This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

Oct 01

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

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Neal

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Neil, welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neal Schore
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Start the next load of laundry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neal Schore
There it is.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite quote?

Neal Schore
Build your people who build your business.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Neal Schore
My favorite tool is firing your devil.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we do that?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Neal, thank you.

Neal Schore
Thank you so much.

Sep 28

1184: How to Know When to Quit with Lindsay Crouse

By Podcasts No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Lindsay

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Lindsay, welcome!

Lindsay Crouse
Thanks so much for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsay Crouse
Yes, that’s exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, absolutely. Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsay Crouse
No, this is great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

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

Lindsay Crouse
Pen and paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Lindsay Crouse
Running. Distance running.

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

Lindsay Crouse
This idea that perseverance can work against us.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lindsay, thank you.

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

Sep 24

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

By Podcasts No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Joe

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, welcome back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Like, the chin area?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
The wrist? Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joe, thank you.

Joe Navarro
No, thank you.

Sep 21

1182: Connecting More Powerfully in an AI-Driven World with Gina London

By Podcasts No Comments

Gina London discusses how to hone in on your presence and purpose to distinguish your communication.

You’ll Learn

  1. The one communication skill AI still can’t replace or replicate
  2. How to train your brain for more confidence
  3. The habits that undermine your credibility and presence

About Gina

From Farmland, Indiana, to boardrooms around the world, Gina London has spent her career helping people find their voice. Founder and CEO of Language of Leadership, Ltd., Gina is an American entrepreneur based in Ireland, a dual U.S.-Irish citizen, and a trusted advisor to leaders across nearly 60 countries.

A former CNN correspondent and Emmy-winning journalist, she now coaches executives, government leaders, and high-performing teams on communication, leadership, and influence.

Gina is an adjunct professor at University College Cork, a columnist for The Irish Independent, and author of Amplify You: How to Power Up Your Connections in an AI World. As AI gets smarter, human connection is the essential skill that sets us apart.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Gina, welcome!

Gina London
Hi, it’s great to see you. Thanks so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about getting amplified, and congrats on the fresh release of your book, Amplify You: How to Power Up Your Connections in an AI World. Could you start by sharing with us one of the most surprising discoveries you made while putting this together?

Gina London
Well, when I started this whole journey, because I work as a communications coach and trainer and speaker, I think the thing that continually stopped me when I first moved in from being a broadcaster and a television journalist into strategy communications and transferring the skills is that it is a transferable skill. Because I thought, “Well, this is something everybody does. And what can I bring to this?”

And one of my friends who actually worked for the BBC when I was at CNN, she said, “Gina, you forget what the rigors of 24-hour news have done for you in terms of your story-crafting and your vocal presence and the energy that you bring on camera is something anybody can learn for themselves, but most of them don’t, unless they have.” Like, you’re going to a gym, you’re not going to just watch a YouTube video and then pick up the trap bar and do it properly. You need a coach to help you.

And so as I was writing this, I thought, “I want to give fundamental but essential skills in a way that’s easy to apply and habit-stack one on top of each other in an incremental, developable way. So I can give people this guide book that they can use to help them power up their connections and their humanness, especially when we got all this AI stuff making us feel somehow very replaceable.

I want to help people to say, “No, these are the tools that anybody can develop.” But it does take some effort and it is a skill. So I’m surprised that we’ve got it all out here, but it goes from the way you talk to yourself, the way you talk to others, the way you show up, and then put it all together in some behavioral techniques. And I’m pretty proud of how comprehensive it is. So I’m really delighted that it’s out in the world now.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, yes. Well, congratulations.

Gina London
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a cool story of someone who, indeed, amplified themselves, they started from a spot where they figured, “I needed some help,” and then what they did and what the result was?

Gina London
Yeah, I’m so grateful because I did start writing this column. I write in the Sunday Independent newspaper here in Ireland, and it’s on leadership and communications. And so I got a note from someone who had read the column.

He was the CEO of a big engineering company here in Ireland, but he was also, he’d acquired a new company in the UK and he was also requiring something in North America. And as these acquisitions were going through, he was going to be doing a roadshow to meet with the employees.

And he said, “Gina, I’m very aware that I’m a big guy, I’m a serious guy.” And as I was watching him when we were having our initial discovery call, I said, “Yeah, and you’re an intimidating guy. And if you’re coming into my new company, and I’m an employee, I’m going to be questioning, ‘Am I going to be made redundant? Does this guy really care about me? What is happening to my job?’”

And so I put him on camera, doing this, “Welcome, and here’s the vision,” discussion that he would do normally. And then we played it back and I said, “Now I want you to do it again and I want you to smile like your face is feeling like it’s going to crack.”

And the big guy, Steven, says, “Well, I don’t do this happy-clappy stuff.” I’m like, “Just work with me a little bit on this.” And we played that second clip back and he watched it and he said, “You know what? I could smile even more.”

And that’s where that light bulb moment is where someone sees how others see them and they realize it’s not fake, it’s not manipulative, but it is an effort. And if you’re unaware of what you look like when you’re communicating, well, that’s the first step to building your awareness.

And then the second step is let’s have a desire to amplify, not change you, but let’s start taking more control of these things. So it’s not just about smile more, but it’s about, “Are you aware of the emotions of what you’re saying? Have you chosen words that are connecting with your specific audience? Do you have more control over the vocality to support those words? Is it energetic? Is it confidential? Is it thoughtful?”

And then, “Do you have the face and the body and the gestures and all of that integrated so you’re creating a real compelling, connecting,” and in this case with my guy Steven, “reassuring communication experience?”

So it’s reminding people that communication is not just a transfer of information, it’s creating an experience with the big giant caveat that this is not manipulation and then fake and exploitation when you have mutually beneficial goals in mind, and that it’s heartfelt and driven by your values. So we get into that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Gina, I like that so much. There’s so much goodness there. And so I like the way you said it with regard to amplify, you know, you’re not some other creature. You are you, amplified because you’re not aware of how you come across. And that is just eye-opening for people all the time when they see themselves on video.

I’ve taken a video of friends that said, “Hey, watch out, you keep doing this thing where you’re stroking your tie.” He’s like, “What? No, I’m not.” It’s like, “Oh, wow, that’s so weird.” You’re shocked. Like, you can’t believe it until you behold it. And he was like, “Oh, well, there it is. Okay. That’s a thing that’s happening. Wow!”

Gina London
Exactly, because we have these patterns and habits of how we’ve been communicating up until now. Most of us are on default. And so we don’t know. Maybe we might have been told, “Hey, you ramble,” or, “Hey, I don’t know what you’re saying,” or, “Hey, I can’t actually understand you because you mumble.”

But then most of us stop right there and think, “Well, that’s just how I am. That’s just the authentic me.” And I want everyone to understand that your self-acceptance and your self-development do not have to be at friction, that you can still be who you are and you’re a great human being and you’ve come as far as you have you’ve come.

And you can also layer on some more intentionality of how you think about the other person, how you prepare for presentations or even just a one-on-one or a casual conversation.

This stuff matters, and I think it really matters more than ever because we are becoming more and more dependent upon Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT to help us in our written words. But if we don’t sound like we write, or we don’t write like we sound, that means we probably haven’t taken enough control of who we are.

And I think it’s really important for us now to be irreplaceable as humans. So human-up your skills, folks. And this book, I think, comes at a really great time.

Pete Mockaitis
Human-up your skills, yes, indeed. When you mentioned amplifying your facial expressions, your body language, your gestures, your vocal tone, and thinking about the emotions associated with what you’re saying, that is the telltale sign for me with regard to, I’m thinking about YouTube.

And if you’re watching something, maybe there’s no face and it’s just visuals, or maybe there is a person. But, like, that’s how I tell that it’s AI and, apparently, I don’t know, maybe the comments are fake, too, but it seems like it appears that many of these people, the comments, are completely unaware that this is not a human being in front of them.

But that is what does it for me, it’s like, “No, that person is saying something sad but they don’t look sad. Their tone of voice isn’t sad. Like, that person is saying something really surprisingly, powerfully insightful, but they don’t look like they’re saying it. It’s just wrong.” And so that’s what does it for me.

And what’s funny is a lot of humans are doing this, too, just before the land of AI. It’s like, “Wait, you’re saying something that’s, like, really a big deal but you don’t look like you think it’s a big deal? So now, I don’t know, is it a big deal or not? Or did I misunderstand you? What’s going on?”

There’s, like, a confusion inside of me when there is an incongruity when things don’t match up, assuming I’m paying enough attention. That’s another thing. It’s, like, maybe because it’s incongruous, it’s boring, and I don’t care, or I was like, “Well, whatever.” And so I’m not even paying enough attention to notice that it doesn’t match up.

Gina London
You are so hitting on the incongruity and the lack of attention span that people have these days. So in the incongruity piece, I have an illustration in the book of a three-legged stool: words, voice, and your body.

And in the body part, I would also include your clothing and your wardrobe choices and your grooming and those sorts of things because it’s all giving that impression of who you are to that audience.

But what we’re talking about is a lot of people, especially in business, more formal settings, like my CEO guy, they’re focusing on the words, but they haven’t learned how to integrate and connect the voice to the emotion behind those words. They haven’t necessarily picked words that are warm or that can be reassuring or connecting in the particular situation to that audience as well.

And then the body language piece, as I was mentioning, if it doesn’t look energetic or urgent or sensitive, there is that lack of balance, and that three-legged stool doesn’t stand as well if one leg is the only one that’s really engaged.

And with your point about the attention span, it’s not that everybody has to be super dramatic, it has to be jazz hands or whatever, but you do have to have that sense of, “I’m in real time with human beings. I’m seeing you. I’m hearing you.”

And this is the experience that is going to make them wake up for six seconds and not go back on their phone or get out of their thoughts and listen to you because you know the sense of urgency, you know the enthusiasm, you know the passion, and you have worked at yourself to be able to bring it so you’re not some slick, impersonal, overly polished and artificial AI slop. We got to ratchet this stuff up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well said. I dig that a lot. Now, when we talk about these emotions, and I think that’s great in terms of them being a focal point to tie this together in terms of the theme, you know, the dress and the appearance and the intonations and the body gestures.

The emotion is the theme. Like, “Is this serious? Is this sad? Is this exciting? Is this inspiring?” I think some people might say, “You know, Gina, we’re just talking about facts. It’s like, ‘Hey, here’s the report of what happened over the last month. Here are the numbers. Here are some charts with the numbers. They’re just facts. So where do the emotions come into the play here, Gina?”

Gina London
Yeah, exactly. And this goes from one of my very first times I was ever going through TV anchor training, and they do have that. I went into some little studio in Texas with this coach and we were reading from a teleprompter, or I was reading.

And he was reminding me, and this was really important, and I use it with my clients all the time, too. It doesn’t matter what it is you’re delivering. Those numbers mean something not just for the shareholders, but maybe for your job or your bonus or the path of this company.

What are the hopes, dreams, and fears attached to those words? And because I am a positive communication coach, I’m not about being someone who preys on fears, but someone who reassures around fears. But be aware that there’s emotions to those words.

And so that doesn’t make you be overly theatrical or giving fake energy, but it does help you ground yourself. And what is experiencing, what the people who are hearing those seemingly just factual numbers experiencing?

I work with senior leaders who are giving their quarterly reports to the board, or their earnings reports to their shareholders, or they’re doing a town hall to their employees. People want to feel a connection. They want to know that they’re aligned on something that they can work toward that’s going to feed their family.

And I don’t care what topic it is. If it’s worth speaking about, it’s worth speaking about from the heart. And it’s not, by the way, I know we’re speaking in the US here, or I’m coming from Ireland and you’re in the US, but it’s not, “I am American.” It’s not an Americanist thing. It’s a human thing, because no matter where I go, people are wanting to be seen, to be heard, to be valued.

And if you’re the person who’s presenting whatever it is, you have that opportunity to either make more of a connection or be neutral. And there really is no neutral. Neutral is usually read as distracted, not interested, not caring, phoning it in, and none of that is going to build a connection or build trust.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like what you had to say with regard to the fear and reassuring. And we had another anchor on the show, Erica Mandy of The NewsWorthy, who was delightful. And whenever I’m listening to her short audio news program, which I think is swell, she does do that reassuring thing, and it feels good.

Like, if there’s bad news, she’ll own it and convey some emotions, like, “We do have another school shooting to tell you about, you know, last night….” She’ll sort of lay it out there, and like, “Yeah, this is sad. It’s concerning.” And it feels like she’s there with you as opposed to just saying the words.

Like, ‘Here is a thing that transpired.” It’s like, “Well, no, it’s actually heartbreaking and very troubling that this has happened yet again.” And so we’re feeling some of that emotion, but also in a reassuring way, like, “Oh, and our news anchor is freaked out, too.”

Gina London
Right, you’ve got to be able to know the goal and assume the role within the right parameters. If you’re in an anchor position, you can’t fall apart. You shouldn’t probably fall apart and start crying on air.

That said, if you were just dispassionate and just reading the words on the teleprompter, then the people listening or watching you are, “Do they have any emotional investment to it at all? No, they should because they’re human.”

Likewise, in the corporate world, if your sales numbers are down, somebody is upset about that. And if you’re too mean or not caring enough, you’re probably demotivating your employees.

And so it’s really important for people to know that you can set the energy, you set the weather with the tone of your voice, with the eye size that you give as you’re speaking. I had an accounting conference that I was the facilitator of a couple of years ago, “Ooh, accounting. So talk about numbers.”

But there’s still amazing people who are doing those numbers. And the president, as I was spotlighting the different speakers and facilitating the panel and the thing, at the very end, he came on stage and he had prepared remarks, and he said, “I’m going to take a page from Gina, and put my pages down.”

And he actually put them over on the podium and he walked to the front of the stage. And so he spoke from the heart. And I’m telling you, every single person, and that was nothing he’d ever done before, right? And every single person in that conference stood up and gave him outstanding ovation because it was such, for him, it was a big leap.

Now, for somebody who’s more practiced or they’re maybe more of an extrovert, this wouldn’t seem like a lot. And that’s what I think is so important about my book is that it takes anybody where they are, and these little things that might seem like not a big deal can bridge a gap between yourself and an audience in a positive way, which is what this is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear what you have to say about confidence. Listeners always want more of it. They ask about it. They re-watch episodes about confidence. So how do we have more of it, Gina?

Gina London
Confidence is the outcome after you learn and can apply the techniques of best practices of communication. You don’t first think into confidence and then exude it. You realize vocal projection shows authority, “I will learn how to give more volume.”

Anybody, whether or not you’re a self-described introvert, extrovert, anywhere on that scale, you can learn to project your voice. Don’t rely on a microphone, number one. Number two, posture. Walking into a room with a slow but meaningful pace is going to affect a look of, “I belong. I’m comfortable. Looking out at the people in a room, I can make eye contact.”

Those little tools, when you know that you can do it and you’re practicing it and you’re actually doing it, that’s going to change your feedback loop of how people receive you. So the first position is you’re going to learn some of these techniques.

You might feel like you’re doing the big smiley crack thing like Stephen was when he was doing his presentation practice. But when you start to see how people react to you, it’s going to reassure you and reaffirm that.

So that changes that feedback loop of how you speak, how you walk, how you look, how you engage. That’s going to result in more head space for real-time decision-making around the content that you’re wanting to share or the conversation that you’re going to have.

And that makes you feel more confident as a result. So it’s an outcome. The actions inform the emotion, not the other way around.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. So I’m not so much hearing it’s so much a matter of mindset or belief or self-talk. Is that in the mix at all for confidence?

Gina London
Yes, of course. So my book has three main sections: say it, look it, be it. And the say it part starts with how we talk about ourselves to ourselves. So, absolutely, I mean, the first person that you talk to in the morning and the last person that you talk to at night, even if you have a partner or you’re doing a little prayer, it’s still you.

And I think that’s really important is to… we have a section, I have a section, “How do you interrogate the words that you use to talk about yourself with yourself? Are they words that you own and that you truly believe, or were they maybe words that were put there by someone else?”

And if that was someone else that put it in there like a coach who said, “You don’t work hard enough,” or, in my case, a teacher who said I mumbled, are those things that are serving you? Are those things that you want to hold on to? Or, they’ve taken root because they were planted in by someone else?

So we go through that whole interrogation process because I do want you to have positive self-talk. I do absolutely encourage you to embrace the growth mindset that you can develop and amplify yourself. And that is okay.

The same way you develop a better tennis serve or a golf swing or a piano or violin, it’s the same application for how you become a more intentional communicator, an intentional human being.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, in your pitch, I understand there are some communication habits that quietly undermine credibility and executive presence. Uh-oh, Gina, what are these and how do we stop them?

Gina London
Well, I’ve already touched on one, and that is the soft speaker. It’s not that if you’re an introvert, you have to be yelling all the time. But it is that a stronger voice, it’s going to be able to contribute in a busy meeting more than a soft voice that people over-speak.

So I certainly do want everyone to feel more comfortable hearing their voice hit the back of the room. It’s not about diaphragm breathing or anything super technical, but it is about matching the breadth of your voice along with that word is going up the top of your mouth, roof of your mouth, back to the back of that room.

And that’s going to help you when you say things like, “I have something I’d like to add here,” as opposed to inside, eating those words, “I have something I’d like to add here.” So that undermines your authority.

Your ability to reach out and try to network within an organization is also something that’s really important. Don’t think that your work is going to be the thing that’s getting you the attention or the promotion. You also need to work visibly, and that includes reaching out to people that might be two layers above you.

Not to say, “Hey, pick me, pick me,” but, “I see you,” or, “I’ve read about you,” or, “I saw you on this Slack meeting or something, and I’d like to know more about you. Could I have a 10-minute virtual or real coffee with you to learn your story because I find you inspiring, I find what you do interesting?”

People really gravitate to being asked for advice or sharing their story. So networking is a corporate-y word for just building relationships, but proactively building friendships and learning how to take more control of your voice would be the two things that I would encourage anybody to start being real intentional about.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m really digging your perspective on the emotional theming of things. And so in my mind’s eye, I’m seeing the How We Feel app, which divides the universe of emotions into pleasant and unpleasant, and high energy and low energy, and then within each of those 36, so a total of 144 possible emotional flavors there.

How do you think about the palatte or the landscape of emotion? Do you keep it broad in terms of, “Hey, these are kind of like one of the five-ish kind of core things on the menu”? Or do you get precise, like, “This is wistful versus bittersweet”?

Gina London
Well, that’s a fantastic question. And I want to also go back and say I’m digging your use of the word diggin’, by the way. That was really fun. And that’s where I think everybody has a palette.

So I would certainly not be someone that would say, “Let’s go through and I want you all to be able to see the same palette of colors the way that I want you to see the way I see them.”

I would encourage you to think more broadly because, when we get into wistful and we get into the, I mean, I think that’s a lovely nuance and I love poetry and I love literature, so I would certainly like that.

But to make it easier when someone is trying to power-up or human-up themselves from maybe never considering it, I don’t want to get into lavender versus violet because I think someone might have a hard time with, “Is it blissful? Is it wistful?” But I do want you to think about the hopes, dreams, and fears. So I break it into three.

And I do also use the visualization of when you’re speaking even a straightforward presentation, there are probably sections within that presentation that are more serious, more uplifting, something to be aspirational about.

And so I encourage people to look at their script or their presentation or their report, like a conductor would for an orchestra. Where are the parts of that presentation that you need to have your voice get a little slower to show some seriousness, where maybe you want to power it up because you’re telling an energetic story of victory or maybe one that’s more disappointing?

When you feel yourself in the emotions of the words, a lot of us can naturally change those, but some people can’t. So I don’t think you need to get into the subtlest, more microscopic, precise nuances of how you would describe the emotion, but I would like you to have the general understanding of where you are taking that audience at a particular time.

And if you are delivering some difficult news, I also would encourage you, “Can you give them a little bit of hope towards the end?” because we don’t want to just be left with our emotions flat on the floor. We want to be feeling like there’s some reason to keep going for some reason.

And if you’re a leader, or even if you’re a colleague presenting to other colleagues, I think keeping that in mind is also going to help you have the words in a particular order and have your voice and your body language and your facial expressions connecting to those emotions while you go on. So you are creating a journey.

Does it have to be extremely nuanced? No, but you should be aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You should also be reading the room, because if you are delivering information, information, information, boring, boring, boring, and the eyes are starting to glaze over and you continue to steamroll through that, you have already lost them. If you think it’s boring for you, it’s completely boring for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. The symphony orchestra conductor picture, I think, is super handy because, if you think of a great conductor, they really do, with their whole bodies, convey not just the tempo, like, you know, one, two, three, four. But, like, the mood, the vibes, the feels of the piece, and they’re quite distinct in terms of, like, the slow, sad part versus the fast, exciting part, all those dimensions with the pacing and the volume.

And I think, when you imagine yourself in such a role, it also feels rather empowering in terms of, “This is the art that I seek to create and the emotional journey movements of this piece of oratory,” not to get too highfalutin about it, but it does. It puts you in a good head space, I think, to really consider more dimensions than words, words, words.

Gina London
Than just the information, yeah, because you know, like any of us right now can think about, “Who was that boss that we really liked to listen to? Who was that teacher, that professor that really made the lecture come alive? Who is that person that you can think of right now that you think is a captivating speaker, if it’s a celebrity or a politician or whoever?”

More than likely, they have worked on this stuff. They think about, “Where is a place where I can put some energy in what might be a straightforward, otherwise, presentation or a report or an update?”

I was working in Switzerland last month with a chief medical officer of a big medical device company and very facts, very scientific, all of this, but I said, “You’re saving people with cancer. Is there a story that you can tell?” And I said, “Just give me someone’s first name.”

He got into this whole story about Christopher and what they were able to do and how it made him feel and what his family did. And this is from a very scientific sort of logos-minded, not ethos-minded guy. And it was captivating.

I said, “Now you can pick that little story as an example in an earnings update, in a town hall. You can do that stuff.” And what I’m driving at here is freeing people up to bring more of them, their human selves, into what might be an, otherwise, very dry, factual operations report.

It changes the way people receive you. And people do have shorter attention spans. They do want to connect with people in a work environment, wherever. These types of human skills, you can use them in so many different places. And I think it’s just really important for people to get excited about this and not feel like, “Oh, another set of rules.”

No, it’s you crafting oars for your little boat that’s already out there floating in the river of life, folks. What can you do? You can construct oars or paddles or maybe even a motor and a sail, and you can take more control of how it goes and how people interact with you. And I do find that really exciting.

It’s not just for, “Oh, she’s a natural,” or, “He’s a natural.” It’s a developable skill. And there are tools that you can put into your toolbox. And then depending on where you’re going, what the communication event is, and everything is a communication event, everything is worth trying these things out, changing those feedback loops, and then you’ll become more confident and more comfortable as a result.

And that’s really the keys that anybody can take. But they do have to take them, they do have to explore them and make them applicable for themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and this is sort of the theme that’s coming up with regard to you keep your professionalism, well, in certain contexts. You keep professionalism and the emotions and it’s winning.

What comes to mind is so random, but it was a snippet from an earnings call. It was Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two Interactive. And he said something to the effect of, “Things are shaping up to be a blockbuster year fueled by the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most anticipated entertainment release in history.”

And I thought, “Dang!” because, here he is, and earnings calls tend to be among the most boring and staid of contexts. And yet, I thought he did a fine job of saying something that’s pretty exciting, “Biggest entertainment release in history. Whoa!” within the same context that fits of, you know, professionalism, earnings call.

And if it was purely, like, reading a transcript, that would feel very weird, “The most anticipated entertainment release in history.” Like, it doesn’t sound like you’re anticipating it that much, bro.

Gina London
Exactly. If you’re going to use words that are superlative in nature, then why not link that with an energy in your voice? And if you are on video or people can see you and face to face, make that face match that, too. So back to the whole incongruence thing, it’s not off balance like that little three-legged stool.

And that’s where I encourage people to power up your language. If you have corporate lexicon that you have fallen into that trap of way of speaking, look at those words again. Does it mean anything to you? Does it say anything to a brand-new employee that’s just coming out of college who doesn’t know your corporate lingo?

If not, then change it, warm it up, make it have meaning. Don’t think that everybody knows what you’re saying because you’ve been saying it a certain way for so long. And if you are saying it with a complete lack of emotion or a complete lack of vocal intensity or energy, you are replaceable.

I’m sorry to say that that transcript can be written by ChatGPT or Claude now, sent out there, and probably read by some voice gen that’s going to sound really slick and have no soul. So if you have a soul, this is a chance to really make it shine and connect to the other souls in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
“If you have a soul, now’s your chance to make it shine.” I like that a lot. And with the professionalism, I think some people maybe have a little bit of fear of, like, cutting loose or getting too emotional. Like, it’s not Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch, you know, in terms of like, “I’m so excited about this release.” It’s not that, but there’s genuine human emotion present within that professional package, and that’s winning.

Gina London
Exactly. And that’s one of the things that one of my first sections is all about the FAQs, “Well, Gina, what if I’m an introvert?” “Well, Gina, doesn’t this sound like it’s fake or exploitative?” And I answer all these questions.

And one of those things is, “Well, but I can’t just be overly animated, and, well, you’re telling me to do all these things all the time.” Like, “No, I’m telling you to be situationally aware. Don’t jump up, up and down on Oprah’s couch, unless you’re Tom Cruise, because you can, I suppose, do that if you want. But know the guardrails of your situation. But do push the boundaries a little bit.”

If my accountant president had stuck to the script and just stayed behind the podium and held on to both sides of that podium and looked down and just read like he was prepared to do, he never would have had that connection.

And I think this is the wonderful, as we said before, free opportunity for anybody to explore the range of you. You probably have, when you’re with your family or your friends, you’re at a sporting event or something, you’ve probably got that energy version of you.

So don’t switch it off just because you walk into work or you’ve turned on your Teams or your Zoom meeting for that business sales call. You can still bring your humanness to those things.

I worked with the chief technical officer for Pernod Ricard for a number of years, and I can share that because he’s on my LinkedIn page. But Pierre-Yves was very by the book. He was a native French speaker.

He was now, because their company was doing a lot of AI to help promote their market, their marketing and their sales funnels, he was in charge of a lot of that. So he was being asked to speak at a lot of English language native conferences where he not only had to work on some enunciation so he could be more easily understood, speaking in a second language, but he also didn’t want to just be getting too technical on the AI stuff.

He wanted to use stories and even shared more about himself to have that connection with the audience. And we had such a wonderful time that his assistant, who would be putting in our coaching times, even said to him, “I’m so happy when I get to put in another time that you’re working with Gina because I get to see how you progress all the time.”

And that’s really rewarding because people can amplify themselves while still being very true to themselves. And I think that’s the important thing to remember, too. This is not changing you. You are already a fully formed human being, but it is amplifying you, and these are some of the tools that you can use and they’re available for anybody.

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

Gina London
I think one of the most important conversations I’ve had is about conversations, and it’s with the wonderful woman who wrote the foreword to my book, Susan Scott. So she wrote a book called Fierce Conversations. And her foundational premise, which is true, is that our conversations are our relationships.

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

Gina London
Well, I also have the privilege of having Dr. Wendy Suzuki, she’s the head of the arts and science program over at NYU and she’s an author herself and a neuroscientist. And years ago, when I was working in the White House, and President Clinton was there, and this is the only thing that he taught me and nothing else to share.

But there’s a little technique of putting your thumb here on your palm, turning that palm around and putting a pressure on it, and it helps you go from reactive, maybe your face might be leaking something or the nerves might be coming up when you’re getting a difficult conversation, to keep your face and your voice in check.

And I asked Wendy if that, I said, “Is that a placebo or is that a valid thing?” She says, “No, no, no, this actually helps you go from the amygdala point of the trigger response, very emotional response, more into the prefrontal cortex.”

And so I don’t know if it was actually an experiment or a study, but it was validated by one of the top neuroscientists, and that makes me really happy because I’ve been transferring that and teaching that to my clients as well, as a way to keep yourself grounded when you’re feeling like, otherwise, you might leak some emotions that you don’t think are going to build your credibility or that connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. So this sounds like an acupressure move, and Wendy Suzuki, she’s a guest on the show, so she must be right.

Gina London
She is. Of course, she is.

Pete Mockaitis
She has the imprimatur of How to be Awesome at Your Job. So let’s review. I grab a palm, one hand, and with my other hand, I put my thumb firmly in the dead center of the palm and put some pressure on it?

Gina London
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do I hold it for a while or…?

Gina London
Do I hold and how long? And does it make a difference if it’s my left thumb to my right? No, the idea here, really, is to give yourself that reminder that you are communicating even if you’re not saying a word.

So it’s usually used, I use it when I’m going on a stage or I’m in a panel or in a debate of some sort where I’m maybe getting a question that I’ve not expected, or maybe a client is asking me something that is out of scope, and I need to prepare a good response. I want to keep my face composed. I want to keep my pace slow and even.

So this just helps me remind myself to keep that game face on so that I can focus my brain matter not on the emotions and the cortisol that’s coming up, but on how I construct, “How can I purposefully go into my toolbox of techniques and land an answer that is going to continue to build that trust and that credibility going forward?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Gina London
In the business sense right now, I’ve read a lot of them, but I really keep going back to The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stainer. And I loved his book because it’s short, simple, and, most important for me, easy to apply.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous. And a favorite tool?

Gina London
Well, I won’t lie and say that I don’t use any of the AI bots. I’ve not gotten familiar with Claude. I do use ChatGPT. It’s become a real easy way to write quick emails. And I think, sometimes, when you’re doing, for example, my daughter has just gone off to college, and all the type of getting her into housing and all the follow-up that you do with student administrators and things, that can be a little bit emotionally charged.

So you can give that prompt. The ChatGPT tool doesn’t have any of that emotion that it’s caring about, “Which word should I use?” then it spits out something. But what’s really important, when we talk about this kind of a tool, and this is inherent, of course, in the book and for our own communication as well, is to not settle for the first thing that they come up with.

Look for, “Are those words that you would use? Would you sign off like that? Is it too flowery? Is it not warm enough?” Use it as a skeleton, but you put your own flesh on those types of things. I think that’s really important as more of us are using AI agents.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Gina London
Favorite habit for me is making my bed.

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

Gina London
The fact that you’re communicating always, either by default or by design.

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

Gina London
You would go to my website, GinaLondon.com, or if you’d like to buy the book straight up, we have, obviously, a way that you can buy the book from my website. Or you can go ahead and buy it at any of the online places that you would purchase a book because it’s everywhere now.

And, certainly, if you want to follow me on any socials, I’m over on TikTok and Insta and my favorite place, though, is LinkedIn because that’s where a lot of the business and professional conversations are happening and I love to be there.

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

Gina London
Don’t think that you have fully arrived. When you get complacent about your communications, that’s when you start to slip. Your caring needs to constantly be cultivated. The same way I won’t get up and not make my bed, I also won’t get up without thinking about, “What’s my self-discipline? How can I add value to someone else? How can I help someone else?”

So one thing I think, also, is really important to remember is that when you’re feeling self-conscious about yourself, your communications, maybe your career path or whatever it is, the best way to heal that is to get more others-focused. So the more others-conscious you can be, the less self-conscious you’ll be as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gina, thank you.

Gina London
Oh, it’s been a pleasure. Absolutely enjoyed it. I was digging the whole experience.

Sep 17

1181: Finding the Hidden Networks that Multiply Opportunities with Ethel Mickey

By Podcasts No Comments

Ethel Mickey reveals how the everyday relationships we foster, both in and out of work, shape who gets ahead.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why networking by the books leads to nowhere
  2. Why certain “time-wasting” interactions are actually critical
  3. The right and wrong ways to build visibility

About Ethel

Ethel Mickey is a sociologist who studies why inequality persists in workplaces that claim to fix it. She is an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino and a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Her research—and her book Networking to Nowhere—reveals how everyday workplace relationships quietly shape who gets ahead in tech.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Ethel, welcome!

Ethel Mickey
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to chat with you. You had a very intriguing pitch. And I want to know, right at the beginning, why do some people seem to get opportunities effortlessly while others seem to do the right things but struggle to get ahead? What’s going on here, Ethel?

Ethel Mickey
Well, my argument in my new book that’s out, Networking to Nowhere, is that we really need to look at the ways in which people are networking, engaging in their relationships, both inside and outside their companies, and thinking about “How are opportunities flowing through relationships in ways that are often invisible but can create really unequal outcomes, specifically thinking about for women compared to men?”

Pete Mockaitis
How does that go down?

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, so I’ve become really frustrated by how much career advice aimed at women, essentially, boils down to them needing to do more. So they should network more, they should speak up more at the table, find more mentors, promote yourself more.

And so the puzzle for me, I really wanted to know whether women weren’t really doing enough or whether there was something else going on. So what I’ve done, I spent several months inside a software company doing research, and I saw that opportunities often travel through, like I said, these relationships that are largely invisible.

So who knows about a current job opportunity? Who gets recommended for that job? Who had someone willing to advocate for them? And I got to thinking, you know, “Maybe women don’t need to network more. Maybe we need to understand why the networking they’re already doing doesn’t produce the same opportunities.”

And as a woman myself, I recognized some of these dynamics in my own career. I could see how easy it can be to internalize this message that you just need to network harder, when the more important question may be whether you’re being included in the relationships that carry opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, the relationships that carry opportunity. That does seem like it could certainly be a missing key if you’re doing some networking stuff that doesn’t seem to be materializing into outcomes, results, opportunities that you’re after.

Could you give us a few examples just to paint the picture of what are we talking about in terms of these exchanges and these relationships where opportunity is flowing and others are missing out on?

Ethel Mickey
So I’m going to talk about a few people from my research. All of the names that I use are pseudonyms to protect their identities and maintain confidentiality. But let me talk to you about Heather. She’s a white woman. She’s been working in the legal department of this software company for about six months.

So she’s relatively new, she’s just starting out her career, she’s in her late 20s, and she does aspire to move up into management, but she realizes that she’ll probably have to leave the company, her current employer, in order to move up the ladder. And this we see is common practice in tech as well as other industries.

So when I asked her in our interview, “How do you approach networking?” she takes several minutes to rattle off all of the events that she regularly attends, the various professional groups she’s involved with, and she tells me that her idea of successful networking is to go to the event, make three connections, and start three conversations on LinkedIn afterwards.

So it’s this very kind of pragmatic, logical approach. She has a game plan and she sticks to it through all the events that she goes to. She also tells me that she volunteers, she’s on the board for a community nonprofit, and she views this as an extension of her networking because she’s meeting people in the local community.

And Heather is not alone. A lot of the women I talk to attend conferences, trade shows, seminars, meetups, and express this idea of the power of the potential of networking events, this kind of you-never-know attitude, that if you happen to have a chance encounter with the right stranger, that that person is going to propel their careers.

So, Heather, by all accounts, is following all of the conventional networking advice that were given, but she, at the same time, as we continued talking for over an hour, could not point to a single encounter at any of these events that led to a concrete opportunity for her.

So I want to compare Heather to Chris, who’s one of her colleagues at the same company. He works in the HR department. He’s in his 40s, also relatively new to the company. And he came to the firm after being laid off from his previous employer.

So he tells me he hasn’t had a real job interview in over 17 years. And I found this fascinating, “What do you mean you’ve been working in tech and you haven’t had an interview in 17 years?’

And so he tells me, for his current job, that he was hired through a Barstool interview. And so what does that mean? He said he asked his buddy who he knew that worked at the company to grab a drink with him. His friend not only coached him on the application, but also put in a good word with the hiring manager.

So Chris went through the formal route to apply for that job, but by the time he accepted the offer, the company had elevated the title and pay level of the original position. So we see here two different approaches to networking with two different outcomes.

And the point, I want to be clear, is the man isn’t doing anything wrong. The point is that she was working harder at networking, Heather, that is, but he was benefiting from relationships that already existed rather than trying to tap into these potential, maybe, relationships that you could meet at hypothetical events.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that makes sense. But I think there could be all sorts of corollaries in terms of how folks want to. It’s funny, people have mentioned, “Oh, you want to grow your podcast? Well, be a guest of the podcast. That’s what you got to do. Sure.” And so that is a winning approach, yes.

But it’s all about, “Well, how well does that podcast audience fit your podcast audience and how large that podcast audience?” Because you may very well be a guest on 50 podcasts and see very little benefit, versus you could be on one podcast and it’s just, like, quadruples listenership.

Or people will apply to 400 jobs on LinkedIn Easy Apply, and they say, “Oh, shucks! You know, the market is brutal. I applied to 400 jobs and saw nothing.” And others will, you know, have a dozen conversations and say, “Oh, cool. I got three interviews. All right, we’re cooking here.”

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think when we’re talking about the most valuable connections that we have, it’s people with access to opportunities. And so even if people, women, men, are engaging in these strategies to try to edge out the competition and get ahead, if they’re located in these places, in their workplaces where they don’t have visibility, they don’t have access to folks that have the best information or the ability to put you on a high-status project, then all of your efforts are sort of moot.

And so understanding the ways in which your workplace is organized, where you fit in that workplace, and how to then kind of broker relationships across your immediate circle can be really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so tell us then, if going to the networking events and setting a goal and meeting three people and having a follow-up and adding them on LinkedIn is not the way, tell us, how do we do effective networking that brings about the opportunities?

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, so the networking, I find, that actually changes careers doesn’t really look like networking. It comes from these relationships that already exist. So we can think about, you know, reconnecting with former colleagues.

Former colleagues can speak to not only your personality but your performance. So how were you as a colleague? How did you manage deadlines? What were you like to work with? These are some of the most valuable connections that we can have, professionally speaking.

Volunteering for cross-functional work might not feel like networking. It actually might sound like a waste of time if you’re getting asked to do something that’s not part of your immediate job description.

But thinking about building relationships outside of your immediate circle, outside of your team, gaining that visibility, building relationships with people who you’re working alongside and might vouch for you down the road, I think, that can be a really useful strategy.

And the people in my research that do that kind of cross-functional work, it’s typically the men that I see doing this, are able to better position themselves for leadership when it comes time for a promotion, And I think also helping other people before asking for help.

And so thinking about investing in a relationship, not networking events. Investing in people and thinking about, you know, don’t wait till you need a job, don’t wait until you want the promotion, but stay in touch with with former coworkers. Cultivate relationships with people who have visibility across the organization and really don’t assume that great work speaks for itself.

So making sure people outside of your immediate manager or supervisor knows what you’re contributing. A lot of this, too, can happen through more informal gatherings. So I see in a lot of what I study that it’s a quick conversation over coffee. It’s grabbing lunch.

It’s going to a ball game after work where people are able to, kind of, more casually say, “Oh, this is what I’ve been working on. Here’s kind of a puzzle that I’m troubleshooting. What ideas do you have?”

And so if invitations to those kinds of informal gatherings aren’t coming your way, what are some ways to create your own opportunities to build relationships? So sending out invitations yourself, or organizing a lunch group, starting a cross-team discussion group, whether that’s in person or online.

So some of these are are ways that we can think about the right way to network, which, as you notice, I said nothing about events and conferences.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s intriguing because, in a way, I can, hey, I love going to events and conferences myself, and it’s a different feel, you know? I mean, you are meeting people and you are broadening your horizons.

But, in some ways, it’s a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder, to really get enough of a connection, a vibe, a shared understanding of another human that you encounter, even if you are cutting loose, you know? You’ve got a session, then you go to a dinner, and then there’s cocktails afterwards.

Even if you had a few good hours with folks, which is kind of as good as it gets, really, in my experience when it comes to relationship-building at conferences, it’s kind of hard for them to have a real sense of, “Boy, you know, Ethel is just awesome to work with. Boy, she is so sharp. She has a gift for this.”

Like, it’s hard to get to that point with people in those contexts. And that’s what I’m hearing, what I’m picking up from what you’re saying is, and that’s really what the impression that we need to leave folks with for opportunities to flow our way.

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, and I also enjoy conferences. I just got back from a really big one in New York City. And I see a lot of value in going there and exchanging ideas and presenting my work to an audience who ask really smart questions.

And so there’s a kind of engagement that can happen in these settings that is super valuable for us, professionally. But I will say I don’t approach conferences hoping to find the connection that will make or break my career.

And, you know, I’ve talked to people who are hiring at conferences. It didn’t really matter. They didn’t quite remember that five-minute conversation where maybe we exchanged business cards or connected on LinkedIn.

But I don’t want to devalue conferences altogether. To tell a story from this last conference I was at, there was someone who came up to me after I presented, and we had a very quick exchange, and they were very excited about the work I was doing, and there was some overlap thxre with our ideas.

And I said, “You know, follow up with an email to me and we can keep the conversation going.” And, you know, this person did follow up and wrote a really thoughtful email to me. It was clear they had read some of my research, which is like the biggest form of flattery, but they were asking smart questions that made me think differently.

And you know what? I’m going to remember this person now. And there was an opportunity that came up just recently, and I couldn’t do it. And I put this person’s name forward because they seemed like a good fit.

So there is a way to work the conference, but thinking about maybe the steps that happen afterwards or how thoughtfully you’re engaging with these kind of one-off chance encounters might be something to rethink.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, please, share with us your favorite moves you’ve heard of people doing in terms of really developing these relationships that make things happen for you.

Ethel Mickey
So I distinguish between two types of networking in my book. And the one that we’ve really been talking about I call strategic networking. And this is really doing it by the book. So everything we’ve been talking about, like the conferences and making sure you collect a LinkedIn contact after the conference, really thinking more of a quantity over quality approach.

But I want to distinguish that between what I call strategic socializing. And this is where folks, and I find that it’s typically men that do this. But strategic socializing is where you kind of blur the professional and personal relationship. So you’re thinking about building friendships with the people you work with, maintaining those friendships, socializing with them outside of normal work hours.

So some of the primary ways in tech that guys especially would be connecting and building relationships is through things like sports, whether that’s fantasy sports leagues, going to sports games, also video games.

They had video game leagues, they’d go to Marvel movies together, ski trips, golf outings, a lot of these things that kind of seemed what the women would actually describe it as a waste of time, like, “I don’t have time to do all of this, and I don’t want to hang out with my coworkers after work.” But the men would say, “I’ve met some really smart people that have opened up doors for me through these opportunities.”

So if we’re thinking about like the different types of networking, that’s sort of the categorization that I put forward and think about, you know, “How do we leverage some ties that we already have, reconnect with folks that maybe have gone dormant? And think about is there something we can do to connect on a personal level?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really interesting perspective – the perception of an activity as a waste of time versus not. Because, in a way, it’s very misleading because a networking brunch sounds so productively effective and important as a thing one should do, like, “Ooh, yes, yes, I’m looking to expand my network. And this is an event for this explicit purpose. This is a great match. Let me go.”

As opposed to playing video games together sounds like, you know, we’re just goofing around, and I guess, in one way, you are. But in another way, the extra relaxed, diffused nature of such activities, it makes it feel all the more like real friends, you know?

Ethel Mickey
Like, authentic.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about, yeah, real friends versus deal friends, or friends of utility versus true friends. It’s, like, if you’re doing a thing together, it’s almost like part of our lizard brain is just like, “I must like this person. We are friends. We belong to the same tribe, community, posse, grouping. We are bonded by this thing more so than we were both at a networking brunch together.”

Ethel Mickey
Yeah, I think what you’re talking about, it’s like part of human nature. And there’s a whole wealth of social science research that shows that we gravitate towards people who we view as similar to ourselves.

So that could be shared interests, like, “Oh, you like golf? I like golf. You like video games? I like video games.” It could be identity-based. So when we walk into a space, you know, perhaps I’m seeking out other women, I’m seeking out people who I view as at my same age or career stage.

I’m a working mom. I love to connect with other working moms. And this is just part of how we are as people. We bond really quickly when we can swap stories, exchange experiences. It fosters this sense of ease pretty immediately, trust and communication.

So none of this is inherently bad. In industries like tech, where we see who holds the leadership positions and the power is drastically skewed towards one group, if the men are just gravitating towards other men, then we get this situation where all of the information that’s happening over these kind of informal golf outings or hitting up the bar after work just kind of circulates in the same circles.

And so women continue to be excluded and are left out of these interactions and they’re left out of the information loop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if anyone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, “Oh, my gosh, this is happening in my world,” tell us some of your favorite tactics, moves, events, invitations that you recommend folks proactively rock and roll.

Ethel Mickey
One thing I do caution women against is believing that they need to network exactly the way men do. Men’s networks often develop organically through workplace cultures that have historically centered men, as I’ve been talking about. And so simply copying these behaviors doesn’t necessarily produce the same results.

One of the biggest takeaways from my research is that women shouldn’t just try to network more. They should intentionally cultivate a community of strong ties. So I encourage people to think of building a career ecosystem rather than just a contact list.

And think about every relationship doesn’t have to do everything for you. I think we put a lot of pressure on finding a mentor that can, you know, solve our whole career and figure everything out for us.

But, you know, maybe you have one person in your ecosystem who’s a sounding board. Another might be a sponsor for you. Another might introduce you to people you want to collaborate with. Another might simply be the person that reminds you you’re not alone in your workplace.

And so together, these relationships, this collection of relationships, can create resilience for us. And if the informal networks don’t naturally include you, don’t network harder. Build your own circle of trust.

So we see that women absolutely benefit from building relationships across the company that I studied, including building relationships with influential men. But what my research also taught me is that having a strong community of other women provides something different, and that’s a reliable source of peer mentoring, honest feedback, and advocacy.

So that doesn’t replace your broader network, but it makes it much easier to navigate some of these dynamics that we’ve been talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Within this ecosystem, can you lay out a few of these key roles you want to try to fill out?

Ethel Mickey
Sure. So, you know, I could talk a little bit about my own circle that I have built. And, you know, I have a group of women at different career stages that I regularly stay in contact with.

So we’re not talking about a lot of people here because you want the touch points to be more frequent. So there are folks that I have that are reviewing the work that I’m doing. They’re reading a research paper, they’re talking through an idea with me, and they’re really, like, my ideas person.

I have women at other career stages a little bit ahead of me who will write letters of recommendation and serve as a reference for me. They’ll open doors for me when they can.

And then there are other professional relationships I have that do, you know, kind of merge into friendships where it’s, like, “I need advice and you know me as a whole person outside of just the work I do. And can you advise me based on what you know about me?”

So we can kind of think about, you know, building this team, like a board of advisors, if you will, that each have their own different roles and different areas of expertise when it comes to supporting you.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say group and team and board of advisors, are they talking to and knowing and meeting each other, or rather it’s a collection of individuals that your relationship is with each of them individually?

Ethel Mickey
That’s a great question. And I hope I’m not throwing too many metaphors out there. It could be both. I have both. I have a group that I meet with kind of bi-weekly, and it’s a writing group, it’s a check-in group, it’s an accountability group, and we all know each other and we all support each other.

But then I certainly have other folks on my board of advisors, if you will, who aren’t part of that circle, but I’ve connected with them through other jobs or through other research teams. And we stay in touch and it’s more of a one-on-one relationship.

I think, in most cases for people, these relationships will be one-on-one. But we see that a lot of companies have affinity groups or ERGs, employee resource groups. So these might be ways to think about, “How do I build this kind of ecosystem within structures that are already in place?” in your company.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to know, do you have any favorite ways you like to reach out? We talked about mentors. And so some folks suggest, “Don’t come on so strongly,” like, “Will you be my mentor?” But rather, you know, ease into it, like, “Hey, I’d really value your input on this thing.” So how do you imagine making the approach, building these relationships and understandings?

Ethel Mickey
You know, maybe I’ll tell a story about someone else that I interviewed from the tech company, and he was an engineer. His name was Rohit, he’s an Indian man in his 40s, and he had a really successful trajectory pretty rapidly. So he got promoted, I believe, within just four months.

And so when I asked him, you know, “What do you credit to this rapid acceleration?” he talked a lot about these little projects that he would take on, often as favors, taking things off his boss’s plate. So he didn’t consider his boss a mentor yet but he was being very strategic about building personal relationships with high-level people.

And he was thinking about, you know, “How can I take something off of your plate, be useful to you, you get to know me, you get to see the kind of work I can do beyond my job description?” So he was building visibility, building connections, building a positive reputation as a helpful person.

And when he got promoted, his manager said, “I couldn’t think of a better person than you.” And not only did he get the promotion, but they built this relationship that was built… it eventually became built on reciprocity where they were exchanging information, they were leaning on each other to complete tasks and hit their deadline.

So that could be a way to think about maybe not something we think of as networking, but by going that sort of extra mile, it creates that visibility and those connections that can turn into something more.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like what you’re saying there with regard to the taking on little projects, doing favors, being proactively helpful. And you said the very thoughtful email message you got, in which that person had read your research meant a lot to you.

And I’m thinking about, I think, Tim Ferris had some tips in terms of, if you want someone to mentor you, like, take massive action on whatever they recommend, like, “Oh, hey, thanks for that book recommendation. I read the entire thing and here are my summary notes.”

And maybe that feels over the top but it could also send the message, “Oh, wow, when I share some advice, input, perspective with this person, they really run with it. This is sort of a good use of my time.”

And so I’d love to hear more about what are some of the moves in which you apply effort that dazzle and delight someone you’re trying to build a relationship with?

Ethel Mickey
You know, it’s interesting that we’re talking about mentorship because I actually think this is bleeding into sponsorship, and sponsorship can arguably be more effective or important, especially if we’re thinking about trying to network to climb ladders, right?

So there’s networking that we do if we’re looking for a new job and we’re thinking about “Who’s outside of our company? How do I know more people in the industry?” But I also write and think a lot about how networking is just part of the everyday work we do because work is so relational, especially in an industry like tech where work is structured around teams.

A lot of times, evaluations are done by peers. So we’re thinking about building relationships and reputations in our own companies to survive. And so when we’re thinking about sponsorship, it’s not just having someone guide you. It’s having someone who will say, “I know her and she’s excellent.”

And I find that women often do have mentors, but men are often more likely to have sponsors. And so, you’re asking for examples, like thinking about becoming known before you need something.

People remember generosity, they remember competence, and they remember reliability far longer than those one-off networking conversations. And I would encourage people to be really careful about what kinds of projects they’re taking on or what kind of extra work they’re doing.

So to give you some examples, there was one woman I interviewed who was really aspiring to become a VP, and by all accounts, she was entirely qualified for it. She had been at the company longer than almost anyone I had met.

She was a director. She had all of the credentials. And she was taking kind of the same approach to these little extra side projects, but the work she was doing was, like, really invisible.

She wanted to train new hires and create curriculum for them. And so what ended up happening was she was spending more time with very entry-level people, which she viewed as a waste of her time. And so I repeatedly heard women express disappointment over the lack of credit or lack of visibility that they needed to further advance.

Some women took on planning the company retreat, and that’s important, but it’s not going to be visible in the same way as pulling off a last-minute favor that your boss needs to hit a deadline that he’s going to report to the executive team.

So I do want to caution like what kind of extra work are we doing and being really thoughtful about it, but also ensuring that credit is being given to the work we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s come up in a previous conversation about, you know, promotable work versus not.

Ethel Mickey
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so you can be a super friendly, helpful team player who pitches in and assists with all kinds of things. And that is, hopefully, noticed and appreciated. But depending on the people and the personalities and what folks really value, it doesn’t get you anything but more remorse when they fire you, you know? It’s like, “Oh, I feel really bad firing them but I’m still going to fire them during the layoff season.”

Ethel Mickey
Well, I always say if you do that grunt work really well, you just get more grunt work, right? Because they’re like, “Oh, you’re so good at party planning, like, you should plan the next one.”

And it’s like, well, then you get into this cycle where you’re stuck and you’re not doing work that you find meaningful. It’s not getting you positioned to move your career in the way you want.

And, you know, I saw this a lot with women who were engineers and highly technical, and they kept getting pushed into more people management jobs and roles. And these weren’t necessarily jobs that they wanted or were trained to do, but they kept getting asked to, “Hey, will you will you manage this person? Will you mentor this person?”

And before they knew it, they were, you know, either a project manager, a product manager, and they were kind of looking around, like, “How did I get here? Like, I want to be a developer, I want to be an architect, I want to code things, and now I spend my day managing personalities.”

So we do have to be, yeah, mindful of the types of tasks that we’re being asked to do and what we agree to.

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

Ethel Mickey
So I think that I want it to be clear that understanding some of these dynamics that I’m talking about isn’t discouraging, and, particularly for women. I know your audience has a lot of women who are navigating careers, and I hope that the information and that my research can be liberating in the sense that, once you realize that careers are built through these trusted relationships rather than constant self-promotion, you can spend your time much more strategically.

And for leaders, those who are in a position to maybe serve as a sponsor or serve as a mentor, this can be a reminder to really think about and take a look at who’s getting included in those informal interactions. Who do you just kind of automatically gravitate towards? And maybe is there someone that’s been inadvertently pushed to the sidelines?

So thinking about who gets included in those interactions where trust and opportunity are built. So understanding how opportunities actually flow can allow us to invest our time differently and, hopefully, more effectively.

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

Ethel Mickey
So my favorite quote is from Grace Hopper, who is, or was, a trailblazing computer programmer, and she said that, “The most dangerous phrase in the language is we’ve always done it this way.”

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

Ethel Mickey
So I want to talk about Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties.” And so folks in sociology, but also management, know about this research, which shows the value of our weak ties. These are those one-off connections that can often create new kinds of information.

This idea, if you talk to a friend of a friend, you might have access to different information than if you talk to your best friend or a close family member. You’re kind of expanding your network in those ways. And I bring that up because what’s fascinating is that my research found a little bit more of a nuanced picture.

So these weak ties might help you access information, but many of the jobs and promotions that I observed actually came through these trusted relationships that we’ve been talking about. That’s people who are willing to put their own reputation on the line by recommending someone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ethel Mickey
One of my favorite books is by a sociologist, Lauren Rivera, and it’s called Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. And this is just an excellent, well-researched book that shows how hiring an elite industry.

She looks at banking, she looks at law firms. It’s often much more social than we admit. So it’s not just about credentials, it’s about, “Who is a good fit? Who is familiar to us?” We’ve talked a lot about who’s familiar and how that can create trust.

But when that’s used in hiring, it has profound implications for inequality. And my own work extends that conversation by asking, you know, “What happens after people get hired? So how do relationships inside workplaces shape who’s getting opportunities like promotions and recognition?”

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

Ethel Mickey
So this might seem kind of cheesy, but my calendar. You know, relationships don’t maintain themselves. I try to keep track of birthdays. I schedule reminders on my calendar to check in with people who matter to me, professionally, every few months.

So that board of advisors that I was talking about, I have calendar reminders to send them a note, see how they’re doing. And, you know, I also find voice notes remarkably effective at keeping in touch. They feel more personal than a text or an email, but it’s not as big of a lift as a phone call or hopping on Zoom.

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

Ethel Mickey
I’d say the goal isn’t to know more people, it’s to know people well enough that they’d confidently say, “You should hire her.”

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

Ethel Mickey
So my website is EthelMickey.com.

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

Ethel Mickey
Think less about expanding your network and think more about strengthening the one you already have. Don’t measure your network by how many people know you. Measure it by how many people have seen your work and would enthusiastically recommend you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ethel, thank you.

Ethel Mickey
Thank you.