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Feb 29
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940: How to Find the Best Job for You that Actually Exists with Lauren McGoodwin

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Lauren McGoodwin challenges the notion of the “dream job” and makes the case for pursuing the “good-enough” job.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why the dream job actually doesn’t exist 
  2. The true drivers of happiness at work 
  3. Why to become invaluable–not indispensable 

About Lauren

Lauren founded Career Contessa in 2013 after experiencing a gap in career development resources for women who might be job searching, soul searching, leading and managing, or trying to find new ways to advance within their careers. With women accounting for more than 50% of the workforce and the workforce being less defined than ever before, it seemed crazy (and outdated) that a resource for us didn’t exist.

Fast-forward to today, Career Contessa is now the largest online career site built inclusively for women. Lauren is also author of Power Moves: How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose (2020), co-host of The Career Contessa podcast, and an educator/speaker on a variety of career topics. 

Formerly, Lauren was a University Recruiter for Hulu focused on hiring, employer branding, and program management. Lauren has a Bachelors in Education from the University of Oregon and a Masters in Communication Management from the University of Southern California where she wrote her thesis on millennials and career resources. 

When not Contessa-ing, you can find Lauren spending time with her family in Redondo Beach, CA where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Resources Mentioned

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Lauren McGoodwin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lauren McGoodwin

Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am super excited to dig into your wisdom. And could you start us off by sharing, so you’ve been in this Career Contessa game for a while, great brand.

Lauren McGoodwin
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

And it even existed before How to be Awesome at Your Job, so kudos on a long run here. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive piece of career advice that you’ve come to learn and adopt and share during your reign as the Career Contessa?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been around for 10 years, I’ve talked to a lot of successful, very fulfilled people. I think the biggest thing, the biggest misconception I’m sort of very much on brand for that millennial woman who was striving for perfect, was that the dream job does not exist, it’s a myth. It’s a myth that kind of keeps you perpetually stuck. So, that’s probably the biggest one from talking, and basically having the job that I do, which is finding out “What does make a successful career? People who are fulfilled, how do they do it?”

And that’s a big one, I think, because it starts to sort of managing your expectations and actually not expecting to have this dream job that checks every box in your life. It’s similar to trying to find a perfect partner, right? But with jobs, for some reason, we believe not only do dream jobs exist but that, “I should have one. And if I don’t have one, something about me is missing and wrong, and I’ve messed up,” and turn yourself into this personal DIY project to fix that part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So, the implications of that then is if we’re not in a dream job, that’s okay, nobody is because they don’t exist. That’s your view on the world?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, it is my view on the working world, that there is no such thing as a dream job. And you’ll see it makes a really good saying as a meme on Instagram and TikTok and whatnot of the dream job exists and hustle harder to get that dream job, and a job should check all these multiple boxes but what I find is that, really, what the dream job is made up of is this elusive kind of lifestyle piece of a job, where it doesn’t include hellish commutes or return-to-office mandates that you don’t agree with, it doesn’t include manipulative coworkers or bad bosses who actually don’t know how to manage.

And so, you’re sort of looking for this thing that doesn’t exist, and so your expectations are consistently misaligned with reality. That is equivalent, for me, of someone who has a very fixed mindset versus having a growth mindset, someone who can say, “Hey, my ability to learn and adapt is more important than, okay, my ability to be perfect at this presentation.”

So, I think what happens is dream job isn’t just like your job title and your company. It’s really inclusive more of like a lifestyle, and a mindset, and these realities that, one, don’t exist, as COVID, I think, is such a good reminder of, like, things can change quickly, and being able to be adaptable, and be able to lean into uncertainty, is really kind of the stuff that makes you more invaluable at work versus the person who’s like, “I found the perfect job title, and it looks really good on LinkedIn, and I’m able to share these…” I call it, like, glitter and glue moments, “All these glitter moments in my career but the glue is what holds the career together.”

And so, that’s why I’m actually a big advocate for people who always say, “Well, if I’m not looking for a dream job, what am I looking for?” And I will advocate for a good-enough job. A good-enough is really practical, it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. But dream jobs is you’re stuck there.

One of the things that people will ask me “If I’m not looking for a dream job, what should I be striving for?” which this is unique for each person, but this is why I’m a huge advocate for the good-enough job. The good-enough job is practical. It’s not perfect. It’s not having you strive for that perfectionist tendency that can keep you stuck. And so, the good-enough job, again, it’s practical. It allows you to still have a life outside of work. It doesn’t ask that work check every box of your life and fulfill every part of you.

And I think COVID was a good reminder of that for people, and I worry that now, in 2024, we’re starting to forget about that and try to go back to those tendencies. So, I would just say, to answer kind of the very first question, the piece of advice I have learned the most that kind of counteracts, actually, building a fulfilling career is trying to go after that dream job.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so that’s a cool distinction there, a dream job versus a good-enough job, and I like what you had to say with regard to partners in terms of, like, no human being is perfect, and no job is perfect. And so, I would say, I think that my dear bride is a good wife, and she’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect. So, help us orient to things a little bit in terms of good-enough.

Lauren, lay it on us, four levels of job, if I may.

One, unacceptable, you should probably get out of there as soon as you can. Two, good enough, yeah, you should probably hold on to this. All right. Three, about as good as actually exists in real life, so hold on with all your might. And, four, just unrealistic, like, that probably doesn’t exist for anybody, so disabuse yourself from that notion readily. So, I put you on the spot there, Lauren. Give us four levels of job, starting with a rung that’s, “Yeah, I should probably get out of here.”

Lauren McGoodwin
Yeah. So, an example of this is like the person who has their “dream job,” they’re a lawyer, they worked their whole life for this, this is the thing they wanted to do, they’ve got that corner office, but they’re miserable. They’re working nonstop. Maybe they’re paid well but it doesn’t matter because they have no life, they have no friends, they’re not able to have any hobby.

And so, it’s that mix of, like, “But this is what I thought I wanted so I need to continue it.” They’re burnt out, they’re all the negative things. That’s sort of what I would think is the rung of like, “But this was supposed to be my dream job. I worked so hard to get this.” It just never, never goes away.

So, then the good-enough job, again, it’s practical but it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s something that you’re really good, you’re not particularly, like, dying over passion for whatever industry, you work in manufacturing, but you’re really good at your job, and it gives you work-life balance that works for you. Maybe for you that means, “I want a really high salary, and I’m willing to sacrifice having to go into an office and commute every day.” That works for the chapter you’re in right now.

Like, stages of your life are similar to stages of your career. I talked to someone the other day, who she got a new job, and she’s been working at a startup, but she has kids now, and the startup has a lot of it can feel a little unpredictable about what’s going to happen, so she’s like, “I really like that but I kind of made a little bit of a career pivot, and I wanted to go to a bigger company because I was looking for something that was more stable, offered me remote role, was an increase in pay because a lot of times startups will give equity.”

And so, again, that is a good-enough job for her. She’s like, “I like this thing well enough, I don’t have to be a die-hard for it, but also it’s not asking more from me than what I think is reasonable given the exchange of money,” the exchange of the paycheck part for her. That can be a good-enough job. Then you have the person who maybe go even like a step further, where they have this deep passion of being able to reclaim their life from work.

And so, they have a job that allows them to have more PTO, or maybe they do, like I talked to someone the other day, she’s a teacher and she’s doing like a job-share with somebody else. So, for her, that’s a good-enough situation. She doesn’t want to totally leave the workplace but she wants to reimagine how it works for her.

So, there’s all these variations of what the good-enough job can be for you. The teacher is deeply passionate about what she’s working on. She’s just struggling with how to make that work with her life, so a job-share works. Then you have the other person who’s like, “I’m not deeply passionate about it but I’m good at it and I’m paid well for it, and so that works.”

And then the top, or the first rung I said is the person who’s like, “I thought I was passionate about this. This is a dream job, it looks good on paper, I’m working for the right company, I’ve reached all these achievements, and it’s not working for me. And now I have this piece of me where I feel like I failed or, somehow, I have this expectation hangover of this isn’t what I expected to be, on top of the fact that I’m burnt out and all these other things.”

So, I think there’s obviously a lot of variations, careers are super personal, but I think what it comes down to is managing those expectations, understanding that the dream job, this concept of a dream job is more about the lifestyle that goes with it. And so, restudying those expectations and then going out, and kind of I always tell people, like when I was a recruiter, “You don’t get everything.” It’s like, the realtor will ask, “What are the top three most important things to you? Neighborhood? Number of bedrooms?”

I think that’s also important to do in your career, and I think it starts with aligning with your values. So, thinking about, “What do you really value personally? And then, how can you translate your top values into the career that you have?” Those are just all good starting places. There’s obviously a lot of intricacies to this but when you are trying to make the shift from dream job to good-enough job, I think that’s a really good starting place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I dig it. So, we’ve got a picture of the lowest level of job, bad, and then a picture of good enough. Could you also paint a picture for us for the highest levels, like about as good as it gets in the real world, as well as this is just impossible and unrealistic in the world of reality?

Lauren McGoodwin

Like, this job doesn’t actually exist, but if we could make it exist, this is what it would look like?

Pete Mockaitis

Kind of like a fantasy dream job people have that is harmful because they are comparing it to an unrealistic thing?

Lauren McGoodwin
I think that’s a little bit like lazy girl job, which is this TikTok phenomenon that went off, where it’s like you basically don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have to be involved or engaged in any way, but you’re paid really well. I think of that as almost like this true fantasy. Like, one, it is an exchange for you creating impact and value for the company, the exchanges they’re going to pay you. So, you’re not going to be able to actually gives you or never asks you to take a call that’s inconvenient. The realities of life are sort of that is going to happen.

So, to paint that picture, I almost think the comparison is this lazy-girl job thing that people were talking about. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist but, for me, I look at a “lazy-girl job” which I hate because you wouldn’t hear a lazy-boy job, but, anyway, that’s a whole other topic. But, for me, it’s like I actually have had a job before. My very first job, I was an admin assistant. My only job was to basically wait for the phone to ring.

Now, I wasn’t well-paid, and I had to show up to an office so I wasn’t able to just do what I want all day long, but, for me, I was, as a human being, part of our wellbeing is we want to be engaged, we want to create something, we want to use our brains. And, for me, that was really mind-numbing work, but if we wanted to paint this picture of this “lazy-girl job” or this ultimate job that really doesn’t ask you to do anything, I think people think that would be fulfilling, but I don’t think it would.

I think us, as human beings, we want to move forward, we want to make an impact, and you wouldn’t get that in that situation, but I could see that being this, like, ultimate dream job for somebody.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, I love that so much, that notion of a dream scenario would be that you don’t have to do much but you get tons of money. And what’s interesting is, I think, we can see that in real life in terms of if you’ve been on vacation for a while, it’s like you’re actually kind of bored, “And I want to get to it and start being able, contributing somewhere,” there’s that.

And if you look at folks who, I don’t think you can even call them jobs but they have some sort of a subsidized living situation, like a trust fund or some kinds of funds are just flowing into their life without effort, and often these folks are as susceptible or more so, I think the data show, to depression and other kinds of challenges because there’s something that’s not quite being met there.

So, I think that’s a great thing to call out, that you might imagine this thing exists but it kind of doesn’t from a job perspective. And even if you were subsidized magically, that often has its own perils with regard to mental health and fulfillment. So, give us that level that’s maybe just below that in terms of, “This is about as good as it really gets in terms of, I wouldn’t call it a dream job because it doesn’t exist, but this is as close to optimal as one might hope for in this life.”

Well, now can you paint a picture for, if we’ve got four levels, like terrible job, good-enough job, then as good as is realistically optimally possible in real-life job, and then the fake dream job. I think we covered levels one, two, and four. But paint a picture for number three, the best realistically optimal job we might have in life.

Lauren McGoodwin

I think going back to the example of my friend, she was working in one type of marketing, and she’s transitioning to a different type of marketing. She was working for more of a startup-type company that had a little unpredictability with it, she’s going to go to a manufacturing company. So, on the surface, working for a big brand name, way cooler. The type of marketing she was doing? Flashy, cool, really, again, kind of that glitter and glue metaphor, it’s using that, fits into the glitter side.

But she is moving over to manufacturing, definitely not as flashy and cool, doesn’t look as good as a big brand name on LinkedIn, and she’s going to be doing kind of a more traditional marketing route. Now, for someone who’s looking at this, they’re like, “Wait, she’s going from this really cool job to this really boring job.”

But that, for her, she maybe sees this shift from being like, “I had my dream job and it hasn’t necessarily been a ‘dream.’ I’m really ready to go to a good-enough job, a job that I can close my laptop at 5:00 p.m. because I do have young kids, and I want to be able to spend time with them. I get flexibility. I have remote work status with this one. Instead of getting equity, I’m getting a higher paycheck.”

So, again, thinking about “What are my top priorities? And I’m going to get them at this place. Even though it might not be the ‘dream’ on paper to somebody, for me it’s a good-enough job. It doesn’t ask me to give up my life in exchange for the job.” And that is something that I think is really important. A good-enough job is going to take you out of that tunnel vision you have or that fixed mindset that you have.

It’s maybe going to take the pressure off you that you’re feeling right now. Maybe it’s going to give you clarity because you’re not going to see your workplace as your dream, so maybe you’ll be able to recognize when there’s toxicity happening in a workplace more often, things like that. And so, for me, when I hear someone who saying, “You know, I’m kind of leaving the cool, flashy thing. I’m going to go over here but I’m being paid more. It seems like I’m going to have really good work-life balance. So far, from the people I’ve interviewed with, I really like them.”

It’s like they have this surprise factor, where they’re like, “But I should like this big, cool company, checking the box for me.” And I think that is the dream job versus good-enough job kind of conundrum, is sort of this mindset of, like, “I should want this thing. This thing should kind fulfill me, and why doesn’t it?” And so, I’m really proud of people who can make the shift over to “those good-enough jobs” for them.

And it’s not easy to make those decisions and determine, “What are my values? What are my top priorities? Now I have to find a company that fits.” I’m making this sound like it just landed onto their lap but I think it does take some internal work of getting over these preconceived misconceptions of what you should want.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. And this conversation about dream jobs is making me think about, I guess, there’s been a recent trend of big personalities on YouTube quitting YouTube, which is funny because I understand that the data reveal that young people now, more than they want to be teachers or firefighters, they want to be YouTubers. So, that’s the job, I guess, everyone wants. They think it’s the coolest. Not an astronaut but a YouTuber.

And so, folks who are YouTubers, who are collecting over half a million dollars of income for creatively making videos, are like, “I can’t take this anymore,” which is fascinating in terms of a picture of the dream job doesn’t exist. And if you dig deeper, you sort of learn that, “Oh, well, behind the surface of just making cool videos, they got to manage a team, and brand deals, and books, and accounting, and everyone wants a piece of them.”

Lauren McGoodwin

And the comments, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, the reality is, “Huh, it’s not just a creative wonderland of nonstop adulation for me being me, but there’s a ton of responsibilities that are sufficient to overwhelm a portion of these people who have what appears to be an ultimate dream job.”

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s tough, I’m sure. It’s very hard for them to walk away from that because it’s that feeling of, like, “You’re not just going to get this back if you change your mind,” meaning, like, the person who worked all the way to become the partner of a law firm, and I’m only using that as an example because I feel we hear a lot about lawyers who are, like, “It wasn’t what I thought it’s going to be.”

But anybody who kind of gets in that golden handcuff rut sort of thing in their career, it’s very hard to walk away from that. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of share the message early on about good-enough job versus dream jobs. Careers are long and windy, and you take U-turns and left turns and right turns, and up and down. It’s not this linear career path.

And the more we can kind of, I think, spread this education about what a career is, or what a career path looks like, I mean, I came from the generation very much of, like, this ladder and the lean in, just lean in to saying yes to things. That just hasn’t been the reality I’ve experienced, and I think many of the women I’ve talked to and interviewed, or experts that I’ve interviewed, that hasn’t been their experience.

And same with our audience at Career Contessa, it’s like your best skillset to building a fulfilling career is a person who is being proactive in the driver’s seat of their career versus the reactive to whatever is coming your way. And then, again, also studying this mindset of, like, “I’m part of that world, too,” just thinking about your values, determining kind of your purpose, thinking about, again, I have this phrase about how to be invaluable at work.

And people are always asking because they’re like, “Oh, I thought you want to be indispensable.” And I always say, “Look, but if you’re indispensable to a role, how can you grow because they can’t afford to lose you?” So, that’s a different mentality when you’re indispensable, the company is saying you’re primed for overwork because they can’t afford to lose you versus the mentality of, “We don’t want to lose you,” so you’re primed for more valuable work, for example.

So, again, these are just like this is the lessons that I think is kind of one can learn early on. It’s actually very helpful throughout your career. A lot of us, to your point about the YouTuber that many of us learn at mid-life or later on, and so that’s why I’m here to spread this information

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Well, I do want to hear more about your unique vantage point. So, with the Career Contessa podcast and YouTube channel and speaking, you have a fun vantage point. And I know when I dork out and look into all my analytics and things, and emails from listeners and see, “Okay, what’s really the hot stuff in terms of what people really want to know, and what kind of content advice, wisdom, is resonantly transformational for them?”

So, Lauren, if I could put you on the spot to share with us maybe three super nuggets that you’ve collected from your time podcasting and engaging with so many folks, what have been some of your favorite discoveries?

Lauren McGoodwin

I interviewed a woman once on what actually drives happiness at work, and I still love this conversation, and they were relationships, purpose, and autonomy. And I really loved that because I feel like happiness at work sometimes feel like this very elusive thing, and I guess in a way it is, but I thought that was a really fun conversation. Sometimes you have conversations where you learn something, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s certainly a puzzle piece to the career puzzle.”

I think another big piece for me is the difference between, like I said, being invaluable at work versus being indispensable. I really fit this millennial woman stereotype of the, like, work hard until they recognize your work. I very much learned through my own experiences, but also through our audience and talking to people, it’s really important to advocate for yourself.

There are good ways to advocate, bragging, however you want to call it. Some people don’t like it. They’re like, instead of advocating, think of it as self-expression. However you need to see this, it is very important that you are able to talk about your wins, and your accomplishments, and your achievements. So, those have been some big wins for me.

The other thing, I think, that’s been kind of eye-opening in terms of stuff I’d learned is, like, it’s interesting that you can outperform someone and not necessarily be better than them, and I think that’s a hard reality. And part of that comes down to they might be better at telling their story, they’re better at managing that, I guess, “playing the game.” And I think that sometimes, again, like a hard reality to come to terms with, but I also think it’s very true.

And so, again, self-advocating, learning how to tell your story, making sure that you’re aligned with the right stakeholders and getting in front of them, that’s really important. And, also, that confidence is not something you’re born with. It’s built by taking action. So, nothing is going to just come to you. You have to have the confidence and the willingness to try something in order to start getting traction.

So, if I could drop it into three nuggets of wisdom, those are like some three big takeaways I’ve had in the last year of talking. I have the best job because, through the podcast, YouTube channel, what we do at the side, our whole job is basically trying to find out, “How can you build a healthy fulfilling and successful career?” It is not a perfect black and white formula that fits in a box for everybody. But there are certain trends that I hear over and over again, and those are a few of them.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone that you’ve worked with who saw a real cool transformation in terms of they had one perspective, and then they learned some things, changed some things, and saw a fantastic result on the other side of things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, I have a couple. I have a friend who recently was working for a thing company, and their whole career was, like, the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Amazons, the Facebook, very much like you look at her career path, you’d be like, “You’ve got one very linear career path at a certain type of company,” was part of the layoffs that happened, has been searching for a job, and was kind of only searching one way for a job, which was, essentially, using her network, referrals, applying, things like that, introductions to hire, relying on her network.

For a whole year, she’s been looking for a job. She’s incredibly talented. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is she recently hit the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn to a job that had been reposted a couple of times, had less than 50 people apply for it, it was a very different industry than she had been in before but a similar job, like job function, and ended up going for two interviews, got a job offer, meaning the process was like weeks’ long versus multi-months long.

And I was talking to her, and she was like, “I’m almost afraid to take this because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, and it flips all the logic I’ve thought of on its head.” And so, it was almost like she was uncomfortable with this unknown for herself, of like, “Shouldn’t I just keep sticking with what I’m doing even if it’s not working? Eventually it will work.” And she ultimately decided she’s going to take this new job, couldn’t be happier. It very much fits the description of this “good-enough job.”

She goes into the office once a month. They really value her experience in a certain industry. She was feeling very discouraged from the job search before. And I feel this breathes new life into her, and watching her just have this new motivation. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of us sometimes do have this fear of the unknown, or the fear or doing something different. And there were a couple of takeaways from it.

One, there’s no right way to job search. So, if you’re job searching right now, try a lot of different strategies. Yes, tap your network. Yes, try to get referrals. Also hit Easy Apply to the jobs that you think are really interesting to you, or the companies where you’re like, “I like the company well enough. I need to learn more about them.”

So, I love that story. I love the fact that it reminds you that find a target company, network, absolutely. This job market, absolutely has taught me that there are no rules so you have to try a little bit of everything and test out, and see what strategy works best for you. But ultimately, I think, also, going in with if you can manage your expectations to not be too fixed mindset on it has to go a certain way, if you take some those, I think it’s a really freeing thing as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious, anything else you really make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, my book is called Power Moves so if you’re interested in exploring more of these topics related to the dream job and going after the good-enough job, Power Moves is really a framework on how to build a career that is based in a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. And then, of course, my podcast is called Career Contessa. I’ve really made it easy, and that’s where I get to talk to people who share what drives happiness at work. And I love being able to have those interesting conversations. So, if you’re interested in podcast advice, or career advice, check out Career Contessa as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My favorite quote that I learned from someone the other day is, “This or something better.” And I think that is an incredible quote especially for 2024 with this economic climate, this tough job market, it’s “This or something better.” So, remind yourself of that when you feel like, “I’m not making any progress. I’ve got a rejection.” And I always try to remind people, if they don’t look at your resume, they’re not rejecting you. My point being they look at your resume for seven seconds, or not at all, having a fresh mindset of, “That’s not necessarily a rejection that way,” but it’s, “This or something better.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lauren McGoodwin

I’m loving people who are doing research on remote work or distributed work. So, there’s a lot of CEOs out there who want to call everyone back to the office because of productivity, collaboration. And what these people who do this research are finding is, like, absolutely not necessary to be in office to collaborate, to be productive. And they’re actually doing a lot of research on what does drive those things.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. And a favorite book?

Lauren McGoodwin

A favorite book, Atomic Habits. I love that book. I quote it a lot. That and Essentialism I think they were like books I’ve read at the right time of my life to help me kind of get organized and focus, and gave me that fresh perspective that was really important.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Loom video recordings where, basically, you’re able to audio record yourself, or you can be on video, and then a screenshare. So, I’ll use it for trainings. It’s great for asynchronous work where you want to be able to send feedback to someone on something. So, on our team, we’re a fully remote company, so I will use Loom to send feedback on, “Hey, I read this article. Here’s something I would change. I’m going to edit here, edit there.” Sometimes we’ll use it for resume reviews for clients, too. So, I love Loom absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Lauren McGoodwin

Favorite habit, probably a to-do list. Definitely a to-do list. And I’m not fancy. I use pen and paper but that’s probably one of my favorite habits. I also am really big on 10,000 steps a day, so I just got a walking pad, and I have a standing desk, so that’s a big part of my personality is I’m a very 10,000 steps a day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Certainly, just the dream job myth, I think, is something that people are starting to know me by, is that they’ll say, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but I’m looking for a dream job,” or something like that. Or, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but then what do I find instead?” So, I would say the dream job myth is definitely something I’m quoted back and used on myself a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Everything is on the Career Contessa website, so CareerContessa.com. Podcast is called Career Contessa, and the book is Power Moves. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m Lauren McGoodwin on LinkedIn, and I post tips daily on there, and I would love to connect with you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My final action, I think, going back to one of the nuggets of things I’ve learned is “How can you advocate for yourself this week? Or, how can you make your accomplishments or achievements known this week?” Does that mean you can send a quick email to your boss, of, “Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been working on”? Can you mention yourself in that Slack channel, like, “Here’s my win for the week”? What can you do to make sure that you are advocating and letting your wins be known?

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lauren, thank you and good luck.

Lauren McGoodwin

Thank you.

Feb 26
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939: How to Waste Less Time on Meetings…and Spend More Time on Strategy with Rich Horwath

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Rich Horwath reveals how to cut through the busywork and make more time for strategy.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What being “strategic” really means
  2. The critical questions that determine what truly matters
  3. Why most meetings are useless—and how to fix them 

About Rich

Rich Horwath is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books on strategic thinking and has been rated the #1 keynote speaker on strategy at national conferences, including the Society for Human Resource Management Strategy Conference.

He has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX TV to provide commentary on the strategic aspects of current events and his work has appeared in publications including Fast Company, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.

A former Chief Strategy Officer and professor of strategy, Rich has created more than 700 resources to help leaders at all levels maximize their strategic potential. He designed the Strategic Quotient (SQ) Assessment, a validated tool to measure how effectively a person thinks, plans, and acts strategically. Rich created the Strategic Fitness System as an online platform for leaders to practice the skills to effectively navigate all areas of their business, including strategy, leadership, organization, and communication.

Resources Mentioned

Rich Horwath Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Rich, welcome.

 

Rich Horwath

Pete, thanks. Great to be with you today.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom that you put forth in your book Strategic, but first I need to hear a little bit about you and the Second City improv club in Chicago. I did a little bit of training there myself. Tell us the tale and how that relates to you and strategy.

 

Rich Horwath

Well, strategy, for many people, can be quite boring, and realizing that early on, I said, “Well, how can we differentiate ourselves? We know strategy is important to have differentiation.” So, I said, “One way to potentially not be as boring is to do some improv training.” So, I joined Second City because I lived in the old town area at the time so it was very close, and spent a year there training, doing weekly classes, and it was a great opportunity to really push myself outside of my comfort zone.

Anyone who can tell you that’s heard me sing, singing is not a strength of mine, and some of the improvisation required making up songs as we went. So, being able to put yourself out there and do something completely terrible, and make it through mentally and emotionally, was a good way to build some mental fortitude.

 

Pete Mockaitis

I like that a lot. I remember I did an intensive over, I guess, five-ish days, just before Thanksgiving, and I remember I came back from it, I said, “Oh, this is fun. I think it really loosened me up.” And my friends said, “Pete, I don’t think you needed to be any looser.” But, nonetheless, I got looser and I appreciated the impact.

 

Rich Horwath

I love it. I love it.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, you’ve been talking about coaching, studying, consulting, strategy stuff for a couple decades, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this stuff as you’ve delved into it?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, one of the things that’s a little counterintuitive is we hear the mantra “fail fast” a lot, and it’s come out of Silicon Valley, and a lot of people apply it across the board, “Fail fast. Try something. Fail.” And my experience, Pete, has been that that’s not really a great recipe for leaders to follow, especially ones that are in more established industries.

Because, yes, in a startup environment in Silicon Valley, a tech company, you’re going try things, see if they work because you’re really pioneering new markets. But if you’re in a more experienced industry with maturity, the ability to succeed, to think, and to plan is something, I think, it’s going to be more important to people’s long-term career success.

So, that’s one thing that would be a bit counterintuitive is, I’d like to say, let’s replace fail fast with think first and then succeed. So, that would be one thing I’d mention off the top of my head.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I like that a lot in terms, yeah, fail fast has a time and a place in terms of, “Okay, don’t spin your wheels forever. Sometimes the best way to learn is just by trying it out, see what happens.” But other times, the cost of failure is pretty significant, and the benefit of getting it right the first, or second, or third time, instead of failing dozens of times, is massive. So, I’m right with there. I love my 80/20 Rule, my the-one-thing kind of stuff. It’s a beautiful thing.

For those who are not yet converts into strategy is awesome, can you share with us what’s sort of at stake or the benefits for professionals who master this stuff versus kind of limp along, doing okay with the whole strategy thing?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, when we think about the average person out there, and their ability to be led, to be a follower, to have set direction for them, one of the things that we see from a research standpoint is that 22% of people in the workforce, and this is a study of 30 million workers by Gallup, found that only 22% said, “Hey, our senior leadership has set great strategic direction.”

And so, one of the things we want to think about is if you’re in an organization that doesn’t have good strategic direction, all of a sudden, you’ve got people spending time on this thing, time on this thing, they’re spreading their resources too thin in lots of different areas, and it’s not all gelling together. So, being able to be strategic, to set direction for your business, whether you’re the CEO, whether you’re a first line manager, whether you’re an individual contributor, is going to be really important because strategy isn’t just what’s written in the PowerPoint deck.

It’s how each and every one of us spend our time, day in and day out. That’s the real strategy because strategy is about resource allocation. And the most important resource is time. So, all of us out there are strategists. The key is to have an understanding of what that means, and then really understand, “Are we putting our time into the priorities that are really going to drive value for our company and for our customers?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And I think that most of us think that we probably do an okay job of this, “Sure, I got a to-do list, and I think about what might be most important, and I put an asterisk or a box around that item on my to-do list.” So, is that adequate? Or just what sort of benefits might I unlock if I were operating at a Jedi-level of being awesomely strategic?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, Pete, I’m going to borrow one of the phrases you’ve used because I really like it. You call yourself pathologically curious.

 

Rich Horwath

And I think when we consider the ability to be strategic, a lot of involves that level of curiosity, that explorer’s mindset, that we’re trying to discover new ways, new solutions, new approaches to bring value to people. Because what happens is, too often, if we’re just following a to-do list, and we’re on that activity treadmill, then we can lose sight of, “Are we really providing new and differentiated value to the people that we’re serving, either internally or externally as well?”

And so, I think being strategic is, “How are we accumulating or generating insights?” and I define an insight as a learning that leads to new value. So, the best leaders, the best managers are the ones that are continually accumulating these insights, these new learnings that are helping them bring value to their company.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I like insights. Maybe, Rich, can you make it all the more real for us by sharing a cool story of a professional who upgraded their strategic game and saw some cool benefits from it?

 

Rich Horwath

So, I was working with a mid-level manager at a medical device company, and this is about 10 years ago, and we were in a session, and we were doing some brainstorming using a tool called a value-mining matrix, which, in simple terms, is looking at customers and needs, and trying to determine, “How can we bring new value to meet some new needs that people have?”

And this company was in the cardiovascular space, so the heart space. And, typically, when they had these brainstorming sessions, all the ideas were in the heart space, but this one leader said, “You know, I was in an operating room not too long ago with one of my customers, and one of the main problems, the challenges that the surgeons and the nurses had was really being able to get rid of a lot of different materials, liquids, things that were no longer usable in the operating room right after the surgery, and they didn’t really have a good, clear, clean way to do that.”

And so, she said, “Maybe we should think about some type of disposal service for general surgery.” And it was interesting, Pete, because people in the session were kind of rolling their eyes, and looking around, and somebody even said, “You know, we don’t do that. That’s not what we do.” But she said, “Well, we need to think. We’ve heard the term outside the box, but we need to think about what are other ways that we can solve challenges that our customers have?”

And so, they wound up doing a pilot program in coming up with a prototype service to work in general surgery to remove the different types of waste materials, and it was successful at a regional hospital. They rolled it out across the State, and then they rolled it out nationally, and a couple of years later, that was a hundred-million-dollar piece of their business, which was a fairly significant part of the company.

So, again, it was this idea of not just being locked into doing the same things and the same ways we always do them, which tends to be our operational effectiveness, but strategy is really about, “How can we pick a different path that’s going to help us be successful?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. I love that. Well, it’s so funny, when you said that idea, it seems so perfect because, yeah, that’s probably how it would land, like, “Aargh, this is annoying. Let’s get back on track. This meeting is already too long. We don’t really do that.” But then I’m thinking from my perspective, “Man, if you solve a problem that surgeons are having, there’s probably a lot of money there.”

 

Rich Horwath

Exactly.

 

Pete Mockaitis

And, sure enough, there was. And money not just for the company but, I imagine, for that clever professional, as well as people on their teams, some promotions and raises are probably dolled out along the path of making that happen.

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, absolutely, there were. And, again, what it did was it forced everyone in the organization to rethink what their sandbox was. And, again, it typically was the heart space, and they said, “We need to look at other ways that we can take our capabilities, our skill sets, and our knowledge, and apply them across all the needs that surgeons might have.” So, you’re right, there was a big seismic shift in the way people were thinking about the business.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, in your book Strategic, it sounds like is that kind of like the main point you’re bringing there, it’s like, “If you take the time to get these insights, great things happen”? Or, how would you articulate the main message or the big idea here?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, I think that’s a great way to capture it. The reality is if we think about physical fitness, so if we think about running, jogging, lifting some weights, doing Pilates, if we do any of those things once a year, one day out of the year, we’re probably not going to be very physically fit. If we played the guitar once a year, we’re probably not going to be a great guitar player.

But when it comes to strategy, and planning, and thinking strategically, a lot of people do it a couple days out of the year, in November or creating their plan, and then it goes away for about 11 and a half months. So, a lot of people treat strategy like a birthday where it happens once a year, there’s a lot of signage and funfair, and then it goes away.

So, the premise of the book, to your point, is really about, “How do you take the importance of generating insights on a yearly basis, and make that everyone’s daily job? How do we create that accountability for learnings that lead to new value?” because that’s the way that you really take knowledge workers and create a true learning organization, versus people doing their own things in silos, which happens quite a bit.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. I like that notion, the fitness, strategic fitness once a year, once a quarter isn’t going to cut the mustard on the body, nor will it with your strategic skills. Well, Rich, could you give us a quick overview of you lay out four disciplines of strategic fitness? What are those?

 

Rich Horwath

So, there’s strategy, leadership, organization, and communication. And so, in my work over the last 20 years, I found that the executives that are truly successful in the long run, they’re good in all of those areas. They’re not just one or the other. For instance, Forbes magazine found two years ago that the most CEOs that were fired in the Fortune 500 were fired because of emotional intelligence issues, not financial performance.

So, just being good at strategy, as a leader, is not good enough if you’re not good with people, if you’re not a true leader, if you don’t create purpose for other people. So, one of the keys is you’ve got to be well-rounded in the fat that you have to be a good communicator, you’ve got to be able to set the structure for the organization and the processes, you have to be a leader, meaning you have to be able to set direction and serve others to achieve goals, and then you’ve got to be able to set strategy, meaning, “We’ve got to allocate our resources in order to get where we want to go.”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now that is a fascinating little tidbit you shared there, and I didn’t think we’d talked much about emotional intelligence in a conversation about strategy but let’s go ahead and do it. 

 

Rich Horwath

Well, when we think about emotional intelligence, there’s two main areas. There’s self-awareness and then there’s the situation awareness. And the situation awareness is really about your interaction and relationships with other people, and that’s the one that seems to trip up most of the CEOs, is it relates to their teams, as well as the board of directors.

So, oftentimes, they’re surprising the board of directors with news about different things. From a culture perspective, they’re not creating the integrity of having a culture where they’re talking and doing things that match up. So, oftentimes, they say, “Well, honesty is one of our key values,” and, all of a sudden, they’re asking their people to do things that may not be quite honest as far as customer reporting, customer sales and things like that.

So, to your point, they don’t tend to be the big scandalous things, but a lot of it is just their awareness of how they’re interacting with other people. And are they doing it in a way that’s empathetic, meaning they’re putting themselves in other person’s shoes to understand, “How does this person want to be treated? What do they need to know? And am I being transparent with the things that they would want to know?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

That’s beautiful. And not to dehumanize this at all, but it is actually quite strategic, in my experience, to have a wide network of good relationships that you can work with again and again and again. I’m just thinking about John, this guy I’ve collaborated with from time to time on some big audio projects, and I was like, “Ooh, I’ve got a short deadline.” And so, I was like, “Oh, I’ll call up John. Oh, he has some availability. Well, that’s great news.”

And so, it’s like if I had been a jerk in previous times I had big audio projects with short deadlines, and yelling at John to do more faster, well, then you wouldn’t have that resource available. And so, it is with all sorts of things, strategically thinking, it’s, like, we have our strengths, our gifts, what we can do way more efficiently than others, and to the extent that you are filling in your gaps with other people over a lifelong network of collaboration, that is just a huge enabler of strategic goodness.

 

Rich Horwath

And, Pete, what you just said there is such a good point, you said the word lifelong. And I think that’s a great reminder for everybody out there because, too often, we look at relationships as transactional and short term, instead of lifelong, like you talk about. And if we think about that relationship from a lifelong perspective, one of the things I encourage people to do at all levels is to pick the top ten people that you work with on a regular basis, and then map out, “What are the intentional things that you want to do to develop that relationship even further or deeper over the next year?”

And so, that’s one thing I’ve seen people do to be successful, whether it’s with your board of directors, colleagues to your point, other people that you work with outside your company, but pick 10, 15, 20 people, and just jot down a couple bullet points for this year, “What do you want to do to build or develop that relationship to another level?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I love that. Well, so now you highlight a number of time traps that impede our ability to be strategic and effective. Can you share what are some of those? And how do we deal with them effectively?

 

Rich Horwath

So, when we look at being strategic, time, the ability to marshal, to use your time effectively is so critical. So, there’s a few things that trip people up when it comes to time. One of them being just not carving time out to think. Sometimes we’re on that activity treadmill, we’re going and going and going, but we don’t really stop to think about, “What are we doing? How are we doing it? Why are we doing it? And are there ways to do it differently or better?”

And the best executives I’ve worked with are the ones that really carve out some times, 30 minutes, 60 minutes a week to step back and think about changes that they would like to make and the ways that they’re using their time. The other really interesting learning I’ve had in studying CEOs is a lot of the good ones batch their time.

So, instead of bouncing from one thing this minute to another thing this minute, to email, to a report, to a one-on-one meeting, to a staff meeting, they really batch their time in chunks of two, to three, to four hours. So, they might say, “Well, I’m going to do all of my one-on-one direct report meetings on Monday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.”

And the big benefit of that, Pete, is they reduce the number of mental transitions that they have to make during the day. Because if you have 70 or 80 different mental transitions during the day, that’s what causes burnout, that’s what causes people to be really tired at the end of the day. But if you group all of your one-on-ones for three to four hours, then you do 45 minutes of email, and then you do a couple reports, now you’ve got three or four transitions versus 60 transitions.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I think that makes all the difference because it takes a while to get into the groove of a thing, and then I think the time in which you’re not in that groove, there’s friction. And so, yeah, less time in the friction zone would probably result in less burnout, more energetic goodness, so that’s awesome. Now, I need to hear about the particulars for the how-to’s of strategic thinking, like the key questions you ask, how you identify what really, really, really is important and worthwhile versus not so important and worthwhile. How do you go about thinking through and approaching these?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, so, in general, I think we could start with three A’s. There’s a three A strategic framework, which is acumen, allocation, and action. So, acumen is, “What’s the insight? What’s my learning here?” So, one thing I’d recommend is try for a week, every interaction that you have, if it’s a one-on-one meeting, your daily staff meeting or huddle, a report that you’re doing, after you have that interaction, sit down for just a minute or two, and ask yourself, “What did I learn in that session? What was the key takeaway for me?”

Because what we see, Pete, in the last couple of years is we’re stacking meetings on top of each other, especially if we’re in a hybrid or remote format and we’re doing a lot of things on video. We tend to stack those meetings and we go from one to the other, and we don’t really take the time to identify, “What are the action steps out of this interaction? What were my learnings? And what would I do differently with that next interaction with these same people?” I also recommend this idea of scoring your interactions, especially meetings.

So, as you go throughout your week, one thing I have executives I work with do is I have them use a scale of one to three. So, one was low value in the interaction, two is mid-value, and three was high value. And what’s interesting then is that if you categorize those results at the end of the week, so you say, “My operating meeting, my IT meeting, my HR meeting,” if you rate all of those throughout the week, if some of them are coming as a one, a one and a half, or a two, then you need to ask yourself, “Is that a meeting that we should keep doing? And if so, how do we improve the value of that meeting?” for yourself, for the other people involved with it.

So, that first A, acumen, is really about thinking, “How do we create more value in what we’re doing every interaction?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

And if I may, when it comes to scoring the value of the interaction, how do we think about measuring value and making that assessment? And what are typical sorts of improvements that you’ve seen upgrade the value?

 

Rich Horwath

So, the main thing I would say is you have to have your goals clearly identified, not just your goals, but you have to understand the goals of the other people, the other groups that you’re meeting with. Too often, people go in with their own agenda to these interactions, and they’re not really empathetic as to what the other person is trying to achieve as well. So, to me, the first step in understanding or ascertaining value is, “How well did that interaction help us progress toward our goals, not just my goal, not just your goal, but our goals collectively?”

Once we understand what the goals are, then we need to ask ourselves, “Did we have the right questions and preparation going into that interaction?” I’m a big believer that if you have a one-on-one meeting, a group meeting, you’ve got to have preparation.

Forty-eight, 72 hours beforehand, send out one or two key questions, and have people think about that. So, when you get into that meeting, that conversation, it can start at a much more accelerated pace because people are really ready to engage. So, I would say those are a couple of the key things that can turn up the volume on value.

 

Pete Mockaitis

And I suppose as you go through this exercise regularly, you might discover fairly quickly, “Oh, actually, the goals that we’re pursuing in these meetings aren’t actually worth pursuing at all.”

 

Rich Horwath

Great insight. Yup, exactly.

 

Pete Mockaitis

“Let’s skip the meeting and it’s all good.”

 

Rich Horwath

And that’s a good point, Pete. I would recommend folks out there to think about taking a meeting audit. So, jot down on a piece of paper, on a Word doc, what are all of the meetings that you currently attend, and think about what’s the goal, or what’s the purpose of those meetings. And a lot of times, when people do an audit or an inventory of their meetings, to your point, Pete, there are some of them, they say, “You know, this is not adding any value. I’ve done this meeting for three years and it’s the same old conversation.” And it could be better served if somebody just sent out an email, or, even these days, did a quick one- or two-minute video overview of the topic and information that they wanted to share.

 

Pete Mockaitis

I like that a lot. I am a huge proponent of Loom. I guess there are many software pieces that do this kind of thing. But, oh, yeah, that screen recording, so quick and easy and simple. Don’t have to coordinate everyone’s calendar, and it’s just like, “Here’s what you need to know. Here’s the process. Here’s the software and the documents and the things that we’re doing, or an update on what I’ve discovered, and what I might recommend we look at next,” and then that’s that.

 

Rich Horwath
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of software and things to do that. And, again, I think the key point, and you touched on it as well, is we just need to think about, “How are we using our time in ways that are getting us to our goals?” because, too often, time is driven by activity for activity’s sake alone.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Let’s hear about allocation.

 

Rich Horwath

So, allocation then, that second A, is really about, “How are you using your resources, your time, your energy, your mindset, your talent, and any budget that you have to achieve the goals that you have?” And, again, the key for allocation, and you know this as well as anybody, great strategy is as much about what we choose not to do as it is about what we choose to do.

So, the best managers, the best leaders I’ve seen are really crystal clear for themselves and their team on, “Here are the areas and things that we’re not going to spend our time on. So, we’re not going to generate these reports. We’re not going to work with these types of customers. We’re not going to fulfill these types of requests because they’re not the sweet spots where we can bring the most value.” So, a lot of allocation is, yes, you have to have a to-do list but, as we’ve heard before, you want to have that not to-do list as well so people are really clear and not wasting time.

 

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love the not to-do list. And I remember I was having a chat years ago with a friend. We were talking… totally different context; we were talking about dating. He’s like, “You got to get really clear on your must-haves and you-can’t-stands.” I was like, “Okay, I guess that makes sense.” And, also, I said, “I think it also is really helpful to get clear on your doesn’t-matters.” And he’s like, “Why? Why did you say that?” I was like, “Because I think it’s easy to get sidetracked.” Like, “Ooh, that’s impressive that he’s rich.” It’s like, “Oh, but actually that doesn’t matter because of…” well, whatever reason. He’s like, “Financially, it’s all good over here.”

Because it’s easy to get sucked into something that’s attractive and interesting, romantically or from a business career professional perspective, because it just sort of triggers something in you, like, “Ooh, that’s really cool and nifty fresh opportunity.” Like, “Oh, we got to do AI because everyone is doing AI, and AI is the thing to do, right?” It’s like, “Okay. Well, maybe, but that’s actually not at all a good reason to go do AI because it’s hot and everyone else is doing it.”

Maybe it’s like, “Oh, there is an opportunity here to do substantial savings. Maybe,” or maybe it’s not. So, I like that notion a lot, getting clear on the not to do. And while we’re talking allocation, I got to hear your take on the 80/20 Rule. Is it real, Rich?

 

Rich Horwath

Absolutely. I believe it’s real, both from a business and a personal perspective. When you think about the organizations that have really been successful, and obviously the ones that come to mind, the Apples, the Googles, the Nordstroms, the Metas, what you find is that they’ve really driven tremendous value through one or two things that they’ve done for the most part.

And then once they’ve gotten 5, 10, 15, 20 years in, they start to add other things. But really, my experience working with leaders is that if you can identify that 20% of things that’s going to drive 80% of the value, that’s going to be a great ticket to being as effective as possible. And I do recommend everybody out there, at least once a quarter, jot down how you’re spending your time in 30-minute increments throughout the week. Add those things up at the end of the week, and I’d even recommend graph it out.

So, on the X-axis, put the different categories where you spend your time, on the Y-axis the hours, and map that out, draw that out. And what you’ll find is there’s going to be a couple things that take up the majority of your time. The question is, “Do those things actually matter to your goals and priorities?” And if they don’t, then we need to make some changes. So, that’s my perspective, Pete. What’s been your observations on the 80/20?

 

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, it really has been, and there are times when I have actually made a spreadsheet of, “What is the expected profit generated per hour of Pete required of all these different initiatives?” And just as the 80/20 Rule would predict, the vital few activities, those 20% of things that drive 80% of the value, can, indeed, be 16 times as impactful as the trivial many activities. And it’s just so eye-opening.

I think if there’s a whiff of procrastination in my psyche, and there is often, just having that kind of clarity is so powerful. It’s like, “Okay, Pete, this is 16 times as important as the other thing. So, don’t even think about investing your time in that other thing.” And it’s just pretty wild. So, I’d love to hear from your perspective, working with clients, what are some common themes of activities that are often in that vital few top 20% zone that are truly often 16 times as impactful as the other stuff?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, I would say the number one thing is spending time with customers, so it may be your customers internally. So, if you’re an HR leader, it might be spending time with the person who’s doing compensation, the ones who’s doing incentive, the ones who’s doing DEI stuff. So, to me, spending time with the people that you’re serving, either internally or externally, that, I think, is where most of the leaders I’ve talked to are really getting a ton of value.

One of the things I throw out there that I’d say a lot of leaders get caught up in, that doesn’t bring a lot of value, is presentations, whether it’s presentations internally, presentations to the board. I’m seeing leaders spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with these presentations when, in fact, I think what most people are really hungry for is a real dialogue, not just a presentation, “I’m going to talk to you for 30 minutes, and then I’ll give you two minutes at the end to ask a couple questions.”

People want interaction, they want dialogue. So, that would be one, I would say, trap to avoid is getting caught up in the real fancy presentations as opposed to creating real dialogue with folks.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And the action?

 

Rich Horwath

So, the action, that third A, is really about, “How are you prioritizing what’s important versus the stuff that’s urgent?” And I think you brought up the 80/20 and some of the ways that you use it, I think that’s a great tool to help people act in a way that’s going to really drive value for them and for the people that they’re serving, if you can take the time to identify what those few activities are that are driving the majority of value. And then, like you said, a good leader helps people avoid the noise, the things that are out there but aren’t really relevant.

So, I think, as a good leader from an action standpoint, you’re almost putting earmuffs on people to say, “Look, here’s what we’re focused on. Don’t let all these other things that are uncontrollable in the environment, or things like AI, distract us from really what the task at hand is.” So, it’s really just that ability to prioritize the important versus the urgent.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it, Rich, if you could lay on us any other quick tips, tricks, questions, shortcuts for zeroing in on super high value stuff fast?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah. Well, one thing, Pete, we’re all involved in meetings, and meetings take up a lot of time. And the recent study shows that about 70% of executives feel that meetings are inefficient and ineffective. And so, one of the things I’d recommend is this meeting framework. So, think about three things. Think about your intent, your decisions, and your insights.

So, intent is, if you’re meeting with people, even if it’s one person, “What’s the intent? What’s the purpose?” and formulate that in an agenda. The second piece is decisions. If you’re just meeting to talk, and you don’t have decisions where you’re moving things forward, you’re potentially wasting time. So, think about what’s the decision there. And then that third one is insights. Take time at the end of interactions to really think about, “What’s the learning? What’s the new action plan based on that interaction?”

So, I would say that’s an important one around meetings, it’s just that idea of intent, decisions, and insights. That’s a key one. And then, I guess, the other piece I’d mention, too, is just that we’re in a lot of conversations day in and day out, so we really want to make sure that we’re in conversations that are exploratory, but then also think about a funnel, we’re at the end of the conversation, we’re getting to the bottom of the funnel.

A lot of conversations I’ve been a part of and see, we’re at the top of the funnel the entire meeting and that’s where we end, but we don’t get down to the end of the funnel to the neck of the funnel, to say, “Okay, so what based on this conversation? What’s next?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

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

 

Rich Horwath

A quote from Proverbs, it’s “Iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man.” I think we can learn something from everybody out there if we’re just open enough to do that.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

 

Rich Horwath

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. 

 

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool?

 

Rich Horwath

Mindjet. So, it’s a mind-mapping software, very simple in nature, very inexpensive, but, to me, it’s the best way to think through an article, a project, even your to-do list for the day.

 

Pete Mockaitis

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

 

Rich Horwath

I start with a mental workout each morning. So, not jumping jacks, or pushups, or burpees, or anything, but I do a mental workout where I actually take some of the things that Olympic athletes use, like visualization, affirmation statements, performance statements, and I tailor that for my business. So, I visualize the meetings that I have coming up, how I’d like to be in those meeting, I think about a couple key performance statements, like, ask good questions, be a good listener, be an active listener, things like that. So, I try to do that each morning to kind of frame my mental attitude for the day.

 

Pete Mockaitis

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

 

Rich Horwath

New growth comes from new thinking

 

Pete Mockaitis

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

 

Rich Horwath

A lot of free resources, about a hundred different free resources at StrategySkills.com, articles, white papers, infographics, videos, podcasts. So, StrategySkills.com.

 

Pete Mockaitis

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

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, I would say that the one thing to keep in mind is, “How are you bringing new value to people?” It’s easy to say, “This is my job. This is my activity. This is what I do.” But then, let’s take that one step further and think about, “How am I providing, creating, delivering value for people today?” If we put ourselves in that value mindset, we’re always going to be relevant to the folks that we’re working with.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Rich, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many good strategic decisions.

 

Rich Horwath

Pete, thanks so much. It was great to be with you today.

Feb 22
0

938: William Ury on How to Thrive in Conflict

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Renowned negotiation expert William Ury draws from his extensive experience of working in the world’s toughest conflicts to help transform conflict into opportunity.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why we need more conflict, not less
  2. The true enemy to confront
  3. How writing the other side’s victory speech can help you win

About William

William Ury is one of the world’s best-known experts on negotiation, and co-author of Getting to Yes, the world’s all-time bestselling book on negotiation with more than 15 million copies sold. A co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, Ury has devoted his life to helping people, organizations, and nations transform conflicts around the world, having served as a negotiator in many of the toughest disputes of our times, taught negotiation to tens of thousands, and consulted for the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. He has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from Kentucky wildcat coal mine strikes to family feuds, from US partisan battles to wars in the Middle East, Colombia, Korea, and Ukraine. 

Ury is an internationally sought-after speaker and has two popular TEDx talks with millions of viewers. He lives in Colorado where he loves to hike in the mountains.

Resources Mentioned

William Ury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bill, welcome.

William Ury
Well, it’s a real pleasure to speak with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to kick us off, if you could, with a super-riveting tale about a high-stakes negotiation you participated in, and how a key breakthrough emerged.

William Ury
Okay. Picture it, it’s about 20 years ago, I’m face-to-face with the president of Venezuela, he’s furious at me and yelling, getting very close to my face, and yelling at me. I’m in front of his entire cabinet. It’s past midnight. I’m surprised. I’m thinking, “Oh, a years’ worth of work down the drain.” I’m feeling embarrassed and I’m about to react and defend myself, he’s saying, “You know, you’re a fool, you third-siders, you mediators, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t see the traitors on the other side,” because I had said, “I thought there was some progress,” and he really got ticked off at that. And I was thinking of how to defend myself.

And then I caught myself for a moment, and I went to, what I call, the proverbial balcony, which is that place of calm and perspective, just for a tiny second, bit my tongue, and I asked myself, “Is it really going to advance things here if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? What am I here for? I’m here to calm things down.” So, I bit my tongue and I listened, and he proceeded to shout, and rant, and rave right close to my face for about half an hour, but since I wasn’t feeding him anything, slowly his energy began to wind down. And then I watched his shoulders sink, and he said to me in a very weary tone of voice, “So, Ury, what should I do?”

That, my friends, is the moment that a mind begins to open up. That’s the very faint sound of it. So, I said, “You know, Mr. President, it’s almost December. Plans for Christmas have been canceled. Why don’t you give everyone a break?” what’s in Spanish called a tregua, a truce, “Just give it a break for this conflict,” because there were a million people on the streets calling for his resignation, a million of his supporters calling for him, there is fear of even civil war. It was a really tense situation in the country. And he looked to me for a moment, he said, “That’s a good idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech.” His mood had entirely shifted.

And what I realized then in that moment was that maybe the single greatest opportunity we have in negotiation, the greatest power that we have is the power, not to react but, instead, to take a step back, go to the balcony as if the negotiation is unfolding on the stage in front of us, remember what we really want, and listen. And that’s the key, to me, to unlocking a lot of the difficult conflicts that we face, whether it’s in our personal lives, or at work, or in the larger society.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Bill, I love that. And so, your genius move there was to say nothing.

William Ury
Exactly, to say nothing. Exactly. And maybe the easiest thing to do. It’s hard in that moment but it’s not like you have to come up with something clever. It’s to say nothing, and then, if anything, listen to yourself. Watch your own emotions. Watch yourself. Listen to yourself. How can we possibly listen to others if we haven’t really listened to ourselves? Tune in for a moment, and say, “Wow, I’m agitated. I’m feeling embarrassed. I’m angry. I’m pissed off.” Whatever it is, as soon as you start to listen to yourself from that little bit of a distance, your nervous system starts to calm down, and you can bring your best to the situation instead of your worst.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like the balcony a lot as a visual because, and maybe this is deliberately why you chose it, I have the experience, when I am overlooking a large expanse, and, in particular, actually, a lot of empty seats. I don’t know, maybe it’s like all those moments before the keynote, before everyone arrives. There is a sense of calm and power that comes from being in that visual kind of a space. And I don’t think that’s just me. That might be humanity itself. What’s that about?

William Ury
I think so. Actually, right now, I’m in a place, a little getaway in the mountains, and I can see about a hundred miles from here. And what it does in the brain, is that spaciousness, you’re looking over seats, is it gives you perspective. It’s what psychologists call perspective-taking. You could see the larger picture because, so often, in these conflicts, in these negotiations, daily, or small, or large, the biggest casualty is we lose our perspective.

And so, the ability to step back for a moment and see that larger perspective, and you may be in a closed office or something like that, but look out the window, or close your eyes for a second, and remember a beautiful scene that you’ve been in, and all of that will help your brain just recalibrate and tap into your inner potential to deal with that situation, that difficult situation, as hard as it is, with your maximum potential.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, zooming out a little bit, I guess getting some perspective from the balcony, your book is called Possible, and you say that you’re neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but rather a possibilist. Can you tell us what that means? And I’d love to hear the inspiring basis upon which you found your hope.

William Ury
Well, Pete, so, yeah, after all these years, I’ve spent about a 40, 45 years wandering the world in some of the toughest conflicts here in this country and around the world, from labors strikes and coal mines, to board room battles, to political disputes, to civil wars, Middle East, Columbia, Ukraine, North Korea, and people ask me, “So, you’ve seen some of the worst of humanity, how do you feel?” And I used to say I’m an optimist, and I’m an optimist, but now I like to calibrate a little more, and I say, “Actually, I’m a possibilist. I believe in human beings. I believe in our potential to transform conflicts, to change those situations.”

And the reason I believe it is I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen it in small situations, I’ve seen it in large situations, and I saw it in South Africa back in the ‘90s when blacks and whites were in a war, a race war, I saw it in Northern Ireland where there was a sectarian war. I’ve even seen it in the Middle East. I’ve seen it here in this country, and it’s that spirit of possibilism, of being able to see opportunities where others only see obstacles, that I think is key.

And it’s that spirit of possibilism, I think, that we need more and more in our daily lives, in our work lives, in our personal lives because the world outside seems to be, like, going a little crazy, and we need that mindset, which is, it’s not Pollyannish, it’s not like, “Okay, the world is all rosy,” but we look at the negative possibilities, but then we look for where those positive possibilities, we bring our curiosity, our creativity, and our collaborative potential to bear on the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And in your book, you mentioned you’ve been in a number of situations where most people said, “Yeah, this is going to end pretty poorly,” and yet there were surprisingly positive developments in how things unfolded with regard to potential global calamities.

William Ury
That’s right. I’ve learned so much from just watching how people do these things. Going back to, again, like to South Africa, like a guy like Nelson Mandela. Here he was in prison for 27 years, and what’s the first thing he does in prison is he studies the language of his enemies. He learns their history, he puts himself in their shoes, he learns how they think, how they feel, what their traumas are, and that enables him, actually, when he comes out of prison, to be able to persuade them to lay down their weapons and agree to a democratic situation.

And it’s those kinds of things I’ve seen over time that I think that’s what we’re going to need in today’s…We live in an age of conflict. Everywhere around us, conflicts seem to be increasing, polarizing us, even poisoning our relationships, and paralyzing us, and we need the spirit of possibility, of meeting animosity with curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you can tweet that, Bill. That’s nice. And within that, I’m curious, you’ve been doing this for a long, long time. Tell us, what are some of the most recent, surprising, and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about this human communication conflict thing that you’re capturing in your book Possible?

William Ury
Well, one thing is, for a long time, I’ve noticed the importance of going to the balcony, and I noticed the importance of building a bridge, but, in today’s times, often we need more of that. And the thing that’s kind of the hidden resource that’s all around us that we don’t see is what I’ve come to call the third side. Because in every conflict, we tend to reduce it to me versus you, or us versus them, there’s always two sides. And what we don’t see is that there’s always actually a third side, which is the surrounding community, it’s the whole, and that’s a huge resource to us.

If we’re stuck in a conflict, it’s really hard sometimes to go to the balcony, it’s hard to build bridges with some people, or in some organizations, or in some situations, but we can get help from the people around us. It may be our friends, it may be our neighbors, it may be our colleagues, it may be our allies, and it’s not just people to be on our side. That, too, is important, but people who can take the side of the larger whole. Let’s look at it from that larger perspective, who can help us, who can sit us down with the other side, who can listen to us. It’s engaging, building that, I call it a winning coalition for agreement. Building a coalition where we’re not alone in the situation.

And that, to me, is one of the great hopes for humanity, and for us individually in any of our situations, is to look beyond the two sides that we’re always being asked to take one side or the other. But where is that third side?

Pete Mockaitis
I love that notion, the third side, the winning coalition, and we’ve started to introduce some of these concepts, the balcony and the bridge. Could you give us that intro within the frame of the camel story which I really enjoyed?

William Ury
Right. Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories, Pete. It’s an old story, a fable that comes from the Middle East about a man who dies, and he leaves to his three sons, as their inheritance, 17 camels. And to the first son, the oldest son, he leaves half the camels, and to the middle son, he leaves a third of the camels, and to the youngest son, he leaves a ninth of the camels. Well, three sons go about it, and it turns out 17 doesn’t divide by two, and it doesn’t divide by three, and it doesn’t divide by nine, and they start to get into an argument, each one wants more. And you know how brothers can get, almost comes to fisticuffs and violence.

And, finally, in desperation, they consult a wise old woman. And she listens to them, like a good manager listens or whatever, she says, “You know, I don’t have the answer to this. I don’t know if I can help you, but if you want, I actually have a camel, and I’d be happy to give you my camel.” So, the three sons say, “Okay.” Well, then they have 18 camels. Well, 18, as it turns out, does divide by two, so the first son takes his half, and that’s nine; the second son takes his third, and that’s six; and the youngest son takes his ninth, and that’s two. And if you add nine, and six, you get 15, plus two, 17. They have one camel left over and they gave it back to the wise old woman.

Now, if you think about it, a lot of our conflicts, a lot of our situations are a little bit like those 17 camels. You approach it, there’s no way to divide it up, there’s no way to solve the problem. Somehow, what we need to do is, like that wise old woman, we need to step back to the balcony, look at that larger perspective, see if we can come up with a creative idea, a creative reframe, which, in this case, is the 18th camel, that’s the golden bridge, as it were, and see if we can transform the situation, and it often takes the help of a third side, which, in this case, is the wise old woman.

So, to me, actually that story, which I’ve been telling for a long time, I hadn’t realized, it has all those three ingredients, to me, which are the magic ingredients, the magic potentials, the magic victories that we need, which is, one, is a victory with ourselves which is ability not to react but to go to the balcony; the second is a victory with the other side, mutually agreeable solution, a golden bridge as it were; and the third is a victory with the whole, which is to engage that third side, the surrounding community. And if you can put all three together, that’s my aha in this book, then what’s seemingly impossible, and we’re facing a lot of seemingly impossible situations these days, becomes possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And I want to dig into each of these three in a bit of depth in terms of hearing some best practices and practical ways to implement, particularly in workplace scenarios. But first, I just want to go meta, or broad scale for a moment, and here you say that we actually could benefit from more conflict instead of less. What do you mean by that? And why is that the case?

William Ury
Yeah, it seems strange to say, particularly for someone who’s spent his whole life trying to help people resolve conflicts, to say that we actually need more not less. In the sense, I’m trying to say it to provoke people, is to say conflict is natural. We often kind of like, a lot of us, and me included, we find conflict uncomfortable and we try to avoid it, or we accommodate, we give in, we appease, or sometimes we go on the attack, and none of those three A’s, what I call them – avoid, accommodate, or attack – actually help us, really, get what we really want.

And so, to me, we’re not going to be able to end conflict. It’s part of life. There are a lot of conflicts, you may not even be able to resolve them, but the opportunity that we have is to transform them, it’s to actually, instead of avoiding it, it’s to embrace the conflict, transform it. In other words, change the form of it from what’s so often a kind of destructive fight or a sullen silence into kind of an engaged conversation where you listen to them, they listen to you, you come up with creative ideas. And if you think about it, conflict can be healthy. It can be productive. It can lead to better communication, more engagement.

They say that marriages, for example, benefit from some conflict, which get the issues that are, otherwise, under the carpet, engaged but in a constructive way. That’s the real opportunity, it’s to transform the conflict. And whenever you need change, whenever there’s something wrong, oftentimes you need conflict to be able to engage it. So, in that sense, when there are things wrong with the world around us, we actually need more conflict not less. Conflict can sometimes lead to innovation. It can lead to better ideas. The essence of what is a healthy democracy is conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now let’s dig into these three unique human superpowers. We’ve got the balcony. We’ve got the bridge. Can you start with the balcony?

William Ury
What I’ve discovered over the years is that the single biggest obstacle to me or to any of us getting what we want is not what we think of it. It’s not that difficult person on the other side of the table in the office or wherever it is. The biggest obstacle to us getting what we want is right here, it’s me, it’s the person I look at in the mirror every morning. It’s my own, our own, very natural, very human tendency to react, in other words, to act without thinking.

As the old saying goes, “When you’re angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret,” and that often happens. And so, the ability to not react, and that’s a choice that we have in that little moment, like I did with the president of Venezuela there, that little moment, we can choose not to react but to think about what’s going to really advance our objectives here, and we can respond creatively.

And, to me, that’s the key.

The ability to step back for a moment, before we react, I mean, we live in a very reactive culture and reactive times on social media. That ability not to react but to go to the balcony, and everyone has their favorite way of doing it. Some people, it might just be as simple as breathing, taking a walk, a workout, meeting a friend. Everyone’s got their favorite way. What’s your favorite way, Pete, to go to the balcony?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I was reminded back in the day when I was interviewing for jobs as a candidate, and when I felt nervous, I don’t know why, but I guess there’s some science behind it. When I put both of my feet firmly, squarely on the floor, and just became aware of the presence of my feet there, I just felt more solid, grounded, firm, rooted, and that helped.

William Ury
That’s great. That’s exactly it. Essentially, in that moment, you’re pausing, you’re probably breathing, which brings a little more oxygen into your brain. When you put your feet on the ground, you started to relax, and that’s one of the wisest things, pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. When you’ve got something hard to do, start by relaxing. And you were relaxing in that moment, feeling your feet on the ground, and that visual imagery helped some of your nervous system, and then you can bring your best to a difficult situation, like giving a keynote or dealing with a difficult issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay. So, that’s the balcony, it’s sort of the internal game, we take a breath, we focus, we don’t react, we don’t get defensive, don’t scream in anger. That sounds kind of easy, Bill. Any pro tips, do’s and don’ts about executing this well?

William Ury
Well, it sounds easy but when we’re triggered, when we’re reactive, when our emotions are taking us away, when we’re angry, when we’re fearful, when we’re anxious, it’s not so easy, it turns out, and that’s how often we feel when we’re in a tough situation, a difficult conflict, or an office spat, or whatever the situation might be. And so, that’s why we have to kind of cultivate it.

So, I’d say one thing is if you know you’re going to be in a difficult situation, you know you’re going to be in a difficult conversation with a colleague, or whatever the situation might be, with your partner, with your child, resource yourself. Everyone has their favorite way to resource themselves. I like to go for walks, ideally, in nature. Somehow nature fills me with a sense of awe and wonder. I relax. I can then bring my best. So, before any important negotiation, I go for a walk.

But everyone will have their favorite way of resourcing themselves so that you can actually have some natural resilience, so that when you go in, you’re going to be a lot less reactive when the other side starts saying things that press your buttons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, now let’s talk about how do we build that bridge?

William Ury
Just the same as with the balcony, you have to do the opposite of what you might naturally feel like doing, you might naturally feel like reacting. Do the opposite and take a step back, go to the balcony. The same is true with the bridge. What happens in difficult conflicts is we tend to dig into our positions, the things we say we want, the things we demand. The other side digs into their positions, they push us, we push back, it goes nowhere, or it escalates even.

And the opposite of that, actually, what you find successful negotiators doing is the exact opposite of pushing. Because when you push, for example, right now, if I were just pushing you, Pete, if I put up my hands, you pull up your hands, and I was just pushing you, what would you naturally do?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would push back, step aside.

William Ury
Right. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d probably be more shocked, like, “What is going on right now?”

William Ury
That’s it. Exactly. But people tend, when they’re pushed, to push back. It’s just instinct, and then we’re in a standoff. And what you find works is to use the power of surprise, which is to do the exact opposite of pushing, which is to attract. Because it’s almost like in a conflict, your mind is here, the other person’s mind is way over there, and you’re saying to them, “Hey, come on over to my idea,” whatever it is, “Come over to my position.” It’s not easy for them. It’s like there’s a big chasm, and that chasm is filled with, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t satisfy my needs, that’s not what I want. Other people will think I’d given in, or I look like a failure, or a wimp.” There’s a whole bunch of stuff in that chasm.

Our job is to build them a bridge over that chasm. It’s to start where they are for a moment, leave where your mind is, and this is not always easy, but leave where your mind is, and start the conversation where their mind is, where they are. You’re asking the boss for a raise, for example, “And I deserve that raise,” and you’re all there. Put yourself in the boss’ shoes for a moment, and imagine, “Wait, there’s a tough budgetary situation.” Start with your boss’ situation. How is the boss going to justify your raise to other people in the organization, and so on?

Think about their problem. Help them solve their problem so that they can help you solve yours. That’s the art of building the other side a golden bridge over that chasm of dissatisfaction. In other words, making it as easy as possible for them to move in the direction you want them to move. Attracting rather than pushing is the exact opposite of what we might normally do in a difficult conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And when you speak to helping to solve their problem, and imagining it from their perspective and their stakeholders, you’ve got a really cool approach called writing your other party’s victory speech. Can you unpack that a little bit?

William Ury
When I face a tough situation, it could be personal or it could be global, and it seems impossible, what I like to do is I like to start at the end, and work backwards. You might not be able to get from here to there, but you might just be able to get from there to here, and then work your way back to there. And the way I do that is I like to sit down and write the other side’s victory speech. In other words, I do a little thought experiment. I imagine, “What if the other side accepted my proposal? What if they said yes?” What if they said yes to your proposal? Imagine that for a moment.

Your boss says, “Yeah, I’ll give you the raise.” Your colleague says, “Yeah, I’ll help you on that project.” Whatever it is, you think about that, and then imagine that they, then, have to justify that to someone else, to their boss, or to their colleagues, or to themselves looking in the mirror, or to their board, or whatever the thing is. What’s their victory speech? They say, “Yeah, it was a good idea for me to agree with Pete, and this is why, because it’s going to do this, that, and this.” You write their victory speech, and you think about how they can see that as a victory.

Then you see your job as helping them deliver that victory speech. And by writing that victory speech, by imagining it, it becomes more possible. And then the job becomes, “Okay, what can I do right now to start to help them, put them in a position where they could deliver that victory speech?” It has to be a victory for you, too, of course. But their victory speech is why they decided to agree with your proposal.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And then, in so doing, that naturally will spark some ideas for, “Oh, wait. You know what, this would be really easy for me to put in my proposal. It doesn’t make any difference to me, but might make all the difference to them in terms of what they’re able to share in their victory speech.”

William Ury
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, can you talk about the third step, or should I say, maybe third superpower?

William Ury
Balcony is one of our superpowers. We all have that ability within us to, as you mentioned, say nothing, not react. We all have the ability to build a bridge, and a core part of building the bridge, I should mention, is listening. We think of negotiation as talking, but, actually, if you observe the behavior of successful negotiators, they listen far more than they talk. There’s a reason we’re given two ears and one mouth, is to listen twice as much as we talk. And so, listening is key.

Now, it’s not always easy to do all this stuff. It’s not easy to go to the balcony in a difficult situation. It’s not easy to build those bridges. And this is where we need help, and that help, as I mentioned before, is around us. We may not see it but there’s a tendency in almost every conflict to kind of reduce it to two sides. It’s like two sides, it’s us versus them. It’s Arabs versus Israelis. It’s labor versus management. Whatever it is, it’s husband versus wife, we reduce it to two sides. But, in fact, there’s always a third side, which is the people around.

And I’d learned this, really struck me once, I’m an anthropologist by training, and then I got into negotiation but I was studying anthropology to understand and figure out human beings. And I was visiting an indigenous tribe, in Southern Africa, in the Kalahari Desert, the so-called Bushmen, and I was watching how they deal with conflicts. When two people get into a conflict, it can get serious because the men all have these arrows that they hunt with, which have poisoned tips, and you can kill someone, and then that person takes three to die, will kill someone else. And pretty soon, you have the equivalent of a small-scale nuclear war in a small group.

So, what they learned to do, what I saw, is when tempers start to get high, and you notice that, and people notice that, someone goes and hides the poisoned arrows out in the desert, and then the whole group gets together around the campfire – the women, the men, the children – and they talk it out. And it might go on for a day, or two days, or three days. They don’t rest until they talk it up because they know what the consequences are if they don’t. It’s not just a question of reaching an agreement. There has to be a kind of reconciliation.

And what I realized is that’s our ancestral birthright, it’s that use of the community, of the people around us to help create a container, a space, within which even the most difficult conflicts can gradually be transformed. That’s the third side, and that’s a power that we all have to evoke, or we often play the role of third siders. We don’t think of it necessarily but parents are always playing that role of third sides among their kids, peers among their colleagues, or the odd managers among their employees.

It’s that third-side role of helping listen to people, help them cool down, helping them get into communication with each other, helping explain what the other side thinks. All that knitting together turns out to be key if we’re trying to transform the impossibly difficult conflicts that we sometimes come across.

And the third side is the help of the whole, that’s what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. That’s beautiful and a good reminder to seek that out, and to get that support. In the workplace, any pro tips on what might make for great third side collaborators to get in on the mix?

William Ury
It could be someone even outside your workplace, or just a friend and a colleague who can be a coach to you. You have a hard situation, sometimes we get blinded but the ability of using a friend or someone as a coach, to say, “How am I going to approach this difficult issue I’ve got with my colleague, or a coworker, or my boss?” That’s one. Another is there might be a colleague that you could involve. Sometimes, too, you’re not alone in these situations.

Imagine that you’re facing a difficult boss. If it’s just you, that’s one thing. But if it’s you with your colleagues, that’s the winning coalition, can approach the boss and sit down, and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this,” then you’ve got some more power. There’s real power in the third side, and sometimes you need that in situations because not everything in the workplace is fair.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you talked about the tribes, you mentioned it might take a day or two or three, and, in your book, you mentioned working through some negotiations, that could take months or years. How do you think about patience and how we can get more of it? Because I think, sometimes, we can have the frustration that, “We’ve had this conversation four times, and it’s going nowhere. I guess it’s just hopeless.” How do you think about those situations? It seems you think about things differently.

William Ury
I do. I just know that when you get into these real gnarls with each other, and we kind of know this in families and so on of how these kinds of disputes can go on for a long, long time. And this kind of negotiation, I’ll just say upfront, can be some of the hardest work that we humans can do, and it takes patience, it takes persistence because, when you’re looking for possibilities, you make little breakthroughs, and then you might make progress, and then you might have a setback, and then you got to go back.

And it’s that way that I see the little possibilities turning into large possibilities. So, it’s true, it takes some time. Human beings, we’re not like computers. We take time. We have our grievances, we have our wounds, we have our traumas. It takes time to work through those, and it does take some patience. On the other hand, I would say, if you do invest in those relationships, if you do build trust in those relationships, then you can operate very fast at the speed of trust.

I remember a long time ago, I had some funding from Warren Buffett to work on avoiding nuclear war, a long time ago, and he was telling me about a negotiation he got involved in with his partner about making a major investment. And it was hundreds of millions of dollars, and he said the negotiation took place in one minute over the phone, where the guy called him up, and said, “We’re about to make this deal. What are you thinking?” He said, “What do you think?” And they were able to make the deal quickly. Why? Because they had developed the trust beforehand. They knew that the other would not take advantage of them.

And so, to me, if you want to move fast, then invest in building trust and confidence because, then, you can operate at the speed of trust, which is very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. A lot of this has come back to when you say trust, patience, persistence, humility, calm, just sort of good human virtue stuff. Do you have any pro tips on how we can develop that within ourselves and our colleagues before we have a conflict or a negotiation that we’re getting into? Are there practices? You like going for walks. Is it meditating? Or is it reading, or spiritual practice? Or, how do you recommend folks get better at these just human goodness kinds of things?

William Ury
Well, the first thing, Pete, to recognize is that this is not rocket science. These are things that are inside of us. These are human potentials that each of us has. This is our birthright. So, it’s developing things that are already inherent in us. And, yeah, everyone will have their favorite ways of doing it. It might be meditating. Meditating can calm us down. It might be going for walks. It might be getting a coach or having a friend be a coach, coaching each other, all these kinds of resources. And then investing in the relationships around us by building trust.

It might be those little things where you put deposits in the bank of goodwill. You acknowledge someone. You thank them. You go out of your way to help them so that, then, when it comes to a difficult situation, you can withdraw a little bit, you can count on that, and say, “Look, we’ve got a hard situation here to work through.” But then you’ve got something to work with. And so, it’s that relational work that’s key to building the resilience that will allow us individually within ourselves, and then relationally in our organizations and in our work lives to be able to navigate some pretty stormy weathers sometimes.

And trust can’t be underestimated. It takes a while to build up trust but it can be destroyed in a second. So, what’s interesting to me is, even though sometimes people associate negotiation with kind of slight shading of the truth, or manipulation, the best negotiators I know, the thing they value most is their reputation for honesty and fair-dealing because, then, the other side will trust them, they’ll share more information, and you’re more likely to end up with a creative solution that works for all sides.

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

William Ury
One thing I just want to say is in a lot of these situations, there’s an element of power. We feel like there’s an asymmetry of power, we feel powerless. And so, one thing in negotiation, when you’re on the balcony, that you might want to think through is you’re trying to get the other side to do something, you’re looking for an agreement. Paradoxically, it’s helpful to think through what I call, what negotiation would call your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

In other words, imagine that you’re not going to reach agreement with the other side, what’s your best course of action for satisfying your actions if you can’t? Imagine the difference it gives you. BATNA, knowing that, it seems like negative thinking, but it’s actually alternative positive thinking. It’s like, “I’ve got an option here. If I can’t reach agreement with a person now, maybe I can reach agreement with someone else. If I can’t get this job, maybe I’ve got another job.”

Just thinking through that gives you confidence that you’re going to be able to satisfy your interests. And that confidence, actually, increases the chances that you’re actually going to reach an agreement. So, paradoxically, when you’re on the balcony, think not just about what you want, but what’s your alternative for getting what you want if, for some reason, you are not able to reach agreement with the other side. Think through your BATNA. BATNA is power. BATNA is confidence.

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

William Ury
A quote from a great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said, “We are continually faced with great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. And now a favorite study or experiment?

William Ury
My colleague, negotiation colleague at MIT, Jared Curhan, did some very interesting experiments where he was studying how people negotiate.

And what he found was there was a very interesting correlation between how cooperative people were, how likely they were to reach agreements that were good for both sides, and the amount of silence that he noted in the negotiation. In other words, those little pauses, where people paused, they were a little more reflective, which is, of course, time on the balcony, so that silence turns out to be one of the great powers not when you’re talking but when you’re not talking. When you just even take that moment of silence, there’s a correlation with creative outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

William Ury
Favorite book that I’ve always liked is a book that was written 2500 years ago in China, the Tao Te Ching, which is kind of a book of paradoxical wisdom, but things like, I remember one quote from it, which is, and it goes back to your earlier question, “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” In other words, oftentimes, our minds are like these fizzy glasses, it’s full with fizz. Can we just take a moment, like when you planted your feet on the ground, to let the fizz settle so we can actually see more clearly, and, thus, act more effectively?

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

William Ury
Something that we all have, which is the ability to listen. But listen not just the way we normally listen, which is we normally listen within our shoes, like thinking, “Oh, I disagree with this, I agree with that,” or whatever it is. The kind of listening where it’s empathic listening, where you put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You try to imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes for a moment.

And if you can do that, if you understand where their mind is, you’re going to be much more effective at influencing them, of helping them move in the direction you want them to move. And it’s also, to me, it’s a sign of basic human respect. And I find that that’s maybe the cheapest concession you can make in any negotiation, is to listen and give them some respect. And it also helps you influence them more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you’re known for, people quote, Kindle book highlight, re-tweet, from you again and again?

William Ury
Well, I’ll give you a contrarian one. I’m known for “Yes,” for getting the “Yes,” but I also wrote a book about “No” and the importance of “No,” and what I call the positive no, which is a yes, followed by a no, followed by a yes, like a sandwich. It’s a no which starts a yes; a yes which is important to you, “I’ve got an important family commitment this weekend,” followed by a very calm and matter-of-fact no, so you say to your boss, “So, I can’t work through the weekend.”

And then on the other side of it is a yes on the other side, which is, “But I can work with John and Mary, and we can make sure the work can get done anyway.” Sometimes it’s important in negotiation to have that yes, but it’s very important also to have the no to stand up for what’s important for you.

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

William Ury
Just my website would be good, which is just my name, WilliamUry.com.

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

William Ury
I do, which is next time you find yourself in a little bit of a spat or a conflict with a colleague, or a coworker, or a boss, think about bringing that spirit of possibility; think about tapping into your innate human superpower of going to the balcony, of not reacting, but asking what you actually want; and the innate superpower of the bridge, of listening, of being creative, and the innate superpower of engaging the third side, the community around you. If you put all three together, you can transform your conflicts. And if you can transform your conflicts, you can transform your lives.

Feb 19
0

937: Speaking the Hidden Language of Connection with Charles Duhigg

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Charles Duhigg shares the simple secret that helps you build powerful connections with anyone.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What supercommunicators know that others don’t 
  2. How to ask questions that deepen and enrich relationships 
  3. How one sentence can dramatically ease workplace conflict 

About Charles

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. He writes for The New Yorker and other publications, was previously a senior editor at The New York Times, and occasionally hosts the podcast How To!

Resources Mentioned

Charles Duhigg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Charles, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charles Duhigg

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to be chatting. I read your prior book The Power of Habit many years ago, and you got a fresh one, Supercommunicators coming out here. I can’t wait to dig into your wisdom. But first, I got to hear, so in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and graduating from impressive places, you’ve also served as bike messenger. Tell us this tale.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, so before I went to business school, I was living in San Francisco and didn’t have a real job. And so, I was like, “You know what I could do, I could become a bike messenger.” And this was back in the late ‘90s when bike messengers were super cool. And so, I signed up for it, and I lasted, literally, one day. I actually got pneumonia from being a bike messenger for one day because San Francisco, of course, was filled with hills, and I was not physically ready to be a bike messenger.

It was interesting though because I would say probably about half, I mean, I did spend time with the other bike messengers, and probably about half of them were more active drug users and had some real serious health issues going on. And I do remember there was this one guy, I took the bus over with him in the morning, and we were driving over the bridge on the way to San Francisco, past the IKEA, and someone was like, “I hate IKEA. IKEA is corporate awfulness.”

And he’s like, “No, bro, IKEA is the best. They got that play area for kids. Me and the wife sometimes will just bring our daughter there, and then we just take off for like six or seven hours, man. It’s amazing.” And I was like, “Okay, this is bike messenger life.”

Pete Mockaitis

Bike messenger life. Well, I’m thinking you have to be in great shape. If they’re using drugs, which drugs are we talking about?

Charles Duhigg

I don’t know. I did not really ask. There seemed to be a lot of conversation about the various drugs, which, of course, I knew nothing about. No, they’re in great shape. Like, if you ride your bike all day long all over San Francisco, you’re in pretty good shape. The other thing is I just didn’t know how to navigate San Francisco, and it’s a hard city. There are ways around the hills and I knew zero of them.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, you lived to tell the tale, and I would be most terrified of getting hit by cars.

Charles Duhigg

Yes, I was terrified of a lot of things. That was definitely one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
But if you’ve got the cool bag, the bike messenger bags are the coolest. Like, the seatbelt buckle and that material.

Charles Duhigg

And at the end of that one day that I spent as a bike messenger, when I was on the bike coming home, I felt like the coolest thing on earth, I was like, “Yeah, I’m a bike messenger. Just, like, messaging stuff,” and then I got pneumonia.

Pete Mockaitis
Mercy. Well, I’m glad you’ve recovered and I’m glad we’re here now chatting about Supercommunicators. It’s a great title and a great premise, and you were something of a supercommunicator in your world, although I think you’ll tell us times that maybe that was not as much the case. But before we get into all that, can you maybe kick us off with anything particularly startling or surprising that you discovered as you’re researching and putting this together?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. This has really changed how I communicate. And you mentioned that I’m a supercommunicator. Actually, the truth is all of us are supercommunicators at various times. We all sometimes walk into the meeting and we know exactly the right thing to say, or a friend calls and they’re upset, we know exactly how to make them feel better.

And the point is that, actually, we all have this talent. In fact, it’s actually hardwired into our brains, it’s how we evolved but sometimes we can forget it. And so, the goal of this book is actually to remind people or teach them how to think about communication so that it’s easier to remember what to do to be a supercommunicator.

And, for me, this really started when I was talking to these marriage therapists, and one of them described the situation that I’ve had a lot in my own life, which is sometimes I would come home from work after a long and hard day, and I would start complaining to my wife. I’d be like, “My boss is a jerk, and my coworkers don’t appreciate me, and blah, blah, blah.” And my wife, very, very wisely, would offer some practical advice. She’d say something like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch, and you guys can get to know each other better?”

And instead of hearing what she was saying, I, of course, would like explode, and be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? I want you to be outraged on my behalf.” And so, when I was talking to these therapists, I was like, “What is going on here? We’re both bringing sort of our best selves in this conversation, we’re both bringing good intentions.”

And they said, “Look,” and this is the big insight of the core of the book. They said, “Look, most of us think about discussions as just being one thing, it’s a discussion about one topic but that’s totally wrong. Every discussion is actually made up of multiple kinds of conversations.” And, in particular, there’s these three buckets that most conversations fall into.

There are practical conversations, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch? Here’s a problem, let’s solve it. We need to make a plan for how we’re going to get to my mom’s for vacation.” Then there are emotional conversations. And in an emotional conversation, I do not want you to solve my problem. I want you, literally, to just kind of give me encouragement and validate how I’m feeling.

And then, finally, there’s also social conversations. And social conversations are about how we relate to each other, how other people see us, how sort of we exist within society. And, oftentimes, when we’re having a conversation, we will move, or having a discussion, we’ll move from conversation to conversation. But if we’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we really won’t be able to connect. And that was what’s happening.

Pete Mockaitis

We, meaning, like, party A and party B, both on the same page, the same style and level of conversation.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. When I came home and I was upset, I was having an emotional conversation and my wife replied with a practical conversation, and so I could not hear what she was saying and she got frustrated by what I was saying because we weren’t, what’s known within psychology as the matching principle, we weren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. And so, when you say, to complexify, often the conversation is not just one, it’s multiples.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Sort of simultaneously, or weaving back and forth, or all those things.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. You’re usually moving from emotional conversation, to practical conversation, to social conversation, and then back to emotional. And what’s important is just that everyone who’s in that conversation, whether it’s two people or many people, that we look for the clues about what kind of conversation is happening, and we match others, and we invite them to match us.

So, when someone says something really emotional and they’re sending us a signal about, like, “Look, we need to talk about how we feel. This is not about solving the problem. This is about airing out why the problem exists,” our ability to pick up on that and then match them, and then, after that, invite them to move to solutions, to move to a practical conversation, that’s really powerful. That’s how you connect with, really, anyone.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. Well, that sounds powerful. I suppose, if I may be so bold, can you prove it? Can you tell me, really, what’s at stake or what’s unlocked if we upgrade our super communication frequency from once in a while when I’m on fire to fairly regularly?

Charles Duhigg

It’s hugely powerful. Think about at work how many conversations you have that if the conversation goes well, things get so much better, and if the conversation does not go well, things don’t get better. Like, let me ask you. So, just think about the last week, what’s the most meaningful conversation you had in the last week?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m in the process of buying a company, so we had a meeting with the buyer-seller accountants, so I think that seemed important from just a dollars and cents perspective.

Charles Duhigg

That seems really meaningful. And I’m sure that that’s like taking up a bunch. Now, my guess is that a lot of those conversations are practical, but buying a company also brings up a lot of emotions. Like, it can be scary, it can be exciting, you can have partners who are saying, “I think we’re moving too fast,” or, “We’re not moving fast enough.”

A big transaction like that, have you found that some of the conversations you’ve had with your spouse, or with your partners, or anyone else that they’ve been emotional instead of just purely practical?

Pete Mockaitis

They have been emotional in that you see emotions are there but it hasn’t been super intensely emotional in either way.

Charles Duhigg

That’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, maybe between my partner and I, like, “Oh wow! This will be such a cool opportunity if we did this, or this, or this, or this. This will unlock this,” so there’s that. But never have we been super intensely emotional in terms of, like, angry, or, “You’re screwing me over,” which is great. None of us feel that.

Charles Duhigg

Which is great. And, by the way, most emotional conversations are not super emotional, they’re not super intense. We all have those conversations sometimes, and knowing how to navigate them is really important but most of the conversations we have every day are at a lower temperature, and that’s fantastic.

But if your business partner came, and he’s like, “I’m so excited. This is going to be amazing,” and you didn’t engage with that excitement at all, you didn’t sort of invite him to share that excitement, it’d be hard going forward. And then if you came in super practical-minded, and you’re like, “Look, I don’t care how excited you are, we got to figure out the dollars and cents on this,” and all he talked about was like the excitement and how he feels, it’d be super frustrating for you.

But just helping us recognize what kind of conversation is happening, that helps us figure out how to communicate.

Pete Mockaitis

It does. And what’s intriguing, though, is the interconnectedness. Like, let’s say, “I’m super excited about this specific possibility of integrating some staff here over there,” and they go, “Oh.” And so then, in some ways, the optimal response, for me at least in that moment, is not so much, “Yeah, that’s really cool,” although that’s not bad. I mean, I wouldn’t shun that, I’ll take it.

But I think, for me, I guess maybe next level stuff is hitting both, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, that is really exciting, and it will be so easy to just do this.” It’s like we hit the emotion and extended the practical at the same time.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. So, the book is filled with stories of sort of supercommunicators who are just normal people who sort of figure something out about a particular conversation. And one of them is about the CIA officer in his early 30s, he’s just been hired, and his job is to go recruit spies overseas. So, they send them to Europe, and they’re like, “Come back with some spies.”

And this guy, his name is Jim Lawler, he’s a great guy, he spends, like, a year trying and just strikes out again and again and again, and he is terrible at this job. He can’t make a real connection with anyone he’s trying to recruit. And then he meets this woman Yasmin who, she’s in town, she works in foreign ministry in her home country in the Middle East, she’s like the perfect, perfect candidate.

And he goes, and he “bumps” into her at lunch, and then invites her to lunch next day, tells her he’s an oil speculator, and eventually they get to know each other, and they kind of start investing in each other a little bit. And then, at one point, he’s like, “Look, I lied to you. I’m not an oil speculator. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Will you help us by telling us what’s going on inside your ministry because we want the same things you do? We want to stop the repression of women. We want to bring down this theocracy that’s ruling your country.”

And she just looks at him and starts crying, and she’s like, “They kill people for that,” and she just bolts out. And so, this guy, Jim Lawler, he’s told his bosses already that he’s recruiting Yasmin, and when he goes and he tells them, like, “I tried to close the deal and she ran away,” his boss was like, “You’re going to get fired. You’ve been here a year, she’s your only possible recruitment, and you just screwed it up.”

So, Lawler knows that he has one more opportunity, one more meal that he can ask Yasmin to have with him. And so, he takes her to the meal, and she’s really depressed, and she’s depressed because she’s about to go back to her home country, and she’s kind of depressed in herself. She’s depressed that she hasn’t changed more on this vacation, and he tries to cheer her up. He tries to tell her stories about when they were sightseeing, and it just doesn’t work.

And then towards the end of the meal, he just decides, like, “You know what, this isn’t going to happen. I’ve screwed this up.” And so, he just gets honest with Yasmin, and he says, “Look, I know that you’re disappointed in yourself. I’m super disappointed in myself. Like, I thought I was going to be a great CIA officer, and it turns out I’m terrible at this. And I see other guys who got hired with me, and women who got hired with me, and they’re doing so much better. They all have this confidence I don’t have.”

And he just starts talking about how he’s going to have to go back to Texas, and work for his dad. And his brother is a better salesman than he is. And while he’s describing all this, he’s just being as honest as he can, matching Yasmin, unintentionally she was glum and wanted to talk about how she felt, and now, finally, he is also talking about how he feels, she starts crying. And Lawler reaches across the table, he said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” and she goes, “No, no, what you want is important. We can do this together.”

And she becomes one of the best assets in the Middle East over the next 30 years, and Lawler actually goes on to be one of the top recruiters in the CIA. But I think the point here is that, unless we know how to look for what’s happening in a conversation, unless we are a little bit conscious, and it’s not hard to get conscious of this, a little bit conscious about how to match someone, we can totally miss what they need, and they can miss what we’re asking them for.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, thank you, that’s a lovely tale. And so, let’s just go ahead and do more, please, Charles. So, that’s a demonstration of the emotional vibe, like, “What’s up?” And so, in that instance, there’s crying, there are some dramatics. So, give us more of the tale showing how that unfolds marvelously in the practical flavor and the social flavor?

Charles Duhigg

Well, okay, and I would actually say that conversation, there are emotional aspects but there’s also practical aspects because she’s agreeing to become a spy for him. So, one of the things that we know is that when researchers have looked at people who are consistently supercommunicators, they found that these kinds of people, on average, ask 10 to 20 times as many questions than other people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, no kidding?

Charles Duhigg

But we’re oftentimes not aware of it because the questions are like, “Hey, that’s interesting. What do you think about that?” or like, “Huh, what did you do next?” or just little things that make it easier for us to enter a conversation. And there’s actually an experiment I like to do. So, think for a second, if you were having, like a really bad day, like just a terrible day, who would you call that you know would make you feel better?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, we got a few options.

Charles Duhigg

Sure, but I don’t know, who comes to mind first?

Pete Mockaitis

I’d say my wife.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Now, let me ask you this, is your wife, like, the funniest person you know, like standup comedian funny, like just kills it every time?

Pete Mockaitis

She is among the funniest people I know.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Okay. But you described her as a wife, you don’t describe her as, like, my comedian wife.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg

What about is she the most successful person you know, like earns the most money?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, depending on how we measure success, yes. From an income-generation perspective, she is not.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. And what’s interesting is the audience probably thought of someone that they telephone to make them feel better. And that person probably is not their funniest friend, or their smartest friend, or their most successful friend, so why telephone that person? What’s that person doing that makes us feel so good?

And the answer is what they’re doing is they are inviting us to share who we are, and then they’re proving to us that they are listening. So, you asked for an example of how this happens in the everyday world. There’s a guy named Nicholas Epley who’s a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the things that he’s done a lot of work on is trying to figure out, “What kinds of questions can we ask that make people feel closer to each other, almost like without it being obvious?”

And what he found is that there’s this category of question known as a deep question. And what a deep question is that it’s something that asks you about your values, or your beliefs, or your past experiences in a way that invites you to open up and explain who you are. So, an example of this is to say to someone, like, “Where do you work?” and then they say, “I’m a lawyer.” You say, “Oh, have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Like, do you love practicing the law?” Those are deep questions.

Now, they don’t seem like overly intrusive or awkward but they’re deep questions because they invite the other person to expose something a little bit that’s vulnerable. And if when we hear that vulnerability, if we reciprocate that vulnerability, that other person will feel closer to us. So, my guess is that a lot of the conversations you have with your wife, and tell me if I’m getting this wrong, involved you asking her the deeper question rather than the surface question, her telling you something that’s real, and then you responding with something real yourself, and that you probably feel closer as a result. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, sure, that happens.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. But we don’t think about asking deep questions, and yet it’s something that we know helps us figure out what the other person wants to talk about, it helps us align.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s hear some more examples of these deep questions. So, “Have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Do you love practicing law?” What are some other examples here?

Charles Duhigg
Really, I mean, anything. Like, where did you grow up?

Pete Mockaitis

Danville, Illinois.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Like, what was the best part of growing up there?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, what’s deep is that I have to think for a while. There’s a lot of good things.

Charles Duhigg

That’s a good sign though.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s so funny. When I hear questions, I really like to answer them masterfully or accurately. But, in some ways, I could say any great thing about growing up in Danville. So, I’ll say. I just had a lot of fun meeting so many different folks. And it’s almost like divisions of, in my experience, like divisions of race or class or whatever didn’t even matter. It was just like, “Oh, well, Ruhini’s parents have a huge house. That’s kind of cool,” and that’s that. And then onto the next. It doesn’t matter.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s what’s interesting about the answer you just gave me. First of all, you’re telling me a little bit about what it was like to grow up in this place. And so, you’re telling me about your experiences. You also told me about your values, like you value people who are kind, you value kindness. It sounds like you value kindness more than financial success or professional success.

It sounds like you’ve had some experiences where, like, you’ve had friends who are more wealthy than you and probably friends who are less wealthy than you but you found something really meaningful in creating friendships that aren’t defined by demographic lines. That’s a pretty easy question for me to ask, like, “What’s your favorite part of growing up there?” And yet, when you answered that question, I now know so much more about you, and you also told me something kind of intimate.

Now, in the language of psychology, you’ve exposed a vulnerability. Like, you put me in a place where I can judge you. You might not care what my judgment is, and you probably don’t, like if I was, “Oh, man, that sounds like a terrible place to grow up,” you wouldn’t care because I’m some idiot that you just met.

But the fact that you opened yourself up and exposed little bit of vulnerability means that you’re ready to feel closer to me, and if I reciprocate with vulnerability, if I tell you that I grew up in New Mexico, Albuquerque, which is true, I’m going there pretty soon, and one of the things that I loved most about it was that it was a place, like my high school was on 89% Hispanic or Native American. And that’s true of a lot of New Mexico and to grow up as a white guy, to get a chance to feel like a minority is really powerful and it creates empathy.

Like, A, I’ve told you something about myself by answering the question that I asked you, but, B, by reciprocating your vulnerability, we feel closer to each other. We can’t help but feel closer to each other. Literally, our brains are hardwired to feel closer to each other.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, and what’s interesting is, as we super-communicate with each other, is that it’s funny how the monkey mind just has all these associations, in like, where it just might naturally want to go. So, you say Albuquerque, I’m thinking, “I love the show Breaking Bad,” and so I have a desire to say something about “Breaking Bad.” But, really, from a connecting perspective, that doesn’t really do much for us here.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s a good example here. I said I’m from Albuquerque, you definitely could’ve broken in and been like, “Oh, my God, I love Breaking Bad. That’s the best show ever.” But because you are a good communicator, you intuit it, like, that would actually disrupt the flow of this conversation. That’s a fun conversation, maybe a practical conversation, and I’m revealing something about who I am. It’s an emotional conversation or social conversation. And so, instead of interrupting me and stealing the spotlight in saying, “Man, I love Breaking Bad. Do you like Breaking Bad?” you knew to match the kind of conversation I was having.

Now, think of how many times we sometimes get this wrong. Like, I get this wrong with my kids all the time. Like, if my kids come to me with something they want to talk about, they’re upset about something, or they want to talk about the social scene at their school, and instead of listening, and asking questions, and matching them, and meeting them where they are, I start trying to solve their problems, like I have all these lessons in my head that I want to shove into their head.

And, of course, they’re like, “Whatever, dad.” It’s like you breaking and being like, “I love Breaking Bad.” It’s me being like, “Well, here’s a lesson that you can learn.” I do this all the time. I still make this mistake but the more we become conscious of it, the more that we’re aware of listening for what kind of conversation is happening, matching other people, inviting them to match us, the more we end up having those special moments.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, I think if we weren’t primed in the world of, I’m thinking about deep questions and matching, and practical versus emotional versus social, I might very well have just let her rip with “Breaking Bad is awesome.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Or, I might’ve like talked about growing up in Albuquerque. I mean, this is something that definitely happens, someone says. My dad passed away about five years ago, and I found that when I came back, I was living in New York at the time. When I came back to New York after the funeral, it’s the most interesting thing that had happened to me that year. It’s sad and it’s hard but it’s also just interesting and complicated.

And one of two things would happen. I would tell people that I was just back from my dad’s funeral, and they would say, “I’m sorry,” and then change the topic. And they’d usually change it to something that’s totally unrelated or totally different emotional attitude, or they would just not respond. That happened all the time. And what I really wanted was I wanted people to be, like, “What was it like? What was your dad like? Tell me about your dad.” That’s amazing when someone has passed away and someone else asks you what they’re like, you love describing them.

And I think that, to your point, oftentimes during the most meaningful conversations, we have this instinct to do that, “Hey, Breaking Bad, I love Breaking Bad” because we feel so uncertain, we feel so unsure of ourselves in the conversation. But the more that we can recognize how the conversation works, what this other person is asking for, the more certain and comfortable we become in giving it to them. And that can be incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. And I think there’s uncertainty or fear or trepidation, whatever the vibe is, in that moment. It’s like the risk is really, I think, lower than what we perceive it to be emotionally.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because if I were to say, “Oh, man, I’m sorry. That must’ve been really hard. Tell me what are some of your favorite memories of your dad that came to mind.” I’m thinking, like, at worst, you might say, “I’m really just not comfortable telling you about that.” You’re not going to scream at me or assault me. You might just shut that down if it’s like, “Dude, I barely know you. I don’t feel like crying in front of you at this moment. It’s been a day. I’m just going to terminate the conversation.”

Charles Duhigg

And, by the way, it’s been five years, and so when I bump into other people who have been to the funeral, I ask them, like, “Tell me a little bit about your dad or your mom.” Literally, not once has someone ever said, “I don’t feel like talking about it right now.” People love talking about it. It’s like literally this thing that just happened to them. It’d be like if you got married and none of your friends asked you about the wedding, like when you get married, you want to talk about the wedding, “It was overwhelming.”

And, honestly, like going to a funeral for a parent is just as overwhelming, and sad instead of happy, but you still want to talk about it. And I think that you’re right. I think that people perceive a risk that not only is overblown, oftentimes it actually isn’t even there.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, so then social, who are we, this category, it sounds like we’ve touched upon it in terms of it’s unveiling values and what we’re about.

Charles Duhigg

It’s a little bit different. So, when we’re having a social conversation, what we’re really talking about is, “How do I relate to other people? How do they relate to me? How do I see other people? How do I think other people see me?” So, think about, for instance, there’s a story in the book about Netflix. So, Netflix had an executive who, about five years ago, he used the N-word in a meeting, and he used it in a kind of benign way.

He was trying to describe something but many people in the meeting, for good reason, were offended. He ended up getting fired because of this, but it set off this whole controversy within Netflix. And they hired someone to come who was a supercommunicator, understood how communication works. Her name is Verna Myers, she’s amazing.

She kind of transformed how the conversation, across the entire company, thousands and thousands of people. She transformed how the conversation is happening to help people understand, “It is okay to say to someone, ‘I see something differently than you because of my background, and that doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right.’”

If I’m a black parent, I might very well see cops differently than a white parent. And that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong or I’m right. It also doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other. But understanding that difference, that’s a social conversation. It’s a conversation about identities, and how identities shape how we see things. That’s actually a huge part of understanding. And if we’re comfortable having that conversation, then it makes it a lot easier to come together.

Secondarily, as part of that conversation is this emphasis on belonging, that every single person has the right to participate in a social conversation and to have an identity. Everyone has had a racial experience, a gender experience, whether you’re black or white or man or female or nonbinary. We all have these experiences that shape who we are. And sharing that with other people, it feels really good. That’s a social conversation.

A social conversation is sharing how we see ourselves in an attempt to align how others see us with our self-image, and to hear how they see themselves and how that might differ from how see them.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some more examples here?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Well, so a lot of social conversations are like office gossip. There are actually these really interesting studies on gossip. And what they find is that gossip is really important within companies because gossip is how we not only learn information, it’s how we establish moral and social norms without having to be overbearing about it.

So, if someone is, like, “Oh, my God, Jim got so drunk at that party last night,” and they seem critical of it, then we know, actually, drunkenness is not a norm that’s accepted at this company. And it gets even down to smaller things. And once you start thinking about these kinds of conversations and the powerful role that they play, you can begin thinking about how to make them better.

So, there was a study that was done of an investment bank, and this investment bank was like a place for people who are at each other’s throats all day long. They were competing for deals, they were competing for bonuses, they would have these screaming fights on a regular basis during meetings.

So, these researchers come in, and they tell everyone, “Okay, look, before every meeting, for the next week, what we want you to do is we’re going to give you some notecards. Before every meeting, just write down, literally, one sentence on the notecard, and write down what you hope to accomplish in this meeting, your goal, and what kind of tone or mood you hope the meeting will have. And then when you start the meeting, if you want, you can read it, you can share it with other people, or you don’t have to.” Most people didn’t.

And what they found is that, when they looked at the cards people wrote, what people would write were things like, “I want to ask Maria if she wants to come on vacation with me but I want to make it easy for her to say no,” or, “I want us to figure out the budget for next year…” a pretty practical conversation, “…but I want everyone to get everything off their chest because there’s been some tension.”

Just by asking people to write that sentence before each meeting, the incidence of conflict went down 80% within the firm that week. Now that did not mean that people agreed with each other, it did not mean they stopped fighting, it did not mean that they were less competitive, but because everyone knew what they wanted out of that meeting, and because they knew what kind of mood they were looking for, they were able to signal that much more easily to other people, and we pick up on those signals.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Well, that’s my favorite kind of thing, Charles. We have a minor intervention with a huge result, that’s cool. So, we’re writing that down, and, in so doing, that gets to the “Who are we?” in terms of, I guess, “Who are we?” in that moment in terms of how we’re showing up right then and there.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. We’re coming together and we’re working for this firm together. We are all here trying to remind ourselves that we are on the same team as opposed to on different teams. And if I’m talking to you in a meeting, and I’m saying, like, “I want to discuss the budget but I want to give everyone a chance to get things off their chest,” then what I’m saying to the other people is, “I understand you’re frustrated. I’m your boss. I could tell you we’re just going to do the budget. It’s my way or the highway. But I’m signaling to you, in a social context, I understand you are frustrated. I understand that you don’t feel like I am being the boss I ought to be right now.”

“And once we have that conversation out in the open, then we can start talking about how do we resolve it? Are there things about how we run the social organization that is this company, that we run it in ways that make it hard for people to speak up or to bring their best selves to work? If we’re having conversations with someone else, and we’re talking about ‘How does Jim see this?’ or, ‘I have a problem. Here’s my solution.’ That’s a practical conversation. “Now let’s think about how the rest of the firm is going to react when I bring up this solution.”

That’s a social conversation because the way that other people react will not be based entirely on pragmatics and practicality. It won’t be based entirely on emotions. It might be based on power differentials or on structural issues. But once we sit down, and we’re like, “Look, let’s talk about how this is going to play out at the company from a social perspective,” then suddenly we’re having a slightly different conversation than an emotional conversation or a practical conversation. We’re trying to anticipate how other people see themselves and how that shapes what they believe.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

No, the thing I would say is the book is filled with stories, and the reason why it’s filled with stories, there are stories about there’s this awesome study called the 36 questions that lead to love. It’s known as the Fast Friends procedure, and it was this study that try and make strangers into friends, and it worked. It worked by getting them to ask each other deep questions.

There are stories about conflict, like, “What do we do when we’re in conflict with someone?” And the answer there, and that story takes place in part online in Facebook. It’s this group that was put together of gun rights advocates and gun control advocates. And what we found is that, in conflict, it’s even more important to prove that we’re listening.

And one of the ways we can prove that we’re listening is by this thing called looping for understanding, which is pretty instinctual. It’s, ask someone a question, repeat back to them what they just told you in your own words. And then the third step, and this is the step that most people forget but it’s the most important, ask them if you got it right.

If you do that and you continue looping until they agree that you’ve gotten it right, it’s almost impossible for people to be angry at each other no matter how big their difference is. And that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with each other but it means you can take anger out of the equation. And so, my goal with these stories is, and there’s a lot of practical tips.

There are sorts of the bullet points after each chapter, but my goal is to give people these skills that they can use to become better communicators because, as I mentioned, all of us are supercommunicators. Sometimes we just do it by instinct, sometimes we’re just lucky and it comes out, but if we learn the skills then we can do it whenever we want. And for the most meaningful conversations, we can really connect with someone else.

Pete Mockaitis

Just a follow-up on the looping point, I understand you’ve also got some research associated with the asking of a follow-up question is another super powerful thing that people did.

Charles Duhigg

Absolutely. And that’s actually a form of looping. Like, sometimes if I ask you a follow-up question, it’s proving to you that I was listening to what you were saying, and that’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. And so then, the good follow-up questions do just that. They prove that you were listening to what we’re saying as opposed to, “So, tell me more about that” which still is a decent question when you got nothing else. But, ideally, for a follow-up question, we want to have some content. I sort of think about it like when I’m getting emails, it’s like, “Was this a mass email sent to the whole world or was it sent specifically to me, Pete Mockaitis?”

And there are little indicators of that in the note. And so, too, with the question, one would have to have listened and shared some bits, like, “Oh, you said you think guns are a great way for teachers to prevent violence if they were all armed. Is that right?” “Yeah, that’s what I said.” It’s like, “Well, are you aware of some incidences in which folks armed up the teachers, and they saw the desired results?” So, there’s a follow-up question that shows I was listening.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, that’s a question where you are presupposing the answer, so I would say one thing that’s important is…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I really wasn’t. I was like “Do we have that information?” “I’ll tell them and then no more problems.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, if you’re genuinely and curiously asking, that’s the key to ask curious questions. But you had said something like, the generic question is like “Tell me more about that.” But, again, getting back to deep questions, instead of saying, “Tell me more about that” like an easy way response, if you’re not certain what to say, is to say, “What did you make of that? You just told me about this thing. Why was it important to you?”

And that’s a deep question. It doesn’t appear deep. It doesn’t appear intrusive or it doesn’t appear overly intimate but, again, it’s asking me to explain about my values, or my beliefs, or my experiences. It’s giving me a chance to tell you about how I see the world. And I guarantee you that once you hear that, the follow-up questions are going to be almost automatic.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Charles Duhigg

I think the quote that I use most with my kids is, “It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn something from it.” And I realize this is kind of a cheesy quote. But honestly, I make mistakes all the time, we all make mistakes all the time, and it’s so easy to get down on yourself, that if you tell yourself, “It’s only a mistake if I don’t learn from it,” then it stops being a mistake. It starts being an experiment. And not all experiments are supposed to go right.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

Actually, I mentioned the 36 questions. This is an awesome, awesome study. So, what they did, it’s these two researchers at the University of Rhode Island, they took all these people in pairs, and they put them in a room, total strangers, and they would have them ask these 36 questions back and forth. And they designed the questions to be deep questions without appearing…many of them didn’t appear very deep, particularly at first.

And then they send everyone home, it only takes an hour, they send everyone home. This is pre-internet, by the way. And then seven weeks later, they tracked down everyone who’d been in that study, and they asked them one question, “Did you ever seek out the person that you had that conversation with?”

Now, they had not given them any information on how to find each other. There was no exchange of business cards or anything like that, so finding the person you had the conversation with was actually kind of hard. They found that 70% of people who had engaged in those conversations had sought out their conversational partner. They’d go out to beers and movies together. Three people ended up getting married to the person that they had the conversation with.

And it’s because of this emotional reciprocity, it’s because if we ask deep questions, and then we answer them, we feel close to the other person. And so, I just think it’s a wonderful study.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. I actually went through that list of questions on a date.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, yeah?

Pete Mockaitis

We didn’t end up getting married.

Charles Duhigg

It’s okay. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis

But, in a way, it was a good outcome, and then I think we…I don’t know how much that exercise contributed to things but I think we parted on good terms not too long thereafter.

Charles Duhigg

Excellent.

Pete Mockaitis

And I guess we knew some new things. And a favorite book?

Charles Duhigg

I used to always say The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which is just one of my favorite books. And for anyone who hasn’t read it, there’s a chapter on the religion of happy-mindedness. William James, of course, is like the father of American psychology. And the religion of happy-mindedness is about people who are just happy. Like, why are they happy? And what did they know that we don’t?

But the other book that I love, that I’ll make a plug for, it’s actually a novel. It’s by Jennifer Egan, and it’s called A Visit from the Goon Squad. And very similarly, I think it’s about how we create happiness in life, and how we recognize it and sometimes fail to recognize it even when it’s right in front of us. So, it’s a wonderful book.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

So, I just read an article about AI for The New Yorker, and part of it is about Microsoft’s Copilots that are coming out. And so, I’ve been using all the different AI products, and I will say, like, I don’t think that it’s making me more productive. It’s just super fun though. Like, I sent out an email this morning, and I made an image on Midjourney for it. So, I would say, right now, AI is the tool that I’m enjoying very much.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so lay it on us, ChatGPT, Midjourney, what else is cool and interesting?

Charles Duhigg

Oh, the Copilots. There’s going to be an explosion of Copilots over the next couple of years. And Microsoft is releasing them right now, but every company is going to be creating agents or copilots. So, in three or four years, this is totally feasible. We will wear a device that records every single conversation, and that conversation will be digitized. It will all be our data. No one else will have it.

And then 10 years from now, you’ll be like, “You know, I was once doing a podcast, and this guy talked about AI, and I can’t remember who he was, but he mentioned Midjourney. Go find that conversation.” And the AI will be able to find it. It’s what large language models index and search very, very efficiently with even vague guidance.

And so, if you think about it, our conversations are a huge corpus of knowledge, it’s a huge database, and it basically only exists between two people, or if you happen to be recording it, it exists between two people and whoever is listening to the conversation, but it’s hard to remember and you don’t know exactly who said what. And once we’re able to unlock the database of conversations, it’s going to be awesome.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And you are a habit master. Tell us your favorite habit?

Charles Duhigg

So, in The Power of Habit, there’s this whole thing about keystone habits, which are habits that set off chain reactions of other behavior changes. So, for me, I would say my keystone habit is definitely exercising in the morning. And I really dislike exercising, so what I do is I sign up for half marathons. And, by the way, I hate races. There’s nothing I enjoy about it.

But I sign up for half marathons because I’m so scared about how bad it will hurt to run that half marathon if I haven’t trained. And that gets me to go train every morning. And then after I train, I’m like, “Oh, man, I feel great. This is really good.” So, I would say my big keystone habit is trying to exercise at least once each day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

As I’ve been working on Supercommunicators, the story with my wife, I think, is something that really resonates with people, because I think we’ve all experienced that. Like, someone comes to us with a problem, and we try and solve it for them, and then they’re frustrated, and then we’re frustrated. And so, I find that explaining, “Oh, it’s actually two different kinds of conversations are happening here,” that that’s been really powerful for a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

If you Google me, I’m at CharlesDuhigg.com. If you just type Supercommunicators into your Google browser, I’ll probably come up, or Power of Habit. And then my email address is charles@duhigg.com, and I read every single email I get from listeners and from readers, and I respond to every single one, so feel free to drop me a note, and I will definitely respond to you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

I think that, here’s the thing that I would say, is think about your job right now, and think about where you’re not communicating as well as you can. Maybe it’s with a coworker, maybe it’s with your boss, maybe it’s with a client, maybe it’s when you’re doing pitches. There are some times in your life where you wish that you could be an effortless supercommunicator, and it’s not happening on a consistent basis for you.

And my guess is, as a result, you’re shying away from that opportunity because you’re worried that it’s not going to go as well as you want it to go. So, just break it down. Try and think about the last conversation you had where it didn’t go as well as you wanted it to go, and try and figure out, “Were we having the same kind of conversation? Was I asking enough questions? Was I asking the right kinds of questions? Was I proving to this person that I was listening to them? Were they responding to me and inviting me to match them?”

If you do that, you’ll find that there’s this part of your work life that you probably don’t like as much as you should, but it is an absolutely solvable problem. Nobody is born a great communicator. It’s just a set of skills that anyone can learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Charles. Thank you. I wish you much luck and super communications.

Charles Duhigg

Thank you so much.

Feb 15
0

936: The 8 Super Powers that Unlock Gravitas with Lisa Sun

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Lisa Sun shares her tools for building true, lasting confidence.

You’ll Learn:

 

  1. What gravitas really means
  2. The Six Forces ruining your confidence
  3. How to discover your “confidence language”

About Lisa

Lisa Sun is the founder and CEO of GRAVITAS, a company on a mission to catalyze confidence. GRAVITAS offers innovative size-inclusive apparel, styling solutions, and content designed to make over women from the inside out.

Prior to founding GRAVITAS, Sun spent 11 years at McKinsey & Company, where she advised leading luxury fashion and beauty brands and retailers in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Latin America on strategic and operational issues. Her first collection was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, People, and the Today Show in the same month.

Sun and GRAVITAS have been featured on CNN and in Forbes, Fast Company, New York Magazine, Elle, Marie Claire, InStyle, and more. GRAVITAS includes among its activities a commitment to AAPI causes and New York City’s Garment District. Often called the “dress whisperer,” Lisa is also a highly sought-after public speaker who likes to impart her hard-won knowledge on gravitas and how to best harness it to other women. 

Resources Mentioned

Lisa Sun Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Lisa, welcome.

Lisa Sun

Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom you’ve captured and put together in your book, Gravitas: The 8 Strengths That Redefine Confidence, because confidence is something our listeners often say, “Yeah, I want more of that,” and I can dig it. So, in your fashion business, you are on a mission to catalyze confidence. I did look that up in the dictionary, it meant what I thought it meant, to, like, accelerate like with a catalyst.

So, just if anyone else was wondering, but could you give us a tale from your own career story in which you had catalyzed some confidence, what went down, and what did you do?

Lisa Sun
So, I was at McKinsey and Co., the management consulting firm for 11 years, and after a year of being there, I had my first annual performance review.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, boy.

Lisa Sun

And the opening line was, “Lisa comes across as young and overly enthusiastic at times. She should seek to have more gravitas.” I think we have all been told at some point in our career to be more confident, essentially, they were saying that. And when I asked my boss, “How do you get gravitas?” she said, “Go buy a new dress, wear big jewelry, and great shoes.”

That is the most offensive piece of feedback you can give to a 23-year-old, making $43,000 a year, size 18-20 to go buy new clothes. And when I asked her why, she said, “Okay, really, it’s not about clothes. Every morning you wake up and you’re the first person you have to look at in the mirror, and you have to like yourself, I can teach you how to be good at this job but I can’t teach you how to like yourself.” So, I put on a dress, it reminds me I can do this job. So, she said, “Dumbo did not need a feather to fly. It reminded him that he could.”

And so, what we have done, and why our mission is to catalyze confidence, is, “How do we, as adults, create reminders every day of our talents and gifts?” And so, that’s really the origin story of my company, of the book, and I know we’re going to dive deeper into what we’ve learned, but I do think that we’ve got to reframe confidence, gravitas, not as a behavior but as a choice and a mindset.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, already you’re dropping actual wisdom on us. Thank you, Lisa. We had a really cool chat with Dr. Srini Pillay back in the day. We’ve got a link in the show notes. And he used a cool term, psychological Halloweenism to mean just that, like, there are ways you can dress up, like in a Halloween costume that impact you psychologically.

And so, for her, it was the dress. Sometimes I put on a blazer jacket, it’s in my office corner, just like, “No, Pete, you’ve got to get serious and be Mr. Executive right now. Let’s put that on.” And it makes an impact. And so, it’s not about the clothes itself but it can be prop that helps get in the right mindset, like Dumbo and his feather.

Lisa Sun

And I think the reason is, and this is really what we dive deep into, is if you look up the word confident in the dictionary, it has nothing to do with bravado, swagger, or performance. If someone tells you be more confident, you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to speak up, I’m going to be assertive, I’m going to stand on the stage.” It’s very behavioral.

If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s an understanding of, appreciation of, and trust in your own talents and abilities. And so, that actually shifts the entire way you think about it. And the reason we, as adults, need reminders is we are born fully self-confident. Ask any five-year-old what they’re the best at in the world, and they’ll tell you right away. You don’t have to have kids but you know this feeling, “I’m the best at soccer,” “I’m the best at hugs,” “I’m the best at everything.” They’ll run off a long list of their accomplishments at five.

But what we found is in your adolescence, between the ages of 8 and 12, there are six forces that hold you back. They actually appear on the ages of 8 and 12, it’s chapter 2 of my book. And so, it’s not our fault that we have an inner critic. Think about your adolescence, it’s all about starting to be doubting yourself, self-consciousness. And when those forces appear, to break out of them, we actually, as adults, have to make a conscious choice, and we have to channel a different mindset.

And reminders, like a dress or a blazer, they remind us to believe in ourselves again. And it’s really, if you were five years old, you don’t need the blazer, but as an adult, because you’ve had setback, disappointment, you’ve experienced fear, insecurity, self-doubt, that’s why we need these little tokens in our life to break ourselves out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to hear about the six forces soon but, first, let’s just make sure we conclude the thread. So, you had the conversation, it’s not about the clothes, but the clothes can help be a reminder. And what, ultimately, did you do in your McKinsey days to boost that confidence and get superior reviews?

Lisa Sun

Well, to be clear, I wish I could go back in time to give myself this book. I feel like you write the book you most need to read yourself. I wish I could get in the DeLorean and go back to that 23-year-old person. What I did is not what I would tell people to do today. Like, I wish I could go back and tell my 23-year-old-self something quite differently.

Well, parts of it. The one part I would still do is I always say the mentor chooses you; you don’t choose the mentor. Make yourself mentor-able. So, one thing I was really good about was saying, “Hey, what’s one thing I could do differently?” I really think people are bad at giving feedback, and also asking for it. It’s like browsing in a store, “Can I help you? Do you have any feedback for me?” “No, I’m just browsing,” “Oh, no, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing well.”

So, one thing I do is I took ownership of it, and I said, “Okay, what’s one thing I could do differently? What’s one thing I could do differently?” And over time, I enlisted a lot of people that have fingerprints on my journey, everyone from McKinsey offered me a speech coach. So, I was one of the few associates that, every Friday, was in front of Judy Marcus, saying, “Let’s practice my presentation.”

But I think what we did over the course of 11 years is we corrected the behavior but I don’t know if I ever fully corrected the mindset. So, to give you an example, someone at a book reading in DC said to me, “I’m going to call BS on this whole thing. I always thought of you as a very confident 20-year-old or 30-year-old.” And I said, “I was faking it. I was performing. I was actually still deeply insecure, overachieving, beating myself up, tons of self-loathing, but I learned how to play the game. I learned how to pretend to be assertive, and outspoken, extroversion, charisma.”

And so, I think that I was able to do it because I played into what the mold asked me to, but it wasn’t enjoyable. I don’t think I really liked myself during the process.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so then, how did you get to the place where you authentically had that internal deep wellspring of true confidence?

Lisa Sun

Well, I left McKinsey in 2011, I took a full year off, and went around the world by myself with my BlackBerry. I don’t know if any of your listeners still miss their BlackBerry. I miss my BlackBerry. That thing never died or cracked. And one of the things that I realized was the fundamental difference between our society and Asian cultures, or even other cultures, is our culture really celebrates extroversion and charisma.

Pete Mockaitis

We’re talking about US business culture?

Lisa Sun

US Western. I would just say Western culture, North American culture. And, for example, Kelly Shue at Yale, she’s a professor, she studied 30,000 employee records, and she found that men were consistently rated highest on promotability but lowest on actual performance and results, and women were the opposite. Women were very good at delivering results and performance but not promotion potential.

And when she double-clicked on promotion potential, it was extroversion, charisma, and outgoingness, like being outgoing. And so, she said, “This explains a huge part of the gender pay gap related to promotion,” which is we’re scoring things that you can see but not actual results. It’s like why Janet Yellen was told in 2013 she didn’t have the gravitas to lead the Federal Reserve.

And Ezra Klein at The Washington Post said, “It’s because the pervasive view of gravitas is not stretched to include her. She’s self-spoken, collaborative. By the way, the most qualified person for the job. Why is it we only label confident people as extroverted?” And so, that was the first unlock, as in my travels, as I was reflecting on this after leaving McKinsey, it really started to make me think that, “Are we talking about confidence in the right way? Are we really helping people be their strongest versions of themselves?”

And so, when I started my own company over a decade ago, I said, “Look, this is not about asking people to fake it to make it. This is about creating products, services, and content that really help people turn the mirror on the inside and see how valuable and strong they are.” Things don’t get easier, we get stronger, and I don’t think we, as adults, acknowledge those strengths actively. We can tell you what we’re working on, our opportunities, our deficits, things that aren’t going well.

But when I ask you and put you on the spot, Pete, and say, “What are you the best at in the world? Tell it to me like a five-year-old,” you’re going to sit down and go, “Huh, I need to think about that question a little bit.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, it’s funny, and when you say that, I do need to think about it, and it’s like, “I guess I’d have to combine. If I’m number one in the world, I have to combine like six things that I’m top 1% at so as, probabilistically multiplying them that makes me top dog out of eight billion.” That’s how I’m thinking about it.

Lisa Sun

You can’t benchmark yourself. No, Pete, that’s my whole point. Like, you automatically went to benchmarking it. It’s not measurable. It’s how you feel about yourself. It’s the iceberg model of consciousness. Ten percent of the iceberg is visible. It’s the behavior we can see. Ninety percent is below the water line, and it’s thoughts, values, feelings, wants, needs about ourselves.

So, I can tell you pretty confidently, because I’ve written a book about it, I can tell you now what I’m the best at in the world because, guess what, you’ll never be able to measure it. It’s in my own head, it’s what I think I’m the best at in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, what is that thing, Lisa?

Lisa Sun

So, I always share two. I’m the world’s best plus one. Please invite me to a party. I will fetch your drinks. I won’t hover.And I’m the world’s best positivity mirror. So, when we spend time together, I will see something in you that you may not even see in yourself, and I will take a moment and I will reflect it back onto you so that you know that I saw you, and I value you, and I heard you.

Pete Mockaitis

And as you’re thinking about this world’s best piece, the focus is not so much that that it is factually, demonstratively, empirically, provably, truthfully correct in, like, a scientific or journalistic sense of the word, but rather that your innermost depths of being are vibing with that as true. Is that accurate?

Lisa Sun

Yup, because mindset drives behavior. Carol Dweck, at Stanford, wrote this great book called Mindset, and she’s proven over and over again that if you can reset your mindset, you can change your behavior. I’ll give you a very clear example that I think some of your listeners will appreciate. I own a women’s wear company. We make $100 to $300 dollar workwear, and I still dress hundreds of women a year, and you can book a 30-minute appointment with me. And, Pete, I’m about to give all your male listeners an insight into what every woman feels. You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. We’ll take it.

Lisa Sun

Every woman comes into a dressing room with the worst self-loathing, the most negative mindset she sets herself up to fail, even before all those six forces that we’re going to dive into, she brings all six forces of her inner critic into that dressing room. She tells me, “I hate my arms. I hate my thighs. I’m going to lose 10 pounds.” Like a mirror inside a dressing room, as soon as she undresses, she doesn’t feel like trying on clothes.

And for 10 minutes out of those 30 minutes, I don’t let her talk about her body or her clothes. I ask her three questions, “What are you most proud of in the last year of your life? If your best friend was standing here, what would they tell me about you? What are you the best at in the world?” And, by the way, no woman wants to answer these questions but I always say, “If we can’t reset the chemistry of this room to a place of positivity, we are going to fail today.”

And so, as she starts answering the questions, I’m like a velvet knife, you don’t feel like it’s happening, I’m starting to dress her, and we start laughing and smiling, and she comes out of the dressing room, all of our mirrors on the outside so you only get to see yourself when you’re fully dress, and she’ll say, “This is a skinny mirror.” I’m like, “Nope, it’s from Bed, Bath & Beyond. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. It’s 1995, I can’t trick you.”

She goes, “What did you do?” I said, “We made a choice that this was going to work. We changed your mindset from a place of negativity to a positive place where you start to tell me all the things you love about your life, and then you let me do the work. I’m a dress whisperer. I get it right on the first time.” And so, I use the dressing room as an analogy of how most of us wake up. Most of us wake up in a deficit mindset, focused on what’s missing in our life, or what the weaknesses are, versus focusing on the abundance we have, the talents we bring, our superpowers.

And if you reset that for yourself every day, by the way, I still, I woke up with all six forces in my head today. I still have to reset it. But if you can do that, that drives the behaviors and outcomes you want in life.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Yeah, I really dig that. It’s associated with needing to do a reset in the morning. And I’ll tell you, what’s been most effective for me is straight up dunking into cold water. It’s like my brain is not capable of having many other thoughts, but they’re like, “Oh, oh, oh, that’s cold.” And then I’m kind of rejuvenated, I was like, “All right.” And so, it’s almost like I wash away that stuff. Now, that is…

Lisa Sun
And maybe that’s your little black dress. That’s your little black dress, right? You don’t need a blazer this morning. You’re just going to dunk yourself in cold water. The thing is as I’m putting on my clothes for the day, and I have to wear gravitas every day, we literally have the word gravitas sewn into the back of the clothing, it’s the clothing label.

And so, that’s literally a ritual for me of I woke up with all six forces focused on the weaknesses in my life, and as I’m dressing, I’m like, “Okay, I’m the gravitas woman. All right.” I validate myself. I tell myself what I’m proud of from the previous day. I really go through this ritual. And I think that’s what we’re trying to help people do is reset their minds before they take on the day.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, let’s hear about the array of rituals that you’ve seen in your work and discovered are effective for people. So, I mentioned cold water, you’re talking about a great dress, some validation. Show us, what does this look like in practice? And what are some different flavors of it?

Lisa Sun

And maybe I take away from rituals and more about the approach we built, but I always say confidence is not a state of being; it’s a total approach because every single day you’re going to face setback, disappointment, fear, insecurity. And so, it’s really about creating an approach in your life. The three parts of the approach is, one, identify which of the six forces you’re feeling.

And I know we’re going to go into them but I think it’s really important, before you diagnose insecurity or fear, to know what’s driving it. It’s like why you don’t ask kids if they’re sad. You say, “What happened?” You double-click on it. So, I feel like we need to do a better work in having conversations with our inner critic, like, “What is driving me feeling this way?”

The second part is I always say you’ve got to be able to take a self-affirming inventory of your strengths and talents. And in our work, we identified eight superpowers, most of us have two or three. My mom who is my guru has all eight, she’s like, “I take your quiz. I have all eight of them.” So, you can take a free quiz from us and discover what your superpowers are.

But then the third part, and I think this is the really important one, is really believing in those superpowers, connecting them to real-life events, starting to really understand and advocate for your talents, but also decide where you have gaps. A lot of people take our quiz and they’ll say, “Okay, I have three of them but there’s ones I don’t have.” I’m like, “Well, first of all, love the three you have. It’s not like Pokemon. You don’t need to catch them all.”

But of the five you don’t have, what do you want in life, and which of those five do you want to cultivate? So, you take real ownership. As people progress and climb the ladder, they go from having two superpowers to four or more. And we found that in our longitudinal quantitative data over the course of five years.

So, if I step back from it, it’s like diagnose what’s driving insecurity and fear in your life, be able to create a self-affirming inventory of your strengths and talents. And then the third thing is, take ownership of what capabilities you want to grow and advocate for and own over time.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s dig into it, these three pieces of approach in some depth. What are these six forces? And how do we identify them?

Lisa Sun

So, the six forces, the first is called the deficit mindset. This is where you view weakness or what’s missing over your potential and your strengths. The easiest way to diagnose this one is when you look in the mirror, “Do you look for the wrinkles or your beautiful eyes?”

The second one is called shrinking effect. This is where you shortchange yourself or underestimate your own abilities versus others or a standard. The example I use here is this is why people say sorry all the time without actually being sorry because they just think they must be in the wrong. Or, this is why women will only apply for a job if they’re 100% qualified, whereas men will often apply if they’re only 60% qualified, “Ah, that’s good enough.” But if you have shrinking effect, you’re like, “I have to be perfect to sit in that seat.” You shortchange what you’re offering to the world.

The third force is called satisfaction conundrum. This is where you tie your self-worth or happiness to an external marker of success, “I’ll be happy when I lose 10 pounds,” “I’ll be happy when I get that promotion,” “I’ll be happy when I get that car.” The problem is, when you tie your self-worth, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have goals and ambitions, but when you tie all of your self-worth to a single marker, if you get it, you just chase the next one, “Oh, I lost 10 pounds. I think I could lose five more.” It’s a treadmill.

Or, if you don’t get it, you beat yourself up for not getting it. And so, every time I didn’t make partner at McKinsey, I literally took it out on myself. I had this brass ring that I tied all of my happiness to when I should’ve stepped back and said, “You know what, I’m really creating value, I have a lot going on in my life. This one thing didn’t happen for me. Okay, I need to figure out all the other gifts I bring to the table.”

The fourth we call superhero façade. This is where you go, “Ahh, I got this. Every part of my life is perfect.” Then you try tell the world that you’re a superhero. The problem with that approach is the most successful people in life will say, “You know what, whenever you see me succeeding over here, I promise you I’m failing somewhere else.” And when you can talk about where you’re failing, you invite people to have fingerprints on the journey, and to help you, and make you even more successful. So, the most confident people in the world do not tell you they’re perfect or they’re superheroes. They’ll, in fact, tell you the reverse.

The fifth force is we call setback spiral. This is where a negative moment of criticism, a disappointment, spirals to expound all parts of your life, “So, this person gave me a piece of criticism. That must mean I’m a terrible sister, daughter, friend.” You start to say, “Okay, all parts of my life are off even though this is squarely just in one part of it.”

And the sixth force is systemic bias. This is where there are asymmetrical structures of power at work, where the rules were not created by you or for you. So, it took me twice as long to get to the same markers of leadership as my male colleagues. Well, reflecting back on that, I would say when I joined McKinsey in September of 2000, only 13% of the global partnership were women. There weren’t that many people that looked like me. So, maybe part of this wasn’t me. This was the system wasn’t built to see someone like me yet.

And my favorite article from Harvard Business Review the last four years, written by my two friends, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, is, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” because it implies we’re criminals or unwell, when, in fact, a lot of it was driven by systemic bias, that the roles just weren’t created by us or for us.

But, in total, these six forces allow you to have a vocabulary to say, “Okay, right now, the way I’m feeling, oh, it’s satisfaction conundrum. I’m tying so much of my happiness to this one marker. Okay, Lisa, how do I go fix that now?” But I think it’s really important to diagnose which one you’re feeling. Maybe all six.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, that is handy for sure because when you, like a good consultant knows, when you properly segment the problem, you’ll see there are very different solutions, whether it’s a factor one versus factor four. So, tell us, once we zero in on that, what do we do about it?

Lisa Sun

Well, then what you do is, I always say, “Okay, now you’ve had a conversation with your inner critic. You’ve explored why you’re feeling this way, what the worst-case scenario could be, and now you can drown it out with the megaphone of your superpowers,” because when you know your strengths and talents, it changes the solution space. You can focus on what you do have and what you can bring to the table. You have gas in the tank to keep going.

And so, for us, we did launch a quantitative study, and you can take the quiz at MyConfidenceLanguage.com for free, and you can discover, of the eight superpowers you’ve identified, which ones you have, and lean into those. So, I’m happy to walk through those eight and then give you an example of how that changed my life, if that helps, Pete. Do you want to go there?

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it. Yes, please, let’s hear it.

Lisa Sun

Okay, so let’s do it. So, the eight superpowers. Leading, “I set direction, I’m in charge, I inspire followership.” Performing, that’s what you and I are doing together right now. We’re on center stage, extroversion, charisma, the exchange of energy between two people. Those two superpowers are the most written about and talked about. Less than 20% of people in America have them.

So, the six that cover 80%, and, by the way, if we let them perform all day, nothing would get done. The other ones are achieving and knowing, “I get things done with a winner’s mindset. I love goals and I love meeting, exceeding them.” It’s being an athlete. Knowing? “I’m the smartest, the most well-researched, most process-oriented person in the room.” You want to build IKEA furniture with someone who has knowing as their superpower.

The best example of this is the three black women from the movie “Hidden Figures.” How do three black women have the gravitas to send a man into space at NASA? They weren’t the leaders. They weren’t the performers. They were the achievers and the knowers. The next two are giving and believing, “I support others. I’m empathetic.” Believing, “I’m optimistic. I see the best in everyone.” The best example of these forms of confidence, Ted Lasso.

Ted Lasso actually says, “I was underestimated my whole life because I’m not a commander, I’m not a leader. I’m here to help everyone become the best versions of themselves. I’m not here to win or lose. I’m here to believe.” And so, that’s a unique form of confidence that is undervalued and underestimated in the workplace.

The last two are creating and self-sustaining. Creating is my number one, “I can believe in things before I see them. I love the future ideas. I create something from nothing.” And self-sustaining, this is the hardest one for most people to get, “I like myself. I don’t need to impress you. I don’t need external validation.” It’s the quality most needed to ask for a raise, a favor, or overcome criticism.

But together, all eight of them, start to create a different inventory for your life. So, for example, my confidence language is creating. I’m the daughter of immigrants, I know what it takes to create something from nothing. Immigrants believe in things before they can see them. Performing, that’s what we’re doing now. Leading, being in charge. And giving.

And so, I know that those are the four I have. By the way, my team has opposite languages because my language doesn’t get anything done. Most of my team is achieving, giving, knowing, believing. They get things done. They stay organized. They keep everyone motivated. And so, you’ve got to have that language.

And the reason why that’s so important, I make women’s workwear, in March of 2020, when the pandemic started, our sales were not zero. They were negative. We had to refund people because we have a 30-day return policy. If you just bought a dress to go to the office from us, you send it back to us. And so, what we did is we did not let those six forces hold us. We didn’t focus on what we didn’t have.

I could’ve spiraled. I could’ve had deficit mindset. What I did is I said, “Team, what are superpowers? What do we have right now that no one else has?” I put on LinkedIn, and this is my performing and creating superpower at work, I said, “The sales of my company were negative.” No superhero façade. “If you need hospital gowns or face masks, we can get them to you. DM me.”

And Uwe Voss, the CEO of HelloFresh, DM’d me and said, “We need 2500 face masks in Newark right away. How can we help?” And so, we pivoted our business for 72 days during the pandemic to making personal protective equipment. And that was only possible because we focused on our superpowers and our strengths, not our deficits and our weaknesses.

My team’s confidence language, they got it done, they organized the spreadsheets, they got people to come in and work. It’s really about focusing on your strengths and having that growth-based mindset instead of deficit mindset.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. Really cool. And so now, I’m thinking here. So, we identify the forces that aren’t working for us so much, as well as identifying our superpower. How does that knowledge then translate into the feeling of, “Alright, in my innermost depths, I’m confident and ready to rock”? How do I make that leap from the knowing to the feeling?

Lisa Sun

Well, so once you’ve discovered your superpowers, I always say you’ve made the unconscious conscious. So, the good news is you now have words attached to your talents. And the quiz is not wrong. A lot of people take our quiz, and they go, “Whoa, I have five out of the eight.” I’m like, “Are you surprised?” They’re like, “Yes.” I said, “You’ve been underestimating or underleveraging yourself your whole life. You’ve got a lot.”

Or, “These are the ones, I don’t have them.” I’m like, “Don’t focus on those. Focus on the ones you have.” To own it though, I always tell people, take a moment you’re really proud of in life, and deconstruct it through the lens of your superpowers. Why did your superpowers drive that outcome? Connect it to a specific memory.

It’s like that movie “Inside Out” from Pixar. Your brain can only remember core memories. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday but it has these little core memories that form the basis of your character. So, take one of those core memories and say, “Huh, I have five superpowers. What is it about me that made that happen?” because we’re so focused on looking at the summit that we don’t turn back around to see how much we’ve accomplished.

By doing that, you start to believe in it. It’s one thing to take a quiz, it’s another thing to actually believe in the results. After that, then you can start to say, “Okay, how am I going to advocate for that? How can I show up? How can I make sure I get credit for my talents? And where are the places I want to add to my superpower portfolio?”

So, the example I just shared with you of pivoting my company to making personal protective equipment for 72 days, I can connect that to my four superpowers. I can say, “This is why I got us here. By the way, these are my team’s superpowers and how they contributed.” So, I really believe in my confidence language.

If I tie it back to what I’m the best at in the world, I’m really high on performing. So, that doesn’t surprise you when I tell you I’m the world’s best plus one. When I tell you I’m the world’s best positivity mirror, that’s giving. You can actually start to see all these things come together.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, lovely. Could you share with us another story of someone else who had things come together in terms of they worked through these approaches, and where did they start, what did they discover, and where did they land?

Lisa Sun

So, I’ll give you an example. In chapter one of my book, I talk about a woman named Suzanne, and she is in finance, and she came to me, and she said, “Ugh, my boss just told me I didn’t have gravitas.” And this is one of the funny things I always think, when you tell people to be more confident, it’s anxiety-inducing, it’s ambiguous. I kind of want to say, “Which of these eight superpowers do you want me to embody?”

And I said, “Okay, I know he can’t take the quiz, but which of these eight superpowers is your boss, is your CEO?” And she said, “Okay, he came up through sales. He’s probably performing, he’s leading, and he’s achieving.” “Okay, got it.” I said, “Let’s have you take the quiz,” and she goes, “Oh, my gosh, I’m knowing, achieving, and giving. We overlap on the achievement, like I always had a number, but I’m not extroverted so I don’t have performing. I don’t have leading.”

And she goes, “Huh, so when he says I don’t have gravitas, it means I’m not leading/performing.” And I said, “Okay, but are you getting credit for being giving and knowing?” She goes, “You know what, that’s not in his style.” And I said, “But you take care of everyone, you’re the smartest person driving the process, you’re VP of finance.”

And I said, “It’s actually a double-edged sword. Number one, when you do your weekly check-ins, make sure you’re taking credit for the things that he’s not seeing, the way in which you build relationships, take care of others on the team, the way you built up process, the way you think about numbers. You need to make sure you get credit for being achieving, knowing, and giving.”

“At the same time, you can say to him, ‘Hey, to get to the next level of leadership, I think what you’re saying is I need to work my leading and performing skills.’” And she did that, and she goes, “He said yes. He said, ‘That’s what I mean by gravitas. I need you to speak up more in meetings. I need you to be seen as setting direction more actively, but you’re right, I have not acknowledged that you are the most collaborative and empathetic person in the team.’”

And it’s funny, McKinsey did a report that said women are the reason why companies made it through the pandemic but the ideas of collaboration, empathy, care, they’re not on the traditional HR scorecard because women didn’t write the scorecard to begin with, so how do we give them credit for those things?

And, ultimately, what happened is she got promoted to CFO after two years because she got recognition for the qualities that she brought to the table, but she added superpowers. She actually retook the quiz, and she said, “I have four and a half superpowers now. That is so different than two years ago when I only had three. Thank you so much. I feel stronger that I can advocate for myself in this environment.” But she was promoted to the C-suite in less than two years.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, lovely. Well, Lisa, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lisa Sun

Thank you, Pete. No, I love that this is How to be Awesome at Your Job, and I think being awesome starts with recognizing how powerful you really are.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

My favorite one is my best friend Jane Park, who is the founder of Tokki. She always says, “Life doesn’t get easier. We get stronger.” And what I love about that is it focuses on the fact that there are no regrets, only learnings in life, and that the more we view every single moment of our life as an opportunity to get stronger, the stronger we get.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

I really think Kelly Shue at Yale did a phenomenal job with her study. I’m going to give her a shoutout. It was awesome.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Lisa Sun

My favorite book is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence Others. And it’s ironic because he focuses mostly on extroversion and charisma: smile, shake hands, be engaged. And a hundred years ago, that book was formative in terms of changing the way in which we relate to each other.

But the real reason it’s my favorite book, because I think what we’ve done is we’ve expanded it. I hope Dale Carnegie, if he were still alive today, would love the expansion we’ve done on his work about adding more qualities and superpowers to the equation. But when I was 12 years old, I was a freshman in high school, and my parents realized they could not afford the education that I wanted, or they wanted for me.

Let’s be clear. I went to a fancy college. It was $28,000 to go to an Ivy League college in 1996. And so, my dad went around town, and he asked, “How can I help my kid make $28,000 a year to send her to college?” And this is before endowments were releasing financial aid left and right. And the local Toastmasters chapter said, “Hey, the Rotary Club, the Lion’s Club, they have these student-speaking competitions. Your kid could win $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. We will train her to become a public speaker.”

And so, I got to join Toastmasters at the age of 12. And when you join, the founder of the chapter that I joined in California gave me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s book. I still have it. It says 99 cents, and he said, “This is the first book you’re going to read,” because, think about it, a Taiwanese immigrant’s daughter had to learn how to operate in Western culture. And the Toastmasters and Dale Carnegie taught me how to show up that way.

So, I ended up winning $20,000 in speaking money to pay for my first year of college, and then had another scholarship for year two. But that book, I still love that book mostly because of the memory and the way it changed my life so early on.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s beautiful. We had Joe Hart, who’s the CEO of Dale Carnegie Organization currently, on the show, and we stay in touch. So, I will let him know.

Lisa Sun

Will you tell him? I’m obsessed with the book and him. I have a personal connection to Dale Carnegie’s teachings.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And now how about a favorite tool, something that you use to be awesome at your job?

Lisa Sun

So, my favorite tool, I still own a Levenger.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Lisa Sun

Old-school Levenger. I still write out every day my priorities, and I block out time on my calendar to think. So, I still use a Levenger. I’m old school.

Pete Mockaitis

And those who are not in the know, these are those handy notebooks with the disk so that you can remove pages then put them back in, right?

Lisa Sun

Yes

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Lisa Sun

So, I do two things. One is I am a hip-hop dancer, so I dance in a dance class five days a week at Anna Kaiser Studios, and I really love the power of dance. So, that’s one thing that I do. The second thing is once a week, I turn off my phone for eight hours, and it’s usually on a Saturday. And of those eight hours, I will go to a museum. I’m lucky I live in New York City, so I recognize that’s not for everyone, and I will just let my brain turn off for an hour or two just looking at beautiful art or something that I want to learn about.

But I find that, because we’re always in response mode, that we don’t give our brainwaves the chance to amplify and lengthen. And I actually turn off. It’s not like “Do not disturb” because you can still see if text messages are coming in. I literally turn it off for eight hours.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

Oh, the one that I get quoted most often is self-confidence is a choice and a mindset before it becomes a behavior.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

Well, I would say, first, make sure you take the quiz at MyConfidenceLanguage.com. It’s really fun. @lisalsun at Gravitas New York on all social media platforms. And if it’s LinkedIn, I really am responsive on LinkedIn messenger more so than email.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

How to be awesome at your job, I think, starts at recognizing how awesome you are first.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Cool. We got it. All right. Lisa, this has been a lot of fun, and I wish you all the best and much gravitas and confidence in your adventures.

Lisa Sun

Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me.