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Each week, I grill thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance.

Mar 03
0

1037: A Better Approach to Chasing Goals: Tiny Experiments with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains the problem with how we approach goals—and why experimenting is key to fulfillment.

You’ll Learn

  1. The two approaches to setting goals
  2. The fallacy that leads to regret
  3. How to handle frustrations and disappointments

About Anne-Laure 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a former Googler who decided to go back to university to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. As the founder of Ness Labs and the author of its widely read newsletter, she is the foremost expert on mindful productivity and systematic curiosity. She writes about evidence-based ways for people to navigate uncertainty and make the most of their minds. She lives in London, where she continues to research and teach people how to apply scientific insights to real-world challenges.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anne-Laure, welcome.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom associated with Tiny Experiments. You do a lot of research and put together these tools in a practical, applicable way, which is kind of what we’re into. Can you tell us any super surprising and fascinating discoveries you made as you were doing the research and putting this stuff together?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
To me, the most surprising thing was how many of the decisions we make at work or in life, in general, are actually following automated scripts that we kind of copy-paste from other people, and a lot of them are useful. You don’t want to overthink every single decision, and sometimes someone has done the thing you want to do in a way that makes sense for you to just copy, right? But a lot of these copy-pasting that are happening are happening subconsciously. So, that was interesting to me to just notice the number of decisions we make that are not truly our own decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they just come from whatever is around us, huh?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Exactly. We’re social creatures and we learn from observing others, which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is actually worth it taking sometimes a second, especially for big decisions, asking yourself, “Where is this choice coming from? And am I making this choice based on what I actually want to do and explore and achieve with this particular project or area of my life? Or, am I just automatically copy-pasting what someone else has been doing?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. And can you tell us, in terms of the folks you’ve worked with doing these tiny experiments, any really cool or especially inspiring stories that leap to mind of folks who did the stuff and saw cool results?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, a lot of people I worked with start experimenting in their jobs, and, for me, the most amazing thing is when they manage to get other people around them, their colleagues, to experiment with them. And so, I’ve seen people now who literally run tiny experiments together as a team, and every month they have a one-hour meeting where they catch up and they say, “Okay, what is the thing you’ve been trying this month? What did you learn? What can we learn as a team?”

And because of that, it’s also created this psychological safety, where it’s completely okay to start something new and say, “I’m just running an experiment. I don’t know where this is going. I’ll report back in one month and we’ll see what happens.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Okay. So, then the subtitle of the book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. So, could you paint that contrast or distinction for us, the experiments versus goal obsession? And what’s kind of like the vibe or the feel of these two different worlds?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, I think visualizing it is helpful to understand the difference between kind of the status quo in terms of how we approach our ambitions and the alternative that I describe in the book. So, the mental model we tend to use when you talk about success at work and in life in general is the mental model of a ladder, in the sense that you have a series of steps you’re supposed to go through in a specific order, and when you’re done with a specific level, you can go on to the next level.

It’s a little bit like this very linear video game where you just collect all of the points and the artifacts and then you’re allowed to go on to the next level. And this kind of assumes that you already know where you want to go, that you have this very specific outcome, this very binary definition of success, whether you get there, yes, success, or you don’t get there and that’s failure.

The alternative to this linear model is a more circular model, a loop, cycles of experimentation. And so, that’s why I contrast the linear goal-setting approach to the experimental goal-setting approach. And in that case, instead of focusing on this very specific outcome that you want to achieve, you think like a scientist. You start from more of a hypothesis, a research question, and you ask yourself, “What might happen if I tried this thing, this particular action, this particular way of approaching a challenge?” You collect data, and based on that data you make decisions.

And what’s great is that in a world that keeps on changing, that’s fairly uncertain, you’re not clinging to that illusion that you know what the world is going to look like in three, four, or five years. You can just trust yourself that if you keep on iterating, collecting data, and experimenting, you’re going to grow, you’re going to learn, and you’re going to evolve with the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us an example of a specific domain in which we may often tend to approach in a goal ladder way? And then what that looks like in practice in the alternative tiny experiment way?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I’ll take social media. I think this is something we’re all using, and whether you’re using it at a personal level or at work, maybe. This is something we’re all familiar with. So, the linear approach to growing an audience on social media would be, “I’m going to get to 10,000 followers by the end of the year.” That’s the linear approach. You have a specific end goal and you’re going to work really hard to get there.

The experimental approach is to say, “I’m going to post twice a day until the end of the year, and then I’m going to see where we’re at, at the end of the year. I’m going to look at where we’re at, what worked and what didn’t, and based on that, for my next cycle of experimentation, I’m going to tweak, I’m going to iterate and improve my process.”

And, again, you might not necessarily hit those 10,000 followers by the end of the year, but that’s the same as with the linear goal, actually. So, that hasn’t changed, but it’s your approach, your mindset that has completely changed. One of them is a lot more experimental and not focused on the outcome, but more focused on the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And so then, could you share with us a cool story of this in action, in terms of someone really did see some amazingness unfold when they did it this way?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I think one of my favorite examples is someone in the Ness Labs community that decided to, they wanted to grow their professional network, and that’s something that can feel quite fuzzy, right? How do you grow your professional network? And a lot of people might end up attending. We’ve all been at those work events or conferences where we’re not quite sure what we’re doing here.

And so, what he did is that he designed an experiment where he said that, “For the next three months, every Monday, I’m going to reach out to someone on LinkedIn, someone whose work I admire, someone I heard on a podcast, or maybe I read their newsletter, or I saw something interesting they were working on, and I’ll just say, ‘Hello, and can we grab a virtual coffee?’ and that’s it.’”

And so, the great thing again is that you’re not trying to get to a specific outcome. The only kind of like measure of success is, “Are you doing the thing or not?” And so, every Monday, he sent that cold message on LinkedIn and he had a little tracker for it, tracking yes or no, and he ended up connecting with a lot of people. Some of them became collaborators, working on projects. And so, that was a project, a tiny experiment that happened in the past six months.

And so, long term, I don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen with that particular experiment, but I can already imagine that this is going to lead to a lot of interesting work. And it will also create a bit of a safety net for this person where, even if things end up not really working out with their current job, they’ll have now a stronger, better professional network they can reach out to you in case they want to actually start and do something else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I like that as I’m imagining just sort of the mental, emotional, I don’t know, groove, vibe feeling of approaching the tiny experiment mindset. It’s a lot more pleasant in terms of, if it were a linear metric, gold, obsessed kind of a situation, like, “Ugh, I’m not getting enough meetings on the calendar. Aargh, what’s wrong?” you know?

As opposed to, if it’s a tiny experiment, it makes it more like a game, it’s just, “Oh, this is kind of fun. Oh, let’s see what happened. Oh, it’s time to check in on my LinkedIn account. Did it have any cool responses?” And then just that whole energy is more pleasant. And along the way, I imagine, in my own experience, that results in more creative, flexible, smart ideas along the way, as opposed to when you’re just like mad and frustrated it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, absolutely. Because when you’re experimenting in this way, also whenever you see that, I don’t know, maybe it’s been two weeks in a row, and you didn’t get a lot of replies, what a scientist does when they’re faced with unexpected results, they don’t say, “Shame, I’m such a bad scientist. I’m terrible. I’m a failure,” right? They just look at the results and they ask themselves, “Huh, that’s interesting. What’s going on here? And what might we want to try or explore or experiment with?”

And so, just using again that experiment of reaching out to people, whether on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, you could say, “You know what, this week, actually I’m going to tweak the language a little bit, or maybe I’ll add a little like photo of something that I think is fun or interesting, and I’ll be a little bit more creative with the way I design these outreach messages.” Because again, as you said, you’re not just really trying to get to that specific outcome. You’re just experimenting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve mentioned that we have some harmful beliefs about success. Can you unpack some of those? Like, what are some of the most harmful, why are they harmful, what should we have instead, and how do we just reinstall our belief systems?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I think, to me, the most harmful one is thinking that we know where we’re going and what we will want in a few years. And also associated with this, with linear goals also, is the idea that if we get to a specific place, if we achieve a particular milestone, whether it’s a promotion or anything like that, then we’ll be happy. It’s this “if, then” feeling of, “If I achieve this, then I’ll be happy.”

This is called the arrival fallacy, and a lot of people experience this, where you do get to that place of success where, defined in a traditional sense, and you realize that, “I’m still the same person. My problems are still here, and I’m not necessarily much happier because I’ve achieved this goal.” What a lot of people end up doing when they find themselves in this situation is that, instead of questioning the approach to goals and success, they just figure that, “Oh, it probably wasn’t the right goal,” or, “I’m just going to find another one. I’m going to try and climb to the next rung of the ladder.”

And that’s very harmful because you find yourself on this kind of like treadmill, trying to find what is the next success you’re going to chase in order to finally be happy. And again, and there are studies asking older people about their regrets. A lot of them actually regret having a lot of this, you know, really focusing on this linear path of success in their career instead of exploring it a little bit more.

And so, connected to the first one that I mentioned, this idea that you think you know what you want, whenever you take a step in a direction and you start having more experience, acquiring more skills, connecting with new people, you become a different person. And so, your goals and the direction you want to go in and your ambitions are going to evolve, and that’s a feature, that’s not a bug. So, I think embracing this is actually a lot less harmful than trying to resist it and trying to stick to a fixed plan.

Pete Mockaitis
The arrival fallacy. I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase but I know of the concept and I think it’s so powerful and dangerous in terms of, “If I just,” fill in the blank, you know, “…get the promotion,” “…get married,” “…have a child,” “…earn X dollars, then I’ll be happy. Everything will be fine, and all my problems are solved,” and it’s not true.

It’s funny how we have our doubts. I think it was John Green, who wrote The Fault in Our Stars and some other novels, was on The Hilarious World of Depression podcast, and I thought it was so perfect. He said that he was talking to a wealthy person, and he said, “Boy, if I just owned a whole plane instead of this fractional lease situation.” It’s like, “Oh, man, you’re still in it. You haven’t figured it out yet. That’s not how it works.”

And so, tell us, if folks have their doubts, like, “Okay, easy for you to say. Easy for you to say, Anne-Laure, but I don’t know,” anything that you can share to disabuse folks of their arrival fallacy?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yeah, I still experience it, so I want to clarify that it is really not about completely getting rid of it because it is such a deeply ingrained psychological mechanism that you’re always going to fit. And what’s interesting is that the more you are dissatisfied with your current situation, the more likely you are to cling to that arrival fallacy that if only you had this one thing, everything would be better.

So, what I really recommend is not that you’re trying to get rid of it, but just catching yourself when that happens, noticing that you’re doing that, that you’re really hoping, and that you’re going to be happy only if you achieve that one thing, and then trying to bring yourself back to a more, this is what I call having a more experimental mindset rather than this linear mindset, where we feel like, “If only I can climb and I can get to that next level, I’ll be happy.”

Bringing yourself back to that experimental mindset, reminding yourself that this is just a giant playground for you to try new things. You have no idea what’s going to happen. You actually have no idea what’s going to make you happy. A lot of people discover sources of happiness in their life, not because they had a perfect vision of what that would look like, but because they put themselves in lots of different situations, talked to a lot of people, discovered new perspectives, got outside of their comfort zone and tried these new things, and then they experienced that happiness.

And it’s almost like a surprise, you know, it’s like, “Oh, wow, I love this. I don’t know, I love water skiing,” or, “I love hosting workshops,” or, “I love mentoring,” or, “I love all of these different things.” And there’s no way for you to know if you don’t try different things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s fascinating how what we think we will enjoy or not enjoy is often wildly wrong.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember one of my all-time favorite consulting projects was working to help out call centers for an insurance company, and I was like, “Wow, that sounds boring. Call centers and insurance. Eugh!” And yet, it was the coolest thing because it’s sort of like, “Oh, wait. The work we’re doing is improving the call center employees’ experience, which is improving the attrition and retention rates, which is improving customer satisfaction, which is improving profitability.”

And it was just like, “Everybody is winning here, and it feels really good. I like this kind of people transformational type stuff more so than what seemed more fun, interesting, and sexy on the front end.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, exactly. And so, I think this is really why, whenever you’re faced with something like this, same as you. If I saw this on paper, I would think that this is the most boring job. And I think that’s why it’s important to really approach those opportunities and saying, like, “I’m not necessarily going to…” If there is a little bit of curiosity, and this is really the compass that I use, right?

If there’s at least a little bit of curiosity, it might be worth saying, “Okay, let me just give it a try. Let me treat that as a time-bound experiment and let’s see what happens.” And again, you kind of start from a hypothesis. And, in that case, your hypothesis might be, “This is going to be so boring. I’m going to hate it.” But this is a hypothesis, “I don’t have certainty. It’s a hypothesis. So, now let’s test the hypothesis.”

And it might be that you were correct, that was really boring, and good. Now you know. Now you have confirmed your hypothesis after running the experiment. Or you might be wrong, and that’s the beautiful thing about having this experimental mindset, is that a scientist, when they’re wrong, they’re actually really happy about it because they learned something new, they feel like, “Oh, I stand corrected. I had this hypothesis, but the data is showing something else, and that’s amazing. I just discovered something new.”

In the case of those personal experiments, that means you discovered something new about yourself, about your work, about the world, and that’s actually pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That reminds me, I think it was an Adam Grant’s book, Think Again, he was talking about interviewing, might have been Daniel Kahneman, or some illustrious, you know, thinker, researcher, who said that he loves it when he’s wrong, which is kind of surprising because most of us think, “Oh, no, I feel embarrassed. You know, oh, I was wrong. I feel dumb and stupid. I should have known better.” And he said, “I love it when I’m wrong. That’s the way I know that I’ve really learned something.” And I think that’s a beautiful reframe right there.

And so, speaking of reframes and good feels, good vibes, you’ve got a section about holistic self-regulation, which sounds handy. So, let’s say we’re in, Anne-Laure, we’re like, “Okay. All right, we’re going to do some experiments. We’re going to see what happens,” and we’re in the midst of them, and yet things aren’t going the way we would like, or prefer, or we’re experiencing some frustrations, disappointments, messes, disasters, whatever, how do we engage in holistic self-regulation?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I like to describe it as a little dance. So, the issue a lot of people are kind of like facing, and especially if they’re doers, high-agency people who just want to fix the problem, is that they might just bypass looking at the actual emotion and the response, and just try to find a solution and fix the problem and the source of the disruption.

And what I really recommend doing is just not doing that, not rushing, taking a moment to go through the first step of that little dance, which is to engage with the emotion, to understand the subjective experience. And I recommend a tool that psychologists call “affective labeling.” It’s just a fancy word to really say “naming your emotions.” It just means naming your emotions.

There’s a lot of research showing that, by just taking the time to name your emotion, you’re going to be able to process it much better. So, what’s the emotion? So, as you said, things are not going as planned, right? Is it worry about whatever other consequences there are going to be because this thing is not working? Is it maybe fear of being judged by your peers or your manager, who might be looking and feeling like, “Oh, wow, she didn’t do that very well, or she made a mistake”?

Is it anxiety because you know that you’re supposed to present the result or something like that tomorrow and obviously the data is not what you thought it would be? So, what is the emotion? Affective labeling, naming the emotion, and that’s already going to help you process it. Only once you’ve done this, you can go on to the second step of the little dance, which is dealing with the actual consequences.

And so, basically, you dealt with the emotion at this emotional level, and now you can go at a more like mental cognitive level where you’re dealing with the actual problem. And, again, there’s research showing that you’re going to be able to do that much more effectively if you process the emotions before. So, those are the two steps. The first one is really processing the subjective experience and then dealing with the objective consequences.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I hear that those are very different processes and thoughts that you’re having, and I could see how you may…well, you tell me, what kind of trouble do we get ourselves into if we kind of do both at the same time or skip to the second part and don’t do any labeling?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
So, the problem if you just jumped into solving the problem is that you’re not going to realize how your current emotional state is probably going to impact your judgment, and so you’re probably going to make decisions that are driven by those emotions, whether that’s the fear, the anxiety, the worry, and you might, for example, cancel tomorrow’s presentation because you feel like it’s not ready because that’s driven by the fear of being judged or the anxiety or whatever. Or you might make any kind of like rushed choice that you think is rational but is actually driven by the emotion. So, that’s the big risk.

And then the other one is just that, you know, your podcast is called How to Be Awesome at Your Job. If you stay stuck in just processing the emotions, and you don’t deal with the consequences, you’re probably not going to do a great job. So, at some point, you do need to move on to dealing with the actual consequences.

But, in general, the challenge I’ve seen for most people is not the dealing with the objective consequences, it’s that they skip the emotional processing, they don’t do the affective labeling, and they try to solve the problem straight away when they’re still in that state of fear or anxiety or just that stress state.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, you said “affective labeling” and at first, I heard you say “effective labeling” like, “Oh, I do a really good job of labeling it.” So, I’m curious, there are different typologies, I guess, in terms of how many emotions we humans experience, and I guess there’s the “Inside Out” movie, or others, that might say we have seven emotions. But lay it on us, how do we know if our affective labeling is effective labeling? Is it just like, “I’m feeling angry. That’s that”?

Or, I’m thinking about Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. They’ll say things like, “Oh, I’m feeling angry because my need for respect, I don’t feel, is being met here,” which I found pretty handy. It’s like, “Okay, if there’s like an emotion and then perhaps a perception of a cause or need being unmet,” is pretty handy. When do you consider the affective label feeling done? Is it when I am chilled out a little bit about it, I’m not as worked up? Or it’s when I’ve said one word, “Angry”? Or, when am I ready to move on?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yeah, so this is really the emotional regulation part where it’s really about paying attention to how you feel in the moment, and sometimes actually just saying, “Oh, I’m so angry. I don’t know.” Maybe a contractor didn’t deliver something on time or whatever, “I’m just, I’m so angry or I’m disappointed.” Like, already, like, just in those few minutes of conversation, I think we’ve mentioned six or seven different ones. So, actually, angry is good if that’s what it describes, right? But if, after saying this, you still feel like, “Oh, there’s something else,” you can still go and dig a little deeper, and, “Okay, I’m angry but why? What is the underlying emotion underneath this? Okay, oh, it’s that.” And you will, by doing this, like those different layers of affective labeling, you will progressively feel calmer, and being able to re-engage at a cognitive level because you have dealt with the emotions. So, that’s one part.

The other part is that, sometimes while dealing with the actual objective consequences, you might have emotions that pop up again depending on what you discover, what you’re trying to solve. Let’s say that you’re trying to solve a problem and you discover that the only reason why this entire thing is happening is because one of your colleagues forgot to do something you told them to do. And so, again, like you might have an emotion that comes up. You go back to the first step of the little dance, process that, and then deal with the consequence.

So, there’s a term in psychology also called metacognition, which is the ability to observe your own thoughts, your inner landscape, and this is something that you can practice. And at the beginning, it might feel a little bit like, “Oh, what am I doing? I am angry,” those words. But after a while, when you’ve done it for a while, it will become very natural to go through those steps of the dance and going back and forth between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when you mentioned the underlying stuff, in a way, this is dangerous for me because I am very curious and could examine something for long, long stretches. But let’s say, “Okay, I’m angry about the contractor not doing the thing right,” okay. And you say, what would be the step associated with getting out the underlying stuff?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
So, again, it’s only in that specific context, it’s only doing as much affective labeling as is needed for you to be able to then move on and deal with the objective consequences in the moment. If, and that can happen, you realize that there’s something actually quite juicy or interesting in terms of your own cognitive or emotional patterns while you’re doing this, or maybe after a while you notice that every time a certain type of challenge arises at work, you have the same type of emotional reaction, it might be worth digging deeper, but this should happen in a different kind of modality.

So, for some people, it’s journaling, for some people it’s talking therapy, you know, whatever it is, where you have more space to explore this. Affective labeling is more of an in-the-moment tool to do just enough emotional processing that you’re able to think clearly again, that you can then deal with whatever problem you’re facing right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you. So, with the contractor situation, we might say, “Okay, I’m angry because he did the thing wrong, and this seems like a pattern, and that folks think they could just take advantage of me because I’m so nice,” or whatever. And so then, the goal is not to dig into, you know, “Why am I broken?” or, “What’s wrong with people in the world today?”

But rather say, “Oh, maybe there’s a pattern there associated with perhaps I need to be more assertive or establish boundaries or expectations more candidly, assertively, proactively in my interactions with folks. But we could just sort of note that and park that for my journaling time or therapy time or whenever I’m having a nice long walk, and that would be interesting to dig into.” As opposed to, “Stop everything. Emergency inspection must happen now before I, you know, ask for a partial refund or whatever it is I need to do.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, exactly. And this is what’s really nice, is that in that way, you can actually just note these things and make sure that they don’t remain unexamined, and so you still will do that work outside of the current situation, like professional situation you’re in, but you’re also helping yourself make better decisions in the moment. So, it’s helpful as a tool to self-regulate in the moment, and as a tool also to notice patterns that you might want to explore deeper at a later moment.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Honestly, your questions were amazing, so I’m good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Thank you. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
It’s been attributed to Viktor Frankl, but it’s actually much older than this, and it’s, “In between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Anne-Laure, I got to say, you’ve piqued my interest here because, fun fact, that is the most cited favorite quote amongst How to Be Awesome at Your Job guests, but you brought an extra wrinkle to it, it’s like, “Oh, it has history pre-Victor Frankl.” Do you know the tale? Can you tell us?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Well, I went in that rabbit hole, but there, basically, we don’t know who said that first, but there are lots of different versions of it. They’re very, very close in much older books, and Victor Frankl is the one who made this version famous, and the one I quoted is his version. But it’s very, very old actually. And so, that’s interesting, is that this idea that we have this little space of freedom is quite old. I have an entire footnote about this in my book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
There’s a recent study that shows that the systems that are activated in the brain are the same for impulsivity and curiosity. And I find it fascinating because that has a lot of implications for how we navigate the world and distraction and creativity and all of that. So, that’s one of my favorite studies at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I can relate to that. It’s like, “I need to know everything about this now.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s really dangerous for me. I have to keep lists and guardrails and rules for myself. And a favorite book?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
That would be How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, who is also a French neuroscientist, and it’s a very short book, but it teaches you how your brain learns anything in childhood and adulthood, and it’s very helpful to understand how we navigate the world.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I use a note-taking tool called Roam Research, and it’s a bit of a weird, non-linear thinking type of tool where you can connect all of your ideas in little bullet points. And most people who look at my notes think that it’s a complete mess, but it’s helped me write a book and complete a PhD. So, I’m so grateful for this tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Going for daily walks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Become the scientist of your own life.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Go to NessLabs.com to subscribe to my newsletter, and look up Tiny Experiments anywhere books are sold, or go support your local bookshop by ordering it there.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I want to ask them, “What will be your first tiny experiment?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne-Laure, thank you. This is fun.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.

Feb 27
0

1036: Becoming a Happy High Achiever with Dr. Mary Anderson

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Mary Anderson shares key habits to fuel your career and well-being.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why high achievers often don’t enjoy their achievements 
  2. How to break free from the cycle of negative self-talk 
  3. The SELF care framework for high achievers 

About Mary 

Dr. Mary Anderson is a licensed psychologist, author, and sought-after speaker with over a decade of experience helping patients become happier, healthier, and sustainably high-achieving. Dr. Anderson earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, with a specialty in Health Psychology, from the University of Florida and completed her internship and post-doctoral fellowship at the VA Boston Healthcare System, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Boston University School of Medicine.

Her book, The Happy High Achiever: 8 Essentials to Overcome Anxiety, Manage Stress, and Energize Yourself for Success––Without Losing Your Edge, was published by Hachette Book Group in September 2024. 

Resources Mentioned

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Mary Anderson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mary, welcome!

Mary Anderson
Thank you so much, Pete. I’m so excited to be here. I’m excited to have a great conversation. And hello to all the listeners out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited, too. We are talking about The Happy High Achiever. That sounds like something I’d like to be, and many of our listeners would like to be. You’ve worked with many folks in the zone of high achievers who are happy and not so happy. Could you give us, perhaps, one of your most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made while working with this population and researching the book?

Mary Anderson
That’s a great question. Well, I think, really, what prompted me to write the book was the surprising thing that I came upon after working. I was working in the financial district in Boston. This was actually many years ago, I had the idea for the book, and I would have these amazing high-achieving patients coming in. So, successful business professionals, doctors, lawyers, grad students, just amazingly brilliant, talented.

And then they would sit on my therapy couch across from me, and really candidly, courageously describe struggling with self-doubt, worry, perfectionism, anxiety, and burnout. And that’s what really was so surprising to me was how much they were really struggling with even just feeling like an imposter sitting in meetings, even if they had the credentials, or even if they had experience or the talent.

And so, that really helped me realize, “Wow, there’s these amazing high-achieving people out there who are not enjoying their excellence.” And that’s what really prompted me to write the book, and it was really that surprising kind of discovery all those years ago that now inspired The Happy High Achiever to now be in the world.

It really motivated me to do the work to help put a book in the world, to share science-based actionable strategies and skills, to help these ambitious people who are amazing but struggling. And I wanted to give them specifically tailored strategies that they could use in their jam-packed schedules because they are busy people. So, that’s really what my aim was for the book.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s quite a turn of a phrase, not enjoying their excellence, not only because it’s alliterative, which I love.

Mary Anderson
Me as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s kind of haunting and rings true. Like, we would imagine from the outside looking in, “You’re on top of the world! That’s got to feel amazing!” And yet, when you look in, and it’s like, “Well, you might think it would feel amazing.” but it sure doesn’t.” So, can you, this is probably maybe a whole other podcast conversation, but what’s that all about, Dr. Mary Anderson? Like, what’s getting in the way?

Mary Anderson
Awesome question. So, for this, I would say the approach I use is cognitive behavioral therapy, so CBT. It’s a science-backed approach for the treatment of anxiety and depression. And what it teaches us is that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all directly impact each other. And the goal of CBT is to help people feel better, so we target their thoughts and their behaviors to help them feel better.

And so, why are people feeling so anxious, so overwhelmed, so worried? We can point to those two-pronged reasons of cognition and behavior, right? So, their thoughts or self-talk, so how they’re thinking about themselves, the world, and other people; and their behaviors, so their actions and their choices that they’re making in interacting in the world. So, that’s, really, what I target.

So, what this is all about is that often their thoughts are relentlessly self-critical, so they’re very hard on themselves, but not in a helpful way that you would think like, “Oh, I’m just, you know, keeping my edge there.” Actually, there’s a tipping point where if it’s negatively skewed where they’re really being self-critical, they’re being really hard on themselves in a really unhelpful way, their negative self-talk, that relentless negative self-talk, and then also relentless pace.

So, in terms of their behaviors, they have a relentless pace. So, they’re not implementing regular self-care that is necessary to provide the energy for sustained happiness and high achievement. So, it’s issues with their thoughts, their self-talk, and their behaviors that are creating this really unfortunate situation of they are high achieving, but in terms of how they feel, they don’t feel good. They feel anxious, worried, overwhelmed.

So, that’s at the very root of what’s going on, and that’s why I help target improving and optimizing patients’ thoughts, their self-talk, and their behaviors, and that’s what helps them feel better and actually perform at their best.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say the pace, do you just mean doing a lot of things and not resting? Or what are kind of like the problematic behaviors there?

Mary Anderson
Great question. So, the relentless pace I talk about is often to help people understand that ambition itself is not a bad thing. Ambition is great. I think that’s a great quality to have. It’s that when people aren’t taking time to rest, and I have this acronym I use SELF, so self-care, right? We just need to make sure that as we are going into the world as these ambitious people, aspiring to be our best, that we are implementing the necessary self-care so that we can be our best, so that we have the energy necessary to be high-performing in the short term and to be our most excellent self in the long term.

Because, high achievers, we’re busy, right? We have jam-packed schedules. So, I often start talking about self-care with my patients, and they’ll be like, “Dr. A, I don’t have time for self-care,” because they’re thinking, which a lot of people do.

It’s kind of this myth out there that self-care means needing to take two-hour long bubble baths or go on week-long meditation retreats or buy yourself expensive treats, and that’s really not what’s necessary and it’s not what I’m talking about. When I talk about self-care, it just means taking good care of yourself on a regular basis so that you can feel and be your best.

So, I have that acronym of SELF, so it’s nice and memorable, and again, the four science-based self-care fundamentals that people can prioritize to get their best bang for their buck. These people are busy. If I’m asking them, “Okay, you’re already overwhelmed, your overextended schedule, I’m now going to ask you to add in lengthy, complicated self-care behaviors.” Is that going to work? No, right? It’s just not, it’s not possible.

So, I want to keep self-care doable so that we keep doing it, right? So, I teach them the four self-care fundamentals and help them really problem-solve how to implement that within their lives, and that’s what’s going to fuel them so that they can feel their best and perform at their best. And I’m happy to go through that self-care if you want to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now we can’t resist an acronym, Mary. SELF, lay it on us.

Mary Anderson
Okay, SELF. So, S is for sleep, and I can’t stress enough just how essential sleep is. So, as adults, we want to aim for seven to nine hours of sleep a night, and we can just kind of know instinctually, right? It’s hard to feel and be our best if we’re exhausted all the time. But, also, research shows that there’s absolutely a negative impact to chronic lack of sleep. So, we know that it can negatively impact things like memory, attention, concentration, decision-making skills.

But, conversely, good night’s sleep, so, again, really getting that seven to nine hours of sleep a night can help promote things and have a positive impact on things like problem-solving skills, productivity, decision-making, so many amazing benefits. So, if you want to be a high achiever, you got to get that seven to nine hours of sleep a night. It’s one of the very first things I assess when my patients come in to see me, “How much sleep are you getting?” And if they’re chronically getting less than seven, they’re having a hard time.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Mary, maybe I’m getting too detailed here, but I’m a big lover of sleep. Are we thinking seven to nine hours of actually asleep as per your Oura ring or Fitbit or Garmin Watch wearable? Or seven to nine hours in the bed with your eyeballs closed?

Mary Anderson
Well, ideally, it actually means seven to nine hours of sleep, and I help people who do struggle with sleep. So, if they’re in bed trying to sleep and getting frustrated, we would actually say, you know, especially if it’s been, you know, people sometimes stay in bed 15-20 minutes, and they start getting frustrated that, “Oh, I’m not falling asleep, and now I have this big work meeting tomorrow.”

We actually encourage, “Get up. Get out of bed. Go do something really quieting. Just like make sure you’re staying in a dark room.” So, the issue is we don’t ever want to associate the bed with frustration, so it’s called stimulus control. So, you want to make sure the bed is just for sleep and sex only, and so if people are frustrated, “Get up and move out of bed.”

So, ideally, for what we call sleep efficiency, the ideal situation is when you are in bed, you go to bed. It might take a few minutes to go to sleep, but when your eyeballs are closed in bed, you’re sleeping. And then, once your eyeballs open, you get out of the bed. You’re not just staying there because, again, we want to really optimize that association cognitively, where the bed is actually where you’re going to be sleeping.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Mary Anderson
So, that’s kind of the technical explanation of it. But, yeah, seven to nine hours. It’s really helpful for people. So, that’s the S of SELF. It’s sleep. Seven to nine hours. E is for exercise, and I think we all know the importance of exercise for physical health, but also for mood and stress management. Exercise, any type of physical activity, and I encourage, keep it doable. Do something you like. So, walking is great.

I think sometimes people vastly underestimate the benefits of walking, but exercise is one of the most efficient, effective ways of decreasing cortisol, our stress hormone. So, if we can aim to get at least 30 minutes of some type of physical movement in our day, it’s so incredible for managing our stress and that means preventing burnout.

Burnout is really chronic stress that occurs over time that’s not being managed. So, the best prevention of burnout is to ensure that you’re managing your stress along the way. And, again, one of the best ways to do that is to get physical activity in. L is look forward, and this one is the one that surprises people sometimes because they haven’t heard of this one.

L is look forward to pleasant activities. So, our goal, our mission, if we choose to accept it, which I hope we do, is to aim for at least one pleasant activity a week, okay? And that’s because so many high achievers, they’re just work, home, work, home, work, home, and things can start to feel really stressful if we don’t have anything to look forward to.

So, just the anticipation of some something positive is powerful. So, keep it doable. Again, I encourage people, plan a meetup with a friend on a Saturday, book a massage, have concert tickets for Sunday, or even something even smaller, like, make sure you queue up your favorite Netflix episode, or plan to get your favorite takeout on Friday.

And then what you do is you just remind yourself during the week. Maybe Tuesday is going to be a long, stressful day. You know, you have meetings all day, back-to-back. You have deadlines coming up and you’re like, “You know what, on Saturday, I’m going to make sure that I,” whatever it is that you want to do.

Just plan something that you know you’re going to look forward to and that is not about productivity.

Because so many of us, high achievers, we love to be efficient and productive, but we need to give our brains a break and have something to look forward to that’s not just about productivity. It’s just about something pleasant, because, again, that provides a powerful mood boost throughout the week and then when you’re enjoying the activity.

So, SEL, and then F is fuel.

And here the aim is to fuel our mind and body with good nutrition and hydration. So, making sure we’re drinking enough water. Our cognitive performance really declines if we’re dehydrated at all, research has shown that. Also, we know nutrition is important, right? So, fruits, veggies, lean protein, of course, important for physical health, but I think sometimes people don’t recognize for cognitive performance, it’s so important.

And so, I’ll ask people like, “Have you ever tried to concentrate when you’re hungry or thirsty?” And people are like, “Oh, yeah, it’s really hard.” But just making the time during the day where I have so many of my patients, right now most of my patients are probably ladies, like in their 30s, high achieving, and they’re like early to mid-career, and so they are working hard and they’re like, “Dr. A, I don’t even have time for lunch.”

And I said, “We have to fuel your brain. You know, our brain runs on glucose. We need to have some kind of fuel.” So, I have them, you know, ideally, it’s real food, but if not, get a protein bar or even a protein shake. That one’s good, and like that’s another pro tip where if they’re like, “Well, I can’t eat at the meeting,” but they’re in back-to-back meetings, have a protein shake in a mug. No one’s going to know it’s a protein shake, but you’re getting nutrition and you’re getting that nourishment that you need to fuel yourself.

And also, for F, for fuel, I talk about fueling your mind with some quiet. How often do we unplug? As high achievers, we’re constantly kind of just inundated with information and barraged with problems to solve. So, fuel also means fuel your mind with quiet. So, that means spending some time in nature, doing some meditation. I use the Calm app. I listen to the Daily Jay with Jay Shetty every morning. Or journaling or just doing deep breathing. Just taking three deep breaths is shown to calm your nervous system so that you can feel better and you’re going to perform better when your nervous system is calmer.

So, SELF, sleep, exercise, look forward, and fuel. Those are the four science-based self-care fundamentals that if you prioritize those as a high achiever, that is going to absolutely help you function at your best, function optimally, so you can be a happy high achiever that you deserve to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And over on the self-talk side of things, I’m curious if you could share a couple things you’ve heard in the self-talk realm that are particularly memorable and haunting, as well as typical and highly illustrative of what we mean by problematic self-talk that’s happening all the time?

Mary Anderson
Absolutely. Okay. So, for this, I actually have a term that I’ve coined. It’s called the Troublesome Trifecta. So, the Troublesome Trifecta are the three most unhelpful types of thoughts. We call them cognitive distortions in psychology. So, the three most unhelpful cognitive distortions that so often plague high achievers, and they’re obstacles to enjoying their excellence.

And, really what they do, Pete, is they needlessly ratchet up the stress and anxiety in a challenging situation, or even an everyday situation. It needlessly ratchets up the stress and anxiety, makes it harder to feel and be our best.

So, there’s three that I’ve found are really challenging for high achievers, and it’s specific to high achievers with anxiety. I’ve found from well over a decade of helping clients, these are the three cognitive distortions that are going to be most problematic. First, all-or-nothing thinking. This is so central to high achievers. So, all-or-nothing thinking is thinking in extremes or absolutes. So, it’s, “I must be perfect or I’m a failure.” How I’ve heard it in something that was really haunting, when you said that, I was like, “Yep, I got you on this one.” I’m like, “I got one.” This idea from patients where they’ll say things like, “Dr. A, everyone needs to be totally blown away by my project.” That is so much pressure.

It’s so much pressure to think everyone needs to be totally blown away by my project. That puts so much pressure. I call all-or-nothing thinking pressure cooker thinking because it puts needless pressure. And then what happens, I notice with a lot of high achievers, they start really tying their self-worth to their achievements, appearance, or performance.

They think that they need to prove that they’re worthy or valuable as people, and it makes them terrified, Pete, like they’re terrified of making mistakes or ever looking less than the best. And that, really, perfectionism that’s rooted in the all-or-nothing thinking, it limits them. Perfectionism limits people because they’re terrified to make mistakes. They want to look flawless. So, what that means really concretely, they won’t go out and try new things because they’re not going to immediately, you know, look adept at them.

Also, there’s what I call perfectionism-fueled procrastination, which is they start making the presentation or project or to-do item so monstrous, such a Leviathan, you know, this behemoth in their mind that it needs to be perfect, that they get overwhelmed. Again, it’s that thought feeling, behaviors, they start thinking, “This needs to be perfect,” so they feel really overwhelmed, and then behaviorally, what happens is they procrastinate. They don’t even start because they’re so afraid that it won’t be exactly right or good enough.

And, again, they’re really tying their worth to the outcome, to their achievements. So, the solution for this one is it’s not just like acquiescing to like mediocrity and stagnation, because patients are like, “Great, you just want me to become lazy.” And I say, “No.” The solution, thankfully, is excellence, and this is the first of the eight essentials in my book, The Happy High Achiever. Strive for excellence, not perfection.

And what that means is it allows for both high achievement and our humanity. We’re going to strive for our best while also realizing we’re human. We will make mistakes. Of course, we can do the work so we’re not making careless mistakes, but we’re human. We’re going to have, you know, flaws and fumbles and we’re going to fail.

And to know, really know that we can learn from that, so we don’t have to be terrified, and most importantly, to know that any mistake you make never, in any way, detracts from your worth as a human being, that we have inherent, unconditional worth as humans. And if people really embrace that, if they accept that as truth, that’s when they’re going to feel and be their best because they’re not so afraid anymore.

So, that’s all-or-nothing thinking. That is huge. It is like rampant in the high achievers with anxiety population that I help. So, all-or-nothing thinking, I really try to raise patients’ awareness about that cognitive distortion so that they can catch it and conquer it.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a couple more examples of what that self-talk sounds like in terms of verbiage for all-or-nothing thinking? Because what I loved about that was, something like all-or-nothing thinking in terms of very broadly, like, “Oh, I either need to be perfect or I’m worthless,” right? So, okay. But then you put that note that’s in the context of a presentation, “This presentation needs to blow away everybody. It just needs to.” And so, I thought that was handy. So, we have all-or-nothing thinking applied in a specific context, and it’s still plenty troublesome. So, can we hear a couple more articulations of all-or-nothing thinking?

Mary Anderson
Absolutely. It can be things like, “I’ll never get this done,” “I’m always behind,” like anything where they’re really like just nitpicking themselves in this really extreme way. The other thing is even just they’ll say things like, “Well, now it’s ruined.” Like it’s this extreme kind of thinking, and it just makes you feel awful. So, if you’re like, “Now the product is ruined,” they feel awful and, behaviorally, it keeps them stuck. So, cognitive distortions make us feel worse and keep us stuck behaviorally.

And the other one is sometimes I’ll hear people say like, “I can’t do it, Dr. A. I can’t do it.” That’s very all or nothing. The truth, usually, it’s not that they can’t do it. So, they’ll be like, “Dr. A, I have this big presentation, or my boss wants me to speak at the meeting, and I’m going to have to speak for like 20 minutes in front of everyone. I can’t do it. I hate public speaking. I can’t do it. I’m going to stumble over my words.”

And their big kind of distortion that keeps them stuck is, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” But when we do what I call poking holes, so we ask questions to really question the veracity, the accuracy of their thought, which a cognitive distortion is based on faulty beliefs, assumptions, misconceptions. So, when we start to poke holes by asking questions, the truth usually is it’s not that they can’t do it, it’s that they don’t want to do it. They don’t like public speaking, but they can do it.

We can help them prepare and practice and then do their best. So, they can do it. Like, the can’t, it’s more so they don’t want to do it, but that we can find ways to help them be able to do what they need to do, and that’s called creating, I call it new and improved self-talk. It’s creating a balanced, helpful thought that moves people forward.

So, the all or nothing, can’t, never, totally ruined, anytime you hear that, absolutely, “And it was absolutely horrible.” Well, most things in life are not black and white, it’s gray. And so, that’s kind of the more practical application. It’s not just, “I have to be perfect or I’m a failure.” So, I think that’s a great distinction that you’ll find much more nuanced when you’re bringing that all or nothing to the workplace, and being able to, again, raise your awareness.

Because once we have awareness, then we can take action and start really, again, what I call poking holes and choosing to focus on a more helpful thought that moves us forward, not just keeps us stuck like that cognitive distortion well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that so much, and as we’re talking, I think I caught myself doing all-or-nothing thinking and poking holes just this morning driving to the office, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got a lot of meetings on my calendar today but I didn’t sleep very well. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” And it was like, “What exactly do you mean by make it?”

Mary Anderson
Awesome job, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
“You know, Am I going to, like, enter a coma? Am I going to off myself?” It’s like, “No, no.” And it’s like, “And I guess what I mean is, I don’t know if I’ll be able to show up to all of my appointments in an effective capacity,” or, “No, I guess what I really mean is, I don’t know, I won’t be able to be perfect in all of my appointments.” And it was just sort of that conversation, like, “Well, you won’t be. I mean, you might say something dumb. You might ask Dr. Mary Anderson the exact same question two times in a row, which is like, ‘Uh, dude, I just answered that.’ And then we’ll edit it out, and so no one will know,” and that’ll be that.

“I am capable of showing up, not falling asleep, and making some kind of valuable conversational contribution in each of the day’s meetings. So, if that’s making it, then I am going to make it. I’ll just feel kind of tired and grumpy sometimes and that’s okay.”

Mary Anderson
Oh, Pete, I love it. Yes. So, you poked holes and you helped move yourself forward. And you hit on a point that I talk a lot about with people and it’s so, so brilliant. So much wisdom what you just said is that you will make it through the day. It’s just this day, you know, if you didn’t sleep as well, or if you have lots of meetings, that this day is different in a way. And so, that’s the difference. You just highlighted like, no pun intended, you highlighted perfectly the difference between perfectionism and striving for excellence.

So, perfectionism is the unrealistic expectation that we will almost be like automatons and every single day our best will be exactly the same. Is that possible? No. So, again, excellence and striving for excellence means we acknowledge our humanity. So, we still strive to be our best, right? We’re striving to be our best while also acknowledging as humans, as human beings, our best will differ by the day. So, if you have a good night’s sleep versus, if I have people who are dealing with jet lag.

So, if I have consultants and they’re flying all over the world, I’m like, “We have to take into account, if you just did a 15-hour flight, we can’t expect you to necessarily be at cognitive processing speed the same as if you’re at home and you’re getting solid eight-hour sleep every night.” So, our best will differ by the day. Or if they’re dealing with like the flu or romantic breakups, there’s things that happen because we’re human.

And so, so when we allow for those natural inherent variation of day-to-day, things start to feel easier. And just like you did, you helped yourself in your self-talk, say like, “Okay, I can do this.” You know, basically that’s what I heard, it’s like, “Okay, it’s not going to be perfect, but I can do this. I can make it through the day.” And so, it’s going to help you feel better, and actually that is going to help you perform even better. It’s just talking to yourself in that way, like, you would a friend.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got the all-or-nothing thinking. What else?

Mary Anderson
Okay, so number two of the Troublesome Trifecta is jumping to conclusions, and this kind of comes in two flavors. The first one is negative fortune telling, and this is when we predict something negative will happen even though it hasn’t happened. And this one sounds like, “It’s not going to go well, Dr. A,” or like, “Oh, my presentation is going to be awful,” or, “The project’s going to flop.” So, they’re predicting negative, but it hasn’t happened yet. And so, what’s that going to do in terms of how they feel? It makes them feel overwhelmed, nervous, anxious, and then, behaviorally, it does not help them prepare and be their best.

The other type of jumping to conclusions is mind reading. I think we’ve all done this, when we assume we know what people are thinking about us. So, people will be like, “Oh, Dr. A, they think I’m stupid.” Or I’ll hear things, this is very common, like, “Oh, my gosh, I misspoke in a meeting and now everyone thinks I’m incompetent.” Or even things like, “Oh, if I ask a question…”

So, real high achievers who are trying to be perfect will almost say things like, “Well, if I ask a question, people will think I’m incompetent.” No, you’re asking for clarification on a question because you care so much. You want to know more about whatever the project is that they’re describing or whatever finding or outcome they’re describing. So, people assume that people think that they’re incompetent, which is a major fear of high achievers, to be deemed incompetent or foolish is a huge fear.

Also, it can just be things like where they assume an interpretation. So, say you’re at your desk, right? And again, so I’m having a lot of clients who are like early 30s, they’re sitting at their desk, their boss will walk past them. Now maybe the boss usually says, “Hi” in the morning. Well, this morning, the boss didn’t say hello. So, they’re going straight into their negative self-talk or unhelpful self-talk, that cognitive distortion, like, “Well, my boss must be mad at me.”

And so, imagine if you’re assuming your boss is mad at you, how are you going to feel? Not good, right? And they get really stressed. And then, behaviorally, what that can just concretely look like is maybe in the afternoon meeting, they don’t speak up, they’re like, “Well, I don’t know why he’s mad at me. I don’t want to give him any more reason to be.” So, you see how that all goes.

But what if instead, and this is the solution to the mind reading, stay curious. There could absolutely be alternate explanations. Maybe the boss is rushing to her office to hop on a Zoom meeting. Maybe she’s not feeling well. Maybe she’s just thinking about something. She’s kind of lost in thought and just didn’t say hi that morning.

And so, if you can stay curious and say, “Huh, you know, I don’t know why,” and just say the facts, right? Predict neutral, I call it. Predict neutral. “I don’t know why she didn’t say hi. You know, I’ll go talk to her later today and see what’s going on.” And if they say that to themselves, if they can stay curious and just stick with the facts, we call it evidence-based thinking, if they can stick with the facts, they’re going to feel at least better, not as stressed, and then it won’t negatively impact their performance, their behaviors.

Okay, so that’s negative fortune-telling and mind reading. Super helpful to just stay curious. It’s never helpful to negative fortune-tell and just predict something negative is going to happen, or to predict that people are thinking badly of you if there’s no evidence to support that. So, that is jumping to conclusions.

And then the last of the Troublesome Trifecta are “should” statements. Oh, “should statements,” these are so ubiquitous. These are the ubiquitous for high achievers, this idea of like, “Dr. A, I should be able to handle all of this. I shouldn’t be so stressed. What’s wrong with me? I should be doing more. I should be like them.”

So, this idea comes up too with the “shoulds” often because it’s so judgmental of ourselves, and it can be towards others or situations as well. But high achievers I work with often are very self-critical, and I call it the comparison trap. They fall into this comparison trap where they’re comparing themselves to others, you know, colleagues, friends, and they’re like, “Well, look at what that person’s achieved.” Often, honestly, social media can really fuel that comparison trap. So, it’s really unhelpful with the social.

Social media can be used for good, for sure. But if people are looking at it and feeling less than, it can really promote feelings of like inadequacy, because they’ll say, “Dr. A, my friend just got a promotion,” or, “Look at the award that they’re doing.” They’re like, “Wow, they just gave a presentation at that conference. Like, you know, I’ve been on a panel before, but I’ve never been like a keynote speaker before. Look at what they’re doing.”

And so, even if – it’s really interesting, Pete – even if, because these are, you know, brilliant people, they can articulate, like intellectually, they can say, “I know, social media is a curated highlight reel of just the best moments of people’s lives.” But still, it’s still impacting them in terms of how they’re feeling about themselves, and behaviorally, it doesn’t help them perform at their best. They end up usually feeling really stuck.

And so, a question I’ll ask here is, because they’ll say like, even things like body image, so like, “I should look like her. Like, look at how put together she looks at that conference. She doesn’t even look nervous.” And so, if they’re struggling with anxiety, oftentimes they’ll look at other people, and be like, “They don’t look anxious.” Well, who knows actually what’s going on inside of them?

But they’ll say like, “I shouldn’t look anxious. I shouldn’t be so stressed. What’s wrong with me?” And I’ll say to them, “Would you ever say that to your friend? Would you ever tell a friend, ‘You really shouldn’t look so stressed. You really shouldn’t feel anxious, and you should be more like that person?’ Would you ever say that to a friend?” And they’re like, “Well, no.” I’m like, “Well, why?” “Because it’s mean.” But people will say really like cruel self-talk to themselves.

So, that’s a quick pro tip. Just a litmus test for people. If you notice you’re feeling stressed or if you’re feeling badly about yourself, ask yourself, “What am I telling myself?” And then ask yourself, “Would I say that to a friend?” If the self-talk that you are saying to yourself you wouldn’t say to a friend, it’s not helpful. So, in that moment think about “What would you tell a friend in that moment?”

And that’s just a really simple concrete strategy but I can’t tell you how powerful that can be in helping shift someone’s mindset to something more balanced and encouraging, and that’s when we’re going to feel and be our best.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. And “should” is tricky because there’s an implied standard. I had a friend say, “I should be able to keep the floor clean, but I was having trouble, so I just got a vacuum robot.” And I thought, I almost want to dig into that but he was excited to tell me about the vacuum robot, so we didn’t get into it. But it’s like, “Hmm, where is the standard coming from?” you know, just as a curiosity.

But I do the same thing to myself, and I’m thinking it’s like sometimes the standards have some level of validity, and sometimes they’re just nonsense, like, “Says who and why, huh?” Like, “Okay, we can just reject that standard entirely.” But other times, I’m thinking, like, “I have danced on both sides of a body mass index of 25 to be “overweight,” and then not, which is funny, because it’s, like, almost exactly 200 pounds is overweight for me at my height.

But it’s funny, so I’ll think, “Oh, I should not be overweight. I should eat less, weigh less, whatever.” And so, what’s interesting is like the body mass index of 25, I mean, it is population level, like we can debate that, but it has some level of validity like, “Yeah, generally, you know, when body mass indexes are like above this, there’s kind of more health problems tend to occur population-wide.” So, it’s like it has some level of validity as opposed to something I should just like cast off, it’s like, “Well, forget the body mass index. Like, you do you, Pete. Love that body!”

But I think your point about talking to yourself like a friend is really helpful. It’s like you wouldn’t say, “Yeah, you shouldn’t be overweight.” It’s like, “No, hey, I think it’s good that you are considering your health and keeping an eye on things and following some best practices. So, yeah. I guess the weigh-in today might be an indicator that it would be wise to put a little more attention on this kind of thing.” And that is more how I might talk to a friend, as opposed to, “You shouldn’t be overweight.” And so, that’s handy in and of itself.

Mary Anderson
Awesome job, Pete. Like, awesome, awesome example, and this is one that I help a lot of people with. They’ll be like, “Dr. A, I should be able to fit in my workouts even though I have a jam-packed schedule, but I should exercise.” And to your point, there really are things that are helpful for people to do, but when we “should” ourselves, it’s like we’re shaming ourselves almost.

If someone’s trying to shame themselves to go to the gym, is that going to work long-term? No. They found it just really won’t, and it’ll make people feel horrible about themselves. So, what I talk about, I talk about this in The Happy High Achiever, is when you notice you’re “should-ing” yourself, really know that that’s going to actually keep you stuck. It’s not going to be helpful. So just saying like, “I shouldn’t weigh a certain amount,” doesn’t actually promote proactive problem-solving, it’s not going to help promote healthy goal-setting and move you forward.

So, what I help people do is I decision-tree it out, so I ask them, “This thing you’re ‘should-ing’ about to yourself, is it something you want to do? Is it something you think would be helpful to do? Or are you saying you must do it maybe because of external pressure?” So, with the gym, you know, “I should be able to fit in these workouts. I should exercise.”

And I’ll say, and especially if they’re like, “Well, I should go to the gym,” and I’ll say, “Do you want to go to the gym?” And they’re usually really candid. I appreciate the candor, they’re like, “I do not want to go to the gym, Dr. A.” I’m like, “Okay.” So, just saying, “I should go to the gym,” isn’t going to be effective because they don’t want to, and then they’re shaming themselves about it. That’s not actually going to effectively lead to enhanced performance and behavior or meeting the actual ultimate goal we want for ourselves.

So, what we need to do is say, “Okay.” Then again, curiosity of “Why are you saying this to yourself?” So, I’ll say, “Okay, if you don’t want to, do you think it would be helpful to?” And they’re like, “Yeah, I do. I think it would be helpful to exercise.” “Okay, right? So, now we’re getting to the reality of the situation. Well, why do you think it would be helpful?”

And they’re like, “Well, it really does help me physically feel better. I do notice it helps me manage my stress. Mood-wise, I do notice like my mood is better. Not maybe before I go to the gym, but after. I do feel good I went. I’ve never regretted going to the gym.” “Okay.” And then I’ll say, “Is there a must in there?” And they’re like, “No, there’s not.” The must category is more like societal kind of influence about certain things.

Usually, people, it’s something that they think would be helpful, right? So, like your friend, it would be helpful if he could keep his floor clean, but there’s probably circumstances or reasons why he can’t. So, he was super smart and got himself a robot. That’s awesome, right? And if we can figure out how to move ourselves forward without the shame, that’s going to help us feel better.

And we know if people are happier, they’ve shown in abundant research, if people are happier, it fuels success. So, when we’re happier, when we have a positive mindset, that’s actually going to enhance our productivity, our performance, our efficiency, our creativity, our resilience. So, it really benefits us to be happier first, because you deserve to be, because you’re a human and you deserve to be happy, but also as people in the workplace who are striving to be high achievers, really know that if you can speak to yourself in a way that helps you cultivate a positive mindset, that helps in a positive, like a happiness feeling, that is actually going to play out, that it’s going to enhance your performance.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good to know. Well, now could you share a favorite quote?

Mary Anderson
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another,” and it’s by William James.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Mary Anderson
Yeah, I love it. William James, considered the father of American psychology. And I love that it highlights, as humans, we’re going to have thousands of thoughts a day. And it’s an important point that I really try to underline for people. Our goal is not to try to never have a cognitive distortion. That would be an impossible goal. We are humans, we’re going to have helpful thoughts, unhelpful thoughts on a continuum of helpfulness, right? So, we can’t expect ourselves to never have an unhelpful thought.

But what we can do is equip ourselves with these strategies to raise our awareness of when we’re thinking a less helpful thought, so those cognitive distortions again, Troublesome Trifecta, we’re all-or-nothing thinking, jumping to conclusions, and “should” statements. Really raise your awareness so you can take action.

We want to catch and conquer those cognitive distortions, and we can choose to focus our attention on a more helpful thought. And when we choose to focus our attention on more helpful thought, we’re going to feel better and it’s going to help us move forward behaviorally. So that’s one of my very favorite quotes.

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

Mary Anderson
I challenge people, try to talk to yourself like you would a friend. If you’re in a hard moment, if it’s stressful, if you’re dealing with a challenging co-worker or boss, or you’re stressed out before a big meeting, really ask yourself, “What would I tell a friend in this moment?”

The more that we can speak to ourselves, so focusing our thoughts on a thought that something that we would tell a friend, it sounds simple, but again, the more you can be like a good friend to yourself, you are going to feel and be your best. So, that would be the call to action, really know that by speaking kindly to yourself, which sometimes high achievers balk at like, “Self-compassion, Dr. A., it’s not going to make me weak,” but I’m like, “Honestly, the more kind and compassionate you can be towards yourself, like you would a close dear friend, that is actually is what will help you excel. You will feel happier and you will be high achieving not only in the short term, but sustainably in the long term.”

And that’s the goal. We want to be happy high achievers, enjoying our excellence and putting our best out into the world. You can do it. I believe in everyone out there. You possess the power to be a happy high achiever. Start now. It’s worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Feb 24
0

1035: How to Create Stronger Connections by Disagreeing Better with Bob Bordone

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Bob Bordone discusses the importance of building conflict resilience and how it can help you navigate the tough conversations.

You’ll Learn

  1. How conflict resilience brings people together  
  2. The key to raising your conflict tolerance 
  3. How to face any conflict head-on in three easy steps 

About Bob 

Robert Bordone is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, former Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and founder of The Cambridge Negotiation Institute. He is co-author of Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes, and co-editor of The Handbook of Dispute Resolution. 

Resources Mentioned

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Bob Bordone Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bob, welcome.

Bob Bordone
Pete, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to talk about conflict resilience, how to negotiate without giving up or giving in. Could you kick us off with a riveting tale, no pressure, but extremely exciting, high-stakes negotiation that you were in the midst of? And tell us what went down.

Bob Bordone
Oh, man. You know, there are many, and I think one thing I want to say also is that anyone who’s in a negotiation, for them, it is high stakes and riveting. But the one that immediately comes to my mind is actually one that I mediated, and it was a family of means that had lots and lots of property to be divided between them, and went on for many months.

I mean, there are so many fascinating aspects to this, but, for me, what was most interesting was folks were, and I think this actually comes up a lot in conflict, folks who are fighting over things, but the truth of the matter is that most of the actual fight was about feelings and emotions and stories that people told about each other.

And so, a lot of the work, this may or may not surprise your listeners, was getting folks to actually put aside the fight around the things, to talk about what was actually going on. And once we were able to do that, it didn’t make the fight about every single property easy, but it made it much easier and helped us to bring it to an end that not only resolved it, but also actually helped this family stay together.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, Bob, you’re giving me a flashback. Wow, this was a weird day. But, one time, I remember I did a Myers-Briggs workshop for a group, and then someone said, “That was awesome. You should come do that for me and my co-authors because we’re kind of working on a book together, and this would be really great for our team dynamic.” But as I got into it, what became clear was, “Oh, your conflicts are way deeper than just these personality difference stuff.”

Bob Bordone
Oh, wow.

Pete Mockaitis
“And, like, I don’t even know if I’m the man for this.” But, yeah, there was some family and some history and some emotions and about being appreciated or taken advantage of, or, like, historically, and it’s, like, wow. And just talking about who’s going to write what chapters and how their personality will help or hinder certain sections of who’s writing what isn’t going to cut it.

So, tell me, how do you make that that pivot, that transition, because in their mind, it’s like, “Okay, this the personality guy that’s going to help us write our book.” In their mind, “Okay, you’re the mediator guy helping us divide the property.” And then I say, “Well, no, actually, let’s talk about how you feel your sibling treated you as a teenager.” It’s like, “What?”

Bob Bordone
Yeah, Pete, this is a great question. It sounds like you’re not a therapist. I’m also not a therapist, and also this isn’t therapy. At the same time, I will say that one of the things that I have come to really appreciate, you know, my background is in law. People do not come to lawyers for therapy, but it is often the case that what’s most convenient to talk about is who’s right and who’s wrong, and who gets the thing and what the legal rules are.

But so much of, I think, the work of really being good at conflict to ourself and also being good as a mediator, a facilitator of conflict is getting people to do some of their own work first. And we imagine, my co-author and I in writing our book, that people will come to it, and in their mind, they’ll be thinking about, like, “How do I deal with this unhinged person at work?” or, “Like, my mother-in-law or someone on I’m in conflict with a, whatever, at the local church?”

But the first step, I think, is always doing like an internal audit, because I think, often, part of what makes conflict hard, like, across a proverbial table is that we also often have lots of internal conflicts and ambivalence in ourself. And when we’re triggered in a particular conflict, it’s kind of bringing up what’s happening in that moment. And then a big narrative and our history and our family background, and “Do we need to unpack all of that, like, to figure out who gets what?” No, I don’t think so.

It’s also the case that, I think, the more self-aware we are of those dynamics, the quicker we can move from that, what we call kind of period of limbic irritability, where we’re kind of being emotional or maybe irrational or running.

Pete Mockaitis
Limbic irritability, I can go into that.

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I love that. I would like to take credit for limbic irritability, but that is very much my co-author, who brings a brain science piece to this book. And it’s really just this moment, or actually more than a moment, when someone says or does something in a conflict and the frontal lobe, like the rational part of our brain that makes good decisions, is overridden, it’s irritable, if you will, by chemicals that are coming from the amygdala.

And we know that it’s like the adrenaline and the cortisol, and that’s kind of making it harder to make really good decisions at the negotiation table. And so, the quicker we can name what’s going on to ourselves, and there’s actually research about this, we’re looking at fMRIs, the quicker people are able to kind of name it to tame it, naming those emotions and feelings and those stories, the quicker the limbic irritability actually goes down, and allows us to be more constructive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now this is sparking some remembrance of a nonviolent communication. Is that Marshall Rosenberg?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
In which he nails it, like, to be able to say, “I’m feeling angry because my need for respect doesn’t seem to be being met in this situation.” It does worlds for like, “Oh, okay. It’s no mystery, that’s what’s going on here.”

Bob Bordone
“That’s what’s going on.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I felt like when he said that, that was disrespectful to me, and so I got angry about it. But, I guess, I don’t need to let that impact my thousands of dollars of whatever negotiation here. I can just kind of let go of that,” or maybe say, “No, actually, that’s pretty important, given brand, or reputation, or whatever. That’s got to get addressed here. Let’s do it.”

Bob Bordone
What you just did there, Pete, is, I mean, so critical because it’s, first of all, it’s being able to name yourself, the feeling and the need of what’s not being met, and that is important. I mean, I don’t know any relationship, whether it’s a boss, supervisor, colleagues, parent, friend, you name it, that works well in the long term where one person isn’t feeling respected.

So, the real difficult conversation is “What does respect look like? And how can we change the dynamic?” So, to be able to name that and say, “That is important. What might be less important is whether I’m getting paid $3,000,” or you’ve moved your fence six feet to the right, or whatever it may be. That might be one way of conveying respect, and there might be 22 other ways. But until we actually get at what’s really the real rub, which is, “I feel disrespected here,” it’s going to be actually hard to even have a conversation about the right thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s dead on. And I’ve heard that there is some research, and, Bob, maybe you have it top of mind. When it comes to medical malpractice type situations, one of the biggest drivers is the extent to which the physician is being caring and honest and helpful as they go and say, “Hey, so this is what happened, and we’re so sorry. Humans make mistakes, and we made a mistake, and here’s what we’re going to do to fix it,” as opposed to silence, lawyer up, be difficult. It’s, like, that actually is a worse approach for mitigating liabilities and losses.

Bob Bordone
Amen, yeah. And this research you’re talking about is really kind of fascinating because what it shows is that people are more likely to want to sue in a situation where they don’t feel that the doctor has been willing to kind of has actually met those interests in listening and sharing their contribution, where they’re just in a defensive stance, than if actually there is that listening and that kind of meeting the interests of feeling hurt, and even apology.

And I think where it’s really interesting from a conflict perspective, and someone who is also trained in law, is there’s this interesting sweet spot of, if people can just actually be honest, like doctors make mistakes, that causes damages for sure that need to be compensated. But the moment of acknowledging that goes a long way to me not wanting to destroy you.

I might need another surgery, and, yeah, I kind of expect the hospital to pay for that. But, like, I don’t need to destroy you. But that defensiveness, and what’s weird is law would come in and say, “Don’t say anything because if you say anything, that will be used against you and then we’re doomed.” And so, what ends up happening is we miss an opportunity there. We miss an opportunity that I think is unfortunate from a conflict perspective.

And, I mean, here we’re obviously talking about medical error, but on a day-to-day basis in, like, relationships, I think similar dynamics come up where the act of apology or the act of sharing some vulnerability doesn’t happen because we’re afraid that the other person is going to take advantage of us. Both sides fearing that do the kind of least good thing, the thing that’s like least in their actual character, and then they tell a story about how terrible the other person is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so coming back to your situation with the wealthy family, you noticed, “Hey, there’s some emotional history stuff going on here,” what happened next?

Bob Bordone
And so, just a piece of that, it is not to relitigate that, for sure, and one of the, I think, core things we talk about in our book, it’s not even to get people on the same page. But the process, I think, of just effectively listening to each other’s stories and experiences, having it validated as, “This is how you experienced,” just can go a long way in, I think, changing the narrative and, particularly, like changing the idea of what might be possible.

Like, another domain of work where I’ve done this is working across lines of difference with, like, Israeli and Palestinian young people. It’s not typically the case that ongoing dialogue across a line of difference changes people’s view on the substantive issue, but it powerfully changes their view on the way they tell the story about the other person, and that’s really valuable for what they might be able to do going forward.

And even if they can’t do all that much, being able to say that, “This is a three-dimensional complicated, interesting person that I can identify with,” is better than “They’re the enemy/subhuman/fill-in-the-blank,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so with your book, it’s called Conflict Resilience, what does that mean?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, so what we want to make really clear that it’s not a fancy word or a catchy word for conflict resolution, but it’s actually quite different. Conflict resilience is really the kind of capacity to sit with the discomfort of disagreement, meaning that it’s both this ability to listen very well and effectively and generously, and also assert your own viewpoint authentically, non-avoidantly, but in a way that increases the chances that the other side could hear you. And it’s independent of whether or not we might be able to actually problem-solve, agree, or find common ground.

So, in a sense, it’s a little bit like emotional intelligence. It’s a set of skills, but it’s like a capacity or a quality that, I think, in this case, is prerequisite to being able to do conflict resolution or negotiate or mediate. Because if you can’t stand the heat of the fire of the conflict, then you really can’t resolve it. You can run away from it but you can’t resolve it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, you’re sparking some memories for me. I remember I was dealing with an issue and I was chatting with a lawyer, and he said, very matter of fact, “Well, either they give that money back or you sue them.” I was like, “Oh, just like that, huh?”

And then someone else was talking about the same issues, like, “You know, unfortunately, it sounds like, I know it’s a huge pain, but if they don’t play ball, I think you’re going to have to actually, you know, contact a lawyer and do that whole thing, file a complaint with the county, all that stuff.” And it was so noticing how that juxtaposition there, two people talking about the same thing, one just like, “Hey, whatever, sue. No big deal.” And the other one is like, “Oh, yeah, it’s got to be a real big thing.”

And I think that that is reflective of personality or emotional capacity or something, because to one person, it’s no big deal, and to the other, it’s, “Oh, man,” a huge ordeal is about to unfold.

Bob Bordone
Absolutely. One of the things we talk about in our book is kind of these five Fs: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. I know I said that very fast. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. But they’re kind of like our, as you were saying, Pete, like default tendencies that we have in that moment when we’re feeling conflict. And the brain, the way it’s kind of set up is, in the moment it feels this discomfort, it will go to the thing that relieves it most quickly.

And for some of us, it might be fighting. It feels like we’re doing something. And others, it might be fawning, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. Oh, please forgive me,” or fester, I kind of just kind of sit there and stew quietly, or flee. And the truth of the matter is, though, I think that if we can become more aware of that default, and it does differ, as you say, for different people, it gives us this moment of opportunity to choose something that might be more purposeful, that might actually advance our goal. And it might be very different from you either sue them or avoid it.

I think the other thing, Pete, that you’re bringing up, and tell me if this seems right to you, is that just our individual experience of what might register as conflict just varies. So, just an example with my co-author, since you were asking about co-authors earlier, right? I’m somebody, I’m trained in law, I love to get into a policy discussion, right? We can, you know, whatever. You pick something, Pete, I’ll, like, get into it with you, and it’ll be super fun.

I’ll be like, “I had so much fun, it was great.” My co-author might be like, “Oh, my gosh, Bob’s really upset.” Like, sleepless nights. Like, “Is our friendship in danger?” And I’m thinking that was fun. And so, there’s just a way in which what each of us registers as conflict, so we call this conflict tolerance, in our book, varies.

But the problem is if we if we’re not able to even have the conversation about “How do we handle that difference?” I will come away thinking “This person just caves in all the time. They’re obviously not that smart. They clearly agree with me.” And the other person comes away thinking I’m aggressive, a bully, you know, fill in the blank.

And so, part of it is how do we identify these differences? How do we find ways to talk about how to handle even the difference in which we experience conflict?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, lay it on us. How do we do that?

Bob Bordone
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think, so part of it is doing some work around your own, understanding your own defaults. So, with around the idea of conflict tolerance, we actually break it into two pieces, what we call conflict recognition and conflict holding. So, recognition is, “What is the moment at which I would describe our interaction as conflict?” Holding is, “Once I feel like I’m in a conflict, what is my ability to stay with it versus going into one of the defaults?”

So, doing some self-assessment, I think, is really important. I think the second piece is if I’m in kind of an ongoing interaction with, whatever, a sibling, where I continue to see, like, a shutdown around an issue. Instead of bringing the issue back up, there’s an interesting conversation to say, “Can we talk about what is happening for each of us when this issue pops up? Like, how do you experience a conversation? How do I experience a conversation?”

In other words, we’re going meta on the dynamic. And that may sound, I mean, to some listeners like, “Oh, my gosh, who’s going to do this? And are you going to do this every day, all the time?” No. But if it’s the kind of conflict issue that keeps you up at night, that’s tearing at a relationship that matters to you, that kind of you’re spending a lot of time around a proverbial water cooler or on a Slack channel, going on and on about how horrible they are, yeah, well that’s the time to actually engage this.

And that’s what people tend to avoid, and that’s what we hope our book can really be helpful with because that’s the productive thing we need to do better.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I’m thinking that, for any naysayers out there, I think that this is a tremendously valuable activity. Yes, not every day, and with not every issue. But because it really can be quite illuminating in terms of it registers for one person, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re enraged. You think I’m a terrible husband.” Like, whatever.

It’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, not at all. I just kind of preferred that we do it this way. I just kind of like it a little better. That’s all I was asking.” It was like, “Oh, really? Because it felt like judgy or whatever,” fill the blank. And so, I think those conversations are valuable. I think maybe some level of avoidance, resistance that we feel towards that is just straight up fear. Like, we’re worried the other person’s going to be like, “Oh, you softy. Come on. You always make me the bad guy.” Like, whatever.

It’s like there are, it feels as though that conversation could go very wrong. So, Bob, tell us what’s our risk prognosis and how do we do it well?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I love that you’re bringing this up, right? So, I feel like there’s some good news and bad news in what I’m going to say here. The good news is that my own experience is, often the fear of what might go wrong in one of these conversations is like way more destabilizing, exhausting, and tiring than the actual conversation itself. I mean, it just is.

So frequently, I’ll work with somebody or coach somebody and they’ve practiced and they’re worried, and then after they do it, they’re like, “You know, I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but, like, I’m so glad I did it. Or it helped advance the ball. We didn’t get to Z. We got to F. But since we were at A, getting to F was like progress.”

But the other thing, here’s the bad news, because, I mean, I think there is bad news, and I think this does have people hold back. There is a chance, it’s like whenever you change the script and do something different, there is a chance you’ll get the worst possible answer. There is a chance that if you put yourself out there in a somewhat more vulnerable way to engage something that matters to you, in a way that’s really inviting to the other side, that they might be like, “Meh, I don’t really care.” “Meh, sounds like it’s your problem.” And, therefore, we avoid it.

We avoid it in service of the relationship, but the reality is that, if they really were to do that, in most cases, I’d rather know that now than engage in some kind of farce with you or wait for the slow kill on the relationship. And so, does that makes sense? Or what do you think about that?

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s resonating. And, I mean, you might give him a second chance.

Bob Bordone
You might give him a second chance, oh, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if they give you blowoff, it’s like, “Hey, you know, last week, I brought up this and you said that, but this is actually pretty important to me so I’d love to schedule time to dig into it.” And you might get a second blowoff, like, “No, I don’t think this is worth a second of our company time to dig into.” Well, you’re right, I think you know, it’s like, “Okay, this relationship will never be great. We may be able to endure to put our heads down and get something done, but we’re never going to have a trusting, excellent, world-class collaboration, so long as they are this way.”

And, it is, it’s good to know that earlier, rather than to be blindsided six years down the road, it’s like, “Oh, I thought we were really simpatico, but, no, we’re not at all.”

Bob Bordone
Yeah. Amen to that, right? And one of the things that I really do think, I mean, you touched on something when you said, “Give it a second chance,” right? For sure. And also, later in our book, we kind of offer some of our, hopefully, useful advice on kind of “How do you make this decision to have the conversation and when to not have the conversation, when it’s time to, like, exit in some way?”

And our overriding argument is that we tend to exit too quickly. We tend to go to that convenient, “Let’s just tell a negative story about them, we’re just the best it could be.” But there are some times when either it’s time to exit, or like, I mean, if it’s your boss and you like, you otherwise like the job, you’re going to have to figure out how to manage that relationship.

But, one, I think, important diagnostic part of that, it can’t be whether the other person in the conversation is going to be skillful, because people, as they don’t have some training in it, maybe they’re just not that skillful for whatever set of reasons. But I think you can say, “Can the person at least come to this with a degree of goodwill? Like, do I have to 100% trust them?” I don’t think so. But do you have to feel like they can enter into this with at least some good faith? That’s probably enough, at least to try. At least to try a few times.

And one of the things I always say is, I can’t ultimately change them, but before I make that decision of “This is not going to be the world-class collaboration that I hope for,” I want to have done all that’s in my power. I want to be as effectively assertive and as curious as I could have been. I want to make the conversation as inviting and as kind, but also as authentic as I could have been.

Then, you make your decision based on, after that. I mean, if it’s your sister, you’re probably going to have to have some relationship with your sister. If it’s your boss, well, for the time being, you might, but you might decide it’s time to look for a new work, right? If it’s like your golfing buddy and it’s so bad, you might be like, “Yeah, I’m going to find a new golfing buddy.” You make that decision depending on also what’s in your power to influence.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Now you’ve got a three-step framework: name, explore, commit. Can you walk us through this?

Bob Bordone
Sure. So, the name piece is, broadly speaking, what we would say is the internal work, meaning understanding what are the different internal kind of conflicts or stories that are perhaps making it hard for you to engage the conflict or making you tend to be very argumentative or fighting. So, name is, at both a kind of emotional level, a substantive level, and relational level, what are your interests? What are the kinds of default patterns you have? It’s a lot of self-work.

And we kind of break that into, we call mirror work, which is doing some of the self-examination of your own kind of history and story in this particular conflict. And then the next piece is the chair work, what we really call bringing into some integration, even internal stories or conflicts, and kind of naming them, giving them some voice.

So, just to give you an example, I think, that’d probably be most helpful. If there’s something you want to raise with, let’s just say, your boss, it’s kind of like, “Well, what are the reasons why it’s important to raise this? And what are the reasons why I’d rather not?” And, actually, like giving, naming all of those reasons.

And the reason why that’s worth doing is it’s often, and then practicing giving them voice, is because, often, once we get into the room, we tend to only have one or two of the sides actually get voiced. And the next piece, which is what we call the table work, is actually representing all of the sides in the conversation. So, that’s name.

Explore, I would say, is probably the most at-the-table pieces. So, what does it look like to actually open up and understand, like, “What are the interests of the other side? What is the story they’re telling?” So, a lot of listening, “How am I assertive about my views or needs?” And then the third piece, is commit. And with commit, there’s kind of two pieces in there.

One, we’ve kind of referenced this already, Pete, which is “How do I decide whether, if it’s a negotiation, like, is what’s being offered just something I want to say yes to?” If it’s an ongoing, let’s just say, conversation about, I don’t know, a political difference or a strategic difference, like, I don’t know, “How are we going to agree on an advertising budget for the next quarter?” do I want to kind of continue to engage on this, or do I just think it’s not worth it anymore?

And then, lastly, just from a relational interest, kind of as we were saying, is this a relationship that I might say, “I want to continue in this relationship, but it can only go so deep”? Or, “Gosh, we did something here, we did some work here that was pretty transformational, and we’re actually closer.” Or, like, “Now that I’ve learned what I’ve learned, it’s time to kind of move on.” So, there’s that piece.

But the other piece we really talk about in the commit is, “How can we try to build organizational structures in place?” Like, if we’re a leader, “How do I commit to building an environment that actually encourages people to be conflict resilient, meaning that encourages people to kind of come forward with their different viewpoints, that isn’t a cancel culture, that isn’t a, ‘If you disagree with us or me, you’re a troublemaker’?” So, we kind of offer some advice on how to build a greenhouse that helps people be more conflict resilient.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, I’d love to hear, let’s talk about the internal stuff, mirror work, in terms of, if we’re generally averse to conflict, it makes our necks feel uncomfortable, and there’s a lot of fear, trepidation, whatever, like, across the board, numerous relationships, numerous issues, any pro tips for how we can, generally, get better at this stuff?

Bob Bordone
Yes. So, part of in a situation where someone finds themselves more avoidant than engaging, my coaching on this would be like, “Okay, so let’s make a list of maybe what are the fears you have about engaging this?” and they’ll come up with whatever the reasons are, “It’ll go poorly, the person will get hurt, I’ll get hurt, it’s not worth it. Nothing will change. It’s not that important to me anyway,” blah blah blah. I always love that last one, “It’s not that important to me anyway.”

It’s like, “Okay, you’re paying me to spend time on this, but it’s not that important. I don’t even believe it, but, okay, let’s make that list.” But then, and this is the real coaching piece, “Why is it important? Why might you want to actually raise this?” And they’ll say, “Well, maybe something will change.” “Well, if we don’t, the relationship’s going to end up in the trash, anyway.” “Well, it’ll be hard to work with them,” “Well, it brings morale down,” “Well, how can they get better if I haven’t told them?” They make a list of all those things.

That work, just having them look at those two things, and then be persuaded, not that the first piece is not possible, but that the second piece is as legitimate and important as the first. And so, the kind of work there is embracing, this is the kind of mirror work, both of these are true. And if your tendency is that you tend to let all the fear side win the day, the side of you you’re letting down is all of the reasons why it’s really important to have a conversation, and you can’t do that consistently over time and actually be authentic and connected in relationship with anybody because they’re only seeing one piece of you.

They’re not seeing you. You’re letting something down here. So, if you’re worried about disappointing them, you’re actually disappointing a part of yourself. So, it’s interesting, some of this, I don’t know if any of your listeners, or you, Pete, have any interest in internal family systems, but some of this actually draws on internal family systems work, identifying, “What are the parts of us? Then how do we find ways to not evaluate or silence or overvalue certain parts and undervalue others? But each of these is useful and has served us.”

But when we consistently silence one because of fear, we are losing something, and I think the most important thing is we’re losing the possibility for connection. The possibility for actually a better working relationship. So, we think we’re doing something in service of preserving something, but we’re just setting up the slow kill.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, maybe I’m a dork who majored in finance, and I am. But that makes me think about risk and money. It’s like you could take zero risk and have your money hang out in a checking account. But then there’s the slow kill of its value from inflation. Or you can take some risk, put it in the stock market. Like, it could go down. It absolutely could. But over the long term, historically, things work out a lot better for you if you park it there as opposed to a checking account.

And I think about that, similarly with these conversations, it’s like, you could play it safe and never raise it, and it’s true, you won’t be rocking the boat. You will not cause the potential damage that conversation could cause, but you will also not unlock the greatness that could be possible within this relationship.

And I have been delighted by how, like, sometimes relationships can go into amazing places when you say exactly what’s up. I remember my friend, Anne, in college, and I was maybe a little bit less guarded and flippant, say whatever was on my mind at the time before being chastened by things that went wrong, conversationally.

But I remember she said she was dating this guy, and I said, “Oh, yeah, I know him. You know, he’s funny. He’s funny, but sometimes I wonder, does he ever kind of occasionally strike you as maybe a little bit of an asshole?” And she laughed, and said, “Yes, he does! We’ve been trying to work on that, and we’re probably breaking up soon.”

Bob Bordone
Oh, my gosh!

Pete Mockaitis
And so, like, I had just met her, like, “Oh, I haven’t seen you around,” but then that immediately catapulted to, like, “This guy, Pete, like, he’ll share what he thinks, and so I trust him.” And then I went to great places and, likewise, I’ve heard of therapists who challenge powerful executives in their sessions, it’s like, “Nobody else talks to me this way,” and because of that, there’s just tremendous trust.

Bob Bordone
Tremendous trust, yeah. You know, one of the things I like to do, Pete, I used to not do this. I’m somebody who kind of came to this work largely because I think I was really bad and conflict-averse and wanted to learn more. But one of the things I do now, I think people will find this surprising, it’s I’m supposed to be a mediator, right, but people will be in a room and someone’s saying X and someone’s saying Y and someone’s saying Z and then someone’s like, “Oh, I’m really glad we’re aligned,” or like, “I hear you saying this.”

And I’m listening, I’m thinking, like, “There’s literally no alignment here. What are these people talking about?” And the convenient thing to do would be like to nod my head and say, “Oh, I’m so delighted we’re all in agreement,” and, like, walk out. But I tend to do now, and I used to not do this, I used to be a head-nodder.

But I actually think it’s so much more valuable to be like, “You know, I don’t want to be troublesome, but I actually don’t think you’re all saying the same thing. I think you’re saying really different things. And I think should dig in on that because, otherwise, we’re missing something important here.” And they’d be like, “Oh, I guess you’re right.”

But it goes back to that, like, yeah, as soon as you do something like that with somebody, I just think there’s a level of realness, and it can be done in a way that’s not mean-spirited, that’s not cruel, and it should be done assertively, like, “From what I’m observing, you know, whatever, from what I’m observing, like, this guy sometimes seems like a little bit of an asshole to me. I’m surprised and interested what you like about him,” or whatever, you know. “I’m glad you like him. I don’t want to take that away. I just don’t see it.”

I mean, you know, am I going to do that? Does it make sense to do that with someone’s spouse of 50 years? No. But I think here’s the other thing, Pete, because, one of the things, like, sometimes I worry that our message is that “You should be doing this always and everywhere all the time,” and that’s just not what we’re saying. What we are saying is this skill, this conflict resilience skill, if you want to be a successful leader, if you want to grow professionally and earn people’s respect, it has to be in your toolkit to be deployed at the right times and in the right space.

But to somehow think, “I am going to make it by avoiding everything, or taking out my sword and lopping everyone’s heads off in my path,” I mean, you could get so far, but at some point, that only works for people who don’t care at all about relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and soon you run out of heads. It’s like, “I’ve lopped off all the heads.” Because like fill in the blank in terms of like if you’re looking within any community, right, you know, people talk. And so, it’s like if we’re talking about real estate agents in the Nashville area, it’s like, “Okay, lop off all the heads. None of them want to work for you anymore.” Or, top engineering talent in Silicon Valley. It’s like, “All right, I’ve lopped them all off.”

Bob Bordone
Yeah, that’s right, and, like, no one wants to work with you, you have no trust. And then, what ends up happening, now we’re kind of in just plain negotiation land. It’s like somebody who, let’s just say, there’s 10 points of value to be divided, they’re consistently getting seven, and they’re going around, saying “I won, I won. Look how good.” And, like, they are except for the fact that, with some more skill and an ability to actually handle conflict better, that 10-point pie could be 20 points or 100 points or 200 points.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Bob Bordone
And if it’s 20 and you’re getting 10 out of 20, you ain’t beating them. It’s just a 10 is greater than seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m right with you there, in terms of the creative, collaborative, win-wins. That’s just like my default. And it’s funny, like, you cannot even begin to play that game until the emotions, the limbic irritability, is soothed in terms of like, “All right, let’s see what we can figure out together.” It’s just impossible, in my opinion, to get there when they’re like, “Bob is a jerk. I hate him, and I’m going to make him pay. And also, we’re going to find a creative, collaborative solution together.”

Bob Bordone
Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
No. No.

Bob Bordone
It just won’t work, right? And the other interesting thing about just the brain science aspect of that is when you are in that emotional refractory period, that limbic irritability time, your ability to actually, at a cognitive level, identify the interests of the other party goes down. When people are made to feel anxious, they think, “Oh, let’s make them feel anxious and then we’ll get more concessions,” it leads to quicker exit, lower trust, lower joint gains, lower interest in working together again.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, and your reputation takes a hit too.

Bob Bordone
Yeah, and your reputation.

Pete Mockaitis
Your counterparties talking smack about you.

Bob Bordone
Yeah. So, it’s incredibly short-term thinking. But again, like thinking about that kind of existential brain of ours, that’s like going back to whatever thousands of years when you bang into me on a dark path and you’ve got to make a quick decision of whether I meant it or not. And if you decide I meant it and you’re wrong, you still take your club out and beat me and you’re alive and I’m dead. If you decide I didn’t mean it and you’re wrong, I take my club out and beat you and you’re dead, I’m alive right.

I mean, there’s a way in which the brain is, like, it’s not all washed up. It’s just that most of the things, like, this is we’re talking about conflict resilience. We’re not talking about existential. This is like your boss again, this your direct report, or your sister, or your brother, or like someone, or the real estate agent also goes to the Chamber of Commerce, and has to have a series of ongoing relationships.

So, you have to have a better command of yourself and a set of skills that are not going to put you into this, again, the 5Fs that are going to just make things worse for you, maybe in the short term, but certainly in the long term.

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

Bob Bordone
No, except this has been fun. I love it, I love it. So, thank you, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Me, too. Let’s hear about a favorite quote.

Bob Bordone
So, my favorite quote is a scriptural quote, actually, from Micah, and it is, “This and only this does the LORD require of you, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty good and that’ll do it.

Bob Bordone
I hope that some of the principles in the book honor that.

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

Bob Bordone
For me, I mean, I’m a big fan of all of, like, Daniel Kahneman’s stuff. I particularly love some of the research on self-serving biases, and also on fundamental attribution error. It’s like a fancy word, but fundamental attribution error, basically, the idea that, “If something goes well, it’s because I’m obviously brilliant. And if something goes poorly, it’s because they’re jerks in any way Mercury was in retrograde.”

And so, that tendency to not have a learning loop, I think, if more of us were aware of that, I think it would probably lead to a better conflict handling.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Bob Bordone
My favorite book is actually a fiction book. I mean, there’s lots of negotiations in it. It’s just really fun. I love “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Bob, this might blow your mind, it did me. Did you know that the story of “The Count of Monte Cristo” is based on a real human’s life?

Bob Bordone
I did not know that.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “That’s too crazy. That’s too crazy. No way, it’s a real human.” And, of course, there’s embellishments and literary, you know, whatever. But like, there was a dude who was in prison who escaped and exacted vengeance.

Bob Bordone
I did not know that. I like books that really make you feel like you’re transported to a different time. But another one that I really like is The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton because it’s another book that makes you feel like, in that case, that you’re like in high society, at this particular period in New York City. Anyway, so those are the books that really kind of draw me in.

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

Bob Bordone
Ah, favorite tool, which is actually in our book, it’s called The Ladder of Inference, developed by Chris Argyris and Don Schoen, who are of Harvard Business School. It’s a wonderful tool for all sorts of things, but particularly if you’re in a conflict situation, when somebody says something like, for example, “You really messed up here.”

That, we would say that the top of the ladder, it is a conclusion. It is drawn by, at the bottom of the ladder, an ocean of information or data that we don’t all have access to, we only have some access to some. And then each of us picks some piece of information from that ocean, that’s a piece of data in an ocean, and then we put a story on it, our reasoning and inferences, and that’s how we reach the conclusion.

What the ladder enables you to do is have a much more productive conversation where instead of me saying “You messed up,” and you saying “No, I didn’t,” we can walk down each other’s ladders, talk about data, talk about reasoning. Sometimes it shifts opinions. Even if it doesn’t, it’s just a much more edifying conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Bob Bordone
You know what? What I’m going to do when I get off this call, a daily 45-minute walk with my golden retriever, Rosie.

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

Bob Bordone
So, not to be redundant, but I will be, which is that just the power of the first no makes all of the other yeses actually meaningful. So, to the degree you are in a conflict and you’re avoiding and you’re trying to be nice-y-nice, etc., and you think you’re serving the relationship, finding a way to kind of say, “You know, I pretty much don’t agree with this part, or I have concerns about this,” that is deeply connecting because it, first of all, makes all the yeses seem sincere and it’s an opportunity for connection.

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

Bob Bordone
Yeah, so you could learn more about our book and, hopefully, buy it at our website, which is ConflictResilienceBook.com. That’s ConflictResilienceBook.com. You could also learn more about me and my website, which is BobBordone.com.

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

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I would just say, if you have any kind of difficult conversation or conflict that keeps you up at night, that’s worth engaging and not avoiding. And if do it well, no matter how it ultimately turns out, I think you’ll feel better about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bob, thank you.

Bob Bordone
Pete, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Feb 20
0

1034: Simple Shifts that Form Exceptional Teams with Keith Ferrazzi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Keith Ferrazzi shares the simple but powerful shifts all teams can make to elevate performance.

You’ll Learn

  1. What’s holding most teams back
  2. How to improve collaboration with fewer meetings 
  3. The practices that turn team members into co-leaders 

About Keith 

Keith Ferrazzi is an entrepreneur and global thought leader in high-performing teams and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and its Research Institute. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Who’s Got Your Back and bestsellers like Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, and Competing in the New World of Work. He is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, and other many other publications.

Resources Mentioned

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Keith Ferrazzi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back!

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, I’m excited about the call. And I love the name, that’s my father’s name. So anytime I get a chance to talk to a Peter, a Pete, or a Pietro, it always brings a smile to my face.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, Pietro. A Pietro Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi
Si, è vero. È vero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, we already got some life, some energy in this. That’s good. Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and I am going to accidentally say Never Eat Alone, because I read your book back in the day.

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s okay. That’s what most people know me from 20 years ago. This is the anniversary, 20th year anniversary of Never Eat Alone, the book that redefined “How do you build relationships that open doors of opportunity for yourself?” And now, 20 years later, “How do you build the kind of relationships among the team that you work with that won’t let you fail?”

Pete Mockaitis
And just for funsies, we were talking before we pushed record, I want to know, Keith, are you still a conference commando?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, I just came back from Davos, which is probably the holy grail of conferences, and I had the blessing of facilitating a roundtable of the CEO of two of the largest high-tech companies, the CEO of one of the biggest banks, the head of AI for Salesforce. What an amazing place, and it was all utilizing the simple practices of “How do you deepen and build relationships in this crazy world we’re living in today?”

And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, the book Never Eat Alone was so successful because it was like eating popcorn. “Try this, do this, 15 tips to be a conference commando.” And this new book is the same way, 10 shifts from traditional mediocre leadership to having your team step up in high-performing teamships, and 10 shifts and a bunch of little practices and it’s not that difficult. You just got to pick up and start trying some of the practices.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I know your style, your practices are based on a boatload of underlying research. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and any startling discoveries that made you go, “Whoa!” when you saw it?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, 3,000 teams in our dataset. And what do you think the average team’s courage and candor is among a team on a scale of zero to five? What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
Two point one.

Keith Ferrazzi
You read the book. Actually, it ranges between 1.8 and 2.2, and that is just shocking. How we could be sitting in collaborative dialogues and people aren’t courageous enough or transparent enough or desirous enough to make each other successful to be telling the truth in the room? That’s just sh**. And the average team is mediocre at best. And what I just kept discovering time and time again was how mediocre the average team was.

Now, there are some teams that crush it. Amazon’s team does an extraordinary job on many of the most important shifts of a high-performing team, and so do a lot of the young unicorns that are coming out of Stanford, disrupting large corporations. These companies are doing incredibly well. But the average entrepreneur and the average big-company executives, pretty mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, courage and candor at a two-ish level, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice as compared to a dream state of a five?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, okay, we’re having a conversation about the lagging sales numbers this quarter, and we have a polite dialogue in the room, and then we leave the room, and the real talk happens, and that happens all the time. Or worse, people are DM-ing privately during the meeting, saying the sh** that they won’t say out in the meeting itself.

Keith Ferrazzi
So that’s in the average state. In the powerful state, and I’ll use a company that, really, is a lovely place to work, it’s called e.l.f. Beauty. At e.l.f. Beauty, everybody agrees when they’re hired that “We will have the fastest, most compelling growth as professionals while we’re working here. And a part of that is a commitment that we will always tell each other the truth. We’ll never let each other fail. It’s not throwing each other under the bus. It’s assuring that everybody is successful. We cross the finish line together,” all those kinds of words.

And as a result, in a meeting, somebody will say, “We’re lagging sales numbers,” and the head of sales will say, “You know it’s been very difficult to get the kind of leads we need for marketing because of our lagging competency in digital marketing.” And then the head of marketing will say, “You know, like I appreciate that. We’re down a gal that we used to have in that particular role, and it is an issue. But let’s talk about how we could reallocate resources.” And then the head of HR will pop in and say, “You know what? We’ve got an analytics person over there we could move.”

So, it’s that kind of a collaborative dialogue. Now, all of those one-off conversations would have happened in DMs or behind the scenes, and they wouldn’t have happened from a sense of what I call co-elevation, where people are collaborating in service of a mission, pushing each other higher. Instead, it would have been done in a more eviscerating-ly, kind of passive-aggressive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like whiny, defensive, “Can you believe so-and-so?”

Keith Ferrazzi
Pointing fingers, and that just happens. I am so shocked by the most prominent businesses in the world. So, I have another one. I’m not going to say the name of the company, but this is a company I’m coaching right now, Fortune 50 company. And this business has self-professed that their candor levels are at 1.3 on a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3. And in one meeting, we practiced some practices.

So, my practices are researched. That was the original question, 3,000 teams, I’ve observed practices of successful teams. I take them out, dust them off, package them, put them in other teams to a point where I can prove that “If you do this practice, you will move the needle on the diagnostic and likely move the needle on performance.”

And the 1.3 company did this practice called a stress test. So, we had three critical initiatives that were being, or that are absolutely important for this company to thrive. Three critical initiatives presented. The first one presented and said, “Okay,” and they all present in the same way, “Here’s what we’ve achieved. Here’s where we’re struggling. Here’s where we’re going.”

But everybody knew that they had to individually write in a Google Doc what the challenge was. Like, “I listened to you. Here’s what I disagree with. Here’s a risk you’re not seeing, something. Here’s where I might offer an idea. And here’s where I’d be willing to help.” The entire group is writing this in, and then they go into breakout sessions, and they corroborate as small groups in three. Then we come back in and have a conversation.

And then I asked the team, “What’s the degree of candor you just experienced?” They all put into chat fours and fives. So, literally, one practice moved them from a standard of polite, passive-aggressiveness, and political dialogue to full transparency where they got all the stuff on the table and we were at fours and fives levels of candor in less than an hour of the meeting starting. This is what high-return practice is, and what the book can do for any team.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m curious, what do we think is underlying the low levels of candor?

Keith Ferrazzi
First of all, there’s a wrongheadedness about feedback and candor that was born within our culture as children. So, when your parents gave you feedback, were they giving you input? They were telling you something. They were giving you a directive, “Sit up straight,” “Don’t eat that way,” whatever. Feedback has always come in the forms of a directive. And when you got it from your teachers, coaches, bosses, it’s always a directive.

Now I’m telling your peers to unleash feedback. But if everybody thinks that what they’re doing is giving each other directives, that is a cluster. But that’s why we don’t do it. Right now, we think that feedback and directive are intertwined. We don’t do it. We don’t like when we receive it because we assume that it’s coming with a directive.

I unbundle that when I’m working with teams. I say, “Listen, what we’re looking for is bold, inclusive, direct, challenging data from all of the points of view. In fact, let’s get more inclusive. Let’s go ask people who actually have a dog in the hunt down at the front lines. Let’s go ask innovators outside. Let’s get insights that just blow us away. And then let’s just treat it all like individual datapoints that we don’t have to do anything with, except use to analyze for better answers.”

So, one of the reasons why I think the feedback is so supercharged and the ability to get it more fluidly is to disaggregate what supercharges it. That’s the connection to directive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So, right there, it’s just like, “If you have a different perspective about what we’re doing, what we’re giving, what we’re receiving, that can be big right there,” because some folks might say, “Well, it’s not my place to direct this person because, I mean, I’m their peer, or I’m even at a lower level in the hierarchy of the organization.”

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s right. And instead, now it’s just like, “Oh, I want to give this person my data, my insight. They can do whatever they want to it,” but we start celebrating the desire to be bold and to throw out crazy ideas, and that’s the powerful element. Look, I think the other thing is, you know, in some places, there’s a sense of politicization, “So, hmm, if I make this person successful, do I look less successful?”

And the reality is that’s another reboot, which is the leader needs– and this is, by the way, everything I’m talking about, you can either learn it as a teammate and be the best teammate on the team, or you could read the book and learn it as a leader and get the whole team to behave that way. So, leaders lead differently when they’re asking teams to become high-performing teams.

So, if a good leader gives feedback, a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable; a great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable. A great leader will actually get the team to have each other’s back to the point where they won’t let each other fail.

Now, those are 10 shifts. I just gave you, three of them, you know, a shift from conflict avoidance to candor. The shift from accidental relationships, serendipitous relationships, walking down a hallway, to purposeful, engineered, more powerful relationships. So, there’s a whole series of these shifts. Everyone has simple practices that bring it to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us another, a couple shifts and practices that you’ve seen be tremendously transformational?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, so I became a venture partner at a company called Lightspeed. It’s one of the largest VCs in the world, and I coach their portfolio companies. These extraordinary, thoughtful, fast-growth unicorn companies born out of Stanford University or IIT in India. And these companies, they very much collaborate differently than most other teams. They don’t use meetings as the way in which they collaborate.

So, one of the shifts is from collaborating in meetings to collaborating in technology. So, if I said to you, “We’re running slow on the sales this quarter. Let’s have a meeting on it,” we all get in the room and we start having a dialogue. There’s 12 of us, and four of us would think that we’d been hurt. It’s just, you don’t have time to hear everyone’s point of view. Some people aren’t bold and aggressive in meetings, others are more introverted, etc.

But if I said, “Let’s not have a meeting on it. Here’s a Google Sheet, and here’s all 12 people’s names. First column, what do you think the real problem is that has caused the sales to slow down? Second column is what is a bold solution that could get us back on track? Okay, now everybody writes that up and reads it before we show up in the meeting. Now we show up in the meeting, we probably already landed the plane and all we have to do is agree that one of those solutions or a combination of a couple is the way to go, and we’re off and running.”

The old way would have been the meeting, the meeting after the meeting, the meeting we walked down the hallway, the lobbying behind each other’s backs. I mean, meeting shifting is a major shift that these young, hot unicorn companies, they organically know how to collaborate in asynchronous formats, not meetings. That’s another shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot because, you mentioned Amazon being high performing, and I understand that Amazon very much has a writing culture in which folks do some writing about some things and they might start a meeting with “We’re just reading the writing.” And to some, that sounds very intimidating, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write essays and pages and pages.” But what you’ve described sounds super easy, “I got two cells. I might be generating nine sentences, and we’re off to the races.”

Keith Ferrazzi
I love the purposefulness of the Amazon culture, but I do, on this particular issue, I see the value of it, but I would rather not read in a room. Also, I think that by the time you’re writing up a five-page document, you’re putting a stake in the ground relative to what this thing is. I’m talking about, like, that’s fine if you’re down here on the funnel of collaboration, you’re ready to close something. That’s editing where somebody, where we think we are.

But if you’re up here, and you’re trying to break through a problem, I don’t want you, I don’t want five pages of your opinion. That boxes us all in to your opinion and your solution. I want, “I’m up here. I want to hear what you think the problems are.” Because I’ve seen this where, in a large manufacturer that was retooling a significant part of its product line, they were falling behind, and everyone’s pointing fingers. And I said, “Let’s just do a meeting shift. Let’s everybody go online and we’re going to write ‘We are falling behind. But what do you think the reason is we’re falling behind and what’s a bold solution?’”

And, all of a sudden, we had all of these opinions from different functions. Some people said, “I want to send it down to the plant level and see what they think,” and etc. And, gosh, it just revealed itself. Truth came out of this tapestry of insight. And the person who came up with the boldest idea that worked, that we ended up implementing, was L4 from the people who were actually in the meetings originally, level four underneath the levels one and levels two that were naturally there.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, one, we’re exiting the meeting, and we’re getting all the bold thinking, just straight right out there in a Google Sheet or some sort of easy collaboration platform. Lay some more on us, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi
The word “agile” is a word that came up in the 2000s as a way to re-engineer how you develop software, and it, frankly, was a genius re-engineering of workflow that should be used by all of us in all the projects we do. And, ironically, even companies that develop software don’t practice agile on other project management solutions.

Look, agile can be pretty time-consuming and very in-depth. It can be a bunch of spreadsheets. But here’s what I would say if there’s a critical initiative that you have this year, a wish, a desire, a hope, have your goals for the year around it, but ask yourself very clearly, “What does success look like after month one?”

And after month one, pause and say, “Okay, what have we achieved in month one? Where did we struggle in month one? And what are we planning to do in month two in order to make sure we hit our year goals?” If you work in those short agile sprints, month by month, or if there’s a lot of volatility in what you’re doing, you could do week by week sprints, and at the end of those sprints, utilizing the practice that I’d mentioned earlier called stress testing, where the group of people who are involved in that project, beat it up at the end of every sprint.

They go into breakout rooms and they write, “What risks or challenges do I see that they’re missing? What innovation might I offer? Where would I offer help?” And now, all of a sudden, the whole team is on one page beating this thing up, all full transparency on the table. The person now says, “Thank you. I’ve got all this new information. Here’s how I’m adjusting my next month, and I’m now on track to hit my annual goals.”

Whereas, in the past, we’d wake up at the end of Q1 or Q2 realizing, “There’s no way in hell we’re going to make our one-year goals. We’re already so far off track and we haven’t been listening more and robustly to all of the input.” So, just using simple, agile sprints and adjusting through stress testing at the end of every one is an amazing operating system for the world we’re living in today, the volatility, the need for change, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, we have a big goal, a big timeline, we split it up into segments, so we’re checking in regularly and seeing, “Are we on track and how do we fix it?” getting all the wisdom from the people. Nifty.

Keith Ferrazzi
So, I’m going to harken back to my first book a bit because one of the problems I saw in our coaching of teams is that most teams, do not effectively define what a team is. So, what I mean by that is, in most large companies, the big problem is we think our team is who reports to us, and we’re constantly banging our head against the wall because there are so many other interdependencies that are getting in our way of achieving the things we want to achieve. Well, that is the first shift that I talk about in the book, shifting from hub-and-spoke leadership, where control is what defines a team, to a team being the critical network of people you need to get the job done.

So, as a leader, your team is who you need to get the job done. I don’t work in a big company, I’m an entrepreneur, and my team includes other entrepreneurs, like Peter Diamandis, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s a futurist in technology. He helped me design an entirely new business at Ferrazzi Greenlight that I hadn’t thought of, that was basically, it’s called Connected Success.

We take learners, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders. etc. who want to live the life of Keith Ferrazzi in terms of great relationships, transforming your life, transforming your career, etc., and we take them through an eight-week program. That is very different than the business model that I’ve always had, which is coaching executive teams. So, this is a very different business model.

And my teammate, Peter, incubated that with me, and he doesn’t work for me. I don’t pay him. I’m a partner of his and I do things for his and his teams, and he does things for me and my teams. All of a sudden, he’s a teammate, and if I didn’t define myself that way, I would have never tapped into his genius.

And in large corporations, you know, the software company that I was talking to you about earlier, the hardware and the software division are the same team in the growth of the business, and yet they think of themselves as other. And so, one team collaborates, and then they go try to get buy-in. Buy-in is BS. Buy-in is you’re trying to sell your ideas to people. You need to configure your team around the people you need to get the job done, independent of work charts.

And once that’s done, then you get that group to adopt what I call the social contract, “We’re going to be candid with each other. We’re going to push each other hard. We’re going to keep each other’s energy strong. We’re going to build strong, trusting relationships. We agree on this stuff, and then you do the practices.” So, just redefining team is such a critical component of high-performing teams and team-ship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I’m curious, when you lay out this contract, do you encounter resistance? Or do people sign up readily, and then later on have trouble? Or is it smooth sailing through and through?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, there’s usually, in every third team, there’s one a**hole that is just digging in out of self-preservation, fear, insecurity, selfishness, whatever, and they don’t want to really adjust to become a high-performing team. The reality is, in most teams, once they see, “Oh, wow, our score is 1.3? That’s pathetic. 

So, once you do the diagnostic, people are like, “Wow, that’s not who I want to be.” And now the question is, “It’s fine to be aware, but that doesn’t do anything. What are the practices? So, okay, I’m aware, now you’ve given me a stress test as a practice.” Or another practice is called a candor break, we’re in the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two, and they say, “Okay, what’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?” What a powerful question. They talk in groups of two, then they come back in the main room and they all share.

That’s turning the culture you wish you had into an assignment. It happens all the time in these practices. So, you become awake, you do the practice, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a better way to live my life. I’m not banging my head against the wall about my frustration about another peer. I’m able to have a conversation with them about it.”

So, I think that the adoption rate is very high. Very high. Every once in a while, you get one that’s not, but then it also becomes very evident that that guy is the jerk that probably doesn’t last very long in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
I do love that question in the candor break, “What’s something that’s not being said that should be said?” because it kind of reverses the emotional pressure dynamics, you know? Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable to say this thing because maybe it’ll hurt someone’s feelings, maybe I’ll look dumb, etc.” Then when you shift it, it then feels like the pressure is reversed. So, now the wrong answer is, “Uh, nothing. We’ve said everything.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Right. That’s the ridiculous answer. All I’ve done in most of these shifts, in the high-return practices, I have seen and curated practices that allow you to turn the kind of culture you dreamed of into simple assignments, and people don’t mind simple assignments, and in fact they’re pent up. You know, most organizations that are so overly polite that they don’t share what they’re thinking are usually highly political and they share behind each other’s back.

If you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to step up to a new standard of courage and transparency. Here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to go in small groups of two. You’re going to talk about what’s not being said. I know psychological safety is 85% higher in those small groups. Then we’re going to come into the main room. We’re going to have that discussion because you were assigned to do it so everyone has to have something to say,” and, boom, it’s all of a sudden on the table.

So, it’s actually, there’s a Fortune magazine article I wrote recently that says, you know, I’m tired of hearing people say, “Culture change is tough.” It’s not. Culture change changes when you just adopt simple new practices that change the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about the importance of praise, so this stuff isn’t necessarily all like, “Oh, say the hard courageous thing that’s going to upset people.” But also, we’re sharing some happy stuff, too.

Keith Ferrazzi
Praise and relationships, both are very happy. So, praise, there’s, “How do you shift from paltry limited leader-led praise?” which most companies don’t have enough praise. So, limited praise from leaders to abundant praise from peers. How do you create, and what do you do? If you’re a leader, let’s do a practice. Once a month, we’re going to do a gratitude circle where everybody goes around and shares one person on the team that they’re grateful for and why. Really simple practice. And you can do them even more frequently than once a month.

So, there’s a whole set of practices that shift from the leader being responsible for all the praise to the team. You can still do leader-led praise. You want certain behaviors dialed up on your team, you do an award for that kind of behavior, and you call out who that is. Very simple. It’s Pavlovian in nature, actually, right? It’s like the dog rings the bell; they get a treat. So, if you change your behavior, you get a treat, you get praised. So, that’s on the praise side. Very simple practices breed that kind of energy.

And relationships, you know, most teams have mediocre level of connection. I will go into a team, I’m like, I’ll do diagnostic interviews, “How close is your team?” “Oh, we’re so close. We grew up together. This team’s been together forever. Deep relationship. Deep caring relationships.” “Okay.” And we get in the room, and I ask the question, “Does my team have my back? Do I care about my team and what’s going on in their lives? Does my team know what I’m struggling with? And are they there to help lift me up?” “Oh, well. that’s kind of a high standard. That’s low twos, you know?”

And then I do a practice where everybody goes around and says, “What is my energy these days and what’s bringing it down?” And, all of a sudden, people come over to me, like, “Holy sh**, I’ve known this person for 10 years. I had no idea that their mother was suffering Alzheimer’s,” “I had no idea that they had an autistic son,” “I had no idea that they were struggling so much with this business leader that they serve in the business.” It’s amazing. We just don’t curate purposeful relationships.

Now when you have that, then you have a team that has more empathy, has more care, has more commitment. Yeah. So, I think of all of the interviews I’ve done, I think we’ve gotten through, like, more shifts here. Usually, I get to like three shifts. We got through, moving from candor, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, redefining the team itself as not an org chart but a network.

We moved from serendipitous relationships to purposeful relationships. We sort of threw in there the idea of moving from individual, “I got my own back. I’ve got to take care of my own resilience,” to team resilience. We talked about agile. We talked about celebration. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer growth.

That’s one that I love where teams actually give each other critical feedback on a quarterly basis using an open 360 where everybody goes around, and says, “Pete, what I most respect and admire about you in the last quarter is X. Thank you. And, Pete, because I care about your success going forward, I might suggest,” everybody goes around. And they go, “Keith, same thing.”

That kind of peer-to-peer coaching, I call it an open 360 practice, really starts to prime the pump for a team to become each other’s coaches. Anyway, you’ve been abundant in navigating around the book, so this has been a fun interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
”You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
I do a morning ritual, my fiancé and I, and I’ve just gotten engaged and we’re going to be married in June.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you. The alarm goes off, we push snooze, and over the next 10 minutes, we both lie and meditate on what are three things we’re grateful for at that moment and three things we’re looking forward to in that day. And the three things that we’re grateful for, we’re never allowed to repeat the same one twice, ever in our lives. So, it’s a beautiful way to realize what kind of abundance we have around us.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Look, this is more of a gift. If you’re excited about using the book, you can go to KeithFerrazzi.com, and we provided a video course around the book that you can certainly buy but you don’t have to. If you’re buying the book for your team, you get the video course for free. So, I think the challenge is just try some of these practices on. They’re so easy.

Can’t afford the book? Just go online and type “Keith Ferrazzi TeamShip.” I’ve published a lot of things on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, etc., so just try some of the practices. You’ll learn how game-changing they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you, Keith. This is fun.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time.

Feb 17
0

1033: How to Build Your Social Confidence with Susan Callender

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Susan Callender reveals the critical mindset shifts that lead to greater charisma and confidence.

You’ll Learn

  1. Six steps for overcoming shyness 
  2. How to quickly curb nervousness and anxiety 
  3. The small shifts that improve your professional presence 

About Susan 

Susan Callender is a success coach and founder of Social Confidence Pro, where she runs The School of Social Mastery. She helps sharp, high-achieving yet socially reluctant professionals polish their people skills and step into the spotlight. Through her school and coaching, she helps chronic overthinkers create a bigger impact and add more value to the careers they love. Susan shares her expertise as host of the Social Skills Mastery podcast, transforming clients from Boston to Bangkok and beyond.

Resources Mentioned

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Susan Callender Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Susan, welcome!

Susan Callender
Pete, I am so happy to be on your show. Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, we’re happy to have you. We’re talking social confidence. That’s a hot topic listeners care a lot about, and you are the social confidence pro, so it’s like we’re a match made in heaven.

Susan Callender
I am. I love what I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to hear the tale of how you were going to be on CNN and then you just walked off the set. What’s going on here?

Susan Callender
Well, I identified as a shy person, and, momentarily, for that interview, which happened during the Democratic National Convention back in 2004, I thought that I could get over shyness for a few minutes for an interview.

And so, I walked in blindly to the interview. They were putting on my mic, fixing my hair, the reporter’s talking to me, and my mind is spinning and racing, and then they went, “Five, four, three…” and I pulled off the microphone, and I said, “I cannot do this. I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed. I should have never done this in the first place,” and I walked off the set.

And the most surprising thing, Peter, is that was an embarrassing moment, but it was not even my worst embarrassing moment. I am so glad to be where I am today and holding out my hand and bringing along other people, other professionals, other business owners that find themselves in that situation. There’s hope for you. There was for me, there is for you, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I like that a lot. Not that you experienced a deeply painful situation, but that you use your pain to help others, as well as this notion, I think sometimes people think, “Oh, you know, charismatic folks who are just great on camera or great on stage or great at speaking, they’re just kind of born that way. That’s sort of their personality.” But here you are with an experience that says just the opposite. You’ve experienced a personal transformation here.

Susan Callender
I did. What I realized, and that was one of the catalysts for my doing what I do now, and that was realizing that, “Oh, I call myself shy. I call myself an introvert. Who first called me shy? Oh, it was my mom protecting me, letting people know, ‘Oh, it’s okay, she’s hiding behind me, she’s shy.’” And then as I grew up, when I was in school or in a play, when people saw me being very hesitant, I could then express, when I was eight or nine years old, “I’m shy. I just can’t do it.“

But then this is what happens. One day you’re in college, and then one day you’re 35 and you’re still shy, but now people aren’t relating to it anymore because you’re a professional. They expect you to show up and speak up and add value and do your thing, and that’s where it becomes really difficult. And that’s why I do what I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there in terms of, at some point, the expectations get upgraded and you got to upgrade with them.

Susan Callender
You do, and that’s where I realized, Pete, that it’s not so much the label. It’s the identity. So, you can give a person conversation starters, that’s the most popular thing that I do. People want to know what to say, “What do I say?” I’ll have people line up after a conference, or in a conference room at an office where I’m doing a presentation, and all the quiet people will say, “But what do I say? How do I start a conversation? What should I say to that person?”

But it’s not the words. It’s who you are being. So, I can give you the most interesting conversation starters, but if you still identify as an introvert who really hates small talk, you are still going to be an introvert who hates small talk who happened to have a conversation for one minute. You’ll revert back to who you believe you are. So, what I help people do is to create a new social identity where they can truly fully express themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing and cool, and I’ve heard that that’s a powerful tool for folks trying to make any sort of transformation, like, “I am not going to try to work out but who I am is a runner or a fit person or a triathlete or whatever,” like adopting that identity can really move people to do things differently and to perform better. So, that sounds pretty handy. But, Susan, how is it done?

Susan Callender
Well, it’s done by really priming your brain. So, what I’ve created is a social priming system, and the social priming system is a type of mental rehearsal for social interactions. So, I use the acronym SOCIAL, and what I help people to do is just move through all of those different iterations of how we see things prior to doing them. I’ll give you an example, Pete.

You don’t get lost going to work, because you see it in your mind first. You see your route. But we think for some reason, because we see people performing with social ease, those outgoing people, the people who find it easy to make a conversation, we assume that they do it without practice. We see everything before we do it.

So, with social priming, S is, first, just to settle down. Calm down, take a few deep breaths, and really just find that place within yourself where you really want to do well. Let’s just set this up as a networking event. You’re attending a networking group for the first time. You won’t know anyone, but you know, for professional reasons, you really should be there.

Then O is for observe. Just really look at your current emotional state and just notice, “Do you have any anxiety? Do you have any resistance? Why do you have that anxiety?” That anxiety came from a thought that you have about the situation. What if you changed that thought to, “I’m really looking forward to meeting new people in my field.” It will change how you feel.

And then what we want to do is just create a specific social scenario. Imagine yourself walking into the venue. What’s the first thing you’re going to see at a networking event? Perhaps a name tag table. Visualize yourself walking up to that table. If there’s a person standing behind it, prior to saying, “My last name is…” or just looking for your name tag, visualize yourself, prime your brain to say, “I’m going to say hello to that person and tell them how glad I am to be here.”

When we go through steps like this, Pete, these things happen because we’re priming our brain for exactly what we want to happen. We do the same thing in presentations. And then we just want to immerse our brains in how we want to feel in that moment – confident. We want to have positive outcomes for this interaction.

And then we make it animated. That’s the A in social. Just play through the scene like you’re having conversations, like you’re going over to the bar to get a drink, like you’re going to stop by the hors d’oeuvres table and grab a cube of cheese or a little bit of hummus and pita, and you’re going to turn and find a single person or a person who was alone, and you’re going to walk over to them and mention something about the gathering.

Don’t walk over and say your name first. Because nobody will care who you are until they feel comfortable with you, then they’ll remember your name. And so, just start with something about the setting that you’re in, something about the event that you’re attending.

And then, finally, L in social is for just linking the great feeling that you have with this to any positive situation that you want to have. So, when you click that link, you will know that, “This is how I want to feel in social settings,” and that just seals the deal for you. Then you can do it again, and again, and again.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the link, can you expand on that a little bit more?

Susan Callender
Well, it’s like an anchor. So, the anchor is, “I just did this. I was able to visualize what I wanted to happen. I was able to just settle my nervous system. I was able to calm that anxiety. I questioned where that anxiety was coming from. Why would I feel nervous? I am a very smart, driven person. I have the degrees, I have the skills, I have the credentials. These are my people. Why would I feel nervous? I’ve said words before. I have introduced myself before.”

Pete Mockaitis
I bet you have.

Susan Callender
“I can say words again. I know how to ask for a drink. I know how to introduce to people. All of these things.” When we take ourselves, Pete, out of ourselves and think about the other person, we are so much more calm.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. With the link is not so much, I think we have a tendency to hurry on to the next thing, it’s like, “Well, let’s see if there’s anything interesting in my phone now,” as opposed to linking that experience to, I guess, a new identity there in terms of, “Yes, this happened. This is an experience that just unfolded,” and to sort of sit in it, steep in it, marinate in it, and let your brain link these connections.

Susan Callender
Celebrate the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And it’s funny, I’m zeroing in on the cheese cubes, one, because perhaps I’m already ready for lunch, and, two, it really does animate the A there, the scene in terms of when your senses, what can you see, what can you smell, what can you taste, and makes it all more real and grounded as oppose to the soft languages of ideas, idea things, like, “Oh, some people might not like me.”

It’s like, okay, that’s kind of fuzzy and broad and vague as opposed to a cheese cube, “It is orange. I can visualize it on a little white Dixie plate or whatever, a toothpick, and then I’m there and the mental rehearsal seems all the more genuine and powerful.

Susan Callender
It truly does. And that will help your listeners connect to whatever event they are attending, whether it’s taking place in the workplace, or if they have to go outside, or if they’re taking a client to lunch. Bob Proctor had a very popular quote, which was that, “If you could see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand.”

It’s so true. We’ve gone through all these little iterations in different ways before, but rather than just having your mind go blank with fear, say, “I’ve done this before.” And then at the end, give yourself, when you get back in your car, a little, “Woohoo! So glad I did that. Yes! I knew I could do that.” That just reinforces that. That’s just another type of anchor. “Yes, I can do this again. I’m going to sign up for that other event that I see noted at the end of the month.”  That’s where that momentum comes from.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. I dig that a lot. Let’s talk about the observe the why. I can get into a trap emotionally with why, as I feel a thing and then I say why. And, sure enough, I’m able to generate so many reasons why I feel that, and then I’m almost, like, finding an argument or justification and support for the very thing that I would prefer not to be feeling. Can you give us some distinctions and pro tips on how to do the observe step optimally?

Susan Callender
We all have some resistance in us for whatever reason, “Well, I don’t want to go. I’d rather go to the gym,” “I’d rather go home and walk my dog,” “I’d rather just scroll Instagram,” or do whatever it is that we do these days because we’re so accustomed to being alone. It’s so easy to be alone. Why do we do this?

We do this because we are professionals. We do this because we’ve put in that time and we want to be known for what we know. And the more we stay alone, the more we work hybrid or work from home or do not have all the opportunities that we used to take advantage of, to get to know people, to be seen and to be heard and to be understood for all of the value that you have to offer, well, just take a look at that and observe who you’re being.

Do you want to manage your professional image, or do you want others to manage it for you? Others managing it for you might mean, “Oh, she doesn’t really talk to anyone,” or, “She’s probably not going to show up,” or, “I don’t think that I’m going to ask her because she’ll probably say no, and we really need panelists for next week, so I’m going to go to somebody who I have a feeling will say yes.” And all it takes from you is, “Uh, yes, sure, I can do it,” because you know you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s how we do the identity piece. I’m curious, with regard to the settle down, any pro tips on doing that well?

Susan Callender
What we should take more time for is deep breathing. At any point in your day, when you feel just even a pang of nervousness or anxiety, just stop and take four to six just deep breaths in your nose, slowly out your mouth. It is incredibly calming. And in those moments, your brain will have clarity. Clarity that it could not have, that was not possible when your mind was racing.

You are in control. Do not think that some outside factor is in control of you. And once you realize that, it’s so empowering. It stops the limiting beliefs in their tracks, and increases the empowering beliefs that you have the capability to do anything that you want to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, deep breathing. Any particulars on how one breathes deeply to be most effective?

Susan Callender
I practice something with my clients that is called box breathing. And in that, you close your eyes and just picture a cube. And you can, let’s say that we’re going from the bottom to the top on the left-hand side, and I might say to them, “Let’s breathe in with a four count, going from the bottom left to the top left. And then do a six count, blowing out through your mouth going across the top of the cube. And then a four count, going down the right-hand side of the cube. And then a six count, exhaling through your mouth, going across.”

And even if we’re doing it like at the end of their workday, it just helps them to separate from anything else that’s been going on, or if it’s at the start of their day, or at their lunchtime. It helps you to create space between what you thought was so unbearable, or stressful, or somebody needling you, or somebody not allowing you to, or in your mind, to not show up as your best because you’re so focused on them.

And it just helps you to separate from that and realize that you are your own entity, your own being. And then we can begin. Then we can have a great session. And I can do that either whether it’s one-to-one or in a group. We’re all the same in that way. We like to think that we’re different but we’re not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when you’re in the midst of building your career and developing these skills, what are some practices you suggest for folks, day in day out?

Susan Callender
What I say often is that if you want to be a big deal, you have to act like you’re a big deal. You have value. You are valuable. People want you right now, without question. Somebody right now needs exactly what it is that you have. They’re looking for you. They’re waiting for you. You have to show up. There is no one who is better than you. They just do things differently. But you have your place and you have to claim it.

So, act like you belong and people will treat you like you belong. And then you’ll start to have fun, and then you’ll start to go out more, and then you’ll start to speak up in meetings more, because you realize that people do listen to you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, tell me, any other top tips, do’s, don’ts?

Susan Callender
One would be just making sure that you are in control of your professional presence. And so, that means that you want to pay attention and be in the moment. Stop your mind from overthinking and racing ahead and wondering if you’re going to say the right thing, and just get present and pay attention, and don’t try to think of what you’re going to say. Respond to what’s being said to you. So just presence is so important.

And then your body language, being authoritative and approachable. And that could be as simple as just standing with your weight even on both feet, and then being mindful of your space. If you are speaking to one person, or a table full of people at a conference table, or a room full of people, make sure to connect.

So, with one person, eye contact. With a number of people at a conference table, make each word that you say, connect that with eye contact with each person at a table. If you are answering a person’s question, don’t just look at that person because everyone else will tune out unless you connect with them. So, use your space wisely. Make sure that people can hear you and that they know that you want to be heard.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Any final thoughts?

Susan Callender
What I know for sure, Pete, is that when you change or improve your social skills, whether it’s getting over social anxiety, nervousness, unnecessary worry, overthinking, everything in that realm, it changes your life forever. You can’t unlearn these skills.

And I know that these are not things that you’ve just been dealing with for the past few months or years. For the most part, it goes back to formative years, before the age of seven, middle school years, maybe early college, and then we think that it’s our life sentence, but it’s not. It can be changed.

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

Susan Callender
“You don’t have to be great to start. You just have to start to be great.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Susan Callender
Right now, I’m rereading something, and I do have a tendency to reread things that I love, and that is The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Susan Callender
I journal every day, every morning.

Pete Mockaitis
That kind of sounds like a favorite habit as well. Any others?

Susan Callender
I wake up and I just find ten things to be grateful for every morning, and that’s definitely the habit, yeah.

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

Susan Callender
Act like you belong and people will treat you like you belong.

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

Susan Callender
I would love for people to go to SocialConfidencePro.com/breakthrough, where I have a social identity shift breakthrough series that they will find very helpful to start speaking up and standing out.

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

Susan Callender
Allow people to be seen, take the focus off of yourself and greet people. Make eye contact with them. Do not focus on your needs or your fear. Just make someone else’s day. And when you notice that look in their eye, that smile that they give you back, you will then see just how powerful you are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Susan, beautiful. Thank you.

Susan Callender
You’re welcome, Pete. It was my pleasure to be here.