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Jul 20
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1168: How to Thrive When You Don’t Know What’s Next with Simone Stolzoff

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Simone Stolzoff shows you that it’s possible to turn uncertainty into your advantage. 

You’ll Learn

  1. How to build your uncertainty tolerance
  2. What to ask when you face indecision
  3. Why curiosity is the antidote to fear

About Simone

Simone Stolzoff is an author and journalist who explores big questions about work, meaning, and identity. A former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO, he is the author of two books: The Good Enough Job and How To Not Know. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on the TED stage. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

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Simone Stolzoff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Simone, welcome!

Simone Stolzoff
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn, once and for all, how to not know, and we’re all about sharpening the universal skills here. So it sounds like not knowing is, in fact, a skill that needs to be sharpened. Explain.

Simone Stolzoff
I definitely think that we live in an age where certainty is prized. You turn on the TV or you open social media and there’s someone telling you exactly when the market is going to crash or who’s going to win the election.

But the truth is, particularly with things that haven’t happened yet, certainty is a fallacy. And so in this age where the world is becoming more uncertain and our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline, being able to tolerate what we don’t know, to be okay with not knowing, to admit what we can’t or don’t know is an increasingly vital skill.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Our tolerance for uncertainty has gotten worse. Well, Simone, I would imagine we’ve had so much more practice in recent years or decades than before, I’d imagine our uncertainty skills muscles would be enhanced, would be strengthened, but it’s worse. Tell us the data, the research, the tale behind this.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, so there’s two things going on. One is that the world is becoming more uncertain. So there’s this researcher from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom, who’s been tracking global uncertainty over time. And what he’s found is the five highest measurements of uncertainty since he began collecting data in the ‘80s have all occurred in the last five years.

So between the pandemic, we have these wars overseas, economic precarity, AI, etc. But the other thing that’s less often talked about that I mentioned is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. Now, if you were comparing sort of apples to apples, you can’t necessarily take someone who was a hand-bloom weaver in the Industrial Revolution or someone who was living in Florence during the bubonic plague, and compare that feeling of uncertainty to our current moment.

But what we can do is look at how the internet and mobile phones, in particular, has affected our ability to sit with what we don’t know. And there’s another researcher named Nicholas Carleton out of the University of Regina who’s found that the rise of mobile phones has correlated with a rise in our intolerance for uncertainty.

I think phones do a few things. One is they create the expectation that answers should be readily available. I think this is even more pronounced when you think about chatbots or some of these AI tools that can give you a definitive answer for every single question you ask.

But the other thing is that it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don’t know. Building a tolerance for uncertainty is built through exposure. And when we can always reach into our phone to either distract ourselves or get a pseudo answer about what might be on the horizon, we no longer have to build that tolerance or build that muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay. So while we have more practice at being surprised by the upheaval in the world, we have less practice in the small daily things of not knowing because it’s, well, hey, I guess there’s been quite the evolution from, okay, the internet made it faster than going to the library, then the mobile phone made it faster than going to there, and then you had Google in the mix.

I remember when my teachers were excited about, “Wow, this Google thing is really handy.” It’s like, “You know what? It really is.” And now with the AI chatbots, which, occasionally, end your uncertainty but tell you the wrong answer, which is a bummer at times. So, understood. And how are we, I guess, fundamentally measuring uncertainty tolerance?

Simone Stolzoff
So there’s a few different ways to measure it. There is a diagnostic test that was devised by this psychologist named Michel Dugas that is, basically, answering 20 questions and it measures your uncertainty tolerance.

There are other ways to look at it in more of a high-level way. So, for example, one of the ways that a lot of the economics professors and researchers measure uncertainty in the world is through some proxy metrics, like looking at the mentions of uncertainty in newspapers or in earnings reports, etc.

But it’s also just a felt experience. Whereas, ten years ago, maybe, I would’ve been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. Now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out right away. And that’s a little bit of a lighter example.

But when it comes to things like what my career will look like, or how the war overseas will impact my business’ future investments, or how I think about the prospect of owning a home, these are the types of macro uncertainties that so many, particularly young people, are having to deal with right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, we’re feeling it. I resonate with that. And so I’d like to know, with all of your research and putting this book together, any really striking, surprising, and fascinating discoveries you’ve made with regard to us humans and the state of uncertainty?

Simone Stolzoff
Well, for one thing, we often would rather a certain bad outcome than have to deal with the ambiguity of not being sure. So there’s a few really interesting studies that have brought this to light. One was from the University of College London, where they broke research participants up into two groups.

And one group was given a 50% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock. And the other group was given a 100% chance, they were definitely going to get shocked. And, somehow, the group with the 50% chance were far more anxious and stressed than those with the 100% chance.

Another example comes from the healthcare space where there was a big study of breast cancer patients. And what they found is that women going through a breast cancer journey often found the period between getting a biopsy, getting a test, and getting the results of that test, as the most stressful part of the entire experience, more stressful than chemo or any surgeries.

And so our brains have this natural aversion to uncertainty, to ambiguity. And in some ways, this is biologically wired within us. If you think about an ancestor of ours in the jungle and there’s a rustling in the bushes and they’re not sure the source of that noise, that uncertainty could be lethal. And so our brains are trained to, when faced with an uncertain situation, try to get out of it as quickly as possible. We enter the fight, flight, or freeze response.

But the problem is that the fastest way out or the quickest or the safest way out isn’t always the best way out. And so I think about the sort of upside of building an uncertainty tolerance as being able to discover the possibilities that are sitting on the other side of our discomfort.

So maybe you have a friend who’s stuck in a job that they know isn’t quite right for them, or stuck in a relationship that they know isn’t quite right for them, but they would rather stay in this sort of low-grade suffering than have to deal with the ambiguity or the uncertainty of leaving that relationship or job and figuring out what’s on the other side.

We might know someone who is a creative, an artist or an entrepreneur. And unless they’re willing to tolerate their uncertainty of getting to the precipice of what they know and persisting, they’re likely to reach for derivative answers or things that look like other things that have been created before.

And so the argument of the book is that if we are able to develop more tolerance for uncertainty, we can more gracefully adapt to whatever the future holds and be able to create things that are beyond our imagination of what could exist today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking about my low uncertainty tolerance, which is funny because, you know, I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got businesses and it’s uncertain what my income will be month to month. Wildly so. And yet, there are a couple of times, I’m thinking about, like, early COVID in terms of it’s like, okay, there’s all kinds of uncertainty.

“What I want to know is, Is this a big deal? Are we going to be locked down for a long time or a short time? I want to know.” And so I would keep going to news and it would be it, well, it’s unknowable, right?

And I would just keep going. It’s like, “Well, some doctors being interviewed, so he might know a thing, and some analyst is being interviewed, okay. And someone who’s studied pandemics historically so he might know a thing.”

Or, right now, I’m in it, in terms of like, “Okay, so are we, in this AI business, is it going to take all of our jobs? Or is this bubble going to burst? Or is it not?” And so I’ll go to these YouTube videos, like, “Okay, this is a computer science genius who’s looked at a lot of technology.” He’s, like, “Absolutely it is, you know? And it’s underhyped.”

And then someone else says, “No, these things are…they don’t know anything. They’re just statistical models. They hallucinate left and right, you know? Look at all these people who’ve embarrassed themselves when they relied on the AI.” And it’s like, “Okay, but I kind of need to know. Like, do I need to go learn plumbing? Or should I pull my money out of the stock market?” And it’s unknowable, but we want to know.

And so we can go into, I’ve done this, a dangerous loop of repeatedly seeking information that’s not going to do anything. And I recall, like, CNN and the other news organizations during COVID, or like elections, like, “Who’s going to win this thing?” Like, it really peaks because everyone’s seeking that information again and again and again.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, it’s a survival instinct. When we think we know exactly what the future holds, it allows us to plan for that future and it makes us feel like we can survive. It’s the same reason why we like music that’s based on repeating patterns. When prediction is easy, we feel safe and secure.

The problem is, so often, we looked for certainty where there is no certainty to be found. So whether it’s, you know, “How long will this pandemic last?” or, “What will my job look like in ten years?” Or, one personal example, there was this moment in my own career where I was writing for The Atlantic, working for a magazine, I got a job offer to leave journalism to go join this design firm called IDEO. And I could not make up my mind for the life of me.

On one hand, it’s like, “Oh, woe is me,” you know, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. On the other hand, it didn’t feel like I was choosing between two jobs. It felt like I was choosing between two versions of me. It felt like my identity was so wrapped up in my job, which was the topic of my first book.

But, in many ways, I thought that if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, or if I talked to my Uber driver or yoga teacher, I would know exactly what is the perfect job for me. When, in actuality, when you’re at these career crossroads or at a moment in your life where there’s sort of path A and path B, you can’t know for certain which path will be better for you, ultimately. You have to be able to make choices in spite of the uncertainty.

And so, in many ways, this book, How to Not Know, is my own sort of existential balm for that younger version of me that couldn’t decide. And, hopefully, by helping people get more comfortable, more tolerant of uncertainty, they can be able to make decisions, live their lives in spite of not knowing exactly what is to come.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing there when you said you can’t know with certainty. And that’s true, you can’t know with certainty. And yet, on the flip side, it’s possible that there are some things that are knowable. And if you go know them, you’re like, “Oh, wow, I have to do that as an IDEO consultant? Forget it. Whoa, good thing I asked. No way.” Although that sounds like one of the coolest jobs ever for the record, so I’m a fan.

So there are some things that are knowable and it’s almost like, for me, as a pathologically curious person, it’s kind of dangerous. It’s, like, I have a false belief that, “Well, if I just ask the right questions of the right source, then I will know the right path.” And what’s so tricky is that’s often true and other times not at all true.

And other times this thing in the middle, like, “Yeah, you can learn a good chunk, but, yeah, it’s still going to be a mystery. What kind of project are you on? What’s your team like? You know, what’s the office culture like?” You you don’t know it till you’re in it.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, the psychologist who I mentioned, Michel Dugas, who was the first to link uncertainty intolerance with a lot of these anxiety disorders, the guy who came up with the diagnostic test, told me that when his patients are particularly intolerant of uncertainty, he tends to see one of two behaviors.

The first is they become obsessive information gatherers. So these are the people that need to, say, read three hundred reviews for a plastic water bottle before they buy something on Amazon. And the other is people become extremely impulsive. They just sort of take the first option they can because they don’t want to have to grapple or sit with that uncertainty.

And the truth is there’s a middle path between them. Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is things that you can do to gather more information about the decisions that you’re making, but, often, there are diminishing returns. And you can’t know exactly what a job will be like until you actually do the job.

And so, sort of in the idea parlance, you need to be able to run the prototype. You need to be able to treat your life a little bit more experimentally and provisionally and be able to actually take action rather than thinking that you can just work out every decision as a thought experiment and then know with a 100% certainty that you’ve made the right choice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, walk us through some of that then. In terms of in a world full of uncertainty and a human biology that doesn’t care for it, if we’re at risk for doing things impulsively or over-researching or spending too much of our life on CNN or YouTube and feeling our energy sucked away by these worries, information-seeking, etc., what are the most impactful moves, strategies, practices that we should take on?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we can talk through a few. I mean, one distinction that I like to make is between more acute uncertainty. So this is uncertainty about something that will be resolved, like, “Will I get this job?” “What will be the results of this test?” versus the more ambient uncertainty of, like, the existential threat of AI, things that we’re living underneath.

So when it comes to that first category of things that will actually be resolved, let’s use an example of a high school student who is uncertain about where they’re going to go to college. The first question I’d ask is, “Is there anything that you can do to control the outcome?”

So, say, the student hasn’t submitted their applications yet. There are things that they can do to actually control that outcome. They can try to get good grades, they can try to build good relationships with professors, they can try to write great essays and submit their application. So those are things that you can do to actually control the outcome.

If you’ve done all of those things and the answer is, “Okay, I’ve done what I can to control the outcome,” the next step on the decision tree is, “Can you prepare for multiple potential outcomes?” So often, when we are seeking certainty, we’re trying to resolve this internal dissonance that we feel. And so we fix our mind to one potential path or one potential outcome, and say, “I really want to go to UCLA. If I don’t go to UCLA, my life is ruined.”

But, in actuality, a more adaptive approach is to think about multiple potential outcomes. Think about maybe the pros and cons of these different choices rather than tying your entire identity to one particular path. And so if you can prepare for multiple contingencies is what the social scientists often say.

Then after that, once you’ve done what you can to prepare for multiple outcomes and do what you can to control the outcome, it really comes back to being able to regulate your nervous system, to be able to develop a level of acceptance for the uncertainty that you face. And so there are things that you can do, like yoga or meditation has been proven to help people get better at waiting.

Distraction. There’s a really fascinating study where they were measuring students’ stress levels as they’re waiting to receive the results of a test, and they gave the students three different types of Tetris games, and the first was very hard, the second was very easy, and the third was right at the threshold of their difficulty.

And they found that the first two groups had similar levels of stress and anxiety, whereas, the third group who were immersed in this flow state as they were playing this challenging game were able to better cope with the waiting period.

You can also look for silver linings in potential bad news. So this is what’s often called bracing for the worst or emotionally preparing for potential negative outcomes. But, at the end of the day, it comes to accepting the uncertainty of any sort of decision, like where to go to college.

And so you can apply this to applying for jobs or other sort of questions that you may be facing in your life. And I’ll stop there because I’ve been talking for a while, but we can also talk about some strategies that might be helpful with the more sort of ambient uncertainty that many of us are living underneath today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, it’s so funny, even as you were describing the situation with the, you know, picking a college, I thought my brain immediately went to information sources, “Oh, well, there’s websites such as Unibuddy and ZeeMee which allow you to speak with a student on the campus to get an inside perspective of blah blah blah.”

And so, it’s funny how hardwired and instinctual that is. And, certainly, I think that, and maybe this is where I’m in a bit stuck, in a bit of a loop. It’s like there’s, often getting more information is a great move.

And often there is some creativity to be exercised, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know those websites existed where I could talk to a real student and get the low down, the real dirt, you know, on the campus.” And then there comes a point in which it’s like, you know, paralysis analysis, spinning your wheels, just amplifying your uncertainty.

Do you have any good pro tips in terms of, like, “This is where to draw the line.” Like, “Okay, we’ve done enough information gathering and now we’re moving on”?

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I mean there’s no hard and fast rules. One thing I think about is, if you’re having conversations and not learning anything new, that might be a sign that you’ve sort of exhausted your information gathering.

Jeff Bezos and other people have made arguments that you should transact when you’re 70% ready, for example, because if you wait until you’re a 100% ready, you might miss the opportunity or it might never come.

There’s a great passage from the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath that I really love, where she’s describing this young girl who’s sitting underneath a fig tree. And each fig, in her mind, represents a different potential life path for herself.

She could marry this person or marry that person, or she could, you know, become an Olympic swimmer, or she could move to Paris, etc. And she’s going through this thought experiment of all these different potential figs that she could pick off the tree. And as she sits there, the figs are slowly ripening, and then over-ripening, and then rotting, and then falling off the tree.

And it’s this beautiful image because, you know, so often, if we’re in that information-gathering space, we might do it as an excuse or its own sort of form of comfort because we think, “Oh, we’re gathering information. We don’t need to make a choice yet.” When, in actuality, not making a choice is a choice in and of itself. And some of these opportunities that we think might be there forever are more time-bound that we think.

So, for the book, I talked to this professional poker player and former decision scientist, and her name is Annie Duke, and she gave me a few kind of nice proxies for when you can go fast versus go slow. Often, with these decisions, it’s not about sort of whether or not you can be certain about making the right choice. It’s about whether you can move quickly in making the decision or whether they require a more deliberative, slowed-down analytical thought process.

One of them that she taught me that I really like is called the only option test. And so imagine if you have two choices: go on a vacation to Paris or go on a vacation to Rome. You might think that the choice is really high stakes because it’s a costly vacation. You might not be able to take very many trips like that in your lifetime. And so you spend all of this time gathering information and creating spreadsheets and having pro and con lists.

But she asks a question that I think cuts through the noise, which is, “Imagine your only option was to go to Rome. Would you be happy? And then imagine your only option was to go to Paris. Would you be happy? And if the answer is yes to both of those questions, you can probably make the decision more quickly than you think.”

That’s not to say that things can’t go wrong, but the likelihood that you get swindled by an Italian cab driver or a Parisian cab driver or get food poisoning from undercooked escargot or, you know, undercooked pasta carbonara, or whatever, are probably equally likely. And because the answer is yes to both of the situations, you can imagine, “Okay, if it were my only option, I’d be happy with it. So maybe the decision matters a little bit less than I think.”

So there’s certain sort of like proxy rules or tricks that might be helpful in those sorts of situations of whether gathering more information is actually in service of making a better decision, or it’s just something that you’re doing because there’s a certain comfort in being able to feel like you’re making progress where you have control over an outcome, even if the outcome isn’t necessarily in your control.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot as a shortcut. And I’m thinking about, so, you know, I have a company, Cashflow Podcasting, we launch podcasts for people. And sometimes, and I’ve been through it myself, agonizing over the microphone choice because it feels so consequential, and yet it’s really not.

People have their preferences, you know, about what they like to wear. And that is also, you know, not all that consequential. But people will speak intensely on reviews of microphones about how one is better than the other or whatever. And it’s like, “Yeah, that one’s fine, too. That one’s also fine. That one was also fine.” And so I love that.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, one thing I like to think about is, like, the difference between one-way door and two-way door decisions as well. So one-way door decisions are decisions that are hard to reverse, things like, “Who should I marry?” “Should I buy this house?”

But the majority of decisions that we make in our day-to-day life are two-way door decisions. They’re decisions that, even if you buy the microphone that is not ideal, it’s probably a lower-stakes decision than you think. You could return it, you can get another microphone, you could eat the $150 or whatever the microphone costs.

And the problem is so many of us take the analytical frameworks of one-way door decisions and apply them to these reversible decisions, these two-way door decisions that we make every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good. That’s good. More of these, please. Give us the tricks.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, there’s this ethicist I spoke to, who I really liked a lot, named Ira Bedzow. And so he’s an ethicist, he works for Emory University, so he both works as the ethicist in the hospital and he consults with college students as they’re about to embark on their careers.

And whenever someone comes to him with a predicament or, you know, a question where they’re trying to decide between multiple paths, he always asks them the same three questions. The first is, “What do you want?” And the idea here is to try to get out of your head and into sort of an embodied felt experience out of your brain and into your body.

And the second question is, “Do you want to want that?” which is a little bit heady, but it taps into what philosophers often call our second-order desires. So, “Do I want a cigarette? Sure. Do I want to want a cigarette? Maybe not.”

And then the third question is the one that I think is the most important, which is, “What does that choice say about who you are as a person?” And the reason why I like that third question is because it ties our decisions to our values and our identity.

Because when you’re at a point of indecision, often you can’t know at that moment how that decision or how that choice will actually work out. But if you make a choice that’s in alignment in with the person that you want to be or your value systems, what you believe in, hopefully, you can stand by that choice even if you don’t get the outcome that you desire.

And so I like those sort of three questions as a framework to help someone work through a moment of indecision, “What do you want? Do you want to want that thing? And what does that choice say about who you are?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice trio there. And what’s fun about the last question is, sometimes, the answer to the last question is, “What does it say about who I am? Like, nothing. It’s really pretty minor, actually, now that I think about it. Huh? Okay.” So I guess in such scenarios, what’s your take on just like flipping a coin or rolling a die?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, there’s a chapter about this in the book where I profiled this guy named Max Hawkins, who basically flipped a coin for every decision in his life. He created an algorithm that would make all of his life decisions on his behalf.

So it started with tapping into the Uber API and creating an app that would call an Uber to his house and bring him to a location in the city known only to the driver to try and randomize his existence and get outside of his bubble. And then he started doing it with Facebook events where he would, you know, roll the dice and go to a random public Facebook event chosen by this algorithm.

And at its most extreme, he created an app to tell him where he should live around the world. And he quit his job and, for two years, every month or two, he would pick up and leave and go to Gortina, Slovenia, or Dubai, or Hong Kong, or Ho Chi Minh City, depending on where this app told him to live. And, you know, it’s an extreme case of randomization or rolling the dice.

But I do think that having some aspect of rolling the dice or flipping the coin can be helpful. There’s a study out of the University of Basel in Switzerland where they had people flip coins when making big decisions about their life. And what they found is, even if you don’t go with whatever the coin tells you to do, having that as a data point can be really helpful information.

You flip a coin, you say, “Oh, thank you. Finally. It gave me the answer that I actually wanted.” Or you flip a coin and it tells you to do something, you say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that.” It can be really revealing of what your actual true preferences are.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, I’ve done that with my kids. It’s, like, flip a coin and then it’s like before we reveal, it’s like, “Well, which side do you really want it to be? Well, then how about we just do that?”

Simone Stolzoff
That’s great. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“And we don’t even need to look.” And then they’re like, “No, we have to see.” “Okay, here it is.”

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I have a friend, Jordan, who, whenever someone comes to him with, like, life advice or whatever, he always comes out of the gate super strong, and says, “Okay, you should definitely do this.” And, by being so strong, it gives his, you know, mentee or his patient or whatever, something to react to, and often that reaction can be really telling.

Because, often, when we’re gathering information or flipping the proverbial coin in our heads, we are really good at playing our own devil’s advocate. We can sort of make the bear case to whatever we might be inclined to choose. But, often, life is about transacting. It’s about being able to make choices in spite of not knowing, in spite of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, any everyday pro tips for professionals making the decisions that pop up regularly?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, one principle that I talk about in the book is about finding your anchors. So when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So, professionally, maybe you are dealing with some of the anxiety or stress of not knowing whether your job will be made redundant in the next few years because of AI, or whether you’re working in the right industry, or whether the economic future of your organization is sound.

One thing that I often say is, “How can you bring some certainty to that equation?” So when you find those anchors, whether they are your commitment to live in a particular place, or to be married to a particular person, or your commitment to a set of values, those anchors become the steady sort of rocks that will remain amidst all of the changing winds around you.

The second thing that I often tell people is that you have to be willing to trust in your future self. And so I had this friend named Emily Anhalt, who is a fellow author. She wrote this book called Flex Your Feelings, and she’s a psychotherapist.

And she had this moment when she was in her early 20s. Her mom was given a potentially terminal diagnosis, and she spent week after week in the hospital by her mom’s bedside, and she was really struggling to cope. She was riding this sort of anticipatory roller coaster of fear and anxiety.

And one day, a family friend of hers named Bill came by to visit. And Bill is an oncology doctor, so he has a lot of experience with people at the end of their lives. And he said, “Emily, how are you doing?” And she said, “Honestly, I’m not doing so well. I’m really struggling to cope and I don’t know what I’ll do if my mom dies.”

And Bill said something very wise. He said, “Emily, the version of you that will handle that tragic event if or when it takes place will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more context, more information, and be better equipped to handle it than you are today. You have to be willing to trust in your future self’s ability to handle your future problems.”

And I love this idea of sort of trusting in your future self because, so often, we rush out and meet our suffering. We think, “Oh, if this thing happens, it’s going to be bad for X, Y, and Z reason.” And in Emily’s case, she’s really glad that she got this advice because her mom ended up making it out of the hospital and she didn’t needlessly have to suffer about something that never came to pass.

And then the last sort of piece of advice that I’ll just give to people in facing uncertainty is to try to choose curiosity over fear. As we talked about in the beginning of our chat, our natural tendency when faced with uncertainty is to perceive it as a threat, to see it as something that might be, you know, at odds with our survival.

But, in actuality, there are so many great things that can come from the other side of uncertainty. And curiosity has this magical power to alchemize uncertain situations from things that are just the source of fear into being able to see the possibilities or the opportunities that may emerge. So find your anchors, trust in your future self, and try to choose curiosity over fear.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like about that notion of your future self being born into being able to handle it is that if we look to our past selves, we can see, like, “Oh, I’ve been dealt some challenging circumstances, like this thing happened. Remember when we had to deal with this, this, and this all at once? Remember when this person died? Remember when I was broke?”

Like, there are elements in our past. It’s like the past self managed to deal with that more or less fine. And so, too, we may expect the future self to do likewise.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we all suffer from what social psychologists often call the end of history illusion, which is this idea that when we look backwards, when we look at our past, we see all of the different ways that we’ve changed and evolved and been able to handle adversity.

But when we think about the future, we often think the person that we are today will be fixed forever. We think that, you know, we’re fully baked. And what I like about understanding this sort of cognitive bias or this, you know, illusion is that we are going to continue to change. And, in some ways, that might take some of the pressure off.

Your preferences in 10 years might be very different from your preferences today, because your preferences 10 years ago are probably different from what they are today, your desires, the person you want to be, what you need from your life.

And so rather than think that you need to know exactly what the future holds or have it all figured out, you can have a little bit more humility. You can trade some of that pride or hubris for a sense of openness and, hopefully, accept that you don’t know exactly what is to come, but in some ways, that’s what gives life its texture. That’s what brings serendipity and surprise and some of the magic.

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, well, you know, related to what we were saying, there’s this quote I have in the book from this psychologist named Rollo May, and he says that, “Commitment is healthiest not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt.”

And I love that because he’s basically saying that you don’t need to be a 100% sure before you commit. And, actually, committing, even if you hold a little bit of doubt, can be a great way for you to build your character.

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

Simone Stolzoff
There’s another study that I like from the book from Northwestern University, where they had a big group of students who were all associated with the Greek life. So they were in fraternities and sororities. And they had different groups solve a murder mystery.

And some of the groups were all people from the same organization, so people that were all in the same frat or same sorority, and other groups were heterogeneous, so they had a mix of people from different groups. And what they found is when people were in groups where they were only with people from their organization, they came to a decision much faster.

They were more confident in the decision that they came to, and they were more often wrong. Whereas, when there was a mix of people from different organizations, there was more friction and they felt less good about the process of coming to a conclusion, but they were much more accurate.

And I like this because it talks about, you know, the value of diverse perspectives and decision-making, but also that, you know, part of what makes group-think so attractive is that it’s the friction-free path to certainty, when you can just sort of all agree and outsource your decision-making to maybe the loudest person in the room or the highest paid person in the room.

But, in actuality, when multiple people are able to voice their perspectives, you come to a better decision, even if it doesn’t feel as good while you’re coming to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Simone Stolzoff
It’s called London Falling. It’s by this reporter from The New Yorker, and it chronicles this family in London whose son tragically committed suicide and sort of why and how.

And it’s this incredibly well-reported, deep research, page-turning read about how a family where everything seemed to be fine on paper was torn apart.

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

Simone Stolzoff
I always carry around a back-pocket notebook. And I find that, like, when I have my mole skin, it’s, you know, like, wallet, keys, cellphone, mole skin, I am more open to the ideas that the world holds.

And I like that it’s analog. I like that I don’t get distracted by it because there’s no other apps besides just the ability to write things down. And so having just a really accessible way to jot down ideas or to make observations as I have them has been an invaluable tool for me as a writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Simone Stolzoff
I listen to the radio every morning. This is a relatively new habit. But my wife and I, as we’re cooking breakfast for our son, always turn on this radio station called KEXP that’s based in Seattle. And it’s a sort of a college radio station for adults. It’s this really eclectic music sourcing. And it’s really nice not to rely on an algorithm or to rely on my own preferences, and let these experts in music curation sort of take us into the day.

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, from my first book, The Good Enough Job, the big idea is about the value of diversifying your identity. And I think the quote that really resonates with people the most is that, “Some people do what they love for work. Others do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they’re not working, and neither is more noble.”

And I think that’s particularly relevant to a show like this where, you know, yes, we want to be awesome at our jobs, but also that being awesome at your job or having a great job is in service of, hopefully, having a great life and to not confuse the two, I think, is very important.

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, my website has all my socials, etc. It’s just SimoneStolzoff.com or you can go to HowToNotKnow.com, which might be a little bit easier to find. I also have a Substack called “The Article Book Club,” where I just send out one great article written by someone else every other week. And so if you’re into long-form journalism or just reading the best of what the internet has to offer, I would suggest “The ABC.”

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

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I think, as we talked about building tolerance for uncertainty, one of the best ways to do so is through exposure, through microdosing uncertainty. So if there’s a way this week, whether it’s taking a new route to work, or striking up a conversation with a new colleague, or trying to do things a little bit differently than how you might have done things in the past, being able to expose yourself consciously to that uncertainty will do two things.

One, it might expose a better way of working or a better way of doing things. And, two, it’ll cognitively prepare you for other uncertainties that you may face in the future. So how can you shake up the routine? How can you choose to expose yourself to uncertainty so that you might be better equipped to face the uncertainty that you’ll face without choosing in the future?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Simone, thank you.

Simone Stolzoff
Thanks for having me, Pete. Cheers.

Jul 16
0

1167: Mastering the Three Elements of Charisma with Olivia Fox Cabane

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Olivia Fox Cabane reveals the behaviors and practices that help develop your personal charisma.

You’ll Learn

  1. The number one myth surrounding charisma
  2. How to amplify your presence in just a few seconds
  3. The master key to looking and feeling more powerful

About Olivia

Olivia Fox Cabane is a leading authority on the science of charisma and the bestselling author of The Charisma Myth and The Net And The Butterfly, translated into 36 languages. 

Formerly Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX, she has lectured on charisma, leadership, and innovation at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Marine War College, and the United Nations. As cofounder of the KindEarth.Tech Foundation, she supports foodtech companies advancing environmental sustainability. 

Her clients include the leadership of Apple, Google, TikTok, Deloitte, UBS, and JP Morgan as well as founders of Airbnb, Brex, Paradigm, and Presight. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal.

Resources Mentioned

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Olivia Fox Cabane Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Olivia, welcome!

Olivia Fox Cabane
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you about charisma. And, in fact, I mentioned earlier you’ve been on our list for a full decade. And now here we come. Your Charisma Myth book got its second edition now. And I’d love it if you could hit us with it straight up, what is the charisma myth or kind of the main thing people misunderstand about charisma?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The single biggest myth about charisma is that it’s this innate magical quality that you either have it or you don’t. And, in fact, as researchers have shown in controlled laboratory experiments, they were able to raise and lower people’s level of charisma as if they were turning a dial.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, I think many of us would say, “Hmm, I would enjoy turning up my charisma dial from time to time.” Can you share with us what went down in these experiments and what were the results?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It turns out that charisma is nothing but behaviors. And the reason that we think that it’s innate is because, usually, the “naturals” at charisma learn these behaviors so early that by the time we meet them, usually in early adulthood at the earliest, it looks as if they’ve always had them.

But, in fact, there are people who consciously learn charisma step by step, and Steve Jobs is one of the most public examples. You can see, if you look at his videos from 1983 to 2011, he learned each of the three elements of charisma, presence, then power, then warmth, one at a time. And it’s fascinating to see his charisma grow over the years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s a fun fact. I was unaware Steve Jobs was originally not so charismatic. Can you unpack the story for us?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So if you look at Steve Jobs in the ‘80s, he really is coming across as nerdy, as having trouble with eye contact, for example. And if you look at it from a charisma science perspective, he is low on all three of the measures. He’s low on presence, he’s low on power, he’s low on warmth.

And the first thing he learns is presence. You can see him being able to be more still, more focused on the audience. He fidgets less. He then gradually learns power where you can see how much more space he takes on stage. You can hear in his voice the way his inflection drops in the right places.

And, eventually, the last piece that he learns is warmth. And what’s interesting with Jobs is that it’s not warmth towards the audience, it’s enthusiasm towards the product that he is presenting and the topic he’s speaking about. Steve Jobs, as Carmine Gallo once said, “Steve Jobs doesn’t sell computers. He sells the promise of a better world. He spoke like a prophet.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Okay, so you’ve observed this by viewing the evolution of his performances in keynote speeches and presentations over time?

Olivia Fox Cabane
I have, yeah, but one of the fascinating things with the new edition is that I was lucky enough to have Dr. Oliver Niebuhr, who’s the guy in vocal and digital charisma. And he and his team actually analyzed the vocal charisma of CEOs, and they just compared Steve Jobs to, for example, Mark Zuckerberg.

And in the later years, you can see Steve Jobs clocking in at 93% on their formula of the elements of charisma. Zuck, his max was 57% on the charisma metric.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’ve got these three components, and could you share with us perhaps a story of someone you’ve seen up close and personal go through a transformation in their own charisma levels?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, one of the most interesting areas where I’ve seen this personally has been in Silicon Valley, where you see young founders who have to learn charisma because it really is the number one investment criteria. In fact, not in theory, people always think that investors fund the right idea, the right product.

Personally, what I’ve witnessed is that investors fund the right person. And one of the best studies on that was actually in 2008 when the MIT Media Lab was able to predict with over 80% accuracy the outcome of negotiations, sales calls, and business plan pitches without listening to a single word of content.

They were analyzing the ratio of speaking to listening, they were analyzing the voice fluctuation, and they were analyzing the emotions that were emitted. And so this is something that, when I was at StartX, I had to teach the young founders of, “Listen, if you are agonizing over every single word in your PowerPoint, it’s going to be a great PowerPoint, but realize how little impact it’s going to have compared to your body language.”

And one of the most vivid examples of that was actually the story of Marilyn Monroe, who took a photographer and a reporter one day to Grand Central Station because she wanted to prove that she could flip from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe at will.

And so it was fascinating to hear from the reporter that she was first Norma Jeane, and she went down into Grand Central Station, boarded the subway car, and even though there was a camera clicking the whole time, no one noticed her.

Then she emerges back onto the street, and the reporter said there wasn’t a grand gesture, “It was just she fluffed up her hair, struck her pose, but gradually, it was as if she transformed into Marilyn under our very eyes, and the crowd went nuts within a few minutes.” They had to shove people to help her escape the growing crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
This is after she was famous?

Olivia Fox Cabane
This was after she was famous. She was able to go down into Grand Central and not be noticed by anyone just by turning off her charisma, then re-emerged onto the streets and show herself as Marilyn just by a conscious effort, because Marilyn wanted to prove that the Marilyn persona was something that she could turn on and off.

And this is just an illustrative example of what the studies have shown that charisma is nothing but behaviors, and that in these lab experiments, the researchers, by instructing the participants to display certain behaviors, were able to get them to be more or less charismatic.

Pete Mockaitis
This is mind blowing in so many ways. And so, well, let’s really get into the nitty-gritty here then. So, all right, we’ll start with Marilyn Monroe. What are the key levers or switches or moves that transform one from Norma Jeane Baker into Marilyn Monroe?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So here we’re operating on guesswork because we, unfortunately, don’t have a video recording of that episode. But my best guess would be that what she was doing in the subway was making herself look small, and it was emanating the “I’m no one, don’t look at me.” So this is a question of how you keep your eyes down. It’s a question of how little space you take up, versus if you are going to make yourself the big gorilla in the room.

And one of the really interesting practices that I’ve seen really help with students, particularly for women, is when they start doing martial arts because that will genuinely change the way that they move through space.

And it was really interesting when Stanford’s boxing coach, at one point, gave his students the exercise of walking through crowded areas, learning how to display a body language such that other people would move out of their way, because he was explaining that the ability to portray dominance was one of the keys in pre-games.

And so if you look at studies, the power component is sometimes called power, sometimes confidence, sometimes dominance, sometimes assertiveness. It’s all a component of power. It isn’t actually the real power to command an army because, as humans, because we evaluate people in just so few instances, we’re always inferring.

And so we infer that someone who is displaying confidence must have something that they are confident about, must have a reason to be confident. And that is why, if you look at the cues from which we read dominance, assertiveness, social status, they, really, a lot of them come down to how much confidence your body language displays.

Here’s the irony. Have you ever had a conversation when you say something and your brain goes, “Ooh, that was stupid?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure.

Olivia Fox Cabane
What happens to your face?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe a wince. It’s just kind of like a “Yikes!” kind of a face, yeah.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah. So two things happen at that moment. First, one piece that might be obvious is that the human brain, being terrible at understanding the difference between imagination and reality, which is the reason why when you watch a scary movie, even though you know it’s just a movie, your brain sees blood and guts on the screen, sends you straight into fight or flight mode, adrenaline rushing through your system.

And the sympathetic nervous system sends the body’s resources to the important survive-the-next-10-seconds things, like muscles, vision acuity, etc., shuts down the unnecessary parts like digestion, immune system, and cognitive reasoning, the expensive part of the brain.

When you attack yourself in that way, what’s really interesting is that the brain isn’t great at understanding that that is a self-attack, that there’s not a real saber-toothed tiger. But here’s the other thing. Even though that was a self-directed criticism, self-directed coldness or judgment, the other person doesn’t know that.

All they know is that, while you were looking at them, listening to them, talking to them, and, therefore, presumably thinking about them, they accurately read coldness, criticism, and judgment on your face. So, naturally, they’re going to assume it’s about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think that that is deep inside of us, just associations. And just yesterday, I was in a physical therapy appointment, and someone was, she seemed perfectly charming, friendly. We did some strength testing, and then she used this device called a shockwave on me. And it hurt, and I actually yelled. I was surprised.

And it was so funny, I had, generally, positive associations with this person, like, “Oh, what a friendly professional.” And then after this, it’s just like, “I don’t like this person.”

And I knew this is not rational. But because she caused me physical pain in an intense, surprising fashion, I was just like, “I don’t really feel like chit-chatting with you anymore.” It’s just there. We just associate and we can’t help ourselves.

Olivia Fox Cabane
One of the absolute truths of charisma is that it’s not just how you make people feel about you, it’s also how you make them feel about themselves. If you make them feel good about themselves, they will associate that feeling to you. If you make them feel bad about themselves, same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so Olivia, please, lay it on us, in terms of what are these behaviors that are going to make us super duper charismatic, persuasive, and funded and sold and all the good things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So presence, power, and warmth. With presence, the interesting thing is that this is where, in today’s day and age, you can gain the biggest bang for your buck, if you will, because presence really comes down to being able to stay fully focused on the other person in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
And with an increasing amount of us distracted every minute by our phones, watches, rings, whatever it is, if you can be one of the few people who can stay fully focused on the other person, you would be amazed at the outsized impact that just a small increase in presence has.

And my favorite trick here is, if you ever notice that you’re in a conversation, but only half your brain present and the other half was busy doing something else, realize that that has a real cost, because there’s a good chance that your eyes glazed over, your facial reactions were a split second delayed, and people can catch that so fast. It’ll come across as an incongruence and you’ll come across as not quite authentic.

Instead, if you can focus on your toes for a split second, that’ll get your brain to scan your whole body from head to, of course, toes and get you very physically present back in the moment, get back in the conversation right after that. So presence, that’s step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, my toes. And I’m also curious about eye contact? Is there optimal amount, approach, style?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so eye contact is an interesting one. If you’ll notice in conversations, often the speaker is the one who will look away while they’re constructing their sentences, or halfway through a sentence, whereas, the listener will tend to have more sustained eye contact.

Now, this is where, of course, neurodiversity comes in, and for people for whom eye contact is less comfortable, you can try looking between the eyes, sometimes at the forehead. But eye contact has one particularly interesting effect, which is deep sustained eye contact can send phenethylamine, the same chemical that is known for producing the phenomenon we know as love at first sight.

Pete Mockaitis
So sustained eye contact can produce love at first sight chemicals. Interesting. Can sustained eye contact also feel weird, uncomfortable, jarring, threatening, off putting?

Olivia Fox Cabane
It can, depending on what other signals are happening at the same time. Sustained eye contact with an aggressive body language can absolutely create a feeling of belligerence. Sustained eye contact with a warm, accepting Dalai Lama kind of body language can get people to melt into a puddle of tears. So it’s just one element.

But one of the most hilarious studies was one in which participants were asked to look at each other and count the number of blinks while they were…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right? And after the research, it turns out the researchers didn’t actually care about the number of blinks. They just wanted people staring at each other without feeling self-conscious. And a staggering number of participants reported increased affection, and some even passionate feelings for one another. It happened fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, so with presence, not so much fidgeting, fully focusing on the person. If your mind is elsewhere, you’re probably sending that message somehow through your face or something. So a quick thought to the toes can get you back in the groove. Maintained eye contact in a warm, Dalai Lama-ish non-threatening format is handy. Anything else we should cover on presence before moving on?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The honest answer is that mindfulness is the single best training for presence. There just is no better way, and mindfulness is hard. If you’ve ever gone on a silent retreat, I’ve always found that the silence is the easy part. The solitude, honestly, you don’t get enough of it. The stillness in the mind, that’s the challenge. So being able to keep your mind centered is a very difficult but a very worthy challenge.

The good news is that even a small increase in your level of presence can really have a big difference. And one of the fastest ways to get that is when you’re saying goodbye to someone in person, pay attention to the way you’re ending the conversation. Are you already, in your mind and with your body language, focused on something else as you, for example, shake their hand and turn away?

Or can you, in the last couple of seconds, while you’re shaking their hand, sustain eye contact, hold their hand for a minute longer with full eye contact, and then turn away? It’s really just one second’s difference. That’s all it is. But it’s the difference between giving the feeling that you were fully focused on them the whole time and the feeling that you were already moving into your next phase of whatever you’re focusing on while still officially looking at them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, with the listening, assuming you got the right body language, posture, curiosity, warmth, etc., going for you, can we overdo it? Do we know how much is too much?

Olivia Fox Cabane
You can overdo it. There’s a couple of downsides. So people usually don’t believe me when I tell them that there’s real downsides to being charismatic. They often think that I’m talking about, “Oh, you can become very powerful and do bad things.” Yeah, sure, that’s obvious.

The less obvious one is that people genuinely can become addicted to your presence. Charisma is a high that people can become addicted to. But the bigger one is that, with the intensity of attention, you kind of create a cocoon within which people can end up spilling their guts.

And then, afterwards, when they realize just how much they’ve shared, comes the ego backlash of, “Oh, God, what have I said?” And that’s when they can associate with you the shame, embarrassment of what they said, the resentment that you somehow got them to spill their guts.

So there are some real downsides to too much charisma and to too focused a state of listening. It can turn into therapy if you’re not cautious, which is where it can be useful to, occasionally, interject your own stories to give them a sense of, “Here’s what you’ve shared. Here’s what I’m sharing.” That can give them a sense of just how much they’ve been self-revealing, and also it can give them a chance to back off if they want to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super thank you. All right. So that’s presence. Let’s talk about power.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, with power, as we were saying, the interesting thing about power is, because it’s read through confidence, the counterintuitive point is that the way to confidence is usually less about building yourself up, and it’s usually more about learning how to remove the obstacles, such as self-criticism and self-doubt.

Because self-criticism is so powerful, because the brain reads it as a real attack, ironically, strength, and power will often come from self-compassion and self-forgiveness. Because the ability to move on quickly when you’ve just decided that you messed up, that is one of the most important routes to sustained confidence and strength in your body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. The ability to move on quickly when you discover you’ve messed up, How do we get that skill of that quick rebound?

Olivia Fox Cabane
A couple of steps. The first thing is de-stigmatize. Whatever it is that is happening, let’s say you’re getting an attack of the imposter syndrome. So with the imposter syndrome, we know now that it’s a fairly common phenomenon, that the vast majority of people experience it at some point or another, that even though it feels like you’re an imposter, it’s just a matter of time before people expose you as a fraud. This is really just a normal experience. De-stigmatize that feeling.

Or if it is the feeling of having failed, it can help to remember that some of the best baseball players or soccer players have occasionally failed eight times out of ten, in some cases nine times out of ten. De-stigmatizing to detaching. The brain, as we’ve just said, does its best to present us with an accurate view of reality but it can’t because there’s just too much going on.

So our brain is almost always going to present us with a distorted view of reality. Sometimes it’s a little distorted, it’s pretty accurate, sometimes it’s widely distorted. So just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true. So de-stigmatize normal experience. Detach, just because a thought is in your head doesn’t mean it’s true.

Your brain’s job is to make up thoughts. Just because you have an ugly thought doesn’t mean that you are a terrible person. So de-stigmatize, detach, and then rewrite.

So the most useful tool for me of all in this is cognitive re-framing. So imagine that you’re driving to a key pitch, a presentation, and you’re focused, you’re locked in, you know your stuff, you’re on the freeway. All of a sudden, a huge black SUV cuts you off, waves in front of you, almost runs you off the freeway, and then exits. How does that make you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Mad, scared, disoriented.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Right. You completely have lost your focus, you might have your sympathetic nervous system activated, adrenaline. But you need to get back into a good state. Now, what if through a total fluke coincidence, you learned that the driver of that big black SUV wasn’t an asshole driver?

It was a distraught mother whose baby was choking in the back seat. And it was all she could do to even keep the car on the freeway while trying to save her baby’s life. Would that immediately change how you feel about the event?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so anger disappears in terms of like, “Okay, I am not wronged by a jerk. But, rather, I unfortunately, was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the midst of this situation.” So the anger goes away. I could still be kind of shaken up and scared, but the anger’s gone.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Sure. But the anger is gone, and then it is much easier to get back into a state of focus if you don’t feel that you have been personally attacked by. And so in most situations in life, you’ll never find out whether it’s an idiot driver or a distraught mother. Choose the version of reality that gets you into the best mental state.

And the reason this is critical is because there is so much body language emanating every second that you cannot control it consciously. The best and really the only way to emanate charisma is to control your mind. Charisma originates in the mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Choose your version of reality. What’s funny is, sometimes, it can be a little far-fetched. And as long as it’s remotely plausible, it does work. So, for example, I know this is not likely to be true, and yet, it does wonders for me.

There have been a couple of times I was disappointed that I wasn’t invited to a wedding. It’s like, “Oh, I thought we were kind of close. I thought we were pals. Well, what’s this about?”

And I say, “Well, Pete, the bride doesn’t want to be seeing you on her wedding day and be filled with regret that she doesn’t get to marry you. That’s going to put a damper on the day. So, of course, she’s not going to invite you to her wedding.”

So now that is so far-fetched, and I’m not that narcissistic to believe that, you know, every woman wishes they could marry me. And yet, I’ll tell you what, in the moment, I feel so much better about not being invited to the wedding. I chose that version of reality, rather far-fetched, but it got the job done for me emotionally.

Olivia Fox Cabane
If it can make you laugh, and if it can get your brain to entertain a different possibility, even for a few minutes, you’ll get the neurochemical change in your brain, and that will get you the body language change you need. So from my perspective, it’s really whatever is the most adaptive, whatever works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, let’s talk about warmth.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So warmth is another one of those you can’t fake it, you have to genuinely feel it. And so sometimes it’s easy because these are people you like. But sometimes it’s harder because sometimes you’re dealing with difficult people.

So with people that you like or people who are just strangers, it’s the fairly easier route of the best way to make a great first impression is, before you walk into the room, knowing that first impressions happen so fast, they happen in just a few seconds, imagining that the person you’re about to meet is a long-lost best friend.

And, really, to make it real, learn from Olympic athletes. Visualization works best when you get the five senses involved. So taste the s’mores that you ate together around the campfire, hear the songs they sung so badly off key. Imagine it vividly.

And then you walk into the room with all that warm and friendly body language. And because, “Hey, thanks, mirror neurons,” one of whose jobs it is to replicate in them what they see in you, they will, in general, people will accept whatever you project.

If you’re projecting confidence, presence, and we’ve been friends for ages, subconsciously, some part of them is going to be feeling, “Oh, this is a warm and confident guy, and it feels like I’ve known him forever.” Why? Because that’s the body language you’re emitting, right?

What if it’s a total jerk or someone with whom you have a long history, or someone who’s really difficult? There’s a couple different ways here. If it’s in the moment, go nuclear. I don’t care what you have to imagine.

You think that your example with the bride was far-fetched. I want you to imagine that they got a terminal illness diagnosis, their dog got run over, their spouse asked for a divorce, whatever you have to imagine, just for a few seconds to get a biochemical shift to get you the right body language.

But if this is a long-term situation, again, let’s use the ability to hijack the brain, the best tool I’ve ever seen, and it works extraordinarily, you wanted to know what has worked the best with the students, this is the one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So, first, you write a letter from you to this person, longhand, with all the things you ever wished that you’d ever said to that person. This is not surprising, you may have done this already. Second, you write their answer to you with everything you ever wished they had said to you, recognizing how wrong they were, anything you wish they had said.

That’s the letter that you read every night for a week. Night one, it’s going to feel weird and awkward. Night seven, you’ll be stunned at how a part of your brain says, “Oh, well, I know I got emotional satisfaction. I know they admitted they were wrong.” The brain is so hijack-able, use it to your advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is striking! I believe it. It’s taken me a while to come around to these principles. I think I have no doubt now that they are effective. I guess I’m wondering, is it dangerous or wrong in some way to be flirting with falsehood in this fashion, Olivia?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes to both possibly. And that’s why I always want to be upfront with when people ask me, “But is it manipulation?” Yes, it is. But then from my perspective, anytime you are trying to convince someone of something, you’re literally trying to change the inside of someone else’s head. How is that not manipulation?

From my perspective, the two guardrails that I look at are intent and impact. Is your intent good? And is your impact good? If the answer to these two is yes, go for it.

Pete Mockaitis
In some ways, like the lies we tell to ourselves for our benefit, I guess there’s another moral distinction there, as opposed to lying to them in terms of like, “Oh, this product can absolutely do that thing that you want,” when you know that it can’t. It’s like, “No, bad move.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, though I do want to give a caution, as many others have said about visualization. It is important, when you are using them for a future outcome for yourself, that if you’re visualizing the outcome, this will only change things if you previously didn’t believe it was possible and if that belief was key.

So, for example, you can visualize yourself winning the lottery all you want. That is not going to change anything. It is the visualization of the behaviors. Visualizing yourself. You know, the studies that were fascinating, when people were actually strengthening muscles by just visualizing themselves, playing the piano, for example, or doing certain motions, and not just the brain changes, but actually the body change.

So visualizing the behavior is key if the behavior has to change. Visualizing the outcome is great, but only has an impact if the belief about the outcome is what was holding you back before.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So that could shift belief, it’s like, “Oh, it’s impossible that I could ever start my own business.” But then you visualize it many times, it’s like, “Well, now it’s suddenly I don’t believe it’s impossible because I’ve had the practice of the visualization.”

And so I guess what you were saying is the transformation that is occurring here is an internal one as opposed to The Secret. We are secreting and manifesting to the universe to bring into our whatever.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yes, sorry, no. You can visualize yourself marrying whoever it is, becoming king of whatever you want, and winning whichever lottery you want, all you want, that will not actually happen just through your believing enough.

And this is something that, honestly, pisses me off quite a bit because there’s so much of a, “Well, if it hasn’t happened, it’s because you didn’t believe hard enough.” No, it’s not. You also have to look at the actual real-world data.

Visualizing and using the brain’s shortcuts to your advantage is really useful, really key when those limitations are what were holding you back. If what was holding you back from being a prima ballerina was not being six foot three, you can visualize it all you want, you’re not going to grow taller through visualization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So these bits operate in the real world. And so tell us what we know digitally, because in some ways I’m thinking the game must be changed insofar as subconscious signaling things like pheromones, whatever, in our fear sweat or our tears, or, you know, there’s fasting studies on this that we pick up on that.

So when you’re, you know, hundreds of miles away, working on a Google Meet or a Zoom or whatnot, those aren’t in the mix. So tell us, what do we have to keep in mind in this context?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, so, indeed, when you’re online, because of the limitations of telecommunication, you’re going to lose so much of the smells of pheromones, but also the microexpressions, which, to the best of my knowledge, aside from Cisco Telepresence, no online video conferencing system can catch.

And so what people don’t realize is that your voice has a much bigger impact than it would offline. And the problem here is one of the key findings that Oliver Niebuhr’s team had was that, if there is too high a rate of compression, there is a risk of emotional confusion, with emotions like excitement being read as impatience or even anger.

And so their conclusion was, whenever there’s a risk of compression, turn off your camera, because your voice is so important that that is what must be first.

Pete Mockaitis
Very, very practical tip. And I’ve been there. So I love it. You’re increasing the bar, not just, “Are my words audible to you?” but, “Is there compression occurring?” And I guess then there’s also some basics, like, on your side, make sure you have, you know, good, strong, reliable internet connectivity bandwidth, working in your favor so it’s not tempted to do the compression.

In terms of specific media, tech tools, are some more prone to compression than others?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So I’m going to have to pull up the actual data here because we’re going to get very technical. All right. “Specifically, at high compression rates, MP3 and Speex codecs demonstrate a higher rate of emotional misclassification and a reduction in perceived charisma, particularly for female speakers.”

So women’s voices are more affected by the negative effects of compression, which is one of the two pieces of bad news that his team had found, along with the fact that women are more impacted by the rate of how formal or informal their clothing is and how impressive their titles are.

So to simplify things, a male founder can show up in a hoodie and be fine. And a female founder, to get the same level of respect, will have to dress a lot more formally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, duly noted. I guess I’m also wondering, okay, so MP3 compression, I don’t know if there’s a difference between Google Meet versus Zoom versus Teams on default compression settings. Or is that a setting that we can readily change in the platforms? You and I are using Riverside right now, which is, podcasters love for this very reason. We have local recording, full fidelity, no compression.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you’d have to ask Oliver. His recommendation is usually use the high fidelity or music mode if it’s available.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, music. Okay.

Olivia Fox Cabane
Choose the original tone function, if that’s available. And, of course, the quality of your mic is really, really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. What I’m thinking about, and echo cancellation is sometimes a thing or reduce background noise, sometimes those, well, now we’re getting deep into, I also own a podcast production company, into my dork down here.

But with regard to equipment, I mean, you can go wild here. There are so many microphones that I’ve spent, literally, dozens of hours of my life listening to Bandrew over at Podcastage review different microphones, so no need to do that. But any quick tips from your perspective on microphones?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So a key feature of the microphone’s transmission quality is the frequency response. And what you are looking for, ideally, is a large diaphragm condenser microphone. And what you’re looking for is a mic with a curve that is as flat as possible, as unbiased as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, totally. And I would say my favorite, this is, well, I’ll just go and name a specific one. This is the microphone we send to podcasts guests who don’t already have a microphone, is the Maono HD something, which we’ll link in the show notes. And that’s a nice one, you know?

It’s under a hundred bucks. It includes a stand and a pop filter, and you can get nice and close. It eliminates background noise. It’s not built to last for a decade like some of our nice little Sennheiser goodies that we’re playing with right now. But, yeah, it’ll get you done.

And then, on the camera side of things, I’ve got to believe that has an impact in terms of what we’re seeing less visually. And what I love is I’m working with, and again, not that to go, no one has to set up a whole podcast studio, but I’ve got an SLR, like a wedding photographer camera camera behind a teleprompter situation, the Elgato prompter, which I love because, Olivia, I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but the lens is right behind the prompter, which is also a screen.

So as I look at you, I am looking at the camera, which is also the display at the same time. So I think that’s really cool. And some people have mentioned, “Wow, I really feel like you’re talking to me.” So for that eye contact presence stuff, I imagine that’d be a little bit of a boost.

But lay it on us, in terms of any do’s and don’ts in your web conferencing situation? Good microphone, dress appropriately, don’t get compressed, watch your tone, mute the video if necessary. What are some other do’s and don’ts here?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So gestures, even if they’re not picked up by the camera, are worth doing because they impact the fluctuation of your voice. And to give a broad generalization, more fluctuation better. But in addition, you’re completely right about the eye contact.

And Oliver’s suggestion was tape either the photo of someone you like or even a stuffed animal above your camera and speak to that because that will automatically give you a warmer, more present, and better focused eye contact.

You do want to be as close to the camera as is comfortable, because, in general, the larger your face appears on screen, the more people will feel that you are present and attentive to them. And, finally, this was, for me, one of the most fascinating discoveries is, in the new edition, I had assumed, along with everyone else, that lower voices are more charismatic. And the signs prove me wrong.

And one of the best examples, I’m going to say a sentence, and I’m going to ask you to pay attention to your emotions while I say it, okay?

“The key for most people’s level of happiness is absolutely the color of their toilet paper. And if only they changed from pink to blue, their problems would be over.” So, eventually, your brain kicks in and says, “Hang on.” But it takes a while.

Meanwhile, your emotions are like, “Oh, sounds credible, authoritative. Yes, this is someone who knows what she’s talking about.” And if you pay close attention, the specific piece that has this impact, which in terms of presence and power especially, is a determining factor.

The one that communicates confidence, competence, authority, and trust is the rate and the speed of the drop, “It’s toilet paper. It’s blue.” Instead of, as unfortunately so many teenagers these days have, you know how their voice goes up even when it’s not a question, the up talk? That’s a killer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I see. So a quick drop is what brings it.

Olivia Fox Cabane
A quick drop. The speed and the depth of the drop turns out is what has the key in how much authority and confidence you convey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I do that now, I feel kind of silly. Like, I’ve got a voice modulator. Is that like within reason or am I overdoing it or is it all good? Just lay it on.

Olivia Fox Cabane
The way I always recommend it is, listen, when you’re trying a new behavior, do it in situations when it doesn’t matter, like when you’re ordering coffee or when you’re chatting with an Uber driver. And stay close to home in the moments when it’s high stakes.

But by practicing new behaviors in low-stakes environment, you can see what feels natural and what doesn’t and, gradually, slightly expand your comfort zone.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, when you were doing those drops, what I felt was, “Whoa! Intensity.” And so I think that could be good or bad, insofar as, so it seems powerfully awesome in the sense that it’s, like, “Whoa! This person really, really means what she’s saying about this toilet paper.”

And I guess it’s about congruity again, in terms of it’s, like, “Why on earth would anyone have such intense feelings about toilet paper? This is odd,” then that’s off as opposed to, if you say, “When our clients implement this technology, they tend to see an 80-90% impact on sales.” It’s like, “Oh, shoot, he really was serious about that impact on sales.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
For example, but also think about politics. What if instead of toilet paper, for which I chose a deliberately ridiculous example, what if I’m saying, “And, really, the problem here is redheaded people. And just getting rid of these redheads would solve all our issues”? That’s when it gets into danger territory.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, and I think that what’s so funny then is, not funny to endanger the lives of redheads there. They’re very precious. I’ve got some in the family. We love them. What’s funny is when those shades of gray, the danger zone, in terms of, like, if you already like a politician or speaker or whatever, you’ll be inclined to give them all kinds of grace.

Like, “Well, obviously, he was just joking.” It was like, “But, no, seriously, if you look at the research on redheads, it’s kind of concerning,” you know, versus someone who already dislikes that speaker is, like, “Can you believe this? This is a call to violence. This is outrageous.”

And then folks who are in the middle, I think, may very well be curious and potentially persuaded, like, “Huh, what’s the deal with the redheads? Maybe I should look into this.” Is that a fair reading or am I making stuff up?

Olivia Fox Cabane
That’s an excellent reading, and that is exactly the danger of humans going along with things emotionally, and their reason kicking in belatedly, sometimes honestly, if at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I also have to get your take on 80% predicted that folks would get sold or funded or whatever based on a few variables. And we’ve mentioned a few of them. I want to cover any that we didn’t, because one you mentioned briefly was the ratio of speaking to listening. What’s ideal there?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So this is really just confirming the idea that charisma is even more how you make people feel about themselves than it is how you make them feel about you. And, for me, the best illustrative story for that is when Benjamin Disraeli was running against William Gladstone for the post of Prime Minister to the British Empire.

And one young lady who happened to be the future mother of Winston Churchill just happened to go to dinner on consecutive evenings with both men. And so the British press asked her afterwards what impressions they’d made, and she said, “After dining with Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. After dining with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I were the cleverest woman in England.”

And, of course, Disraeli won because he had the ability to make her feel interesting and intelligent. And so what I desperately try to get into students’ heads is, “Stop trying to impress people. Let them impress you, and they will love you for it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny, it’s so true. I’m thinking about, well, back to this physical therapy yesterday. When I asked a question, and when the doctor said to me, “That’s a really important question,” it was like I felt great.

And so it’s like I like him more because of it. And it wasn’t because he said something brilliant. It was because he just, you know, said something that… I like to think I asked good questions as a podcaster, so you know, he struck a nerve, like, “Yeah, good. That’s nice.”

Olivia Fox Cabane
It’s the tiny things, like saying, “You know…?” or if ever you need to get them a feeling of impact, it’s saying, “You know, I’d never thought of it that way.” Now, of course, as we said, because humans are so good at catching up on incongruence, if you don’t actually believe what you say, one, you’re going to pay a penalty because incongruence is expensive in the brain.

And two, there’s a good chance that your macro and micro expressions will clash and then you’ll come across as inauthentic. So this is one of the cases where, again, charisma begins in the mind. You have to believe what you’re saying. And this is where I want to be upfront and frank. There’s a reason why there’s a positive correlation between charisma and narcissism.

It’s not necessarily that charisma makes you narcissistic, but it is a reason that narcissists do sometimes have an easier time being charismatic because they’re genuinely convinced that they are the best, most interesting, most fascinating, and, therefore, that is what their body language absolutely genuinely and congruently communicates.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous point there. So with listening, the overall idea is to make them feel special and important and clever and wonderful. But is there a number? Is there a ratio of listening to speaking that the science says is pretty good?

Olivia Fox Cabane
The point at which they say, “Am I talking too much?” is when you know you’ve done it right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the other side. Okay. So plenty, I mean, it sounds like.

Olivia Fox Cabane
So plenty. So for the second edition, we had the book reviewed by a Gen Z panel, and one of them was a founder and he said, “You know, I’ve noticed every time when we were selling customers that if they had spent 80% of the time speaking and we had spoken for less than 20%, we were going to close.” That was his ratio, 80-20.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Olivia, this is so good. I could talk for another hour. But, tell me, anything critically powerful that we got to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Olivia Fox Cabane
In terms of the best practices to increase charisma, one of the most uncomfortable, but one of the most impactful is improv, improv theater, because it is a fabulous way in which to practice different modes of being, different ways of body language, different characters, in a way.

This is one of the best and fastest ways to increase your comfort zone socially. So even though it can feel really uncomfortable at first, improv theater is one of the best investments you can make in your own professional development.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay. I’ve done an improv course. I thought it was so cool. Agreed. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research we haven’t talked about already?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Well, the research that changed everything, the first study that in 1989 showed that charisma was nothing but behavior, I think I’d have to choose because it was the turning point when charisma started becoming a science.

But in 2011, when Antonakis and his team showed that not only was charisma behavior, but that behavior was teachable, that’s when charisma became an applied science. And that’s when people realized that charisma can be learned.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Olivia Fox Cabane
So you don’t actually need charisma to succeed. You don’t even need charisma to get people to do what you want them to do. If all you’re looking for is compliance, read Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is the Bible of mind manipulation.

The limitation is that those compliance methods really only work while they are in play. And what you don’t get is the ability to inspire people, the ability to lift whole teams. In an almost radically opposite direction, because one of the most transformative paths to charisma is actually self-acceptance.

As we’ve seen, the path to more self-confidence is often through self-forgiveness and self-compassion, is Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. So on diametrical opposite pieces of the scale, you would have Cialdini on influence and Brach on acceptance and self-compassion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And a favorite habit?

Olivia Fox Cabane
Yeah, it’s incredibly uncomfortable. But if you’re willing to, Metta meditation, M-E-T-T-A, especially self-metta, which is the self-compassion meditation. And I think there’s actually an audio recording on my YouTube channel of a short metta meditation.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
AskOlivia.com.

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

Olivia Fox Cabane
For job interviews, use the visualization techniques to imagine that the interviewer is a long-lost friend. That will change the first few seconds of the interview. And because of the primacy effect, everything that happens afterwards will be filtered through that first impression. And you never get a second chance to make a good first impression so you might as well get it right the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Olivia, thank you.

Olivia Fox Cabane
My pleasure. It was great being here.

Jul 09
0

1166: Making Moments More Meaningful with Dr. Ian Bogost

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Ian Bogost shares why everyday moments are the foundation of a gratifying life–at work and beyond.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why small moments matter so much
  2. How dematerialization is hurting you–and what to do about it
  3. Tiny upgrades that enhance every day

About Ian

Dr. Ian Bogost is a writer, designer, and scholar of media and technology. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor and Assistant Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis, and a founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His latest book is The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.

 

 

Resources Mentioned

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Ian Bogost Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ian, welcome!

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about having a more gratifying life and work and career experience. And you know, Ian, I don’t know if you would think of it this way, but when I think of gratification, I think of Cow Clicker. Can you tell us what this is about?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, this is one of my legacies. This is from, gosh, 15 or more years ago now I made this Facebook game called Cow Clicker. And this was in the day when Farmville was really popular and people were like, you know, sending you updates from their farm on your Facebook feed.

And I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. And I kind of thought Facebook was a little ridiculous, too. It was this, like, weird way of using your friendships and your connections when they were useful to you and not really engaging with those people as kind of full people.

So I made Cow Clicker, and the way that Cow Clicker worked is that you clicked on a cow, picture of a cow that I drew, and it would move. And then you could click it again six hours later, and you could invite your friends into your pasture. And it kind of ran away from me at that point. It got very complicated.

But you’re absolutely right, because I mistook my critique of Facebook for something different than it really was for the people who played and enjoyed Cow Clicker. And what they liked about it was that they got to click on a cow, and the cow mooed, and that was delightful. And then they got on with their day and they came back and did it again.

It took me many years to come to terms with what I had really made and why it was meaningful and valuable to people and how I’d sort of mistaken what I had in mind and my head for what really happened, which was a little bit of delight, delivered a little bit of delight to people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful. And I’m thinking about, I’ve heard a legend that Daniel Kahneman once said, “I love being wrong. It’s the way I know I’ve really learned something,” which is a lovely frame.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve been wrong a lot in my career and I’ve tried to learn from it. Or maybe wrong isn’t exactly how I’d put it, that my thinking has evolved and I’ve tried really hard to shift my thinking as the world has shown me new things.

And so this new work on gratification is it comes from me being wrong many times, like layered wrong-nesses over the course of the last 30 years. And one of them is definitely how wrong I was about games. One of my jobs is being a game designer. And I used to think that games were important because they could show you how, like, complexity works.

And then I thought games were important because they were kind of like toys, like you could play with them. And now I realize they’re more just things that you have no reason to interact with and that don’t apologize for that fact.

And there’s tons of stuff like that in the world. All the time we’re surrounded by it, that it’s just there for us to encounter. All we have to do is accept it. So I love being wrong so I can learn in that way. And certainly the book and the work that I’ve been doing is born of many different layers of wrong headedness.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. And so let’s hear a little bit of the story. So you kind of created it as a critique and then you’re like, “Isn’t this kind of weird and silly and exploitative?” And what was your arc of discovery there?

Ian Bogost
Well, I mean, it took me so long to discover that it was more interesting than I thought. The fact that people got the critique right away. They understood that Farmville was ridiculous and that Facebook was exploitative.

And I was there making those arguments, like, in 2010. It was long before the whole kind of like tech lash came about and people started doubting whether big tech was doing them any favors. But back then, everybody loved Facebook. It let you connect with your friends, right? It was amazing. Like, what’s there not to like? Maybe they didn’t love Farmville so much. So some people got it.

But then others were enjoying themselves. And I guess at that time in my life, I couldn’t quite grasp that they were enjoying themselves with this ridiculous, unenjoyable object that I’d made, or that I thought was unenjoyable.

And I had game designer friends, and I think the chief among them was Raph Koster, who’s a well known game designer in the multiplayer online game space, and he was like, “Ian, you know, I think you’ve got this wrong. Like, you made something amazing and delightful and people are playing it, and you need to learn from it in that way.” And I was like, “Yeah, whatever F.”

And then the years went by. And, by the way, I blew up Cow Clicker in a Cowpocalypse in 2011. And there was like a cow rapture, all the cows went away. It had really become an obsession of mine, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.

And so I just kind of got rid of it by making the cows go away. Although you could still click the spot where the cow used to be, until Facebook changed their software and then it stopped working without my intervention, maybe five years later.

But I realized, I think it was maybe two or three years ago, I did a story for The Atlantic where I went to this cow therapy farm where you can hug a cow as, like, a therapeutic act. And I was like, “This is my opportunity to come to terms with my cow problem, you know?”

And the cows had been rescued from this, like, traumatic escape where they’d escaped a slaughterhouse in St. Louis where I lived, and there was a huge outpouring of sentiment in favor of the cows, and the cows were, you know, save the cows.

One of them they named Chico and everybody was in the streets with the cows running around. And they saved them and sent them to this, like, cow ashram where they help people feel better about their lives.

So I used that as a way of trying to understand the experience and, you know, like just the idea that these simple tiny things, like clicking on a cow, that that might be it. That might be enough, you know? That might be enough. And that took me, I mean, it took me 10 years. It took me 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it might be enough for what exactly?

Ian Bogost
It might be enough to make your life meaningful. It might add a little bit more contentment, that you need to feel guilty about or weird about. And it’s not the same as, like, pursuing a career in order that you can achieve the next promotion or help your clients or, you know, finding your life partner and building an environment in which you want to live together. It’s not big stuff like that.

But those small encounters, like clicking a cow, that they can still deliver, not just meaningless meaning, but deep, rich meaning. And I would say that some of the other interests that I had at the same time as I was working on Cow Clicker, but I couldn’t quite recognize, like I was writing about toasters and slippers and other kind of seemingly unimportant elements of the build environment.

And they seem like oddities or curiosities, like how weird it is that someone will pay attention to, you know, the design of a toaster? But don’t you experience delight when you make bread in the morning, when you hear it pop up, and you see it and you smell it, and you feel the warmth and you see the brownness?

Those kinds of encounters started to get, they just really started to interest me. And I was like, “Hmm, I’ll put that in the back of my head.” And over the years since then, I’ve been trying to build a kind of theory, a way of understanding what little tiny experiences like clicking on a cow or making toast have to teach us about feeling larger scale contentment in our lives at work, at home and elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing, and I know you love your cow puns, so I, too, am struck by the notion that clicking cow could really “moo-ve” the needle on mental health.

Ian Bogost
There you go. That’s it. You’re doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
So deep, rich moments. If anyone is scratching their head saying, “Huh? Click cow? Looking at a toaster? What do you mean, Ian?”

Ian Bogost
So here’s a different example, right? I recently re-watched “Mad Men,” the television show. And you know, it takes place in an office in the 1960s. And an office of the 1960s is totally different from an office in the contemporary world.

And one of the things that I noticed was the telephones, you know, the function of telephones in that era. A large part of their lives at work was making calls, taking calls, answering phones, pressing the buttons on those phones, dialing the phones.

That’s not, like, why you do the work. You don’t go to work at the start of the day in order to use telephones. You do it in order to get work done, to call your clients, to close deals, to, in their case, assemble the advertising campaigns that they’re selling.

But along the way, you spend a lot of time using the telephone. And that makes the telephone like a big part of your life in the 1960s, and it was designed in a way that made that experience delightful, tangible. It had heft.

You picked it up. There was an intimacy to the voice on the other end of the line. You held it very close to your mouth, in a way that also felt intimate, right? If you had multiple lines, you press the chunky buttons.

So I became, like, as I was watching this, you know, after having having written the book, I thought, “Wow, that’s a perfect example of the kind of phenomenon that gives you meaning, but that doesn’t feel like it should be meaningful.”

Because what you’re really after is like accomplishing goals normally, but along the way, you have the experience of doing, in the case of a workplace, you have the experience of doing the work, the moment-to-moment encounters that make up your daily life.

And those are much more meaningful than we give them credit for. Or maybe a different way to put it is that you better make them meaningful because so much of your life is comprised of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So they are meaningful. And I guess we got to go right for the core of that. It’s, like, what do we mean by meaningful? What makes something meaningful versus not meaningful?

Ian Bogost
So this concept which I call gratification, which is all about being connected to the physical world, this gives you a sense of grounding, it makes you feel purpose. And, also, we live in these physical human bodies that we carry with us everywhere we go, whether we like it or not.

We may think that a lot of our lives have been mediated or digitized, or we don’t really need our bodies anymore, or that they’re secondary to our computers and our smartphones, but they’re not. We still live in the world inside these bodies.

And so the sense of, like, sensory connection with the world, with your home life, with your work life, that adds this kind of base layer of contentment. It’s not the same as happiness or as satisfaction, which is more about like goals and the future and accomplishing things and having purpose. All that stuff is great. I’m not against any of that.

But along the way, you can derive much smaller but still equally meaningful encounters from being connected to the physical world around you. And so my advocacy here, whether it’s for cows on your screen or telephones in your office, or whatever else you might find, and we can talk about more examples that haven’t been outmoded by technology, like handsets have, is that by embracing that, by realizing it’s a huge part of your daily life, you can become more content than you would be if you didn’t.

It’s not trying to replace that purpose and that ambition that you might feel in your job, but rather to amend it. And also to give you a sense of maybe where some of that unhappiness or discontentment might come from, maybe you just feel disconnected from the moment-to-moment actions of your work rather than the purpose or goals of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Disconnected. Well, I’m thinking about the mindfulness literature in terms of being present and in the moment, and many monks or everyday meditators find this kind of a concept. Like, their breath is meaningful and they’re unaware that it’s meaningful until they stop and attend to that and that alone.

Ian Bogost
Right. So I think, in the contemporary world in the West, we’ve leaned on mindfulness as a way of trying to give ourselves a break, you know? Like, that’s sort of been the interpretation, the Western interpretation of Buddhist-style mindful meditation, that, “I’m harried. I have all these goals and all these ambitions. I have all this stuff I have to do. I need a way of overcoming that sense of anxiety and being one with myself.”

But we don’t do it in order to really be one with ourselves or with our breath or with our telephony or with our cows or whatever. We do it in order to give ourselves pause. It’s, like, we have all these ambitions and all this stuff we’ve got to do, “Let me just take a break so I can get right back to doing all those ambitions that I have.”

And I think the difference between gratification, what I call gratification and mindfulness, is that it’s not in your head. Like, that idea that we can think our way through and out of any problem, I think that’s mistaken.

Some of the way that we live is through our bodies alone, and so you can’t think your way out of your bodily encounters. One reason you can’t do that, Pete, is that they happen to you in the moment in which they take place, right?

Like, when the phone rings and you hear it ring, you can’t sort of go, “Well, I’ll, like, process the sensation of the phone ringing later. I’ll save that up. I’ve got other things to do right now.” And so the sensory engagement, well, you could turn off your phone, of course, right?

When you go out on a walk and you feel the texture of the gravel under your feet, or you feel the heat in the air closing in on you, that happens right then, in the moment. And you can’t sort of put it away in order that you can make sense of it later.

When we’re at work, in particular, our time is kind of not our own. It’s structured by others. We’re often told what to do and where to do it. And so maybe you can take a break and kind of catch your breath, go to the break room. Some people work at home where they can, literally, go do a little bit of yoga or something like that. That can help.

But it shouldn’t and it cannot be a replacement for the moment-to-moment experience of doing your job. So either you figure out how to make that experience meaningful or more meaningful as you do it, not for the ends that it provides, but for the experience that it delivers in the moment, or you’re just going to be like less happy than you could with your lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Less happy than you could be. Well, that’s certainly valuable in and of itself. And it’s funny, sort of like the motivational purpose frame of the mindfulness as well, it’s like you have more meaning and gratification in the moment as is.

And I would also suggest that the show is called How to Be Awesome at Your Job, in so doing, all kinds of good additional result-oriented benefits could accrue to us if you’re more present in a conversation, for example. People just like that. That’s part of what makes a person charismatic or likable. you know, improves leadership, etc.

Or, you just not being stressed, harried, disconnected elsewhere is just going to aid your capacity to think and be creative and make decisions and all kinds of other things on top of just having a gratified, meaningful sensory experience in those moments as well.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. And here’s the way I’ve been thinking about this. Most of our lives, most of the things that we pursue because we think they’re valuable are kind of goal-oriented, outcome-oriented.

We’re very goal-oriented people and we live in a very goal-oriented and outcome-oriented culture. There’s probably pros and cons to that, but that’s the way it is. I think, all in all, it’s a good thing. Like, we want to accomplish stuff, right? And that’s one of those things that we want to accomplish is purpose, meaning, and, you know, like material success, maybe.

You want to be better at your job so you can get promoted, you get a better job. Maybe you could start your company, whatever it might be. All of that is fine. I think that we need to take a break from it from time to time.

And we need to, in order to experience those kind of moment-to-moment pleasures, you need them first not to have any purpose other than to deliver the experience because, otherwise, you’re just instrumentalizing them, turning them into kind of, like, efficiency gain, hacks, or whatever, before you’ve even made sense of what they’re for, right?

So the first exercise is, “What does it even mean just to experience the sensory world as I encounter it? And then, why is it that that’s so hard to do?” And one of the reasons is that we’ve been kind of trained not to do it, right, or we’ve been, what I call it, dematerialized. We’ve been disconnected from all sorts of aspects of the physical world at work, at home, in every aspect of our lives.

But that said, I also think that you’re right, that if you imagine your overall contentment your whole life, everything in your life that’s going on, how happy you are with your job, with your family, with the car you own, with all of it, then one component of that is your sort of day-to-day sense of, “How good do I feel just moving through the world?”

And if you can build like a foundation like a bedrock, a bedrock part of your overall contentment that comes in part from a sense of gratification, like, you know, you take your coffee in the morning at work, and you pour it out into the mug in the kitchen, and you feel the warmth of the mug in your hand, and you smell the coffee having been brewed, and then you taste it, and it energizes you.

And also you have a moment of time that you can share with your coworkers. That little thing does fuel you up, right? Like, it gives you some sense of, “Okay, this is a thing that I do. It’s a ritual. And I’m also just having and I’m aware that I’m having that sensory experience.”

Now, what if I told you that you have that, like, all the time, constantly? And so you can build a sort of sense of overall pleasure that comes from the things you’re already doing that you don’t need to change, that then will give you a little bit of a of like a boost, you know?

But I don’t think that we ought to start by thinking of the purpose of gratification as sort of fueling us up to be more effective or more productive, because then we almost can’t experience it. You have to, like, learn how to experience it before allowing it to serve some of those higher order purposes that you’re thinking of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there in terms of your frame of reference, your intention, your mindset, perspective, attitude, beliefs, all that stuff with regard to how you approach it can alter the experience itself.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, totally. You know how, like, people feel, like sometimes people feel like their work is meaningless, like, they just don’t know why they’re doing it. And that’s one of the things that would make you uncomfortable, dissatisfied at work.

You brought up these games. Many years ago at my game studio, we made this game for a popular ice cream chain. It’s one of those where they, like, bash up the ice cream on a cold surface. You know what I mean? And it was this training game to help people figure out portioning because that’s where a lot of the profit was made or lost in the game.

And I learned a lot about this. This is just like a menial job, in a way, like a first job for 16-year-olds or like a minimum wage job. But it was really important to this company that the job be good. And one of the things we discovered was that the workers, the line workers, like one of their senses of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the job had to do with, like, why were they more or less successful? Why was their manager praising them or yelling at them?

And a lot of it had to do with the kind of mechanics of pulling ice cream, and the fact that they have different viscosities and, like, the mint was super thin, and the cake batter was super thick. So paying attention to those, like, small-scale physical differences.

In this case it’s ice cream, so it’s easier than if you do, like, knowledge work, but bear with me here. Knowing and, like, attending to the specifics of their physical acts, that had a lot to do with their overall sense of contentment or even just of clarity with the job, right?

Now, in the book, when I was researching the book, I talked to a lot of people in different professions, and one of the people I talked to does tile setting. So he works doing mostly residential construction, setting tile, and he was telling me all about, like, all the moment-to-moment attention and care and detail of the work of putting one tile next to the other, which, if you don’t know anything about it, you might think it’s easy, but it’s not.

And he told me how gratifying this was, and how much clarity he was able to achieve during the course of a day. He was able to think clearly, he was able to solve problems, not just over the course of the day or the project, but like moment to moment. He was really engaged with it.

And his name is Dan. And I said, “Dan, you know, a lot of people who work in knowledge work, work in office jobs, would love to have that kind of moment-to-moment clarity and contentment in what they do. But sometimes they just feel like they’re sending emails. You know what I mean?”

So the moment-to-moment experience really does matter not just because it might make you, like, more successful, but because it also gives that moment meaning. It allows you to understand what it’s for, why you’re doing it, especially why you’re doing it like many, many times a day or a week or a year, which is what our lives are. There’s a lot of repetition.

And so if we can find a way to make that repetition compelling, then it will feel less like boredom or like a slog, and more like something we want to do, not just to get through it, and not in order to achieve some greater further outcome from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that something feeling like less of a slog is, and I don’t want to go into this loop because like this is, like, “Yeah, it’s awesome to be meaningful in the moment and that’s also super helpful.” So I guess I’m thinking, like, if an activity feels aversive, unpleasant, we will just naturally choose to do less of it, and often to our detriment.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, for sure. Or you’ll try to, yeah. And sometimes you can’t do less of it because that’s where the job is, you know? And then you’re really faced with a huge puzzle. And people, they get into their heads about this, they’re like, “I hate my job, I think. Maybe I need a new job.” And they might, right?

But what if what they really hate, or at least in that moment dislike, is not the job itself, not the outcomes, not the colleagues, not the purpose, not the career, not even the sector, but something about the moment-to-moment experience that they’re engaged with.

I have a colleague at the magazine, at The Atlantic, who got this, like, mechanical keyboard. All we do as writers is type, right? Like, that’s what the job is, is typing and talking on the phone. And, you know, it’s not just typing, but it’s a lot of typing.

He got one of those mechanical keyboards, it’s clicky clicky keyboards. You know, some people might find that irritating when it’s in the next cubicle, but he knew that the moment-to-moment experience of pressing buttons on the computer is what his job was composed of at a sort of atomic level.

And that having an apparatus at his desk that would make that experience more gratifying, it wouldn’t make his relationship with his coworkers easier or better. It wouldn’t make the stories he was editing or writing easier or better. It wouldn’t make his overall sense of career progress easier or better, but it would add something to that moment-to-moment experience of doing it, right?

So, I mean, you know, maybe there’s not a simple solution like that for everything, but I think that we’ve massively underestimated the degree to which the physical connection and contact, the sensory experience of work is a massive part of our sense of contentment at work, not just what we’re doing the work for, not just the money we’re getting paid, not just the purpose or the career advancement, but literally, what’s happening to you one moment to the next.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that example a lot. And when you talk about we’ve become dematerialized and we’re sort of trained to be in that fashion, it’s kind of funny. I’ve noticed, in the world of emails, for example, I pay for the software Superhuman, which I absolutely love.

And in some ways it has some extra features which are nice, but for the most part, I’m just using it as a more beautiful, faster, more responsive skin atop of Gmail. And it’s like Gmail can, for some, be zero dollar cost. You pay out in other ways.

And so I guess my dematerialized trained brain has a number of times thought to myself, “It’s so silly to pay money for this thing that doesn’t do anything, really.” And I try to convince myself, like, “Well, Pete, I mean, because it’s faster, you’re actually able to get the job done.”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, you’re trying to optimize.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I have to resort to an economic productivity rationale to myself to feel okay with, “Yeah, I’m spending money because it makes email, which I don’t like doing, a more pleasant experience sensorially. And that is just fine and dandy.” I’m hearing loud and clear from you.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, I love the email example because it’s a huge part of all of our lives, right? I also paid for a Gmail client called Mimestream, and it’s not as fancy as yours. It’s really just an email client. But for some reason, my brain just rejects the Gmail client.

I load it up and I just cannot make sense of it. And Mimestream just looks a lot more like the email clients that I’m accustomed to. And it took me a minute to accept that all I was really buying was this sort of sense of visual similarity with, like, Apple Mail, which I use most of the time.

But once I accepted that, it was fine because that was real. Like, it’s real. Like, my sense of moment-to-moment visual contentment with email, which I also spend a lot of time with, that’s a huge part of my workday and my work life. And I will tell you, I literally feel better using my Gmail work account, like so noticeably so. I know that it’s improved my life because of this silly software program that I bought.

Here’s another gratification-oriented email work example that I’ll share with you. I’ve got one of these Logitech mouses, mice, whatever you call them.

And it’s got a button right where my thumb is. And I programmed this button in my mail client to delete emails so, like, a delete email button. Oh, I love pressing the delete email button. And I’ll just sit there and I’ll just delete, delete, delete, delete.

And that feeling of, like, email triage that all of us do, which it’s just a chore, “And don’t you have a delete button on your keyboard? Bogus!” I do. I do, indeed, have a delete button on my keyboard. But something about having, like, this dedicated email deletion button that I press many times a day, that gives me, like, enormous gratification.

It doesn’t really, like, solve the communication problems that generate the emails in the first place. Maybe I’m deleting some that I shouldn’t, but that’s a different problem, right? That’s a different problem than the one that I’m identifying. So you’re exactly onto it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m thinking about a Guy Ross, How I Built This interview with Paul English who made Kayak. And they sort of established you’re basically just a skin on top of some fancy technology that someone else made. He’s like, “Well, yeah, but that’s what we needed,” and which became a huge company.

Well, now I’m thinking that’s intriguing in terms of how we might choose to integrate delight, sensorial delight into things because I’m thinking about I’ve got this app called Do Habits. And what’s so funny is I like that when I tap it, there’s a little bit of a haptic sensation. And the user experienced designers, you know, they obsess over this all the time.

There’s a little haptic sensation and also makes a little string note. Like, mmm, you know? And so as I tap it, like I did how many minutes of exercise, like, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And it just feels great. And I find myself wanting to exercise more so I can tap it.

Ian Bogost
So you can tap more. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, that’s totally real, though. I mean, think about, you know, and there are, like, kind of dark patterns to those sorts of designs. Like, you know, when you go into like a casino and you hear and see all of the sensations and sounds, it’s drawing you in and trying to capture your attention.

But the reason we like interacting with our smartphones or our smart watches or our devices is because they’re delightful to interact with. They have these smooth surfaces. They’re responsive. You can, like, have the little springy thing when you refresh a feed or something, and it bounces as though it’s a real physical object. Those things are designed to be delightful.

I mean, they’re not as delightful as they once were, I think. But they’re purposely designed in order they can give us some of that. You know, that’s simulated tactile feedback. I recently wrote a little software program for my smartwatch that is just a timer. It’s literally just a timer.

But I found that, like, most of what I do when I time things is I want, like, kind of multiple 30-second long time. Like, it’s 30 seconds, it’s five minutes to brew tea, or, you know, I’m going to do a minute of hard planks at when I’m exercising, or something. Like, I just don’t need an hour-long timer that much, which is the one that comes with the watch. And I made it work exactly like you’re describing. Tap, tap, tap to add 30 seconds.

Like, it’s silly, but the delight that I feel when I do that is real. Like, it’s not invented. You haven’t made it up. Have you ever gone, like, out of your way to go to, like, the coffee shop or the eatery that has, like, the nice cups or the takeaway plates that are, like, really thick, or those bamboo-like disposable or recyclable cutlery?

Like those sorts of experiences, you will even seek them out because they give you a richer sensory engagement than some alternative would. We’re kind of doing this all the time. We just sort of go, “Well, that’s obviously unimportant. Like, I don’t know why I’m doing that. There’s something wrong with me or something weird about it. I just need to keep that to myself and not share it.”

When, in fact, we all do share in all of that delight. It’s the same reason that, like, a noisy office or a quiet office, or one that’s too bright or not bright enough, or has the wrong color temperature bulbs, or where the carpet is, like, it used to be nice and plush and now it’s been worn down.

Those things have an impact on your day-to-day life. You may not want them to, or you may not take it as seriously as you should, but they absolutely do.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’m also thinking about how when organizations or people give us sensorial delight or sensorial disgust, I have associations with that organization or that person. Like, if, for example, at one point, I rented an office, and in the bathroom they had the cheapest, thinnest commercial, industrial toilet paper that exists.

Ian Bogost
Totally. No, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And I know they did that just because it was cheaper, low cost. And yet, I felt a level of not being cared for?

Ian Bogost
Right. No, but, literally, I mean, you paused because it feels, I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you paused because it feels weird to admit that, to admit that, you know, like you take a business meeting and you go to the restroom, and the toilet paper is like surprisingly thin.

And you’re thinking in your head, you’re like, “What is this company’s values, right? What are they all about?” And you’re not wrong to think that it’s sort of like, you know, like there’s an old joke that if you’re like boarding a plane, and you’re in the jet wing and you see, like, a bolt on the ground.

And you suddenly feel like, “Well, am I safe here?” Even though there’s no evidence that there’s any relationship between, like, the loose bolt and anything that’s been done, but it’s just like that. There is a sense of care that goes into the design and operation of these environments that we live in all the time, including our offices.

And that sense of care, it doesn’t just send messages, it actually delivers experiences that matter to us. I mean, I talk to a lot of people about work, okay? And the bathroom comes up all the time. All the time. Like, if folks feel like the bathroom is, like, too public, like it’s kind of in the wrong place, or they have to pass by too many people to go there, or there aren’t enough stalls, or the stalls aren’t big enough.

In America, we have these, you know, bathroom stalls that you can sort of see under and see around. And in Europe, they tend to have these enclosures with full doors that make you feel. The ones that have, like, the locking door that has the red and the green, you know, vacant-occupied, that gives you the sense that, “Okay, now I’m having privacy because I’m signaling it to someone else, and they’re not going to, like, rattle the door to see if someone’s inside.”

I know it sounds ridiculous to say that your contentment in your job might have something substantially to do with the design of the locks on the restroom stalls, but, honestly and truly, it does. It really does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then I’m thinking about the feedback that we choose to share with folks. And so I’m thinking about, I hired someone to paint my new office space, which I own and I’ve got co-working situation going on, which is pretty cool.

And so I got some bids for painters, and there was one who just seemed like he cared a lot. He’s very thoughtful and asking follow up questions and just kind of going through all the things in some detail and just sort of thinking, like, “Hmm, you know, I’d probably go with this sheen for this purpose, unless you were looking…”

Ian Bogost
That’s the stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I just got the vibe, he really cares about the painting he’s doing. And so I hired him, and I didn’t hire someone else who cost a little bit less, and so they asked for some feedback on the form, and it’s, well, one, there’s some social pieces. It’s sort of, like, “I don’t really have a relationship with you. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I got the vibe you didn’t really care that much about my paint job because what I feel…’”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
There was less sensorial delight and, yeah, I think that’s the case with a lot of things with regard to the feedback that we choose to give tends to be the one that feels most defensible, “Well, there’s a better price over here. Oh, they can better match my timeline.”

What they didn’t say is, “It felt like he didn’t really care about me and my job and my office the way the other guy did.” And so we won’t say that generally, and, thus, we won’t hear that. And we are devoid, we’re missing out on a huge important piece of feedback. And I think that that’s another reason why we feel silly about these sensorial little things we’re discussing is because other people won’t vocalize them to us unless they have to be our close friends or partners.

Ian Bogost
That’s exactly right. And, you know, one of the pieces of advice I give in the book is that if you can verbalize, just talking about these kinds of encounters, like we’re doing right now, it makes them feel less weird, less embarrassing, less, like, foolish.

And I have found, when I start talking to people about these kinds of experiences, you know, like, “Look, I really cared about the sheen of the paint,” or, “You know, have you noticed the wobbly knob? Like, the wobbly knobs really bothering me,” or whatever it might be, that people, they light up right away. They’re right there with you. They just have a hard time starting that kind of conversation.

And so verbalizing it, vocalizing it is one way of making it matter, of making it normal, of acknowledging that it’s a big part of life. And I think that the optimization, goal-oriented mentality that we have, not just as workers, but also as managers, sometimes makes us think that it’s, like, more noble not to care about these things.

That like, “Well, you should just be able to look past that and, like, get on with the important big stuff part of your job.” But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Because these little things eat at you, and they eat at you because they matter, because they’re happening multiple.

Like, you are seeing the walls of your office every moment of every day. And if the light reflects on them improperly because the wrong sheen was put on them, that colors every moment of every day of your work life. You better get it right, not just because it’s nice to get that kind of thing right, but because it actually really does impact your sensory experience of being at work and doing your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ian, so we’ve had a lot of fun philosophically here. And if folks are thinking, “All right. Okay, I’m sold. All right, de-materialization has happened to our detriment. These sensorial things really do matter. And I don’t need to feel silly about it. I can talk about it. I can invest in making it swell,” do you have any top do’s or don’ts for us as we start living life with this new lens?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think the first one we’ve already talked about a little bit, which is just, if you accept these gifts as things that matter, I don’t want to say take it seriously because that puts too much of a burden on your brain.

But if you can be open to the idea that some of these small stuff encounters with the physical world are capable of delivering meaning, then the meaning will just kind of arrive. It’s happening to you all the time.

One way you can do that is just by, like, lingering a little bit longer in the experiences that you’re having wherever you are. And this will help you identify them to kind of feel the sensation of encountering them.

Like, sometimes, I just let my fingers sort of rub up against the keyboard. It just, like, grounds me, like, “Here I am with the keyboard.” And then I also sense the little nubs on the F and the J key that orient me for touch typing, which is like a tiny moment of gratification that I have.

So that’s one thing. Just, like, linger in these moments like a little bit longer. Talk about them, give them surface. But I think the big thing is that, if you are willing to accept that your life isn’t just made of big moments of accomplishment, and then nothing in between matters, but that your life is made of moments, then you can take those moments as they are given.

Even if they don’t do anything for you, even if it’s just, like, “Ah, you know, at this time of day, the way that the light shimmers off the sheen of the paint, huh, that’s beautiful.” That’s enough, right? So dividing your day up into moments every now and then, and just taking in the moment. Not being mindful about it, not trying to, like, bend your brain to accept them or what have you. Just allow yourself to have a moment. That’s another thing you can do.

And then, you know, I think this is a little bit harder, but in the workplace, I think that accepting and even communicating up the chain that some of the trappings of physical life, you know, whether you work from home or whether you work remotely, whether you are in a co-work situation, whether you work a normal job at a workplace, that the physical environment in which you work has an outsized impact on what you’re able to get done at that work, right?

Which means that maybe, like, little tiny changes would make your life a lot, “Oh, actually, if we just had this different kind of coffee cup, I think it would be a lot better.” Like, being willing to make those kinds of small asks where you find the opportunity for improvement is maybe also something that people can do right away, you know?

And then one last thing I’ll throw out there that’s more about your home life than your work life. Find things to do outside of work that are sensorily different from the ones that you do at work. I don’t mean, like, that have different goals. I mean that whatever your sensory life is in your job, find ways of exercising a diversity of sensory encounters outside of it.

So, you know, if you’re a knowledge worker and you’re spending all your time at your keyboard with your computer sitting down, then something that you do while you’re standing up and outside, that’s an interesting experience, not because you need to garden or because it’s better to knit than to move symbols around between SaaS systems, but just because it gives you a different sensory encounter.

It, like, rejuvenates you in order that you can come back and appreciate the world of work, of the moment-to-moment experience of work with kind of renewed attention. So there’s a few ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I like that a lot. And I think just pausing in order to do that. And I’m thinking about, I remember when I first got an iPhone that had the face ID unlock feature, I thought it was so cool. And I guess I’ve grown accustomed to it, as maybe we do sensory habituation stuff.

And I remember my wife asked me, because whenever I did it, I would flash a real big smile, and she’s like, “Do you have to smile for it to work?” I was like, “No, I just really like doing it.”

Ian Bogost
I mean, I think what you’re expressing is the sentiment of wonder. And if you believe, I really believe this, that there’s nothing whatsoever that isn’t worthy of wonder. And we do forget that. We forget it as we grow older, in general, but then we forget it as the things that were once wondrous become more familiar.

And they’re still wondrous, right? Every day, we’re surrounded by all these miracles. And then there are new ones, too. So being open to feeling that sense of wonder, and really thinking about sensation, about your presence in the world as a human body, as a series of gifts, I think that that’ll change your whole life.

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

Ian Bogost
This is one from the Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa, he says, “When you ask how you should do things, it’s like trying to buy a pair of gloves so you don’t have to touch. One doesn’t have to think about how, one just does it.”

I love that. I love that idea that we’re stuck in our heads and we’re mistaking effort for something that requires none.

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

Ian Bogost
One of the things I’ve become really interested in over the past few years are a series of research experiments carried out by an Oxford University psychologist named Charles Spence and a group of colleagues that he works with.

And one of the things that he works on is what’s called multimodal perception, which is the idea that, like, seemingly unrelated things can change your experience of sensation. So one of my favorite versions of this study is, like, changing the color or shape of a spoon with which you eat yogurt actually changes people’s understanding of the taste of it, or how much they think they enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Ian Bogost
One of my favorite books ever is a novella by Nicholson Baker called the Mezzanine. It’s been around for many, many years. And it’s about a man who is riding an escalator from the ground floor of his office building to the mezzanine level of his office building, and that’s the whole book.

And it sounds ridiculous, I know, but over the course of the ride, he reflects on all of these ordinary experiences that he’s had, you know, having lunch, buying shoelaces, and it just is this vivid celebration of the depth and magic of ordinary life. It’s a really short little easy read that I love to come back to.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ian Bogost
One that I love that isn’t technological, or at least not in that way, is the Pigma Micron archival ink pens. You know what I mean? I use them in 0.1 millimeter thickness.

And I just find that the smallness and the precision of writing with them, they invite a kind of precision of thought or action. Even if what I’m doing doesn’t have it, it sort of inspires me to think better and more deliberately about what I’m writing down and why I’m writing it down.

Pete Mockaitis
Any favorite habit?

Ian Bogost
Lingering a little longer than needed in anything that I’m doing. And, especially, to the point of, like, if something feels like a little boring, if you’re like, “This is a little strange. Like, what am I doing?” a little awkward, a little weird, that’s something I try to notice.

It’s just a good sign that I’m about to find something new inside of something familiar. So seeking out that kind of sense of weirdness or embarrassment or boredom by letting something resonate a little longer, that’s something I try to do just when it occurs to me without pressure.

Pete Mockaitis
And speaking of resonating, is there any key thing you share with folks that really seems to resonate, they quote back to you often?

Ian Bogost
I think the idea that your life is made of moments, that you can divide it up a lot of ways, but one of them is in these tiny chunks of time that don’t feel like they mean very much individually, but that add up to a lot over time.

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

Ian Bogost
My website is Bogost.com, that’s B-O-G-O-S-T.com. And the book is SmallStuffBook.com.

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

Ian Bogost
I think it would be to realize that your work life is more than just your goals and your ambitions and the outcomes that those produce. It is those things, but it’s more than that. It’s also, and maybe when you think about it, it’s even kind of mostly the experience of doing the work, of being in the workplace and getting the work done with the people that you’re doing it with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ian, thank you.

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much for having me.

Jul 02
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1165: How to Have Better Disagreements with Julia Minson

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Julia Minson reveals her strategies for making disagreements productive.

You’ll Learn

  1. The HEAR framework for productive disagreements
  2. The key to avoiding a stalemate in an argument
  3. Simple phrases that communicate curiosity instead of judgment

About Julia

Julia Minson, from the Harvard Kennedy School, studies the psychology of disagreement and conflict. Her work focuses on how people can communicate across differences without conversations becoming hostile or unproductive. She’s the author of How to Disagree Better and studies “conversational receptiveness” — the language patterns that make people more open, collaborative, and willing to engage.

Resources Mentioned

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Julia Minson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Julia, welcome!

Julia Minson
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about disagreeing better. Could you start us off with a key thing you’ve observed time and time again like the top thing you see that folks get wrong about disagreeing?

Julia Minson
I think there’s two things that sound like the opposite of each other, but they’re actually the same thing. On one hand, people avoid disagreement because they feel, like, intensely uncomfortable with it and sort of, like, really don’t want to get into it. And then on the other hand, you see people sort of flying off the handle and getting into very aggressive disagreements.

And you see both of these problems sort of all the time, and they’re actually related, right, because it’s usually when a person is avoiding something for a long time, eventually they sort of like blow a gasket, and then end up expressing their perspective in a very unstructured and unhelpful way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, and this is a learnable thing to not do that and to disagree better.

Julia Minson
Yeah, absolutely. So I am a psychologist at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I have spent my career trying to figure out how to help people do this better. And there’s really some, like, very concrete things that we get wrong, that if we fix them, life can get easier, conversations can get more productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone who saw a transformation in that regard?

Julia Minson
Sure. Well, I mean, honestly, I don’t know if you’ve heard this saying, “All research is me search,” right? So a lot of the time, academics study the type of thing that gives them the most difficulty, and I am absolutely the kind of person that used to be extraordinarily argumentative.

You know, I’m pretty smart and I used to love to show it to everybody who would listen. And I just learned over time that you get a lot more mileage by trying to understand where the other person is coming from because, so often, you start arguing and you don’t actually know what the argument is about, right?

You are sort of pushing a point and you don’t understand why the other person is resisting. But if you have some sense of where they’re coming from, it just really sort of transforms the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve got a cool concept, a turn of a phrase, conversational receptiveness, and I just think that is a very handy thing to have tattooed into our brains, if you will. Tell us, what does that mean and how is it helpful?

Julia Minson
So receptiveness to opposing views is your sort of tendency to think hard about stuff you disagree with, right? So we normally, as humans, do a really good job thinking about ideas we agree with and we ignore or look for flaws in ideas we disagree with.

So, for a long time, I was sort of really interested in this thing of like, “Are some people better at putting as much thought and putting as much effort into ideas they disagree with as ideas they do agree with?” And you could think, like, “Look, that’s probably a good idea because I will end up being a smarter, more well-rounded person.”

But once we figured out how you can measure people’s receptiveness, we also realize that people are quite bad at expressing it, right? So I can be thinking really hard about your perspective, I can be like, you know, putting in all this intellectual effort, but you have no idea.

So as the person I’m speaking with, if you don’t know that I’m trying, we are just as likely to have sort of very negative conversation and experience, you know, a bunch of conflict escalation and bad feelings towards each other if you don’t know that I am trying to listen to you.

So conversational receptiveness is a way to express the fact that you’re being receptive using words, right, using language, so that it’s, like, totally obvious and totally transparent to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us maybe a demonstration of some key phrases or indicators which share, “Hey, I’m receptive,” versus, “I’m not receptive”?

Julia Minson
So the best way to memorize kind of the basics of conversational receptiveness is using what we call the HEAR framework, so H-E-A-R as in, “I hear you.” And each letter stands for something, kind of a different idea.

So the H stands for hedging. So you might want to say, for example, “Look, COVID vaccines are safe and effective,” right? That’s a pretty sort of dogmatic statement, and a person who disagrees with you will start looking for holes in your argument and looking for counterexamples of, you know, they heard that somebody had some kind of vaccine side effect.

Instead, you could say, “Look, most physicians tend to believe that COVID vaccines are largely safe and effective,” right? So “most tend to” and “largely” are all ways of kind of hedging my claim. So it’s words like perhaps, maybe, occasionally, some people, right?

And what it does is it really kind of takes this wind out of your counterpart sides. It’s, like, you’ve demonstrated with your words that you understand that there is, in fact, another perspective, and you’re leaving a little bit of room for it. So that’s the H.

The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So the idea behind conversational receptiveness is not that we have to agree. It’s not that I have to, like, change my mind, I have to compromise, you know, I have to like meet you in the middle and give you a hug.

It’s that I recognize that any two humans agree on some stuff. It could be that we’re both concerned with something. It could be that we’re both upset about something. It could be that we just have some values that are in common.

So words like, “I also want to,” or, “I am also concerned with,” or, “We both would like to see, you know, XYZ happen,” just sort of puts us on the same side of the table for a second.

The A stands for acknowledgement. So taking a couple minutes to restate your counterpart’s perspective before you launch into your own argument, you know, “I hear that it’s really important to you that this project is delivered at a particular level of quality.”

Or, “I understand that you’re very concerned about the hours that the team has been working.” So it’s using my own words to demonstrate to you, like, unambiguously, that I was listening when you were talking.

And, finally, the R stands for reframing to the positive. So dropping negative and contradictory words like no, can’t, won’t, don’t, terrible, hate, kill, and replacing them with some more positively balanced words like, “It would be wonderful if,” or, “I appreciate it when,” or, “Great.”

So, “I hate it when people push me into stressful decisions.” Stop. It could be replaced with, “I really appreciate it when people give me more time to consider important choices. Thank you for understanding.” So kind of like same content, but a very different flavor. So H-E-A-R.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then you said using words. I mean, those are all words. I guess I’m curious also if there’s a degree of nonverbal things that convey receptiveness or lack thereof.

Julia Minson
Yeah, certainly. I mean, you can imagine, right? Like, if a person is nodding, if they’re smiling, if they’re not interrupting you, all of those things seem more receptive than the opposite. It tends to be the case that words are easier to control than our bodies, and actually easier to interpret than our bodies, right?

So a lot of the time, when people are listening hard, they look very serious and they kind of look sullen and they look like they’re staring into space. And it’s not because they’re not listening, it’s actually because they’re working really hard.

And so it’s very easy to interpret, or it’s very easy to misinterpret body language to mean something different. And people, like, misinterpret language language all the time, but language is clearer. So it’s, like, when we’re choosing between two imperfect tools, words are clearer than body language.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to acknowledging the other perspective, are there any tweaks you might put on the traditional notions of active listening, or is that just what this is?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so active listening is a really sort of interesting idea because it’s a mix of, like, stuff that happens in your head, the actual listening, and nonverbal stuff like nodding and smiling and eye contact, and some sounds, like uh-huh, and hmm, and huh, and then some restating.

And it’s really unclear from that whole kind of like menu of stuff what’s important, what really does the work for you. Like, if I’m nodding but not smiling, like, does that work? Or do I have to also be smiling? We focus on the language because you really can’t fake it.

Like, for me, to restate what you said in a way that’s accurate, I had to have listened to you. I can nod and smile all day long and have no idea what you’re actually saying. But for me to restate your words, that’s unfalsifiable proof that I was actually paying attention when you were talking. So that’s sort of why the focus on restating.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when it comes to the nods and uh-huh’s and okay’s, am I hearing you say that it’s unknown in the research if that is getting it done or not?

Julia Minson
So it’s not that it’s unknown. So we actually ran a very fun study where we wanted to see, like, you know, people always talk about how important it is to be a good listener, right? We all kind of agree on the fact that good listening is important.

And what we wanted to see is how good are folks at judging whether the other person is being a good listener, right? So imagine the setup where there’s a small lab room, it’s a little, like, slightly larger than your bathroom probably. And people go in there and it’s two strangers.

And what we tell them is that, “You need to have a conversation with this other person and get to know them, for example, as if you wanted to have them be a roommate. Like, what are the things you would ask them about and learn from them if you were interviewing them as a potential roommate.”

And in the room there’s two chairs. And behind one of the chairs, there’s a screen on the wall. And this screen is playing this, like, ongoing loop of commercials that are on mute, okay? And so one person sits down and their back is to the screen, and they walked in and they noticed the screen, and we’re like, “Ah, just ignore the screen. It doesn’t matter.”

The other person sits down and they’re facing the screen, right? So they’re facing their conversation partner and this person also has the screen behind them. And that person got special instructions. And so their special instructions are, “Either ignore the screen, talk to your counterpart, get to know them, or pretend you’re listening, and we will pay you extra money if you can memorize all the products for which there are the commercials on this screen.”

So it’s like if you go on a date, and there’s, like, a football game playing above the bar, and you’re wondering if your date is listening to you or, like, watching football above your head, like this is the experience.

And so then the person who had their back to the screen, what they have to do is they have to guess which condition their partner was in. So afterwards, we tell them, we’re like, “Hey, some people were instructed to listen carefully and some people were instructed to memorize commercials behind your head. Which condition do you think your person was in?” It turns out that people are terrible at this task.

Pete Mockaitis
Terrible at guessing?

Julia Minson
They’re terrible at guessing because they all think that the person sitting across from them, who is nodding and smiling, is listening to them, even though they’re not actually listening because they’re trying to memorize this other thing because they’re getting paid extra money for memorizing this other thing.

And so you can imagine, like in a meeting, for example, at work, you see this all the time. There’s a room full of people that’s, like, nodding and smiling and maybe even, like, typing on their laptops, right, but what they’re actually typing is their grocery list, or, like, they’re writing whatever, an email to their family, right? You have no idea what information is actually getting through.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating in and of itself. So I guess one takeaway is, “Hey, if you fake that you’re listening, you’re going to fool the other person. So I guess, good to know, but that doesn’t seem like a great strategy to do.”

Julia Minson
Well, it depends, right? Like, it depends on whose perspective you are looking at, right? So if you are trapped in an awkward situation and you’re just killing time, people are, like, very good at faking, you know, listening, smiling, like enjoyment, all of those things. Like, we are good at sort of getting along with people.

If you’re the person who’s trying to make sure that something is getting done, if you’re running this meeting, if you’re trying to brief people on a new project plan, if you need to make sure that everybody’s ducks are in a row, then you need to look for more reliable signals of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s super handy. Well, that HEAR framework, I like it and it seems to make great sense as you lay it out there for us. I’m curious if there are any finer points or distinctions or hiccups or little things that trip people up when they’re trying to execute this.

Julia Minson
The most common, I think, first experience is that it’s harder than people imagine it to be. So it seems super easy, you’re like, “Oh, H-E-A-R, I can memorize the words and I can say them.” But when you are in a disagreement, what you’re mostly thinking about is how to win. You’re thinking about how to come up with the best argument.

And so now, I’m asking you to do this extra thing that you have to do on top of thinking how to win, which might also feel like it’s going to prevent you from winning, because you now have to think about your counterpart’s argument and you have to take it seriously.

And so people just find that it takes some cognitive effort and it takes some practice. In the beginning, I always liken it to playing piano. Like, the first time you play piano, it does not sound like music. And so this feels awkward and effortful.

And then with some rounds of repetition, people start kind of getting into the groove of it, and becoming much more fluid at it. So I would say, the first thing to do is to not give up when it feels awkward the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s a really key point there. We have a lot of our attentional resources on how to win, generally. And it sounds like that may not be the ideal stance in order to really listen and hear and receive someone’s perspective in the first place.

Julia Minson
Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, it kind of brings up another really fascinating idea for me, which is that, how many times have you walked into a conversation and thought, “Okay, what is my goal here? What am I trying to accomplish? Do I have strategies that are going to help me achieve my goal? And are those the right strategies?”

Like, most people don’t think about their goals unless it’s sort of a very important conversation that you have been planning for a long time. And so when we enter a disagreement, it’s usually spontaneous, right? Like, you’re sitting there having a conversation, somebody says something and you’re like, “Oh, no, like you’re wrong. Let me fix you.”

So our first immediate goal sort of stems from this assumption that, “I’m right. You’re wrong. I’m going to tell you how it is,” right? And quite often, that doesn’t serve us well. So the question of, “What am I trying to do? And what’s the right strategy to do it?” I think, is a really, really important piece of all of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s super. So it sounds like you may be saying, if we don’t take time in advance to thoughtfully consider our goals, the default goal is winning, fixing them, and being right.

Julia Minson
That’s right. That’s right. And then, of course, if you have two people who are both pursuing that goal with some gusto, what you end up with is a stalemate, right? Nobody gives in, nobody is listening, and eventually people get frustrated with each other and, either it escalates into a fight or you just walk away from it, and you’re sort of like, “Yeah, this person isn’t going to listen to reason.”

And that’s terrible, in the workplace because both people are frustrated, nothing got done, and you have sort of soured a potential relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if the default goal is how to win, can you suggest some alternative goals that may very well be worth focusing on and pursuing in a given conversation?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so what’s interesting is that there are so many that people don’t think about. Like, if I’m with my manager, right, I might just want to impress them with, like, how smart I am, right? Or I could want to be funny. Or I could want to just pass the time because we’re stuck at the airport together. Or I could want to show that I’m sort of really well versed in a particular topic.

My favorite goal, and I think the goal that serves disagreements the best is the goal of understanding what exactly your counterpart believes and why they believe it. So in order to make any kind of progress on the disagreement, I need to know sort of, like, what you’re all about.

And quite often, and I have this experience all the time. People come to me with a disagreement. Since my book has come out, I’ve had these totally wild conversations where I’m signing books and somebody sort of stops the line and says, you know, “Julia, can I ask you for advice on like this?”

And then they start telling me sort of, like, this long extended story about their friend or their life partner who doesn’t do this or does something else. And I always say to them, I’m like, “Have you asked them why they think that’s the right way to behave?”

And I often get one of two responses. Either a person is just completely baffled and they’re like, “No, I haven’t asked them. Thank you for pointing that out. I’m going to go ask them,” which, to me, just sort of boggles my mind that somebody’s been in the conflict for days or weeks or years and has never asked their counterpart why they believe what they believe.

Or, I think the more potentially risky one is people say, “No, I haven’t asked them, but I know they’re this kind of person and they were brought up in this kind of family and this is why they are like that.” And so there’s sort of, this set of assumptions about, you think the other person believes what they believe for some set of reasons that you have, essentially, made up in your head and haven’t tested by asking the question, like, “Tell me more about your beliefs.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, a set of assumptions, and I have found my assumptions are often incorrect, and so it’s well worth asking. You said ask why they believe what they believe, and you used the phrase, “Tell me more.” I’ve heard that sometimes a why question can trigger defensiveness. Do you have any favorite approaches or questions you like to use in unearthing this stuff?

Julia Minson
Yeah, I think people, in general, struggle with asking questions or making statements that signal their willingness to understand, their desire to understand, and aren’t, like, gotcha phrases in sort of question form, right?

So you could say, “Why do you believe that?” That sounds like an attack. Or I could say, “Look, you know, I’m really curious to understand why you believe that.” That sounds more like curiosity, right?

And the why is there, but I think the real, you know, I have sort of this mental bar that I set for myself is, you know, if I asked a question that makes me feel superior in a disagreement, I shouldn’t have asked it.

Like, if I feel I just scored a point, then I’m actually losing, I’m losing at my own game of sounding curious and trying to gather information from the other person. Almost everything in disagreement that feels really good to ourselves is probably destructive to the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I hear you. So if you’re disagreeing on a science issue, you say, “Well, then why is it numerous systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials have showed, in fact, the exact opposite is what happens in experimental conditions? Suck on that,” you know?

Julia Minson
Right. Or, “Well, then how do you explain…?” blah, blah, blah, you know, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay. That’s a nice little internal emotional indicator there. All right. Well, I’d also love to hear, in the whole emotional game here, in terms of you want to win, there’s high stakes, you feel threatened or intimidated or disrespected, we can get hijacked in this emotional land. Any pro tips for dealing with all that?

Julia Minson
So emotional regulation, right, is something that people struggle with but is doable and it’s not just for conflict. It’s for all sorts of other things. A lot of the times, I mean, I’m going to say things that, after the fact, sound totally obvious but are profoundly true.

Our emotions come from our brains, right, which are, ultimately, physical organs that need rest and food and water. And so, quite often, if you are feeling yourself overtaken by emotions, what that means is it’s time to take a break. It’s time to take a break from this conversation or it’s time to take just, like, a break break, right?

And it goes back to this point of planning. Quite often, we end up in disagreements spontaneously with no forethought. And often, we fly off the handle because we are tired and because we’re stressed out and, you know, it’s Thanksgiving dinner, and, like, everybody has had a drink or two, and it’s in the evening and there’s all kinds of physiological and situational reasons why we are not at our best at that moment.

And so, one, if we have the ability to plan a conversation, prepare yourself to do it at a time when you’re at your best. And if you don’t have the ability to plan the conversation, you can always pause it and say, “Look, this sounds important. I’d like to talk to you about this thoughtfully. Can we schedule coffee for next week?”

So, like, when somebody comes after you over dinner about, like, “Well, why haven’t you guys gotten married yet?” or something incredibly sort of personal and triggering and random that can come up at a strange time, you don’t have to entertain it right then and there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s super. So just having it planned for a time when you’re at your best and you’re sort of mentally prepped for it, as opposed to, you know, surprised, shell-shocked, like, oof, getting disrupted. I’d love to hear if, for whatever reason that’s not so possible, “Oh, we got a meeting with the big account or the big executive, and I’m not going to be able to get back on that calendar for months,” do you have any pro tips for in the moment dealing with the stuff?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so, back to sort of this idea of question-asking and inquiry and showing curiosity, there’s two ways of thinking about this. There’s sort of like, “Are you trying to help your counterpart have a better experience? And are you trying to calm yourself down?”

And those things are intimately related, right, because when we are in a conversation, when we’re in a disagreement, the way you’re reacting to me is what’s causing my emotions. So if I can slow it down long enough to get you to calm down, it will also calm me down. I mean, I think one of the things that people really sort of forget about disagreement is that it is a dynamic interpersonal process. Like, you can’t disagree by yourself in a vacuum.

And so if I can stop myself from trying to make the argument and, instead say, “Hey, I’d like to understand where you’re coming from, I’d like to understand why this matters to you. Tell me why this is a big deal,” that very simple action tends to make the other person calmer, explain their perspective, kind of appreciate the fact that they were asked, and then that gives me a chance to calm down.

So the two things, really, like, reinforce each other. The contrast is I make a forceful argument, you make a forceful argument, I have to make my argument even more forceful. The next thing you know, we’re yelling at each other.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s really quite brilliant because you get a moment to regroup and the spotlight is off of you. So maybe they do ask, and you can’t escape or reschedule. It’s, like, “Why haven’t you gotten married yet?” And you’re like, “Whoa! What the heck, man? Kind of none of your business. We’re going to live our life the way we see fit. Thank you very much.”

But instead of saying that with that question of, “Oh, this seems like this timeline is really important to you. Can you tell me more about that?” A question along those lines shifts the spotlight off of you and can make them feel appreciated, and lets you take a breath and recollect all at the same time.

Julia Minson
Right, exactly. And, I mean, honestly, you can keep going and going, like, “Oh, are you married? How long have you been married? How is it going? Do you have kids?” Like, you can ask many questions, which serves dual purposes, right? One is what you just mentioned, which is, you know, giving yourself a break.

But, two, part of the reason that the person asked the question is because they have an opinion about what you should be doing with your life, and they want to share something. They feel like they have wisdom or advice or insight to offer.

And so you’re asking them, and they’re going to tell you, right, and they will feel wonderful about it. And they’re going to feel like you’re a great listener. And then by the time all is said and done, hopefully, you have a way of talking about your perspective that sort of resonates with what they are concerned about.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot because many of the times, it’s not really about you at all. They have a belief about how things should be with marriages and timelines and, I don’t know, you name it – fertility, population, furthering the species, whatever.

They may have an opinion and they’re not even directly attacking you. They just, generally, have some kind of worldview, and so you can inquire about that. And in so doing, they like it, they can talk about it, and they might not even have to return to you at all.

Julia Minson
Right. And this is sort of like, great, we’re running with the marriage example because I just spontaneously brought it up. But you can imagine, you know, let’s say these are your parents or, like, your uncle or whoever it is who has some stake.

And maybe they want you to get married because they want you to have kids, which is, one conversation. It could be that they want you to get married because they think that it’s, like, financially more responsible to put all your pennies together and invest in the American dream. That’s a totally different conversation.

And so the way you sort of talk about it would be different depending on what it is they are concerned with. Or it could be sort of this entirely different thing you were suggesting, which is it’s not about you at all. It’s about their, like, world views about the institution of marriage, which is a third type of conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And, Julia, could you share with us any of your most favorite and least favorite words, scripts, bit of verbiage when it comes to doing this conversational receptiveness thing well?

Julia Minson
So, the way I think about a whole conversation, right, is like having basically two big activities that you’re trying to pursue. You’re trying to understand where the other person is coming from. You’re trying to gather information. And then at the same time, or like in the same conversation, you’re also trying to convey your own set of beliefs and make your own argument.

And so, overall, people spend way too much time in the second part, the part where you’re trying to make your own argument. So the first thing I would advise folks to do is to re-balance your attention and your time to spend a lot more time in the place of sort of inquiry, and signaling curiosity.

So all those kinds of phrases around, you know, “I’d like to know more about how you came to hold this belief. I would love to understand why this is important to you. What would you like to see happen here? Have you seen this thing…” whatever it is, “…done very successfully? Would it be helpful if I did X, Y, and Z?” So they’re all questions that sort of are like getting around this person’s beliefs and values.

And then, at some point, you’re going to feel like, “You know, I think I get it,” right? And you might want to say, “Okay, so I think I get it. Let me tell you what I think I just heard, and you tell me if like I did get it or not, right?”

And so that’s sort of a transition because, once you restate what you heard, they might say, “Well, kind of, but not really, and there’s this other thing. And I forgot to mention…” blah blah blah blah blah, right? And so then you might have to spend a little more time there.

Or they might say, “Yeah, you know, that’s right. You got it. Thank you for listening to me. I think that’s exactly what I was trying to say.” And then you switch to the part where you are now making your own argument. And that’s where you use the HEAR framework, right?

So there, you can do your H-E-A-R to show that, “I have a point of view here, I have a set of beliefs, but I’m going to express it in a way that still, like, recognizes the fact that I just spent 20 minutes listening to you and I was actually paying attention.”

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

Julia Minson
I think that a lot of the time, people are hesitant to think about these topics, especially, like, if we are, for example, debating how to do a project at work, maybe I’ll say, “Well, you know, receptiveness is good. I need to understand where this person is coming from because I need to work with them.”

But sometimes we get into these topics that feel very moralized, like, if we talk about a company’s environmental policy, if we talk about affirmative action and hiring, if we talk about medical policies that support reproductive care. Like, there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of topics even in the workplace that feel very, very moralized.

And I think people are afraid to approach those topics because it feels like, “Well, you know, how can I possibly condone that crazy perspective?” And that, to me, seems like a mistake because if you have a passion around a policy area and around a way that you would like to see the world changed, it’s very hard to wield influence if you keep walking away from people and walking away from conversations because you don’t think that they are sort of worthy of being engaged with.

So that’s something that I really like people to think about as, like, “How am I going to wield influence if I don’t engage?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well said. And when you talk about the moral piece of it, perhaps there’s a dimension of us that feels, even hearing out and providing a respectful opportunity to air the alternative view, which we may even see as evil, is to, in some way, support, condone, approve, welcome, entertain, negotiate with, whatever, the evil.

And I think that, if we evaluate that, that’s really more of an emotional vibes thing as opposed to a logical thing.

Julia Minson
Well, you know, it’s back to assumptions, right? Like, how do you know they’re evil. Like, that’s a big word, like evil with a capital E, that’s like a big accusation, right? So how do you conclude that without really thoughtfully engaging with a person and their beliefs, you know?

And most of the time, when you really listen to people, they say things that kind of make sense, at least in some dimensions or from the perspective that they see the world from. And, frankly, even like the people who are evil, if you’re in a conversation with them, it is often because you need them to achieve a certain goal.

If you can sort of, relegate them to the eighth circle of hell and never have to deal with them again, that’s great. But most of the time, we don’t have that power. Most of the time, we actually need to get things done. And so, again, if you’re going to get things done, you have to understand the other side.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, we’ve had Chris Voss, and other folks who’ve done hostage negotiation, on the show. And, in fact, even folks who are committing evil actions, in terms of they have hostages, they’re threatening to take their lives, providing some of this understanding stuff is tremendously helpful in untangling that dangerous situation.

Julia Minson
Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And I had a student last year who worked for an immigration non profit. And he said, “Well, how can I possibly have a conversation with these people that work for the government, and they’re hauling children away from their parents, and etc?”

And I said, “Well, if you want to help these children, do you think it would be effective to tell this person who is doing their government job, ‘You’re a horrible human being and I hate everything you stand for’? Like, do you think you’re going to get anything out of them after you say that?”

So there’s sort of the impulse to tell people what exactly we think of them. But, again, is it serving your goal?

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

Julia Minson
William Wrigley Jr., remember, like, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Wrigley’s Field? So a hundred years ago, he said, “When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”

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

Julia Minson
The famous Milgram experiments. The reason they’re so important to me, so, you know, in the Milgram studies, right, you had participants who gave other people, trained actors, but of course, they didn’t know that they were trained actors, gave them electric shocks, and they thought that they were participating in a study on learning.

And there was this experimenter in a white lab coat who kept telling them to give this other person electric shocks. And, in reality, it was a study of obedience to authority. And for Milgram, this was sort of this whole illustration of what happened in Nazi Germany and how easy it is to get people to obey authority through sort of very subtle changes to the situation.

Well, as a little girl, I grew up in Russia. And the reason I’m a psychologist is because my mom was a psychologist, and the reason she was a psychologist was because she read the Milgram studies. So, you know, she was a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union, and it, like, really resonated with her to the point where she learned English and got a PhD, and here I am, you know, a generation later.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Julia Minson
I read a lot of fantasy. And I really like an author named Alix Harrow. She’s got a new novel called The Everlasting that I wish I could wipe from my brain and read all over again so I could have the experience again.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Julia Minson
Espresso maker.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Julia Minson
Sitting on the couch after dinner, piled up with, like, my youngest child who’s ten, and our dog who’s 70 pounds, and we all watch an episode of “Modern Family.” And thank God, “Modern Family” is so long that, like, one episode at a time, we’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, two years.

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?

Julia Minson
“Everything is negotiable.”

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

Julia Minson
So my website is DisagreeingBetter.com.

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

Julia Minson
Yeah, next time you disagree with somebody, pause and think about whether you understand where they’re coming from. And if you don’t, ask.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Julia, thank you.

Julia Minson
Thank you very much. This was great.

Jun 29
0

1164: How to Pace Yourself for Success and Long-Term Thriving with Elizabeth Svoboda

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Elizabeth Svoboda shares expert tactics for finding the right pace to sustain your energy for the long haul.

You’ll Learn

  1. The subtle warning signs you’re overpacing
  2. How to structure your day for maximum energy
  3. How to streamline your day with selective mediocrity

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Svoboda is an award-winning science writer and contributor to Scientific American, Discover, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other publications. Elizabeth is a winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Writers, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband and young sons.

Resources Mentioned

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Elizabeth Svoboda Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Elizabeth, welcome!

Elizabeth Svoboda
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I’m excited to be chatting about The Art of Pacing. And congratulations, release day is here, now, the day of our recording. I bet that feels good.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yes, it’s surreal, but it feels great. I’m kind of riding the wave here and hoping it lasts, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. Well, so tell us, could you share, for starters, a super surprising or particularly fascinating discovery you’ve made about pacing as you’re doing your research and putting this all together here?

Elizabeth Svoboda
So the genesis of this book was I started having some interesting conversations with, like, high-level coaches, Olympic athletes. And the thing that surprised me the most at first was, well, number one, just how seriously they took the business of pacing, which meant taking much more rest and much longer periods of recovery than most of us actually allow ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

Like, we all kind of have this stereotype in our heads of, like, the Olympic athlete who’s toiling from the break of dawn until the sun goes down, but it is just not reality at all.

And so having these discussions, I started to think, “What if we could all start to pace ourselves as thoughtfully, as deliberately, as these athletes who, again, are amazing or doing world-level things? And what would that produce for us in our lives?”

And I think that initial element of surprise was really what helped propel the entire book forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is striking to think about in an athletic context. And you could see it elsewhere. I’m thinking there was a podcast, I think it was Father Mike Schmitz. He’s a priest, and he was telling a story about even if you’re saving the world.

Like, let’s take a look at some nuns who are actually, like, saving the world, they’re right up in there in the midst of poverty and, like, doing the good-est of things, right, you could imagine. And their order of life, it’s locked in there. Rest, prayer, dinner.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Totally. And, especially, in the context of service or somebody like a nun, somebody who is really devoted to that, you have to be, like, healthily selfish in a way. Just like they say on the airplane, you got to put on your own oxygen mask before you serve others.

And when you see these nuns with these schedules that they take their rest time, maybe they take their naps, 45 minutes every single afternoon, that is them tending to what they need before they tend to other people.

And I think, from the outside, we kind of see it as the other way around, like they’re doing all these amazing unselfish things, but the fact is, in order to be able to do those unselfish things over a sustained period of time, they’ve got to keep pouring into themselves.

And I think I knew that intellectually before I started writing this book, but the research really does support that. And so I believe it even more strongly now.

Pete Mockaitis
And, well, in a totally different context, I’m thinking about parenting and how that can be so often brutally exhausting, in that, like, if there’s not thoughtful, plan-ful moments, it’s like these precious little ones will take every minute there is.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Exactly. And to be honest with you, like, my kids are a little older now, they’re 10 and 13, but I was very overwhelmed, especially when they were at that toddler stage, like when one was 18 months, the other was, like, four, and I was just going crazy at times.

And so one of my sort of impromptu pacing strategies that I devised at that time, and I worked it this out with my husband, but I was, like, “I need to take, like, a 24-hour retreat. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get a hotel. I’m going to check in, like, early afternoon one day. And I am going to do two things.”

“I’m just going to sleep. And then I’m also going to work on, like, the writing passion projects that I haven’t had time for, that I’ve really been wanting to dive into and haven’t.” And so for that entire 24-hour period, that’s exactly what I did. Like, I alternated between the writing and the resting or just conking out.

And at the end of that, I was shocked how much of a difference it made for me, especially after being immersed in, like, kid world, kid universe constantly. I just felt so refreshed and so restored. And, honestly, I’ve been doing a few of these every year ever since.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fantastic. I recall a good friend and listener of the show, Lisa, they said, “What do you want for your birthday?” And she said, “I want 24 hours completely by myself.” And she did. She got a hotel and it was everything she hoped it would be.

So, well, those are cool perspectives. I think we can resonate naturally with the notion of, “Yeah, sometimes you feel overworked and tired and stressed, and rest is really great.” So I think it might be easy to overlook it, or overlook the importance of it.

Could you share with us a story of someone who figured out this pacing thing and kind of what the before-versus-after picture looked like for them?

Elizabeth Svoboda
Well, I learned so much about pacing when I spent a day with the Olympic middle distance runner Ajee Wilson, and I love her pacing philosophy. It’s something that she calls rigid flexibility. So, obviously, she has these very important, like these kind of non-negotiable things that she wants to accomplish each day. That’s the rigid part of it.

So every day, she does a pretty intense, two-, two-and-a-half-hour practice session, like all different lengths of runs, taking these little micro breaks in between, but really, really intense. But then what she does after that, and this is where the flexibility element comes in. You know, I kind of asked her, “Well, what do you do at the end of your long practice every day? Like, do you have a hobby? Do you go out with friends? Like what do you do?”

And she’s, like, “You know, this might sound kind of boring, but to be honest with you, I crash out. I will often take a really long afternoon nap.” And maybe we don’t all need, like, that two-, three-hour nap, but I think what was really striking to me is she was taking the amount of rest that was sort of commensurate with, or that matched, the intensive effort that she put in.

And so you had this rigidity, like you do have to do this thing, that this is a non-negotiable this practice, but you are putting way more padding and way more flexibility around that, and way more recovery than most of us typically do.

And I think that we can also adopt this approach at work. Like, obviously, not all of us are world-level, Olympic-level athletes, but, you know, let’s say you have a work project that you absolutely have to get done this week. Like, that’s the non-negotiable thing.

So, sure, like, you commit to putting in some time on it each day, but you give yourself a big cushion. Like, you give yourself a lot of recovery time between work blocks. And when you’re not working, you do something that’s as completely unrelated to what you’re doing at your desk as you can.

Because, you know, just scrolling your phone in between times, that’s not going to cut it, that’s not going to restore you, that’s not going to give you any energy. Like, actually get out into the world. Like, meet a friend, do something in “meatspace,” I guess, some video game players call it.

So I think that this rigid flexibility is something that, as I observed Ajee, I was determined to create my own version of that. And I think she learned that, too, through tough experience. Like, world-level athletes, they all, many of them, anyway, have this tendency to go above and beyond. They want to push, push, push. They want to do more.

But for her, she found that when she pushed too hard, and when she didn’t give herself enough time for recovery, she would come up with an overuse injury at the very worst minute, like right before the biggest competition of the year.

So I think, as an athlete, you sort of learn these things in a very visceral way. And that’s a very memorable lesson.

But, you know, those of us who aren’t athletes, maybe sometimes it takes us a little bit longer to learn that, because we can keep going through the motions of our day for a long time, even though we are still crashing out inside.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s well said, it takes us a while to learn that. I’m thinking about my sweet mother, and whenever I got really cranky about something disproportionately, and this was well through my teenage years, she would ask me if I was hungry. And, in a way, I kind of didn’t like it.

I was like, “I’m not hungry. I’m mad about this thing.” She’s like, “Yeah, I understand that. But, also, you know, when was the last time you ate?” I was like, “I don’t know, maybe like nine hours ago.” She’s like, “Okay, well, how about we have a little break and eat something?”

And so, I’m like a 17-year-old here, you know, I think I’m almost a man. And, yeah, I was slow to learn that. And, likewise, I think I was slow to learn, even as a young adult in the workplace, it’s like, “Hmm, I find that I’m substantially grouchier and less enthusiastic about all the ‘boring’ ‘BS’ I have to deal with if I’m properly rested.”

If I have enough sleep, I am able to appreciate, “Well, you know what? There’s something kind of interesting about this task. And it makes some sense that I’m being asked to do this, even though it’s not quite how I would do it. I kind of hear where they’re coming from.”

I was just much more understanding and cheerful and interested. And for me, again, it’s also subtle. It’s, like, “What is enough?” Like, the difference between 5.6 hours of sleep and 6.8 hours of sleep doesn’t seem all that substantial. Maybe an episode or two of Netflix at night. And yet, for me, I found that really will show up.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yeah, like, one thing that really was driven home to me so many times in researching this book is there are certain physical states that are not conducive to clear thinking or reasonable thinking at all.

And so, yeah, getting not enough sleep might be one of those things. But just like if your nervous system is in a super activated state, you’re going to be having all these squirrelly thoughts all the time, “Oh, I screwed this up. I screwed that up.”

And a lot of that, I mean, I think we tend to believe everything our brains are telling us, like, take that as the gospel truth. But what I have learned, I think, through direct experience as somebody who tends to get spun up in this particular way, is that when you get your body into a more settled state, your mind actually will follow.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember that at the precise moments when you’re feeling the most spun up. But that said, it is absolutely true, and if you just sort of persist. And, you know, there are sort of spin-down practices that work better for different people.

Like, I’m pretty much a terrible meditator. Like, I do not have that kind of focus. And so I do deeper breathing, like a specific breathing tactic that a psychiatrist taught me called modulation breathing. But, yeah, for you it might be meditation, it might be like walking meditation, you take a walk outdoors.

But the point is, whatever it is for you that gives you that feeling that, “Okay, I’m starting to spin down now. And let’s see, let’s give a more objective reading on this situation. Like, what is really true here?” And you’re going to be much more likely to come to terms with what’s happening. And it might not be great, but, like, you’re just coming to terms with what’s happening.

And then, “What can I realistically do about it?” And it is really, really hard to do that sort of essential assessment process if you were in that monkey-mind squirrelly state. So I would say, like, the first thing, tend to the physical spin-up before you try to get into the deeper thought and make the next best decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is shocking how much that state, the emotional weather or vibe, and the internal weather going on there, has a profound impact on our decision-making, and we’re often unaware of it.

I mean, I think we know. Okay, if I’m enraged and I want to fire that person, maybe now is not the time. I should probably think about that before I just lash out. That’s probably a smart move. So I think we’re aware of that.

But I think the subtler shades of emotion are also coloring our decision-making, what we think is true versus false, or a wise move, or an unwise move. And I think, for many of us, it can pass right by our awareness and we don’t even know how much that’s influencing us. That’s just a theory, a hypothesis, my own experience. Has your research revealed some of these things?

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yes, I was just thinking, that is exactly right. And so I’ve come to see these spin-down tactics, whether it’s the breathing or whatever gets you into that more centered state. Like, it’s not just a good short-term pacing tactic that allows you to get through the day. It’s a good long-term pacing tactic.

Because once you’re in that more centered state, you are going to make decisions that serve your present and future self long term.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And, again, I think that we can forget about all kinds of little things in the, like, “Oops. oh, I haven’t had any water or beverage for six hours. Oopsie! And I’m a little thirsty, but that’s probably not causing me to be super irritable. Well, maybe it very well is, you know.”

So the squirrelly state, that’s a good turn of phrase. What are some of, perhaps, the subtle yet reliable signs we should be on the lookout for, like, “Oh, maybe I’m in the squirrelly state, and it would be better to do some of the spin-down stuff”?

Elizabeth Svoboda
For me, what it is, like, I won’t have any trouble getting to sleep at night, but I will just bolt upright in bed at 4:30 a.m. and my heart will be pounding, like, to beat the band.

And after that happens, as you can imagine, it’s really, really difficult for me to get back to sleep at all after that. And I’m just like, I’m just spun up. And I remember talking to a psychologist about how this happens to me.

And he’s, like, “Yeah, this is what happens. Like, if you are in a more chronic or a more elevated stress state, that burst of cortisol that normally would just wake you up more gently, it’s going to pile on top of all this cortisol you’ve already got going, and it is going to give you a jolt like you wouldn’t believe.”

“And you’re going to have, like, this fear signal. It’s, like, you’re not afraid of anything in particular, but it’s, like, you don’t even know where this fear signal is coming from. You just sit up and you feel terrified.” And so, for me, that is a major red flag. That is a warning sign.

But, you know, for you, it might be something a little bit different. It’s when you start skipping meals, or forgetting to drink, or just not feeling hungry or thirsty, that is often a sign that your system, for whatever reason, it’s trying to deal with whatever crisis it perceives is right in front of you, or on the horizon, instead of just tending to the boring daily things that you have to do to get yourself through the day.

So when you notice those signs, and if you’re listening, you probably have some idea what these signs might be for you, that is really a warning, like, “I need to pause here. I need to maybe do a little bit more spinning down. And then I need to ask myself, like, ‘Okay, what’s the next wise choice? Like, what do I need in this moment? And how can I fulfill that need?’”

And it might be something super mundane. It might be just like taking your water cup and just sticking it under the tap and making sure you get a couple swallows of water in your mouth. But I think a lot of us are not alert to those earlier warning signs until it’s kind of too late, and we get into a full-fledged bout of depression, full-fledged burnout, and that is just really, really dangerous territory.

There was one study that really shocked me when I came across it, and it was about, like, 200 people, and they were diagnosed with exhaustion, which is basically like a burnout state, and they received initial treatment for that.

But then they followed those people up for several years after the initial exhaustion, and they found that fully a third of them still qualified as exhausted, as basically burned out. And so the fact is once we sort of crash, we can kind of limp along in this languishing, in this burned out state for years on end.

Like, you kind of think it’s going to go away once it happens. Well, if you don’t tend to it, if you don’t make real steps to, like, refill your tank, it is going to persist. And I think a lot of us don’t like to admit that to ourselves but it’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so when it comes to refilling the tank, I think folks are perhaps quick to dismiss that, like, “Okay, yeah, I know that’s good, and maybe I’ll do that later after this project, after this move, after…” whatever. And so do you have any pro tip, research-backed suggestions for, “Ah, science suggests that this is a super rejuvenating spinning-down move, you know, per minute required of your life”?

Elizabeth Svoboda
Well, I mean, of course, if you can take a longer break from work, that is a great thing to do. But that said, I know a lot of us are in a position where that is just not available to us. Like, maybe we just started working at a particular company, we’re not quite senior yet, and we don’t feel like we can make a request to take a month off, right?

And in those situations, what has been really helpful, I think, for me, is a practice that I call energy management. And I’ve talked with a number of athletes, too, who use this. And as far as the biggest bang for your moment of effort, it’s hard to beat, and it’s very simple to start.

Like, what you do is you identify which times of day that you naturally tend to be most alert or most focused. So for some people, like, for me, it’s around mid morning, anywhere from like 10 until 12:30 or whenever I break for lunch.

But for other people, it might be afternoon, or for some creative types, sometimes it’s like late at night. And then what you do is you plan your most mentally demanding, like, work that matters the most that day to coincide with those natural energy peaks.

And so all it is is about aligning your toughest efforts with the moments when they’re naturally going to feel the least effortful. So it’s like your body is going to kind of give you these waves. Like, if you think about a surfer, the surfer waits for the wave before they try to ride it.

And so you are riding your energy peaks as you know they tend to come up. And then after lunch, like a lot of us have a huge energy slump, and that is totally normal. It’s to do with digestion and a bunch of other things.

And so if you can’t take a full traditional Siesta-style break at that time, you can still sort of downshift by doing something that’s a lot less demanding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yes. So identify those moments. And I’m thinking, for me, what’s more obvious is the moment I am the opposite of super alert, and it is almost exactly 1:45 p.m. Central Time, and regardless of how much I slept, what time I woke up, whether I had a delicious latte, even shortly before that, or whether I ate, whether I ate a lot, whether I ate a little, no matter what, right around then is, like, “Oh, I am sleepy.”

And it’s just great to know. And I actually try to get at least 10 minutes of straight up, literally, in a bed during that zone because it just feels so right in terms of, “It’s lined up, having a power nap would be great, generally, and this is the ideal time I might do that.” So I pull that off most days.

Elizabeth Svoboda
And that is amazing, and I would say, yeah, if you can get away with doing that, taking that 10-minute nap under your desk, or whatever you need to do, do it because that is going to give you a boost like you wouldn’t believe, and it can even help ease you into your next energy peak.

Like, for me, I tend to have not the highest energy peak, but, like, a smaller one starting around 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s funny, and sometimes I have, like, a little shot of espresso just to kick this off a little bit more.

But, like, at that time I know I can go writing, I can go deep into the creative stuff for about an hour before the hangry starts to sort of get the best of me. And I’m like, “Okay, I think that this is a good time to break now.” So look for those smaller peaks, too, in addition to those, to the lulls and the bigger peaks.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay. And we had Dr. Michael Breus on the show, he’s a sleep doctor, talking about your chronotype. You may naturally be an early-morning person or a late-night person. And his suggestion is, to the extent that’s possible, try not to fight it and see if your family, workplace can accommodate you as as much as you can, because it can be pretty tough being a night owl in an early-bird’s world.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yeah, exactly. And if you’re doing shift work and things like that, it’s just very, very difficult, too. It’s basically asking you to find a peak at a time when you normally would not find that. And the research shows that if you’re trying to do that, maybe like for a month you can get through it, but if it’s like years on end like that, where you’re forcing yourself past your natural chronotype, you are going to have more chronic disease burden, the health issues that are associated with that are just going to build up.

And so, yeah, as much as possible, like, ride those natural energy waves, catch them when they happen, and don’t beat yourself up when they’re not there because everybody is going to have sort of those fallow periods, those lie-flat periods in their day.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you’ve got a fun term of a phrase, ludic loop. What is that?

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yeah, so this is something that actually happens to us, a lot of us anyway, when we get into this trance of scrolling our feeds or clicking for the next notification online. And the term ludic loop, it actually came from some research that an anthropologist did.

And what she was studying was actually slot machine gamblers. So these people who were sitting in front of their machines, like, over and over in this trance, just pushing the lever over and over again. And then what some other research shows is that when you are doing these repetitive things, you are often getting a little bit of a dopamine burst associated with that.

And it’s not just from doing the thing itself, it’s from the anticipation of what’s coming next. So you might be getting a dopamine burst when you click on your notifications, and that’s because you’re anticipating, “I’m going to get a new message. Somebody is going to like my post,” or whatever it is.

And that’s okay, like, as far as it goes, but it just tends to draw us into these endless loops of consumption. Like, we get the dopamine burst, and that kind of motivates us to keep scrolling until we get the next dopamine burst, and the next, and the next. And so it’s kind of a very shallow engagement.

What happens, just like at the slot machine, people get up from the seats after five hours and are like, “What just happened to the last five hours of my life?” I think a lot of us have had that experience, whether we’re scrolling Instagram, scrolling TikTok, like, “What just happened to that last 45 minutes? Like, what kind of went down the hole there that I’m never going to get back?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I always wonder, “How can I use that for good?” It doesn’t seem to happen to me when I’m folding laundry or processing email, unfortunately.

Elizabeth Svoboda
I mean, if you’re familiar with the flow state, like deep creative engagement, I think of the online scrolling as a sort of shallow flow because it’s like a passive flow where you’re not engaging, you’re not making any progress, you’re really not contributing.

And so what I tell people is if you’re going to try and swap out some of that sort of shallow flow, that shallow scrolling time, find something that you know helps you get into a deeper flow. So if you’re a writer like me, it might be working on your latest story. If you play an instrument, even just getting into practice, a lot of people get into this deep flow.

And the great thing about flow is it’s, again, a state that makes you feel like you’re hanging onto a tow rope and you’re getting pulled along, like you are enjoying the process so much that it’s easier to keep going than it is to be allowed.

So, yeah, like, replacing that shallow flow with deeper flow, that’s going to be the best thing because then you’re not going to feel like you’re at loose ends, like, “Oh, well, now I’m not scrolling. What am I going to do instead?”

Once you’re in that flow, that question is going to be answered for you. You’re going to be so engaged that you’re just going to want to keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, Elizabeth, tell us, what are some of your favorite tactics that are just fantastic for this?

Elizabeth Svoboda
One thing that has been really fun and really freeing for me is practicing selective mediocrity. And I, first, heard Whitney Casares, she’s a doctor, she’s on Instagram, she was talking about this.

And so basically what selective mediocrity is, is you are choosing, you’re deciding, like, “I’m going to do all these different things in my day, and I’m just going to do an adequate job at them. Like, I’m going to be just okay. Like, I’m going to send the one-line email if it answers the questions, and this five-paragraph thing that somebody sent to me.”

“I’m going to blitz through this project evaluation if I’m pretty sure that my manager is just going to skim it for five seconds and then put in the pile on his desk,” right? And so it’s about giving yourself permission to streamline in that way, to do just enough, like, just good enough, but don’t do more than good enough.

This is what one psychiatrist told me, like, he tells his clients, like, “Don’t do more than good enough unless you’re just totally passionate about the thing that you’re doing.” And when you do that streamlining, then you’re going to have more energy to put into the things that matter the most to you that you really absolutely care the most about doing your best at.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some top examples of these are great candidates for being selectively mediocre at?

Elizabeth Svoboda
At work, it’s just kind of there is so much busy work that so many of us have to do, whether it’s, like, a survey, a progress report. And I’m not saying, like, blow it off entirely, but it really is okay to, like, set the timer for five minutes and just make a goal, like, “I’m going to get through this in five minutes. And if I’m done, I’m just going to be done and I’m going to turn this in. I’m not going to obsess over it for 20 minutes or half an hour,” not that I have ever done this kind of thing in my life.

But just like that kind of stuff, that kind of cruft that accumulates in the corners of your work life, your everyday life, that is the kind of stuff that just be selectively mediocre and embrace that. And it’s just so freeing and it gives you a feeling of power, I think, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a very nice piece to highlight there because I would say, busy work, I mean, whenever there is a process in which you suspect your input is not all that mission critical, I think is a great place to be selectively mediocre.

Like, sometimes, this is me, I love human development and learning and growth and improvement, right? And so if I get a survey, it’s like, “Oh, you know what? I would relish the opportunity to serve you by sharing with you as much insightful, actionable feedback as possible. So let me really just…”

Yeah, I’ve done this before. I have gone deep. And then you wonder, it’s like, “Will anyone ever actually read and ponder this? Or is it just sort of like, ‘Yeah, it’s on the checklist. Send out the survey.’”

Elizabeth Svoboda
And to be honest with you, like, a human may not even be reading that. It’s probably going to get scanned through ChatGPT or whatever. So why do we do this to ourselves, yeah?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me, Elizabeth, any final do’s and don’ts here with regard to pacing?

Elizabeth Svoboda
One of the things that I always sort of stress to people is pacing, it’s not just like a one-time thing, like, “Okay, here’s my pacing plan. Here’s what I’m going to do this week. Here’s what I’m going to do this month. Let’s have ChatGPT optimize that for me.”

It’s a lot more fluid than that. It’s sort of a process of ongoing noticing what’s going on and being responsive to that. Like, checking in maybe more often with yourself than most of us typically do, like, “Where am I now? Where am I actually headed? What direction am I heading in? And what adjustments or what pace changes can I make that are going to be most likely to get me there?”

And even that finish line, don’t be surprised if that starts to evolve as well. Like, you might have a certain goal right now, and for you in this moment, that’s a really meaningful finish line in what you’re pacing yourself toward.

But as you get more knowledge, as you get more experience, that may change, that may evolve in ways that are sort of a happy surprise to you. So I think just sort of being open to that and just knowing that fluidity and flexibility are really at the core of what it means to pace yourself in a smart way.

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

Elizabeth Svoboda
So I love, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Father Greg Boyle, who founded the Homeboy Industries. It’s like a gang rehabilitation program in LA. And he says, “Systems change when people change. They’re bite-sized moments to be able to reflect back to people the truth of who they are. Then you watch them become that truth and they extend that truth to other people.”

And so that resonates so much for me because part of what I outline as a good pacing strategy is becoming skilled at finding those bite-sized moments to remind people of what you see in them, the potential that you see in them, and where they’re headed.

And in the book, I call them brief candle moments, and creating those is so fulfilling. If you are the initiator, or if you’re the recipient, and it may not be a long time.

It may be like two or three minutes, but you learn something in those moments that you look back 30 years down the line, and you’re like, “If I hadn’t heard that in this moment, my life might look very different than it does right now.”

So just those trajectory shifting moments that you can create for other people, like, that is going to be enormously fulfilling to you, and that is certainly something that I try to put into play as part of a longer-term pacing strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, I remember that’s resonating. Back in episode 14 with Dr. Marcia Reynolds, she made me cry when she told a story when she turned 20 in jail, and someone there just said to her, “You have no idea who you are,” and talked about how she was so smart and courageous, and she had all these opportunities and advantages and strengths and things she could do. And she just felt really seen. And, bam! It really was transformational, sharing that piece in that moment.

Elizabeth Svoboda
That is incredible. And, yeah, people often do get emotional when they recall these moments. And so I was a volunteer in a mentoring program one time, and I knew this guy named Tom. And Tom was, like, a retired guy in his 60s, but he was the best person that I know at offering these moments to other people.

So the kids in this program, they were sort of in this category that, at the time, was called Youth at Risk. Maybe some of them had been in trouble with the law, they were having trouble at school, they were just struggling in different ways.

And Tom, he just had this way of offering these brief candles of really conveying to somebody in this capsule that packed a punch of, like, what he saw in them, the potential that he saw, all the things that he loved about who they were.

And I just watched it transform them, and I’m kind of getting emotional thinking about it because if we could all be a little bit more like Tom, I think the world would be a much better place.

Pete Mockaitis
This also reminds me of “The Lion King.” And no spoilers, anyone, it’s been out for a while. But when Simba sees his dad in the stars, “Remember who you are,” I mean, that’s powerful stuff. That’s powerful stuff.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yeah. And, like, people don’t realize. Like, you can really give this to somebody, and it’s like this infinite thing that you’re giving them, and it’s going to take two minutes of your time. And I think if that came home to more of us, we would all be looking for these opportunities on a daily or, like, an hourly basis because that’s the impact that they can have.

Pete Mockaitis 
A favorite habit?

Elizabeth Svoboda
It’s a practice that’s in the research, it’s called resonance frequency breathing, but I’ve come to call it modulation.

And so what it involves is actually breathing at a pace in which there’s the greatest variability between the way your heart rate speeds up as you breathe in, and then slows down as you breathe out. And so if you’re a fitness gadget person, you might’ve heard about heart rate variability.

And so breathing at this pace, which for most people is about five breaths a minute, that is going to get your heart rate variability in the highest possible place. And that is going to facilitate you getting into that calmer state faster.

And I had a really crazy experience when I first tried this type of breathing. It was in the office of a psychiatrist, Joe Arpaio, who teaches modulation to his patients. And so what he did, like, he clipped a little heart rate monitor on my finger, and he had me do my modulation breathing. For me, it was like 5.2 breaths per minute. Do that for about five minutes.

And I was watching, like on his laptop screen, there was like a little tracing, and where my heart tracing started out like real jaggedy and unpredictable, they were just slowly relaxing into these smooth, these more like S-shaped sine waves, showing that my heart rate variability was improving.

And at the end of those five minutes, Dr. Joe, he turned to me and he was, like, “You know what? You just calmed yourself down way faster than if I had taken an IV sedative and I pushed it into your arm right now.”

And it really struck me because I had gone into that day pretty, pretty skeptical. I mean, we all hear about, like, different breathing practices, and we try different things that we read about in magazines, and maybe it doesn’t really work for us. But for me, sustaining that about five, 5.2 breaths per minute for…you got to stick with it for more than 30 seconds. It’s got to be, like, three, four, five minutes.

But you can do it alongside everything else in your life. Like, I do it all the time when I’m waiting at red lights or when I’m chopping up the food for dinner. Like, it kind of weaves around just the daily practices that you’re already doing.

And so I can attest that this really does work, and it really is better than taking sedatives and hoping for the best.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s awesome stuff, yes. And there are apps, even the Calm app on the free, before you subscribe, will give you four seconds in, six seconds out, which approximates that, or as well as Elite HRV with a heart rate strap will give you that kind of a visual experience if you’re into it. So that’s real. That’s my experience.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Yeah, I love Elite HRV too. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Elizabeth Svoboda
I’m kind of obsessed with An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum. Now not a lot of people have heard of this, but, basically, what it is, it’s a collection of diaries and letters that were written by a Dutch Jewish woman during World War II.

And over the course of these diaries and these letters, you see very clearly how she evolved over time from somebody who was pretty anxious, very self-focused, like always getting spun up, as we’ve been calling it. And she really evolved into somebody who was so dedicated to service. And it’s sort of, I mean, I feel like I’m nowhere near being there yet, but it still, it gives me hope that all of us might be able to evolve, at least in that direction, no matter what craziness is happening around us.

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

Elizabeth Svoboda
I have been spending a fair amount of time on Instagram these days. My username is svobodster, so that’s S-V-O-B-O-D-S-T-E-R. It was a nickname given to me in fifth grade by my best frenemy. So there you have it. Also, you can find me at my website, ElizabethSvoboda.com, and I do have a beehiiv newsletter as well called “The Art of Pacing.”

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

Elizabeth Svoboda
If you find yourself during the day in mental overload or just in the midst of a crisis that really caught you off guard, first, just take a few minutes to do your spin-down.

And then once you reach that state where you’re feeling a little bit calmer, ask yourself, “What’s the wise choice here?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Elizabeth, thank you.

Elizabeth Svoboda
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been a blast.