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Jun 08
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872: How to Get Unstuck and Break through Any Problem with Adam Alter

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Adam Alter says: "Action above all."

Adam Alter reveals the secret to breaking yourself out of any rut.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When it pays to lower your standards
  2. The question to ask for better insights
  3. The essential skill to accomplish your goals

About Adam

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing, and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology department. In 2020 he was voted professor of the year by the faculty and student body at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and was among the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017. Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.

Resources Mentioned

Adam Alter Interview Transcript

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

Adam Alter
Thanks for having me, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. But, first, I was really digging your TED Talk about screens, and I’m curious if, in the time that has elapsed, if you’ve discovered any other fun, interesting tactics or approaches to reduce phone time.

Adam Alter
I have been trying to acquire as many physical objects as I can that track my phone, so there are all sorts of interesting little cookie-jar type things that work for phones quite effectively. So, you put a little, that have timers, you could put a countdown on them, and say, “I don’t want to use my phone for the next hour,” and they trap your phone. I didn’t really talk about that in the TED Talk, that was a few years ago now, but I find those physical barriers very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. So, the trap cookie jars, just leaving it elsewhere. I’m curious, so if you’re at a restaurant, where is your go-to hiding spot?

Adam Alter
So, my kids are small, they’re five and seven, so when we go to restaurants, we don’t really have any screens at all. We try to keep our phones either in the car or we try to keep them under the table in a bag somewhere, so I don’t have a great hiding spot for the phone. I certainly don’t bring the cookie jar into the restaurant. That would be a little unorthodox but we’re pretty good about keeping the phones as far away from the table as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. I’m curious if there are any particularly surprising or eye-popping discoveries you’ve made while putting together this book.

Adam Alter
That’s a good question. There are a few. One of the really fun things about this book was that I did a huge amount of research into how extremely successful people, A, have got stuck in the past, and, B, how they’ve managed to find breakthroughs. And some of the stories, I found very surprising. Let me just pick one of them.

There’s a fantastic story about Lionel Messi, the soccer player, who I think is the best player today, and he’s one of the greatest players of all time. And the very interesting thing about Messi is that he is known for being extremely anxious, and so much so that early in his career, some of his coaches said to him, “I don’t know if this is going to be right that you’re going to be a professional because you’re obviously struggling with emotional consequences of playing high-stakes matches.”

And what he ended up doing was he established this really, really interesting technique where he would get on the field, and for big matches, for small matches, he spends the first three, four minutes of the game not moving. Basically, he ambles around, he barely moves. All the other players, the other 23, sorry, the other 21 players are darting around, and he’s basically still.

And he spends these minutes doing two things. One, he calms down. He has a sort of series of mantras that calms himself down, but the other thing he’s doing is he’s developing a strategic advantage because he’s watching all the other players in a way that no other player does, and learning how they’re interacting with each other, who seems to have a hidden injury, who’s connecting particularly well with a particular teammate, and then he uses that, he deploys in the remaining 85+ minutes of the game.

And he’s never scored in minutes one and two of any match, but has scored in every minute from three on, which shows you how he’s really, essentially, not a player on the field until minute three or four. And what I found totally fascinating about that is, A, here is the, what I would consider to be the greatest soccer player of the day, who’s stuck, he really was dealing with a major sticking point, but he found a tremendous breakthrough.

And that breakthrough, what’s so interesting about it is that it’s paradoxical. Instead of doing more to get unstuck, most of us kind of flail, he does less. And I found a lot of that kind of Zen-like do more to do less, do less to do more, there were some really interesting ideas that came up as I was researching for the book, and that was one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. And that practice, it’s so cool in that, well, a lot of times performance anxiety issues boil down to we’re being self-conscious, “Oh, I hope I don’t screw up. I hope I don’t mess this up,” all that kind of chatter inside the head. And when your goal is to see, “All right, what’s the deal here with all these players?” it’s really quite the forcing function of the opposite of thinking about yourself and how you’re operating there.

Adam Alter
Yeah, because I think if he spent those few minutes just thinking about his heart rate, and saying, “Well, how’s my heart beating? Am I sweating? Am I nervous?” that would be counterproductive. But what’s brilliant about that strategy, as you’ve said, is that it’s outwardly focused. It gives him a task, it gives him something to do, and so he’s not just kind of biding his time.

He’s doing something that’s very valuable for the long run, but that also, because of its nature, it’s a little bit more cerebral instead of being something where you move around, it’s something that kind of calms his body down. He’s not really getting his heart rate up the way the other players are earlier on in the game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s maybe zoom out a bit and hear about the main thesis of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. What do you mean by breakthrough? And what do you mean by unstuck? And what’s the big idea here?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so the kinds of sticking points I’m talking about are protracted ones. These are ones that last often months, years, in some cases, decades, or even entire lifetimes. So, I’m not really interested in the sort of trivial daily frustrations that we all deal with. I’m interested in the bigger sticking points that we actually also happen to deal with pretty much universally.

And I’m especially interested in the ones that are susceptible to strategic intervention. In other words, there’s something we can do about them. There are a lot of things that cause us to be stuck but we don’t have a lot of say in, we don’t have much that we can do about. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, a lot of people felt stuck, but if you were physically stuck in a particular location, and you couldn’t travel because of government regulations, that’s just how it was. There wasn’t much you could do about that, and I don’t think that’s especially psychologically interesting.

What’s interesting to me is that the vast majority of cases of this kind of protracted stuck-ness are cases where there’s something you could if you knew what to do. People sort of say to themselves, “I know there’s a way out of this. I just don’t know which direction to pour my energy.” And so, that’s what this book is. Essentially, it’s a sort of roadmap for what I call finding breakthroughs.

The breakthroughs are essentially what’s on the other side of whatever it is that’s your sticking point, getting over the hurdle, getting past the mire that’s in front of you that’s preventing you from moving forward. That’s what the breakthrough is. It’s the sort of flipside of being stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, so how is it done? Are there some core principles? You mentioned heart, head, and habit.

Adam Alter
Yes, there are. Exactly. So, you’ve just listed the three sections that talk about the interventions. I actually start the book by talking about the idea that it’s surprisingly common for us to get stuck. I say it’s universal, and often people hide how stuck they are from the world, and as a result, we see a lot of success stories that make us feel a little bit inferior.

So, I talk a lot in the beginning stages of the book about licensing ourselves to be stuck in the first place, and that then segues into the first section of interventions that focus on the emotional consequence of being stuck because humans actually are well-designed, well-engineered to get unstuck physically. If you’re stuck or trapped in a particular place, your first instinct is to kind of fight, it’s to flail. And that’s very useful if you’re physically trapped.

There are these really interesting stories every now and again of people finding hysterical strength, is the term for it, when they lift up a car and somehow free themselves. Now, unfortunately, we get confused between that kind of stuck-ness and the stuck-ness that’s emotional or mental, and we give that same kind of flailing response to these situations, and it doesn’t do much good for us.

So, the first thing, really, is to calm down and to accept where you are, and then to start thinking about what the best strategies are. So, the second section starts to deal with those strategies. That’s a section called head, and that’s really about what goes on inside your head as you’re trying to get unstuck, and I suggest a whole range of different sort of strategies that we can use to either find creative breakthroughs, or breakthroughs in financial sticking points, or business sticking points, or relationship sticking points.

And then the last section of the book, which I think is probably the most important, is habit, which is the argument that it’s great to think about emotions and it’s great to think about strategy but, ultimately, you can’t get unstuck if you don’t act. And so, that last section is about action. And, in fact, the last chapter is titled “Action Above All” because I think privileging action when you’re stuck is the most important thing to do.

And I talk about how, when it feels impossible to act, you can act despite that sense that there’s nothing that can be done. So, that’s a sort of roadmap of the roadmap itself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you give us some examples of success stories, interventions that could be particularly helpful for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? I’m thinking about procrastination. I’m thinking about difficult office relationships. What are some of your faves?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of my faves is it’s from the last chapter of the book. I was just talking about this idea that action above all is really important, that you’ve got to act. And Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the rock band Wilco, who’s also a writer, sort of all-around renaissance man, has talked a lot about the idea that it’s exhausting being someone who has to be creative and thoughtful every day for decades.

And some days you wake up and you don’t want to do the job. And it doesn’t matter whether your job is as Tweedy’s is, to write music and books, or whether it’s some other thing that requires that you bring your best self to the workplace. And so what he sort of described is if you absolutely have to be creative and you don’t want to be, one of the things you can do is you can lower your threshold as low as possible, right down to the ground.

Normally, we’re perfectionists, we want to do good work. He says the best thing to do when you first start is to say, “Anything is better than nothing.” He thinks of it as pouring out the bad ideas. And so, he says to himself, if he’s writing a particular, say, music track, he might say, “What’s the very worst musical phrase I could write right now?” And then he spends 15 minutes working on the worst musical phrases he can come up with.

Now, because he’s very good at his job, it’s very easy for him to do that. Most of us can do a bad job at the thing we’re good at or the thing that we spend a lot of time at. And even if that action is not itself useful, it’s sort of like moving sideways, it does two things. It shows you that you can move, that you’re not, by definition, stuck if you’re moving, but it also sometimes can grease the wheels for further action. It sort of shows you how to act. It shows you that you can act. It signals that you are someone who is capable of acting.

And, by contrast, if you’re coming up with bad ideas, sometimes that illuminates good ones. And so, he talks often about the fact that those first 15 minutes may be wasted but they often pave the way for many, many hours of much stronger work. He talks about it as though the crystal-clear water of creative ideas has a layer of muck on top of it. And once you pour out the muck, the good crystal-clear water is there, and the ideas pour forth.

And that’s, I think, absolutely true about general sticking points in the workplace. You just have to act, and the best way to act is to lower your expectations and standards, at least temporarily.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that a lot in terms of even if you, sure enough, produce nothing that feels good at all on that day, you’ve at least kept the habit, which I view as an asset in and of itself, alive and moving as oppose to, it’s like, well, getting momentum in the opposite direction, momentum towards nothingness.

Adam Alter
Yeah, and rumination as well, because what ends up happening is, if you’re not acting, you’re thinking. Sometimes thinking is very valuable and, actually, you should think for a long time before you act. But if you’re at the point where, more than anything, thought is not going to rescue you, you really need to do something.

And it’s funny, because people don’t have that instinct. Their instinct is, “If I don’t produce something phenomenal right now, it’s just not going to be good enough.” But very, very often, it’s even mediocre products that end up freeing us. So, when you hear stories, you hear George R.R. Martin who’s writing the Game of Thrones books, or the Song of Ice and Fire books, he’s talked about the fact that he’s sometimes stuck for a decade.

Now, you can imagine how high his standards must be. And, as a result of that, unless he cranks out these passages that rival his best work, he probably continues to feel stuck. And I think if I were going to be his personal consultant, I don’t know if he’d ever want one or if he’d ever take me seriously, the first thing I’d say is, “Write a hundred really terrible pages if you have to, because behind that will be some good stuff,” and that’s what Tweedy and others, and not just Tweedy, many other creatives have found.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds really cool for creative work. And as I think a little bit about my own experiences there, sometimes I feel, it’s like, “Oh, you know what, young kids and get good sleep, having this or that, I’m just slightly sick,” whatever. It’s like I’m clearly not at my best, and I know it. And I also don’t want to do the thing, so there’s sort of a double whammy there.

And so, it’s very easy for me to delude myself to saying, “Well, you know, it’s probably not going to be worthwhile anyway, so maybe just skip it.” And yet I’ve found that when I really put it to the test, that I have actually had, sometimes, breakthrough excellence above and beyond average in sort of a tired funk state. And I don’t know whether that’s true, how we explain that. Maybe, in some ways, there’s benefit associated with, I don’t know, like slap-happy condition, like when things are hilarious.

It’s like different brain portions are operating, and sometimes that works out better, and sometimes it just unmasks the lie that you’ve been saying to yourself.

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the key axioms in the book is that if you spend, say, a thousand days doing the same thing, you’re trying to find some sort of nugget of gold, maybe it’s a creative output, maybe it’s a good song, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be creative work, but let’s say, you do your job for a thousand days. It’s actually very, very hard at the beginning of each day to predict whether it’s going to be a good one.

There’s a lot of research that suggests this. Sometimes this happens in lots of domains. It happens with athletic pursuits as well. You often think, “Oh, I had eight hours of sleep, it’s going to be a good day,” and then it turns out not to be. Other days you had three hours of sleep and you’re hung over, and you produce your best work.

And I give this talk to freshmen at NYU sometimes where I show them the four emails over the last 15 years that changed my professional life. They were these random emails that arrived, that, for example, introduced me to the world of book-writing, or to a kind of consulting that I now do. And with each one, I was convinced that this was a nothing, I was like, “Ah, I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’ve got all these other things that I’m worried about working on.”

And, ultimately, I ended up saying yes, and sending the follow-up email. But alongside those four emails that changed my life, I don’t know, 25,000 that did nothing for me, and you just don’t know when those moments will come up. So, I think you’re right about establishing the habit because you want to be in the game when those good things do happen. It’s like being in the stock market on those few days when there’s a big bump. You don’t want to be out of the game, and I think that’s true for work, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about procrastination. I’m curious about sort of interpersonal relations that can feel stuck, like, “Oh, my boss or my colleague is a jerk, or I’m not good enough. They criticize everything I do. I just don’t want to be around them. They’re toxic,” kind of fill in the blank. When a relationship feels stuck, any cool stories or tactics there?

Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a very different kind of situation when it’s a relationship that’s essential. That’s one of those kinds of stuck-ness, it’s where you may not have control over who your boss is. Then you have to try to figure out what you do have control over. And sometimes you have some control, sometimes you have very little control.

What you do have control over often is this question of whether, when things are really dire, this is the right either position for you at that particular company, or that particular organization, or whether perhaps you should jump ship, find something else. That’s always a question that’s worth asking, and certainly it’s worth exploring whether there are other options. If things really are that dire, that’s something worth asking.

But one of the really interesting ideas that, I think, if it’s not a truly toxic relationship, there are just people in the workplace who don’t get along. If it’s a toxic relationship, that’s problematic, and there needs to be a remedy put in place, often distancing or moving to another position, if possible. But when the relationship isn’t quite toxic, but perhaps the interactions are not all that fruitful, there’s some hopeful research that suggests that the kind of creative conflict that you have at work and in other situations is actually very good, or can be very good, as long as it’s not deeply emotionally aversive.

There’s fantastic work, for example, looking at how Pixar has come up with some of its best ideas and its best films, and its Academy Award-winning films, and a lot of them have happened where the producer, the one who’s most famous for this is Brad Bird. He will put someone, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons, he’ll bring someone in to cause creative conflict or general conflict. And you’ll have all the animators in Pixar who are famous for spending a huge amount of time getting the fur just right so it looks like fur, the water just right so it looks like water, and so on.

And these people will be brought in to, say, they’re storytelling experts, they’ll come in and say, “No one cares about the fur and the hair and the water. If the story is not compelling, you’ll lose them in five minutes. They’re not going to go away saying, ‘That story sucked but how about that fur.’ That’s not the way movies work.” And sometimes, these conflicts, if you can reframe it as a kind of challenge and you can rise through it, it could be very productive. But, again, if it’s toxic, that’s obviously not the recipe.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. The fur, boy, I had the exact same thought when I was getting a little too into audio editing, and seeing just what’s possible in terms of removing every errant thump or pop or hiss. And then I saw, I think it was iZotope who’s showing off their audio software, and I was like, “Wow, that is so amazing how they’re able to remove the wind in that scene.” I was like, “What movie is that?” And then I went over to IMDb, and people were just, like, trashing the movie for just being so terrible.

Adam Alter
Trashing the film, right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Yeah, but nobody mentioned how they did an amazing job removing the wind sounds in that scene.” So, yeah, fur and wind, that’s exactly true.

Adam Alter
It’s easy to miss the point, right? It’s nice to have those black sheep, and they’re occasionally telling you, “Hey, you’re not paying attention to the right thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I loved your example of Lionel Messi there. Anything else in the zone of people and their emotions, if it’s depression, if it’s anxiety, if it’s just they feel stuck in the sense that it is just hard to handle business with the stress and the emotions and the overload and overwhelm in their lives?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there is an excellent story, and this one is more about being a good leader, although it applies also to just working with other people in general. This is a story about the jazz pianist, the giant Herbie Hancock. And when Hancock was up and coming, he was a young pianist, he was trying out or he’s auditioning for Miles Davis’s band, and Miles Davis was terrifying to other musicians.

He would get on stage and he would shout at them, and he would tell them they weren’t doing the right thing. He was known for being a perfectionist and for knowing exactly what he was looking for. And even if you were very talented but you happened, in that moment, not to be giving him what he wanted, he would tell you, and he would do it publicly sometimes.

So, Hancock went in to an audition at Miles’ house, at Davis’s house, with some of the biggest jazz musicians of all time, I mean, the most prominent, the most impressive, the most technically gifted, and Hancock tells this story of walking into Miles Davis’s house, and all these musicians are there. He’s terrified because of the moment of the whole thing, but he’s also terrified of Davis and the fact that he’s going to shout at him. And he’s a young guy, he’s kind of concerned.

And they start the audition, and about five minutes in, Davis picks up his trumpet and he throws it on the couch, it looks like with disgust, and he goes upstairs, and they don’t see him for the next three days. And Hancock was convinced he’s blown the audition, “If Miles isn’t even there, how could this be going well?” But he starts to loosen up, he’s like, “How many chances in my life am I going to get to play with these giants of the jazz world?”

He starts experimenting, he gets a little bit expansive, played some great stuff, he’s happy with himself. At the end of the third day, Davis comes down the stairs, and he picks up his trumpet and he starts playing with the band again. And Hancock’s kind of confused, and he goes over to Davis at the end of the day, and he says, “I thought I’d lost you. You went upstairs after five minutes.” And Davis said to him, he often had this kind of Zen-like sayings, he basically just said to him, “I was on the intercom, man, and I heard everything, but I knew you wouldn’t play properly if I heard it live.”

So, he knew that. Even though he was this incredible hard ass, he knew that there were times when he has to take the pressure off, and that his musicians wouldn’t give him the best if he was there putting the screws on the whole time. And I think there’s something, obviously being a toxic leader who shouts at people on stage is bad, bad, bad, but the fact that Davis had this ability to recognize in Hancock that kind of nervous energy that could be produced or applied in the right direction under the right circumstances was, I think, something that a lot of leaders miss.

It’s really important to know when to push, and to say, “I expect a lot from you,” and it’s also really important to know when to give people space and safety to expand into their roles, especially when they’re young or when they’re early in a job. And I love that story because I think it’s a very, very powerful idea in terms of how to be a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, thinking about some of the head stuff, are there any magical mental phrases or reframes that are handy that come up again and again?

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things we do is we are often striving for genuine radical originality. That’s true in creative work, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in businesses. It doesn’t matter what sort of work you do, you’re always trying for something new. And I think we put a big premium on newness, on novelty.

And radical originality is a myth. It’s this idea that there are certain things out there that are really new and different from everything else, and that’s just not true. There are a lot of great examples of this kind of myth. Bob Dylan is often pointed to as the kind of radical original voice of the 20th century, but when you go back, even Dylan himself said, “That’s not true. I was borrowing from all these different traditions.” And you can find the DNA of all sorts of other work in his songs.

It’s just very, very hard in any world to find this genuine originality, and, unfortunately, when we strive for it, it’s a little bit like striving for perfection. It makes us feel stuck because we can’t quite reach that standard. So, a much better thing to do that tends to be quite useful is what is known as recombination. This is when you take two existing things that are themselves not new, and you make some new product by combining them, by bringing them together.

And there are some amazing examples of this in business, in music, in art, in filmmaking. And one of the things I’ve done over the last 15 years or so that I find very useful is, any time I see a good idea, is I’ll put it down in this document that I have that’s now hundreds of lines long, and what I’ll occasionally do, if I’m stuck, I’ll go in and say, “Let’s look at idea 37 and idea 112, and let’s see. Can they be combined in a way that is new?”

And it’s a great exercise because it kind of makes you a little bit creatively limber but, also, if you’re ever stuck, just think about two things that you like that are interesting that haven’t been combined, combine them and you’ve got something that’s new, it’s a recombination. It’s a great way forward.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in your document that’s hundreds of lines long, it’s anything you saw that you thought was cool or a good idea of any domain.

Adam Alter
Yeah, that’s one version.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us a couple examples, like, you’re in the grocery store, you’re like, “Oh, that looks tasty”? Or, what are some lines?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so here are two lines. One line is I teach a case to my MBA students on a little alarm clock called the Clocky. I don’t know if you know about this clock, but when it rings, to stop you from hitting the snooze button, it’s on wheels and it runs away from you, and it runs around the room. So, you’ve probably heard of this. It’s a clever little alarm clock.

So, when I first heard about this, about maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I thought it was really clever. No, it’s probably 15 years ago. So, I put it in the diary, it’s in that document, and it sat there for a long time. And then a number of years later, I was writing about how we could stop ourselves from binge-watching too much Netflix or too much of whatever video platform is your poison.

And I was wondering, “Could you somehow marry this Clocky idea to the binge-watching that we do?” which, by the way, the way we binge-watch and why we binge-watch, it’s a brilliant piece of product engineering, that the next episode automatically plays, so I thought that was a very clever idea used a little bit nefariously.

And so, I took these two ideas, and one thing that I now do is if I don’t want to binge-watch, I don’t have Clocky because Clocky is a bit random for this purpose, but that kind of same principle of making it hard to hit the snooze button, I will set an alarm, put it in a different room of my house for, say, an hour and a half later. In that way, if I’m watching Netflix, I have two episodes in and I don’t want to watch a third, I timed the alarm to coincide with the end of the second episode. I have to get up and go turn the alarm off to continue watching.

It’s not like I cannot watch anymore, but it’s a good way to minimize the likelihood that I’m just going to sit there in a stupor, not moving and let the next episode play, and that’s been very effective for me. So, that’s just one example, a very personal one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an example, Clocky, like it is necessary to move in order to shut the thing off. So, okay, nifty. So, I guess I’m wondering, in the course of just living life and capturing ideas, it’s just anything you think is clever in any domain?

Adam Alter
Pretty much. I’ve got different versions of the document. So, there’s a document that is called book ideas, and that’s like any idea that I think is interesting enough that, at some point, I might explore it for a book, to write a book about it, and see whether it’s thick enough and interesting enough to form a book. And there are a hundred of ideas in there, and that would be lifetimes of book-writing, so I won’t do many of them but it’s a useful exercise.

I’ve got one for research that I do as an academic, like the kinds of projects I want to do. And then I’ve got this sort of generally cool and interesting ideas document which sometimes comes up in consulting or speaking engagements. I’ll bring some of those in if I think they’re useful. And often they form the basis of case studies for teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. In your book, you’ve got a section called 100 ways to get unstuck. Could you share one or two or three extra fantastic ways to get unstuck that are broadly applicable, highly powerful, provide a good ROI, and that we haven’t covered yet already?

Adam Alter
Yeah, absolutely. I think experimentalism. Experimentalism is a philosophy that makes adults more like children. So, the way this works is, you know, kids ask a million questions. I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, they don’t stop asking questions about everything, and they’re learning at an incredible rate because they don’t take anything for granted. No common wisdom is common wisdom to them. Everything has to be pushed and prodded. They’ve got questions for everything.

And we lose that somewhere between childhood and adulthood. We start to assume things are the way they are for a good reason, or at least we don’t really question it. Experimentalism is this philosophy, the sort of child-like philosophy of saying, “Is this really the best way things could be?” And what you find is many of the most successful people in all sorts of domains are chronic experimentalists. They question everything, or if there’s a particular area that matters to them, they specifically and sharply question all sorts of assumptions in that domain.

A really good example of this was an Olympic swimmer named Dave Berkoff who swam for the US in the ’88 and ’92 Olympic games. He was a backstroke swimmer but he wasn’t as tall or as broad shouldered as a lot of the backstroke swimmers. He didn’t have the same kind of natural talents as some of the other swimmers did. But what he did have was he was an experimentalist. He was incredibly curious.

He tried a whole lot of different techniques, a whole lot of tweaks, and his coach encouraged that in him. He ended up discovering a special technique that became known as the Berkoff blastoff, where he would go under water and stay under water for almost a full lap of the pool. And it turned out that that made him about 85% faster. And he broke world records that way until other swimmers caught on. He still ended up winning other medals because he was continuing to experiment.

But it’s a great illustration of how we take so much for granted, and often it’s deviating from the herd by experimenting that produces really interesting insights.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay, experimentalism. What else?

Adam Alter
I think I also really like the idea of exploring and exploiting, as these two basic approaches to growth and change. So, exploration is this period of time, where, let’s use sort of the hunter-gatherer approach. Imagine you’re on the plains, you’re a prehistoric person, you’re trying to find food. Exploring is when you say, “I don’t know where to even begin. I’m just going to try all sorts of different areas of the pasture in front of me. I’m going to go far. I’m going to go close. I’m going to go left. I’m going to go right. I’m going to try everything.”

After you do that for a while though, you might decide to say, “Well, there’s a little patch over here that seems promising. I’m going to spend all my time on that patch now. I’m going to exploit that patch for all it’s worth.” And that’s a really good metaphor for what we can do in the workplace. So, exploration, if you think about a painter like Jackson Pollock, Pollock became very well known for a certain style of painting – drip painting.

But before he did that, he tried five or six or seven other techniques for about five years, and then he hit on this drip technique, and he was like, “This is me. This is for me. This is my thing.” After exploring those other options, he switched into exploit mode, said no to anything that wasn’t about drip painting, and became an absolute expert in this one thing that he owned.

And it’s a great lesson, and actually, it turns out that when you look at the best periods in people’s careers, they almost always follow a period of exploration, followed by a period of exploitation. So, go broad and wide, say yes to everything, be an omnivore, consume whatever you can consume, try everything. But then at a certain point, you’ve got to say, “Well, what was the best of that?” And then you go deep in that thing and say no to everything else. You are single-minded. You say no to almost everything. And that is the recipe for the best creative and really professional outcomes, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Any others?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there are plenty of others, there are hundreds. Let me try and pick which one I like best to hit off. All right, here’s a good one. I really like this one. There is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. The creative cliff illusion is this illusion that our creative ideas are best when they first arrive. So, for example, if I say to you, “Come up with ten slogans for this particular company. Here’s a product, give me your best slogans for the product. Imagine we’re trying to sell as many as we can.”

You ask people, “Are your first five slogans going to be best or are your 15th to 20th slogan that you come up is going to be best or better?” And almost everyone has this instinct that the good stuff is easy to come by, which is the first stuff, it just kind of stumbles out. And then it gets hard, and then it’s probably kind of clunky and it’s not very good.

It turns out that that’s the illusion, that there’s a creative cliff, that our creative ideas fall off a cliff. The early stuff turns out to be trite and boring and that’s what everyone else is thinking, too. If you can push against the difficulty of that next phase when it stops being easy, that’s when you start to have divergent thinking. When you get a little bit idiosyncratic, you think about things in a way that makes you different from everyone else.

And so, the quality of ideas gets better if you can sit with that discomfort with further attempts. And so, that, I think, is a really profound idea because we often associate hardship with badness. But, in this case, it’s the hardship that signals or heralds the good things that are about to come.

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

Adam Alter
I’ll say one more thing. There’s a really interesting idea called teleoanticipation. Teleoanticipation is very important when we think about long-range goals, which is when we tend to get stuck, something that you’re doing for a long time, whether it’s a physical pursuit, like a marathon, or whether it’s something at work, like a project that takes six months or a year or five years to complete, or a long artwork that you’re working on that takes a long time to complete, or whatever it is.

Teleoanticipation is a term that basically means forecasting the end. And it’s a really important skill because it means that proportioning your energy, your creative energy, your physical energy, such that you have just enough to reach the final point. The best way to run a marathon is to collapse right after the finish line because then you’ve put everything in. Sometimes people put in too much a little bit early, and then they collapse before the finish line.

One of the best skills we can learn is to be better at teleoanticipation, to knowing how to proportion our energy so we don’t come out the starting blocks too fast either physically, when we’re doing a marathon, but also intellectually and creatively, when we’re doing creative tasks. It’s very, very important to know how to pace yourself. And it’s a skill that’s worth learning.

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

Adam Alter
I think, because so much of what we’ve discussed has been about creativity, I like the idea, this goes back to Henry Ford, the idea that instead of thinking about how to create a better horse and buggy. I can’t remember the quote itself, but we need to think about creating something altogether different, and that’s where the car comes in.

So, instead of trying to perfect something and make these little tweaks to it along the way, think about whether there’s a completely different alternative altogether. And that’s what the car did. It, essentially, changed the way we travelled altogether. So, even an inferior car was better than the best horse and buggy you could come up with.

And that goes a long way to that experimentalism idea that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes the very best version of what everyone else is doing is not as good as this new thing you could be doing. Even in its infancy as it’s half-formed, it could be a better way to do things. And so, I think that’s quite powerful.

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

Adam Alter
One of the pieces of research that I really love is this anthropological work that Bruce Feiler, a writer, he’s done, where he went around the United States and interviewed people about change, and found that on average, every roughly five to ten years we experience what he calls a life quake.

A life quake is a massive change. It can be something we invite into our lives. It could be something that we have no control over. It can be good. It can be bad. Things like birth of a child, death of a loved one, divorce, change of job, change of career, moving to a new country, and so on. And because those are universal, we all tend to have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them in our lifetimes. It suggests that we need to be very nimble in the face of these changes.

And that’s why you essentially need a roadmap for these moments when you feel stuck in the face of this kind of change, because what you were doing in the past perhaps won’t serve you quite as well in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Adam Alter
It’s summer, and every summer I read Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. It’s a book that sort of explores the idea of good times, and the transience of good times, like a summer. That’s my favorite time of the year. And the book is essentially about this period in a young guy’s life that is bounded. It ends when the summer ends, and he goes back to college.

And I think one of the really nice insights there is that it’s so important to kind of leach out the very best from these periods, and make sure that you capitalize on them to the extent possible. I think we often look back on periods of our lives, and say, “Well, that was amazing, and I really miss it.” But one of the things that I do a lot in my research, and what a lot of my research focuses on, is on, “How do you, in the moment, extract as much juice as you can from that particular situation rather than looking back in the future and saying, ‘Oh, that was really nice. I wish I could have more of it’?”

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

Adam Alter
A favorite tool I would say is, I travel a huge amount, and I have a digital notepad. It’s called a Remarkable, and it goes everywhere with me. If I only have one thing with me when I travel, which happens sometimes, it’s my Remarkable because that’s where all those ideas go. I’m constantly hoovering up ideas and trying to make sure I don’t forget them.

I always worry about this, actually. I do a lot of my thinking when I’m running. And then when I get home, I’ve forgotten what I’ve thought about. But the Remarkable is a great tool because it goes everywhere. It seems like an endless capacity, and I use it constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Adam Alter
A favorite habit is running, I would say, four times to five times a week for 30 or more miles a week. I’ve been doing that for long enough now that I can call it a habit.

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?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the things that I talk about a bit is the question of how we should structure the work week, which is obviously very relevant to work. And some of the first research I did that made me interested in what I do is in whether we should have a five-day eight-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, a four-day ten-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, or a three-day 13-hour-and-20-minute work week, which is also 40 hours.

And the research that I did suggests that three-day work week is the best one. And I think a lot of people find that a little surprising. They imagine 13 hours of work, and they’re overwhelmed by it. But, also, that gives you four days of the week when you can do other things. And that’s something that I hear talked about quite a lot.

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

Adam Alter
They can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on Twitter, and they can find a lot of information at my website, AdamAlterAuthor.com.

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

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think action above all. I think do something ASAP, I would say today, tomorrow, whenever you can carve out a few minutes. If there’s something that’s been making you feel stuck, where you haven’t been able to make as much headway as you’d like, lower your threshold down, say, “It doesn’t matter whether I do a really bad job at this,” liberate yourself to do a poor job, but just do something in the general direction of the thing that you’re trying to achieve. And I think you’ll find that just that feedback you get from having done that is itself good medicine, and it pushes you in the right direction as you move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Adam, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and many fun breakthroughs.

Adam Alter
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Jun 05
0

871: How to Lead More Powerfully by Being Human with Minette Norman

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Minette Norman says: "Leaders tend to believe that they need to have all the answers and that they cannot show emotion. It’s time to set aside these limiting beliefs."

Minette Norman discusses what it takes to foster psychological safety for your team.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret to high-performing and high-engagement teams
  2. How to increase psychological safety in five steps
  3. What you should stop doing

About Minette

Minette Norman is an author, speaker, and consultant focused on developing transformational leaders who create inclusive working environments. Before starting her own business, Minette spent three decades in the software industry.

Minette is the co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human. Her second book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, will be published in August 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Minette Norman Interview Transcript

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

Minette Norman
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to talk about your book The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human. Could you maybe tell us, first of all, what does that term psychological safety mean?

Minette Norman
I’m happy to, and I just want to say, first of all, that it is not only my book. I co-wrote it with a wonderful co-author, Karolin Helbig, so it was a 50-50 collaboration, and I want to say that upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Minette Norman
Yeah. And let me explain psychological safety because it does sound like an academic geeky term, people throw it around a lot without always understanding what it means. So, I will ground it in the idea that it’s a belief or a feeling that, in a group setting, I am safe to share my idea, to ask a question if I don’t understand something, to disagree with someone else in the room, and to show up the way I want to show up, not trying to conform to the norms of the group, without fear that if I do any of those things, I’ll be rejected, I’ll be excluded, or I’ll be seen as that troublesome person.

So, it’s really this deep feeling that we have as parts of a group, whether we’re in or out, whether our ideas are welcome, or whether they’re not. And if we think about it, we probably have all experienced both having psychological safety, like being in a team where I speak up, or I can share my ideas, or I feel like myself, and times where we’ve been in groups where we sit back, and we’re very cautious, and we don’t speak up because we think we’re going to be shot down, or we’re going be embarrassed if we say something here. So, that’s basically what it means.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a sense for, in the United States workplace in 2023-ish, roughly what proportion of professionals generally have it and don’t?

Minette Norman
I don’t have a good metric to tell you so I’m just going to go on anecdotal evidence, which is that it’s less common than we would hope. So, I would guess that probably less than 50% of team environments would consider themselves to be really psychologically safe. And I’ll tell you, I worked 30 years in the tech industry, and I got interested in this work specifically because I would often be in meetings where even though I was pretty senior – when I left I was a VP of engineering at a large company – and I still would sit in meetings and go, “Do I dare speak? Do I not? I have something to say but I don’t think it’s welcome here.”

So, my own experience, and the experience of so many people I worked with, was that they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up, or they didn’t feel that they could be less than perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talked about being yourself, I think it’s interesting in terms of just, like, the political climate. It seems like in most mixed rooms, if you were to share a deeply held belief that was on one side or the other of the political continuum, there’s a good chance that won’t go so well for you. So, is that sort of included within the umbrella of what counts as being psychologically safe?

Minette Norman
Well, you have to also know these situations you’re in. So, if you’re in a professional setting, our book is focused on the workplace so I’m not talking about the world at large, in general, about how to have a conversation about politics with your family, but in the workplace, let’s just ground us there for now. In the workplace.

You have to know what is maybe just going to be a taboo topic in the moment and not go there. Like, you’re not going to say if someone’s a Trump supporter and someone’s a Liberal, like, that’s probably not a good discussion in a team meeting about how the project is going. This is just going to go badly and devolve.

So, I think that if we are talking about work, there’s this idea of showing up as your authentic self, so maybe let’s go back to that. Now, people bring as much of themselves as they’re comfortable bringing to the workplace, and it doesn’t mean you show up with your ugly colors if you don’t want to show those ugly colors at work.

And it means that, also, when you think about women having to prove themselves in different ways than men, or people of color having only certain aspects of their experiences that they’re willing to show in the workplace, we all have to decide for ourselves what we’re willing to share. But what I’ll say is that, in a psychologically safe environment, you may be someone who has a very different viewpoint than the rest of the room, and you’ll know that that viewpoint is welcome. And I’m not talking politics, so we’re talking work. But let’s say, and this has happened in groups that I’d been a part of.

We have all agreed that this is going to be our strategy moving forward. And then you see someone in the corner of the room who’s got some odd body language. They’re kind of sitting back in their chair, their arms are crossed, and you think you’ve all agreed. And then you, as the leader, you can say, “Hey, Alice, over there in the corner, you’re looking like you’re not quite with us. Is there something else you want to add to this conversation?”

Depending on the level of safety in that room, Alice may say, “No, no, I’m all good,” even though you can tell that she’s not, or she may say, “I’m seeing a risk that we haven’t even talked about. What if we…” and then she can share her thought, and then, suddenly, we may have a whole different discussion, “No one has brought this other thought up. It’s really important for us to consider what Alice just contributed,” but she wasn’t quite sure her idea was welcome until she was called upon and invited to offer an alternate perspective.

That, unfortunately, doesn’t happen enough. And what I see happen a lot, this is both in teams I’ve been a part of and teams I’ve worked with, is that you have a meeting, for example, and everyone ostensibly agrees in the room, “Here’s our strategy, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s how we’re going to proceed.”

Then you leave the room, whether it’s a virtual room or a physical room, and then there are the side conversations, the meeting after the meeting where people say, “You know, that’s just never going to work,” or, “I totally disagree,” but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up in the room. There’s something about those team dynamics that are not healthy enough to invite the dissent or to invite the “Have you thought about this?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. I guess as I’m thinking about this, it seems like the authentic-self component of the definition is, I guess, it seems to be, like, a higher bar in terms of that, or at least maybe I’m projecting my own viewpoint on things in terms of saying, “There’s a risk I don’t think we’ve considered,” seems perhaps less risky, to me, than sharing any number of, I don’t know, things about one’s self.

Like, I remember someone shared, let’s just say, any number of self-disclosure things in terms of, “I went to Burning Man,” or, “I went to an eight-day silent Jesuit prayer retreat,” or it’s like they’re sharing sort of their lived experiences associated with what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re passionate about, in bringing their authentic self. I guess, depending on the context and the group, it may seem more or less risky to reveal either a work concern or a personal bit of life.

Minette Norman
Yes, that is so true. And you only reveal, generally, someone has to go first also with revealing. And so, for example, if you’re a manager or a leader, if you reveal nothing of yourself, if you’re very guarded, and we talk about this in our book, like taking off that mask of perfection as a leader, if you come across as, “I am just this powerful leader. I know everything. I don’t have a life outside of work,” well, no one else in your organization is going to share who they are outside of work either, and it’s going to be this very stilted artificial environment where people just show sort of a mask of who they want to appear as.

But if you, in a position of any kind of leadership or authority, you show up in a more human way, and it doesn’t mean…this is where I think people get confused when we talk even about vulnerability. Like, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have to share your deepest darkest secrets, but to share something about who you are as a human being, or even that you’ve had failures in your life, you’ve had setbacks, you’ve had hardships, you have emotions, then you are more likely to invite others to do the same.

And that usually does have to start with someone who is either seen as a leader or as a dominant person in the group, that if they can let down their guard a little bit, then others will start to feel more comfortable doing the same. But if you feel marginalized, whether you feel you’re from an underrepresented group, and you just don’t feel like you’re a part of the in crowd, you are not going to be the first one to probably share who you are fully.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so psychological safety, we’ve defined it, we got a vibe for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice, and it sure seems pleasant. I’d like to be in rooms where there’s psychological safety for folks. Can you unpack a little bit, associated with the performance, team effectiveness correlates to having versus not having psychological safety? Just how much of a difference does it make?

Minette Norman
Yeah, and there is a lot of research on it. I just want to unpack one word you said, which was it sounds pleasant. And I want to just say that it isn’t always, like, “Kumbaya, we all love each other all the time, and there’s never disagreement.” In a psychologically safe environment, you can have debate and dissent and it’s safe to do so. So, you may not always feel like it’s pleasant. It can be challenging, but it’s challenging in a constructive way. So, I just want to pick apart that word a little bit before I went further.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So, it might feel uncomfortable but it’s not, like, terrifying, like, “I’m unsafe. I’m an outcast. I should polish up my resume now based on how that conversation went down.”

Minette Norman
Exactly. It can be, like, sometimes when you have a debate, it can be very energizing because you feel, like, “Pete, I’m not attacking you, personally. I disagree with your idea but let’s make this better together.” That’s actually really energizing as opposed to, like, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and you should be looking for a new job.” So, those are different ways to engage in dissent and disagreements.

So, yeah, it definitely enables you to have those hard conversations that may not always be comfortable but they’re more comfortable than they would be if we didn’t feel safe with one another. So, coming back to the question now of performance, there’s lots of research, and certainly Amy Edmondson, who has done decades of research on the topic, has uncovered that performance is directly correlated to having a higher degree of psychological safety.

And why that is is because, first of all, people openly discuss risk and failure so that they can learn from mistakes more rapidly rather than being doomed to repeat the same thing over and over. If there’s this stigma that we never talk about failure and we don’t talk about risk, what happens is that we go dark on that and we hide from one another when things have gone badly, and then we’ll probably just repeat those mistakes and failures over and over.

And her original research, which I don’t know if you’ve read her book, The Fearless Organization, but in her book, she shares that in her research in the medical field, that teams that had a higher degree of psychological safety had better patient outcomes because those medical teams were actually willing to talk about mistakes.

And, for example, in a medical setting, someone at a lower hierarchical level than, let’s say, the surgeon, could actually question, “I think that we’re risking something here. Like, is this the right medication? Is this the right dosage?” and they could question the surgeon or the doctor even if they were not at the same level. Whereas, in teams where there was sort this huge hierarchical difference between doctor and nurse, the nurse would never challenge, and, therefore, there would actually be worse patient outcomes.

In the world of other kinds of business, what we see with a higher level of psychological safety is we see more innovation. And why that is is because, in an environment where you’re trying to innovate and come up with new ideas, that will only happen if people are willing to share maybe a crazy idea, maybe an idea that seems like completely impossible. And that happens when people feel that, “My idea is welcome here. All ideas are welcome.”

And then we can refine them together, we can debate them, we can take the best nuggets from everyone’s thinking, and we can shape that into something that’s really greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s the way I see a psychologically safe team, is that if you can really tap into that genius that is there, because everyone has their own way of thinking and their own experiences, then you can get something that is bigger and better than the individuals in the room could do, but only if everyone’s ideas can come forth, and everyone’s voice is welcome, and everyone is really valued in a group.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, now could you perhaps share a story of a team that really upgraded their psychological safety and the cool things that came about from it?

Minette Norman
Yes. So, I want to talk about a team that had a high degree of psychological safety that I worked with early in my career before I knew that term, and then I want to talk about how I actually tried to do that in a team that I led. Is that okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Minette Norman
Okay. So, early in my career, I was in the software industry in Silicon Valley, and I was in a company, and we were a cross-functional team, there were about eight or ten of us on the team. We all had a different function, and we just somehow, without ever talking about these terms or anything, we listened to one another in a really important way, and that everyone’s voice was equally weighted.

And we took turns doing things like administrative work. Like, in a team meeting, we would take turns who took the notes, because when you take the notes, you don’t participate as much. We got to know each other. So, to your point about your authentic self, over time, because we worked together and we met daily, working on our project, we got to know our little quirks, we got to know who did what, and who was strong at this, and who was weak at this.

We even got to the point where we could joke with one another about our little quirks because we knew each other enough that it was okay. Like, humor can be very dangerous when you don’t trust someone, but it can be very bonding when you do. So, we were this amazing team, we put out the best product that division had ever put out ahead of schedule, customers loved it.

That was early in my career, and I didn’t know that that was, like, a particularly psychologically safe team until I’ve discovered the research on it much later. But then I was leading teams, and what I found in my group was that people all stayed in their lane. I had a bunch of leaders who reported to me, and they all had their area of responsibility, and they were kind of guarded with one another. And it took us actually bringing someone in, an outside facilitator, to start getting us to talk about what was it we could do together, how we were stronger together, how we could help each other.

And it really wasn’t until we shared more about ourselves, like our whole career journey, or what was important to us in our lives when we got to know each other, then we started to care about each other as individuals, and not just as, like, “Okay, this is the head of engineering, this is the head of agile practice, and this is the head of training.” Instead of our functions, we got to know each other as individuals and we knew, like, “Okay, so-and-so grew up here, and this is what he loved to do, and this is what’s important to him and his wife.” And somehow then we could have the more difficult conversations.

We could actually disagree with one another instead of this sort of false harmony, and we became a much stronger team together, but we had to consciously get to know each other as individuals instead of just, like, “Okay, we’re showing up at work, we’re our perfect selves at work, and we’re going to be a gelled team together.” It didn’t work until we actually invested the time to get to know each other on a different level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, within your playbook here, you mentioned five essential tools. Could you walk us through each one and tell us some best practices for using those effectively?

Minette Norman
Sure. So, yeah, we wanted our book to be, first of all, as short as possible because we know that business leaders are busy people, and, if you’re like me, you have lots of business books on your shelf that you haven’t finished. So, we wrote this book as short as possible, and we have these five plays, and underneath them are five moves, and they can each be used individually so you don’t have to read the book sequentially.

But the way we started our first play is called communicate courageously. And for a leader, like, the very first thing that we advise you to do as a leader, if you want to be a more courageous communicator, is to embrace the idea that you don’t know everything, and to invite other people to help you with your thinking.

So, if you get up, for example, and you give a presentation, a powerful question you can ask is, “What am I missing?” because when you do that, what you’re doing is you’re inviting others to add on, or even to dissent with something you’ve said, but you’re saying, “I am a human being like everybody else. I can’t possibly think of everything there is to think of. And I am inviting you to contribute.”

And then, of course, it’s really important that then you welcome other perspectives if someone does say, “Well, Minette, did you think about this? Like, this seems to contradict your thinking,” that you welcome the other viewpoints and that you get comfortable with, “I am imperfect. I don’t know everything.” So, that’s a starting point. And, of course, that was just one of five moves under communicate courageously, but I thought I would just start with that one. So, that’s the first.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that, yeah.

Minette Norman
“What am I missing?” “What have I not thought of?” That’s another way of saying that. You can find your own language, but I think what’s really interesting is I said that to a leader once, and they said, “Okay, I’m going to ask if that was clear.” And I said, “No, no, because if you say, ‘Was that clear?’ what happens is everyone says, ‘Hmm-mm, yeah that was very clear,” because you’re the leader in the room.”

It’s not so inviting as saying, “What am I missing?” Then you’re asking someone to contribute something back as opposed to a yes-no. It’s really hard to say to your leader, “No, you were completely unclear just now. I didn’t understand you.” So, that’s our first play.

Our second one is about listening because we really believe that listening is something that we think we all know how to do well as human beings. Just forget about even being a leader, or a manager, or anyone in the workplace. We think, as human beings, we all know how to listen, that it’s an innate skill. But what happens is there are so many things that get in the way of us listening to one another well, and it’s a critical skill for everyone because, first of all, as human beings, we need to be heard. We want to be heard. We want to be valued.

And if you are sitting in front of me and, first of all, you’re distracted by something else, I know you’re not listening. But what also happens, and this is so hard to overcome, is that we, instead of listening, we are preparing our response. So, as soon as you start talking, Pete, I’ve heard the first thing you said, and I’m already reflecting on what I’m going to say next. But instead, the powerful thing to do is to truly stay with the person and just, like, listen, maybe ask a clarifying question to make sure you really understood them, and then only when you’ve fully heard them, then you can say, “Okay, maybe I’ll share my perspective now,” instead of this need to just come up with our response right away.

And then this leads into the third play, which is managing our reaction. So, let’s say we’re listening, and you challenged me, you may say something to me that feels like you just disagreed with me, or you dissed me, or you made me feel stupid for something, and I get defensive. And that is, again, this is human biology, every human being will get defensive because this is our brain’s way of keeping us alive and safe, and we don’t differentiate between a physical threat, like I’m about to get hit by a bicycle on the road, and I jump back, and my boss just criticized me in public.

So, to our brains, what just happened then is a threat, and what happens then is that our amygdala fires and kicks in with the fight, flight, or freeze reaction to keep us safe. This doesn’t serve us well in a work setting because, when we get defensive, what do we usually do? We lash out at the other person, or we freeze because we just don’t know what to say, and we can actually practice. And we talk about this in book, we can practice. We can’t stop ourselves from getting defensive, but we can practice how we respond.

And one of the most powerful things we can do is to just pause. So, if someone says to you, “You know, that is just a ridiculous idea. That’s never going to work,” you’re about to get angry with them, and then, instead, you go, “Oh, okay. Let me take a moment, let me come back, and let me say, ‘Can you say more about that? I really want to understand what you just said.’” It wasn’t very long. Like, I just took a little breath, I took a little pause, in that moment, I calmed my brain, and I was able to continue in a more constructive way.

So, that, listening, not letting the defensiveness take over, and responding productively, I will tell you, this was something I had to work on so much in a professional setting, and I’ll probably be working on this the rest of my life, it’s a hard skill to learn, to remember to pause, but it can change your relationships at work in such a positive way because, instead of it being this battle of who’s right and who’s wrong, it becomes a collaborative conversation and a real dialogue.

So, that’s our third one, is managing our reactions, and becoming more self-aware that we all have emotions, we all have reactions, and in order to handle ourselves better in a business setting, no matter what level we are in the organization, we can benefit from greater self-awareness and greater regulation of our response. So, that’s the third play.

The fourth play in the book is about embracing risk and failure. And it’s one of the things that turns out to be so critical in psychological safety that we can openly discuss the failures. And I mentioned in the medical setting, but it’s really in any setting. And that one of the best ways you can do it is just to openly share your failures as a regular practice, like what went well. Of course, we want to learn from what went well, and we want to replicate as much as possible; what didn’t go well, what can we learn from that.

And to make that a regular thing, and thinking a little bit more like scientists. Scientists experiment and go in the lab, and they know they’re going to have a lot of failures before they’re going to have success. And if we can think more like a scientist in any setting, and realize that failure is going to help us get to the big breakthrough, and if we’re not having any failures, we’re probably not pushing the envelope enough, we’re probably not reaching as far as we could go with new ideas and innovation.

And so, de-stigmatizing the topic of failure, and not making it like a finger-pointing blame game of “Who did that?” and “Why was that wrong?” but instead, “What can we learn from this? What did we do that we want to do differently moving forward?” So, that’s a really big topic. And one of the things we share in the playbook is that it’s something that came out of the software industry, that teams that I worked with use, and it can be used in any setting, and it’s called the blameless postmortem.

And the idea is that, like after you’ve had a failure, like in the software industry it’s often an outage. Let’s say you’re on Zoom, and Zoom has a big worldwide outage. The Zoom team would go back, and they would have a blameless postmortem to say, “What led up to that? What happened? What can we do differently to prevent that going forward?”

That can be applied in any setting. And it’s a great way for team members to not point any fingers but instead say, “What are we collectively going to learn from this? And how are we going to be better going forward?” So, talking about failure is not something, honestly, that I was used to in the workplace, and it’s something that you have to get accustomed to doing and practicing. So, that’s our fourth play in the book.

And then the last one is actually a really big topic, and it’s the topic I focus most of my work on, it’s about inclusivity. So, we call the play using inclusive rituals. And what we’re talking about there is creating an inclusive culture, and psychological safety is truly the foundation for inclusion. So, if you think about there’s so much talk, of course, about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the world today and in the workplace. And it’s often focused on hiring a diverse workforce.

And if it stops at that, you will not actually, as an organization, benefit from the diversity that you have on your teams because, without a safe culture, and without an inclusive culture, people who feel different will just conform to the group norms, and they won’t even show up with any differences. They won’t share their opinions. They won’t share their experiences.

So, we introduced the idea of inclusive rituals, and we start with how you run your meetings because meetings is how…we spend so much of our time in meetings, and meetings are often a very much sort of an expression of organizational culture. Like, how we show up in meetings, often what you see is that in a meeting of eight or ten people, there are two people who do most of the talking, and the other six or eight people who sit back and are fairly quiet.

And if you want to truly create an inclusive environment, you have to find a way to bring in those other quiet voices, and there are different techniques for doing it. So, we share some examples of taking turns, like doing actually a very deliberate turn-taking rule, pointing someone as a facilitator, and taking turns playing that role so that you make sure you hear and invite all the voices. And then, very deliberately, inviting dissenting viewpoints as opposed to quickly converging on agreements which don’t usually lead to great outcomes or thinking things through all the way.

So, that’s the fifth, and each one of these five plays with their five moves could be as complex as you want it to be, or as simple as you want it to be, and we try to make it very simple in that we give you ideas of what to put into practice right away. And then we offer, for the reading material, if you want to go deeper on any of these topics, because they’re all quite big topics, but we want to make it accessible and actionable.

Like, if I want to run a more inclusive meeting tomorrow, I’m going to use this rule “No one speaks twice until everyone speaks once.” Try that out. See how it works. And if that works, then maybe the next thing is you ask someone to play devil’s advocate in the room, and then that brings dissent into the room.

So, just trying out things, experimenting with them, see what sticks, see what doesn’t, see how you want to refine things, and that’s how we really want people to think about this material, is that this is a toolkit for you to use one bit of it, some bits of it, and find what works for you but then keep consistently trying other things, and trying to go deeper on this work because it can transform how people feel about being at work every day, and how they contribute, and how much they feel they can do their best work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, so we heard about the five plays. I guess I’m curious to hear the opposite in terms of common mistakes, things that many professionals do that are harmful to psychological safety. They might not even know they’re doing it, but it can have a really damaging impact. Are there a few don’ts you would also highlight for us?

Minette Norman
Yeah, that’s probably a very long list so I’ll come up with a few don’ts. So, let me just start with meetings since we were just on meetings, and then I’ll work my way backward. Don’t in meetings. You know one of the ones that can really destroy psychological safety is someone is speaking, and you interrupt them, and you don’t let them finish.

I’ve read research about this, I felt this myself as a woman in a very male-dominated field. Women are interrupted three times more frequently than men in business settings, and actually in all settings. So, when you interrupt people, they start to feel that their voice isn’t welcome, and then they go quieter because it’s not worth the effort.

So, pay attention to interruptions, and it may be a very, very inadvertent and accidental interruption. So, I just talked over you, Pete, and someone, either I or someone else can say, “Oh, I’m really sorry I interrupted you. Please finish your thought and then I’ll come back to my thought.” And just that really the small correction can make all the difference because then I’ve just said to you, “I do care what you say,” as opposed to just talking over you and continuing, and then we never come back to your thought, and you feel minimized, and you feel excluded, and you feel like you don’t count. So, that’s one.

I will say a really important one, and that is when someone asks you a challenging question, and especially if you’re anywhere in a management or leadership position, it is so important that you not shoot them down, and that’s when we get defensive. But I mentioned it before, it’s one of the worst most destructive things I’ve seen happen in a business context is that someone asked a question, and maybe it wasn’t even meant to be a challenging question.

They’re brave enough to ask a question, and the person at the front of the room who’s holding a Q&A session, for example, makes them feel stupid in the moment, like, “I’m not going to answer that question,” or, “That’s a ridiculous question.” I’ve heard an executive say that, “That’s a ridiculous question.”

So, this is what happens. First of all, the person feels humiliated in front of their peers. But, second of all, everyone else who witnessed that interaction suddenly feels like, “Oh, it’s not okay to ask this person questions. They’re not going to respond well.” So, you basically just shut down the people in the room. So, be really careful with your responses that may embarrass people, or that make people feel less than.

And if you get a question that you can’t answer, just say, “Oh, I’m not prepared to answer that question. Can you give me a minute? Or, I’d like to come back to you on that. And thank you for the question.” So, there are ways to handle it that are going to increase the psychological safety, and there are ways to handle it like, “That’s a ridiculous question. I’m not even going to answer it.” That’s going to be pretty destructive. So, that’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Minette Norman
Well, if anyone wants to learn more about the book, I will just say that we have a website, you can get some sample content, it’s just ThePsychologicalSafetyPlaybook.com. And what we’re finding is that there are so much interest in the book in all different industries. And that was maybe what was really surprising to us and fun to find out.

We’ve been finding out about people in the automotive industry, in law, in HR, in insurance, in tech, and the food industry, and they’re all finding value in this book. So, what I want to say is that psychological safety is important no matter where you are, no matter what you do. It’s any time you’re dealing with teams of people, it matters.

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

Minette Norman
Yes, and it’s hard to pick because I have my selection of quotes around my office, but I’m going to pick one. And this is from Madeleine Albright, and it was something that I kind of heard later in my career, and it feels right to me today, and it is, “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice. And now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.”

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

Minette Norman
Yes. So, this one comes out of UCLA, and I discovered it when I read a book called Social by Matthew Lieberman. It’s about the brain, and it has to do with our brains recognizing pain. So, they did these functional MRI studies on people, and they discovered that what they call, so the researchers from UCLA, call social pain.

When you are excluded, when you are left out, and when you feel hurt, you’re not part of this group, our brains register pain in exactly the same way they register physical pain. So, why is this so important? Because when we are feeling excluded at work, when we feel that our voice is not welcome, our brains are experiencing pain.

And so, I always say, like, we need to minimize the pain we are going through at work. People are suffering. And so, that’s why I think it’s so important to create a culture of psychological safety and inclusion so we can minimize that pain that human beings are going through every day in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Minette Norman
My favorite recent book, as I read constantly, but my favorite recent book is actually a novel that I think applies to the workplace as well, and it’s the novel called Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Have you read it, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Minette Norman
Okay. It’s a great book. It came out in the last year, and it’s about a woman who’s a chemist in the late ‘50s, 1960s, and how she just plows through this male-dominated industry, and does things on her own terms and with her integrity. And I think it’s about speaking up and staying true to yourself. I think it really applies to the workplace everywhere today in 2023, and it’s a great read.

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

Minette Norman
Lots of software, a simple software, but I will say the one thing I probably couldn’t live without, what tool I couldn’t live without is Evernote, or any note taking tool, because I’m constantly reading and collecting ideas, and things I want to come back to, so I put everything in Evernote so I don’t lose it, because if I write it in my physical notebook, I can’t read my handwriting afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Minette Norman
I’m a big walker. I’d love to exercise, in general, but I think walking is the best way that I clear my head, and I often get my best ideas and my clearest thinking when I’m just out for a walk.

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

Minette Norman
There’s a quote from the book that comes back a lot, that we’ve seen people quoting, so I’ll just share it. It was, “Leaders tend to believe that they need to have all the answers and that they cannot show emotion. It’s time to set aside these limiting beliefs.”

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

Minette Norman
If they want to get in touch with me, they can find me on LinkedIn or my website MinetteNorman.com, and I already mentioned the book site, ThePsychologicalSafetyPlaybook.com.

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

Minette Norman
I would say that small actions and small behavior changes can make a hugely positive impact. So, my call to action is just commit to trying one new behavior in your next interaction with a human being, in your next meeting, and it could be just commit to listening fully, or taking a pause before responding. And you may be amazed by the changes you’ll see in your relationships in the workplace and your relationships in real life. So, just try one small thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Minette, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and psychological safety.

Minette Norman
Thank you. You, too, Pete.

Jun 01
0

870: Becoming More Memorable and Persuasive with Diana Kander

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Diana Kander says: "If it's not memorable, then it's mediocre."

Diana Kander reveals the simple secret to creating more memorable impressions and persuading others to say yes.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Precisely how forgettable you really are
  2. The simple secret to becoming more memorable
  3. Why you don’t want to start with a self-introduction

About Diana

Diana is a serial entrepreneur who entered the United States as a refugee from Ukraine at the age of eight. By her early thirties, she’d launched and sold millions of dollars’ worth of products and services. Today, she is an innovation consultant, keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have been taught in over one hundred universities. She can juggle, do a handstand, though not at the same time . . . yet.

Resources Mentioned

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Diana Kander Interview Transcript

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

Diana Kander
Pete, I’m so excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting again. I remember, it’s funny, we’re talking about being memorable, and we’re just chit-chatting about how I remember a lot of the things you said the last time, even more than the average guest, even though they’re all swell and awesome. So, yeah, you’re walking the talk here, so I’m excited to get into some of your insights.

Diana Kander
Pete, I came here with a present for you. I’d hoped it would be here in person, but the mail service is not my friend this week. But you’ve done such an incredible job with this podcast, and when you’re on YouTube, you get those YouTube Awards. And in podcasting, there’s no awards, like nobody sends you anything in the mail. And so, maybe it’s presumptuous of me, Pete, but I made you this 20-Million Downloads acrylic plaque. Imagine me holding it. Here we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Diana Kander
And so, I’ll send it to you after the show for you to put on your desk, but what an incredible feat for you to accomplish.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, that is so thoughtful. Wow, I appreciate that. I’m looking forward to placing that prominently. And I wonder, because we’ve had other episodes about how to, I don’t know, get people’s attention, or be persuasive, or cold email, or break into warm-up relationships, or whatever, and I don’t get very many cool gifts. I get a lot of pitches but it’s a pretty rare gift, and I didn’t even know this is coming. We said yes to you just because you’re fantastic and we want to hear what you have to say, so, but this is just pure gravy, so thank you for that.

Diana Kander
Yeah, bonus. Gravy is where relationships are made, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Quoted already, there you go. Well, it’s fun. We’re already warmed up but I had to know about your 2023 goal of doing the splits, because we talked about your plank insights last time, which was fun. So, I want to hear about you and the splits. How is that going?

Diana Kander
Every year, I pick an impossible physical feat. So, I teach people how to be more curious and innovative in their lives. And the way I push myself out of my comfort zone is I pick something that feels impossible for me to apply those skills to. So, between the plank, I did a handstand, I did pullups, and then this is these splits, and it’s going pretty good. Not even out of my comfort zone. It just takes a little bit of practice, and the right tutorials, and commitment.

Pete Mockaitis
So, now, when it comes to the splits, what are the primary muscles that got to get real flexible? Is it the hamstrings? Is it about all of them?

Diana Kander
Oh, boy. Yeah, it’s quads and hamstrings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Diana Kander
And your goal is to not tear anything while you’re trying to get to it. But, for me, the splits felt like an impossible goal. I’m over 40, I have never…I can’t even sit in a straddle. Some people might know that, like, with your legs. Even the little part, like gymnastics for my kids, I can’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Diana Kander
And so, it felt like, literally, “Is this even possible for an older person like me?” And, in fact, it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’ve done it?

Diana Kander
I’m getting close. I have till the end of the year.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re way ahead of schedule.

Diana Kander
I’m feeling pretty confident.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you feel like it’s just a matter of time.

Diana Kander
That’s it. It just takes time and determination.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, I want to know, as these muscles loosen and your range of motion improve, do you experience less pain or better posture or other benefits? What I’m getting at, Diana, is do we need to have a stretching episode for How to be Awesome at Your Job, or is that not at all that…?

Diana Kander
I know that you’re a big fan of The ONE Thing, Pete, and I thought this was going to be my one thing, that if I learned how to do the splits, I just imagined, like, a world of just general flexibility and posture. And I will tell you that that is 100% not the case. Like, I have no additional skills, like nothing else is stretch-ier. It’s just this one teeny tiny thing that I can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, now we know, but it’ll be still cool.

Diana Kander
Still very impressive and I can do it anywhere, unlike pull-ups, like I need a lot of things to be right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you say it like that, I’m imagining you’re just chatting with someone you just met, you say, “Hey, check it out, I can almost do the splits. Watch this.”

Diana Kander
I could it at the airport, yeah. People asking, people know I’m working on it, they’re like, “Can you do it?” I’m like, “Let me do it right here for you.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Lovely. All right. Well, we are talking about, you’ve got a book here, a fresh one, Go Big or Go Home: 5 Ways to Create a Customer Experience That Will Close the Deal. And I loved it when you were sharing with us, “Hey, I got this book,” you did part of our work for us in terms of, like, well, you know what, not all of our listeners are really in the world of sales or customer relations or customer experiences, but you’re like, “Hey, how do make your presentations memorable or how to double your closing rate for pitches.” Like, “Oh, well, that sounds great.”

So, lay it on us, any fascinating discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Diana Kander
Yeah, if we want to talk about being memorable, Pete, I think it’s important to understand how forgetting works first. So, let me tell you the research. An hour after you do your pitch, your presentation, you’re trying to get a new job, you’re presenting something, and you’re trying to get a big decision, an hour afterwards, they will forget 50% of what you said. And the week afterwards, they will forget 90%. And, unfortunately, you don’t choose the 10% that’s left. It’ll be like what shirt you wore or how many times you said uhm. Like, it’s a random 10% of the presentation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Diana Kander
So, the only way to mess with those statistics, to have them remember more of it, is to have them have emotional peaks during the presentation. So, emotion is directly tied to our memory. That’s why you can remember almost everything about 9/11, or, a happier note, your wedding day. You can remember the weather, like every special part of that day. But you can’t remember a month before that what happened, anything about what happened that day.

So, if we can tie our presentation to some kind of peaks in their emotion, then we’ll have a lot more luck having them remember it and pick us. Then we’re talking to them on a subconscious level and we’re saying, “Hey, this just feels right.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, emotional peaks, that sounds great. I mean, fundamentally, how can I get someone else to have an emotional peak?

Diana Kander
Yes, how do you do it?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking that Hollywood is awesome at this. We got the musical scores, and the shots, and the lighting, and the multimillion dollar budgets, and the most talented actors in the world, and the director saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not good enough. Let’s run it again,” and have accents, I guess, in my own mind’s eye. So, how do we do that when we’re just humans talking to each other?

Diana Kander
That’s exactly it. Think about how you can remember lines from movies. Like, can you remember a line from a presentation? No.

Pete Mockaitis
Only a few.

Diana Kander
So, how do you get it in there and get it sticky? And so, in the book, we outlined a framework that spells out the word MAGIC, so five different things that you can do to create that emotional connection. And I’m happy to go through some of them or all of them with you today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I think that I’m in, in terms of let’s hear those five things. I’m thinking, have we established sufficient why? That’s one of my little internal guidelines I’m thinking about. Being memorable sounds great. Being persuasive sounds great. Any other compelling reasons why being memorable and having emotion transmitted will be fantastic for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Diana Kander
Let me tell you how this book came together. So, I got a call from a CEO, his company creates experiences for, like, stadiums, universities, and he said, “I want to write a book about our company and what we do.” And I said, “Good luck, buddy. I do not want to be a part of this effort.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, do you want me to write that for you?” Okay.

Diana Kander
And he said, “Okay, I get it. Will you at least come take a tour?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll come take a tour.” And I show up, and he’s walking me through this really impressive facility, and then he says, “Look, that’s the world’s biggest 3D printer.” And I was like, “That’s pretty cool.” He said, “We use it to build the world’s biggest 3D printed thing for the Raiders new torch.” You know, they have a torch in their stadium?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Diana Kander
And I was like, “How did a company out of Kansas City win this huge deal?” And he said, “Oh, we have a move. Like our typical close rate is 45%, but when we do this move, we’ll close 90% of deals.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this is what I love. Therefore, Diana, lay it on me.

Diana Kander
And I was like, “Okay.” And so, he explains what they do, and I was like, “This sounds amazing.” And I started interviewing employees at the firm, customers of theirs, other people who do move-like things, and I’d become obsessed with this idea. And by the end of it, I’m begging him to let me co-author this book about this method they do so that I can share it with as many people as I can. And so…

Pete Mockaitis
What’s the move?

Diana Kander
He did to me, you know. It’s about connecting with the person that you’re talking to on an emotional level. And you can do it even if you never even meet the person, and it’s about using these tools that are at your disposal that most people neglect, and because they’re not memorable, they are just mediocre. They blend in with everybody else who’s pitching or trying to get the attention of the people that they’re pitching.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, it sounds good. Now, Diana, before we get too excited, I’m wondering if there’s any nervous folk in the audience, saying, “Wait a minute, Diana, is this manipulative if I’m stirring up emotions in another person deliberately?”

Diana Kander
Yes. I don’t think it’s about being manipulative. I think it’s about showing exactly who you are. I think that a lot of times we want to connect with other people, we’re excited about the thing that we’re trying to sell, but we don’t know how to communicate that. We can’t be like, “Pete, this is an exceptional book, and you’ll have to know about it.” Like, that’s just mediocre. So, how do we connect soul to soul, Pete, like, establish deeper trust and connection with people in a way that just our words alone can’t do?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you. So, I think maybe some fundamental principles associated with, “Hey, it’s something you really believe in. It’s going to be for their best interest and for their benefit. You’re not a flimflammer or a con artist.” Okay, so assuming that’s true, let’s proceed.

Diana Kander
Okay, let’s assume that’s true. So, the framework spells out the word MAGIC. Do you want me to give you all of them? Let me open up the book. M, you make something surprising; A, you analyze them on a deeper level; G, you give the pitch in the right order; I, you include a 3D object; and C, you co-create together.

Is it embarrassing that I had to open up my own book to read those five short statements to you? I just wanted to get them right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no, no, I dig it. I think that will facilitate Googling it everywhere, when they’re, “Who was that guest that Pete had who was so amazing, and there’s magic, and it was…?” So, that’ll be useful. It’ll trigger the keywords just right. So, yeah, let’s go through it. How do we make it surprising?

Diana Kander
All right, Pete. Make it surprising is doing ordinary things in unordinary ways. It is finding little ways…

Pete Mockaitis
For listeners, she’s sipping from a How to be Awesome at Your Job mug, which you have had printed because they don’t exist in my world.

Diana Kander
Yeah, I made my own mug. I love schwag so much, Pete. I love schwag, I have an account at the place where I made your award. I love schwag so much I made my own How to be Awesome at Your Job schwag.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fantastic. Thank you. And now I want one. And I’m wondering, so when it comes to schwag, you didn’t print 300 of these.

Diana Kander
I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
You did one. So, first of all, it’s very practical, who lets you do just one?

Diana Kander
You got to find ways to do ordinary things in unordinary ways. So, for instance, people who are applying for jobs can find creative ways to convey their information. I’ve heard of people who put their resumes on a cake, or in a box of donuts, or in a chocolate wrapper, lots of food items. But you basically communicate the same thing you would communicate otherwise, but in new and unique ways. And that could include having some kind of sight or sound or color. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. You know, back in the day, when I was doing tons of case interview coaching for aspiring consultants, there was a guy who was awesome. He was having trouble getting attention from, I believe, it was McKinsey & Company, and it’s one of these good selective consulting firms. And for his birthday, he sent a cake to the office that had some of his contact information, and it said, “All I want for my birthday is an interview with McKinsey.” And they didn’t respond right away, but they got around to it and he got the job, so that was cool.

Diana Kander
That’s amazing because it was memorable. And this could be as simple as, when you send an email to somebody, to send a video instead, or maybe use some kind of music. Just changing what people are expecting, it could be as simple as changing your signature line in your emails to be something that is surprising, unexpected for them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And very practical little piece here, where can I get schwag printed on a one-sy, two-sy basis instead of, “Oh, buy 500 mugs”?

Diana Kander
Zazzle.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Diana Kander
Do you know that website?

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. I do now. Thank you. Zazzle.

Diana Kander
Oh, yeah, I have a block membership for those, and it’s official.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’re surprising, we are doing something that is unexpected, and it’s maybe physical. Just for funsies, could you give us a couple more examples?

Diana Kander
Yeah, I think it’s all about researching the person. So, for instance, we started this interview and I had that award, but in order to come up with a thing that I wanted to surprise you with, Pete, I had to listen to a bunch of your old podcasts, and I had to think about, “What would Pete care about? What would be valuable to him?” And so, it’s about really just being thoughtful and starting the conversation off by saying, “This interview is going to be different than your other interviews,” and just making them feel that teeny tiny tweak.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. I dig it. I love it. And that takes some hustle, some effort, some time and energy. And I guess you could have help to assist you with some of that in terms of background legwork research, but a part of that I guess really does need to be from you.

Diana Kander
You have to care so you can’t do the move on every project. You can think about if you have a sales process, how to add pieces of magic that are consistent but it still requires this move. This special kind of connection with others, requires you caring and doing a little bit of extra in order to make them feel special.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. And what’s funny, and I think I get a lot of the opposite in terms of…well, I get a lot of pitches, and it’s a blessed place to be.

Diana Kander
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Better than the first few where we were pounding the pavement, asking lots of people and only a fraction said yes. Now, this is, “Oh, so many incoming pitches,” but they say, “Oh, I love your show,” it’s like, “Hmm, do you? I don’t know if you’d listened to my show at all, particularly because this is so not relevant.”

And so, that’s a real bummer when it’s just straight up, I don’t know, lying or inauthentic. And so, yeah, so you do that and it’s surprising. It’s very cool. Could you give us some more examples? We got a cake, we got 20 million downloads, we got the mug.

Diana Kander
It depends on what you’re doing. So, if you’re trying to get a job, again, it’s about getting somebody’s attention in a meaningful way. If you’re trying to create a memorable presentation, surprise could be something funny that happens that’s just different than how most speeches start. We believe in this idea of the golden window, which is you have 30 seconds that they’re paying attention and their brain is asking themselves, “Do I know what this is like? Like, have I seen something like this before?” And if the answer is yes, they’ll pull out their phone.

So, if in that first 30 seconds, you can do something that says, “This is different. You need to pay attention,” because if you think about it, Pete, like what your body does when you’re surprised, you kind of make this, “Huh!” face. You’re open, your hands are open, your eyes are open, your mouth, you’re just taking in as much content as possible. And that’s what we’re doing to them, we’re making them surprised, and then they will pay attention to the next part.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, for the start of a speech, you might give a counterintuitive fact.

Diana Kander
Absolutely. I start my speeches on curiosity with a picture of Snoop Dogg, and I say, “How many people in the audience know who this is? And what’s he up to these days? What job is he doing?” And now I have all eyes, all attention on me because they’re like, “What’s happening? I thought I was learning about strategy in business.” And they are, but we’re going to get there in a very fun way.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it, Snoop Dogg. I’m impressed even more, Diana. Just more examples. In the context specifically of a speech or presentation. Snoop Dogg, they didn’t think that was coming up. What else?

Diana Kander
Adding elements of music like nobody’s expecting, like a soundtrack behind you. Some people include funny videos or memes, just anything that disrupts, like, “This is going to be educational, this is going to be boring.” “I have education for you,” anything that you can make surprising.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m thinking about another speaker, this is hilarious. He was all mic’d up and they were reading his bio, it was like, “So and so, he’s presented in so many countries,” or done whatever, and he just said, “Oh, my, that’s impressive.” It was like, “We know you wrote the bio that they’re reading right now.” That just tickled me. I guess I’m in the speaking world but that just tickled me because it was surprising, like, “Nobody does that.” And, sure enough, it got me in a receptive mode.

Diana Kander
Yeah. And let’s talk about some of the other elements of MAGIC because this can be stacked, so the more of them you can do at once, so, for instance, I got your mug on How to be Awesome at Your Job and that is a 3D object, which we’ll talk about in a second, plus the element of surprise. So, how do we combine some of these together?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. All right. Well, let’s hear about the A.

Diana Kander
Okay. So, A is analyze them on a deeper level. Most people, when they’re pitching somebody, are doing demographic research, which is, “How long have they been at their company? How big is their company?” Just like imagine creating a human-shaped wallet, that’s what you’re doing. You’re just figuring out what the wallet looks like, but you’re not getting to know them as a person.

And what you really want to do is psychographic research, which is understanding their values and what they really care about and things that are tangible, like on the surrounding edges of what they actually do for a living because that will help you connect with them much more than anything that you talk about in the presentation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Diana, now I want to know what are my values that the public doesn’t know so much.

Diana Kander
Well, you heard earlier when I was like, “Well, Pete, you love The ONE Thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
I do.

Diana Kander
You do. And now I can talk about my content in terms that resonate with you, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so funny, that didn’t actually resonate with me as much, not that you’re wrong, I really do love The ONE Thing. But I guess I love The ONE Thing so much, it’s like, “Yes, of course, every human being…”

Diana Kander
Everybody loves it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just as it should be for all of humanity. Shout out to Jay Papasan. Listen to that episode where we talked about The ONE Thing. So, yeah, it’s funny, I’d even recognize that as distinctly me because it’s like the water that the fish swims in.

Diana Kander
I will tell you, Pete, a lot of people still don’t know what The ONE Thing is.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. It’s true.

Diana Kander
They don’t know about it. So, it’s about understanding this person and what they care about, like I know you care a lot about systems and productivity, and you’re exceptional at creating systems around this show on how to make sure that you have a really good show that doesn’t take up a lot of your time away from three kids. And these are all points for me to communicate, like how we value the same things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. It’s true. Well, yeah, it’s funny, that might not have surprised me in terms of, like, yes, like, “Wow, you figured that out about me,” but I was sort of dialed into like, “Yes, clearly, we are on the same page here. Proceed.” So, it was a positive impact, if not a surprising one, yeah.

Diana Kander
Do you know how jury consultants work, Pete? Have you ever heard of this job?

Pete Mockaitis
Just a little bit. Only from the movies.

Diana Kander
Okay. So, you go into a trial, and at the trial, they’ll start with 48 people sometimes that they have to narrow down to 12.

Pete Mockaitis
Voir dire.

Diana Kander
Yes. And as soon as they come up with this list of 48 names that they hand to the lawyers, the lawyer scans it, and sends it to, I’m not going to say guy in a van, but, today, guy in an office that now starts doing what is called psychographic research on each one of these people by looking at their social media profiles, like everything about their lives, their criminal records.

I’m not saying you need to do that about your business contacts, but you would understand them at a deeper level. But you would be surprised at how much information is available, articles that they write, things that they care about, that could just be little hooks for you to bring up as conversation points during your interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really good, and I suppose I did not know that, although it makes total sense now that you say it. I just sort of assumed they were looking at the broad strokes in terms of, “Oh, this is a woman. That is going to be good for us.” “Oh, this is an elderly person. That’s bad for us.” But you’re saying, “Oh, no, no, no, we go deeper that surface level. Uh-oh. Whoa!”

Diana Kander
And it usually takes, like a lot of people think that takes a lot of work. No, it takes, like, 15 minutes if you’re looking in the right places to find. And we’re looking for moments of connection. We’re looking for a good reason, you know, not to get them off the jury. But it’s pretty much the same thing that you would do in a conversation with somebody, Pete, where you’re like, “Oh, where did you grow up?” but you’re doing it ahead of time before you’re actually in the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And in your experience, folks generally like this as opposed to, “Whoa, that’s creepy, Diana. How do you know all this about me?”

Diana Kander
Yeah. Well, you don’t show up, and you’re like, “Ah, Pete, I see here that you live at this address, your house is worth this much, and your children’s names are so and so.” Like, you don’t want to try to freak them out. You got to be cool. But you find ways to, in a cool way, make it a part of the presentation, whatever you’re pitching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve got that. How about the G?

Diana Kander
The G is you give the pitch in the right order. So, Pete, most people, and they mean well, but this is how most presentation starts, they say, “Hey, let me tell you a little bit about myself, then I’ll tell you about my company, and then I’ll tell you why you should choose the thing that I’m recommending.” And that is the opposite order in which you’re supposed to pitch.

We do it because we think that we need to establish credibility, but they don’t really care about us or anything we have to sell until they believe that we understand them and how they see the world. So, every presentation has to start with them, and communicating to them that you see the world in the same way that they do. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it does. And now I’m thinking about webinars because the formula…

Diana Kander
That’s exactly it.

Pete Mockaitis
…is always the same thing, it’s like, “Well, let me tell you about my story.” It’s so funny, it’s like, “Yeah, I don’t care about your story.”

Diana Kander
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what they’re trying to do is, “See how I’m relatable and like you. Like, I, too, had dry eyes, or this pain, or a business that was floundering, or I was overwhelmed by looking at different marketing approaches.” So, I get that that’s what they’re trying to do. I don’t find it as grand but I think what you’re trying to reconcile is, I think what you’re saying is the point is less like, “I went to Harvard, and that’s an impressive school, and I got really good grades, and I’ve been in this industry for 20 years.” It’s, like, that’s not so interesting. But if you also love The ONE Thing, or whatever, that that is conveying that you’re telling me about yourself but you’re, more so, conveying we see the world similarly.

Diana Kander
Yeah, and I think that we do that by starting with them and not us. So, your listeners know very little about me right now, actually. They do not know that I’m a refugee from the Soviet Union. I was born in the Ukraine. These are all interesting things but they have nothing to do with them and what they’re trying to do in their lives.

I want to come in just bringing a lot of value. And at the end, if I’ve done my job of showing them why this can really help them at work and in their business, then I’ll tell them some stuff about me, then they’ll want to know, like, “Who’s this person that I now care about? What are some interesting things about them?” That is the place to bring in stuff about yourself and your origin story and why you’re passionate about this. But at the beginning, it’s just like it’s glazing over and nobody’s listening.

Pete Mockaitis
And the way I am able to share that is I’ve done my research, the deep analysis, previously, and so I’ve got that. So, you gave me, hey, The ONE Thing, and I like The ONE Thing. Could you give us some other key sentences that you’ve seen make a world of good impact when shared early? You could say, “Hey, this was the audience, this was what someone said and they loved it.”

Diana Kander
Yeah, I think the best way to start early is with a question. So, if you have an audience, especially one that you can interact with, the best way to start is by asking them a kind of question that makes them reflect on their own lives where they tell you. So, for instance, when I start the “Go Big or Go Home” keynote, I’ll say, “What does it feel like when somebody’s pitching you? Like, you go to your door, and there’s somebody sitting there with a clipboard, and they’re like, ‘You’ve been pre-approved.’”

And so, they talk about, “Ugh, it feels icky.” And then I say, “Well, what is the sound? Can we make a sound out of that feeling?” And so, then we, as a room together, make the sound, and it sounds like, “Ow, blech,” you know, a terrible sound. Now, all of us, we are pitching on a daily basis, and what we want to be is like a magician. So, what is the sound that you would make when a magician performs their trick and does so flawlessly?

Pete Mockaitis
“Ahh!”

Diana Kander
Yes, that is how we want people to feel about us. We want them to feel that sound. And so, now, we as a group, have done something together. We’ve made that gross sound, we’ve made that ahh sound, we are on the same page, and now we can move on to something interesting or maybe even more surprising, but now we’re doing something together as oppose to me coming in, and being like, “Let me tell you about my sales experience and how this is a method that could really help your company.” You’re like, “Okay, I’ve heard this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s so funny that the sound about an emotion is really resonating because I’m thinking about David Allen, Getting Things Done, we’ve had him on the show a couple of times. He’s great. And he talks about, when you have a list of stuff, a to-do list, or whatever, and you look at it, you just go, “Ugh!” And that’s one of the things I remember most of all the things he said in the hours of David I’ve listened to and read, is the “Ugh!” because I feel it, and I think it later.

And then he brings me for home, he’s like, “Well, part of the problem is you haven’t clearly identified the next action or started your to-do list with clear verbs associated with, well, ‘What does mom mean on your to-do list?’ It’s going to lead you with an ‘Ugh!’ because it’s unclear, that’s one of a dozen things.” And here, now, I feel connected to David and what he has to say. So, I’m with you on the sound emotion.

Diana Kander
Well, that’s surprising. Most people communicate their ideas with words not sounds. And so, that’s another way for us to combine some of these elements together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the I?

Diana Kander
The I, include 3D objects. So, there’s some crazy research, Pete, about how our brains memorize. So, we’re not talking about understanding what your learning method is but I’m talking about remembering, and we all remember visually. And so, you’re going to remember something that’s a picture much more than you will just text alone, but you’re going to remember 3D objects even more than the picture.

And so, I have this example during the keynote where I talk about a product which is called the poo trap, and it is this harness that you put on your dog, that captures the poop at the moment it comes out of your dog, so just imagine that. So, I’m describing, I read the description, but then I show you the photo, which I had to put up on the screen now, but it’s like this S&M-looking contraption for your dog with a bag at the end.

And then everyone laughs, and I’m like, “Look, this photo is so much more memorable than the description,” and I go to my bag on stage, and I’m like, “I’m going to pass around this 3D version of the poo trap. Let’s see which you remember the most,” and they’re like, “Oh, my God!” So, how do you bring your ideas into the physical world?

I’ll give you another example. My friend, Abe, is a cancer researcher, and he goes to these conferences of cancer researchers, and he has this incredible work about how to get your T-cells to fight cancers themselves, like how to arm your T-cells so that you don’t need chemotherapy and you don’t need radiation when you have cancer. But when he goes to these conferences, like everybody’s working on something miraculous, so it’s hard for him to get people’s attention.

So, what he did was had another friend of ours, his kids go to my kids’ school, and we had another mom from our kids’ school make a 3D model of a T-cell fighting a cancer cell, it’s just like a big blob with plastic icicles coming out of it and some lights, like it’s a 3D rendering of science. But he puts it on a table, and he goes to a cancer conference and just flips it on, and everyone flocks to him because they want to know what the thing is.

Pete Mockaitis
“What is this thing?” Yeah.

Diana Kander
It’s different. It’s different. This is about standing out. It’s about being memorable. It’s about piquing somebody’s interest. And it has sparked so many conversations that are so valuable for his research, all because he brought this intangible idea into the 3D world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s juicy. And so, now I’m thinking, I have almost signed up and gone to ATD, the Association for Talent Development conference a few times.

And so, as I’m thinking, if I were to have a table as an exhibitor, and so, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast about being awesome at your job,” I might just have a big ole microphone at the exhibition booth table. And that’s kind of weird and different, and it’s just like, “So, what’s up with the microphone? Like, that’s all there is, huh? That’ll do it?”

Diana Kander
Or it just depends on how creative you want to be but anything that is a representation of what you can create. I spoke to this group of insurance sales folks, and one of them talked about bringing a jar full of pennies with him to appointments. And it’s not a big jar of pennies but it’s this much a month that protects your family in case this horrible thing happens. And you look at it, and you’re like, “Well, I could part with a jar of pennies like that.” And so, it’s just about taking any part of your presentation and making a physical element of it, just something to bring people to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, lay it on us some examples of if things feel abstract, like happiness, joy, a fulfilled employee who wants to stick around longer because they’re engaged and motivated, what are some of the things?

Diana Kander
So, like when you’re pitching, when you’re pitching, Pete? Is that what we’re talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure. I’m just thinking to make a 3D object out of the intangible, what are some cool ideas or examples of how that’s done?

Diana Kander
Sure. So, one way is to make 3D objects about them, so it has nothing to do with your product offering, just your enthusiasm for what they do. So, the mug, the plaque, these are all examples of my enthusiasm to be here with you today. Second, you can show a 3D, something physical that is an example of what you’re talking about.

So, people that I’ve helped get jobs before, they have printed out their number one reference, referral, on a thick piece of paper and left it. And it’s different than emailing it to somebody. Do you know what I mean? Like, one really thick piece of cardboard with this valuable testimonial. They’ll be like, “Do I throw this away? I don’t know what to do with this,” but they’ll handle it, and so it’ll go into a different part of their brain.

Somebody else that I worked with, she went to a presentation and she brought a bunch of tacos with her, and she said, “Our city has the best tacos, and taco stands for…” and then she had something for each of the letters, like tenacious, audacious, I don’t know. Each one of the taco letters stood for something, but they were representative of what she would bring to the job, and it was very competitive. Then, again, she got it.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. And I’ve got a buddy, Kevin, who was presenting, like, “Hey, this is what could be possible if you sort of let our organization just take care of this whole event,” because there was a coalition, it was complicated, a lot of infighting, whatever. And so, he had some large card, like you might find in a preschool, large cardboard-like bricks, and so it looked like red bricks.

He’s like, “So, hey, this is how many people we have right now but our projections are, with this estimate and these funds and the initiatives, we’ll be able to have this many people. We’re going to build it up so it’s six times bigger.” And so, you could put that on a stacked bar chart on a slide, sure. But sure enough, it’s like, “Ooh, that’s a lot of bricks,” just hits people even though it’s the same thing but it’s in 3D.

Diana Kander
Pete, yes/and. So, what I would do in that case is I would bring something that is elaborate that they would not have money to spend on their event but would be cool. So, like as an example, one of those cameras that spins around you and produces really fun social media footage

Anyway, you would bring something that’s like, “We would never be able to afford that,” and be like, “Yeah, you can. Let me show you how to afford this thing. It would be really cool for your event because we’re going to run it a little bit different.” So, like, something that is aspirational, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Diana, I’m curious, since you are an innovation and creativity expert, if folks are thinking, “That’s a really cool concept,” and they’ve only got two ideas and they feel pretty lame, how would you recommend they creatively generate some better ones? Should we hire you for consulting, Diana? Is that right?

Diana Kander
I think it’s about trying to work with people and brainstorm, like, what would work best in the situation, and just volume, volume of ideas. I really believe in creating top ten lists. I think we may have talked about this last time, but we often stop at the first or second idea for something. But if you can push your brain through creating ten different ideas, like some of them will be terrible, but the best one will probably be in the middle, and you would have prevented yourself from getting there by stopping at the first or second.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. So, now, what’s the C?

Diana Kander
The C is co-create together, and we have this really interesting piece of research that was done. This woman followed Hollywood executives around and CEOs as they were getting pitched. So, these are people that are getting pitched a lot of times. And her quote is that people think that just having a good idea will sell itself, and they are wrong because these people who are getting pitched a lot, they kind of try to put you in a box as soon as you come into the room, and stereotype you in some way. And the only way for you to get out of that box and to close the deal is to ask them to co-create a piece of that presentation with you.

So, what that means is we can’t have a fully-baked idea that we go in with. We can have kind of parameters of what we think the idea is, but if we can get them to co-create with us, like, suggest their ideas, kind of like you’ve been doing today, Pete, you’re sharing your experiences, making it a richer experience for everybody else, then that is a true art of seduction.

So, this woman who followed all these executives around, the people who had the best chance of winning the pitch are the ones that had an element of co-creation in it, not ones that are just like razzle dazzle them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you give us some examples of how that might be articulated?

Diana Kander
Yeah, we have examples in the book of how people come with an idea up to 50% and then they say, “What do you think? How do we solve this problem? Let me articulate the problem. How do we solve it together?” If you’re doing a presentation, it’s about having chunks of the presentation where people get to interact. They are voting. They are responding. They are doing something to be a part of the experience in a way that if I were to do this again, it would never be the same exact experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, is it sort of like, “Hey, we see there’s four options. Vote here”? Or, how does that sound?

Diana Kander
So, one of the things that I do at the end of my presentations is I will create a top ten list with the audience. So, I say, “I know how this stuff is important in your work but I don’t do what you do every day. So, can we come up with a list of ten things that are like ahas, or takeaways, or things that you would want to share with the rest of the audience?”

And now, they are co-creating the presentation with me. It’s my framework but then they give examples from their own lives, and they enrich the content even better, and give everybody else ideas in the specific industry that I’m talking to.
Pete Mockaitis
And, ideally, those will be all the more precise and specific to their experiences, whether they are in the food and beverage industry, or industrial mining, or whatever.

Diana Kander
That’s right. And for the people listening to your podcast, they have a job, they’re pitching to their boss, if you come in and you feel like you have to have all the answers, they’re not going to be as bought in as if you say, “Let’s solve this problem together. I’ve done this much legwork, I’ve got this much figured out, I’d love your feedback on what you think about this part, or this part, or help me brainstorm here.” And if you genuinely care about their opinion, they’re going to be a lot more invested in the overall outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Diana, tell me, any final do’s or don’ts you want to put out there in terms of being memorable and persuasive?

Diana Kander
I think that thinking about how to create more magic in your life is the key to building better relationships. It helps you get gifts for your spouse and your kids. It helps you improve existing relationships and build new ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right, Diana, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you start with a favorite quote?

Diana Kander
I’m going to give one from the book, which is, “The only way to connect with people in a way that no one else can is to do research that no one else will.”

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

Diana Kander
We talked about this study in the book about how they put people into an fMRI machine, and they can actually predict your decisions 11 seconds before you can rationally understand them, which means that we’re making decisions in our gut, and then it goes up to our brain where we rationalize why we’re so smart and we made that decision.

But our body is a much older system than the rational brain alone. Like, almost all of our decisions are made on an emotional level in our gut. And so, if you know that about a person, then you want to be able to speak to their gut, and connect with them on that emotional level, because if you just try to stick with logic and reason, you’ll never break through to that very important level.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, Diana, I’ve heard that many times before, that we make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them later. This fMRI 11 seconds is new to me, so thank you. Can you expand on the protocol for this study, that they say, “Hey, do you want to do this or that?” and they could see, “Ooh, the brain is lining up on excitement here and dread there, therefore, they’re going to pick A”? Is that how it goes down?

Diana Kander
That’s exactly it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Diana Kander
And there’s an additional study where they asked people, you know, that study, “Coke or Pepsi? Which do you prefer?” And when the cans were blind, you can’t tell which one is which, people overwhelmingly prefer Pepsi. But when you can see the brand logo, people overwhelmingly prefer Coke. And in the fMRI machine, they can see that when they get excited about Coke, it is their emotional-like memory chunks that are lining up, and Pepsi does nothing for those. I don’t know how they got in there but it is the emotional connection.

Pete Mockaitis
You mean the actual can inside an fMRI machine, it is a picture?

Diana Kander
No, their brains. The brain. But it is our emotional connection to certain things that gets us excited and drives us to action. And if you want to get a yes in a room, you want somebody to pick you, you want them to do what you’re recommending, then you have to talk to them, you have to spike those emotions in some way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Diana Kander
So, related to the topic that we’re talking about and doing research, there’s a book by John Ruhlin called Giftology that I really got a lot of. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t think so.

Diana Kander
Okay. Well, it’s on how to give really meaningful gifts. And we ended up interviewing John for our book, but it is, like, the gospel on how to give professional gifts in a way to create connection with people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Diana Kander
I have to talk about Notion, which is my new second brain. I used to write down everything everywhere, and now I have literally all my thoughts and ideas in one place, and I’m so grateful for it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I might just follow up here a little bit. I’ve used Notion just a smidge. But can you tell me why is Notion superior to, like, an Evernote, or a Bear, or the Notes, Memo app that’s native to phones?

Diana Kander
Because you can create, like, let’s say you have an idea, you can create pages within that idea, so it’s not everything just one straight line. So, for instance, I have, let’s say, marketing for my company, and then I have a newsletter hub, a webinar hub, so each of those is a hyperlink to another page. And in that other page, you can create tables, and you can create that do math for you, and you can create content ideas, and you can add documents and links to…it’s all saved in one place. I don’t know what to tell you but I do know that, now, I have three tabs open on my Chrome. And before Notion, it was a thousand.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Diana Kander
It is drinking 100 ounces of water every single day, Pete. And I’ll give you a rule that helps me do that. I think you have to have rules to help you do the things that you want. And I promised myself that I will drink two glasses of water before having a cup of coffee in the morning, so that helps me in the morning. And then every time I go to the bathroom, I drink a glass of water. I don’t know if you’ve heard the Tiny Habits book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, BJ Fogg, he’s great.

Diana Kander
And now it’s like a cycle that doesn’t end.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what is the impact you have observed of drinking 100 ounces of water per day versus just whenever you’re thirsty?

Diana Kander
We don’t fully understand how much impact just having enough water in your system does for your nutrition, like, just washing toxins out of your body, staying healthy, having the ability to have more energy throughout the day, being able to go to sleep on time. Like, it’s an unbelievable amount of benefits that you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
And speaking of hydration and sleep, do you have a hydration cut-off time?

Diana Kander
Oh, definitely, like 7:00 o’clock. I stop the cycle.

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?

Diana Kander
I think a way to sum up this conversation is if it’s not memorable, then it’s mediocre. And I think we overestimate how much of an impact we make on others. And our goal shouldn’t just be to do our best job, but it is to be memorable. And when we make that the focus, we’ll bring a totally different game to the challenge.

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

Diana Kander
I am very prevalent on LinkedIn. I would love to connect there. And you can go to my website, DianaKander.com. And, oh, Pete, I brought a gift for all your listeners, not just for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy.

Diana Kander
I care about them. I want to connect with them. It’s a pretty good gift, actually. If you want a copy of the book but you don’t want to buy one, just email me diana@dianakander.com, and I’ll send you a digital copy of Go Big or Go Home so that you can benefit from the lessons. You just got to tell me why you want it, and it’s yours.

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

Diana Kander
As I think about your audience, Pete, I think the number one thing I would say is dig your well before you need it. Make sure that you have the relationship. Like, things are happening at a very fast pace. Things are changing, you’re going to need relationships in your life for whatever the next thing is, so make sure that you’re investing in all of those individuals so that you can help them or they can help you later.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Diana, this has been a treat. I wish you much bigness and fun.

Diana Kander
Thank you so much, Pete.

May 29
0

869: Transforming Anxiety into Power with Luana Marques

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Luana Marque says: "We can get rid of avoidance but we can’t get rid of anxiety so we need to be fighting the right enemy to live a bold life."

Luana Marques pinpoints the root of anxiety–avoidance–and reveals how to approach it all the more effectively.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why anxiety isn’t the real enemy
  2. The three-step plan to transform your anxiety
  3. How to manage your thoughts effectively

About Dr. Luana

Dr. Luana is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Founder and Director of Community Psychiatry PRIDE at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and former President of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Almost Anxious: Is My (or My Loved One’s) Worry or Distress a Problem?, which has been lauded for its clear and practical approach to effectively dealing with anxiety.

Frequently cited as one of the leading experts in Cognitive Behavioral Therapies (CBTs), Dr. Luana has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, CNN, Harvard Business Review, and more. She also has been a frequent guest on television broadcasts such as  Good Morning America, Face the Nation,  and CNBC and podcasts including Ten Percent Happier and How to Be Awesome at Your Job.

Resources Mentioned

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Luana Marques Interview Transcript

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

Luana Marques
Thanks for having me. Excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the latest wisdom you’ve got in your book Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power. It sounds right up our alley but I’d like to start with one of your bold moves. I understand that you have, in fact, proactively chosen to negotiate while inside a Payless shoe store. What’s the story here?

Luana Marques
I did. So, I first came to the US as an exchange student and I spoke, basically, almost no English. And growing up in Brazil, we’re just taught to negotiate everything from a car to a banana to pretty much anything. Nothing is at face value what people tell you cost. So, I was here and I needed a pair of winter boots, there’s no need for those in Brazil.

And so, I walked into a Payless with my American family, chose what I could afford for winter boots, and as I was trying to pay, I asked for a 50-cent discount, and my American family, I remember, like they turned bright pink, and they’re like, “You don’t do that.” And I couldn’t understand why they’re so embarrassed, I was like, “Well, what is wrong?” I didn’t know.

I spoke very little English but the store is called Payless, and so I thought, “Well, why I wouldn’t pay less?” I don’t know if it was a bold move or it’s just a ‘I don’t know to speak English’ move but I did negotiate at Payless.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I want to know, what did they say?

Luana Marques
The woman looked at me and said no, and my American mom, like, pulled her money and quickly helped pay. It was really embarrassing for them, I think. I don’t think that saleslady was embarrassed. I felt I shamed them, and I think maybe that’s why I remember it so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess the funny thing for me about Payless, in particular, is, yes, it’s called Payless and it’s like they always had some promotion going, so it’s almost like if you’re actually talking to a decision-maker, they might be like, “Sure, hey, we just got everything all the time, 50 cents is fine by me.”

Luana Marques
That is such a good point. At that point, and I remember I didn’t know that there was so much coupons and promotions and buy-one-get-one-free, like that concept was still not in my brain at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it was not as much bold as it was because you’re unfamiliar with how things are done. Although, every once in a while, that kind of ignorance can really be powerful in terms of, in this case, you might’ve gotten a discount because nobody asks but you asked, and it could happen. And other times, I’ve heard a story, was it Sara Blakely of Spanx, she just called up some merchandisers, and like, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s not what it’s supposed to be done. Oops,” but it worked out great for her.

Luana Marques
No, I think the spirit behind that moment still very much drives me. Like, I will negotiate for my salary. I will ask. My grandma, she used to say, “If you don’t ask, you don’t know. It can be a yes, it can be a no. If you don’t ask, you don’t even have a chance.” And so, I have an event coming up, I’m speaking at Formula One next week in Miami, and I was just not asking for tickets for the event. And then I sat with myself, I was like, “No, I can’t write a book about being bold and not being bold,” so I asked. And I think I might get tickets to watch the race.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Luana Marques
So, that was a bold move.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

Luana Marques
That one was good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Very good. Very good. All right. Well, so let’s hear a little bit about your book Bold Move. Any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made while you were putting this together?

Luana Marques
So, the book, it’s a professional and personal journey for me, and I think the thing that was fascinating, I had the table of contents, I was writing the book, the last section of the book is I call a line, which is the idea of living a values-driven life, so identifying the key values in your life and really aligning your day-to-day life with those values.

And what was amazing to me is that I talk about this a lot, I coach people on the value-driven life, I think a lot about my life, but I realized, as I wrote it, how much I had strayed. I had really started to struggle with health and stopped going to the gym. I put on a lot of weight during the pandemic. I really cared about my work but was not aligning the way those aligned with the specific value related to my work.

And so, it was like this wakeup call, I was like, “Oh, my God, I’ve been talking about this but I hadn’t sat to realign my values.” And it’s something I think a lot of us maybe haven’t done yet since the pandemic. The world went upside down, things stabilized a little bit, and we went back to living our lives as we’ve done, adjusting, I’m sure, but I, personally, needed a major valid realignment to be able to really not only finish the book but to live a better, more fulfilling life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Luana, if I may dig into these values, we’ve come up a number of times here, and it’s such a big word, values. It’s probably the biggest word there is. And so, we’ve had a variety of guests say a variety of things in terms of how one arrives there, like, you could do a values card sort, and you could think about the times that were most meaningful in your life.

Can you share with us what are your values? And how did you stray? And what is a values realignment look, sound, feel like in practice?

Luana Marques
Wow, I’m speaking my language, all so great questions. So, values, to me, just for my definition, are our compass. Often in life, we live a life that we’re sort of guided by external things instead of internal things. And I think of values as sort of intrinsic motivators, so things like health, family, impact, wealth. And so, how do we get our true values?

There’s actually science here. Sometimes people get a list of values and they’ll start circling the values they like, and I have a list in my book. But what we know about values and why is it they hurt so much when we’re not living a life that’s aligned with values, it’s because we’re violating something that really matters to us, so it really only hurts because it matters.

Let me answer your question with an example of how my values got compromised. For 20 years, I worked with an amazing institution at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital, but in the last three years, I had a particularly challenging situation with one of my superiors, and what he did to me really violated trust for me.

And having grown up poor, having grown up with very little, in a situation when home was unstable, if I don’t trust those around me, I can’t really survive, really. For me, it’s sort of I need to have trust to feel safe, safety in the world. And so, I kept working there, and I kept not addressing it, but it was eating me alive.

And so, one of the questions we ask when we’re thinking of values and identifying values is, “Why is this hurting so much? What’s behind this thing?” Because, see, if I didn’t care about this person at all, what he did to me wouldn’t have hurt. So, it hurts because I cared. And that’s how I realized that he had violated trust and that’s why it was so painful.

So, I don’t want to keep going but that’s the first piece. I guess it’s like, “Can you see either if you’re in pain, why are you feeling that pain? What is the value that’s being violated?” because, to me, that’s the first step to then realign your life with those values. Does that answer your question, Pete? Like, I don’t want to sort of keep just rambling about values.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. So, that’s a nice indicator there. And now I’ve got Dr. Steven Hayes in my ear, thinking about values, and I hope to have him on the show. He’s got a great voice. And he said, “Often, when we connect to our values, the most common response is crying.” So, that was a striking sentence, like, “Huh.”

And so then, what does it look like then? So, we see the violation looks like, according to Steven Hayes, of acceptance and commitment therapy, that when you connect to them, you’re crying? What is connecting to your values look like?

Luana Marques
He is so great. And this question about violating your pain is definitely a Steven Hayes question. And the crying, sometimes, is twofold. One, you’re like understanding why it was so painful, and the other one, which I think is implicit in what he’s saying, is there’s a sense of relief, “Oh, okay, now I know what to do.” So, for me, I had to take action and, basically, addressed this with this person so that I could stay with my job and not feel like I was hurting every day.

And that’s the second piece. Once you connect with it, you’re going to have some relief. But in a practical way, what does that look like? In my case, it was intrapersonal conflict. But on-to-day, if we’re talking about productivity, if we’re talking about your life, it’s really choosing actions every day that represent that value.

If you care about connecting with others, are you making time to see your friends? If you care about justice, are you involved in things that reflect justice? And what his research shows very beautifully, Steven Hayes’ research, is when you align daily actions with values, stress goes down, anxiety goes down, depression goes down, and your sense of wellbeing and thriving in life feels much better despite of stress. You still can handle stress better because you’re doing things in a way that’s meaningful to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so then a realignment then is just you’re taking a look at how things are and what you’re doing, what you’re up to, and then doing things differently?

Luana Marques
Yeah, in a meaningful way. It’s looking at it, choosing it, doing it differently, and then tracking the outcome. Because if you change what you’re doing, you want to know if it’s working, if it’s making you feel better. But if it’s value-driven, it usually does.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And then when it comes to the defining of one’s values, so trust is one, how many values do most of us have, more or less?

Luana Marques
I don’t think there is a single research that can agree on that. I think most people would say that it’s hard to hold more than five at any active time and actually live a meaningful life towards them. I think we have many more than that. For me, right now, currently, that’s the important thing, we change through our lives. Currently, the values that are really important to me are trust, impact, health, and family. Those are the four main compasses by which I’m guiding my life today.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Okay, so you’re just getting warmed up talking about values. That’s just a warm up, Luana.

Luana Marques
I know. I know I get excited. I really get excited about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, let’s hear about the book Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power. What’s sort of the big idea or main thesis here?

Luana Marques
The main idea of the book is that although anxiety is extremely painful, anxiety itself is not the enemy. The real thing that gets us stuck is psychological avoidance. Psychological avoidance is anything that we do that helps us feel better momentarily but it has a negative long-term consequence. So, these sort of things like you cancel a date, you don’t finish your report at work because it makes you anxious, you walk in your house and your wife gives you a look, and you know she’s upset, and you’re like, “Oh, I have to work a little more. I don’t want to deal with that right now.”

Those are examples of psychological avoidance. When we avoid, we feel better momentarily. Long term, we are just creating more anxiety. So, that’s at the core of what the book is about. It’s we can get rid of avoidance but we can’t get rid of anxiety so we need to be fighting the right enemy to live a bold life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, to not do the avoidance, what do we do? Do we just go for it every time? How do we think about that, like, “Hey, what’s up? You seem upset. Let’s do this”?

Luana Marques
Well, “Just do it” works for Nike. It doesn’t work for psychological avoidance. We have to be more thoughtful. So, the first piece is actually identifying that we’re avoiding. We may know it but not everybody has paused and really asked themselves, “When my anxiety is high, what do I do?” And in the book, I described something called thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, or TEB cycle, the TEB cycle.

And it’s just a technique that we often use in psychology to just cause a pause, create a pause in your brain. So, the first step is if you’re feeling anxious, ask yourself and write it down, “What am I saying to myself? How does that make me feel? What do I want to do?” And if that action is something that is designed to only bring down discomfort, there’s a good chance that you’re avoiding.

So, does that help a little bit, sort of just setting the framework?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, if that’s the thing that is there, then okay. And then I could see how that behavior could be, boy, just any number of things. So, first of all, I’m thinking about, like, okay, smoking, drinking, drugs, video games in terms of, like, there’s a universe of things that’s just, like, “I am just trying to push the feel-good button here.” As opposed to, I guess, now there are things like it might be in the gray zone, like going for a run, it’s also a healthy behavior which is good for the body, but is also exiting a situation that you don’t want to be in.

So, I guess maybe that might be in the gray zone of it is, “I’m avoiding but I’m doing it in an uplifting way so it’s not purely just to make me feel better.” And so then, yeah, then I guess the behaviors that would be not just feel-good behaviors but, I guess, they’re like helpful or productive or advancing things in some way. Is that right?

So, like, if your partner or spouse has given you the cold shoulder, it might be you don’t necessarily engage in a conversation right then and there but you might say, “Well, okay, I’m going to do something that’s helpful for her at the moment because it seems like that would be useful.” So, I’m purely speculating, Luana. You tell me.

Luana Marques
I love it. So, Pete, I think you’re dancing with avoidance the right way, and this is the trick. Avoidance works and there are times in life that we have to walk away. So, you’re having a really bad day, it’s certainly much better to go for a jog, call a friend, than to reach for a bottle of wine, just in terms of your overall wellbeing.

The question, really, is not about the behavior. It’s like, “What is the function of the behavior and is there a negative consequence?” So, for example, if every time you’re upset with your spouse, the only way you handle it is going for a jog, and you never address that you’re upset with your spouse, there is a lifetime, a time on this. Meaning, eventually this blows up for every couple. There’s never a couple I’ve worked with where they avoid a conflict, avoid a conflict, and conflict just ran away. Conflict doesn’t have legs. It stays there.

And so, the running, and the clearing your mind, and jogging, it’s great but if it’s the only way you address conflict, then now you get yourself into a problem. So, it’s really about that price tag, and I think it’s helpful to think about three ways of avoiding. The ones that you talked about, it’s alcohol, numbing, those are retreating. That’s when we sort of try to move away from discomfort. So, you had a really busy day at work, you just come home and have a few glasses of wine, once in a while that might be okay. If it’s every night, now it starts to get into really psychological avoidance.

Some of us, though, avoid in a completely different way. When we feel threatened, specifically perceive threat, so you’re upset with your boss, you get an email you don’t like, you are angry with your partner, you react. Those are people that raise their voice. They will write a hasty email. The idea here is that they’re moving towards that discomfort but not in a productive way. In a way of, like, “I just can’t feel this anxiety so I have to do something.”

Like, I had a patient that just would explode. Every time something would happen at work for him that made him anxious, he would explode. So, there is the people that react, explode kind of idea; there’s the people that retreat; and the last category on psychological avoidance is really the people that remain.

This is the person that is frozen. They’re in a job that they hate but the idea of transitioning, the uncertainty, they just don’t make the leap. They have a relationship they don’t like. So, they are sort of stuck, unable to move one way or another. Does that help to clarify these flavors?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it does good. Yes. Certainly. So, the avoiding isn’t necessarily avoiding the situation. It’s avoiding the feeling of anxiety, like, “I’m going to escape this into anger. Like, I’m going to tell you what I think about this with some attitude.” Okay.

Luana Marques
That’s really important. You’re right on target. You’re not necessarily avoiding behavior, which is the way everybody thinks about avoidance. You’re avoiding discomfort. It’s really the anxiety that you’re trying to run away from.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so tell us, what’s the promised land? What can really be possible for us? In a world where stuff happens, we feel anxious, what’s possible?

Luana Marques
So, there are three skills that I talk about in the book that I think are very helpful that, really, I’ve used them since I’m 15, and my grandmother taught some of them to me, and then, eventually, I got to graduate school, I was like, “Oh, there’s science behind what she was saying?” and here they are. The first one is shift.

Shift is the idea of learning to examine what we’re saying to ourselves. So, what is it that you’re saying to yourself when you’re anxious? Because what happens when we’re anxious is our thoughts become very black and white. On my early days of dating, I remember I’d go on a date and if somebody gave me a look, I’d be like, “Oh, my God, they don’t like me.” And we jump to these conclusions without any facts whatsoever.

So, shift as a skill is, really, after we pause, can we learn to talk to ourselves as if we’re talking to our best friends? What do I mean by that? I don’t know about you, Pete, but I say things to myself that I would never say to my friends. Like, we talk to ourselves in ways that are very not helpful. So, to shift is really arriving on a more balanced view of the world.

So, if you’re really scared about a presentation, can you say to yourself, “You know what, yeah, I’m anxious, but I’ve given presentations before, and I’m prepared”? And what we see is if we shift, our anxiety goes down a little bit. It doesn’t go away but it allows us to engage with things that cause some of that discomfort in a way that’s more productive.

And I have two more but how does that one sound? I’ll pause here for a sec.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I dig it a lot and I’ve heard that before, I feel it wasn’t Ethan Kross or David Burns, but, yeah, that is good. Talking to yourself like a best friend as opposed to any number of things that you could be saying to yourself, which could be judgmental or harsh, or, “You idiot, you always do this.” Like, okay, you probably wouldn’t talk to your best friend that way. You’d be like, “Oh, man, that’s a bummer. Oh, okay. Well, hey, you know what, everyone makes mistakes. You are awesome at your job in all these ways. We’re going to figure out a plan to fix this. We always do.” And that’s a much better vibe inside.

Luana Marques
Yeah, I love the example you just gave because it’s like a good leader would do. If you’re working with somebody that you trust and they make a huge mistake, you don’t go, “Hey, that was awful.” You sit with them, and you say, “Okay, let’s figure out how we got here, and let’s walk together to get you out of here.” And it’s being able to take that perspective towards ourselves so that we’re not living dominated by negative anxious thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. What’s next?

Luana Marques
Approach, not avoid. So, we actually already talked a little bit about this. You mentioned when you’re in conflict with your partner, and the only way you manage that conflict is going for a run because you feel so anxious about talking that you want to run away. Approach is the idea of going towards discomfort by doing what I call opposite action. So, you’re going to do an opposite action of what the anxiety tells you to do.

But here’s the trick, and this is really important. It can’t be all or nothing. So, if you’re afraid of conflict, you can’t, all of a sudden, turn on a switch and go to your partner, and be like, “Well, we’re going to address this right now.” No one can tolerate that. Our brains can’t handle it. So, what is one thing you can do instead of running away? It could be as simple as saying, “Hey, what you said really hurt me, and I’d like us to find some time to talk about it, eventually.” Or, “You know what, that hurt me enough that I need some space from you,” but trying to go towards that discomfort, and so approach instead of avoid.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Luana Marques
And, finally, we actually already talked about it, which is align, and it is drawing from the acceptance and commitment therapy. And the idea of living a values-driven life is a life that really is meaningful. Now, I do this every week, Pete, on Sundays. I look at my calendar for the next week, and I do a little values check, and I go, “Okay, what am I doing that’s related to impact?”

Like, being with you here today feels so important to me because I wrote this book to help the world find science-driven skills to bring the mental health crisis down. And being in such an important podcast like yours, to me, has impact. So, I can check that today, I can say, “Okay, there is impact here.” And tonight, I’m going to have dinner with my son, and he’s really excited. We’re cooking together. Check family.

And so, for me, I try to ensure that I have a little bit of everything, knowing that an aligned life is not a perfect life. I’m about to launch a book, I’m doing a lot more impact, a lot less family, but it’s in a purposeful way so that I continue to live a value-driven life.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. When we talk about values and alignment there in terms of because some values, I think, could be pretty fuzzy in terms of, like, thinking about a week and can we put a check on it. Like, I’m just going to say integrity. It’s like, “Okay, do I have anything for integrity this week?” It’s like, “Well, I’m just going to try to not lie to anybody over the course of interacting with folks.”

That doesn’t quite seem nearly as concrete. For impact, being on the podcast. Family, cooking with son. How do you think about that when it comes to values?

Luana Marques
So, values should be how we say yes or no to things. And if you’re clear on your values, then when somebody presses you, “Can you do this in a way that’s a little shady?” if you’re acting with integrity, the immediate answer is no. There’s not a sense of, like, “I have to think through this. Or, is there a way around that?”

And so, I think about integrity the same way I think about trust in some ways. As core values, they are non-negotiables. So, they’re values that I, personally, every day, want to live by. And then there are things for me that are non-negotiable. Like, integrity is one of them, for example. That my decisions in meta level and in a micro level need to have integrity.

It is harder to check in the list. It is not harder to live by that value if you have it. So, like, I have my list of values and I look at them often, at least once a week. But as a way to sort of say to myself, “Can I keep myself…” the word that comes to mind is reliable, but it’s not really right. “Can I keep a check on myself? Am I really honoring those values?” And it doesn’t feel hard to do integrity but I get your point that it does feel like it’s more amorphous than, like, family, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I guess it seems less schedulable, it’s like, “Ooh, do I have an integrity activity for this week? Hmm, no.” As opposed to reflecting, looking back, “Did you do this?” I’m thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography here in terms of he had his nice little rundown of virtues and “Did I do it today?” and he made the marks on the grid.

So, I could see, like, in hindsight, you can say, “Ooh, hey, actually, I don’t think I had as much integrity as I would’ve liked to there. I kind of let them think something was the case when I knew it probably wasn’t going to be the case, and I could’ve corrected that, and that would’ve been helpful for them and painful for me. And I didn’t do it. I wasn’t lying but that was less than 100% integrity.”

Like, you might be able to reflect on that in hindsight but I can’t think of an integrity activity that I could make sure is scheduled on the weekly agenda, and then if it’s not, go ahead and schedule it. Maybe you can, can you?

Luana Marques
The only one that I think you could schedule but it’s not, again, schedulable as much is parenting. Like, how do you parent with integrity? What do you teach? And can you create moments that you’re teaching specific things that are related to integrity? But it gets in a whole can of worms. Like, how do you parent? What are your values for parenting? What is your partner’s value for parenting? What are the activities around those values?

But it’s the only one that I could because I have a five-year-old at home, so that is something that we think a lot about. So, maybe it is that we just have to check more and reflect on those mega core values, but I like to think more about that. Now you got me in a linchpin here. I want to think about how do you schedule values, those kinds of values.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also want to dig into one of your concepts. You suggest that we become our own thought lawyers. What does it mean to be a thought lawyer?

Luana Marques
So, what it means is that whenever we’re anxious, our thoughts, well, the way our brain process information is based on our views of the world which are formed early on. I talked a little bit about my view of being afraid I’m not enough, or there are people like they’re not going to think something, or think something badly of me.

And so, our brains are automatically running information that way, which means sometimes our thoughts are not accurate. They’re not either based on reality or they’re likely distorted by our views of the world. And so, to become a thought lawyer is really to pause and look at your thoughts, and to be able to say, “Okay, is this thing I’m saying to myself based on data? Will this hold in a court of law? And if it doesn’t, is there another way to talk to myself?”

So, it’s really questioning our thinking. It’s no different than learning to talk to yourself as your best friend. The idea behind both principles, really, is thoughts are not facts. They feel true but they’re not necessarily 100% accurate. And that arriving at a more flexible view of the world allows us to live a better, more meaningful life.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it’s funny, when I think of interacting with a friend and a lawyer, it feels different. And I guess when I’m thinking about a thought lawyer, as I’m imagining I am cross-examining a thought I have. It’s like, “What is your evidence for that thought?” And, in some ways, I don’t know, I wonder about what’s the tone we’re going for when we’re being a thought lawyer?

Luana Marques
Well, given that we’re trying to live a meaningful bold life, ideally, a tone that has some compassion with yourself. I think the spirit behind both of them is the same, which is, “Can we interrogate our thoughts? Can we not take thoughts as facts immediately?” Now, I worked with some people, they’re very scientific, and so, for them, it’s like they need to be in a cross-examination, otherwise, there’s nothing. This whole friendship stuff, they’re like, “It’s too soft. I can’t do it.”

And I worked with people that go, “Oh, this law stuff, I don’t really care. What I care about is meaningful relationships.” So, think about them, Pete, as different entryways for people with the same goal. The goal here is, “Can we look at what we’re saying to ourselves?” Because if what we’re saying to ourselves is just leading to more anxiety, do we want to keep talking to ourselves that way? And could we arrive at a more balanced view so that we can bring that anxiety down and transform it into more of a power and more meaningful life?

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Well, I guess the way I’m reconciling it is the thought lawyer is the lawyer that I have hired on my team, as opposed to the lawyer on the other team who’s adversarially going after me. Because I think sometimes with thoughts, I mean, you can, I don’t know, at least these are in my own thought life, if I am too intensive with my interrogation, it’s like I flip on into defensive mode. And it’s like, “Huh, really, is that true, Pete?” “Well, yeah, because dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And then it’s like, “Huh, I don’t think I’m getting where I’m trying to be going from this process.”

Luana Marques
So, it’s interesting because defensive mode sometimes is just a way to avoid our own self sometimes because we get defensive, we’re like, “No, no,” and it’s sort of in a way a little bit. I hear you. I think that sometimes we can get so black and white in the interrogation that we just lock our brain more, and that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.

We’re trying to achieve cognitive flexibility. That’s really the goal behind these skills is you have a more flexible brain. And so, I love that you know for you what works and doesn’t work. And I think that’s what I recommend for everybody. If for you, the lawyer that you hired and your team is better, bring that lawyer on everywhere with you, man. That’s awesome. I love the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okey-dokey. And so then, the subtitle of the book Transform Anxiety into Power, so I could see how doing these three things, the shifting, talking as a best friend, the approaching not avoiding, the aligning to be values-driven, are powerful, and we’ve sort of transformed an anxious anxiety into power there. Although, I’m wondering, it’s like could I be powerful without the anxiety? Or, is the anxiety actually being a handy fuel for me? How do you think about that?

Luana Marques
I’ve never met anyone in my life that I worked with that they didn’t want that anxiety gone. I’ll be the first to say I don’t like anxiety myself, so I’m there with everyone here. That being said, we can’t get away of anxiety. If you think about anxiety as sort of a broader concept that involves just even some mild discomfort. Have you ever seen anyone powerful that goes to give a concert, or somebody who’s about to take an exam? There’s some level of apprehension and an anxiousness that is somewhat adaptive up to a point.

And getting rid of anxiety is like getting rid of our pain receptors. It sounds fantastic, you bump into something and you feel nothing, but then you touch a hot stove and we’re in trouble. And so, we can’t get rid of anxiety completely. We can bring it down, and that’s why I chose very thoughtfully the subtitle of transforming anxiety into power.

So, if you’re going to feel anxious anyhow, wouldn’t you want to use it to do something meaningful, something that makes you feel power, make you feel bold towards what you care about? And so, I think we can get rid of avoidance. That, I think, we can do really good. Anxiety, I’m sorry to break it for everybody, we’re all going to have a little level of it. There’s no way around it.

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

Luana Marques
No, I think we covered everything.

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

Luana Marques
So, since I was 16, I’m inspired by Paulo Coelho’s quote on The Alchemist, “Whenever you want something, the entire universe conspires in making sure you have it.” That quote gave me hope when life was tough in Brazil, and still does.

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

Luana Marques
I’m really excited, have been, by the things that I think a ton about is Steven Hayes’ work on acceptance and commitment therapy recently, and this idea that we can actually create more meaningful lives by leaning into our pain, understanding that pain can reflect values, and then create a new life when those values are a part of it. That, to me, is very exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Luana Marques
Favorite book, the last book that I read that gave me a lot of inspiration is Michelle Obama’s new book on The Light We Carry. She has an entire chapter on avoidance, and it’s just so powerful to me to see a woman like Michelle talk about avoidance and also overcoming it. And although she doesn’t use the same terms I use, I can just see the science right there in everything she used, so she inspires me tremendously.

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

Luana Marques
So, I think what I’m really just, I love, nowadays, ChatGPT and just being able to use AI as a way to elevate my writing. I think it’s really incredible. I think there’s pros and cons but it certainly has helped me to sort of streamline my thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel like there are some episodes about this coming up to be done. How do you use it to streamline your writing? Is it in terms of brainstorming or…?

Luana Marques
So, no, it’s mostly, you know, English is my second language. Of course, I’ve been here for a long time. I tend to be a fast writer but being able to create the flow, and sometimes just even clean up the grammar. I can get in a habit there, so being able to say, “Help me rewrite this in a way that ensures tone but allows for grammar correctly, and this, and this.” Just, it literally cleans it up a little bit. It just saves a lot of time. It stays consistent with the message that I want to send. It’s just like I have an editor at home that is just like an amazing editor, and that’s really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Luana Marques
Breakfast with my family, like sitting and actually having breakfast. We had to create that into a habit because life has a way to just take it over, and it’s a habit for us.

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

Luana Marques
Approach than avoid. All my clients say again and again, like, whenever they avoid, they go they hear me saying, “Approach than avoid.”

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

Luana Marques
www.DrLuana.com. You can find out about the book and everything else there, including upcoming speaking events and book signing.

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

Luana Marques
Yes. I encourage you all to take a pause, look at your values, and really make a bold move to align your job with what matters the most because that, I think, guarantees that you’re going to be super awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Luana, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many bold moves.

Luana Marques
Well, thank you so much, Pete. It’s really an honor to be back here. It’s super fun.

May 25
0

868: Fostering the Sense of Community at Work with Christine Porath

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Christine Porath says: "Too many people don’t feel any sense of community."

Christine Porath discusses why community is critical to well-being and shares powerful examples of how to build it in the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The astounding benefits of a sense of community
  2. The one thing to avoid with community-building activities
  3. How vulnerability leads to richer communities

About Christine

Christine Porath is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She’s the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace and co-author of The Cost of Bad Behavior. Christine is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and has written articles for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, and Washington Post. She frequently delivers talks and has taught in various Executive programs at Harvard, Georgetown, and USC. Prior to her position at Georgetown, she was a faculty member at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

Christine’s work has been featured worldwide in over 1500 television, radio and print outlets. It has appeared on 20/20, Today, FoxNews, CNN, BBC, NBC, msnbc, CBS, ABC, and NPR. It has also been included in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Fortune, Forbes, NY Times, The Washington Post, and L.A. Times.

Resources Mentioned

Christine Porath Interview Transcript

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

Christine Porath
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and hear some juicy tidbits from your latest Mastering Community: The Surprising Ways Coming Together Moves Us from Surviving to Thriving. So, for starters, could you maybe share with us a really cool story that has some nifty surprises that illustrates what’s up with community, like what’s at stake and what’s possible and what’s the goodness that we might want to be able to tap into?

Christine Porath
Sure. So, it really was inspired by my brother and sister-in-law’s story. So, in 2008, my brother, Mike, and his wife, Sarah, had a truly terrible life changing day. In the morning, a doctor informed them that their unborn child was missing a kidney, and possibly other organs. And then in the afternoon, they returned home and there was even more devastating news. They had learned from their doctor that their two-year-old daughter, Annabelle, had a rare chromosome disorder, Dup15q, and her mind would probably not develop beyond that of a five-year-old.

And so, feeling lost and scared, my brother turned to Google to try to learn more about this diagnosis, and most of the guidance he found online wasn’t that helpful, but he clicked an old PDF file containing six stories from parents whose children experienced similar disabilities. And the stories contained joy and humor, and they offered reason for hope. And if these parents could cope with these disabilities and even find some joy in the process, maybe Mike and his wife figured they could, too.

And after conquering another parenting challenge with Annabelle, just a couple of months later, Mike realized that solutions could be simple because he had, again, posted online to try to get answers, and that’s where he found them. There was a woman who posted how to teach a child a pincer grasp, how to pick up food, which Annabelle was struggling with. And what Mike realized after trying what she suggested, which was cutting two holes, a sock for her forefinger, a sock for her thumb, and putting Annabelle’s favorite food in the tray, that it didn’t take very long, less than a month, for Annabelle to master that.

And so, through those instances, Mike realized that, oftentimes, lived experience rather than professional expertise can go a long way. And wasn’t it wonderful that communities, in this case of parents suffering with similar disabilities or diagnoses, were helping each other? And so, in 2014, Mike and Sarah bootstrapped a new venture called The Mighty, which is a digital media company connecting people facing disease, disabilities, disorders.

And since then, The Mighty has grown from just a tiny tribe of people to several million people that connect online to help each other, lift each other up. And one of the things that I learned from Mike was that, while groups under The Mighty work created to address specific needs, beyond that they were really solving for the problem of isolation and loneliness.

And I think too many people, I realized, even in the workplace, feel like Mike did, alone or disconnected and suffering, and it was just really inspiring to me to see how they were able to build community from the ground up, and how it’s helped so many people. And since I study stuff in the workplace and I got a frontline seat to see how that evolved, I just was seeing data saying too many people don’t feel any sense of community, about 65%, at work. And this was all pre-pandemic, of course.

And so, I just felt like we could and should do better. And what could we learn from The Mighty and other places like it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so a couple quick clarifiers, 65% don’t feel any sense of community anywhere or at work?

Christine Porath
At work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you. And this pincer grasp, not that it’s a parenting podcast but I got to know. So, I get a sock and I cut two holes in it, and then that’s the trick, it’s like we got two fingers to work with?

Christine Porath
That’s the trick. And you put a sock on the other hand so there’s no cheating involved, and then you have at it. You put favorite food in a tray and, apparently, that’s the way to get at this. So, it was pretty interesting given that so many physicians and experts and others were trying to help them and nothing was working. And so, it was one of those things where maybe some parents that were facing similar situations knew best.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that a lot, and I guess I’m discovering that nowadays that when it comes to doing research, what turns up when you ask a friend versus Reddit, versus a Facebook group, versus Google, versus ChatGPT, are quite different. And sometimes with the search engines, I don’t know how to articulate it, but it seems like the top results are often the ones that have put a lot of effort into becoming the top results in terms of their budgets and their search engine optimizers and all that stuff. And the sock pincer insight is not all that monetizable, and so there’s a good chance it’ll not find its way onto the front page of search engine results.

Christine Porath
Yeah. And so, I think one of the things that they learned was just how helpful community can be around similar issues or struggles or that kind of thing. And so, I think we could learn the same from workplace situations as well. What if we had other people to lean on and glean information from who cared about us or cared about our situation?

Pete Mockaitis
And so then in workplaces, how does that often materialize? Is it within one workplace, like the employer, like Microsoft or Google? Or is it sort of a community, like an association across many employers? How do you see those things working?

Christine Porath
Well, I think it could be either but, really, I was looking to try within organizations, try to build communities. So, at a Microsoft, or at a Motley Fool, or at a small company that people might be able to really feel a sense of belonging and feel like they matter, that they cared, that others around them cared about them, and how that could make a real difference on things like engagement. So, there was incentives for leaders to pay attention to were they building communities where people feel connected also?

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s talk about some of these metrics. Any particularly eye-popping statistics or findings from research? Like, what is the difference that having a great community versus not so much of a community really makes at work?

Christine Porath
Well, we found, when people feel connected with their colleagues, they’re 74% more engaged and 81% more likely to stay with the organization. They’re also far more likely to thrive at work, which we know is connected to performance and things like that. And this was data from over 20,000 people that Tony Schwartz and I collected. So, it ranged across different organizations, across different industries, it was global, so fairly generalizable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Tony Schwartz from The Power of Full Engagement?

Christine Porath
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful.

Christine Porath
Yeah, and The Energy Project where he founded that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we’ve had him on and he’s swell. Okay. So, then could you paint a picture for us, inside a work context, do we have a nice illustration of what a great community story looks, sounds, and feels like in practice?

Christine Porath
Well, I think one that is from a smaller organization that I’m pretty familiar with now is Motley Fool, and they’re a best place to work. And one of the things that they do, they have lots of fitness challenges, which are fun, and that kind of thing, but they organize a lot of events where they show up for each other. One of the things that they did, I know, through the pandemic was they realized that people liked to actually teach one another things that they care about, like hobbies.

And so, even on Zoom, they might sign up for something that they felt like they could teach people about. And it ranged anywhere from how to knit, to butchery-type stuff, to all different sorts of things. And what they found is that it really created a sense of community, both the person teaching as well as the person learning. And so, it was a way to increase engagement driven solely by people and what they wanted to connect with others about. So, I like that because it was, really, doesn’t require a lot of resources, and both the learner and teacher benefit. So, that was one that popped.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. Can you share another example?

Christine Porath
Sure. The book is full of examples. I think one that comes to mind is Marriott has a TakeCare program, and they’re global. After their merger, they have over 700,000 employees, and yet on the ground, locally, they have what are called TakeCare ambassadors. And those folks in a particular location, let’s say Thailand, on the beach there, they would organize activities that they felt like would contribute to the wellbeing of their employees but also the wellbeing of the community.

So, they might do something around protection of sea turtles, or cleaning up the beach, or painting schools that needed that kind of care. But the idea was that they were often doing something for the local community or that would benefit people. They would have painting bike helmets for kids, and so host these events for local citizens and things like that.

So, I think I’ve seen a lot of doing good for the outside community, which generates a sense of thriving and pride and feeling connected to their coworkers and their organization in a meaningful way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I’m curious, in practice, when leaders, either very senior or mid level in terms of managing a team, hear this stuff, and think, “Ooh, that’s cool. We should do that,” what are some of the key differentiators that make community-building efforts meaningful and enriching and impactful in the ways we’re going for versus some that kind of miss the mark or feel fake or off?

Christine Porath
Well, I think one that’s gone over well is at Traeger, eating together or cooking together, and they really looked to, with a new headquarters, they cook together six days a week. And I think it’s different from, necessarily, having food on site to try to keep people there for a lot of hours and things like that. But it’s, literally, they’ll make breakfast, I believe, it’s on Monday, and then lunches all the other days together.

And so, from all data and anecdotes shared, that’s a really nice value that they benefit from and enjoy each other’s company. And there’s research behind the fact that cooking together and eating together is a way to form collaboration, get to know each other better, and ends up helping things like performance and so forth. And some of that research was done with firefighters but I think I’ve really seen it take root in different organizations in meaningful ways.

One differentiator at Traeger might also be the fact that the leaders, including the CEO, Jeremy Andrus, participates and is involved in the Monday meetings that they have, which incorporate a lot of peer awards for living the values and things like that. So, I think that that can make a difference, like leaders not only encouraging certain aspects of, let’s say, sustainability or things like that, sustainable work practices, but role-model it as well.

And so, I think that with Tony Schwartz, that was another finding that we had among that large dataset was it’s really important when leaders not only encourage these practices but live them as well, setting the tone for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then do you have some examples of attempts at community gone wrong where this wasn’t landing with folks, like, “Yeah, this is kind of lame, or awkward, or uncomfortable, or unnatural, and we don’t like this”?

Christine Porath
I think, generally speaking, it’s when they’re forced and mandatory.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “We’re all having fun now.”

Christine Porath
Yeah, exactly. That you have to participate, that these are after-hour events that you feel like if you’re not there, it’s punishable kind of thing, but those are the ones that come to mind. It’s almost like the forced workplace, you have to do work from the office versus having some flexibility. So, similarly, I think around community events, like, ideally, people have some choice around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I remember one time at work, we went golfing, and so I made it very clear that I, straight up, don’t know how to play golf, and that when I’ve attempted, it went very poorly in terms of, like, divots everywhere, so, like, “Just so we’re clear.” And so then, they’re like, “Oh, you’ll be fine.” I was like, “Well, okay, if you say so. I’ve told you sort of what’s going to happen.”

And then I did it and then they were very frustrated with me, and then they’re like, “We’ve got to let them play through. You’re slowing us down.” I was like, “Well, I kind of told you that was how this was going to go.” And so, I found that very uncomfortable and unpleasant in terms of that experience, as opposed to, I don’t know, either choosing a different activity that everyone likes, or just say, “Okay. Well, hey, check this out. Well, you can hang out on the golf cart and goof around and have some drinks, I don’t know, whatever, and enjoy things that way even if the actual swinging of the club isn’t in the cards for the day.”

So, yeah, that’s a good point. So, there’s a choice, it’s not mandatory. And it seems like with the cooking example, and it’s come up before. It’s like folks are doing stuff collaboratively, and so I think there’s probably some magic there. I’m thinking now about Bob Cialdini and his stuff about singing and/or dancing in unison does cool stuff. That might be harder, I don’t know, depending on the vibe of your workplace. Folks might be really into that or not at all.

And so, I guess that’s maybe one of the themes, is that this will be very individualistic for individuals and teams based on what vibes for them.

Christine Porath
Yeah, I think I really like your example of having some choice around different activities, for example. I’ve seen that go over really well. Or, even if you plan an event, like I attended one at a major league baseball park that they rented out the area where you can eat together and so forth, then you could tour the field. This was an evening activity. The batting cages were open so it was really fun for those of us that wanted to take a crack at swinging against some pitchers, but you didn’t have to.

You could hang out and eat or drink with others. You could walk around and tour the facilities. So, it could be a number of different things that you could do even though there was a large room together where people could hang out. So, it provided a little bit of choose your own path depending on your interests and your abilities and so forth that seem to go over really well as far as most people being happy with the choices and that kind of things.

So, I think that that choice element that you highlighted is really key, if possible. And I know for offsites, oftentimes what they’ll do is just people can choose out of three, four, five activities. And I think that’s a really nice way to promote inclusivity as well, the idea that, depending on your capabilities, cultural differences, interests, those kinds of things, you’re providing a number of different paths for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, beyond the activities or the outings, are there any other key ingredients in the mix for having great communities at work?

Christine Porath
I think anytime that you can promote healthier living and provide some sense of, whether it’s recovery or rejuvenation or things like that, those are wins as well. I think of Kelly McGonigal’s The Joy of Movement and the idea of that that’s a nice thing for people that are interested in that, but they’re amplifiers, like doing it together, doing it nature, doing it to music, things like that.

And so, one of the examples that I shared was a woman who actually started a program at Dell at the time around just because people were gaining a lot of weight, they weren’t feeling very good, she started covering them for working out an hour each day. And it ended up becoming, Thrive was the program, but people couldn’t wait to be a part of it.

And I think that part of it was it also broke down barriers, she said, of you might have a leader running next to someone that was in the call center, and it tended to break down silos in the organization, and build, cultivate relationships among people that might not have, otherwise, known each other or gotten to meet one another, and so that was a real positive as well as people became far healthier in terms of practices and things like that.

So, that was a nice example that I liked a lot. It doesn’t work for everyone but I think it, overall, had a lot of positive effects for various individuals, and team performance shot up and things like that. So, even though that they were working less or had the capability to work less, given time off to take a break, to work out, things like that, then, overall, it was a real win for the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
And you also mentioned radical candor. We had Kim Scott on the show, and she was swell. But what role does that play in building community? And could you give us some examples?

Christine Porath
Yeah, I love Kim Scott’s work on radical candor, and some of the examples that I share in the book actually tie to Kelly Leonard, who’s at Second City. And he and Kim partnered to teach people radical candor through improvisation and the idea that we’re all a work in progress. But I think radical candor, when people know that you care personally, there’s more liberty to challenge directly.

And I think that that’s a positive as far as we want people sharing feedback, we want people, basically, coaching each other up, like helping people improve. And a great way to do that is through radical candor, given how negative feedback is often awkward for a lot of us. And so, if you can develop a spirit of radical candor, it really helps quite a bit.

And one of the examples that I liked in the book came from Christa Quarles, who, at the time, was CEO of OpenTable. And one of the things that she shared was she learned she had to give it to get it. In other words, she had to be vulnerable and share when she has messed up or needed feedback, and that kind of broke down some of the barriers, such that people were able to see, “Okay, she can handle that kind of criticism or direct feedback. And what happens if we use it?”

But I think she also had to encourage it along the way, suggesting that, “Listen, failure is okay. Like, through failure, we will learn. So, some of that criticism is actually welcome because it’s going to get us to a better place more quickly.” And so, I thought she handled things really well. And if folks were not comfortable speaking up, one of the things that she did was pulled them aside.

Like, this very talented woman who just was reluctant to speak up in a group, and she coached her effectively, and she just let her know, “Listen, if I need to, I’ll tee you up for this, but we need you. We need your voice. We need you involved,” and it really went a long way to developing her but, more importantly at the time, also what the team and the organization needed.

And so, I thought it was an excellent example of leaders as a coach, and getting involved to kind of get the ball rolling for people to be radically candid in ways that maybe didn’t come naturally, but they needed to break out of what Christa Quarles called ruinous empathy, or this idea of not speaking up because you don’t want to hurt someone, which is the most common mistake. And I think Kim says that about 85% of the mistakes are in that arena.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And speaking of mistakes, we talked about not having the forced fun. Is there any other top do’s and don’ts you’d highlight if folks are thinking, “Yeah, I would like to kick up some community at work”? What do you recommend as being some of the very first things they do do and they don’t do?

Christine Porath
Well, I think the idea of uniting people and providing a safe space for people to communicate is huge, and leaders can set the tone for that by being vulnerable, admitting mistakes, admitting failures, things like that. But one of the examples that I used at the beginning of the book is just an example of Phil Jackson, who, you may know, coaching the Chicago Bulls for all those years and winning so many championships.

But Steve Kerr talked about one of the things that brought them to be such a tight knit team was the idea that every day they met in Phil’s kind of film room, so to speak, but they wouldn’t talk about basketball or the X’s and O’s. It was all about connecting. And so, I think that idea of, “Are you providing a safe space where people are communicating and getting to know each other in different ways?”

That could be around activities. It could be around cooking like we talked about. There are so many different ideas behind that, but I think bringing people together and trying to create a place where people can be vulnerable is really huge. So, I liked that example for the idea that just get people talking, sharing information, and that kind of thing.

Another example that I liked was Chuck Robbins at Cisco, and the idea of having a conscious culture. And one of the things that they did, again, well before the pandemic, was they had a program called Love and Load. And the idea was that people would be providing how they were doing, so just a quick full survey, and the leader would get that data and could really quickly address it.

So, if someone was kind of struggling or not having a good week, a leader could check in really quickly around that. And so, I think it’s helping to create touchpoints between leaders and their direct reports, or even peers for that matter, but the idea of being, I think, people need those kinds of little lifts. And so, the more that the leader can create these touchpoints through the day, which Doug Conant talks about quite a bit and has a book on touchpoints, and really turned an organization, Campbell Soup, around with touchpoints. That would be a really good mode to kind of jumpstart things.

It doesn’t take a lot of time. These were moments that Doug talked about in the hallways, in meetings, in the cafeteria, and it was all about connecting with people, and you listen attentively. He would often try to leverage his expertise and then close with, “How can I help?” And those kinds of moments really made a difference.

Another one that Doug talked about, which I love, was he ended up sending 30,000 thank you notes while CEO of Campbell’s. And I think that’s something that, especially nowadays where people may be feeling a little beat down, or a little negative, or just struggling coming off of the pandemic, well, even before that, this was important, but the point is that these thank you notes made a huge difference in making people feel valued.

And so, those small things can make a huge difference in employees’ lives, and get them engaged, get them, retain them in organizations. And it was kind of fun. I had a friend that a few months ago was traveling on a plane and sat behind a gentleman who was raving about where he worked, at Campbell’s, and the fact that 15 years ago, a CEO had written this lowly salesperson a thank you note.

And so, again, 15 years later, someone is still talking about this, still proud of the company, the connections, the sense of community that he felt because of this action. So, I think that small actions can make a huge difference, and you don’t have to be a leader for that to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, Christine, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Christine Porath
I think the idea of ubuntu, and, “I am who I am because of who we all are.” I like that idea a lot. And as you may be able to tell, I like sports examples a lot. So, I shared an example of Doc Rivers turning around the Boston Celtics at the time with this rallying cry. But I also love the example, and it was actually the woman, Carla Peñarosa Blatt, who I shared the Dell story about, who found that by taking time out and traveling with her family, not wired into technology and things like that, she and her family really felt a much greater sense of connectedness.

And I think, for her, it was kind of putting away the technology even for short periods of time and really trying to connect with people. And, again, it could be short, over coffee, over a meal. It could be in the backyard, over campfire, what have you. But the point being that the importance of maybe disconnecting from all of our tasks, the technology, so that we can connect better and feel a sense of community.

So, again, I think that that’s something that doesn’t necessarily require huge resources but is an action that could make a big difference in our lives as far as the quality of connection and community that we feel.

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

Christine Porath
I have one quote at the beginning of the book that I like a lot that’s actually from Brene Brown, and it’s just the idea of unlocking our potential. So, I believe it is, “You can’t unlock potential if you cannot unlock people.” So, she’s written about this, which I love.

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

Christine Porath
I think you hit all on the radical candor part that I talk a lot about with respect to respect. The other bit is just how rudeness or incivility is contagious. And so, I often cite that but the good news is civility is contagious as well. And so, again, kind of pointing to small actions and how, for better or worse, they have a lot of different ripple effects and can change how our communities feel. So, I hope that’s empowering for people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Christine Porath
Man’s Search for Meaning.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Christine Porath
I like Tony Schwartz’s Energy Audit, or, more generally, just checking in to see how you feel throughout the day, and making adjustments accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Christine Porath
For me, it’s probably working out, ideally, in the morning to get a jumpstart and feeling good.

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?

Christine Porath
I use an example of the 10-5 way which was if people were within 10 feet, they smiled and made eye contact. If they were within five feet, they said hello. And what OSHA healthcare system found is that people felt a stronger sense of civility but also patient satisfaction scores rose as did patient referrals. And so, I just like the idea that it kinda shows how contagion happens even outside of the organization in ways that really help people within and outside organizations to kind of lift them up.

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

Christine Porath
Probably LinkedIn, so just Christine Porath. And I’m on Twitter @PorathC.

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

Christine Porath
I think the idea of think about, “Who do you want to be in different moments?” and just what can we do to lift others up throughout our day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Christine, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and good community.

Christine Porath
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be on your show.