think about the pivotal moments in your life and to think about the what-ifs. You kind of mentioned earlier the what-if when your father passed. And that’s kind of a quite extreme example. But I think one of the things that’s useful to do when you feel like overwhelmed is to think about the what-ifs in your own life. Think about the points when things could have gone differently for you. And there’s two kinds of implications of that.

One is the ways in which they went right for you and the ways that your life has gone in the direction that you wanted to. And the other is to think about how you would have reacted if they’d gone a different way. Because, usually, particularly with the passage of time, it becomes easier to see that, actually, whatever happened was not the only thing that could have happened and the only way that things could have worked out. There are other ways that things could have gone that would have been equally satisfying.

And you can usually see that with a remove. And that helps you to bring perspective on the current moment. No matter what you kind of look at, if you’re looking at the moment right now and you think, “I can’t see a way out of this. I can’t see what happens from here,” you’ve probably felt like this in the past. There are moments in your past when you would have felt like that, and things either worked themselves out for the better, or you know how they could have done. And that, I think, gives you perspective.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think there’s a lot of upsides to optimism, and they pan out over the long term gradually, more than they do in the short term. One of the things about being an optimist, I think you have to be careful not to let it kind of override your basic kind of common sense about how to treat people. I think optimism is a question of directing the optimism that you have.

I think if you kind of think about where you’re optimistic in your life and where you’re maybe not so optimistic, that kind of helps you to identify areas where you might want to concentrate using things like that best possible self-exercise, or where you want to kind of think a bit harder about disputing your version of events.

It’s not that easy to necessarily raise your level of optimism hugely. And I’m not sure that that’s necessarily that healthy an exercise because if you do that, you run the risk of starting to dismiss the problems in your life, or the problems in other people’s lives, or the real challenges that you face. So, I think that with optimism, it’s more a question of directing the optimism that you have and trying to increase it in specific areas than it is with being blanket positive.

It’s not just about being happy or being relentlessly positive about everything. It’s about trying to focus on the areas where you need that optimism. And that’s also true when it comes to assessing what lies ahead of you. One of the things that optimists, an optimist sees opportunity everywhere. And that means you can find it quite difficult to pick one thing to focus on.

If you’re an optimist like I am, you tend to kind of, as sort of from the little description I gave you there of my career, you tend to kind of want to try and do everything. So, you need to bring a little bit of discipline to that as well in terms of what the specific things you want to do, the specific goals you want to achieve, the specific jobs you want to have, the specific roles you want to play. So, optimism is about targeting. It’s not just about being relentlessly sun-shiny. It’s about choosing where you want to increase your ability to see that brighter future.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any guardrails or pro-tips on how much optimism is too much, or when we’re potentially flirting with recklessness?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the best answer there, really, is to listen to other people. So, generally, it’s the point at which you’re tipping over from constructing a version of events that suits you into denial. There’s a point at which people are saying, “You’re wrong about this.” And you need to kind of think carefully about whether they’re right or they’re wrong. You need to think about the data. You need to think about what the numbers say.

We’re disposed to ignore the numbers completely. You can’t ignore them completely. You need to pay a certain amount of attention to them. It’s clearer in things like in health outcomes. If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, it doesn’t make any difference what you do. You’re going to have bad outcomes from that.

If you take wild financial risks, those also are not going to work out for you in the long term. So, there’s just a certain degree of remaining grounded and a certain degree of listening to what people are telling you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, my favorite quote on optimism comes from James Baldwin, the Civil Rights activist. And so, he came out of, this is in 1963, he came out of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, who was the Attorney General at the time. And it was a very acrimonious meeting. Things had not worked out. They had not been able to find common ground. And Baldwin, as it happened, was doing a TV interview the same day.

And, in the course of that interview, he was asked, “Well, what do you think about the future of America? Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?” And he kind of thinks about it for a minute. You can see it on the film if you watch it. He’s kind of thinking for a minute about what to say. And then he says, “I think I have to be an optimist because, otherwise, you’re accepting that human life is an academic matter.”

And what he means by that, I think, is that, you can’t afford to– it goes a little bit back to what you saying about cynicism, that you can’t really afford to say that life is a purely a matter of calculation about what is bloodlessly correct. Life is something we live, and you have to kind of be engaged with it. And that, I think, means being an optimist.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
There’s one that kind of sticks in my mind quite a bit, which is one by three psychologists called Armor, Massey, and Sackett. And that was, essentially, about what people think about optimism.

They basically did an experiment where they say, “Here are some scenarios that the people are facing.” Someone is offered a promotion. Someone is asked to organize an event and a few other things like that. And they asked people, “What stance should people have going into this? Should they be optimistic? Should they be pessimistic?”

And almost universally, across the board with all of these scenarios, the answer is they should be optimistic. And that’s kind of very telling because people don’t expect realism from others. People don’t think that realism is the best way to go into things. People think that optimism is the best way to go into a new challenge.

And then it’s kind of a rider to that, so, two, actually. One is the degree to which they prescribe optimism depends on how much control you have over the situation, which is not surprising in some respects. The other one, though, is that they didn’t think people were optimistic enough. We almost never think that anybody is going to be optimistic enough, or that we are going to be optimistic enough in dealing with these situations.

So, there is an enormous kind of psychological weight to optimism, but one that we tend not to allow ourselves when we’re in a professional context. We tend not to allow ourselves to express that kind of belief, I think, because we think we’ll be viewed as naive, or we think we’ll be viewed as being unrealistic in some way. But I think it helps to remember that, actually, almost all the time, everybody thinks optimism is the right way to approach a challenge. And that, actually, we probably don’t make enough use of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
The book I would recommend is Candide by Voltaire. An old book, it’s published in 1759. The title is Candide or optimism. And it is a book that sets up two different strands of optimism. It sets up one which is, I referred to earlier, this kind of grand philosophical version of optimism in which the world is set up a certain way and things must turn out for the right within it.

And another, which is much more kind of concerned with the here and now in the present moment. And I don’t think either of those two kinds of optimism is necessarily correct or incorrect. They’re both different kinds of optimism. I think it helps to think about both of them. The one in which you try and make sense of the world and the one in which you think about what you can do, what you can do to make your own situation better, what you can do around you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main tool I would say, the thing that’s really made a difference to me in the last few years, given that I’m a knowledge worker, essentially, is Roam, which is a personal knowledge management tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
My favorite habit is probably my version of the best possible self, which kind of takes various forms, but I do it over different time scales. So, I do one, which is sort of for the next month or so, I do one for the next year, and I do one for the next five years. The one that actually turns out to be most useful for me, I found, is the five year one, in point of fact.

Because I think the others, they get derailed very quickly. Things I need to do over the course of the next week, like everybody I set out with my list of to do, most of them don’t get done, you know, some of them do. The five year one, though, is like the compass needle of where I need to get to over the long term.

And I find that it makes it much easier to make all the little course corrections you need to do. And it makes decision-making easier when I’m thinking about what I want to be doing in five years’ time rather than what I want to be doing next week.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the best place is my website, which is Alternaty.com, A-L-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y dot com. You’ll find more information about me and the book there, and some other resources fairly soon. Not up yet, but they’re going to be, they will be shortly. Otherwise, I’m available on LinkedIn.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Always stay open to possibility. If you plant many seeds, some of them will grow. If you go out looking for new opportunities, you’ll find them. If you stay where you are, if you carry on doing what you’re doing, you won’t. So, keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sumit, thank you. This has been fun.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you, Pete. Thank you.

1050: How to Shift Your Mood and Keep Your Cool with Dr. Ethan Kross

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Ethan Kross shares simple, science-backed tools for managing your emotions.

You’ll Learn

  1. When avoidance is actually helpful
  2. Effortless strategies for quickly shifting your mood
  3. The emotional regulation framework used by the Navy SEALs 

About Ethan

Ethan Kross, PhD, author of the national bestseller Chatter, is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed about his research on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Ethan Kross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome back!

Ethan Kross
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete. Always great to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I loved our first conversation about your book Chatter. And now we’re talking about your book Shift. Tell us, what made you think that this book needed to exist in the world?

Ethan Kross
Well, the recognition really came from just talking to people about my first book, which you just mentioned, Chatter. So that book really dealt with, “What do you do when you get stuck in a negative thought loop that you just can’t get out of, worrying and ruminating?” I would give talks about that topic, and the audience would be incredibly receptive to the tools that I would share with them.

But then they’d have loads of other questions about their emotional lives, beginning with, “What is an emotion in the first place? Why do we have them? What do they do for us? Are the bad ones good, or can they help us in some way? And what about if it’s just a momentary increase in emotion that I want to regulate, not necessarily a thought loop?”

And the way I think about the experience I had, it was like I had just given a talk on how to combat heart disease, but people had questions about inflammation, cancer, diabetes, and all sorts of other chronic ailments. And so, it really motivated me to dig into what we know about this messy emotional world that we live in and what we could do to manage our responses to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made. So, you’ve been researching this kind of thing for quite a while at Michigan. Is there insight you share with audiences that make people go, “Whoa”?

Ethan Kross
First off, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotions. People routinely ask me, “What’s the one thing you should do if you are experiencing…?” fill-in-the-blank, A, B, C, D, or E, anger, anxiety, envy, you name it. I can’t answer that question because what I know from the science is that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ethan, if I may, whenever I’m talking to the AI robots, they tell me deep breathing is the answer to calm down.

Ethan Kross
Well, deep breathing can be useful for some people in some situations, but so can a boatload of other strategies. We recently published these studies that looked at how people managed their COVID anxiety during the pandemic. We tracked people for several days over the course of a few weeks, and every day we asked them to tell us, “What did you do today to manage your anxiety about the pandemic?” And we also had people rate their anxiety.

And what we found was there were lots of things people could do to feel better about what they were going through. But, on average, people use between three and four different tools each day. Not one, not just deep breathing. Between three and four, some people use a lot more, some people use a little bit less.

But what we also found, Pete, was that the tools that worked for one person on one day were remarkably different than the tools that worked for someone else on the same day. The tools that worked for one person on one day were sometimes different from the tools that worked for them the next day.

So, I think of all of this now a lot like how I think about physical fitness. A lot of us share the same goal to be physically fit, to be physically healthy. But how we get there can be quite, quite different. If I just look in my immediate social circles. What I do is different from each and every one of those other people in my group, right? We may all like to lift little weights, but I like to do some high intensity stuff, and sometimes I’ll do yoga. Another friend might throw in some Pilates or a different regimen. There are different ways to achieve our goal, and that is true of being emotionally fit as well. So, that’s one thing I want everyone to know. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Another aha, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. So, we often think, you know, if we’re feeling anxious or sad or anger, there’s something wrong with us. These are emotions we want to rid ourselves of. In fact, we evolved the capacity to experience those emotions because they’re often functional as long as we experience them not too intensely or not too long.

Anger alerts us to the fact that our view of what’s right and wrong has just been challenged and there’s something we could do to fix the situation. Anxiety tells us that there’s a looming uncertain threat on the horizon. Maybe we should pay attention to it. Now, clearly, for so many of us, so much of the time, those otherwise adaptive negative emotional responses become harmful because we can’t turn them off, and that’s where the science of shifting that I talk about in my book comes into play.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, this is good, and there was an author, I think it was Susan David, who wrote a book, and she had a cute little abbreviation about emotions, it’s, “What the funct?” That’s spelled F-U-N-C-T, like, “What is the function of this emotion?”

And I found that to be a much more helpful question when I’m having conversations with myself than “Why are you here anger?” because it’s almost like it creates defensiveness. It’s like if you screwed up something at work, it’s like, “Why don’t I have this document yet?” It’s like, “Ugh!” It almost, like, sparks defensiveness, and you can give some, “Well, I’m angry because of all these things!” And sure enough, then we’re really reinforcing that anger.

And what I’d like to do is sort of quickly understand and move past it to be more effective in whatever context I am. So, I think that’s great to note that they’re not bad things to be fixed but they have a function within them.

Ethan Kross
That’s right. And so, what I like to tell people is that if you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you. It means you’re operating the way you’re supposed to operate. But, these tools that we possess, these emotional tools that we have, they’re unwieldy tools, right, as you just described, and we don’t get a user’s manual for how to manage them.

And that’s really what I try to do in this book, is provide folks with a science-based blueprint for how to understand how to turn the volume on their emotions, up or down, shorten or lengthen how long they last, or even jump from one emotion to another. And there are lots of things you could do there. And interestingly, Pete, there’s also, there are a lot of myths about how we should shift that are actually wrong.

So, maybe we could go into some of those myths because those are often fun and they’re helpful ways to introduce some of the tools. Myth number one, avoidance is always bad. So, we often hear that you should never avoid your problems, face them head-on. This was a lesson that was drilled into me from a young age.

It’s absolutely true that chronically avoiding your problems doesn’t tend to work out very well for people. So just suppressing, denying, drowning yourself in substances that may provide you with some temporary but not long-lasting relief. These are things that many people do. They’ve been shown to be harmful, but we have over-generalized from that observation to assume that all forms of avoidance are harmful. They are not.

Pete, have you ever had an aggravating interaction in person or an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes.

Ethan Kross
And you’re smiling already, so I’ll take that as yes. And the temptation existed to respond right away but you combated it. You took time away. You distracted maybe for a couple hours, maybe for a few days, and you came back to the experience and found that it was a lot easier for you to work through it rationally. Does that resonate with you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. “The Lincoln Letters,” right, that’s a historical legend, which I think is true. Lincoln was angry, he wrote some letters, and he put them in his desk and just kept them there.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So that’s a way of being strategic with your attention, right? You don’t have to choose between approaching or avoiding, as we often describe it. You can approach your problems and then take some time away and then come back to them. You could do that repeatedly. And research shows that being flexible in that regard can be quite helpful. So, avoidance is not always useful. Attention is a powerful tool. You want to be flexible with how you wield it.

Let’s talk about being in the moment. We often hear that the goal should be to always be in the moment. Now it’s absolutely true that being in the moment can be helpful when we get stuck in a negative future or past. But there are also ways to travel in time in your mind to help you deal with the problems you’re experiencing, and these are easy, powerful tools that we all possess.

So, I call this mental time travel. Rather than say in the moment, I could transport myself into the future 10 years from now and think to myself, “How am I going to feel about this thing that’s really bugging me right now 10 years from now?” What that does is it highlights something I know at my core to be true, that whatever I’m experiencing as time goes on, it will eventually fade in its intensity.

The reason I know that to be true is the same reason why you know it to be true, and so many of our listeners do as well. We’ve experienced millions of emotional reactions over the course of our lives, and most of them follow the same time course, the same what we call temporal trajectory. Our emotions get triggered, and then as time goes on, they eventually fade.

Now we lose sight of that when we’re struggling, when all we could think about is how awful and consuming our circumstances are. But jumping into the mental time travel machine into the future, it makes it clear that what we’re going through is impermanent. That gives us hope, which turns the volume on our emotional responses down. So that’s mental time travel into the future.

You can also go into the past. I do this a lot, too. I opened the book with a story of my grandmother who narrowly escaped being slaughtered along with the rest of her family during the Holocaust. She lived homeless in Poland for years before she escaped to the States and built a new life. When things feel really bad for me, I jump into my mental time travel machine. I spend some time with her in the frozen Polish woods.

I don’t have to spend a lot of time, just a little bit, and it powerfully makes clear that what I’m going through pales in comparison to what she endured, and that broadens my perspective quite well. So, myth number two, you should always be in the moment. No, you shouldn’t. First of all, if your goal is to always be in the moment, good luck. I don’t think it’s actually possible. The brain evolved to travel in time.

Traveling in time is something we do in our minds, helps us plan for the future, learn from the past. What we all, I think, want to be doing is focusing on “How can we be better mental time travelers?” And that means sometimes recalibrating in the moment, but also traveling strategically in our minds into the future and past, depending on what our goals are. So that’s another myth.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to dig into that notion of, it’s a mental travel, time travel to the past, think about being in the frozen woods of Poland, and that gives you some perspective that your current problems aren’t so bad. I’m curious, is there a way to do that poorly?

For example, I think some might say that if we are quick to imagine much greater troubles elsewhere and dismiss the feelings we have about our current state or situation, that might be, I guess, “invalidating” of the emotion and potentially counterproductive. How do you think about that?

Ethan Kross
I don’t think so. Here’s why. It’s a misnomer to think that you apply these tools, and all of a sudden, a real difficult spot in your life turns into a birthday party with cupcakes and soda and warm cups of tea and pizza, right? That’s just not the way emotion regulation works. So, what ends up happening is, instead, as you get these shifts, these down regulatory shifts in amplitude or duration.

Amplitude meaning how intense the emotional response is or how long it lasts. You’re making it feel more controllable, and so you’re not just saying, “Oh, this is nothing and doesn’t mean anything at all.” I think that’s probably pretty rare, that a kind of traveling into the past and thinking about, “Well, you know, things could be worse.” I don’t think it just turns it off.

Having said that, Pete, I always recognize that there are instances that defy the norms. And so, is it possible that that could happen? Sure, absolutely. And in a minority of cases, like, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that that never does occur. But here’s the good news, that if you find yourself trying mental time travel into the past in this way, and it’s leading to the kinds of outcomes that you’re suggesting, don’t use that tool anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s easy. Sure.

Ethan Kross
Use a different one. And that’s an ace in the hole on the one hand but it’s the truth on the other. Like, I don’t respond well to burpees. Are you familiar with burpees?

I hate burpees. It doesn’t mean they don’t make me feel good. Guess what? I don’t do them. They benefit a lot of people. They don’t really benefit me. And there’s a whole boatload of physical exercises like that. I don’t do dips. It’s too hard on my shoulder. And we could go down the list. I’ll spare you my injuries and idiosyncrasies. But the same is true when it comes to managing our emotions and these tools that I’m talking about.

Some people benefit enormously from what we call expressive writing. Sitting down with a problem and just journaling about it for 15 to 20 minutes for one to three days. Just let yourself go. Talk about your deepest thoughts and feelings. Take it wherever you want. Connect it to your past, your future, whatever you want to do.

Research on that shows that that’s a really useful tool. And, in fact, in that COVID study that we ran, that I mentioned earlier, that was the most predictive of anxiety reductions of all the tools we looked about. But guess what? It was also the least frequently used tool out of the 18 or so that we administered, probably because it’s hard to do. Like, sitting down for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes? We all feel like we don’t.

I say this because you have agency in how you decide to assemble the tools that you apply to your life. And again, I think that should be a breath of fresh air because so many people I meet, they say things to me like, “Oh, I tried mindfulness. I tried meditating. I tried diaphragmatic breathing. It didn’t work for me. It works for everyone else. What’s wrong with me?” Again, nothing wrong with you. We know that there are these person strategy fits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the way you used that term phrase there, assemble the tools. Because sometimes there may be some assembly required. And I’ve been thinking, like lately, some tools I’ve been leaning on a lot, which are new and yet super handy, is that we had a guest, boy, back in the day, Michael Kerr, talked about putting together a humor first aid kit.

And I have diligently followed his advice and even used like a flash card application to assemble mine. And so, I’ve got, like, over a hundred things that I just thought were laugh out loud funny in the moment that I’ve captured, and then I just review them. And then it’s like, “Oh, I remember that time at that trade in Cancun, the trader did this thing, and it was so funny.” And so, it’s great to just have like 10 rapid-fire jokes, it’s like, “Oh, I’m in a better mood.” And there it is.

Ethan Kross
It’s so funny you bring that up. One of the things that we often talk about social media, how it’s bringing about society’s demise, and there clearly are some ways of interacting with social media that are harmful, but I like to remind people that sometimes it can be beneficial from a mood regulatory point of view. We don’t talk about that as much.

And your example makes me think about how I sometimes engage with social media to help improve my mood. Before bed, I will often watch these ridiculously silly short reels, and they bring me such emotional delight. I just find these pranks and other kinds of things, and I’ll laugh at them, and you know, they’re short, and then I’ll send them to some of my buddies, and they’ll send me back the teary-eyed emojis, they’re laughing, and then we both write back that our partners are elbowing us to stop laughing because we’re making too much noise and they don’t understand our humor.

And so, that little exercise of watching a funny video is both instantly elevating my positive affect. It’s also enhancing social connections. A simple thing you could do. So, let’s talk about simplicity for a second, though, because I think that’s another myth we can address. We often think that managing our emotions is hard, you know, “Pull up your sleeves. Get ready for the battle.” Sometimes it is, no question about it. But it isn’t always hard.

There are lots of tools that exist that are relatively effortless to implement. So expressive writing would not be an example of an effortless tool. That’s a pretty effortful tool, right? You’ve got to sit down, 15-20 minutes, you’ve got to write hard. But there are lots of things that you could do that are pretty easy. I’ll just kind of spit off a few. Spit off. Spit out. Mention. Mention a few sounds a lot more appetizing than spit off.

Music. I’ve been listening to music since I’m five years old. I’m guessing you’ve been listening to music for a while, too. Why do you listen to it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s fun. It sets the vibe or the mood.

Ethan Kross
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of I got young kids, like, “Let’s have a dance party,” or it’s like, “Are we are we feeling silly? Are we feeling like cue the Rocky theme to spark the motivation, or ‘Eye of the Tiger?” It’s like a movie, that we’re going to score this thing for the emotion or vibe we’re looking for.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So, close to 100% of people, when asked, “Why do you listen to music?” they answer that question by saying, “I like the way it makes me feel.” But if you then look at the percentage of people who, when they’re struggling, reach for music as a tool, it’s only between 10% and 30%. percent. So, music is an example of one way of harnessing your senses to shift your emotions.

All of our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, hearing, I’ve probably left a few out, those are some of the major ones. Part of the way your senses work is through emotion. So, the senses refer to the different apparatus we possess to take in information about the world around us. Part of the reason we’re taking in that information is so we understand how to navigate the world, and a key part of navigating the world involves understanding what’s safe, what’s not, what should we approach, what should we avoid.

So, your senses are intertwined deeply with your emotions. Again, you know this to be true, like we all do, right? Sounds can elicit emotional responses. Scents, you’ve got a multibillion-dollar industry that deals with just spritzing yourself with scents to change the way you feel about yourself and change the way that other people feel about you. It’s called perfume and cologne, right? Hotels pipe scents into their ventilation system to change the way their patrons make them feel.

Pete Mockaitis
And cars.

Ethan Kross
Food, restaurants, cars. Cars do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m working on that delivery.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, little spritz. I mean, it’s wild. For me, it’s wild. I don’t want to assume that everyone thinks it. I find it amazing. I look at the world through this filter now of our senses managing our emotions. Like, restaurants, why do we pay all this money to eat? This is an emotional experience. It’s not like we’re just lining up for an IV drip. We could get away with just an IV drip, right? Like, getting all the nutrients we want from somewhat no flavor bypassing senses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oatmeal and multivitamins and protein shakes, and move on.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, but even those are spiked with senses. Instead, we spend sometimes hundreds of dollars on these fancy meals. It’s all about an emotional experience. Touch. When a touch is registered from someone who we accept the touch from, that can be an amazingly pleasant experience. We caress our children, our partners. Some people even do it themselves when they’re showing, like they self-soothe, they kind of rub their face, right, when they’re trying to feel better about stuff.

So those are just some examples of very, very simple things you could do to get momentary shifts in emotion, and there are many, many others like it. So, all right.

Let’s talk about one more myth having to do with other people. Other people can be an amazing resource in our emotional lives when it comes to shifting, but they can also be a liability. And one of the things that we often hear from those around us and our broader culture, I think, is sending us in the wrong direction when it comes to how to engage with other people, when it comes to our emotional lives. And this is directly relevant to the work experience.

We often hear that when you’re struggling you should find someone to vent your emotions, to just get it out, let it go. Express it, don’t keep it inside. What we know about this is that venting your emotions can be useful for strengthening bonds between people. Good to know someone is willing to listen to me, take the time to listen and care.

Problem is if all you do is vent, you leave that conversation, you feel good about the person you just connected with, but all the problems are still there because you haven’t actually worked through it. They’re not just still there, they’re even more activated because you’ve just spent all this time rehearsing the awfulness of the situation.

So, if venting isn’t the solution, what is? It’s a two-step process. Find someone to talk to about your problems and spend some time initially getting it out. They do need to listen and learn so that they can help you. Empathy is good. But once they have a sense of what you’re going through, and once you feel heard, then, ideally, talk to someone who can help you put your experience in perspective, someone who can help you work through the problem. Other people are in an ideal position to help you do that because the problem isn’t happening to them. So be wary about venting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff and a lot of places we can go. I want to check out what you said with regard in your book. It was a powerful sentence. Well, I wish I could quote it directly. Maybe you can. You said something, like, “We cannot control what triggers our emotions, but we can control the trajectory of them,” in terms of like the intensity and how long we’re there.

So, one, I think that’s a heck of a statement because, one, if there were a way, you would know about it, like you of all people, having studied this for so long, so intensively. So, I think that’s kind of telling, in and of itself, that to be realistic about what is, in fact, possible for us as a species. Could you elaborate on that?

Ethan Kross
You ever had the experience–where do you live, Pete? What city or town?

Pete Mockaitis
I live near Nashville.

Ethan Kross
Near Nashville, okay. You ever, on a muggy summer day, walk down the street and just catch a whiff of someone who doesn’t smell very good and experience an emotional reaction?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay, yeah.

Ethan Kross
Okay. Yeah, me too. That reaction was out of your control. You happened to encounter something in the world, it activated your senses, in turn, activated an emotional response. We experience emotional reactions like that all the time. We see things, we hear things, we think about things that just pop up in our head. We don’t know why the thoughts pop up in our head, but they elicit emotions. We don’t often have control over those different experiences. They just happen.

However, once those emotions are triggered, then that’s our playground, then we can get in there and alter the trajectory of those emotional responses, right? Like, you catch a whiff of that stinky person, maybe you could choose to inhale more deeply. That might perpetuate the response. You might close your nose, pull your shirt up over it. You might start thinking about how selfish is it for this person to carry them in this way.

Or maybe you might think otherwise, “Well, you know, maybe they’re not aware. Maybe they don’t believe in wearing deodorant.” Lots of ways you could think about the situation to alter the trajectory of that response. And so, this is a chapter in the book, and the setup for it is, several years ago when I was doing research as I do now, I came across an article that said that 40% of adolescents sampled in this study did not believe they could control their emotions.

That statistic just floored me because if you don’t think you can control your emotions, why would you do anything to actually try, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to get healthier, to get more physically fit. Why am I going to go to the gym and do these painful things,” right? It just doesn’t make sense. You need to be motivated in order to use these different tools.

And, of course, I’m a director of a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I’ve dedicated my life to understanding how people can control their emotions. And so, when you dig into it, what I’ve learned is that those 40% of students were right if they’re thinking about the trigger of our emotions. We can’t always control the trigger. We don’t have control over all the factors that could activate an emotional response.

What we can control is the trajectory of those emotional responses. And I think just knowing that can be really empowering, too, because it means that if you do find yourself experiencing a dark thought that you’re ashamed of, recognize that that’s not always under your control, but how you engage with that thought is.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds, is it accurate to say, in your informed, researched view, that no matter what you do, smelling a stinky person is going to trigger an emotional response, just period, even if you’re like trained with exposure to lots of stink for weeks at a time, you’re still going to have a degree of emotion trigger problem?

Ethan Kross
Well, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ethan Kross
Not. No, no, no. You can certainly train, be trained, or train yourself to become immune to certain kinds of provocations. This is often referred to as stress inoculation therapy. Stress inoculation is often utilized in various military trainings, where the idea is, “Okay, put people under stress, under relatively controlled conditions so that they’re used to it, so that when they find themselves in those situations in everyday life, they don’t respond with this huge reaction.”

You, I’m sure, just as I, like we’ve experienced many things the first time around. They were tremendously distressful, but then you realize you get through them. There are things you could do, and they’re not so bad later. Sometimes you don’t even register anything at all. So, certainly, if we have our eye on a particular kind of situation that provokes us, we can train for it, so to speak, to either reduce in its intensity or get rid of it altogether.

That said, you can’t train for every situation in life, and some situations are likely going to always trigger an emotional response. Certain kinds of, I would argue, sensory events. Pain as an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we always have control over, or influence, over the trajectory of the intensity and the length to which we are experiencing an emotion that is triggered, and we may, in certain circumstances, be able to train for, inoculate against certain triggers doing a thing. And so, I’m thinking that hypnosis is one interesting kind of intervention if people have phobias or kind of reactions to things.

There seems to be some good science supporting that, “Oh, okay, with a hypnosis intervention for some people who are hypnotizable, they are not so triggered after kind of going through that.” And then also, you mentioned like a training or inoculation. Let me just make an example. Let’s say I, and it’s true, I feel pretty irritated when I’m interrupted, whether in speaking conversationally.

As well as just sort of, like, you’re doing a thing. It’s like, I’m doing a thing, and then there’s an interruption, like a knock on the door. It’s like, I am kind of flustered by such things. And so, that’s just kind of in there, kind of like involuntary.

I remember there was a time, someone knocked on my door, I was in a podcast interview, I actually gasped, like, “Huh!”

And so, if there’s a thing in us, like we find there’s a trigger that we know is not helpful, and here, for me, it’s being interrupted, I’d like to feel more adaptable and less inclined to being flustered upon interruption, what’s my playbook?

Ethan Kross
Well, that gets to the final chapter of the book, and it’s about “How do you go from knowledge to action?” And what I do in that final chapter is I give you a framework for identifying situations you want to target to minimize the emotional impact they have on you. It’s called W.O.O.P, and here’s how it works.

So W.O.O.P. is an acronym. W is wish. What’s your goal? State your goal. Maybe for you it’s to not be perturbed every time you’re disturbed. The first O, that’s an outcome. Okay, well, what’s the outcome that will come about if you are successful in accomplishing this goal? “Well, I’ll be more emotionally healthy and maybe I’ll have better interpersonal relationships.” The point of that first O, focusing on the outcome, is to really energize you, to put in the motivation to achieve this goal.

Now let’s get to the second O, which is obstacle, “What are the personal obstacles that may stand in the way of me achieving this goal? Well, I just have this automatic reaction when someone disturbs me. I just, I can’t take it. It affects me to my core.” Okay, now we at least know what the problem is. Let’s get to the final element of this framework, the P, which is the plan, but it’s not any plan. It’s called an if-then plan.

If I’m disturbed and I find myself going to that dark, dark place that Pete goes to when he’s disturbed, then, and then you plug in what you’re going to do. And what you’re going to do is use one of the 20 or 30 shifters you’ve just learned about, and maybe a combination of them to stay calm in that moment, to broaden your perspective, so that you can achieve your goal.

If we were actually training for you to achieve this goal, I would have you write those different elements down, maybe once, maybe twice, and have you read them over a few times. Research shows that this framework is incredibly useful for allowing people to achieve all sorts of goals because what it does is it systematically targets each of the impediments of goal pursuit and it nips them in the bud from the start.

This framework has been applied with older adults to help them with emotional and health goals. It’s also been applied to kids as young as first graders who are trying to improve the way they achieve. This also happens to be a framework that is mightily similar to what one of the most successful organizations in the world uses before complex engagements, i.e. the Navy SEALs.

The Navy SEALs do something very, very similar when they’re planning a mission, “What’s our goal? If we achieve this goal, what is going to happen? What are the obstacles that might stand in the way? And then for every obstacle, we’re going to come up with three to five different specific plans, so we’re virtually never caught off guard.”

Now, we can’t plan for everything, and the good news is that if you are caught off guard, you still have knowledge of these other tools we’ve been talking about to fill in the blanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Ethan, tell me, any final shifter you want to make sure to get out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Kross
You know, I think we covered a lot. We covered senses, we covered attention, we covered some perspective-taking, we covered people. Physical environments, get a healthy dose of nature, put some pictures of loved ones around your office to give you an emotional boost when you need it. Yeah, I think we’ve covered a bunch of it. We’ll leave a little bit more for people to discover.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, now can you share a favorite quote?

Ethan Kross
“This too shall pass.”

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

Ethan Kross
The study I talk about in chapter one, which tracked newborns and through adulthood, they’re still being tracked, and found that the ability to manage one’s emotions in childhood predicts all sorts of great things later in life. But even more importantly, that capacity is not fixed. It’s malleable. You can get better or worse at managing your emotions, which I love that finding because it really speaks to the agentic side of what we’re talking about, that your destiny is really in your own hands.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ethan Kross
I’ll give you two. One is pretty common, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. And, in a different direction when it comes to fiction, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite Ethan original nugget or soundbite that people are vibing with?

Ethan Kross
If you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you, there is everything right with you.

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

Ethan Kross
www.EthanKross.com.

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

Ethan Kross
Learn about the tools that are out there for managing your emotions. Leading other people, I think, starts with leading yourself. The tools that I talk about, decades of research, hard work went into identifying them, but the take-homes are really, really simple and straightforward. So, learn about those tools, practice them to find the tools, the combinations that work best for you, and share them with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Ethan, thank you.

Ethan Kross
Thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Pete.

1049: What Dyslexia Can Teach Us About Creativity, Problem Solving, and Critical Thinking with Kate Griggs

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Kate Griggs discusses the untapped power of dyslexic thinking—and how professionals everywhere can harness it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why dyslexia matters for everyone in the workplace
  2. The surprising indicators that you may be dyslexic
  3. How anyone can develop dyslexic thinking skills 

About Kate

Kate is a proud dyslexic thinker and has dedicated her career to shifting the narrative on Dyslexia and educating people on its strengths. She has written two best-selling books on Dyslexic Thinking, published by Penguin: This Is Dyslexia and Xtraordinary People, and has shared her wealth of expertise in Made By Dyslexia’s free training courses for schools and workplaces on Microsoft Learn and LinkedIn Learning. She is one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices and is also the host of the chart-topping podcast, Lessons In Dyslexic Thinking, and the presenter on the University of Dyslexic Thinking DyslexicU courses.

Her innovative approach to social change and advocacy has garnered global recognition, with major publications including BBC Morning Live, This Morning, and Harvard Business Review covering her efforts. Her powerful TED talk has also inspired countless individuals and organizations to rethink how they perceive Dyslexia.

Resources Mentioned

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Kate Griggs Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kate, welcome!

Kate Griggs
Thank you. It’s great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat. We’re over a thousand episodes into this series, and not once have we had an episode on dyslexia. So, I would love to start by putting you on the spot and tell us, why should the average, you know, knowledge working professional give thought and attention to understanding dyslexia and its impact at work?

Kate Griggs
Well, for several reasons. Firstly, dyslexia is one in five.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Kate Griggs
So, it’s 20% of us in every workplace will be dyslexic. A lot of dyslexics won’t know that they’re dyslexic, though, because it isn’t routinely picked up at school. So, a lot of people discover through their kids, where maybe their children are having struggles at school. But the reason it’s really important that you should know about it is that dyslexic people have exactly the skills that our AI world of work needs.

So, we index very highly on all of the soft skills or power skills that we’re now beginning to call them. So, things like creative thinking, complex problem solving, interpersonal skills, innovation, all of those things are things that dyslexics are naturally really, really good at. So, it’s important that you recognize those skills and lean into them as a dyslexic person.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s an intriguing setup right there. Thank you. So, if one in five of us have it, and yet very rarely is it diagnosed. How do we know? Are we one of those five? How do we determine that?

Kate Griggs
When you know about dyslexia, it’s actually quite easy to spot. Dyslexic people have what I describe as a spiky profile. So, with a normal cognitive profile, people are sort of in one either average or above average or below average across most things. Dyslexic people have things that they are exceptionally good at.

So, they’ll be in the top percentiles, but they’ll also have things that they’re exceptionally bad at, which is in the bottom percentiles. And those things are the things that we tend to measure intelligence with. Certainly, exams and tests at school and a lot of psychometric tests are based on our kryptonite, if you like. Whereas, the superpowers that dyslexics have are these soft skills of creativity.

So, you can spot a dyslexic person if they appear to be really, really brilliant at something, but then their work, their written work just doesn’t give you the same indication. So, that’s a really easy way of spotting a dyslexic colleague. But also, if you’re a dyslexic person, it’s just that you find something is really, really easy and other things really tricky.

And I think the other thing that almost every dyslexic will struggle with throughout life is bad spelling. So, I think if you spot a spelling mistake, think dyslexia.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, you mentioned bad spelling, and I think that’s what most of us, when we hear the word dyslexia, that’s what we’re thinking, it’s like, “Oh, it’s kind of hard to read because letters are mixed up and it’s tricky.” But are there, in fact, sort of multiple varieties or categories or facets associated with dyslexia?

Kate Griggs
There are. The sort of spiky profile that I mentioned, you know, not all dyslexics are going to be bad at the range of things that dyslexics can be bad at, or good at them either. So, I’ll give you an example. My entire family are dyslexic. So, my dad was, my brother is, both my kids are, my husband is as well, and I think we all have a sort of different pattern of strengths and challenges.

So, my husband’s actually really good at spelling because he has a really strong visual memory, so he can visualize a word to spell it. So, he might struggle with some sort of irregular words, but mainly he’s a very good speller. Some dyslexic people can be actually very, very good at math. I am in the camp that is not so great at math. So, your eyes seem to be really good or really bad.

It is a real pattern of strengths and challenges that that’s why it’s important to really understand what you’re good at and do much more of it and delegate what you’re not so good at.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I suppose, or maybe this is my big reveal that I’m dyslexic.

Kate Griggs
That happens a lot, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, I guess I sort of assumed that all humans had areas in which they had great strengths and yet also great deficiency. So, for example, what comes to mind for me is I can just generate ideas by the boat full. So many ideas it’s overwhelming and I can’t even possibly execute all of them, and so that’s kind of cool and handy.

But on the flip side, I will have a really hard time if someone gives me directions to sort of just, “Oh, go back the way you came.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s not going to work for me.” In the world before ubiquitous Google Maps on smartphones, I got lost kind of a lot.

And I’ll also get lost if I’m even playing a video game like Fortnite, So, does that sound like a dyslexic profile or something else?

Kate Griggs
It does sound like a dyslexic profile. Like I say, it’s a real pattern of strengths, and there’s just irregular things, things that most people are really good at that you really struggle with. And I think it definitely does sound like a dyslexic profile but, I mean, you’d have to tell me more about what you’re bad at, probably, for me to be able to tell you. I’m sure you don’t want to share all that.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, drawing three-dimensional shapes, I am bad at that. I would say processing mail and email, more so just because I find it kind of boring and I have so many exciting ideas I want to run after. Yeah, those are some things I’m bad at.

Kate Griggs
Yeah, if you think of dyslexia is really just a different way of processing information, and the regular way that we process information in work and in education is very much a sort of written format with lots of information coming at you as words, and dyslexic people are not brilliant at that. They have other strengths.

But that’s not to say, if you’re picked up and given good reading instruction, every dyslexic person can read so it isn’t just not being able to read either. But there’s loads and loads of information on our website, or we’ve done some training with LinkedIn that’s free on LinkedIn Learning because we work with LinkedIn to make dyslexic thinking a skill. So, it’s a searchable skill now on LinkedIn. So, there’s lots you can learn and we have our own podcast called Lessons in Dyslexic Thinking. So, if you start learning about it more, you’ll soon understand whether you are or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there, what’s perhaps the quickest, easiest way of assessing?

Kate Griggs
We’ve actually got a checklist test on our website, so check that out, because that’s a really good indication as well. I mean, it is just a checklist test, but if it says you’re likely to be dyslexic, then you almost certainly are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s talk about this dyslexic thinking skills in a moment. First, I’d love to dig into, perhaps, the dangers or the dark side, because, generally, I think there’s vast levels of unawareness to your message and what you’re putting out here, that dyslexia is quite common. And what are the dangers of folks not knowing this and making assessments or judgments or decisions in that darkness?

Kate Griggs
I think the not knowing is a really big cause of low self-esteem. It’s a big cause of people not actually pushing themselves to the jobs and the opportunities that they really should be pushing themselves towards. So, there’s even more of a dark side that we tend not to talk about as a charity because we’re very sort of pro the positivity.

But if you look at children that are excluded from schools, or even straight through into the prisons, very over-representatively high number of people are dyslexic because, particularly, if you are not taught to read and write properly, your trajectory in life is pretty bad. And for a lot of people, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, that can be a really big issue.

So, there are some real societal issues of not identifying dyslexic or dyslexic people. But I think the main thing from a personal level is that you can go through life thinking you’re not very good at all sorts of things, and also not realizing the things that you are good at, you’re actually really good at them, and they are dyslexic thinking skills and that’s so important. You just assume, like seeing the big picture, that’s something that dyslexic people are absolutely brilliant at.

So, we solve problems from looking at the big picture, the top down, and that’s just something that we have to do because it’s the way we think, but that’s a hugely vital skill in anything that you do. And we really are better at it than people who are not dyslexic, or most people anyway. So, it’s really just understanding those skills.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you there, certainly. So, if one were to internalize a belief like, “Oh, I’m dumb,” or, “I’m no good at blank,” a broad domain, when, in fact, the truth of the matter is more nuanced. It’s like, “Oh, actually, I have some superpowers over here, and some difficulties over there. But when I compare my difficulties to whatever else seems to be doing just fine with no trouble whatsoever, I might falsely infer that, ‘Oh, I’m just not that bright. I guess certain career opportunities are just not available to me.’”

Kate Griggs
Yeah, and it’s that thing, “I’m not that academic” is one that I hear a lot. But Cambridge University always says that they have a huge number of dyslexics on those PhD programs. So, if you can, you know, dyslexics can get through education and can excel. And I think you’re quite likely to be put off the academic route at an early age when you’re struggling at school.

I had a really, really tough first few years at school, and at sort of eight years old I thought I was really stupid because I couldn’t do what the other kids could do. And there was, no, I wasn’t picked up as dyslexic then, and there was no support for my strengths. And I then went to a new school that was phenomenal, and they instantly picked up I was dyslexic. They gave me incredible support for the things that I was struggling with but also were just interested in, as much interested in what I was good at and really nurtured those strengths.

And I think that’s something, the whole reason I do the work I do, and write the books I write, and do the podcasts I do, is because I really want people to understand, dyslexic people to understand, that they are brilliant, they have a different way of thinking, and it is a phenomenally brilliant way of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s unpack that. What is this different way of thinking and its advantages and the dyslexic thinking skills?

Kate Griggs
So, as I mentioned before, dyslexic people have, well, according to the World Economic Forum, and according to some research we did with Randstad Enterprise, the foremost sought after skills are creative thinking, communication into interpersonal skills, adaptability rather, and resilience, and complex problem solving. All of those skills are things that dyslexics really excel at.

And I can give you, as well as knowing that they’re the skills that every workplace is looking for, I can give you some real-life examples of where organizations or career routes really fit well into those thinking skills. So, for instance, we work very closely with GCHQ, which is the British intelligence agency. They have actively been recruiting dyslexic spies since they started a hundred years ago.

And the reason that they are actively recruiting dyslexics is because dyslexic people are really good at this sort of complex problem solving and connecting the dots. So, they can connect completely different things together to spot a pattern of communication or to spot a trend, and that’s an intelligence, or the sort of intelligence that GCHQ do, that’s exactly what they do.

They’re looking for cyber-crimes or they’re looking for communication to see where terrorist groups are connecting and planning things. So, they can, dyslexic people are really good at looking and joining up those interconnected things. Forty percent of entrepreneurs are dyslexic and that’s because dyslexic people need to be able to see the big picture, be able to sell their ideas, but also build incredible and motivate incredible teams around them.

So those are two areas where dyslexic people really excel. You also find lots and lots of dyslexic people in things like, surprisingly, journalism, and TV presenting, or communicating, podcast hosts, or YouTube channels, channel hosts. A lot of those people are dyslexic because we’re very good at storytelling. We’re brilliant at simplifying things, sort of seeing really complex issues and simplifying them. So, they’re all skills that we don’t test in schools, and a psychometric test wouldn’t pick up, but they’re really vital skills in every workplace now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you help me understand what it is about our brains and the means by which they go, they process, they interact with the world and process information, such that a person with dyslexia will typically struggle with one set of things but excel in the other? Is there a common linkage or big picture factor that kind of illuminates or explains what’s going on here?

Kate Griggs
So, it is, literally, the way our brains process information. So, for instance, dyslexic people, we think holistically, if you like. So, we like to see the big picture, we like to see all of the facts so we can then come down and drill down into how we’re going to do things. Non-dyslexic people tend to think sequentially, so they’ll go step by step by step. Whereas, we need to see “Where is the end? Where does it all join together? And then, let’s come back and go through the process.”

We also are very multi-sensory thinkers. So, when we’re making decisions, doing things, we tend to take in lots of different things, which is what makes us very good with people, because we can read people, we look at cues that maybe other people wouldn’t see. We’re kind of seeing the person as a whole, if you like, and the situation as a whole. So those are two areas. Whereas, probably most people who are not dyslexic may be a little more less multi-sensory, it’s more sort of what you see is what you get and may not be reading the nuances.

Then when it comes to the struggles, we tend to have problems with our working memory. So, if you think of memory as a shelf and you’re putting books onto the shelf, so if you’ve got lots of books on the shelf, that is a real problem for dyslexic people because we tend to focus on one, two, or three, and then we’ve forgotten those one, two, or three as you get onto the next one.

So, that’s when you’re, if you’re giving a dyslexic person lots of commands, and saying, “Right, I want you to do this and then do that and there’s something else and something else,” you tend to kind of lose where you’ve got to. An example of that would be if somebody gives you directions. Thank God for Google Maps.

But when somebody gives you directions, that are like, “Go down the road, and you turn right, and then you walk for 10 minutes, and you turn left, and it’s the first next, left, the next right.” I mean, but I’m kind of thinking, “Hang on a minute, I get to the end of the road and am I supposed to go right or left?” because I’m trying to remember what they said next, and I’ve forgotten them.

But if I see a map, I can visualize where I need to go. So, it’s just a different way of processing the instructions versus looking at something which is as clear as daylight to me where I need to be going. So, it’s that kind of thing. And dyslexic thinking, actually, was put into the dictionary as a noun back in 2022 when it was also added as a skill on LinkedIn.

And the dictionary definition for dyslexic thinking is an approach to problem solving, assessing information and learning often used by people with dyslexia that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking, and interpersonal communication. So, that, in a dictionary definition, sums up what dyslexic thinking is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so, yeah, let’s hear some examples of cool stories of people with dyslexia working their strengths and skills to achieve great results.

Kate Griggs
So, a great resource for cool stories is my podcast, Lessons in Dyslexic Thinking. We’re just, next week, about to release our third series. The first person that I interviewed for the third series is Erin Brockovich, the amazing campaigner who featured in that film of her life, which Julia Roberts acted as her.

Dyslexic people do tend to make really brilliant changemakers. We don’t like the status quo. We love a challenge. If you tell us something can’t be done, it just makes us really want to do it. And you often find that we have a really strong sense of justice and right and wrong. Erin tells the most amazing story about how she, basically, she kind of worked her way into a job that she was completely unqualified for as a legal clerk working for a law firm in California.

And I think the guy who hired her actually felt sorry for her because she was a single mom and she needed some money. So, he gave her a chance and gave her a job, and basically said, “You know, go do this filing. Just, here’s loads of boxes. Just go and do the filing.” And she opened up this box that was all Hinkley, the place that we know she went on to do the big lawsuit against.

And she looked through all the files, and she could see a pattern of things going wrong and health issues for all of the residents in Hinkley. She was supposed to be just putting the filing away and just sticking things into drawers but she started looking at everything that was there, and she’s got a really amazing visual memory.

And she could see that there were these children were getting sick and things were going wrong. So, she went to her boss, and said, “Look, I’m looking at this, and I think there’s a really big issue here.” And he said, “Look, you’re supposed to be a filing clerk. You need to just file things away.” And she was so dogged because she could see there was something wrong.

And, eventually, her boss let her go out to Hinkley to meet the people and understand what was going on. And from that, from her spotting a pattern in the paperwork that she saw that something was going wrong, she then went and found out about all of the things that were happening in Hinkley, and the fact that the big company was poisoning the water. And saw that right through to the end until they got the biggest legal claim in American history. So, that was somebody who had no qualifications, was incredibly determined, and really wanted to make a difference.

Another amazing story, actually, in the last series, I interviewed Bob Ballard, who is the explorer who discovered the Titanic, and he talks about how he was on, he was doing a project for the Navy, and he was out at sea, and he’d been looking for the Titanic for ages and ages, but he was actually doing another project, and it was in the area that they thought the Titanic was.

And he just got a sense that the Titanic was exactly where he was in the ocean, and he persuaded his team to dive. And they were all saying, “Look, there’s no evidence here.” And he said, “Look, I just know it’s here. I sense it. I feel it. I’m putting all these things together. It’s here.” And they did a very, very deep dive and, sure enough, found the Titanic. So, that’s using intuition and actually putting interconnected pieces together.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And with the Titanic and the Erin Brockovich story, it is very effective in highlighting the unique ability that can also lead to social difficulty. It’s like, “What do you mean you know the Titanic is here?” And then, like, I could see how, in many circumstances, what happens is, “Oh, we don’t go searching for the Titanic. We go and say, ‘That guy has a screw loose,’” or some sort of demeaning, unfair judgment or characterization. Or, “No, this is not your job. Go ahead and continue filing the things.”

It’s seeing something that others don’t is already a cause for potential social rebuke or isolation. And then it’s not too hard to believe, “Oh, I guess I just don’t know, and they would know better. They’re the lawyers, they’re the divers and explorers.” And so, I see that pattern, how that could very easily unfold there.

Kate Griggs
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it’s having that understanding work environment, where people will allow you to make those leaps of reasoning. I was talking to, also on my podcast, I’ve talked to the former director, actually, of GCHQ, and we talked to spies at GCHQ as well, and they have something called the 24/7 center.

And that’s where you have a series, lots of spies, actually sitting there, looking at communications right around the world. So, from emails to, I mean, it’s amazing how people spy on us, isn’t it? But it’s a good thing in this instance, stopping cybercrime and terrorist attacks. But they look at right across social media to look at seeing if they can find patterns.

And in the 24/7 center, what happens if you think you’ve seen something, you then go to your boss, and say, “Right, this is what I’m seeing. I’m seeing a whole pattern of things happening here.” And because they need to act quickly, and it needs to be an instant, “Okay, there’s a problem. We need to stop it,” they don’t have to do what you would normally have to do in the workplace, which is, “Okay, I get where you’re going with this but go away and tell me how you’ve actually made those connections. I need to see the process behind how you’ve made those connections.”

They don’t have to do that because they are well-enough qualified and experienced enough to know that if they see a pattern, there’s a problem. They need to do something about it. And I think what’s frustrating for so many dyslexic people is that until we have the confidence to really believe in our abilities, we can see patterns, we can spot things, we can see opportunities in businesses and things.

But, often, other people can’t see those things until we explain how we got there and we often can’t explain how we got there. It’s just a sense or we’ve put some thoughts together, two plus two equals ten. And often, it’s very frustrating and until your teammates understand your strengths and you really understand them yourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, how do we build on those strengths, these skills?

Kate Griggs
First thing is to learn about them. So, as I mentioned, we have free training for the workplace. We actually have free training for teachers in schools. We have the podcast. We have a whole series of information on our website. So, the first thing is to learn about them. I also have two books. I have a children’s book which is being released on the 27th of March on Dorling Kindersley, and I have a book on Penguin called This is Dyslexia, which is out at the moment.

And that will teach you lots and lots about dyslexia and dyslexic thinking as well. And once you start unravelling it and learning about it, you’ll either spot it in yourself or you’ll definitely spot in colleagues and friends around you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any top tips, do’s or don’ts, you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Kate Griggs
If you’re a dyslexic person, don’t spend time trying to get better at your weaknesses. Delegation is the key to everything. And every successful person, dyslexic or not, has learned that delegating what they’re not so good at is the best way to be productive. So, lean into your strengths 100% and be open about your strengths and your challenges with others.

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

Kate Griggs
When we did our first report, “The Value of Dyslexia,” with EY. The then CEO of EY said, “You wouldn’t employ Superwoman and tell her how bad she was with kryptonite. You’d make sure that you told her how brilliant she was with all the things that she was good at.” So, I think that’s probably my favorite quote, and I try and live by that. I try not to do my kryptonite.

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

Kate Griggs
We’ve just done an amazing report called Intelligence 5.0. It came out, we launched it during UN General Assembly week, at the time we launched the University of Dyslexic Thinking, which is a short course university on Open University. The Intelligence 5.0 report is full of incredible, incredible insights, research from all over the world, but also really leans into the fact that the way that we’re testing and measuring in schools is completely outdated in an AI world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Kate Griggs
A book I read many years ago, which sort of started me on my journey of really understanding dyslexic thinking, was Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. It’s old now but I love that book.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Kate Griggs
I try and just have a few minutes of calm every day, whether it’s sitting in the garden, taking in nature and listening to the bird sounds, but just trying to take five minutes a day to do nothing and clear your mind.

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

Kate Griggs
Do what you’re good at. Do what you love. Find your passion. Do what you love, because that will take you far in life, whatever it is.

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

Kate Griggs
Kate Griggs, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m a top voice on LinkedIn. MadeByDyslexia.org is our website. And both my books are available in all good bookstores, but also on Amazon, so, This is Dyslexia and Xtraordinary People, for kids.

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

Kate Griggs
I think, for every dyslexic, just learn, really, really learn about your dyslexic thinking skills, and understand what they are, and add that you are a dyslexic thinker to your LinkedIn profile because companies are now actively looking for dyslexic thinkers. And if you don’t add it as a skill, they won’t be able to find you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kate, thank you.

Kate Griggs
Thank you very much. Great to join you.