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How to be Awesome at Your Job Podcasts

Oct 08

1187: Knowing When to Speak Up versus Shut Up with Vanessa Bohns

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Vanessa Bohns shares a science-backed guide to deciding when speaking up is helpful and when silence is the better choice.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to be honest without being harsh
  2. The hidden trade-off between vulnerability and competence
  3. When it DOES hurt to ask

About Vanessa

Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in psychology from Columbia University and an AB from Brown University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and other outlets, and her research has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and on NPR’s Hidden Brain. She lives in upstate New York.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Vanessa, welcome back!

Vanessa Bohns
Thanks so much for having me again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn, once and for all, whether or not I should say something and discuss your book. But I got to hear about your time working at a sleep lab first.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, you know, my introduction to research and the thing that made me fall in love with it was working at a sleep lab at Brown University when I was an undergrad. And it was just a crazy experience where we ran this sleep camp for kids between the ages of eight and 12. We were trying to capture them right around puberty.

And they had to live in the basement lab for a week in the dark. And we gave them little naps throughout the day to see how sleepy they got, and they had to take these little sleep tests and they had to eat the same little bologna sandwiches at the same times all the time because they couldn’t know what time of day it was outside.

We couldn’t have watches. It was this crazy experiment. It was actually very useful for the world. It showed us that kids through puberty have to get more sleep. They have to go to bed later, wake up later. So there was a purpose behind the madness, but it was a wild experience and it just showed me how elaborate a psychology study can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Vanessa, I love that so much for several reasons. One, I love sleep and I have been into a sleep lab myself at Vanderbilt, and that was quite an experience, all the wires and the monitoring things going on there.

Vanessa Bohns
What did they test you for?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it was sleep apnea, very ordinary. And what’s so crazy is, like, they told me, “Oh, yeah, it looks like you have mild sleep apnea.” And I was like, “No way.” Like, I didn’t believe it. I was like, “Can you show me some footage?”

And then I just, like, got a phone recorder the next night, it was like, “Oh, yeah, there I am doing the thing.” I was like, “I guess I could have just done that instead of gone to an elaborate laboratory situation to learn this.”

Vanessa Bohns
Actually, I worked in one of those labs after at the NYU lab, and I would watch people sleep all night and then put the apnea mask on them to see if it actually made their sleep better. It was fun. Anyway, I loved the sleep stuff, but you know why I can’t do it? It’s because you have to stay up all night, and I love sleep too much, I cannot do sleep research.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And that’s a great reason. You love it too much to do it, the sleep versus the study of it. And one thing that I thought was so striking, though, was I asked someone, the lab technician, as she was getting me all hooked up to the things, I was like, “Boy, I bet you’ve met a lot of people and heard a lot of tips and tricks for, you know, how people are are trying to sleep better. So what’s the thing?”

I guess I can’t stop being an interviewer about being awesome at your job, being awesome at your sleeping. And she’s like, “Oh, I heard all kinds of things but the real thing that does the trick no one wants to hear, which is put your phone in another room.” I was like, “Oh, okay. There you have it.”

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, it’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool beans. Well, so, Should I Say Something? I’m glad she said something. She’s sort of shared her perspective. Your latest book, The Science of What to Share and What to Keep to Yourself. Can you tell us what’s the big idea here?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so, partly, this is a follow-up of my first book, which is all about the influence we have on other people. And I kind of left that book saying, you know, we have more influence than we think on other people, and that means sometimes we should use it and sometimes we shouldn’t, because that influence could be good or bad.

And so this book is kind of answering the question, “Okay, you know, you told us to use it sometimes, but when are those times?” And so the big idea here is that the choice of whether to say something is as important, if not more important, than how we actually say the thing.

Usually, the dilemma we’re wrestling with, and I saw this again and again because I’m obsessed with advice columns, and I would read like The Ethicist in The New York Times and social cues, and it was like every question, it’s not like, “Oh, how do I phrase this thing?” because that’s not a true dilemma. It’s more of a practical instrumental thing.

But, like, the dilemma is, “Do I tell this person that, you know, I got the job that she wanted.” “Do I tell this person that they’re doing something annoying?” “Do I tell this person that, you know, I hate their Botox?” And so these kinds of questions were the real dilemmas. And so I wanted to look at what the science said in trying to answer them.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that is so fantastic. And I’m glad you wrote this book because I was thinking about writing a book kind of like it, but I thought this was going to be a lot of work and, I don’t know. I’ve got other things I want to do. So you did it for me and that’s fantastic.

And because I’m right with you, that is so critical, and not just because it’s a juicy question for The New York Times’ Ethicist, but it has real implications. And on the one hand, you know, we’ve heard, you know, for Amy Edmondson was on the podcast, and we talked about psychological safety, and that’s just so magical, in part because folks are really able to, they feel safe, saying what they really think.

Like, “Hey, this thing we’re doing kind of doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe we should do something else,” versus just, like, holding that to themselves and then the team never being enriched from that.

So one might infer from that, like, “Oh, it sounds like that’s the move, you know? To be awesome at your job, to have awesome teams, we really got to be doing the sharing.” But, Vanessa, you suggest it’s not quite so simple.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, and I love this connection to the work on psychological safety because it’s true. You would think, in a psychologically safe environment, that means I can say anything and people are, you know, it’s not going to change how people think of me, and it’s not going to change their feelings.

But we know that’s not true because, even in a psychologically safe environment, people are people, right? And so one example, so I organized the book in chapters about, like, “Should I be honest? Should I share my success? Should I share my failure? Should I apologize?”

And so one of the chapters, the one about sharing failures and vulnerabilities, right, you might think that, “Oh, it’s psychologically safe. I can just kind of share the stuff that’s going on in my life. Like, I’m having a really hard time in this aspect of my personal life, and then everybody is just going to be open and supportive.”

And what the research shows is that people are supportive. And so if you’re looking for, you know, social support and building rapport and trust, you will get that if you share this difficulty that you’re having in your personal life.

But, again, because people are people and we build our impressions about other people, you know, aside from any psychological safety in a group, we also can judge that person as being less competent. And so when you share something, there are often these trade-offs.

In that one, it’s like you share a vulnerability at work and there’s a trade-off. It doesn’t mean that people are going to like you less, which we often really focus on, but in a workplace environment where you really want to display competence and be seen as someone who can get things done, it can actually hurt you a little bit in terms of the perceptions of your competence.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, Vanessa, I’m with you. I mean, the stakes are big. Well, they can be, depending on the context of the conversation. So can you walk us through how should we think about it when we’re in that pickle, “Hmm, should I say this?” Do we have some key principles to work through? Or how do we wrestle with it?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so each sort of dilemma has its own set of specific principles, but there are also some just overarching principles that we see kind of in most of these domains. And so one is that we tend to be overly focused on the short-term discomfort of saying something and less on the long-term ramifications of it or consequences of it.

And so one principle that shows up again and again is to take a long-term view, right, “If you say this right now, what are people going to think when they remember what you said, you know, six months from now?”

And sometimes that means you should definitely say it. So when we take a long-term view about, for example, being honest with someone about their work performance. Right now, in the moment, I’m really focused on sort of the short-term discomfort of being honest and how it’s probably going to hurt this person’s feelings if I’m giving them honest, difficult feedback.

But in the long term, I really want them to have that feedback. It’s going to help them improve. They’re going to look back and be happy that they received it and happy that I gave it.

And so when you take a long-term view, you realize that this momentary discomfort isn’t really worth the long-term consequences, so I’m not going to stay silent. I’m going to actually say something.

There are other situations where you might not want to say something, right? And so if we take the same sort of feedback question, if someone has done something that they’re not going to have a chance to do in the future, and it’s already done and they can’t go back and fix it, there is no point in being honest and telling them they did something wrong.

So there’s this distinction researchers make between brutal honesty, just honesty for honesty’s sake, like, “Oh, that really stunk,” and benevolent honesty, so honesty with this kind of long-term plan.

And so one sort of principle that applies specifically in the feedback domain, but also you can apply it to other domains, is ask yourself, “If I say something, if I say this thing, if I give them this feedback, how are they going to use it?”

And if you can’t come up with a reason why they might use that feedback, then you really don’t need to say it. There’s no point in saying it. If you, instead say, “Oh, well, they can use it to improve in the future,” then it’s worth saying.

And so this is something I talk about. You know, I teach this big intro class and I give hundreds of students their first exam, usually their first college exam ever. And I have to make this decision each year about what kind of exam to give them. And there’s a lot of different ways you can go, right?

And people have taken each of these approaches. So you can imagine a professor who decides like, “I’m going to give a really easy exam to boost their confidence. They’re new students, they’re anxious, we’re always hearing about like the mental health crisis of students, so let’s just give them a really easy exam and it’ll boost their confidence.”

Or, you could take the approach, which some of my colleagues take as well as, “Let’s give them a super difficult exam to wake them up and weed out anyone who’s not going to sort of make it, right?”

And so these are, like, two approaches that are completely approaches I’ve seen my colleagues take. What I try to do is neither of these. One is like brutal honesty, like, “Oh, you can’t make it using your current sort of set of skills.”

The other one is just kind of avoidance of the issue and false hope. So it’s like, “Okay, you know, eventually they feel good now, eventually they’re going to encounter something that’s a lot harder.”

So I try to use this benevolent honesty strategy where I give them a challenging exam, I give them real feedback, and then we focus everything on how you’re going to improve on the next exam.

And so, again, it’s all this forward thinking, like, “I assume you’re going to get better. We’re going to have a difficult conversation about what went wrong here. I’m not going to give you false hope by giving you an easy exam. I’m not going to be brutal and say, ‘I guess you can’t, you know, make it in this.’ But we’re going to have a difficult exam, we’re going to have the conversation, and we’re going to talk about how to do better next time.”

And so, in general, that sort of approach of, like, let’s look to this forward long-term oriented way of giving feedback is really useful, both for deciding whether to give feedback and how to give the feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really a nice distinction there, the benevolent honesty versus brutal honesty. If you cannot answer that question, “How will they use this or behave differently as a result of it?” then don’t do it. So if it’s like one and done, never again, okay, maybe you might be like just let them go.

Although, you might say, “Hey, we’re not going to handle this exact situation again, but there will probably be a time in which a client has a unique request. And when they do, it’d be great to, I don’t know, read their email twice, or double-check the thing, or anticipate what they might really need, or ask a clarifying question, like whatever it is.”

So, I suppose, if you zoom out one layer of, “Are they going to do this again?” I guess the ‘this’ can be super specific or broadly more and more vague or generalizable.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, and what you’re doing is really looking for this future-oriented feedback, right? So it’s not like, “Oh, you know, you shouldn’t have done that, you shouldn’t have sent Karen that email.”

It’s like, “In the future, when we have clients like this, we want to make sure that we run an email by somebody else. We send this kind of email. We read the email twice, whatever it might be. So it’s less about like what you did in this specific situation, and more like how we’re going to avoid that problem happening in the future.”

And the nice thing about that is it’s easier to give that feedback. It’s really hard, like when you think about, like, telling someone what they did wrong, you brace for it in your stomach. It’s just like, “Ugh, this is going to be painful for me. They’re going to get defensive. It’s just me telling, like saying something that’s going to make them feel bad.”

And part of why giving feedback is so hard, like honest feedback, is that we are genuinely kind and we want to be kind people. And we feel like that kind of feedback is not kind. But the kind of feedback that is kind is what helps people improve.

And so saying instead, “Okay, in the future, let’s do it this way.” It says, “I trust you to improve. I know that you can improve and you care about this, and we’re kind of on the same team to improve in the future.” And it makes it so much easier to give that feedback.

It’s like a helpful kind of, you feel like you’re being kind of pro-social and benevolent as opposed to just being kind of mean, which is part of the holdup people have. But also, people are way less defensive. They’re not going to argue with you, “Well, I meant to do it this way.” It’s like, “Okay, going forward, we can do it that way.”

Pete Mockaitis
And, Vanessa, I just want to check an assumption, I think, we’re both making here, this notion of we, “We want to be kind and not mean.” I think that seems like a general human principle. But I also get the impression there’s a subset of folks who are unconcerned entirely with that.

And so it’s like, “This is how it’s supposed to be done, so I’m just going to say it and that’s that.” It’s like they don’t give it a second thought. Do you have a sense from the research, like, what’s the term we use for these people with this, on this continuum of this trait? Like, what do we call the trait? And how many people have it versus don’t?

Vanessa Bohns
I mean, I would say, you know, there are people who are more communal-oriented or agreeable, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreeable.

Vanessa Bohns
But I wouldn’t say that the feedback example that you gave, “This is just how it’s supposed to be done,” is necessarily not benevolently honest, right? It’s still like, “This is how it should be done.” There’s this kind of broader future-oriented, you know, “I’m teaching you. So maybe I’m not doing it in a super touchy-feely way.”

And I think that’s where people get a little bit caught up. Like, it doesn’t have to be touchy-feely. There has to be a plan for the future, not just, “You did that terribly,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Vanessa Bohns
So there are people, I’m sure, who would say like, “Oh, you did that terribly. You’re terrible at your job.” That’s, I think, a very small subset of people. And it’s more for the people who don’t feel comfortable saying that, but don’t really know how to do this other, like, benevolent, honesty, future-oriented kind of feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So it can be benevolently honest and genuinely helpful, although, in a super blunt, maybe a candid package, that’s not fun to get. But I guess what I’m hearing from you is that, is it fair to say, the vast majority of humans are concerned about such things, being kind and not mean?

Vanessa Bohns
Yes. And even that awkwardness we feel when we give, you know, difficult feedback, that is telling you that you care about hurting someone else’s feelings. There’s nothing else in that interaction that’s like really the hard part.

The hard part is when you say something that other person is going to be uncomfortable, that’s not going to feel good, that other person’s going to be a little bit hurt, you don’t know how they’re going to react. There’s this idea, it’s really bracing yourself for hurting this other person that makes that so uncomfortable for us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So it’s not just us feelers who feel that substantial amount of discomfort here. This is, you believe, quite prevalent across the vast majority of humanity.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, people hate giving negative feedback. I mean, there’s tons of research just on these, you know, whether it’s doctors even who give regular feedback, who have to tell people about, you know, dire diagnoses, professors. Like, I’m sitting here talking about this. I hate giving negative feedback to students. It pains me.

But this is why, the way that I’ve sort of found to do it is this future-oriented way where I’m like, “Okay, together we’re working to help you improve, right? I’m not just here criticizing you, essentially.” So I do think it’s a pretty universal difficulty that people have giving negative feedback, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re talking about the feedback domain. What’s another key domain we should think through?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so another one, if we go back to sort of the sharing vulnerability at work, right? As I pointed out in this case, there’s kind of another theme. So you asked about like kind of these general themes in the book. So one is this long-term, short-term thinking, right, and being future-oriented.

Another one is trade-offs. And the fact that in different situations, you should be super aware of what your goal is in that situation to understand how to manage a trade-off. And so in the vulnerability domain, like expressing to a colleague about some personal stuff that’s been going on with you at home, the trade-off, as we talked about, is between competence and warmth, we would say, in experimental psychology.

So it would be like, “People are going to like me and feel close to me if I open up and trust them.” And so a lot of our fears are about like, “Oh, if I tell people, you know, the things I don’t like about myself or things that I’m finding difficult, they won’t like me.” And it turns out that is really not true.

People feel, like, when you trust them with what’s going on with you, they really lean in towards you. But as I mentioned, there is this trade-off with competence. You can seem less competent, less able to handle certain things.

And so in that case, you want to, first of all, ask what your goal is, “Which of these things do I prioritize? Being seen as competent in this situation or being liked?” And if you’re, like, in this workplace environment, “I really want to make sure I’m still seen as competent.” But if you still see your kind of work friends as your friends, and you, therefore, want to share these things with them, there are ways to do that that just aren’t in the workplace.

And so one sort of recommendation I give in the book is that, when you’re trying to balance these things, you don’t want to, if you’re trying to prioritize competence, don’t tell people in the hallway or at the beginning of meetings all the stuff that’s been going on with you at home.

Unless you are have a specific instrumental ask that, “I need some support,” or, “I need some time off,” that’s fine. But if you’re just kind of sharing sort of difficulties that you’re having, keep it to happy hour after work. Keep it to a coffee meeting outside of work.

And that can give you a chance to actually connect with people, talk to them, make them feel closer to you, which we see is a benefit of sharing vulnerabilities. But, at the same time, it’s not, like, “In the workplace, I’m talking about these things and now people are questioning my professionalism.”

“They’re questioning my competence. They know what’s going on outside of work, but then, in the workplace, I’m kind of putting in my workplace face and getting the job done. And so people continue to sort of see me that way in that domain.”

Pete Mockaitis
And then, I guess, when it comes to vulnerability and versus that competence situation, I imagine there’s a number of things we could disclose that feel personal but would not result in a competence hit. It was like, “Oh, you know, I’m really worried about, I don’t know, my son’s drug problem.” I’m just making this up. My kids are drug free.

But, like, that’s a vulnerable thing to share. It’s heavy. It’s emotional. It’s not something that you broadcast, generally. And yet, I would imagine that the recipients at work would not conclude you’re less competent as a result of this disclosure. Or, how would you think about that?

Vanessa Bohns
So they didn’t ask that exact kind of thing, but, I guess, when you look at the kinds of things that researchers have tested people disclosing, so, for example, saying like, “Oh, I had a big fight with my girlfriend today,” right, that’s kind of similar. It doesn’t have to do with the workplace. It’s something that’s kind of on your mind and is this vulnerable thing you’re wrestling with.

People, again, they felt closer to people who are willing to share that. But if they were the ones sharing it, they also got this hit in incompetence. They don’t have a mechanism in these studies, so it could be a number of things.

It could be that you think this person is distracted, or, you know, they’re not like focused on work, or they don’t know professional norms about what to talk about. These are all conjecture. I have no idea based on the research. They didn’t actually show any of that.

But there is sort of this sense of like, “Okay, you know, my sort of friendliness-trust button is being pushed and not my like, ‘Oh, this is a competent worker,’” when you’re disclosing these kinds of personal things.

One interesting thing is that, if you find out that somebody is going through some of these personal things, but they don’t specifically disclose it, so it’s like, “Oh, wow, this person is being professional and pressing on and, you know, doing their work despite all this other stuff they have going on.”

And that’s where you can find out, like, again, in a coffee shop outside of work or through word of mouth, suddenly, that makes us think, “Oh, wow, that’s a really competent person,” right?

And so, again, the idea is not to deny yourself asking for help for things that you actually need help for. When there’s an instrumental need, when it’s like, “I need support,” you should ask for that.

When you need advice, you can, ideally, you can go to, like, a mentor who is there to hear things that you need advice on. And that could be like work-life challenges and things like that.

But it’s one of these things that’s kind of tricky if you’re walking around your workplace regularly kind of talking about personal difficulties going on at home. It’s just worth knowing that there could be some risk that that could make you seem kind of less competent.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s true and it’s good to know and to make an informed decision with regard to giving these trade-offs. And, sometimes, you might gather, “You know what? This team seems to think I’ve got competence in spades, but they think I’m kind of cold. So this is a trade well worth making in this context with this environment.”

Well, I’d also love to hear, what were some of the most mind-blowing experiments in terms of, “Wow, humans are like this? Hmm. I’m surprised.”

Vanessa Bohns
I think one kind of fun one, just because I love animals, I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but, is this study on zookeepers. And this was with respect to whether you should express your passion for your work.

And this study looked at zookeepers who see their job, really, as not just a job but a calling, which, you know, when you think about it, so many of us want to feel about our job. We want to love our job. We want to have passion for our job. And zookeepers feel this way.

And so they interviewed, these researchers interviewed a number of zookeepers, and they expressed their love for their job. But one thing that was really interesting is that they explicitly said that they would not tell their managers the kinds of things they were telling these researchers.

So expressing that they love their job, they’re passionate, because they felt like, if their managers knew how passionate they were about their job, they might exploit them, ask them to work extra hours, ask them for things that they felt like were unreasonable.

And one thing that’s really interesting about this is, when experimentalists have kind of taken this idea and tested it, we tend to think, if you just give people jobs that people tend to be passionate about, or jobs that tend to not have a lot of passion, or not be associated with passion.

Like, you take a zookeeper versus like an accountant, or, you know, someone in a creative industry versus like a financial industry, and you ask them like, “Would it be okay to ask this person to do things outside of their role, ask them to stay late, ask them to do things without pay, basically do these kind of, you know, borderline exploitative behaviors?”

People think it’s okay if you’re passionate about your job to ask people to stay late. But they’re like, “Oh, the accountant, the financial person, that’s not fair to ask them to stay late.”

They even have things like, you know, there was a strike, “Is it fair to ask these people to clean the bathroom?” And they’re like, “Okay, yeah, this person in a creative industry who’s passionate about their job, they can clean the bathroom. But this financial person, no, that wouldn’t be right to ask them to clean the bathroom.”

And so, once again, there’s this kind of trade-off in being passionate about your job where it’s really great to be passionate about your job, but it may not be so great to express it to people who might exploit it, for example, to managers.

And so I’ve just found that really, really interesting that these people who love their job were still kind of cagey at work about telling the people who are in charge that they did.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I imagine it comes from experience. Like, they’ve lived it, they’ve seen it, they’ve witnessed it, and that is a nice little gut-check for anyone who’s asking anyone to do anything. It’s like, you know, “Would you ask this of someone who had less passion for the job?” That’s handy.

And so then, within your zone of, “Should I say something?” It seems that I feel that trade-off yet again. I’ve known someone who was interviewing and he really wanted the job, and then the person interviewing did not give him the offer, and said, “Well, you just didn’t seem that interested.”

And he’s like, “I’m very interested. It’s, like, that’s just my personality.” It’s like, “Ahh.” And so it’s funny, like when you’re interviewing for a job, it seems like you want to show all kinds of enthusiasm and passion for it.

And yet, when you’re in the thick of it, you know, your manager may or may not exploit that knowledge. And, yeah, I guess it’s kind of case by case. Or do you have any pro tips for navigating it?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so that’s exactly right. You kind of picked out the different points at which you should say that you love your job or shouldn’t say that you love your job, right? And so, for example, lots of job ads these days are like, “We want a passionate worker.”

So Jon Jachimowicz, who does a lot of this work on passion, has looked at job ads and shown this increase, right? So we do want to hire people who seem interested and passionate, particularly for certain kinds of jobs.

Like, again, if we go to like accountants, like we don’t care that much if our accountants are really passionate. But in some kinds of jobs, we’re really looking for someone who’s going to bring this passion and extra energy.

And so when you are interviewing, before you have the job, you do want to express your passion. Once you actually have the job, continuing to walk around being like, “I love my job,” you know, if you’re okay with getting extra work, that might be fine. But there should be this sort of awareness, once again, that there is this trade-off.

So people, there’s been recent research by one of my students, actually, and some other researchers, showing that bosses tend to give more work to employees they see as passionate and employees they see as intrinsically motivated.

And so, again, if that’s fine with you, you can express your intrinsic motivation and your passion. But it is one of those things to be aware of that also could set you up to, potentially, be exploited, to be the person who’s asked constantly to stay late, to do the extra work, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and then, I guess, there’s yet another layer in terms of, “And if you do those things,” is there some meritocratic force that’s going to result in, you know, good things flowing to you? It’s like, “Oh, wow, that person, they’re on it. I count on them. Of course, they’re going to get the promotion or the raise or the bonus or whatever,” versus, “There are none of those available for anybody, so we just appreciate them. Thanks.”

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, and some of this research has specifically looked at, like, promotable and non-promotable tasks. So this is a distinction that’s been done in research looking at, like, the kinds of tasks certain groups of people, like women versus men, wind up taking on, and also people who express passion in, like, intrinsic motivation for the job.

And this research has shown that, specifically, it becomes a problem because these people wind up getting these jobs that don’t actually lead to promotions later on. They’re just, like, extra work.

It’s just, “Yes, I can count on that person to do it,” but it’s just like kind of the busy work that needs to get done, right? It’s the like pitch in and, you know, again like stay late, clean the bathroom in that one study, do things that are really outside of your role that may not actually help you down the line.

Yeah, and some other. I mean, this is really related to another section of the book, which is on asking and whether we should ask for things. Because one of the things I talk about is the fact that an ask really is inherently full of social pressure, particularly in the workplace.

And so, when we ask people to do things outside of their role, to stay late, to do something even, you know, borderline inappropriate, whatever it might be, it’s really hard for people to say no.

And so I have done research on that for about 20 years. My most recent research has really tried to push it to the extreme in the lab. And so you asked about, like, studies that make me say, “Wow, I can’t believe people are like that.”

I have to talk about one of my own because I’ve honestly been shocked that this has been happening in our lab. We have these studies where we ask participants to unlock their phones and hand it over to us to look through.

And when we tell people, “We’re going to run a study like this,” most people, like 75%, say, “I would never unlock my phone and just let you look through it.” But when we actually ask people, they immediately unlock it, hand it over, like over 80% of the time.

And so we think that, you know, if we’re asked to do something we’re uncomfortable with or we’re asked to do something we don’t want to do, we’ll just say no. But when we’re actually put in that immediate situation, we wind up complying.

And we even have people, so we had a study where we said, “We’re going to look through your web search history,” because no one really wants to share their web search history. And they would like blurt out random things they had shared rather than just say, “No, thank you. I don’t want to do that.”

And so this idea that, you know, the things we ask also, sometimes that means, “Go ahead and ask. There’s no harm. And people are more likely to say yes than you think,” sometimes it means like, “Think twice. Maybe don’t ask for that if that person is already overcommitted, and you know that by asking, they’re going to feel pressure to agree.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, and then they may agree and they may do it and then they resent you and the relationship is damaged even though, like, ideally, they would have said no. So when you said they blurted out, what were they blurting?

Vanessa Bohns
So we had, you know, just random things that they had searched because they thought we were going to look through their web search history. So it’d be like, “I just searched how tall Peppa Pig is. I can tell you why if you want to know.” Or just like these random things.

Pete Mockaitis
“I had a wart on my foot, and it’s almost gone now.”

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, I’m only sticking to the ones that are like less personal. But, yeah, those, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, good point. Thank you. Well, Vanessa, tell me, is there anything else you really want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Vanessa Bohns
Well, I’ll just kind of finish this whole “When to ask? When not?” with a couple suggestions that I’ve been really excited about that we’ve been working on in our lab for how to get people to say yes but still feel like they are, you know, not resent you after the fact, feel like they actually genuinely committed.

And so one thing we’ve been testing is, if you give someone advanced notice, so, you know, you can try this when you’re asking for something at work, we often will just either email someone with an ask or show up and ask them in the moment.

The best thing is to combine those two things to tell them, “Okay, I want to come ask you this question, and actually ask them, but I want to ask you face-to-face because that’s the most effective way to ask.”

And we found that by giving someone a heads up, so that you walk into their office, you make the request, but they already know what you’re asking, it makes them feel like they had time to process, so they’re not like put on the spot.

And we found that it doesn’t actually change how much, like how likely they are to say yes very much, but it does make them feel like, “Okay, I know what I was getting into. I don’t feel like you kind of forced me into this. I didn’t feel obligated or compelled.” So I would recommend people trying out these different ways of asking for true consent and not just compliance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, any final really cool stories that have come about in putting this together?

Vanessa Bohns
Okay, one thing I do talk about in the book is my own experience being ghosted on the academic job market. And this idea that, you know, when I was on the job market, I wound up having these interviews, and academic jobs are intense interviews where you have meals with tons of people and you spend tons of hours with people, and you really feel like you get to know these people.

And when I got rejected for this job that I was kind of holding out for, no one told me that I got rejected. I had to, like months later, I had to be like, “Is that job still happening?” Like, “Oh, no, we just wound up not hiring anybody.”

And so one of the things I talk about is this idea that we often let our anxiety about being honest about these things, particularly rejection and difficult feedback, convince us that the kind thing to do is not to reach out and tell someone, “Oh, you’ve been rejected.” But, in fact, it’s so much worse for the person on the receiving end.

And so one sort of point I make there is how important it is to actually explicitly reach out and tell people like, “I’m sorry. The position has been filled or we’re not hiring, etc.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that really exposes the truth of our sort of, I don’t know, pusillanimous interior avoidant self is that, “Is this really about kindness or is this really about your discomfort?” because just ghosting is clearly not kind, but it’s sure more comfortable for an individual in terms of, like, not saying the thing is more comfortable than saying the thing. Yet, ghosting is clearly less kind than saying the thing.

Vanessa Bohns
But, you know, the research shows that we know that when we’re on the receiving end and we clearly say, “That felt way less kind than actually just having someone tell me I was rejected.”

But the rejecters/ghosters don’t realize that it’s actually more kind. And, as you point out, I completely think it’s possible that we convince ourselves because it’s easier for us. And so I think one big takeaway is that, as we’re figuring out like, “What’s my goal here? What’s my motivation?” that we’re honest with ourselves.

Because, I think, if we were to put ourselves in the other, on the sort of the receiving end, we would realize that actually, “No, that’s really unkind to just have no communication.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it takes one extra layer of thoughtful consideration. It’s like, “Oh, that’d be so mean to say you’re rejected.” It’s like, “Yes, but how mean would it be to say nothing?” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I guess that would be even meaner. Okay.” So, yeah.

Vanessa Bohns
And I’ll tell you even more sort of realistic scenario. For example, when we have candidates come and interview, they interview with, you know, my entire department. And as department chair, if I’m telling someone they didn’t get the job, I’m the one who reaches out and says, like, “I’m really sorry, but we went with someone else.”

And I think there is a sense that if everybody else that person met with also sent them, like, a version of a rejection email, that that might not be kind. But I actually think that people would appreciate having someone reach out and say, “You know, I’m really sorry it didn’t work out, but it was a pleasure to meet you,” as opposed to like, “Oh, then I never heard from those other people I actually spent a lot of time with again.”

I think that’s a clearer place where you can imagine really not being sure, like, “Should we all, essentially, reach out and reject this person?” But you can do it in a way that is actually kind and says like, “Oh, no, I acknowledge that I met you. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Like, good luck.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, agreed. Cool. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so I will say this is not a quote I find inspiring, but it’s a quote I find enraging, which is kind of a type of inspiring. So there’s this Wayne Gretzky quote that you miss a hundred percent of the goals you don’t, or shots you don’t take. Yeah, I see it all the time.

People always have it in their like email signatures and it drives me crazy because, specifically, because the whole point of my research and this book is like it’s not about just always taking the shot, right?

There are times you shouldn’t be asking for things. There are times you want to think twice. And so that quote, particularly, always just rubs me the wrong way when I see it.

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

Vanessa Bohns
I’ll tell you one of my favorite studies from this book, is this one where the researchers had their research assistants put, like, a glob of chocolate on their face or a glob of lipstick. And they went up to people and they, you know, asked them to complete a survey and pretended they didn’t know they had something on their face.

And they wanted to see what the personality traits were of the people who said something and the people who didn’t say something. And, in the end, what they found was that they couldn’t even analyze the data because only, like, four people out of over a hundred said anything.

And so, for me, that study is it’s such a fun study, but also the fact that, like, the effect was so much stronger than even they imagined of, like, us not wanting to give feedback, that they couldn’t even use half their data.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so I’m really obsessed with this kind of weird but amazing book called Why Fish Don’t Exist. It’s nonfiction. I love nonfiction. And it kind of transcends genres. It’s like a memoir of the author, but it’s also about the taxonomist who came up with, like, the taxonomy that we currently have to figure out, you know, where animals fit in their, like, genre and species, etc. And it’s just a fascinating read and fun.

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

Vanessa Bohns
I mean, it’s just always, always going to be a pen because, I think, and I tell my students this, I tell my executive students, I tell my undergrad students, because it’s just true, based on the research,

Writing things down by hand helps you process more, helps you remember more. It’s just so much better for deep thinking. Like, typing is efficient, but if you actually want to process and think, like, pen is your best friend.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Vanessa Bohns
Going for walks, that just clears my head and it helps me think.

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?

Vanessa Bohns
I would say it’s always my research on asking in person. I get so many emails from people and, I mean, really, I respect that they read the research and they come up with, like, a cute intro, but I don’t know if they realize how many emails I get like this that says, “I know, based on your research, I really should be coming and asking you in person.” I’d say like 50% of the emails I get start with that. And so, yeah, that seems to have made a mark.

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

Vanessa Bohns
Almost everything you need to get in touch is on my website, VanessaBohns.com, but I’m also on LinkedIn, I’m on Instagram, most of the social media sites @profbohns.

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

Vanessa Bohns
Ask for things more, but when you do it, practice asking in ways that actually give the other person autonomy to say no. And I think the asking is a good thing, but I think also the giving the autonomy. So give a try, you know, give people, come up with a request, give people a heads-up that it’s coming, and just experiment, see if it works.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a favorite way that you, or script or preamble or move you like to do for that autonomy-granting accompaniment?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, so, I mean, there’s giving people time. There’s giving people a heads-up. Another one is you ask people in person, and then you say, “Don’t give me an answer right now. Let me know tomorrow. Let me know next week,” right? Again, so you give them time to actually think about something so you get their buy-in.

Another thing we’ve tried is giving people the words to say no. So one thing we found in our work is that it’s really hard for people to find the words to say no, and sometimes we’ll just say yes because we can’t think of a good excuse.

So when you ask for something, you actually give them sort of the script or like the thing you would accept in their no. And so I do this when, for example, I have graduate students and I want to ask them to start a new project.

So my goal with graduate students, I want them, you know, I may think that this is a really good project for them to start, but I do not want them to take on more than they can actually handle. And I want them to be honest if they don’t have time to do something or they’re not interested enough to do a good job at it.

And so we’ll have a meeting and I’ll say, “I have this idea for a project. I want you to think about it and decide whether you want to be part of it. I would love you to run it. So I’m very clear I’m actually asking you to do this if you’re interested. But I don’t want you to tell me right now. I want you to look at your schedule. I want you to think about it. Get back to me the next time we meet.”

And I’ll also give them an excuse, you know, “And if you can’t do it, just tell me, ‘I just have too much on my schedule,’ because it’s, like, I will accept that response.’” And so I try to model that my own requests.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Vanessa, thank you.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Oct 05

1186: The Hidden Cost of Undersharing with Leslie John

By Podcasts No Comments

Leslie John makes the compelling case for why we need to open up more in work and in life.

You’ll Learn

  1. The surprising upsides to oversharing
  2. The easiest and loveliest thing to overshare
  3. Why it’s a good sign when people cringe

About Leslie

Leslie John is the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Her award-winning research appears in top academic journals and media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. She is the author of the new book, REVEALING: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. A Canadian-born, professionally trained ballet dancer, she now calls Boston her home, where she lives with her husband and two young sons.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Leslie, welcome!

Leslie John
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about oversharing, and could we start at the beginning? Could you make the case for oversharing? I think even the word itself seems like it’s a bad thing, oversharing.

Leslie John
I know, I know it’s off putting, and it’s a cheeky title, my book, The Underrated Power of Oversharing. It’s, “Ooh, la la.” So let me just disarm things right off the bat. There is still such a thing as TMI, as oversharing, and there’s lots of oversharing that is not good.

The point of the cheeky title, and my cheeky point, is to say that, oftentimes, what we think is oversharing is just sharing, and sharing is incredibly helpful for our relationships, for our well-being, and, of course, in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what we think is oversharing could just be sharing. This reminds me, we’ve had guests who’ve said, “What you’re calling micromanaging is really just managing.”

Leslie John
That sounds like rationalization that a control freak would use, but I’m kidding. No, but when I’m teaching my PhD students, it is true, like, to really teach someone, you got to get really micro. So I agree with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so tell us, then, could you maybe orient us with an example of what’s something that some might call oversharing that you think is just great level of sharing?

Leslie John
Well, so here’s something that I shared at work. which was, and I was junior, too. So I was a baby academic, just starting out, and it was a conference, a work conference, and it was late at night, a party, and we were all gathered around, myself, a bunch of junior people, and then two super grand poobah senior people, who we were all desperately trying to impress.

And someone came up with the great idea of saying, “Let’s go around the circle and…” it never ends well, right, “…and share our most embarrassing story ever.” So most people, you know, they started, they’re like, “Oh, you know, like, I worked too hard and, like, one day I got caught working at an odd hour of the day,” or, “Oh, my gosh, there was a typo in this abstract of a fancy academic paper I published. The horror!”

They’re just these, eyeroll-y, like humble brags, right? Like, they’re not actually embarrassing moments, what people were sharing. They were just kind of trying to present themselves in some, there was like a form of posturing, right?

But, for whatever reason, I decided to go for it and share my, actually, most embarrassing story ever, which is also in the book, you’re welcome. But it basically entails me going into grand detail about an episode where I peed myself on stage in the front of, like, a thousand people.

And so I told that story in lots of graphic detail, and people cringed afterwards. And the next morning, I woke up and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’ve been canceled. That was career suicide. It’s like I poured gasoline all over my body and lit a match, like, the end.” So it really felt like a tremendous overshare TMI moment.

But, thinking back, those two grand poobahs, they became my closest mentors. They opened doors in academia that I didn’t even know existed. And, you know, they’re close, I’m close with them.

And they said, “It’s not, ‘in spite’ of what you shared that night, it’s partly because of it, because you were real and you were actually funny, even if it was at your own expense and you weren’t a robot. And we want to work with people, we’re drawn to people who are actually human and maybe have the humility to joke about themselves.”

I don’t know. I don’t want to flatter myself too much, but that’s an example of something, like, sharing an actual embarrassing story in a work context to people that are way higher status than you. Like, they didn’t even know I existed. That was the first thing they knew about me.

So I think that’s, like, a pretty strong example in the sense of, like, pushing some skepticism that we may actually have about this idea that oversharing is redeeming.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that says it so well, right? Well, I’ve accidentally had an accident as a grown-up as well.

Leslie John
Tell more.

Pete Mockaitis
It was, um, we had a lot of luggage, and a young child, and a long mass transit ride.

Leslie John
Yep, this is a setup. This is, yep.

Pete Mockaitis
And it didn’t seem like I had an opportunity to exit, and so that happened. No one else seemed to notice.

Leslie John
And to be clear, it wasn’t your child.

Pete Mockaitis
No, no, it wasn’t. Okay. So it happens to the best of us. And to your point about we like working with people who are actually human.

Leslie John
Yeah, that’s apt today, right? Whew, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that says a lot, because I have, even before AI, I remember back in the day when I was on the other side of the career fair for the first couple times, you know? So I was with Bain & Company back at the University of Illinois, trying to get some sharp young associate consultants in the mix.

Leslie John
Yep, fancy schmancy.

Pete Mockaitis
And whenever I heard people say, “Well, hello, I am looking to merge my interests in accounting and finance in a high-impact…” And I was, like, “Are you really? Is that, like, what’s in your heart of hearts, your burning desire?”

Leslie John
Yeah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I’d be like, I would much appreciate, even if it feels offensive. I was like, “How on earth are companies paying half a million plus a month for a team of five, young folk like you to do stuff?” I’d be like, “Now that’s a real question.”

And I would find that person memorable and interesting and want to have a closer look at that resume application.

Leslie John
Right. And, in fact, there’s data to support this, too. There’s research on job. I love this example of job interviews because job interviews, you know, it’s easy to say when you’re in a high-status position, everybody loves and respects you. You have a lot more leeway of what you can share often, except for immoral things, which is we’re in a higher-standard category, but setting those aside.

But when you’re junior and you’re being evaluated, and it’s super competitive, like a job interview, even then, it can benefit you from being a little bit more open. Not talking about, like, your rashes or like trauma. Like, not… like a little bit more open. A little bit of authenticity, a little bit of humanity. And that’s a great example.

And so this research study, they got transcripts of people in job interviews, and then they looked at, they analyzed the transcripts, and they looked at what predicted getting the job. And they found that among the people that were qualified, it was the candidates who were real that got the jobs, who answered the question, like, you know, that dreaded and kind of unfair question of, like, “What’s your biggest weakness?” And people are, like, usually, “Oh, I work too hard.”

The ones that answered, and a real weakness, like, or a real perceived weakness like, “You know, sometimes I’m quieter in meetings, that’s because I spend a lot of time listening and processing.” Like, something, “So sometimes I’m misunderstood,” right?

So that kind of answer is what I mean by being a little bit more open in that situation, right? So key, of course, is reading the room and understanding the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is a juicy bit of research. Do you have more like that?

Leslie John
Well, in fact, I do have lots of juicy research. I actually insulted the Harvard prof that was interviewing me in my Harvard interview. So that research, when I read it, I’m like, “Oh, redemption, there’s method to my madness.”

Because when I was interviewing, I, inadvertently, sassed the interviewer. I, inadvertently, made a comment about his weight. And so, like, super meanie move. But it’s kind of sassily delivered in the moment.

And, again, one of these, like, my face turned bright red. I’m like, “Oh, my God, they think I’m a horrible person. Why did I do that?” You know, sometimes when I’m nervous, I just blurt things out. It’s a tick or something. I don’t know.

But then three days later, they called me. It was Harvard. And they said, “When you sassed us like that, we thought you’ll fit right in here. Our students are tough, so you got to have the hutzpah.”

So, you know, it easily could have gone the wrong way, but the point is these things are not as risky as we often perceive them to be. And even when there is something negative that comes out of it, like, you know, you’re at a party, you say something a little bit offside, you feel, or like you’re in the workplace and you feel like you insulted someone.

You can always go back to them and say, “Hey, I’m worried about how my comments went over, right?” So it’s not like this one-shot thing that it’s oversharing. And then you can see, even there’s a benefit to that because now, okay, maybe you shouldn’t have said the thing, but now by approaching and talking, now you’re forging a relationship with the person.

The person respects you because you’re asking them questions, you’re hearing them out, you’re learning about each other, right? So it’s, like, even those moments that feel cringe-y and overshare-y, there can be an upside.

And when I was writing the book, it made me reflect on all these funny moments in my life where I thought, “Oh, my God, what did I do?” And looking back, I realized the long game. There was always some amazing redemption to them, so much so that like every single one of these things I would do them all over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this is eye-opening. And we’ve heard the acronym TMI, too much information. You also introduced the acronym TLI, too little information. How should we be thinking about the concept of TLI?

Leslie John
I think TLI is way more common and way more problematic, actually, than TMI. TLI, too little information, you know, we didn’t even have a word for it. That’s how, like, much we’ve ignored this problem.

It’s not to say TMI isn’t real. For sure, there’s still TMI, but the more I learned and the more I really practiced opening up more, the more I realized, “Wow, this societal fetish with TMI, or the societal, it’s like the greatest social sin, TMI, right?” That’s how we treat it.

But it’s really not the bad, like, of course, sometimes you really can. You can get canceled. You can get fired for telling your boss, “You have a hidden disability,” whatever. All these things. Of course, of course, of course.

But on the whole, in so many circumstances, we hold back when it would benefit us so, so much to open up a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s handy to remember. There’s a foil, an alternative set of letters to think about when TMI fears are in our brains. So can you maybe give us some guidelines in terms of, in a way, it’s an art. You can have too little information. You can have too much information.

We might be calibrated a bit too conservatively, and it’d be in our interest to share a bit more and to be a bit more disclosing and revelatory and human. But how do we gauge things and get that dial where we want it to be?

Leslie John
Yeah, great question. So the first, I love where you started in that revealing wisely, figuring out how much to share, what to hold back, how to share it, there’s a lot of science to it, but it’s also an art and I think, most of all, it’s a skill. But, oddly, it’s not a skill we’re, like, taught in school.

My kids just started school. It’s not a skill we’re taught. We’re taught math, arithmetic, but yet, this is really important, figuring out what to share and what not to share, because if we do it well, the rewards are so great.

We get well-being, we get friendships, we get close relationships, we get influence in the workplace, for example, we get respect, admiration, all these things.
So, yes, it’s a skill, and so the first thing to say is that, like any skill, you have to do it to get better at it. You have to practice. And what typically happens is we don’t even open up at all. Like, we don’t even get to practice because we don’t even consider saying the thing.

So we have to start doing it more so that, then, we can learn, like learn by doing. So that’s number one, it’s a skill. And it also means, like, when we do screw up, like have some self-compassion, to get all therapy-y. Have some self-compassion because you’re going to get it wrong because you have to fail to learn how to do it. Okay.

But, in terms of, like, if I was a listener, I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But give me the tools, give me the tips.” So what I would say is one really good guide that you can use in any situation almost, the time when I would say it doesn’t apply is in, like, a very close established relationship where kind of these norms of reciprocity fall away, but I digress.

The tip is the principle of reciprocity, which is, essentially, what it sounds like. You want to be aware of, “Is there a back and forth of information exchange? If I start revealing something, is the person, my acquaintance, my colleague, my boss, are they saying something back? Or are they just saying nothing? And am I continuing to go on and on and on?”

You typically don’t want to be in a situation where you’re doing all the sharing and the other person isn’t reciprocating. If they’re not reciprocating, that is information. I mean, unless you’re in a unique context where, like, your boss is interviewing you and asking for feedback or whatever.

But, typically, in a given conversation, you want to follow this principle of reciprocity. And it also means, when someone says something to you, like, I’m thinking you’re on the playground and the kids are playing and they’re happy and they’re smiling, and they say, what I would say is a little reveal.

Usually, in these situations where, like, we make small talk and we just say, “Oh, they’re having so much fun.” But that’s super boring. What would it mean to reveal a little bit more there? What it would mean would be to say something like, “They’re laughing so hard. I don’t even remember the last time I had a big belly laugh.” Like that’s a little reveal, okay?

And so that’s like an olive branch. And then the person I’m with, ideally, they’re going to then share, like, the last time they belly laughed, and then maybe I’ll share some, like, mildly embarrassing story, right?

You see, you want to go back and forth mutually, gradually getting deeper and deeper. So the dynamic of reciprocity is really key. So, anytime, we’ve all been in those situations where, like, you’re on the receiving end, and someone’s just like dumping and dumping and dumping and it’s like dysregulated, you don’t want to do that.

So reciprocity is a principle that you can, like, use and apply tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really handy in terms of you’re offering a little bit at a time instead of all at once and observing the response and seeing, with the reciprocity. And what’s interesting is, sometimes, even then, if you’re not getting much back, that doesn’t necessarily, I’m thinking about my own experience.

I don’t think that necessarily means, “Oh, you’re dead in the water. Don’t share anything with this person.” It could just mean they’re tired, they’re distracted, they’re bored, they’re not that interested in what you had to say with regard to laughter.

And yet, you might very well share more, and it’s totally cool. So I guess my thought is the reciprocity guideline is a handy one, and I’d say, well, you tell me, expert, it’s a fairly safe and conservative one. Does that sound right?

Leslie John
Yeah, that sounds totally right. And, yeah, it’s also a guideline. And like any guideline, sometimes it behooves us to break it. It’s also worth noting that, in that situation where you’re saying something, you reveal something and they don’t say anything back, that’s a moment where we are prone to overreacting where we’re like, “Oh, I said too much.”

Like, we think we attribute it to something we did or said, maybe we said too much. And that is so, like, unless you said something really clearly offensive, it’s usually not the case. It’s informative. You should take note of it.

It could be that they’re tired, it could be that they’re bored, it could be that they don’t want to start another friendship, or, like, all kinds of reasons, and they’re all legitimate. And it, most importantly, gives you information. It’s like, “Okay, maybe they’re not down,” or, “Maybe it’s not interesting. Maybe I’ll ask them a question.”

Like, asking a question is a really good way of, then, if you’re kind of trying to understand and you sense that they’re, maybe, you could bring them into a dialogue with you. So question-asking is another great tool you can use to kind of prompt.

Like, if you say something and you feel like you’re kind of stonewalled, you could ask a question like, “How did you experience that?” or something like this, and see what they say. And if, again, they’re like terse, that’s more evidence.

It’s kind of like we’re amateur scientists going through the world and trying to figure it out. And I think this is to the point that, like, being really cognizant of the situation and how people act and using that to guide our behaviors is really important.

There’s also certain things that people often ask me, “Okay, are there things that are TMI that I should just never share?” Of course, we all know what the taboo topics tend to be, you know, sex, politics, finances, religion.

I wouldn’t say those are off topic, per se, because there’s really a situation for anything, in my view. What I would say is, so it’s really hard to give like topical advice, but what I would say is one, two red flaggy things. One is gossip, especially at the workplace.

So gossip, even though it can be fun and juicy to do, I don’t advise it because it’s not so nice. And it actually makes you look bad. So when you say negative things about other people, people implicitly associate those negative things with you as well. It’s one of these kind of subconscious biases we have.

So it makes you look bad. So don’t gossip. It’s unkind. It’s not your information to share. So that’s one rule of thumb I give.

One of the things that people often ask, “What are things that we tend to undershare?” Like, “Hey, I hear you that you’re saying we should share a little bit more a lot of the time, but what the heck does that mean? How do I do it?”

And one really easy low-hanging fruit way to start is with praise. So think about the things, positive things that come to mind. Like, for me, as a nerdly academic, I’ll be walking down the hall at work and I’ll see a colleague whose paper, academic paper, I just read, and I’ll think, like, “Oh, I love that study. I love the study design. I love the paradigm. Like, yes, I’m a real nerd.”

But we often keep those things to ourselves. But if we say them, so praise, say, “Hey, Josh, I love that paradigm. Mwah! Chef’s kiss.” Like, a specific and sincere piece of praise, that’s a kind of sharing that is very much low-hanging fruit, that we so frequently undershare.

And it’s kind of a one-two punch because, one, the person will feel good. Again, must be specific, must be sincere, right? I’m not talking about vacuous praise. Specific and sincere, they feel good.

Also, you can then start to be strategic, right? Like you can reinforce good behavior as a leader by praise. And it also makes you feel good. Tons of research on this. The giver. It also makes you look good. Again, the same principle with gossip, how saying negative things makes you look bad, saying good things makes you look good.

And then what I have found is that when I’m doing this, applying this, again, because like I’m my own guinea pig in all of this, I have found that it makes me a more positive person. And at the risk of sounding toxically positive, like I am happier because I notice the good things way more often because I’m so in the habit of, like, praising people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and it is just a good feeling in terms of you say something and then they’ll have a response, a reaction, like, “Oh, thank you.” You know, like they were surprised. They weren’t expecting that. There’s some delight and it’s just great. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, that was a nice moment of connection we got to share together and I feel good that I helped someone else feel good and, yay, you know?”

Leslie John
Yay! That’s right. Yay all around.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what’s really interesting about when say praise is, I think it gets to this core emotional resistance here that… because, in a way, like praise doesn’t feel super duper disclosive. Disclosive? Disclosing? In that, in terms of, for me, personally, all I have shared is an opinion and perhaps among the safest of opinions. It’s like, “Hey, this thing you did, I thought was good.”

And yet, there’s still a similar emotional internal sensation going on with resistance to doing a praise versus resistance to sharing a thing. I suppose vulnerability is the approximate English word we’d use. Can you talk about this emotional stuff here?

Leslie John

So I think of vulnerability is, like, kind of it’s really deep sharing. It’s emotional openness. It’s saying, “Oh, I feel really anxious about public speaking. I’m really nervous to give this presentation. My mouth is feeling dry. I’m feeling anxious.” That’s vulnerability.

Most of the time we’re not being vulnerable at work. Sometimes, it behooves us to be vulnerable, but we still need to be very cautious because it is a very risky talking about feelings, negative feelings. Anxieties can be very risky, especially at work, but there’s also huge reward when done the right way.

What I think is a great low-hanging fruit in the workplace is transparency. Transparency is cognitive openness. Transparency is sharing how your mind works, how your thought process works, kind of bringing people under the hood of explaining why you think the way you think, how you came to a certain conclusion.

That’s the kind of revealing that is, really, you get a lot of bang for your buck because it’s relatively safe because you’re not, like, talking about deep, difficult emotions, but you’re opening up because you’re opening up about how your mind works.

So, imagine, for example, your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, I noticed you were really quiet in that meeting,” which I guess is a criticism. And one of the reasons you were quiet is because you’re nervous about speaking up and you don’t know if your ideas are good.

So you could say, you could be vulnerable, and you could say exactly that. I don’t recommend that because that would diminish you, potentially, in the boss’ eyes. But what you could say to them instead, so instead in these situations, we think we either have to do that or just kind of, “Uh, okay, you’re right,” grin and bear it, which also is not great.

Instead, what I’m suggesting is transparency here would be really helpful. If you said something like, “Yes, I realize that and, you know, the way my mind works is I really like to spend time listening and really processing what people are saying. And that’s why I’m a little quiet at first because, then, I have more to contribute when I feel I’ve really processed it. Now, I’m happy to speak off the cuff if you’re telling me you’d like me to get in sooner. That’s great feedback.”

That’s what I mean by being transparent, right? And this is a way where the default, the standard is to just be like, “Okay, boss, yep, you’re right.” That doesn’t really advance you. Saying, “I have anxiety and I don’t think my ideas are good,” that’s dangerous.

But being transparent and saying, “Huh? Well, it’s good observation. The reason why is because I need to process my thoughts,” that actually strengthens you and makes you come across as thoughtful, you know, as mature, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a handy distinction there in terms of vulnerability versus transparency. And it seems the key difference there is you’re not sharing the deepest emotional secrets of your inner life, but you are sharing something real and of significance about you and your operations.

Leslie John
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m curious, any other key things you want to be on the lookout for as you’re observing people, their receptivity, their dynamics, their openness? You clued us into checking for reciprocity earlier, which is pretty handy. Are there any other things we should be on the lookout for that could give us some handy indicators?

Leslie John
Well, I think that checking for the feeling of TMI actually is important, or the feeling, or the cues that you’ve crossed the line, you know, which we’re quite exquisitely attuned to. You know the cringe-y face or the averted gaze, shocks even, gasps.

And the reason, I think, we should pay attention to that is not because we should avoid it, but I think we should learn from it. And I think we spend too much time beating ourselves up and feeling ashamed over it when, instead, if you sometimes get there, if you sometimes get that reaction, this may sound crazy, but it’s kind of a cause for celebration because you know you’ve gotten there. You’ve gotten to the limit.

So often, so many of us, we’re in this restricted range of how much we share. We share a very restricted range and I want us to widen up and expand our range.

But if you never experience that, you’re not going too far. And the goal in the end is like, for me, I’m like total emotional intimacy, like with my spouse. I can tell him anything, like that’s the goal. And total guardedness in, say, like a deposition, right? You want the full range. And most of us are kind of stuck in a really small range.

Interestingly, there’s that one analogy is one piece of career advice I got about negotiating, was if you always get what you want in a negotiation, you’re not asking for enough. Sometimes, it’s good to not get what you want because you know you’re pushing it, just like that with revealing. Sometimes, it’s good to feel like you’ve pushed it because then you know where the line is.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much. I’ve got a friend who just recently has been, you know, landed two above $50,000 consulting engagements.

Leslie John
Sweet.

Pete Mockaitis
And before, he had never asked for that high a price. And so we’re like, “Oh, great job. Great job.” And it is, it is sort of like eye-opening for him, like, “Whoa! This is possible? I guess this has probably been possible for years, I’ve just never asked. That’s really interesting.” And you see the world.

And I love that you don’t know the boundaries until you hit them, and they may very well be far beyond your world. And when you told that story, it’s like, it’s funny. What came to mind is, and I haven’t thought about this in years, but I was at a gathering. We were on a beach.

I was at a gathering, and we had a lot of college friends. We got together because we were in the same academic minor program. And so we had a lot of classes together back in the day. It’d been years. We all got together. I thought, “We’re all friends here, you know?” Something came up, so I shared a story of a pretty wild, well, supernatural healing miracle, which is, I guess, that’s in our zone, right? Religion?

Leslie John
What? Wow, can you tell it? Everybody wants to know now. Can you tell it? Very meta.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, a friend and I had a series of visions appear to us, and then we prayed for someone to be healed, and she informed us that she was.

Leslie John
Wow! What was her ailment? Like, what?

Pete Mockaitis
Suicidal depression and self-harm. So it was wild. It was perhaps the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.

Leslie John
Wow! Wow! That is amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so very cool. And so I was just excited to tell the story because it’s something kind of related came up and I thought, “Well, some people don’t want to hear this, but, hey, we’re all friends here.“

And so I went ahead and told the story. And there was, like, it was exactly what you described, and it caught me off guard because people kind of looked away and it was like, “Uh.”

Leslie John
Because are they like, “This is like woo-woo”?

Pete Mockaitis
I guess. I don’t know. It was weird, I thought, “We’re all friends here. What’s going on? We go way back.”

Leslie John
Yeah, I think it’s cool. I have so many follow-up questions.

Pete Mockaitis
“We go way back.”

Leslie John
And I think we don’t know anything. Like, time travel is, like, we do not know the half of it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, but what was so fascinating, to your point, it’s like the people were looking away. It was like, “I guess maybe I shouldn’t have shared that. Oopsies!” And then I actually got a follow-up text message hours later from one person who was in the group, but she didn’t say anything. She was like, “I really appreciated the story you shared. It meant a lot to me.”

Leslie John
Amazing, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was so fascinating because it’s, like, “I guess I did the wrong thing here. But for her, it was very meaningful. So I guess I didn’t,” but she didn’t say anything and it’s so fascinating, like, what’s under the surface. Yeah.

Leslie John
Right, because it would take so much courage for her in that context. You know, a dear colleague of mine, his name is Amit Goldenberg, and he does work on, like, emotional contagion, and he’s done this fascinating work on how your reaction is anchored to the most negative reaction in the group.

Like, implicitly, we act as if the one negative review is representative, but it’s just that, an outlier. It’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So it’s really intriguing what can be happening beneath the surface. And I love what you have to say, is you got to bump up against the wall a few times to really know the boundaries because who knows?

Leslie John
Yep, do it. Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if I never shared certain things, I could be, much like our consulting friend, leaving all kinds of money or value or benefit or goodness on the table.

Leslie John
Money on the table. I know. I was thinking the same thing. Totally. Totally. And, you know, I’ve also found it gives me more kind of self-compassion, and also like the right mindset, which is that, “I’m going to fail sometimes. It’s okay.”

And sometimes it’s actually hilarious, the failures, right? Like, it’s less serious than we need it to be, than we often think it is. It’s not this high-stakes zero-something.

Sometimes there are very high-stakes reveals, but the vast majority of the time, it’s very low stakes, which makes it a great place to practice, right? You know, most of our disclosure decisions are pretty low stakes. The accumulation of our lives, it matters, but this is a great way to practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really rings true. And I might suggest, it’s good for us to be humbled a few times just for our own, just so we’re not too, you know, puffed up, chest, annoying, obnoxious, in the course of living our lives and relating to people, as well as, of course, finding the boundaries, the true limits of sharing.

Tell us, Leslie, any other big things you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Leslie John
We talked a little bit about how when you’re in a job interview or like you’re not necessarily a manager and it’s a little riskier to open up. But as you kind of move up the ranks, as you become more managerial, more in a leader position, you have a lot more latitude, generally, to be more reveal-y.

And we found that when managers open up a bit more, like say to their teams the things they’re working on, as in weaknesses, like, “I’m working on my organizational skills,” or whatever, it doesn’t occur to managers to share this, but when they do, their employees are far more motivated to work for them.

And bigger picture, the dreamy version of saying this, is that people, when you are in a higher status role, you have a lot of power to change things for better. And the examples I’ll give you there are the heavy-hitter ones of Magic Johnson and Angelina Jolie.

So Magic Johnson, in the early ‘90s, some of us might have like flashbulb memories, some of us may be too young. But, essentially, you can still watch it on YouTube. Magic Johnson suddenly had an announcement to make, everybody was waiting, nobody knew what it was going to be.

Superstar Lakers player comes into the hotel conference room and announces that he’s retiring effective immediately because he has HIV. And, at the time, you know, the early ‘90s, this was like very stigmatized disease. It was “the gay disease,” and there was a lot of stigma that got in the way of, you know, acceptance and compassion and help.

And when he did that, he de-stigmatized it and he motivated people who would, otherwise, not get tested to get tested. There’s lots of studies on how, when after that announcement, the uptick, major upticks in testing.

Similarly, Angelina Jolie, that op-ed she wrote in the Times about 20 years ago, about how she had decided to have a double mastectomy because she has the breast cancer gene. And that, in and of itself, caused many, many, many more people to get screened and detected and to get the preventative care they needed. So it’s really life-changing stuff, it can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yes, thank you. And now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Leslie John
One that I recently encountered that I love, it’s a quote by Dolly Parton, seems very apt, a journalist who, Jad Abumrod, who interviewed her a lot, he said that she told him, “You can ask me anything you want, and I get to answer it however I want.”

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

Leslie John
So one of mine is this crazy awesome, a crazy thought, seemingly, crazy, I don’t know, a thought experiment where I put people into a dilemma, where I made them make a choice. And the goal of the study was to see just how important it is to open up and just how much we hate people who, or distrust people, who withhold information.

And the idea was to show that, sometimes, it can be better to say, to reveal, even really bad things about yourself relative to opting out of answering, to refusing to share. So what we did in this study was, if you were a participant, I’d give you two prospective dates, two dating profiles.

And imagine one of the dating profiles, the person had been asked, “Have you ever had any STDs?” And the person answered it and said, “Oh, I have had so many STDs, I can’t even count. I’ve made new STDs, I’ve discovered.”  So all the STDs. So, like, super bad.

The other person. I know this is a super weird experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
This will be the clip we use to share for the episode, Leslie.

Leslie John
But there is reason behind the madness. I love my job. Okay, so then the other person, they were asked the same question about their STD history, and they said, “I’m not answering that question. Just not answering.” So who would you rather date? Who would you rather date?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I saw you deliver this at a keynote, Leslie.

Leslie John
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you know, both are very concerning.

Leslie John
You wanted that on the record, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
But I guess that’s the thing is you’re forcing me to make a choice. So, I mean, I suppose I’ll take the one who owned it, because, then, at least, I figure, “Okay, we can have a conversation about this.”

Leslie John
“We can work with it,” yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to the other one, it’s like, “I guess this is off the table, and it’s probably not good and you were not allowed to talk about it. So I guess I have to pick the one,” yeah.

Leslie John
Yeah. Right. And so that’s what most people pick. First, when we first got that, it was to my astonishment, because I’m like, “Wait, you’d rather someone who is admitting like the worst possible thing relative to someone who’s just like, ‘I’m not answering’?” Like, maybe they’re not answering because, out of principle, that they’re like, “This is a ridiculous question.” We don’t know.

But, yet, that’s not the inference we make. The inference we make is like, “Ooh, we can’t trust them. They’re a hider.” And so we distrust people who hide, who conceal, so much so that we’d rather date someone, we’d rather hire someone, we’d rather be colleagues with someone who admits to things, even if they’re kind of bad, relative to someone who, like, very conspicuously withholds.

And I think that’s because revealing sensitive information, revealing personal information, is a way we show the other person that we trust them. Because it’s like, “I wouldn’t be sharing this if I didn’t trust you. I’m sharing you this because I trust you,” right? That’s what it’s saying, the meta communication, right?

And so when we’re on the receiving end of that, it feels so good that someone has trusted us, and then we trust them back. And that mutual trust is the spark of colleague-ship, friendships, romances, and so on. And so it’s so important that when someone doesn’t do it, we really treat them with contempt when they don’t open up.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s a really great counterpoint to remember, is that if they happen to already know the answer, we will distrust those who hide. I remember once, I was working, and I happened to know this juicy little piece of gossip that a manager, my manager of the project, was moving in with his girlfriend who also worked at the company.

Leslie John
Ooh, scandal.

Pete Mockaitis
So this was, like, that was happening that weekend. And so, you know, on Monday, we were just chit-chatting, and I was like, “Oh, how was your weekend?”

Leslie John
“How was your weekend?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “I don’t think he’s going to tell me this,” you know. But he might say, “Oh, moving, you know, it’s rough.” Okay, you know, maybe leave out some of the details.

Leslie John
And say, “Where did you move?”

Pete Mockaitis
But he’s just, like, in less than a quarter of a second after I asked the question, I was like, “Oh, how’s your weekend?” “Had a steak dinner.” It’s, like, “Okay, someone was ready.”

Leslie John
Oh, wow. Shut down. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
He was ready to answer the “How was your weekend?” question. And so, I mean, we weren’t pals, we weren’t tight. I didn’t expect him to say, “Well, you know, my girlfriend and I were taking the next step.” I didn’t expect, but I thought he’s like, “Oh, I moved, and it was kind of a pain how moving is.” But because he shared even less than I thought he would, I was, like, I don’t know, I felt more distant from him afterwards.

Leslie John
Yeah, that’s so well put.

Pete Mockaitis 
Okay. And a favorite book?

Leslie John
I am loving, I just finished it, well, there’s one that I’m reading right now, but the one I just finished was Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s so good. I love it.

And then the one I’m really in, I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I’m really into true crime right now. One of the books I’m into is Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. I don’t know what these preferences say about me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was just going to recommend The Onion comedy podcast called “A Very Fatal Murder,” which spoofs the whole genre of true crime podcasts.

Leslie John
Oh, I got to listen to that. There was an SNL a couple years ago, one of their music videos that was “Murder show, murder show, I’m going to watch a murder show.” And it was, like, girls’ night in, and they’re getting all excited because they’re going to watch a murder show. So awesome. So true.

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

Leslie John
This is such a boring answer, but I’ve recently encountered zeeg, Z-E-E-G. It’s an amazing scheduling tool. It’s way better than Calendly.

Pete Mockaitis
How so?

Leslie John
Well, so to get nerdy about it, you can make it so that your schedule only opens, only lets people book back-to-back. You can have different meeting types that are easy, like, “Days I’m in office versus Zoom” is a different, like it has a little bit more, a lot more flexibility, actually. I’m not really selling it, I’m sorry, but I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Impressive. And a favorite habit?

Leslie John
Sleep. Is sleep a habit?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great.

Leslie John
It’s so, so, so important. Like, I know people say it’s important, but, like, I think there’s not many people that actually prioritize it the way it needs to be prioritized. At least, for me, I’m a wreck if I don’t have enough sleep. Like, my emotions I can’t regulate, I can’t think as well.

And so it’s, like, I’m just very…And with that one amazing tool that I love, I look really weird, but blue light blocking glasses. I don’t know that they actually, it might just be placebo, but, like, I swear by them. I got them on at 7:00 o’clock at night.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, Harvard Business Review featured a human random control trial, showing that it got the job done.

Leslie John
Really?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, better sleep and better performance ratings from colleagues at work.

Leslie John
Oh, wow. Is that new? I haven’t heard this. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s been around for some years. And is there a key nugget you share that folks seem to really connect and resonate with, they quote back to you often?

Leslie John
Yeah, about my work, one that keeps coming back is to the advice, the guidance. Two things. One, that revealing is a skill. And second is to share a little bit more a lot of the time.

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

Leslie John
My website ProfLeslieJohn.com, or you can follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn @ProfLeslieJohn.

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

Leslie John
Praise someone. Give them a specific and sincere piece of praise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leslie, thank you.

Leslie John
Thank you so much.

Oct 01

1185: How to Reclaim Your 25th Hour by Getting Out of Your Own Way with Neal Schore

By Podcasts No Comments

Neal Schore shares expert strategies for reclaiming the time we don’t realize we give away.

You’ll Learn

  1. The many ways we waste time without realizing it
  2. The 10-second trick that prevents time-wasting miscommunications
  3. How to feel more powerful in just five seconds

About Neal

Neal Schore serves as chairman and advisor to several notable business leaders, boards, and companies across the United States. He also advises multiple private equity and investment firms on executive leadership and strategic initiatives. He currently serves as cofounder and CEO of The 25th Hour Group, an executive coaching and leadership events firm that showcases his proven leadership toolbox and practice. Previously, Schore served as founder, president, and CEO of Triton Digital, a global technology, data, and services leader in the digital audio and podcast industry. 

Schore received a Bachelor of Arts in business administration, with emphasis on management, marketing, and finance, from Michigan State University. He is currently active in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Program. Schore is a member of the Los Angeles Gold Southland Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the recipient of E&Y’s 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year award for greater Los Angeles.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Neil, welcome.

Neal Schore
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting and find this 25th hour. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising, fascinating discovery you’ve made to share with us here?

Neal Schore
So many discoveries. I think the most fascinating is that, generally speaking, every one of my clients, and then just people when I ask about their 25th hour, always blame other people for the fact that they don’t have enough time.

So it’s too many meetings, or too many emails, or too many family obligations, or whatever it might be. And what’s fascinating to me is, when I teach them the concept of you manage you, how all of a sudden more time appears.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny when you when you mention this, the first thing that comes to mind is I think about my property manager. I’ve got a little apartment in Chicago being rented out. And he said that in his property management experience, it’s amazing how once tenants begin paying for their own electricity and water, their electricity and water bills just plummet.

So I can imagine in these contexts, it’s like, okay, once they’re on the hook for it and there’s some money, some incentives at stake, they just naturally say, “You know, maybe we could shower a little shorter. Maybe, you know, 74 degrees is cool enough this summer.”

So in the universe of time, once you put that in-your-face challenge about, “Hey, you manage you,” where does the extra time appear from in practice?

Neal Schore
So, obviously, you can’t manufacture time, so it’s not actually about extra time. It’s about the time we stop giving away. So what I have developed in my practice over the last 20-some years is exercises and tools that are very practical, lighthearted, easy to implement, relatively easy to understand that brings the control back to you.

So we spend a lot of time and energy and effort trying to control things that we can’t control, out of our control elements, whether it’s people or processes. And when you manage you, no matter what your rank or title is, it is where the time comes from.

So I’ve watched smart, really capable people just erode enormous sums of time. And with this training and the toolbox, they get to just bring that back. So if I had to say it’s simple, it would be it’s not really about extra time, it’s about the time you stop giving away.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You manage you, stop giving away. Could you share with us a story to paint a picture of all this in action?

Neal Schore
Okay, so I have a client who is petrified of his board.

Neal Schore
So he’s a CEO and he is petrified of his board because he’s got an incredible amount of imposter syndrome. And although he’s the founder of his company and most of the board members of the financial institutions that are supporting him, he just believes that anytime he will get fired.

And so the amount of time and energy that he spends focusing in on not getting fired by over-delivering information, over-emphasizing emails, writes really long emails, what he’ll do in terms of how he manages board meetings, overselling in board meetings, his board wound up growing frustrated with him, not about performance, but about his being long-winded and long in writing. So it backfires.

Now, the emails that he was writing, by how not to get in trouble, so to speak, were taking an enormous amount of time. So, here, he’s spending lots of time crafting and over-communicating, and it’s being poorly received because it’s being viewed as self-serving and non-informative. And so it’s an absolute misfire. So that’s one.

With those modifications, he picked up at least an hour a day. We’re talking about more like 10 hours a week in his board management. With me, I have a great one. It’s a little embarrassing, but I’m free to talk about it. I have freed myself to talk about it.

I’m a young manager. I’m about 25 years old. Most of my staff is about 10 years older than me, way more experienced. And after one of my first team meetings, a woman on the team pulls me aside and says, “Neal, you are really powerful.” And I said, “Thank you?” in a very timid, meek way. And she walked away.

And I spent the next three months, no exaggeration, this is the embarrassing part, trying not to be powerful. So that meant that I was, like, staying late and hanging out with the team members and like back to when I was starting my career, which had only been three years earlier, and like first in, last out, “I’m going to show her I’m not powerful.”

And it was eating me up, I was swirling at night, like the loop just kept playing, wasn’t sleeping well. Finally, I went to her and just said, “Hey, I’d love for you to just explain to me what you meant by powerful.”

And she goes, “Oh, that’s easy. You sit tall in your chair, you’re very approachable, you answer questions very clearly, and you’re always available to help. And I just find that so powerful.”

So, here, she had paid me really like a beautiful compliment, and embarrassingly, I swirled for three months. So had I just paused, figured out her intent, “Is she trying to insult me right now? I don’t think so,” and then just asked that quick, clarifying question, like, “Help me understand what you mean by powerful,” I would have absorbed a compliment and saved myself three months of not being my authentic self.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So there’s our theme. So you manage you because you’re eroding all kinds of time doing things that are not so helpful. And it’s kind of some emotional things at play with regard to doubts and fears that are influencing us to do things that just torch the time.

Neal Schore
Absolutely, consistently, no matter whether you are a young professional or whether you are the CEO and founder, I have not found any exception to the fears that redirect our behavior, the emotional part that you mentioned, away from you managing you. That’s where we try to manage other people.

Like in my case, I wound up trying to be, “Oh, one of the team,” and I was trying to manage them to, in fact, like me, because I didn’t want to be powerful. I viewed the word power as, you know, maniacal or Machiavellian, or I don’t know where exactly my mind wandered, but it was 100% me not managing me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that sounds like a compelling thesis and opportunity for improvement. We are eroding time, giving it away, because we’re not managing ourselves optimally, but rather we’re letting fears, doubts, emotional things manage us. So, Neal, what is to be done?

Neal Schore
So I’m very metaphorical in the way that I teach, and, certainly, in the book, there are a lot of examples and stories and illustrations and metaphors. So what’s to be done?

Well, our robots, and this is the metaphorical robot each of us have, are programmed young to build sequences. In my view, it starts in kindergarten. We go to lunch at 11:37. In my case, I had three varieties of lunch, came in the same lunch box that I carried every single day.

I lined up for recess at 12:02. You came back in from recess at 12:27. It was just very methodical. And that is a representation of how we start our careers and enter the workforce, and then it becomes a sequence of analyst, and then associate, and then director and then principal. And no matter what the titling nomenclature is, there’s a sequence to getting promoted.

And what I like to say is our robots need to be reprogrammed. We have to break sequences. And it’s really uncomfortable to do because it is so amazingly preset or programmed. And so I start people with silly exercises, like, what I call the pant-leg challenge. So what pant-leg do you put on first? Are you a lefty-righty or a righty-lefty?

Pete Mockaitis
I think I have a sequence of not paying enough attention, and rather just thinking about other things or how I better hurry up and get out the door.

Neal Schore
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But, as you say it and I imagine, I think right first.

Neal Schore
Okay, so you’re a righty-lefty. And as you just very properly described, very few of us, in fact, I’ve done this with thousands of people, are focused in on what pant-leg we put on first. We just put on our pants. And our minds are somewhere else, or we’re contemplating whatever it is that we are doing as we are getting dressed.

When I have people change their pant-leg, so you’re righty-lefty, for the next 30 days, you are now a lefty-righty. So that means that when you go to put on your pants, you have to pause, actually stop and think, and put your pant leg on lefty-righty. Or, if you go in your robot sequence, you have to take your pants off and put them back on.

And what winds up happening, and again, I acknowledge this sounds silly on the surface, but what winds up happening is we realize, through an exercise like this, the pant-leg challenge, how programmed we are when it comes to things like our participation in meetings, the length of meetings, the way we call meetings, who attends meetings, and how many accommodations we make around that.

So someone walks into the meeting and they start talking with a colleague about their weekend, and there’s 10 people in the room, and two people are talking, and everyone else is just sitting around waiting for them to finish a conversation.

Very few people are going to say, “Hey, this meeting was called for 11:00 a.m. We’re starting at 11:00 a.m.” It starts at 11:05 or 11:07 or 11:10. And that erosion of even five, seven, 10 minutes multiplied by 10 people in the room, multiplied by the amount of meetings that you have in a day is hours of erosion.

And so when you start to, then, calculate and do things differently, the meeting starts at 11:00, I always teach people to end meetings at least 10% early. So if you wind up having 10 people in a 30-minute meeting that winds up going 27 minutes instead of 30, everyone gets back three minutes. Three minutes is a lot of time to run to the restroom, get a snack, you know, feed the dog, just walk outside for a second.

Pete Mockaitis
Start the next load of laundry.

Neal Schore
Right, start a load of laundry, whatever you want to do, enormous amount of time. And we don’t worry about whether someone is late, or whether they’re not, everyone is adults, and you just start breaking these sequences and the patterns that the company, any company, has been following, and it’s, again, a game-changer.

Then I teach people to take 50% of their meetings, and, excuse me, 75% of their meetings, and make them 50% shorter. So a 30-minute meeting can be done in 15 minutes. And when you take 10 people in that meeting and it’s done in 15 minutes, not only is everyone thrilled, you’re like, “Hallelujah! I just got 15 minutes back to my day,” but that’s 150 minutes of productivity in a company off of one meeting.

And everyone is happier. And you do that by having a very clear agenda. You don’t let anyone derail it. You start, you stop, you go. And there’s tools in the book that I teach about checking in and using professional vulnerability, but also about how to meeting management, a critical part of time loss.

And then people walk out happy, which spreads positive contagious, as opposed to people walking out with the ughs. Ughs is like, “Ugh, I can’t believe I had to sit in that meeting,” or, “I can’t believe I have to go to my next one,” and “Ugh, I can’t stand listening to this guy,” whatever it might be. Everyone gets the ughs, which is a massive time-crusher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re breaking the robot sequences and, particularly, with regard to meetings, I guess what I’m hearing is to thoughtfully assess and assert ourselves in order to not just erode the time.

So, like, “Let’s start the meeting on time. Hey, do we really need to have all these people in this meeting? Do we really need to have it this full length? Let’s shoot for 10% earlier.” So it’s like the robot sequence is a bit of a lazy or thoughtless autopilot that just goes with the flow and time slips away in the process.

Neal Schore
Absolutely. So if we put this in the more practical sphere, step one is to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to do things differently. And then when we put this in a more practical sphere, my favorite story, which I highlight in the book, is around a company that I started working with as they were in the rapid growth stage.

When they started the company, it was eight to ten of them, and they did a morning stand-up every day. I believe it was 8:15 in the morning. And so as they started to grow and they had hundreds of employees, they kept the morning stand-up at 8:15 in the morning.

So everyone arrived in the office around 8:10 to go to the morning stand-up at 8:15. And the office space expanded, of course, but the routine of the meeting was incredibly robotic, what they shared, how they shared it, even then having to start to use a microphone in order to amplify and get the message out. And it lasted about 45 minutes or so, 45 minutes, sometimes an hour.

So every single person, hundreds of people in the company’s day was built around the morning stand-up. Well, we moved it from an everyday meeting to a once-a-week meeting. And the once-a-week meeting rotated every five weeks. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And then, ultimately, we eliminated Friday, so it was four days.

And we wound up building an agenda around the meeting because not every data point that was being shared was applicable. So when you then do the math and you calculate the amount of time saved by not having everyone attend, reducing the meeting to once a week, it was 15,000 hours of productivity redeposited back to the company.

When we looked at the staffing plan of the company, it wound up being a massive reduction in future hires required simply by changing the morning stand-up. And there was no loss of information because so much of the information was just in this rhythm, “And every morning we talk about this and this and this,” which with eight people it works. With hundreds of people, it doesn’t.

And so breaking that sequence wound up, again, over 15,000 hours of productivity back. not only enhanced the bottom line, but people started to come in at 7:00 a. m. So you started this measure and see, instead of rolling in at 8:00 to be an 8:15 stand-up, people actually worked more hours as well.

So people got there at 7:00, it was preferred. Sometimes they left closer to 4:00 o’clock. Other people there, 7:00, 8:00 o’clock at night. So this punch-the-clock mentality that was developed by this morning stand-up completely changed the culture of this company.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. All right. So understood. We’ll thoughtfully take a look at our robot sequences, break them up, see what happens, get more comfortable being uncomfortable. I’d like to zero in some more on this emotional stuff: imposter syndrome, fears, doubts. What are some of your other favorite moves for dealing with these emotional matters?

Neal Schore
So one of the most practical is pausing, then figuring out what the intent of the situation is, and then asking clarifying questions. So it’s like a very quick, rapid fire, in your head, you manage you, where someone is saying something, and then you’re figuring out, “What are they actually trying to ask here?”

Or, “Do they really need my help or do they just want attention from me?” Or, “Why is it that they’re confused?” So we solve for it. Sometimes it’s very much on the surface, “Yeah, I just didn’t clarify it well, or they need some more information.” And then just ask clarifying questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So this is in our interpersonal matters. Rather than stew and try to read the tea leaves of what they might have meant by such a thing, to, in fact, pause and simply ask.

Neal Schore
Correct. Pause, simply ask. Sometimes it’s just about buying a little time, asking and just getting a little bit of time to figure out the intent. But when trained in this, it becomes, you know, within three to 10 seconds, it becomes a very rhythmic way that we save ourselves a lot of time by not getting distracted, by not understanding the intent.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we are all by our lonesome selves, anything we can do to help us get a handle on this fear, doubt, and imposter syndrome stuff?

Neal Schore
So one of the things, one of the tools that I have developed, I call cookies. So cookies came from the eight-year-old version of myself, where in my household, my mom ran a tough kitchen. You did not get dessert before dinner. Period.

And one time, my sister snuck me a pack of Chips Ahoy at 5:00 o’clock before dinner, and it was like a euphoric feeling. I won the cookie lottery. You can’t even describe it. I literally remember vividly, like being at dinner that night, like I beat the system. It was incredible.

And I remember, because it was so euphoric, the idea of giving cookies, that affirmation to employees is really important, but receiving it is also critically important. And the higher we get in organizations, the less cookies or affirmation we receive.

So a CEO of a company, very, very, very few cookies. Like, very few people walking up to me as the CEO of my company and saying, “Neal, you crushed it in that meeting,” or, “Great job in that presentation today,” or, “You did a wonderful job with that client.” It doesn’t happen.

When we, on the other hand, as a CEO, it is very important for me to provide that affirmation and those cookies. So I teach people to, in you manage you, to give themselves their cookies.

And so it would be like this. You could say to yourself after this podcast, “I asked great questions today. I am so happy that I found Neal to bring on as a guest to the show. I am thrilled with the way that everything is going.” It could be any of that. It takes about five seconds to do. And when we learn to give ourselves that nutrition, we become less dependent and needy on other people.

So even as the CEO, we don’t get a lot of affirmation. We get very little, in fact. However, we’re humans. We need it. And so learning how to provide ourselves that affirmation, I call the, you know, sticking with the theme of cookies, that nutrition, it’s great.

And the more cookies we provide ourselves, the more enhancements we allow to reduce that noise for the next test or the next presentation or the next meeting, whatever it may be.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And when you give yourself these cookies, are there any best practices? I’m thinking about, Ethan Kross, who wrote the book Chatter, was a guest of the show, mentioned that using your name in the third person can have some distancing effects, providing a different perspective and can reduce rumination.

And his example, like LeBron James has got to do what’s best for LeBron James, is the example he used. And so in this instance, it’s almost like, I’m guessing, we might want to do the opposite in terms of, like, your front and center, like, “Pete, you were very effective in that interview,” or whatever, I don’t know, “Hey, look in the mirror. Give yourself a hug.”

I don’t know, Neal, you tell me. What is the best practice for making these cookies as hot and tasty and wonderful as possible?

Neal Schore
I love it. You literally nailed it. So one of the other things that I teach people is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And there’s a wildly uncomfortable component to talking to yourself and looking at yourself. And so that’s exactly what I have people do.

So you have to go to a mirror or some sort of reflective device. It could be an elevator in a building, you know, going up or down in an elevator, whatever it may be, preferably with no one around because it’s a personal thing and talking to yourself could wind up putting your business in other people’s business.

And so the other thing is when you’re online, if you’re using Teams or Zoomers or whatever your device is, when you hang up from a meeting, when I hang up from a meeting, it is me staring at me.

And so I spend a lot of time on video with my clients every single week. So when I’ve had a particularly impactful session, instead of immediately flipping my computer down, I have them exit the meeting, the virtual meeting room, and I’m eyeball to eyeball looking at myself.

And I’m like, “Neal, you crushed it. The way you explained that today was exceptionally good. Nice work.” And no one’s hearing me. I’m in a private setting. I am looking at myself, which is very uncomfortable to start with, and I’m providing myself that affirmation, which not only provides the cookies or that nutrition, but it’s also very energizing, right?

No different than when someone pays another person a compliment, there’s a boost that the other person gets. And so, again, as you get higher in a company and you go through the ranks in the org chart, we receive less, although the humanity and our needs don’t change. And so, therefore, you manage you works incredibly well in that case.

Pete Mockaitis
And even if you’re low in the company, if you just have a manager who doesn’t share, you know, supportive encouragement very often, you go for it. I think that’s swell.

Neal Schore
It’s a great point. I was with a young professional just yesterday who’s one of our clients that is drowning in “I hate my job,” and very generationally apropos, “And I get absolutely no credit for the work I do.” And the conversation is like, “Well, why do you need credit from someone else for the work you do?”

And then we go through a series of questions that get, I go through a series of questions that gets that person to the other end of it, which winds up going, “Yeah, I can manage myself.” And so that is in the simplest form, but it’s very applicable there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. You know, I chuckle, I’m imagining the Fathom AI meeting Notetaker capturing that as a summary bullet at the end of the meeting, “And Neal congratulates himself for being awesome.”

Neal Schore
There’s no doubt about it that that has happened, and it is very funny. I wound up forwarding notes from a meeting. It’s very funny. This happened just last week. Forwarding notes from a meeting where I didn’t pay attention to the AI Notetaker. And I had a moment of cookie.

And one of our team members who was looking at it, was like, “Great cookie you gave yourself.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a little embarrassing? But not really.”

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

Neal Schore
Well, I would say that the applicability of the toolbox and the book is there from, again, young professional, even students through retirement. It is also professionally-oriented and in the book, you learn so many tools. One of my absolute favorites, I call “It’s my fault.” It winds up being, again, a game-changer for people who naturally respond defensively, which is about almost all of us, and so many great things there.

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s my fault.” Can you tell us what’s that about?

Neal Schore
Your neighbor’s garbage can fell over, it was your fault, or there’s traffic on the freeway, it’s your fault. And people get very, “How is that possible?” and that’s part of the teachings. And then when you accept the word fault as not being like a dirty, nasty, ugly word, which it really is, like blame, default, it is, and we do things differently, and we just change that defensive setting that we’re all programmed in, it winds up saving not only a lot of time, but we just live happier.

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my own grievous fault.”

Neal Schore
There it is.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite quote?

Neal Schore
Build your people who build your business.

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

Neal Schore
So it’s David Brooks, who’s an author, has a management philosophy around great managers make people feel seen. And there is research around that that he quotes in his book that I find so compelling about employees not needing job descriptions, and learning is really a big part of the motivation system, and experiences are what drive it. And there’s data in there that support all those points. And it is philosophically very much in line with what I believe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Neal Schore
One of my favorite books is From Strength to Strength, and the other one is Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Neal Schore
My favorite tool is firing your devil.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we do that?

Neal Schore
So you fire your devil. Your devil is that metaphorical devil and angel sit on our shoulders, the devil becomes the governor, activates all of our fear systems, becomes the narrator of all those things that cost us enormous sums of time and feed the swirling.

And when we fire our devil, which literally is an exercise where we have a conversation with our devil-self, that version of us that’s that devil, and we’re like, “You’re out of here. You are not welcome here anymore. I am kicking you out. Turn in your keys. Turn in your computer.”

And there’s a whole exercise that I take people through so that when the swirls start, we have the concepts of, “Oh, wait a second. The devil is no longer around.” And then the angel gets to come back and take over the governing of that moment. It saves a lot of time and it winds up bringing that levity or that fun tone to what I teach in my practice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Neal Schore
Favorite habit is exercise. So I am really good about trying to do something every day. So I am not maniacal about it where I have to have it, but I’m mindful about it and I feel better being in the habit of doing something physical or exercise-oriented every day.

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?

Neal Schore
So one of the tools that I teach is around the line of mediocrity. So the concept is, this is the line of mediocrity. It’s just a straight line. And just below the line is mediocre. And just above the line is good. And up here, straight to the right, is exceptional.

And every day, we have moments where we are mediocre, we have moments where we are good, and we have moments of exceptional. We are trained to be mediocre. We learn to be good and we strive to be exceptional.

And what I hear religiously from clients and people that I’ve been in discussions around the book and otherwise is how mediocre, again, a word that isn’t necessarily pleasant, but we bring that lighter tone to it, saves a ton of time and energy where you just go, “Oh, I was just mediocre,” and you have fun with it. And then we fix it and strive for our exceptional.

So leadership is hard. We just recognize mediocre and strive for exceptional.

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

Neal Schore
Well, they can go to NealSchore.com. It’s N-E-A-L-S-C-H-O-R-E.com, or 25HourGroup.com, and there’s links to the book there and all kinds of different exercises and learnings and teachings on the websites as well.

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

Neal Schore
My final call to action is break the sequence. Do not do things tomorrow the same way you did today. You will get comfortable in your uncomfortable, I promise you. And to just shake it up. You’re going to see a whole new world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Neal, thank you.

Neal Schore
Thank you so much.

Sep 28

1184: How to Know When to Quit with Lindsay Crouse

By Podcasts No Comments

Lindsay Crouse reveals the surprising signs that your grit may be working against you.

You’ll Learn

  1. How purposeless endurance keeps you stuck
  2. How small acts of quitting can make bigger decisions better
  3. Why we’re so afraid to quit–and how to get over it

About Lindsay

Lindsay Crouse is an independent producer and journalist and author of The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. A 15-year veteran of The New York Times, her Emmy-nominated work on women’s sports brought widespread change to the industry, including maternity protections for elite athletes sponsored by Nike. 

In The Times’s Opinion section, she wrote and commissioned widely read essays and produced hundreds of short documentaries, including commissioning The Times’s first Academy Award-winning film. A life-long competitive distance runner, she graduated from Harvard College, and lives in New York City with her family.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Lindsay, welcome!

Lindsay Crouse
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about quitting. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you made while putting together your book, The Case for Quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
I think, for me, the biggest insight, I’ll just start by saying, like, I am somebody who approached this book by having embraced a life where I did not like to quit.

I think, in hindsight, I think I feared quitting more than I let myself admit and just kind of clung behind this idea that perseverance is inherently noble. It is inherently the moral and correct thing to do in nearly every situation, and that all champions, truly believe, truly persevere by not stopping, like, that is how they succeed.

And so, I think, I really became convinced, over the course of reporting this and from talking to a lot of people who walked away, that quitting is a companion action to perseverance. It is actually an agent of perseverance.

And if you just stick your head down at every obstacle that you face and you don’t recognize futility or you don’t recognize that your energy might be better suited elsewhere, you are the one that loses in the end. And that, to me, was a surprisingly novel epiphany.

Pete Mockaitis
Quitting is a companion to perseverance. A companion as in it helps you persevere more, or a companion as in these things go together like peanut butter and jelly?

Lindsay Crouse
The former. I think if we’re going to achieve our potential, we really need to get better at quitting. And that means understanding the difference between productive hard work versus the performative kind or work that’s pointlessly hard, like, meaningful struggle versus suffering that keeps us stuck, healthy versus harmful persistence.

You need to be able to quit the parts of perseverance that are bad for you in order to be able to go, you know, potentially further than you want to, than you were going if you just stayed on the path that you were on.

And so I really became convinced that quitting is often a courageous first step to finding something better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a fun story that illustrates all this?

Lindsay Crouse
I’ll give you the story of the woman that I open with. She’s a marathon runner whose story kind of overlaps with my own. Her name is Keira D’Amato, and she, for the longest time, all she wanted was one goal, which was to become an Olympian. And she threw everything that she had at this goal. And she got really close.

Like, she would routinely finish on the podium at NCAA’s, which is the national championships for track in America. So, obviously, somebody like her who is incredibly perseverant has used that attribute to get to where she was, she’s going to keep going. After college, she started training, she put everything again into the school of becoming an Olympian.

And, obviously, what came next was she got injured. And so she didn’t want to believe that. And she just kept training and training. And soon the sport that she loved became something that she started to dread. And that happened to me as well. I’m also a competitive marathon runner.

And I realized that, over years, I just started getting injured so much and just kind of, you know, instead of stopping and resetting and letting these injuries kind of fix themselves, I would just, like, ice my shin bone into submission under my desk, and it didn’t work.

And then after about five years, I started to realize, like, I hadn’t even hit a starting line, so I’d, effectively, quit as well. And that’s what Keira did. And instead of continuing to train, and obviously she was devastated, but she just moved on, finally, she let go.

And she got a regular job. She started a family. She started to disentangle her identity from this goal and this way of life that she’d had and kind of built her whole life around. And then she started to come back slowly, like after maybe like a decade or something.

And then she realized, A, talent doesn’t disappear but too much perseverance can kill your talent, and it can definitely kill your drive, and she just kept going. And, this time, there were no expectations, no way of actually assessing success, because the goal wasn’t to win anymore. The goal was to just explore and figure out what she could do.

And she got faster and faster and, ultimately, started actually beating some of the athletes who had single-mindedly devoted their careers to their sport. Ultimately, she wound up setting the national record in the marathon for women, which, to me, was just such an exciting and truly compelling example of how quitting can actually help you succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that’s quite lovely. It’s not so much she found a totally different thing but, you know, returned to the first thing and came out even better. You said a haunting line, “The thing you loved, you’ve come to dread.” That’s heavy, and I think something many of us can relate to. How does that love turn into dread?

Lindsay Crouse
I think that can really start to happen when we’re persevering in the wrong way. And this can often happen when we really, really care about something. Like, this is why I wrote this book, in fact. It’s for incredibly perseverant people and hardworking people who believe that hard work and never giving up is the only key to success.

And, in fact, if you persevere when you’re failing or when you’re actually just working so hard that you no longer enjoy what you’re doing and it’s starting to diminish your ability to do that thing well, the only way to reset, or the only smart way, really, is to quit, to stop, to pivot, potentially, and then, ideally, regain momentum when you’re ready to come back.

And persevering at something that is failing or that is not working or that you are dreading, it’s just draining and it doesn’t work. But that’s what I was talking about in the beginning of this interview when I was saying that working pointlessly hard does not succeed.

But momentum is energizing and that’s where perseverance really matters and follows through. But I think we don’t always know the difference or we’re not able to recognize it at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Persevering at something that’s draining, it just doesn’t work.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, it’s just diminishing returns. It takes your energy, it makes you miserable, and, worse, it keeps you from investing all of that energy and work in something that actually might succeed.

Entrepreneurs know this, athletes know this. I mean, this is what champions understand, but I think, for us, we just think of quitting as this blanket negative action and that’s what I’m hoping to correct with this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us some pro tips on distinguishing? If any of us are thinking, “Uh-oh, there’s something that I love that I’ve come to dread,” what are some good signals to know, “Ahh, that might mean it’s time to quit,” as opposed to, “Oh, well, you know, you just need a little bit of a rest,” “Oh, actually, that’s depression,” “Oh, actually, that’s some other need in life is getting trampled upon and left unmet”? How do we kind of disentangle the complex inner life as we make these decisions?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve been really frustrated by this in the past, like before I wrote this book, because it always seemed like the answer to “Should I quit or keep going?” was just, “It depends,” and that is so frustrating because it’s like, “Okay, well, it depends on what?”

And, I mean, I think the way that I’d finish that sentence now is the knowing whether to quit or persevere. It depends on the reasons why you’re continuing. And so you just need to understand, “Are you continuing because you love what you’re doing, regardless of the outcome?” So, obviously, for like the intrinsic action of whatever you’re doing.

Or, “Are you continuing because you’re afraid of confronting what might happen if you stop?” And I don’t think we’re taught to ask ourselves those questions enough. It’s often just the answer is, “Persevere. Like, do not relent.”

And so I think if someone’s asking this themselves, “Should they continue or should they quit?” you know, particularly, if they’re pursuing a specific goal, one way to think about this, about whether to persevere or to quit is by assessing your progress.

So are you continuing despite the fact that, instead of getting closer to your goal over time, you’re actually getting farther away? Did you keep moving the goalpost of what it would take to abandon the quest?

Like, do you keep telling yourself, “If I just finish this deadline, if I just file this paper, if I just hit this number, it’s just never enough”? I think when you realize that you’re asking yourself those questions, those are probably times when it actually might be wise to quit. This is not just a setback anymore. This is you grinding with no outcome.

Another thing that I get into in this book that I found really interesting is there’s a lot of neuroscience these days, a lot of research that shows that our brains actually signal futility to us a lot more than we realize. This is true in small animals called zebrafish that scientists are studying to learn more about how and why we quit.

But a lot of humans have learned to suppress those quitting cues, obviously, with our grit and our heroic perseverance. So I think one way to tell, to think about, you know, if you’re facing, if you’re not at this crossroads, but you’re trying to decide, like, “Okay, is this a setback or should I just stop?”

And one way to think about this doesn’t involve much thinking at all because your brain is actually telling you and you already know.

Pete Mockaitis
These neuroscience futility cues, what are they? What do they look like, sound like, feel like when they’re happening?

Lindsay Crouse
So these are called glia. These are small cells in our brain, it’s at a lab called Janelia, which is in Northern Virginia outside of DC, and there’s a neuroscientist there named Misha Ahrens, who’s doing a lot of research on these zebrafish and around how they encounter futility.

So zebrafish, they’re really small, tiny animals. They need to know how to quit in order to survive. And traditionally, they live in these rice paddies in the river Delta of the Ganges in India. And so if they get swept out to sea, that’s devastating for them. They will die. So they need to understand what to do in a current.

And so, in these labs, the zebrafish are made to believe that their effort is failing, and these glia in their brain will actually tell them to stop. And so we have the same, humans have the same mechanisms in our brain, but we suppress those urges. We might call that grit or, you know, something that a champion might do.

But, actually, we should stop as well. Like, when we’re being swept back by a current, the smartest thing to do is stop, save your energy, and wait for a moment or find a path where all of this energy might succeed instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, that’s great for these fish. Pretty clever stuff going on there. So our stop signals, outside of water, what are they?

Lindsay Crouse
Well, one way to think about whether to persevere, or to quit if you’re trying to measure your effort over a long period of time, is to consider – I mean, this sounds really obvious – but is your effort working?

If you look back over the past five or 10 years, are you getting closer to your goal or are you getting further away? Optimism. We’ll often tell ourselves, “Oh, we’re actually just one swing away,” when we’re actually much further.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what’s interesting is quit, I suppose, can occur in a micro sense or a macro sense.

Lindsay Crouse
Yes, that’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if someone is in business, it’s like, “Hmm, you know, this business just isn’t growing, yeah, year after year.” And so we could quit in terms of, “We should dramatically change the approach that we’re using to acquire and retain customers.” Or we could quit in terms of, “Sell this business. Get out of here. This is not for me.”

So I’m thinking there are some subtleties, some nuance, some master-level ways to think about. How big a quit are we talking here?

Lindsay Crouse
Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s 100% right. There’s sort of micro quitting where it’s looking almost doing like a curation of our lives, and excavating the things that are holding us back or kind of weighing us down.

I mean, I think a lot of us, especially the older that we get, if we don’t do that, we’re living with patterns and behaviors and even routines and things that were established by a 20-year-old or even someone younger, even when we were children.

And I think it is a really healthy micro-quitting behavior to, you know, especially as we start to get tired or get frustrated or simply just kind of, I don’t know, experience malaise. We often think that we need to add more to our lives in order to improve them. But, actually, and there’s a lot of research here as well, that the solution, when we do have a problem, is actually to take something away.

And so this, I think, is an example of micro-quitting where you can inventory your life and kind of look at the clutter, like, “Is it digital clutter? Is it schedule clutter? Is it clutter in your home almost?” And it is sort of quitting to throw that stuff away or discard it or end it.

But then, of course, there is that macro-quitting which is very different. It’s taking a path that you’re on and pivoting to something else. But I think, often, doing those kind of micro-quitting exercises can help you build the muscle to make those bigger decisions down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the notion of clutter a lot, metaphorically here, because I think there is a lot of emotional overlap associated with these concepts. I’ve gone through this many times, I guess, every time I’ve moved, and then a few more times after that in terms of, “Let’s really see. Okay, do I really need to take all the stuff with me to the next place? Really?”

And so we go through the closets. Like, “When was the last time I wore that? Wow, you know, I think it’s almost a year ago.” It’s like, “So, obviously, it’s not, you know, a top garment choice for me. It’s not a go-to by any means.” And yet, it feels sort of hard to let go of it.

And, I mean, I’m a semi-tidy person, you know, ups and downs. It doesn’t look like an episode of “Hoarders,” but it’s also not, you know, a masterpiece that Marie Kondo would be proud of. And I’m just sort of, I’m in the middle, with regard to my clutter and tidiness.

And yet, though I prefer, you know, tidy, clear space, it is a bit emotionally challenging to say goodbye to any number of items that aren’t doing much for me, “But, oh, I kind of like them and I might use them someday.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so I think, in that case, I would just kind of, I mean, there’s a lot of things you have to tell yourself that you don’t want to necessarily hear, but the past is gone. Like, you cannot recover what you’ve already spent. All you can do is look forward and think about, “Will this thing make me happy in the future?” not, “How will I feel without it?”

And stepping away or like letting go of an object or a place or a thing or even a relationship, just because you spent so much time in it, that  doesn’t mean that you should continue to do it. Stepping away from something that’s bad for you prevents that loss from actually getting bigger.

And I think you could ask yourself, like, if you were starting over today, would you still keep this thing with you? Again, like, often, that’s an answer where we would say, “Absolutely not,” but we don’t ask ourselves that question, and that’s sunk cost holding us back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is an excellent de-cluttering question. It’s, like, “Would you buy it again today? Or, even, if you’re at a garage sale and it was a nickel, almost free, would you still pick it up?” So very handy in the clutter world versus, and the other dimensions as well.

So I think what’s intriguing here is, I think, that this might be a tendency in all of us. You tell me, Lindsay, you’ve done the research, that I went right for the hard, complex, tricky, intricate, disentangle-y kinds of questions with regard to quitting.

But sometimes a friend and guest of the show, Kwame Christian, says fear masquerades in many forms and sometimes this is one of them, in terms of there might be complex quitting questions, but I imagine some of them are actually intellectually easy but emotionally hard.

So could you just shine a real bright spotlight on that for us to really, you know, prick our consciences or our souls to say, “Uh-oh, yeah, I think I’ve been avoiding this”?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so, I’m happy to talk about this idea of, well, I think what really holds us back from quitting often, and this is so obvious, but it’s fear, right? We’re afraid. And I think that fear can be paralyzing. And it’s important to recognize, like, that’s smart. Like, this is our brain protecting us. We naturally hate uncertainty.

And, again, that actually means that you’re wise to not want to just kind of, like, flagrantly quit everything. And also, look, you are a hard worker. You don’t just kind of leave things behind easily.

But I think, again, that makes us feel like quitting is this moral failure at times when it is actually the smart choice. So, usually, our fear around quitting, it involves judgment that we made the wrong choice, that we are going to regret what we’re doing. And so, ultimately, this fear really proves unfounded.

And I think we fear two different things. We fear the critiques of others, judgment from other people. And there’s a bias called the spotlight effect that observes that we often think about ourselves as going around with this imaginary, like, light on us, like we’re under an imaginary spotlight. And that means that we assume a lot of, like, the other people around us are paying a lot more attention to us than they actually are.

And so for this book, I talked to an actress, and she quit her career after she noticed that all the other actors around her were actually putting their lives, their actual lives on hold to pursue this dream that they no longer really believed in just because, as she put it, they told everyone in their tiny hometown that if they quit, they were going to be a star, and they just couldn’t seem to let go. Obviously, she felt this pressure, too.

And then she did quit. I mean, she really wanted to stop pursuing this dream. She’d made it, but it was time to stop. And it turned out, when she told everyone, like her friends and family, that they all thought the same thing, that they thought when she headed out to Hollywood like a decade or something before that, like, “Sounds great. We support you.”

And so I think that just means that that fear of other people judging us, we just need to accept that the people that really care about anything, that no one cares. And the people that really do care about us, they’re going to be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Most people don’t care and those who do will be supportive. So there you go.

Lindsay Crouse
Exactly. And then, of course, we also fear judgment from the scariest judge of all, which is ourselves, and that comes down to regret. Like, what if we regret our decision to leave? But research also shows that this fear is unfounded.

Over the long course of our lives, what we really regret is inaction, decisions that we didn’t make. And quitting is, ultimately, a decision. It’s a bold act. And what we regret in the long course of our lives is, like, being too afraid to act, too afraid to change, like being too timid.

And so I think, again, if you’re listening to your instincts, most likely when you’re looking back when you’re 80 or 100 or whoever knows how old we’ll be, you’re going to be glad that you acted and didn’t wait longer.

And I think that’s the other thing that’s really important to think about quitting and became very persuasive to me. What we should probably fear the most is failing to decide because, then, we’re bouncing these decisions to our five- or 10-years older selves, and we’re leaving those versions of ourselves with the same hard questions and even harder stakes, because it doesn’t get easier to leave. We just get older.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and you have less time to adjust, you know, rescale, etc., to the new world, post-quitting.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, the stakes go up, and it’s harder to leave. And, again, that sets us up for even greater regret down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, also, you’ve got a number of fun terms and definitions. Let’s hear about purposeless endurance. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like so we might be able to better recognize it within ourselves?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so this is kind of like grit for the sake of it. I mean, another way, I think, to think about it is just kind of like bad work. We think about hard work as just being inherently virtuous, but we can just grind and grind, and almost use that work as a way to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re not actually going anywhere but we feel like the work itself is valuable.

And I think there a number of costs to this. Obviously, the cost of grinding really hard, I don’t like the word burnout, but you can’t grind really hard forever. But, also, you’re grinding with this idea that there is going to be a finish line, and that it is all going to stop, and that it is going to get you somewhere. And work for the sake of work, it doesn’t necessarily work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re enduring, but it’s purposeless in that there’s no purpose. And yet, we’ve almost affixed, superimposed a purpose, like, “Hard work is virtuous in and of itself because it makes me disciplined or gritty or virtuously holy or moral or, in some way, desirable and admirable because I’m hustling, I’m grinding, I’m exerting effort, and that is to be celebrated.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah. I think society bombards us, men and women alike, with inspiration to keep going and go harder and do more. And we can almost use this idea that we can keep going as a proxy for believing that we should. And, yeah, this is purposeless.

And I think the other thing that does is it helps us, or it encourages us, to ignore the costs that pile up while we’re busy doing all this heroic but also purposeless endurance. And so you really have to take yourself out of this. And, I mean, it’s such a simple question, but you could even just ask yourself like, “Why am I still doing this?”

And if you find yourself just reaching for the answer, “Because I can,” as opposed to, you know, a better reason, that would be an example of purposeless endurance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very nice. And then on the flip side, there’s a Finnish term. Can you pronounce it for us, S-I-S-U? What does this mean?

Lindsay Crouse
Sisu, yeah. I’m probably saying it wrong, but, yeah, so Finland is the happiest country in the world, according to these studies, like year after year after year. And one reason, if you talk to Finnish people, like one attribute that really sets themselves apart is this idea of Sisu.

The idea that Finns can endure any obstacle that comes their way, grimly, obviously. But they will get through it. And so I talked to this Finnish scholar, her name is Emilia Lahti – and she talks about how there are actually different kinds of Sisu. I mean, this is obvious, but there’s good Sisu and bad Sisu.

And good Sisu, obviously, is resilience. Like, this is where we put perseverance in it. Like, this is how we think of perseverance and what we actually want it to get us, which is like when we face a setback, we can push through it.

But then there’s also harmful Sisu where you just find yourself grinding and grinding. It’s not getting you what you want. And, meanwhile, you’re expecting others to do the same. It’s almost like that reliance on yourself even when it’s not working.

And what bad Sisu does is it keeps us from understanding that we could actually go around the boulder. We don’t just have to push through, that there are better options. Like, bad Sisu can actually make us feel more helpless about how we approach problems and make us think that the only option is to push through when there are better ways to get what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, a good Sisu, bad Sisu, Finland, I can’t help but think of a sauna.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, absolutely. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
It is sauna, you know? Sometimes it’s good, and it’s, “Oh, yeah, this is really…hmm, this is just what I needed, you know? This is relaxing. It’s just melting away the tension.” And then there’s, like, “I got to hold on for 20 whole minutes.” And it’s just brutal at the end, and it’s like, “Is that really beneficial for anyone? I don’t know.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, like, “What did this get me?” And, yeah, I don’t get into sauna, specifically, in the book, but I think that’s exactly the right thinking. It’s just, like, “Why am I still…? Like, if I’m pushing in the sauna to the point of, you know, potentially passing out, like, why am I still doing this? Like, has it flipped into, you know? It has something that was fundamentally good for me, flipped into something bad?”

I mean, I think, for me, that’s actually the driving theme of this book, especially for somebody like me who does enjoy extremes, right? Like, I love to push as hard as I can and to, ideally, succeed. But I think it’s this idea that our strengths can also be our weaknesses.

And if our strength is this, like, amazing ability to endure, that can become a weakness. It can start to take us down. And I think your sauna analogy is exactly that. Like, you want to do something that’s good for you, you want to push in that sauna, and experience the rejuvenation that it gives you, and then you stay in so long that you actually come out more depleted than when you went in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I want to get your take on – in a way, we’ve sort of been, this has been in the background for this whole conversation – the notion of sunk costs. I learned about that in finance, like, “Oh, the sunk cost fallacy. Pay no mind to that.” And yet, we do. It looms large for us. Do you have any pro tips on, well, first, defining that for folks who are unfamiliar? And, two, how do we get over it and think right?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, well, so a sunk cost is money or time or effort that we already put into something that we can never get back. And it will keep us in bad jobs, it’ll keep us in bad relationships, it’ll keep us pushing at projects just because, again, this idea of fear. We don’t want to lose what we already put in, especially, and understandably, when we don’t know what we’re going to get in its place.

And so, again, I think if you don’t know, if you’re confronting a situation where you’re finding yourself continuing, if you ask yourself, “Why am I continuing?” and the answer is that, “I’ve already put so much into this,” you just need to tell yourself, like, “The past is gone. And if I stay, what I’ve invested, that loss is only going to expand.”

And, again, if you think about yourself in 10 years or 20 years from now, that person is only going to have to deal with even greater stakes, but probably greater reasons why they need to leave.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Lindsay, as we’ve been talking, you’ve dropped a couple of these real gems in terms of, “These are terrible reasons to persist.” So could you, perhaps, as almost like a grand finale of a fireworks show, give us in rapid fire, multiple terrible reasons to persist, how we tend to vocalize it to ourselves, “So I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve missed it so much because I can, because I can stick it out,” all bad reasons to persist? Lay some more on us.

Lindsay Crouse
I think you just gave us some really good ones. Well, I think this idea that rest is only for the person who is beating you is one that I’ve had for a really long time, especially as I was training for a marathon. This idea of just one more, and it’s this idea of the arrival fallacy, right?

That if you achieve your goal, you’ll finally be happy, like, that will finally be it. And then you find yourself bereft and so you just want, “Just one more.” If you start telling yourself that, you’ve probably grown into this cycle where achievement and striving is actually becoming a little bit of an addiction. And you need to ask yourself, like, “What would it take for me to be satisfied and stick with that?”

One thing that – this isn’t exactly probably what you were asking – but one thing that I found incredibly persuasive in the course of writing this book, I mean, again, a lot of these things are obvious, and our intense conviction around perseverance keeps us from noticing.

But this idea of the law of holes, where if you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is that you have to stop digging. But we don’t do that. Like, if we’re in a hole, our commitment to succeeding, we escalate and we just dig harder. And so this idea that, like, if you are in a hole, you have to stop.

The second rule is that you’re in a hole and you need to get out. But, yeah, there are so many things around quitting and perseverance where they’re so obvious and yet there’s something around our culture that keeps us from believing.

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

Lindsay Crouse
No, this is great.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve always thought that TR quote about, “The credit goes to the man that’s in the arena.” It was my high school yearbook quote, and I’ve always been really inspired by people who try.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I think Ellen Langer’s research around mindfulness has always been really fascinating for me. She was a professor that I had when I was in college. And there was one study that she did around, it was like this aging hotel. But it was this idea that framing and how you think about your life can actually make your life true.

And so there was one study that she did where she sent a bunch of really elderly people to, I want to say it was like a 1950s resort. And basically, the elderly people basically were put back in a context where they were in their 20s.

And in this study, they actually started to become younger. It was, literally, rejuvenating for them. And I thought, when I heard about that, it just made me think, “Where in my life can I reframe things that I think have to be this way? And how much control, like how much mindfulness do I have over, I guess, almost like determining my own fate?”

It was this idea, it was incredibly empowering that we have more control over our reality than we sometimes believe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Lindsay Crouse
It’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I always like.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Pen and paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Lindsay Crouse
Running. Distance running.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you talk about quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
This idea that perseverance can work against us.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I’m on Instagram, @lindsaycrouse. I have a website, LindsayCrouse.com, And you can buy my book, The Case for Quitting, wherever books are sold.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Don’t just continue and persevere because you can.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lindsay, thank you.

Lindsay Crouse
Thank you. It’s great to be on.

Sep 24

1183: Using Body Language to Strengthen Likability and Relationships with Joe Navarro

By Podcasts No Comments

Former FBI agent Joe Navarro reveals how to adjust your body language to connect better with those around you.

You’ll Learn

  1. The small gestures that greatly impact your likability
  2. How to maintain appropriate distance and eye contact
  3. The one expression to avoid at all costs

About Joe

Joe Navarro, MA, served as an FBI special agent in counterintelligence and counterterrorism for twenty-five years. A recognized global expert on nonverbal communication, he is the international bestselling author of What Every BODY Is Saying and Be Exceptional. He consults for major corporations and governments worldwide. 

Navarro has been featured on the TODAY Show, CNN, Fox News, and other major outlets, and he lectures frequently around the world on human behavior and influence. He lives in Sarasota, Florida.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, welcome back!

Joe Navarro
Good to be back. Good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you, too. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with a high-stakes story where body language played a key role.

Joe Navarro
Well, how about one where nuclear “go codes” were missing and we had to find who was the culprit.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds almost too good to be real, like Jack Bauer style.

Joe Navarro
Unfortunately, it was real. Unfortunately, seven nations were imperiled by this. This is during the Cold War period, and we come to find out that all this secret material is missing.

The US Army does a great job, narrows it down to one area and one individual that was involved. They finally arrest him, but we come to find out he had a co-conspirator. And that co-conspirator, even though he agreed to talk to me, I was an FBI agent at the time, said, “I’m not sure I want to get anybody else in trouble.”

So I said, “Fair enough.” So we got the army to give us a list of everybody that would have had access to the codes. And then, on a three-by-five card, we put the names of each individual, and then I just said, “Look, I don’t want to know if they’re involved. I just want to know if you know them and did you like them?”

And so I held the card up and then I watched his eyes. And, of course I hadn’t written any books on the subject, so he didn’t know what I would be looking for. But on two cards, his eyes squinted, and I was sitting about the distance between here and the screen, and his pupils constricted.

And just based on that, we requested that these two people be interviewed that we didn’t know were in any way connected. And as it turns out, they both confessed. So there. That happened in 1990, and it’s in the court filings, and pone of them went to jail for 36 years. So true story. And it was all based on body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joe, you’ve really raised the bar for every guest ever when I ask a question about a story. It’s, like, “If there’s not nuclear launch codes and decades in prison at stake, then I’m going to have to move on.”

Joe Navarro
Yeah, pretty much. Look, I always tell people, it was luck, I happen to be at the right place at the right time. And I was that weird kid who, all my friends in high school were playing with baseball cards and exchanging baseball cards, I was writing down the things that I observed with body language and it paid off years later, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it continued to pay off. Your latest book, it’s called Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language. That sounds real nice because most of us will not be in the position of interrogating someone in a legal matter. But I think all of us want stronger relationships.

Can you tell us just how much of an impact can this body language knowledge make in having stronger relationships?

Joe Navarro
I think what the first thing we have to realize is the mistaken assumption that texting and writing and direct messages is connecting. All that is is signaling.

Connections have an evolutionary perspective. We evolved to communicate first and foremost nonverbally. Our first language is nonverbal. That touching between the child and the mother in traditional societies, even the smell begins to shape. And how often we touch and how we look at each other begins to shape that connection.

And in modern society, we tend to think, “Oh, well, you know, I sent him an email message,” or a text message. And then we see the high amount of individuals that feel lonely, feel depressed, the extraordinary number.

I saw a number the other day that young people entering universities, as high as 36% of them, which is an astounding number, feel depressed or anxious, and so forth. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we’re not connecting the way that we should. And if we’re going to connect, then we should do it the right way, which, to a great degree, has to do with how far we stand with each other.

How do we look? Do we stare at each other or do we gaze? How often do we touch each other on the arm and so forth? I just, three days ago, four days ago, I had to attend a funeral.

And once again, it was a revelation of there’s not much you can say but how we revert back to that, our first language, which is, you know, arm around each other, hugs, holding each other’s hands, you know, big men weeping in each other’s arms, very tactile.

And it’s just a reminder that this is our first language, and it’s the way we show love and empathy and everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And I think that’s a great reminder that texting doesn’t get it done in terms of our relational biochemical, bodily beings for getting the connecting stuff happening.

Joe Navarro
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I mean, we are mostly chemistry. And, you know, one way to look at it is texting, it’s immediate. You can signal very quickly and so forth, but how often we ask, “Well, what did you mean by that? Were you…?” you know, we have to include an emoji. We have to do this and that.

And, I think, to a great extent, where oxytocin is released when we are in each other’s presence and we feel comfortable and there’s touch and there’s kindness in how we look at each other, versus dopamine, which, “Oh, I got the message. Oh, this is great.” And then you have that little dopamine high.

But then we see people in a clinical setting just crash, and so they’re constantly looking for the next dopamine high, which with algorithms now, you can be fed for hours constant little hits where, maybe, you interact and so forth, but it never achieves what oxytocin does, which is this profound feeling of contentment and joy and happiness and trust.

Pete Mockaitis
So just so that we are on the same page with regard to this oxytocin and connecting stuff. Texting, instant messaging won’t do it. Will live video exchanges do it? Or is it strictly an in-person kind of a phenomenon?

Joe Navarro
Well, that’s a profound question, Pete. I think virtual environment can do a lot, and it does. And almost 90% or maybe more of the calls that I now get or do, I prefer this environment even over a phone call because I get to look at the other person. It helps you with things like turn yielding.

It helps you with things like, “Oh, he’s pondering what I just said. Did I use a word he didn’t understand?” It allows you certain things. I think it has its place. And going forward, we’re always going to be, I think, now and into the future, well into this virtual environment.

But I have to say, at the same time, we can look scientifically at people who are truly connecting. And we see several things. From the Grant study, which I know you know is in the book, the largest study, it continues since the 1930s at Harvard, which looked at people and connections and so forth.

One of the things that stands out is best predictor of success in business was not IQ, was not where you grew up, was not where you went to school, but your ability to connect with others. And in doing so, you got promoted, you got invited to meetings, you got invited to play golf and all those things.

But the other thing we found is that, and young people don’t think about it, but older people do, is yet you will live longer. Longevity is one of the greatest benefits from that.

But it’s also those people who could connect at a very tactile level also tended to have happier marriages. There’s the occasional touch of the hand, there’s the rub of the back, there’s the caress, there’s, you know, the way to look at someone.

For instance, if I wanted to increase face time with you, one of the easiest things I could do is just tilt my head. And by just inclining my head a little bit, we know from studies that my company has done when I was working with attorneys, people will stay with you longer.

So there are immediate benefits to being present, and we haven’t even begun to study how our body chemistry influences each other. We now have research, and it’s solid research, where the amount of stress that we carry on ourselves, right, in the form of chemistry, will actually influence other people around us.

So if you’ve been in an angry situation and you have a lot of cortisol and it’s literally being exuded by you, it actually will affect the other person in the room. Conversely, if you’ve had a nice time, if there’s a certain amount of pleasantness and so forth, that is felt also. And our animals feel that.

I’ve seen animals alert on people. And you say, “Well, where does that come from?” Well, they’re picking up things that, subconsciously, we pick up on, but we tend to mask it. So there is definitely the benefit of the tone of voice.

On a screen, we don’t see the elasticity of our skin. We don’t see the subtle changes of colors when you say something that’s exciting to me. We don’t see the pupillary dilation of, “Oh, wow, that’s…” right? We just don’t see that.

I was just at a conference three months ago, and one of the questions that I was asked was, “What about AI? What’s going to happen with AI?” And my answer was that, “At this moment, we humans don’t even know how many neuroreceptors we have.”

We know that we can see, we can hear, but we know from scientific studies that some people are picking up other things around them. So we don’t even know what these neuroreceptors are.

Pete Mockaitis
What are they picking up? What kind of things are we talking about here?

Joe Navarro
Well, it can be anything from… we see this, for instance, when we study people who, suddenly, go blind and they begin to pick up on movements, they can sense, somehow. I don’t know. That’s what we don’t know.

We don’t know what the neuroreceptors are, but they sense, better than chance, “Somebody’s behind me. Something moved,” all sorts of things. And so my argument was AI, eventually, we can train it to do quite a bit, but we don’t even know what we’re picking up.

And the studies that now have been done with smell, there’s quite a few studies that I’ve looked at where the chemistry that we give off is influence not just the person in front of you, but a whole group of people. AI can never replicate that. It’ll be impossible. So it’ll be an interesting time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you tell me a little bit about some of the most eye-popping science with regard to our stress is picked up by others, it’s impacting them, it’s affecting them? But, like, what is the nature of the impact, of the effect?

Joe Navarro
So I don’t have the experiment details with me, but, in essence, it’s this. They take what are called two naive groups, people that live in a house, let’s say, or an apartment, they don’t know what’s going to happen, they don’t know what’s going to go on.

And then we take one person and they are subjected to an extreme amount of what we call positive stress. So maybe they’re a skydiver.

So there’s a little bit of stress, and it’s sort of positive stress. Mountain climbers are notorious for this. And then we take another person and we subject them to a different kind of stress, the kind of stress where there’s arguing and there’s a lot of animosity.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. We take their T-shirts and we place them into a house or into those two apartments without letting anybody know. They’re just hidden there. And the people inside those residences, the ones where all that cortisol is at, become more stressed.

They get a little less patient. They tend to be a little bit more aggravated. So they are, without knowing what’s going on, they’re picking up on this cortisol. And part of the equation in this, and I think of my career is, you know, I’m thinking about the times I was on a SWAT team.

You come off of a SWAT operation, high risk, it already takes you two hours to mentally calm down, but you’re taking your clothes off, and I’m putting it in the laundry. You know, “Did that have an effect on my daughter and my wife and in other members of the family? And did that contribute to stress?” The scientific paper says it actually does.

And those are the kinds of things that we’re now finding out about. There’s all sorts of things. So we’re barely starting to understand all of the neuroreceptors that we have.

I’ll ask you something, Pete. Have you ever heard the term umwelt? It’s a German word, and what it refers to is, for instance, a pit viper, a snake, their umwelt is composed of the heat sensors. They sense the world around them by vibrations and heat.

Certain birds will only see in ultraviolet light, which gives them a broad spectrum to pick out very specific flowers and so forth. The human umwelt, we think of is, “Oh, we can hear, we can see, and we can smell,” and that’s actually only partially correct. Our umwelt, well, we can enhance it, obviously, with binoculars.

But our umwelt is actually much broader. We just do not understand it in its totality yet. And in the future, when we tap into that, I think it’ll change many of the things that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, that’s fascinating stuff, an interesting future. I’d love to zoom in to the here and now a bit. You gave us an awesome tip with that head tilt in terms of folks then become more willing to engage with you or curious or hang on to what you have to say a bit longer. Share with us some of these other cues and things that really boost likability and connection.

Joe Navarro
Just the simple, you know, touching. This is the mentalist, that just touching this area while you’re listening to somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, the chin area?

Joe Navarro
Like, you’re thinking, you’re pensive, it takes you from, “Oh, Joe has an agenda,” to, “Oh, Joe is pondering my agenda,” which makes you more likable. So the head tilt makes you more likable, the fact that I’m listening to you.

Now you have to be careful because if you start doing this, you know, and then it becomes one of these where your hand slips, and that just shows you’re not interested. So degrees matter, but just a little bit of pensiveness.

Reacting to words. For instance, you say something interesting and I react by arching, flashing my eyebrows and going, “Oh, yeah, that’s…”you know? I don’t have to say anything. I just like, “Wow!”

So there’s a whole repertoire of things that we can do. One of the easiest ones is to lower our voice. You say something, I say something, and we’re doing it up here, but then I change the pitch and I go, “Wow, Pete, yeah, that’s really interesting.”

And the fact that I changed the pitch positively affects the other person. That is very attractive to the human brain, and it’s universal. So those are a few of the things.

I know you can’t see it. We were talking earlier about the feet, but if you’re in the hallway talking to someone and you just want to increase a little bit the amount of face time, just by crossing your legs while standing so that you’re slightly off balance, if things are going well, usually, the other person will mirror that.

But one of the things that it does is it conveys, “I want to stay a little longer,” and more likely than not, the other person will stay a little bit longer just because crossing your legs is a high-comfort display.

We only do that when we’re comfortable. We never cross our legs and are off balance if there’s anything in front of us that we’re not comfortable with. So very simple behaviors to just increase a little bit of face time.

Now, obviously, if you’ve got somebody that’s got to catch a plane or they got to go, as you said, their feet immediately point in the direction of that gate and it just says, “Hey, I got to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Well, so the theme here seems to be, or maybe a couple themes, is each of these signals convey, “I am interested in you, and I think what you’re saying is interesting, valuable, intriguing. I care to linger in your presence, in your midst.”

And so it’s, like, all of these things that make us likable seem to be the things that are putting good vibes toward the other person. It’s like, “They like me, therefore, I like them, and they are likable.”

Joe Navarro
Yeah, “They like me, and I like them,” and so it’s back and forth. In psychology, there’s a way to describe that, in saying, “Is this experience positively valenced or is it negatively valenced?”

In my book, I talk about comfort/discomfort. And so, the more things that we can do to make them positively valenced, right, if we were to meet in a hallway, yeah, I probably would be leaning against the wall.

I would probably be asking a lot of questions about, “How did you get started in this? I mean, how long have you been doing this? And, like, when you get up in the morning, how do you know what to ask?”

Because, you know, as an FBI agent, I know that I have to satisfy the statute, you know, “Did he enter the structure with the intent to commit a felony?” So I would begin to structure my questions out of curiosity about you, which we’ve known since 1926, and, you know, how to make friends and so forth, is we like to be asked questions.

So the totality of it is, “Was it positively valenced?” And then always thinking, you know, “The next time I see Pete, I want him to remember it as something positive.” Now here’s what’s interesting. Our brains have two hippocampi, the hippocampus, we have two of them.

Everything negative, pretty much, goes in there and it goes immediately in there. But here’s the trick, or the rub, it stays in there for a very long time, sometimes for decades. And so anytime we meet someone or we spend time with them, we want to put as many of those positive traits in there as possible because the hippocampus will retain everything negative.

And that’s why, when I ask an audience, “How many of you have had a bad handshake?” I mean, I’ve seen people just shoot that arm right up and can remember when they were bullied 20, 30 years ago, that’s because of the hippocampus.

And so the brain prioritizes the negative so that we can avoid that for survival. And so anytime we meet with each other, what we want to focus on is those positive things.

Pete Mockaitis
So we store the negative a lot longer than the positive.

Joe Navarro
Yes, which, by the way, is why you can’t get rid of post-traumatic stress. And you say, “Well, can’t you just think of something?” But, no, PTSD lasts for so long precisely because we have not just one, but two hippocampus. And so it retains all those negative events and you just can’t take a pill. That’s not how we evolved.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so to that end, what are some things we should avoid doing in our body language?

Joe Navarro
I’ll give you a list of the ones that stand out from surveys that I do in my classes. Number one is violations of space. Over and over, women will tell me that the guys stand too close to them. And so then the question is, “Well, how far is too much?” Well, culture determines spatial needs, but so do personal needs.

One of the tests that I do, and it’s a fun test, usually after lunch, when everybody is tired, I say, “All right, everybody stand up. Okay. All right, pair up.” I say, “Okay, find the perfect distance that you could maintain for a 20-minute conversation.” Of course, there were some young people there that said, “What do you talk about for 20 minutes?” Well, that’s another topic. It’s like, “What?”

You know, I’m thinking of the three- and four-hour spy interviews that I did, and they’re trying to figure out a 20-minute interview. I said, “Okay, find the perfect distance. Okay, everybody found it? Okay. Now I want everybody to bend your thumb so that you have this, okay?”

“And now I want you to walk forward that distance, which is about between an inch and a three quarter of an inch.” So each pair walks forward about an inch. And you should see how people begin to freak out. They start to giggle and get uncomfortable. And it’s like, “Hmm, I don’t know.”

And then you realize, just an inch or an inch and a half can make the difference between, “We’re going to have a long, comfortable conversation or one where I feel my spatial boundaries are being violated.” And that’s how sensitive we, as a species, are to our spatial needs.

So I always say, “When you come in, shake hands, fingers down, not forward, it’s not a gunfight. You don’t want to have your finger in someone’s erogenous zone here in the wrist.”

Pete Mockaitis
The wrist? Okay.

Joe Navarro
Yes, you don’t. Never. So always fingers down, gentle squeeze. Nobody is impressed with vice grips. And then take a step back so that everybody is comfortable. And then, over time, you will self-adjust. But don’t go into a fixed position that is violating each other’s space.

And now you’re guaranteeing the minimum amount of time because we know what we feel like when we’re violating space. So that’s the number one complaint that I get that, nonverbally, we do wrong.

The second one that I often hear about is that the person either is staring too much, or not making any eye contact, or looks away, there’s all sorts of things. And one of the things we have to realize is that, especially in the business world, we now have more and more people entering the workforce who are actually on the spectrum of autism, and they will make less eye contact.

And so we have to make adaptations and not feel like, “Well, this is strange or weird. He didn’t make eye contact with me.” We just have to accept. There’s a lovely man, he’s in Europe, really a lovely human being. He always attends my training, but he is on the spectrum.

And he waits in line to come and shake my hand, buy my books, and say hello. But he just can’t, you know, and it’s okay. It’s okay. You just have to adapt to that reality. So we can look at each other too intently.

I’ve had women say, “Well, I mean, this guy was just scanning me like he was a radar over the horizon trying to look at my boobs and this and that.” And you have to be respectful that way. Or you’re talking to someone, and this is one that I hear from a lot of senior executives.

They’re talking to someone, they’re talking about something important, and they’re giving priority to their smart watch or their smartphone. And they just find that really distracting.

And so, one of things that we now tell people to do is, “Put the device away. Let them know that you care so much about them that you’re, in fact, going to put the device away. That it’s just us. And they feel even more valued.”

And then someone said, “Well, what if I’m really expecting an important call?” Then front it. Then just say, “Listen, my wife is going to call me or text me if something happened to her,” and people will understand.

But this relentless need to constantly be looking at this at the expense of others, we just, we don’t abide by that. Because these are valued people and the minute you take your eyes off of them, you’re not contributing to that positive experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Well, I’m curious, with this eye contact, too much, too little, do you have a rule of thumb or a guideline that’s close to just right for most people?

Joe Navarro
Well, because I travel all over the world and culture factors in, you know, if you get on the subway in New York, and study after study shows that you can only stare at somebody for about 1.22 seconds. Literally, one second point two-two.

Other parts of the world, the Middle East, Latin America, if you do business in Dubai, I’m getting ready to go to Doha, Athens, a lot of parts, different parts of the world, you have four, five, six seconds that you can look at someone.

And then you go to the Nordic countries, and it’s very limited. It’s very limited eye contact. So I tell people, “Just be aware of where you’re at. Just engage with a person you’re looking at, but don’t be staring at somebody,“ because in some places around the world, it’s offensive.

And, you know, every culture acts differently. Businessmen that I coach, and they’re going to Latin America, you know you’re going to go to an office and you’re probably going to, before anything happens, after introductions, you’re going to be served coffee.

And then you go to other countries, Germany, Austria and so forth, and you almost jump into business immediately without those niceties. And so you have to remember is what is preferred locally.

In the United States, we don’t have a need to, for instance, offer our pedigree. And yet, there are parts of the world where, before you talk about business, they want to know about you and your family, where did you go to school. They want to know about your values. And that’s just something that we don’t really do in America.

So, yeah, I’m a big proponent of knowing what country you’re going to, what culture. And even within the United States, I remember covering the Havasupai Indian Reservation along the Colorado River, and there’s other Native American groups around there, and just learning their culture about how they greet each other.

For instance, on a lot of the Indian reservations, I would ask, “Well, which way did the car go?” And you would expect somebody to, you know, point with their hand, but they point with their chin. They’ll go like this.

And so you just factor that in. You know, when in Rome, you do as the Romans. This works great for them. It’s a great way to signal direction. They do it with their chin, and you just get used to abiding by the culture that you’re in.

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

Joe Navarro
Well, you know, take a look at the book and think about the most important connections that you will make, and then ask yourself, “Would I be considered a high school level, graduate level? Or would I be a tier-one person at making connections?”

And I think what you’ll find is we can all do something a little better to make those connections just a little nicer and a little bit more significant. Something as simple as take a piece of paper, write them a hand note, not typed, slap a stamp on it, and mail it to someone, and you’re going to make their day.

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

Joe Navarro
I think my favorite quote is rather impertinent, and I’m trying to think if I should share it because it was from Mark Twain. But he said, “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and it wastes your time.”

And the message was that spend your time with people that care. Don’t waste your time with those that will never appreciate it.

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

Joe Navarro
I think one of my favorite experiments, and it’s one that anybody can do is the still face experiments, and those experiments done in the early ‘80s where you smile at someone and then look away, then come back, smile again.

But on the third time you just hold very still, which is one of the worst things you can do on a virtual call. You must never hold still. And watch what happens. With children, it’ll drive them to cry. With adults, they get very nervous when they see a still face.

And it’s a reminder that we evolve to exchange signals, not to just sit there like on a virtual call, which is the worst thing you can do on a virtual call.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So on a virtual call, I don’t want to have a blank still face, even if all I’m doing is just listening to what they’re saying.

Joe Navarro
Absolutely not, because your brain is picking up, subconsciously, all sorts of signals and a still face is seen as one less trustworthy but, even worse, it’s seen as a threat. That’s the research.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, boy, you got me thinking about the TV series “Dexter” now, and just like, you know, or what. Yeah, I mean, if you think about, like, really freaky psychopath characters, that is one of their go-to moves.

Joe Navarro
Exactly. And, you know, the still face experiments, you can go online and look at them on YouTube, and you say, “Why wasn’t I taught this 20 years ago or 25 years ago?” And you realize, “Oh, my goodness, how many times have I sat there? I’m sixth in line to be interviewed on a podcast, and everybody else is holding still,” and it’s the worst thing you can do.

Pete Mockaitis
So what do I do instead? I just try to, like, smile or tilt my head or…?

Joe Navarro
Smile, tilt your head, nod, ponder, touch the face, anything but not remain still. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Joe Navarro
Herodotus, “The Histories” by the father of history. I’ve now read it, I think, three times. But the 780 or so pages I’ve read are just wonderful, yeah.

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

Joe Navarro
I would just go to JoeNavarro.net or just Google my name. For some reason, it’ll pop up with my website, and there’s all sorts of goodies there. I have free bibliographies, and hundreds of articles that I’ve written that are available for free.

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

Joe Navarro
My final call to action is one that I gave at JP Morgan a few months ago, and I said, “By close of business this week, send a letter, not an email message, send a letter to someone who helped you along the way and thank them profusely, because you didn’t get here by yourself. And please do so.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joe, thank you.

Joe Navarro
No, thank you.