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

847: How to Enhance Your Team’s Greatness through Coaching with Sara Canaday

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Sara Canaday says: "Anyone can be a good coach. … with the right tools, understanding the core skills that it takes and how to sharpen them."

Sara Canaday shares the essential skills that help managers level up their leadership and engage employees.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The surprisingly simple principles of coaching well.
  2. The two types of coaching and when to deploy each.
  3. A step-by-step guide to coaching effectively.

About Sara

Sara Canaday is a leadership strategist and award-winning author who helps arm professionals with the practices and strategies they need to make the critical shift from informed to influential, from doer to driver, and from manager to leader.

When she’s not speaking or working with her clients, she’s cheering on her son’s football team or hiding new shoe purchases from her husband and 20 year old daughter.

Resources Mentioned

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Sara Canaday Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sara, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Sara Canaday
Thank you for having me back. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom about coaching but, first, I need to hear the story. You became a Cupcake Wars judge which was a longtime dream of yours. What’s the story here?

Sara Canaday
Oh, yes. Well, okay, so before anybody gets too excited, I didn’t actually appear on the Food Network show by the same name but what I did do is, for my birthday, I had my husband recreate the show right here in my home. So, we invited, I want to say it was, eight couples, and part of the invitation meant you had to show up with a homemade, not store-bought, from scratch cupcake with a Texas theme, or something that’s inspired from the year of my birth, the year I was born. And so, these cupcakes were going to be judged on taste, theme, and presentation.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many people did you get to sign up for this punishment, Sara? “Show up with some work and I’ll judge you.”

Sara Canaday
Every single couple came with cupcakes. One couple’s daughter ended up making them, they admitted it to me. Some couples had a blast doing this on their own together and were extremely competitive, I couldn’t believe it but, nonetheless, I got to sit and taste eight different cupcakes and judge them. And so, hey, I may not have been on the actual show but recreating it was just as good if not better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, fun, I’m glad that worked and good birthday memories there.

Sara Canaday
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Way to do it up as opposed to just like, “Oh, I guess we’re going to go to dinner…”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“…for my birthday.”

Sara Canaday
We did something different.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. Well, let’s hear about your latest book Coaching Essentials for Managers. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Sara Canaday
Well, nothing extraordinary other than I’ve had people tell me that it is a really good handbook more than just a book. It serves as a guide. There’s a lot of how-to’s in there. There are powerful phrases you can use to kind of get you off center under varying circumstances of coaching. There’s a coaching prep sheet that you can use before a coaching session so you can feel more confident with the process.

And then there’s a myriad of actual scenarios that you can read about so that if something similar happens, you have a way to navigate the conversation. So, it is a book but most people tell me it’s like a nice handbook, like a guide.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what’s the main idea or key takeaway or thesis here?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think the main idea is that anyone can be a good coach. I think we used to think that a good coach is somebody who’s really charismatic, and they know how to be uber patient, and they just have this knack for more of a counselor-type approach, and that’s not true. Again, with the right tools, understanding the core skills that it takes and how to sharpen them, anybody can pursue coaching today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And we talked about the book title there says, Coaching Essentials for Managers: The Tools You Need to Ignite Greatness in Each Employee. You say anyone can coach. Any thoughts for non-managers in terms of, are there particular skills or tips that you think would be resonant for those folks who don’t yet have direct reports reporting to them?

Sara Canaday
Absolutely. In fact, I am working on a course right now for LinkedIn, and the title is Peer Coaching, and it derives a lot of the same applications and concepts and skills from leadership coaching. So, the very types of attributes and formulas that work for leader-to-employee coach also work for peer-to-peer coaching, and that’s becoming a really growing trend in corporate today.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And so, with peer-to-peer coaching, is it sort of like we switch off in terms of, “Okay, you coach me then I coach you”? Or, how does that go down?

Sara Canaday
That’s exactly right. And it can be a pair, a partner, of coaches but oftentimes it’s a group of about four or five people together that peer-coach each other. And so, there’s a streamlined approach, certain questions are asked, “Bring your latest challenge to the group,” and everybody gets their turn, and then peer coaches are listening not to fix – this is the hard part, it’s just like a leader with an employee – resists moving to fix-it mode right away.

But they’re listening to ask the right questions so that that person that has a challenge can put more structure around their thinking so that they can reflect on what exactly they want to have happen, and then they move in to potential solutions based on what they’ve already tried, based on what the potential roadblocks are or facets that are part of the issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve had really cool experiences with peer coaching. I did the first course in the Co-Active Coaching, the CPCC folks, and I was amazed at, okay, none of us were coaches yet, certified. We’ve done the first course out of, like, six, I don’t remember, and yet folks are having these wild breakthrough conversations with tears and whatnot, it’s like, “Huh.”

To your point about anyone can coach, it’s true. It doesn’t take a superhuman with crazy almost psychic-like empathy skills but rather it’s just, hey, you’re paying attention, you’re equipped with a few tools, and you have just a modicum of patience and good listening and discipline and humility to not try to make the mistakes that really shut down a conversation that’s going somewhere, and away you can go.

Sara Canaday
Yeah, it is amazing. And it’s hard because, for leaders especially, and any high-achievement professional, we’re wired to fix. And coaching, you have to sort of sit on your hands because you want right away to say, “Oh, either that happened to me,” which isn’t very helpful. It can be but to say, “Oh, that happened to me and this is what I did,” it doesn’t let the person you’re coaching reflect on their particular situation because what you did to solve something may not even be applicable or work for them.

And you have to just be patient with asking the right type of questions, open-ended questions not yes-or-no questions because you won’t get anywhere with those. So, absolutely, anybody can do it but it does take discipline because of the way we’re naturally wired.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share with us what’s at stake, or what’s possible, or what’s at risk if we are coaching well versus not well or not at all, or being coached well, or not well, or not well at all?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. Well, this is interesting because when I was writing my book, I did a lot of research around different statistics because I wanted to compel readers about the advantage of coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
As many businesses would start, yes.

Sara Canaday
Yes. And so, there are numerous studies that show that well-coached individuals are higher performers, are more productive, and they’re more engaged. Now, that seems to be a benefit for the leader and the company, but from the employee’s standpoint, there were other studies, Gallup being one of them, that found that when employees were well-coached and they felt like a leader had their progress and best interests in mind, that they were much more loyal and they didn’t feel that they had to look elsewhere to grow and for opportunities.

And I think that latter part is probably what’s going to get people’s attention because, right now, we all know that retaining talent is a challenge. And what studies have found, multiple studies, is that what people want more than a larger paycheck is the idea and the feeling that they’re progressing. And let me just say, that progression doesn’t necessarily mean an advanced position.

And I say that because I think that’s why leaders tend to hesitate to do what I call developmental coaching, which is more about, “How do I help you get more of what you want and do more of the work that you want to do?” Because I feel like, “Well, I know there’s no position for me to advance them to, so why am I going to start this conversation if I can’t promote them?” But nothing is further from the truth here, in that those conversations aren’t strictly about advancing and getting a new role.

They’re about sharpening new skills. They’re about maybe getting a broader network, being introduced to more people. Maybe they’re about taking on a project where they can shine a light on something other than what they typically do. So, there are a lot of things leaders can do to help people feel like they’re progressing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s hear about that. We talked about developmental coaching. You say we’ve got two types. We got performance coaching and developmental coaching. Can you expand upon what each means and the difference between them?

Sara Canaday
Of course. So, performance coaching, for many people, they think in terms of short term. It’s any conversation that points towards helping the employee improve their performance, meet performance expectations. Whereas, developmental coaching is more future-oriented, and that serves to help and support an employee who wants to grow and develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so then, do you recommend both or one under certain circumstances versus one is more appropriate for another context?

Sara Canaday
I absolutely recommend both. I think a natural cadence with a leader and an employee, or peer to peer, is there are going to be situations that call for both. If you’re having regular one-on-one meetings with your employees, sometimes you’re going to talk about missing a deadline, and what may have caused that. And so, that’s performance coaching.

But other times you’re going to circle back to, “Hey, I noticed that in your individual development plan, you want to get advanced knowledge in Excel, you want to learn how to do pivot tables. Where are we on that? How can I help you?” Two different things but both are scenarios that are perfectly within the realm of happening to the same individual in the same month.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then you’ve got a five-step model we’re going to chat through. But, first, could you share with us are there any key guiding lights, fundamental, essential principles that we should keep in mind if we think, “Yeah, coaching, that’s something I should do more of or I’d like more of”? Are there some must-remembers before we dig into the one, two, three, four, five of the five steps?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think it’s a little bit of a mindset shift because those of us who are in corporate for years may have seen coaches or coaching reserved for individuals who weren’t performing at their best. So, instead of it being a positive, it was almost a negative. So, that’s number one. Now, coaching is, in some cases, reserved for those who are being groomed for the next level. So, it can be absolutely a positive thing.

Also, performance coaching, to me, does not include corrective action, so I just want to make that clear. If you were to read and go through any of my literature on coaching, some people may think, “Okay, what’s the deal here? This sounds a little too soft.” Well, that’s because I’m assuming that this is not corrective action. You’ve not coached the person multiple times before on an issue. You’re not to the point where you need to think about whether this is even the right fit for the person or whether they need to move on. So, coaching is not corrective action.

Coaching is a conversation. At the heart of it, that’s what it is. And it is a way for you to partner with the employee and discover mutually what the issue might be, and then co-create potential solutions to rectify, to close gaps, to move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got it. Understood. And so then, you’ve got your five-step model for coaching. Can you walk us through each of the five steps?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. The first one is what I call just assess the situation, and that can happen before you even have the conversation. So, whatever data you have, let’s say it’s performance coaching, let’s say you have monthly reports of somebody in a call center, and you’re able to see from the reports how many calls they’ve taken, how many calls they kept in queue, what was their hold and wait times, whatever it is you’re measuring, and/or you’re collecting feedback from others who are on a project team with that individual, or somebody has come to you with feedback.

That’s part of the assessment but it doesn’t end there. You’re continuing to assess it at the first conversation because one of the first things that I always recommend is that you get the employee’s perspective of the situation. Even if you feel like you understand it, you know it, it’s pretty clear, I would say give that person the opportunity to share their perspective.

So, the question goes, “How do you think that meeting went yesterday? Tell me about the project. What’s new? Do you have any concerns? Where are we on this initiative? Is there anything that’s making you uncomfortable?” So, you’re starting to get their perspective so you have the entire picture instead of jumping to any conclusions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So, that’s one, we assess the situation and then, two, we generate ideas.

Sara Canaday
Generate ideas, right, and this is the co-create part. I think this is another reason maybe leaders hesitate is because they’re like, “I’ve got a multitude of things happening, I’m not sure I’m going to have the exact answer for what’s plaguing this individual or what’s keeping them from meeting these goals at my fingertips, so I’m a little intimidated.” Well, you don’t have to have the answers.

You simply ask the person, “What could you have done differently?” You might have ideas but that’s how the conversation continues. Or, you say, “What might be missing? What’s keeping you from showing up as your best self or for meeting these metrics? What do you think is keeping you?” And even if they don’t have any idea, you come to the table, “Do you feel knowledgeable about the products that you’re selling? Do you feel that you can manipulate all the platforms within a given phone call? Is that what’s plaguing you here?”

So, you come up with solutions together of how to move forward, to get the performance on track, or to help the person feel like they’re progressing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And to your previous point associated with not leaping in and saying, “Oh, this happened to me and this is what I did,” you also talked about co-creating. How do we do that dance associated with we’re not jumping in and doing the idea generation, we’re prompting them? How does that work?

Sara Canaday
Yeah, and I’m glad you asked me that because I will say that true coaching that uses what you have heard as the Socratic method, which is asking question after question, “So, what did you do? So, how did that make you feel?”

Now, I’m going to go on record here saying that if I were to be graded as a purist on coaching, I probably would not do very well because I think there is a point at which once you’ve asked the questions and the person has explored, and you can tell they’re really kind of at a loss, then it’s okay to step in with, “Hey, are you open to hearing what I think might help?” or, “Are you open to a suggestion about how to move forward here?” And then it’s perfectly okay to give your suggestions.

I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m just saying don’t start there. Give the person an opportunity, but then it’s perfectly okay to say, including, “Here’s what’s worked for me in the past.” The point I was trying to make before is that we tend to get caught up in the story, and that’s what I mean by, “Oh, that happened to me,” or, “Oh, well, why did you do that?” “Oh, and then what did he say?” because then we start going backwards and we spend too much of our time in the story and not enough time moving forward in the coaching process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the third step, develop an action plan, how is this done?

Sara Canaday
Again, together. More than anything, you encourage the person, once they’ve decided how they’re going to move forward, “Great. Who can be of most help as you do that? Can you think of anybody who can help you with that?” or, “When do you think you’ll want to have this done by? This has been on your individual development plan, I see here, for eight months. If you want to get it done this year, let’s put an aggressive timeline in here. What do you think of that?”

So, again, you’re holding them accountable for their own action process but you’re giving them some nudges, some support, and you’re challenging them at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the fourth step is provide support. What does that look like?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. So, anything you can do, if you can introduce them to somebody who knows a particular skill or can help them get exposure to a project that has more of the type of work that they want to be doing, then make the connection. If you have access to budget that can be given to them to take on a course, if they need to spend more time with you going over some of their decks for presentations because you found out that they go into too much detail, again, not necessarily a performance issue, maybe a career development issue.

Smart as a whip, know their stuff inside and out, but maybe they’re used to delivering presentations to technical-only professionals, and you want to help them present to non-technical. So, maybe it needs more of your time to go over some of their presentations and give them feedback. Any way you can support them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fifth step, follow up?

Sara Canaday
Yes. And this is like anything else, it’s like having an accountability partner. This is why the peer coaching works so well. You are the person that’s going to help to ensure that there’s follow-through but it also shows on your end that this wasn’t a gratuitous conversation, that you actually do care, and you are going to move forward helping the person see that these things happen for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Sara, can we maybe do a demonstration roleplay in which you coach me about a thing?

Sara Canaday
Certainly.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say I find myself procrastinating on processing my email inbox, and I’ve got a backlog that piles up, and I don’t like it and other people don’t like it. So, where shall we begin?

Sara Canaday
Yeah, and not probably an uncommon scenario, especially as people’s projects get, you know, we get more projects and they get exponentially bigger. So, I think I would start by saying helping you be more open with what may be going on, “So, tell me how the projects are going,” and that’s when you can say, “They seem to be fine but I feel like people’s expectations of me maybe are not the typical what I’m used to. I feel like things are falling through the cracks.”

Again, I’m just going to explore, “What do you think might be going on?” And that’s when you can say, “I feel like my inbox is always full. I can’t keep it up.” My question would be, “So, what kind of organizational productivity system do you have? Do you have a certain cadence to how you handle your emails? Tell me about how you organize your work.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. So, I’d say, “I use the Superhuman email app. I do it when I have a free moment in between things and that’s maybe the extent of my organization in the email world.”

Sara Canaday
Great. Well, for most of us that may have worked to a certain point, but when we get under pressure or when the workload is even more heavy, those moments are fewer and far between, and we find ourselves behind. So, what could you do differently? What do you think you could do differently if just reserving for when you’re free to get to those emails? Any other thoughts about what might be helpful for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I suppose real time needs to be allocated for them, and the amount of time that they have been getting has been insufficient to bring it to zero. So, one way or another, I guess more time needs to go there. I guess I’ve just been reluctant to do so because it’s not interesting and I’m not sure it’s going to be value-added relative to the other things I can be doing.

Sara Canaday
Well, I see your point. We get a lot of emails that aren’t necessarily germane to what we’re doing right now, and it can be frustrating. But if you were to do that, what would that look like? Would it look like in the mornings? When are you at your best, most productive, most efficient?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is in the morning, and I guess I’m wondering if email deserves my best or I should give it time that is my worse, or middle ground. We had Carey Nieuwhof on the show talk about either sort of green-zone times, yellow-zone times, and red-zone times in terms of your energy, attention, focus, motivation, oomph going on.

And so, yeah, that gets me thinking maybe I need to figure out, “Hey, email doesn’t deserve my best time but it needs some time, and so here is the time in which I am medium-functioning in terms of I can be motivated enough to answer these emails but not feel like I’m casting my pearls before swine, or wasting the most precious gold of the day on sort of the administrative feeling matters but still reach that inbox zero which feels so freeing, and feels like I’ve got a lot of mental space when there’s not a big load of emails waiting for me.”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, I hear you. I’m with you on that. I am almost too distracted during the day when I know my emails are piling up. There’s this anxiety, this anxiousness that I know it’s there. And so, I’m all for using your most productive time early in the morning.

For example, I know some people do their best writing or their best strategy-thinking, but I like your idea of at least giving it the medium productivity action so that you can get through it, and you can get through it efficiently but that it also leaves what energy you do have left for the day without that that being that sort of taxing feeling that you’ve got this hanging over your head.

And let’s not forget, you’ve got other people who, for whatever reason, may be waiting on your response for their own production. And so, I would just say think of that, too. You may see this low-value administrative but there may be a couple of key emails in there that need your attention and that others are waiting on. And so, from that standpoint, I think it’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. So, that makes sense to me in terms of it might not be my number one thing, but other people maybe their number one thing is hearing from me so they could proceed. So, just in terms of being a good citizen and team player, I can sacrificially and generously do that for them in the hopes that, hey, we all reciprocate and it works out for everybody.

Sara Canaday
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, I’m thinking maybe 4:00 p.m. might be a good time to put in half an hour a day on the emails, and that should probably get us close to zero if I’m doing that with consistency.

Sara Canaday
Great. Pete, when do you think you can start that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, probably today.

Sara Canaday
Wonderful. Why don’t we reconnect in a couple of weeks? I’ll be curious to see how that’s working for you, and happy to help you if it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle forward. We can maybe come up with other solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. All right. So, there we have it. We assessed the situation, we generate some ideas, we developed an action, we have some support – thank you – and the follow up. Nifty. So, any reflections on your end on the roleplay?

Sara Canaday
One thing I always say as a primer to coaching is that you have to know your employees, and there has to be some semblance of trust and rapport. You can’t skip that when you’re coaching. In fact, I tell a story of trying to help somebody better connect with their project team, and I did what I tell people not to do, and I jumped to the fix-it mode, and I said, “Well, why don’t you start meeting with them individually?”

And that suggestion failed miserably because, A, I didn’t ask her for more questions, but, B, she didn’t know them very well. And so, when she started asking questions, there was almost a kind of look on their face like they didn’t trust her or they weren’t sure what her…

Pete Mockaitis
“What are you trying to pull here?”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, “What’s your M.O. here?” So, this is just a good place to bring up that we’re just doing an on-the-spot, we’ve known each other through professional as colleagues through the years, but we don’t work together. I don’t know what makes you tick on a daily basis necessarily. And so, I would hope that that conversation was a little more refined based on knowing you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay.

Sara Canaday
I could’ve said something like, “Oh, yeah, Pete, I know how much you like those emails.” It could’ve been funny, but it would be a way to build rapport and get you to see that I’m just not going to be rigid about getting your emails done. I’m going to try to approach this in a way that works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. And then I’m curious, when it comes to coaching, any super favorite questions, words, phrases that often yield goodies on the other side?

Sara Canaday
Most of them are open-ended, for one. If you asked, “How is the project going?” “Good.” You’re just not going to get much, right? But if you’re really conscious of asking, “Okay, so what might make you more comfortable with this solution?” that kind of question, you can ask individually or to a group that you’ve just announced a new project or initiative.

And, to me, that gets the meeting after the meeting out in the open, or it gets your coachee to tell you something that they would’ve walked away saying, “Ugh, easier said than done. I knew she was going to suggest that.” But if you asked that right then and there, then you’re peeling back the onion layers and you’re getting to more efficient information.

Maybe you say, “I don’t necessarily see it that way. Can I tell you why?” That’s very different than saying, “I don’t agree,” because you’re putting the person at the defense. Whereas, in the other case, it’s a little disarming. You just don’t see it that way. It doesn’t mean it’s an indictment against them or their idea. You just don’t see it that way, “And can I tell you why? I want to offer another kind of angle here.” So, those are just some examples of open-ended questions.

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

Sara Canaday
No, other than the book has several pages of good, powerful phrases or questions. So, they don’t always have to be a question. It could be, “Tell me more,” which is not a question. But if anybody is interested in those types of tools, the book is full of them.

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

Sara Canaday
My favorite quote is “Please be responsible for the energy you bring into this room.”

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

Sara Canaday
Well, this probably has to do with coaching and it has to do with leadership, but it was done by the Journal of Economic Psychology, and there, there were a group of researchers that wanted to study the optimal strategy for goalies, soccer goalies, and blocking penalty kicks.

And what they found, after watching hundreds of videos and speaking to expert coaches and goalies, is that when goalies stay in the middle of the net, they block the ball 33% of the time. When they move to the left or the right, it goes down by half, 14% on the right, 13.3 on the left. Point being is that we, as leaders, as professionals, I think, sometimes mistake motion for meaning, and we have a bias for action.

I get it. I’m a work in progress on that. And that study, to me, sort of highlights this idea that we would really benefit from taking more pauses, more pauses to think strategically, more pauses to coach our employees, more pauses to reflect.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Sara Canaday
Favorite book, it just came out. It’s called The Chrysalis Code: Becoming the Type of Leader Other People Want to Follow by my good friend and colleague Ron J. West.

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

Sara Canaday
We talked about this the last time. I’m going to say it again. LinkedIn, huge tool for me. And then I’m going to throw in a few personal ones that save me time. Amazon, I don’t know what I would do without it, it’s kind of scary, because when I need something, I don’t have to run out to OfficeMax or fill my day with errands on top of work. My fingertips right there. And, similarly, Instacart, which is not everywhere but a lot of places. And I can imagine, with three kids, this would be a boon for you, but getting my groceries delivered is hugely helpful.

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

Sara Canaday
Well, it’s a word that I didn’t know of until, I think, a year or two ago, and I read about it in one of Adam Grant’s posts. And, apparently, I’m a precrastinator. So, it’s the opposite of a procrastinator. I actually do things really far in advance, and that has served me very well because I guess my years in corporate, I knew that fires would always have to be put out. And so, when I have the time, I would get projects done early so that I wouldn’t feel as overwhelmed when things popped up that were not planned.

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

Sara Canaday
I mentioned one earlier that I think resonates with leaders, which is this idea of mistaking motion for meaning, and that’s probably the key one lately. Ever since COVID, I think, I find that people are just…they have no buffer time between any of their meetings, and no time to actually make connections and put things together, and be creative and innovative.

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

Sara Canaday
I’d point them to my website, SaraCanaday.com, and there’s no H in Sara, and Canaday is just like Canada but with a Y at the end. Or, LinkedIn, of course.

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

Sara Canaday
I do. I would say make one final or baby step toward this idea of coaching. It doesn’t have to be, “Okay, I’m going to coach somebody.” Pick a meeting this week where you’re just going to intentionally ask an open-ended question, or you’re going to intentionally paraphrase so that you can actively listen, “So, what I’m hearing you say is…” or, “Let me see if I got this right.” So, those are the things that are really important in coaching. So, just pick one aspect of coaching, and pick a meeting where you’re going to try it on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sara, this has been a treat. I wish you many good coaching sessions in the future.

Sara Canaday
Thank you. It’s been a treat to be here.

846: How to Elevate and Empower Teams to Reach Their Full Potential with Robert Glazer

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Robert Glazer says: "Organizations should focus on making their people better, help them build their capacity holistically."

Robert Glazer shows how to build your team’s capacity and empower them to reach their full potential.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to cure exhaustion in teams.
  2. The simple trick to making difficult conversations easier.
  3. How to influence company culture without a leadership position.

About Robert

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards two years in a row.

He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today and international bestselling author of four books: Elevate, How To Thrive In The Virtual Workplace, Friday Forward, and Performance Partnerships.  He is a sought-after speaker by companies and organizations around the world and is the host of The Elevate Podcast. He also shares ideas and insights around these topics via Friday Forward, a weekly inspirational newsletter that reaches over 200,000 individuals and business leaders across 60+ countries.

Resources Mentioned

Robert Glazer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Robert Glazer
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the wisdom of your book Elevate Your Team but, first, I got to hear, it’s been a couple years since we last chatted.

Robert Glazer
It’s been a pandemic.

Pete Mockaitis
That it has. Tell me, any particularly wild adventures, learnings, surprises in your life over the last couple of years?

Robert Glazer
It’s just been such a supply and demand see-saw that it’s been nothing like my career. I’m someone who likes to plan long term, and in the business and think two, three years ahead, and it’s just been three to six months is kind of as far as you can look. I would say the biggest thing was we were a fully virtual team for 12 years coming into COVID, and we hit it at times and it wasn’t something that we were really public with, and then it’s just everyone was like, “Oh, you’ve done this. How do you do this?” I ended up kind of writing a book around it.

So, that was a little bit of a whirlwind going from sort of keeping the fact that we were fully remote a little bit on the downlow to sort of becoming an exemplar and speaker and author around it. And, by the way, I just talked to a large company this morning, I mean, two, three years later, people still haven’t figured out what they’re going to do with this, and it’s pretty interesting to me.

That and figuring out the strategy where they kind of have a strategy but they haven’t supported it. And this company was saying they have all kinds of rules for remote work that no one has actually read or adheres to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And I remember even before the pandemic, there were debates in terms of, “Oh, so and so is moving, and they want to move work remotely,” and they’re like, “Oh, well, we don’t allow that.” Like, even then I was sort of, well, I’d been working self-employed remotely for a long time, and so I thought that was really a head scratcher, like, “If this person is excellent and they want to stay working for you, I think you should accommodate that.” That’s my bias.

Robert Glazer
So, here’s my favorite thing, and I was doing a keynote yesterday morning, and I have this slide that I used for a long time and I wasn’t going to use it, but it was David Solomon of Goldman Sachs in January 2021 saying that, or January 2022 saying that “Work from home is an aberration that they’re going to cure as soon as possible, and it’s like this horrible thing that needs to be fixed.” A week later, Goldman announces the best quarterly earnings in the history of the company with everyone working remote.

So, now they forced people back in the office, Goldman’s earnings come out last week, they’re the worst in, like, 20 years and they missed earnings. They’re down 60%. It’s a disaster. It’s just so funny. It’s like what actually…well, does it matter where and how people…Now, look, I am not a, “Everyone should be remote.” I think if you’re Goldman and you’re pitching an IPO, I think that people should come in for that pitch. But if they’re crunching the spreadsheets for 16 hours getting ready for a thing, like, did they need to come into the office that day for that?

But I do think there are things that you need to be in person, you need to be in the office, so I’m not an absolute on it, but I thought the paradox of those two, like statements and results, were really interesting, telling people the thing that was an aberration was the thing that just made your company the most money in its history.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Robert, that’s what I love, your perspective, you’re juxtaposing things, bringing together connections, distinctions, wisdom so it’s a hoot to be chatting again. And you got another work here, it’s called Elevate Your Team. What’s the big idea here?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, I wrote the book Elevate, it was about this concept of capacity-building and how to use that to make yourself better and help train leaders, really, to be better. And a lot of the stuff that we were doing over the years, I realized was the same framework around, “Well, how do you take that same capacity-building framework to an organization? So, what does it look like for an organization these days?”

And, look, it’s better to be lucky than good, and this book is coming out when the playbook of just burn through people and grow your business is just not going to work anymore. People are too tired around, “How do you grow a business on the backs of your people?” And by growing your people, I’m not saying, “We want to grow this business, and it sort of chews out people.” So, it takes that same spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional framework, and says, “How do you apply these principles to the organization rather than to the individual leaders?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, for folks who didn’t catch the last interview, I recommend you do. But could you give us a bit of a refresher? We talked about capacity and building, and capacity-building, can you give us definitions of synonyms for what we’re talking about here?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, capacity-building is just a method. I always say that the long definition is the method by which individuals seek, accept, and develop…seek, acquire, and develop the skills and ability to perform at a higher level. Simply, it’s how you get better. I think it’s a process of how to get better and there’s four pieces.

Spiritual capacity, which is understanding who you are, and what you want most, your values and the standards you want to live by. Intellectual capacity, which is about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline. That’s kind of your personal organizational operating system. Physical capacity is health, wellbeing, and physical performance. And emotional capacity is a few different things. It’s how you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset, and I think the quality of your relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, in order or a team to flourish, well, I won’t steal your thunder, but it sounds like is it fair to say your thesis is you got to be building this capacity, growing in these domains in order to flourish as a team, an organization, a business without…?

Robert Glazer
And a human, yeah. So, the take on this that I have that’s a little different is I think organizations should focus on making their people better, help them build their capacity holistically not to just be good at their job today or the best robot for the assembly line, but how do you make them better at work and better in all aspects? At the same time, better father, mother, spouse, otherwise.

Because I think a lot of the things that people struggle with in work or a lot of their growth areas are the same outside, particularly with people working from home. It’s not like you wake out of bed cranky and tired and exhausted, and jump into work and are a totally different person. You’re going to be the same person. I find people that are organized and disciplined and have routines at work have them at home. They tend to really go hand in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you share with us in terms of what’s the state of team capacity-building these days? How are we doing with these principles, generally speaking?

Robert Glazer
I don’t think well because I think that people are really burnt out, and they’re burnt out from two years of a global pandemic and the bounce back and all the changes, but that one implies that a lot of these things are out of whack. They’re not clear on what they value and what they bring to the organization. I think one of the things that make people stay and interested and growing as an organization, whether it’s intellectual, a lot of learning and feedback, and they’re seeing how they’re growing an opportunity.

We know people’s physical capacity is very diminished right now, so how can the organization help that, not hurt it? Like, how do you get people a break and some rest and get them recharged? And then again, I think that, particularly now, where you’re in an environment, again, where you have some layoffs and otherwise, psychological safety, becomes a big part of that.

Like, I know leaders struggle with, someone said to me yesterday at a keynote I was doing, one of the questions was, “Look, our industry, rough time, bad year, probably some layoffs, otherwise. Like, what do we tell people?” I was like, “Well, tell them the truth. Tell them where your parameters are, where you need their help, what you’re going to do. Communicate with them well because there’s going to be another company that are going to tell every people everything is fine, and it’s not. And they’re really going to lose the trust of those folks.”

So, I think people, when they know the truth and the reality, they’re happy to stay with something. I think it’s when they don’t feel like they’re being told the whole story that you have problems.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you share with us a fun story, a true story, with regard to a team who really saw a cool transformation when they did this capacity-building stuff, they took it seriously, they implemented some goodies, and they saw great results?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I’ll give you some individual examples. So, one of the things that we do with all of our leaders is that we…and I’m going to give you two examples, I think from spiritual and intellectual, to talk about. We help our leaders figure out their personal core values because our belief is there’s no acceleration partners type of leader. The best leader is going to be authentic, and we want to help them figure out what do they value, what are they good at. Like, what are the natural things?

And the first time we did this, and people figured these things out, they actually kind of wrote it up, they went back to their teams, and they said, “Look, I really learned all these things about myself. This is how I kind of show up as a leader. This is what you can expect from me. This is what I need from you.” And three to six months later, we’d measured their performance before that offsite and we did all that and after, and really everyone improved dramatically. I just think their connections to their teams went a lot higher.

Again, example of intellectual capacity, learning feedback, so we will do a training where we model fake conversations between employees and their managers, kind of rip from the headlines. So, we’d sit down and say, “All right, Pete, you’re…” so the crowd knows both sides of the story, the crowd watching this, but we give you a narrative, “Pete, you just started today, you made some mistakes in the first couple months, but you think you’re doing great, and you want to get promoted.”

And then there’s Carly on the other side, and Carly has a card that says, “You meet with your employee Pete, and you just don’t think he’s going to make it. He has not the right attitude. He’s made a bunch of mistakes. He doesn’t seem to be getting it, and you need to sort of, like, let Pete know that this might not be the best place for him.”

And then we watch people have that conversation, and there’s a lot of platitudes, and there’s a lot of dancing around, and now you see why people aren’t on the same page. And we say, “Freeze,” and then we have the team all comment in, and I say, “How many people think that Pete knew his job was on the line?” And 20 people watching will say, “No,” and then I was like, “Okay, what are some different ways you could’ve approached?” and then we’ll have them start the conversation again.

And, again, this is just the thing, “Why do these conversations go so poorly all the time?” Because people don’t know how to do them. And why do they dread? They haven’t practiced them. This is an actual law and order practice, having very common difficult conversations that managers are going to have. It’s not surprising that people aren’t good at something, that they haven’t been trained on, and that they haven’t done before.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s just keep rolling. Physically?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, physically, look, I think you’re putting your money where your mouth is on this in terms of one of the things that we did was we’ve done a couple of fitness contests where… Most companies say they want something and then they incentivize another. They incentivize never leaving the desk, and, “We’ll get you food and we’ll get you your vaccine shot without having to get up,” or all this stuff.

We have said to people on a couple of things, “Hey, we will cover, we will reimburse part of your vacation if you actually take seven days off and don’t communicate with everyone, and actually unplug.” So, we’re again aligning the incentive to that behavior. Similarly, we’ve had fitness challenges where people break into teams during the work day. They have to step aside a half an hour to do anything from walking, to yoga, to meditation, to working out, and the teams get a point and the teams compete, and I think the winners got sort of an Apple watch.

So, again, very different viewpoint when the organization is saying, “Hey, we’re actually compensating you, or paying you, or valuing things that are designed to give you more time, and pay attention to your physical health and make the workplace part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And emotionally?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, example, we’ve always had this employee TED Talks at our organization at our AP Annual Summit, and one year, we decided to step it up. There was a gentleman I knew named Philip McKernan, and he had a program called “One Last Talk,” where people get on stage and they basically deliver the, “What is the one talk that you would deliver if this is your last day on earth?” And these were not, like, he doesn’t let anyone escape with, “Oh, three great things to live a great life.” It’s much more personal.

So, we had a bunch of volunteers, we picked four people, they trained for two months, they got up there and gave these speeches, and there wasn’t really a dry eye in the room. These were like deeply emotional speeches talking about aspects of their lives that many people wouldn’t have known. What was interesting though was that over the next day, the level of sharing across the company, like what people were talking to other people about, making connections, “You are I work together for five years, and I never told you that I grew up in a single-parent household, and I find out the same about you.”

It was crazy watching how that opened the floodgates for people to want to connect on a more human level. And I think, again, that level of vulnerability just leads people to better relationships, more sharing, more understanding other people’s perspectives and where they’re coming from. And, yeah, it was a pretty cool experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, it sounds like there is a boatload of approaches, strategies, tools, activities, tactics, interventions, stuff you can do to see some upgrades, some increased capacity in each these domains. I’m curious, are there a few sorts of top do’s and don’ts that you recommend individuals and teams and organizations consider as we’re looking to implement some of this stuff?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I think that, oftentimes, people try to make too many changes at once. I think people are pretty good with change over time. Similar to New Year’s resolutions, I always say, like, I’m a much bigger believer. If I saw a company trying to do everything that was in this book, I would think their success would be very slow.

I think if they picked a couple things, started doing them, getting traction, and then I think that getting that one percent better each day or week, and getting the compounding effect of that, usually works better than rushing into a bunch of things that you don’t have the time or energy or resources to support.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And are there a few starting points that seem just excellent in your experience?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I guess it depends on the area. I think if we’re talking about kind of a learning culture, some really easy things that you can do to start just getting more discussion or interaction, a book club, a podcast club, or even the CEO says, “You read this book and we get together, and let’s talk about it. Let’s pick a topic, let’s do a book,” that’s super easy.

Reimbursing people for education and learning experiences, I think that’s something that you can do right away. There’s also feedback, like really working with teams on teaching them how to give feedback, what’s good feedback. So many of these things, I think, we just, again, think that people know how to do.

One of the examples I love and I used in the book is that Scribe, which is a book company that does a lot of self-publishing books, so they actually teach their customers on how to give feedback to their team. And they say something like, “Look, saying you hate this cover is not super helpful to our design team. Saying, ‘This cover is off brand for the colors we like and the imagery I want to use, and I prefer imagery that is more X’ is a lot more helpful.”

So, it’s really interesting, like in that context, they’re even teaching that, how to do feedback. So, yeah, there are so many ways for, I think, companies to improve, but I think focusing on opportunities to learn and learn together is usually a pretty easy one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that notion about design feedback because I always feel ridiculous when I’m sharing my feedback on designs, and yet designers seem to really love it. I was like, “This font makes me feel like a child.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s excellent.”

Robert Glazer
That, actually, right. Well, at least they know.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “Really? I feel nutty when I say that out loud.”

Robert Glazer
At least they know what you don’t like about it. That’s fair on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. Well, there’s two things you kind of touched upon that I think are really juicy, and I’d love to hear all the great, your favorite tools for them. First, let’s talk about exhaustion, when folks are just tuckered out.

Robert Glazer
They’re toast, and if you think they’re going to come in and work 80 hours a week, even if they wanted to, I think they’re toast. And I actually think it’s happening more at the leadership level. The leaders carry the water in that first year in COVID, and they have the kids they’re worrying about and the sick parents, and their teams. And then I think, eventually, carrying all that water has really impacted them, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, if you’re good and exhausted, where do you recommend that we start?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, look, it seems counterintuitive when there’s a lot to do but try to give people some real breaks, whether that is the weekend, whether that is their week vacation, whether that is not worrying about emails at 6:00 o’clock after night. One of the tools that I’ve used for years, and, look, France and some places have taken them to the extreme. I think you’d go to jail if you email people after 5:00 o’clock.

But sometimes, like on a Saturday morning, I love to clear out emails from the week, and I learned when I was CEO that if I wrote someone an email on a Saturday, they thought they needed to respond. And I was often doing stuff after hours because that’s when I had time to doing it. I wasn’t looking for a response, that wasn’t the expectation. So, I learned to just use delayed delivery.

And so, anytime I write something outside of kind of normal hours, I delay until 8:00 o’clock the next work day. The side benefit of this is you can look really awesome and be productive at 8:00 o’clock in the morning when…

Pete Mockaitis
“Wow, Robert has given me six emails within…”

Robert Glazer
Yeah, you can do 7:58, 7:59, 8:00, 8:01, now you feel like a slacker in the morning. But I think people really appreciate that, particularly when you are a leader and you’re emailing other people on your team, they don’t know the priority. People tend to assume that everything is important, and not that just you felt like writing the email to them at that time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or I had a cool idea, and I wanted to get it on paper. And while I was there, how about I copy/paste, send?

Robert Glazer
That’s the other thing I do. I keep a notepad for everyone I meet and I take that cool idea and I put it in the part of the OneNote, and, in that way, I sit down and talk about the four ideas as well so they’re not getting bombarded with ADD at different points of night and day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. So, exhaustion, real breaks, whether that’s guidelines on the email timing or expectations, clarity that we’re not doing stuff over the weekend, or that week vacation is true and real.

Robert Glazer
Yeah. And, look, model the behavior. So, I’m a leader, “I’m going on vacation this weekend. If you need to reach me by an emergency, here’s the thing.” Put it on my autoreply, “Don’t email from vacation.” Because people will do what you say. This is the same over parenting. People will do what you say not what you do. Sorry, they will do what you do, not what you say. I got that backwards.

And that’s where I think it’s really important. If you tell people, “Oh, it’s fine to take a vacation,” but then you say you’re going on vacation, you’re out of office, and you’re emailing all week, what they take away from that is that it’s not okay to take a vacation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I remember when I was an intern, like I got the memo in terms of one the one side, the recruiting teams wanted the interns to have a truly fantastic experience so they go back to their university, and say, “Oh, my gosh, you got to work here.” But then there’s your actual work team, and they wanted useful stuff from you that brought things forward and served the client.

And so, I quickly learned, “Oh, in order to do well here, I need to completely ignore the preference of the recruiting team that wants me to not work much, and work as much as necessary to advance the stuff and have things look great for the team I’m working with. Okay, don’t listen to them. Do listen to them. Got it.”

Robert Glazer
And, look, this is the exact point, is that everyone figures this stuff out because the culture values it implicitly or explicitly. And it’s not like anyone told you this, but you very quickly figure out the rules of the road and what you need to do, and that becomes the default point and behavior. Then you think it’s normal and you teach it to the next person.

I literally had a friend, I think in five years, the people he worked for never let him have a vacation without calling him or bothering him. Like, there are just so many reasons why that’s wrong. It’s actually even bad for the company. Like, give the person a break so they actually feel refreshed in coming back. I think you should want people to have a life outside of work. They will do better work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yup, agreed. All right. Now, let’s talk about the folks having difficulty with real conversations, and you say, “Of course, it’s to be expected. They don’t have training or practice very much in that domain.” What are some great first steps to developing that skillset?

Robert Glazer
Practice. I think, I mean, we collect a lot of podcasts that talk about certain topics, “Hey, how do you have this sort of conversation? How do you have a difficult employee conversation?” I remember when I interviewed Patty McCord at Netflix, who’s sort of was part of their whole culture and the culture deck. She talked about when she was training people to do changes in jobs or whatever, she told them to call their own voicemail, say what they were going to say, and listen to it three times.

Just even some basic rep and practice, talk to other people, there are very few things that when you do it for the first time, have never practiced it, it’s going to go well. I think when you think about, in sports, no one does that. In business, we do that all the time. I wrote a Friday Forward about being a speaker at a conference, and I was sort of the general speaker and there was a subject matter expert after me, and I had checked the timing beforehand, I’d met with the AVP people, I had looked at the thing, I had that on my computer.

He came in with three times the amount of slides as the amount of time, didn’t set up AVP, someone had to do his computer. He had great content but he got pulled off stage because he never went through a dry run or practice, or it just doesn’t really work well to do things for the first time, and do them on stage. You should practice anything that you’re going to do.

In fact, someone was saying, our sales team, one thing that we could do better is, when we go into some big pitches, and we did this years ago in front of an important one, it was like we practiced the whole thing an hour beforehand. And what we noticed was we had some awkward transitions, “Oh, no, Pete, you take that. No, I’ll take that.” And we worked those transitions out during the practice, which having not done it, we would’ve made those mistakes in real time.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to the practice of difficult conversations, it’s tricky because, okay, there’s a person, there’s an issue, and we got to talk about it. And, yet, if I want to practice it with them, it’s sort of already the performance…

Robert Glazer
Well, you got to practice it with other people, not with them. But you could practice it with your manager, you could practice it with a peer. Again, you could practice it with yourself. You could sit down there and record it, and be like, “That sounds not good.” Or, again, you can learn some tools that you can use. So, here’s one that I learned, and I learned through all those trainings.

We know the sandwich concept, right? And if you watch it, it’s so awkward. Like, when someone starts a praise, then I’m going to deliver the real thing I want to say, and then wrap it with praise at the end. And you confuse people, and they’re like, “Wait, wait. Am I being reprimanded?” because it’s like two positives and a negative, but negative was the real reason why you were having the conversation.

The last time I had to have one of those really difficult conversations, I actually picked up a cue from someone else, and I started by saying, “Hey, we’re going to have a really difficult conversation, so I just want to let you know that.” That just totally changes the demeanor to me fumbling around for a minute, and being like, “Hey, Pete, what’s going on?”

So, again, but I had to learn that. I learned that from someone else, I learned that that was a best practice. I applied the best practice and it was difficult but I think it went about as good as it could go. And the other benefit is if you know how to do these things, then you don’t lose nights of sleep beforehand on it.

Like, this is the whole point on capacity. Capacity is not more. When you think about intellectual capacity, it’s like if you have a better operating system, if you know how to do it smarter and faster, it should be less energy. If I had 20 of these difficult conversation things, and I walk into one, it will cost me a lot less energy and grief and all the stuff, like, I will know how to do it. That, to me, is the definition of capacity because it’s getting more done with less resources, not more with more resources.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. So, Robert, this is cool stuff, focus on the organization, the team, the leader level. If we find ourselves individual contributors who would like this stuff to be happening in our organizations but isn’t, what do we do?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, look, you can become a leader in the organization with different ways. So, again, a perfect example, just because you’re an individual contributor does not mean you couldn’t start the book club, or the podcast club, or a class, or help start a fitness competition for everyone at the organization. So, yeah, you want to honor individual contributors who don’t want to be leaders.

I think there’s a difference between wanting to be an individual contributor and not have a big team, and wanting to be a loner and not care about other people at the organization. I think, actually, what would make an individual contributor stronger is the more connection they have to the company overall. So, I think they should look at these things as opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, anything else you want to make sure to mention?

Robert Glazer
No, the one other thing I will mention is when we talked about the spiritual capacity and the core values of helping your team understand their core values, in Elevate, I did not have anywhere to point people to do this. And so, we started building it out over the years. We started doing it with our team. I turned it into a course.

There’s some information on that in the book but, also, if you go to CoreValuesCourse.com, if you’re interested for yourself or for your team to figure out, “What are our core values?” there’s an actual process that’ll take you through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds fantastic, and I want to hear more about it. What does the process look like?

Robert Glazer
Yes. So, it goes through a bunch of different behavioral-based questions to figure out, “In different environments in your life, where are you successful or not successful?” And I think when you answer these questions, and you ask to start to pull the answers together, you start to see some pretty consistent themes around where you show up and are highly engaged, and where you are disengaged. And it starts kind of setting the foundation for what your personal core values might look like. And then it gives you kind of a process to suss those out.

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

Robert Glazer
“What the wise man does at the beginning, the fool does at the end.” I’ve always liked that one.

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

Robert Glazer
I was reading about the Dunning-Kruger Effect recently, which was pretty interesting. Dunning-Kruger says that the people who understand something the least often have the greatest overconfidence in their knowledge on the subject. And so, it’s an interesting study in organization or otherwise. Sometimes the loudest voice on something is often the most uninformed.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Robert Glazer
Well, I love Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books. The book I give to a lot of people is a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it.

Robert Glazer
It’s sort of the definitive book. I have it on my desk here on cognitive dissonance. And I interviewed the authors recently. I think cognitive dissonance is so prevalent in everything we do every day, and just understanding that is a huge competitive advantage.

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

Robert Glazer
I don’t think I could live without this tool called SaneBox, which takes your email, filters it out, lets you snooze it to come back. So, it just keeps a lot of email that you don’t need to read out of your peripheral vision. And I remember one time my subscription expired, and like, 300 emails dropped back into my inbox, and I almost had a panic attack. Like, that’s how you know a tool is valuable to you.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Robert Glazer
Well, I like brewing French brew coffee, and it takes five or ten minutes, so I try to time some…I like the concept of habit stacking. So, I try to do something else during those five or ten minutes I wouldn’t do, whether it’s writing in a journal, or stretching, or otherwise, because I can tie it to doing that every day. So, I like the concept of stacking a habit, like something you’re already doing with something that you want to be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that you’re known for, folks are always quoting this Robert Glazer gem?

Robert Glazer
Friday Forward, I think, is the most popular of all time, it’s called the “BS of Busy.” And I think there are some things in there around many of us are busy or just saying that as an answer to everything, and we really need to understand it’s not a great answer to, “How are you busy?” when someone asks. So, I think we need to move away from being busy to being productive and being fulfilled, and so I’ve talked about that a few different times.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah, so everything of mine, Friday Forward, books, podcasts, everything is at RobertGlazer.com, including the new book. If you want the shortest path to the new book, it’s EYT, like “Elevate Your Team,” EYTBook.com.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah, the final challenge I think would be figure out what is most important to your organization today, and then see how you could be helpful to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck and elevation.

Robert Glazer
Thank you, Pete.

845: The Surprising Power of Shutting Up with Dan Lyons

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Dan Lyons says: "Listen more, talk less."

Dan Lyons shows why and how silence can be your greatest superpower.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How conversations dramatically influence overall health and happiness.
  2. How to tell if you’re talking too much.
  3. How pauses wield enormous power.

About Dan

Dan Lyons is the author of Disrupted: My Adventures in the Startup Bubble, a New York Times bestselling memoir, and Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. He was also a writer for the hit HBO comedy series Silicon Valley. As a journalist, he spent a decade covering Silicon Valley for Forbes, ran tech coverage at Newsweek, and contributed to Fortune, the New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.

Resources Mentioned

Dan Lyons Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Dan Lyons
Well, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about the wisdom of your book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. But, first, I have to tell you this is fun for me because I have seen every episode of “Silicon Valley,” and I’d love to hear if you have any particularly fond memories or moments from your work on the show.

Dan Lyons
Well, the funny thing is I was on the writing staff, and we would come in for, I’ll say, 12 weeks or something before shooting began, and then I’d be gone, so I wasn’t ever really there. I think, once, I’ve stayed for a couple of weeks of shooting, so I never really saw the show get made. And one thing that struck me, because I’m not a career TV guy, was that one script that I worked on and delivered, when the episode came out, it had bits and pieces that resembled what was on the page.

Because I think what happens is you write it, then they do a table read that goes well or poorly or somewhat in between, and then they do another rewrite, and then they start shooting but then they tell on every take, tell these guys to improv, and so a lot of the improvised takes are better than what we wrote. And then it goes, it gets edited, and then at that point, they’re looking at the whole season. So, they’re moving things around that used to be in episode two are now in episode five.

So, I learned a lot about how TV gets made, and there were funny moments but, I tell you, it’s kind of a grind. You just sit there, and it’s, like, ten people in a room. Or, imagine, for 12 weeks, five days a week, in the longest business meeting you’ve ever been in, and, yeah, some of the people are really funny but also you spend a lot of time sort of agonizing trying to make plots work. Yeah, it sounds like ridiculous. It’s a lot of work. It’s that hard. But mostly you’re just sitting there dealing with boredom, so, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I wondered how that works in practice, and maybe different writer rooms have different kind of work vibes and styles and approaches. But I imagine it would be a little bit of a divide and conquer, like, “Okay, Dan, you go and write and bring it back.” But is it pretty much, “Nope, all of us are in the room together, slogging through each line of dialogue”?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, the latter. And I don’t know how all shows are, but there’s always a showrunner. And the showrunner really is the head writer and it’s his show. It’s, like, in our case, it was Alec Berg, who’s really a real veteran. And we would all sit around and fill whiteboards with ideas together, and then once we had an episode, it seemed like, “Okay, that’s all there,” Alec would go off and write a version of it in prose, not in screenplay format.

And then he would dish that out to person A, person B, or me, and say, “Okay, now go take this and put it into final draft, put it into screenplay format, and give it back.” And so, it wasn’t really writing. It was more talking and pitching ideas in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for the inside scoop there.

Dan Lyons
I’ll tell you another thing I learned, which is, and I was always guilty of this myself. You’d watch a show and be like, “I think they’re wrestling with this and that and the commentary.” Every week on “Silicon Valley,” I think it was TechCrunch, or maybe it was another tech publication, would do a big essay. Oh, one was the one that Sarah Lacy had.

Anyway, they do this long, long piece about analyzing the story and who they thought this character was based and what the themes were. And I can tell you, nobody talked about themes or big ideas in the room. It was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, “How can we get more jokes? And what plot would be at least plausible?” And, yeah, nobody ever talked about big ideas, or grand themes, or doing satire.

There was some but, yeah, so they would ascribe meaning to these episodes, and I would read it and kind of crack up, going like, “I was there when we envisioned that. Believe me, that was…” so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s funny and reassuring because I remember, as a youngster, when I was first learning about the very concept of a theme in literature, and I was skeptical from the get-go, it’s like, “Do you really think the author had that in mind the whole time when they were doing that?” And I think, in hindsight, my take on this now is like, “Okay, books like ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ like, okay, is straight up is allegorical. It’s just trying to say something.” But other things, it’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe he just wanted to write a cool story, and you just made that up.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, you know, I taught creative writing and sort of literature after grad school at the University of Michigan. It always comes up, like, “Do you think the poet or the short-story writer of the novels meant that?” And I think sometimes, yeah, clearly, you know what they were trying to do, what the point is they’re trying to make with the story. But you get down to these details of, like, wordplay and stuff, and I actually came to believe, like, “I don’t care if the author meant that. It’s kind of interesting, so let’s just untangle that. Let’s talk about that because it’s kind of interesting.”

But, yeah, I wonder, too, intention, what was there, what wasn’t. Or, who said this? Oh, my son was telling me about this. Oh, no, maybe it was a painter, but he was asked to explain, “What’s this mean?” And he was like, “Well, if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t need to paint it. It’s a painting, just look at that.” So, yeah, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And sometimes words are something that we just hold onto and keep our mouth shut. Tell us, this book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you made while putting this together?

Dan Lyons
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you a couple. Well, this podcast is about how to be awesome at your job, so I’d talk more about listening. There are a couple of things up front that have to do with health and wellbeing, and the connections between how you speak and even, like, your immune system. There was this fantastic researcher at the University of Arizona, who, for the past 20 years, has been trying to study these connections between speech and other aspects of our lives and our physical and emotional wellbeing, and he’s making these incredible breakthroughs.

And he’s not ever really been written about. There are articles about when each of these studies comes out, but I spent a lot of time with him. He’s just a fascinating, fascinating guy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s his name?

Dan Lyons
Matthias Mehl, M-E-H-L.

Well, so I don’t know how I stumbled across him. I set out trying to figure out how to keep myself from talking too much, how to talk less because I had a problem with compulsive talking. And I started doing research, like, on two things, “Why do some people talk too much? And how can you fix it?” And I found these researchers who had created something called the talkaholic scale. It was a test you can take. The test, it’s in my book.

And I pegged the needle on talkaholic, just way, way up the charts. And then started trying to figure out, “Well, how do you fix that?” And so, I go off on this journey. And in that journey, I met Matthias Mehl. Because in the ‘90s, there was this book called The Female Brain that came out and talked about who talks more, men or women. And for centuries, the stereotype was always that women are the talkers and men don’t talk.

And The Female Brain came out and said, “Yeah, women speak 20,000 words a day, and men speak 6,000,” ballpark, and like 3x. And Matthias and some of the other people who were at…he was a grad student then at UT Austin, looked at that, and said, “That cannot be true. Those numbers cannot be true.” So, they built this little thing called the electronically activated recorder, or EAR, and, basically, the original was the primitive kind of like digital recording device, and maybe even tapes, with a thing attached to it that would turn it on at random intervals.

So, you had people carry this for a day or a few days, and it turns on and off, and on and off, and from that, you can extrapolate how many words a day they’re speaking. And what they found is, like, no difference. Men and women absolutely the same, both about 16,000 words a day. And, at the extremes, the highest talkers on the survey were all men, so it kind of blew this all up.

So, then he said, “Well, God, if we can study how many words you speak, why couldn’t we study what words you’re using or what kind of conversations you’re having?” So, they did the same thing but they tried to extract the character of your conversations. Then they tried to correlate that with happiness. So, they would have you carry the EAR device and they would calculate how many substantive conversations you had, how many really good conversations you had in a day, and how much of your talk would shift small talk and chitchat.

So, how much of your day is chitchat? And then they found that the people who had more good conversations and fewer bad conversations, or less small talk, turned out to be happier when they did self-scored reports of “How happy are you?” Then he said, “Wow, if people who have good conversations are happier, I wonder if they’re healthier?”

So, he did another passthrough, recorded all these people, then matched them to blood draws that measured their immune system, and found the same thing. Good conversations correlate with healthier immune systems or a lower risk of heart disease and inflammatory disease. And it’s gone a little beyond that, too.

But, yeah, it’s fascinating to think, and it sort of reinforced what I was thinking, that when I stopped just going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and became intentional about my speech, and spoke less, yeah, I did get happier, I did feel better, and I thought it was just that I was not annoying people as much. But Matthias sort of said, “No, it really is a physical reaction.”

And his example, if you want to know what a good conversation is, is that it’s authentic and you’re being honest and transparent. And the best way he puts it to me is it’s the difference between saying, “Hey, how are you?” or saying, “Hey, how are you?” or, “Really, how are you?” Anyway, that was a huge thing. And I think it does apply to work because I think it’s one thing maybe we don’t always do at work is to really have deep substantive conversations.

And I don’t mean like talking about your personal life, but at work, really digging into really important things that I think probably makes a healthier workplace. I think a lot of the lessons that I learned that apply to individuals also can be applied to an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, that’s a lot of powerful stuff. And it’s sort of funny, as we’re speaking now, you say you’ve recovered from being a talkaholic.

Dan Lyons
Well, there it is, I just gave you an overly long answer to a simple question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, as I contrast the conversation that we’re having now with videos we’ve seen of you being interviewed elsewhere, and from years past, it is like you have a different demeanor. So, it checked you out.

Dan Lyons
Do you think so?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dan Lyons
Well, I don’t know because I…hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you’re talking about “Silicon Valley,” the startups being a Ponzi scheme, I was like, “Wow, that guy is really going.” And it’s like, versus now, it does. It’s a different vibe in terms of just thoughtfully considering the pieces and the pacing. Yeah, I see the difference, Dan, for what that’s worth.

Dan Lyons
That’s good to know. My wife was very relieved that I did a lot of work on this. Can you imagine?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so far, fascinating, the quality of our conversations can determine the quality of our happiness and health. That’s cool right there. So, can you tell us, your subtitle is The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, in addition to being happier and healthier, what else can folks, looking to be awesome at their jobs, get from keeping their mouth shut?

Dan Lyons
Well, I’ll tell you another story. I do a lot about listening, again, so if you’re not talking, obviously, you have the opportunity to listen. And it’s something very few people can do well, and I include myself on that. I don’t think I’m a great listener, although I’m working on it. So, I’ll tell you a story. When I wanted to learn how to listen, there’s an executive coach named Jerry Colonna, who, he’s called sometimes The Yoda of Silicon Valley, or The CEO Whisperer.

So, he works with CEOs, with startup founders, or sometimes big CEOs, and he does these, like, three-day intensely emotional bootcamps, and everybody ends up sobbing, talking about their shame and guilt. He really digs deep into this, but the biggest thing they teach in these workshops is how to listen. And I think it’s become pretty much conventional wisdom now that a leader needs to listen more than talk.

So, I called him up, I got an appointment with him, “Can you just teach me a couple of the techniques you use in a bootcamp? I can’t come to a bootcamp but what I wanted to exercise is what I would do while I was there, and give me a couple of quotes. As a journalist, just, like, give me a couple of good quotes.” And so, we get on the call, and it’s like this, on video, and say hi or whatever. And then I get my laptop, I had my keyboard here, and I’m ready to ask him questions, and he says, “Dan, all right, stop talking. Stop taking notes.” I mean, not talking. “Stop typing. Stop taking notes. Stop and just look at me.”

I’m like, “Oh, crap.” He’s like, “So, what are you thinking right now?” And I’m like, “Enough of a jerk. Well, I’m thinking I’m not going to get anything useful for my chapter.” And he’s like, “Okay, fine.” He’s not rattled by that. And he starts interviewing me, and the questions get more and more intense. And his final one is like, “What do you fear? What do you most fear? What are you afraid of?” And I end up telling him this thing that I probably told two people in my life, like my wife, and I don’t know if I’ve even told anyone else. Like, really deep.

And then I’m welled up, like I’m kind of crying on this call. And then we’re out of time. It’s 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s how you listen, Dan.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. Listen, dude, so I hang up. And he’s like, “We can book another half hour to do the interview.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” but I hang up and I was like, “No way am I ever getting near that guy ever again. Like, he’s a witch. I’m not getting near whatever he does.” But, also, I was kind of angry, because I was like, “Now, I got nothing. I wasted all this time.”

And then I realized what you just said, like, he didn’t tell me he’s listening. He just showed me how to do it, and then he showed me how devastating it can be, like how powerful it can be if you do it well. So, I keep encountering this in work. We have meetings, and someone says, like, “Let’s have a half hour,” and there’s five of us, and someone just throws up, “Let me share my screen,” and throws up a PowerPoint deck with eight zillion datapoints on it, and just talks for 30 minutes, and the rest of you just sits there, going, “Oh. Mm-hmm.”

Or, companies do all hands, and it’s just an hour and 90 minutes of slam, slam, slam, slides and then five minutes for questions. And I come to think that if you’re a boss or you’re just a manager with a few direct reports, or you’re the CEO of a company, like listening is probably the most powerful thing you can do. Just imagine, if you’re a CEO, all you do is talk, you never listen, you have no idea what’s going on in the business. You live in a bubble. So, yeah, I really, really became, like, born again about the power of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s powerful stuff. And I’m thinking about times that I’ve really been listened to, and I’m thinking about this dude. His name is Corey McQuade, he was with the Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, and we’re just talking about insurance-y finance-life things. And so we did that in one meeting, and he was really listening, and he’s taking some notes, and then we had a follow-up meeting. He said, “You know, Pete, I heard you say duh, duh, duh, duh.”

And it was weird because it’s like, “I know I told you those things, and yet the fact that you internalized them, held them for this period of time, and are able to summarize, synthesize, represent, share implications, is like casting a spell on me.” It was wild.

Dan Lyons
Right. Yeah, it’s incredibly powerful. And it applies across all sorts of things. There’s research that I cite about working in sales, and how important listening is, talking less, asking questions, and then really listening. So, you’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to figure out what the problem is that you can solve.

And there’s, like, a study where a company called Dong uses machine learning. They suck up, like, thousands of hours of sales calls, analyzed them down, and tell you your top performers, asked this many questions, speak this many words, or this percent of the conversation is them talking versus the other. Yeah, it’s phenomenal, like it crossed pretty much every aspect of your life. Like, for me, it’s more with my kids and my wife, but where I’ve seen amazing, amazing changes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so just keeping your mouth shut enables listening, although it doesn’t guarantee listening. Dan, can you share some pro tips on, once we’ve shut our mouths, what do we do in order to do great listening from there?

Dan Lyons
Right. So, there’s a concept that people call active listening, which means you’re not just hearing. You’re actually leaning in, you really have to listen, and it’s really, really hard to do. One expert says if you’re listening, really listening, for 30 minutes and you’re not exhausted at the end of it, then you weren’t listening hard enough.

So, yeah, it’s a skill, I think, you can develop, and there are exercises. Like, one is you and I would sit down and I think we pick three questions, and I ask you those three, and you answer them, and I think you speak for five minutes without being interrupted, and then we flip it. Maybe it’s just one question. Anyway, so we take turns.

And if you don’t use the whole five minutes, we still sit there in silence, like I don’t speak for five minutes, and we flip it around. And then you just talk about afterwards, like, “How did you feel when you were listening? How did you feel when you were talking?” So, you talk about the exercise.

There are other types, yeah, where it’s just pretty much a recall with the guy you mentioned, listen to someone talk for 10 minutes then write down everything he came up. Don’t take any notes while they’re talking, so you just listen, then you go write it down. And it’s amazing how little you remember, or you can get better at it. But I think it’s a skill you can develop.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you just work it, there is practice.

Dan Lyons
You’re probably really good at it. I mean, to be a good interviewer, I think I’ve come to believe, I used to think it was about having great questions. I now think it’s about being a great listener, and then responding.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think the advantage I have in this context is we’re blessed to have so many incoming pitches, and we proactively seek out other folks, so that, by the time we’re talking, I am so fascinated by what you have to say that it’s like I’m chomping at the bit to get all that wisdom.

Dan Lyons
You know, I’m the same way. I used to be a journalist for a long time, and it’s what I loved about the job. If you go meet fascinating people, they would talk to me because I came from a magazine, so they thought, “Okay.” And, yeah, just hear their stories, and I go back and write their stories. But, yeah, it was fascinating.

I still like that. Like this book was really me just calling all sorts of interesting people I interviewed. I found a psychologist who works with prisoners in California, and the big problem they had was when they get up for parole hearing, they start and they’re okay, but then they get a little provoked and they start talking too much, and they will basically blow their parole hearing.

And so, she works with these mostly guys, and to teach them how to breathe and relax, and how to not lose it during an interview, and how to just stay calm and under-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, when it comes to keeping your mouth shut, we got better health, better happiness, better relationships, and the opportunity to listen really impact folks in a cool way and strengthen those connections. Well, now can you share with us how do we know if we are talking too much?

Dan Lyons
That is a really good question. In my case, I just knew that I was annoying people. I would leave a party and say to my wife, “Did I talk too much?” and she’d be like, “Yeah,” because it’s mostly driven by anxiety. So, I’d get anxious in a party and I would start talking, and then I just keep talking. One way you know you’re talking too much is if someone tells you, someone just says to you, “Hey, you really monologue too much. You should let other people get a word in.” I think a lot of people who really talk too much, basically, knows. A lot of people have said to me, “Oh, yeah, I want to read your book because I know I talk too much, it’s like a problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, they already know. It’s not we have to look for some special clues in terms of the body postures or body language of the people we’re talking to. You just got to know.

Dan Lyons
Or, you see people trying to pull away, you know what I mean. You’re talking, you realize…

Pete Mockaitis
Their feet are pointed away.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, they literally start to turn their body, or they go, “Oh, I’ve got to meet…” There are clues, and that’s a problem. Some people are such compulsive talkers, like, they don’t pick up on those cues. And so, I actually have a part of the book, too, about how to escape an over-talker. And there’s another version of an over-talker who’s the interrupter. So, how do you break the habit of interrupting? And then, also, how do you deal with someone who’s interrupting you?

Again, it’s almost always men. Men interrupt women constantly. The stats are incredible, and there’s just lots of research, it’s not like it’s one study that found this. But, yeah, so then it’s a lot of times men aren’t aware that they’re interrupting constantly until you record a conversation, and then show it to them, and they’re usually mortified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.  With the Gong Group that was doing that machine learning and data analyses on the high-performing sales folks, was there something like a magical ratio or range associated with questions asked or proportion listening?

Dan Lyons
The most successful sales reps asked 11 to 14 questions. Fewer than that and you’re not digging deep enough but more than that, and the call starts to feel like an interrogation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is that like in half an hour or what time are we thinking here?

Dan Lyons
They analyzed more than 500,000 calls. On the sales calls with the best close rates, where, one, in which reps knew how to keep quiet and ask questions instead of making a sales pitch, 11 to 14, they deduced the calls worked best and the questions are scattered throughout. And when a rep identifies three to four specific problems, no more, no fewer, that the customer needs to solve, the best reps made calls feel like conversations.

They spent 54% of the call listening, 46% talking. The worst reps talked 72% of the time. And I don’t have how long a call was to land those 11 to 14 questions. But, yeah, those are some interesting datapoints. I don’t know how prevalent the idea is. I think it’s an outdated idea that sales guys or salespeople just talk, talk, talk, they’re fast talkers, and they kind of twist your arms, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that my impression is that most sales folks are aware that they should ask questions and listen. And yet the common practice is often not as much that, even though that is the best practice that is published and known and promulgated. That’s my sense, anyway.

Dan Lyons
I think so, too. And I think that’s only because it’s really hard. Even if you know you should do it, it’s really difficult to do that well. And it’s a skill you really have to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we’re after those benefits of talking less where we clearly understand, “Okay, yup, I am talking too much,” can you break down for us, Dan, some of the key practices or step-by-steps to successfully talking less?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I actually came up with five, that I guess you call them exercises, that I do. So, not every day, but I think of it like a workout that it’s, like, going to the gym and you don’t even have to do this all day every day. You might pick an hour or an opportunity to use one of these is how I view it. So, the first one I have is called ‘when possible, say nothing,’ which is very obvious, but it’s often very possible to say nothing when you’re checking out at the store. So, there are occasions where gabbers like me will start striking up a conversation with someone but you don’t really need to. So, that’s one I practice with.

Another one is mastering the power of the pause. So, it’s this idea that when you pause, it makes people uncomfortable, and can be uncomfortable for you to sit with a pause. There are some research that shows it only takes four seconds, a four-second break in a conversation for people to start feeling uncomfortable. So, if you can master that and live with that uncomfortable silence, you have a lot to gain.

Actually, even in public speaking, but in negotiations, for example, pauses are a really huge thing. And I interviewed a few master negotiators about just that, how to use a pause strategically in a negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s intriguing. So, four seconds of pause makes people uncomfortable. And so, are we saying, one, live with that yourself. But is it sometimes the right answer to, “Go ahead and have them feel uncomfortable in that pause”?

Dan Lyons
Well, no, no. Yeah, exactly right. So, like car salesmen, I think they’re trained to do this and to say, “Here’s the price,” and then sit. And according to one negotiator I interviewed, a woman in Boston, she’s brilliant, she’s like, “When they do this, people actually start negotiating against themselves. It’s often, too, with a job offer and a salary offer that you know it’s too low, and they’ll just sit there.”

So, if I hold ideas, you just do the same back, you go, “Well, hmm, I’ll think about that.” And she told me something evil, which is that, I don’t know if it’s all the time or at least once. She would practice on car salesmen because she felt like they were fair game, and they’re out there, and it’s like easy prey. They’re always available for practice. So, she would find, she’d get an offer for a bait-and-switch offer in the paper, or, no, flyer, “If you want to trade in your car, you can get this much and get this much of a deal on,” whatever new car it was, or some crazy offer you weren’t going to get.

And so, she walked in, and said, “Hey, I’m interested in this offer.” She told me, “I didn’t want to get a new car. I like my car. I have no desire to buy a new car.” She says, “Well, I saw this offer.” They said, “Well, you know, that’s…we can’t blah, blah, blah, we don’t have one of those. But what we can do blah.” And she was like, “No, I came in because there was an offer, so if you can give me this offer, I’ll buy the car.” And then she just waits.

And she said, “They’ll to, like, try stall you. They’ll go out back and talk to the manager. There is no manager.” Like, she worked in the car business, too. She’s like, “They’re not going there. They’re going to have a cup of coffee and just make you sit there.” So, she said, “I brought, like, a thermos and a book, and I would sit there and wait.” She’s like, “I picked a day when I’m just going to do this.”

And she said she knew it wasn’t going to end up in her buying a car, so it was really just sharpening her own skills, “Can I just go and sit with this quiet?” And, eventually, you go back and forth a few times, and they say, “Well, I guess you’re not going to get a car today. Bye.” But, yeah, so, using that discomfort. There’s a story, too, in the book of a guy who was making a big sale to, I don’t know, someone in charge of government in the Middle East to have a franchise to sell candy or chocolate in this country, and the salesman says, “Well, here’s the price,” and the guy says, “Hmm, that’s too high.”

So, the other guy just sat there. And the story goes, he sat there for 45 minutes, and then finally the customer said, “Okay, we have a deal.” Like, they just sat there. I like that. To me, it almost sounded like it can’t be true but, yeah. So, pauses are very powerful. I had other things where I tried to find, add silence to my life.

I found this stuff called forest bathing, which is you go out in the woods and you don’t really do much. You just sit in the forest, usually with a guide, which I found really good. I also think you should quit social media, if not completely, then almost, as much as you can. I think social media is creating mental illness at a societal level, which is also what pushes us all to talk too much. We live in this culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, there are some spooky data, especially with teen and pre-teen girls. Ugh.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. But also it just, if you think about it, the model they have is “We need to keep you on the site as long as possible so you look at many ads as possible. How do we do that? Well, if you’re just reading, you’re not going to stay that engaged, so we need to get you talking, and sharing, and retweeting, and getting in arguments with people.”

So, the best way to get you engaged is make you angry. “So, we put stuff into your feed, we figure out using machine learning algorithms,” they know collecting thousands of datapoints about you, like down to “How long did you pause over that photo?” Everything. So, they know exactly how to provoke you. But the problem is then that anger you experience online carries with you back into your real life.

So, you get on this dopamine cycle if it feels good, and then you stop and you crave the dopamine, but you’re also creating this cycle of just epinephrine just flowing through your bloodstream all the time which causes all sorts of health problems. Like, for example, you notice how angry people are now compared to 20 years ago? And what’s changed in 20 years? The internet. Social media. So, yeah, I think if you can stay away from it.

I, actually, think there’s a larger problem of information overload, where there’s just so much stuff. I have statistics on how many movies or how many hours of entertainment Netflix is going to make this year. The number is crazy. So, we just have a lot coming at us, and I don’t think our brains have evolved as fast as the internet has.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got some silence, we got quitting social media. Any other key practices?

Dan Lyons
Well, the last one was learn how to listen, which we already talked about. But I tell you, I also interviewed a woman who runs this thing called the International Listening Association. I couldn’t imagine there is a thing like that. They have an annual conference. And I said, “What is this, like people walking around, not talking?” And she said, “Oh, everybody makes that joke.”

And she and I had become friends since then, but she also is a professor. She teaches a course in listening, like the whole course is just how to listen. And it turns out to be very powerful in that you can be interviewing someone, I found. I interviewed someone who’s really, really shy, like almost couldn’t get on the phone to talk, like really, really has social anxiety, so I knew that conversation is going to be difficult.

If I go in rapid-fire questions, blah, blah, blah, like that just going to just shut it down. And so, I had to really take a deep breath, ask my questions and not fire off the next question, just listen, and it kind of worked. And I told this professor about it, I said, “You know, it’s amazing is this woman. The more it went out, she became really fascinating. When she was super shy and uptight at first and really uptight, and by the end, she was laughing, and telling me stories and about her life and growing up.” And I said, “She was the most amazing person.”

And my friend, the professor, said, “That, actually, that’s what happens when you listen to people. They actually do become more interesting.” So, I was like, “Wow, that’s really powerful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the name of the professor?

Dan Lyons
Her name is Sandra Bodin-Lerner, that’s B-O-D-I-N dash L-E-R-N-E-R. I should introduce you. You might find her to be a really interesting guest. She first got a career, she was like a public-speaking coach for people in business. And now she does that, but she also does listening workshops in companies because they realize, “Oh, yeah, it’s not just about speaking well.”

At one point, she made, I think, it was really fascinating, and we talk a lot about sort of in companies now, of we need to have these difficult conversations. We need to have these conversations and reckon with big issues, but nobody ever tells us how to have a conversation. So, yeah, she’s a fascinating woman.

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

Dan Lyons
No, I’m all good. I appreciate you taking an interest in my book.

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

Dan Lyons
Well, along the lines of this, Winston Churchill’s mother was named Jennie Jerome, and she once described…this is about listening, a story about listening. She once described the difference between having dinner with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, so two very big, important British politicians.

And she said, when she had dinner with Gladstone, “I left thinking that he was the cleverest man in England. When I had dinner with Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.” And, to me, that always just summed up why listening works, what the effect it has on the other person.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine she liked the latter more afterwards.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, I think it would be Matthias Mehl’s research about good conversations and the immune system. It’s a remarkable report.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dan Lyons
I’ll just tell you what I’m reading right now, which is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s, like, an unbelievable book. It’s huge. I guess, as a writer, I admire it because it won the Pulitzer Prize. Just the writing is amazing. Just the amount of research he did, and how he shaped into a narrative, into a story. It’s phenomenal.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, at work you mean? Yeah, I’d become a big believer in notebooks. I got this while I was researching my book, reading Richard Branson’s book. And Richard Branson is a big believer in listening, and one thing he does is he always carries a notebook and a pen, and takes notes. And he says it’s one way to become a better learner, he forced himself to learn and write things down. And then also you have a record of every meeting you have. So, yeah, in the last two years, I’ve become really, really a believer in notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be all the more awesome at your job?

Dan Lyons
I put sticky notes above my computer screen on the wall, and say things like “Quiet,” “Listen,” “Wrap it up.” I just put reminders not to talk too much. And that habit, it has helped me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think it is that the first beat of the book for me was talking less, listening more, speaking with intention, can do so much for you. It can make you happier, healthier, more successful, blah, blah, blah. The second thing I realized that I did not anticipate going in is that the real power of it is that you make the lives of people around you better. So, that’s the real ripple effect of this, and that was quite profound for me.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, my website DanLyons.io.

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

Dan Lyons
Yeah, yeah. Next time you’re in a meeting, which will be tomorrow, you probably have eight tomorrow, see if you can listen more than talk. Oh, here’s a great exercise. If you’re on a Zoom call with one other person, if the person will agree to let you record the call, record the call, take the recording, send it to Rev.com, or something like that, have it transcribed.

Then print it out and you see, literally, in front of you, just in blocks of texts, how much you talked, how much the other person talked, and then keep trying to work on that so you’re less and less. That, to me, was like an eye-opening exercise and, yeah, I think a really good one to try. If you want to learn to listen more, talk less, that would be a great exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun as you keep your mouth shut.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, thanks for letting me talk for so long about not talking, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

844: The Six Words that Dramatically Increase Your Impact with Jonah Berger

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Jonah Berger says: "By understanding magic words and their power, we can increase our impact in every aspect of life."

Jonah Berger reveals how to massively increase your persuasiveness through simple shifts in your language.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The simple two letter shift that makes you more persuasive.
  2. The easiest way to look–and become–smarter.
  3. A tiny speech habit that’s undermining your impact.

About Jonah

Jonah Berger is a Wharton Professor, internationally bestselling author, and world‐renowned expert on change, word of mouth, influence, natural language processing, and how products, services, and ideas catch on. He has published over 70 articles in top-tier academic journals, teaches one of the world’s most popular online courses, and accounts of his work often appear in places like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. Millions of his books, Contagious, The Catalyst, Invisible Influence, and most recently Magic Words, are in print in over 35 countries around the world.

Berger has keynoted hundreds of major conferences and events like SXSW and Cannes Lions, advises various early‐stage companies, and consults for organizations like Apple, Google, Nike, Amazon, GE, Moderna, and The Gates Foundation.

Resources Mentioned

Jonah Berger Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jonah, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Jonah Berger
Thanks so much for having me back. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I had so much fun chatting with you last time, and I know you’re going to have a boatload of wisdom reading through your latest book Magic Words. I’m just going to dig right in because I think you have too much great stuff in the time we have. So, could you start us off with perhaps one of the most particularly striking, surprising, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while putting together this work?

Jonah Berger
I think the most surprising thing to me is the bigger question, which is that everything we do involves language. And I put in almost in there because there are things we do, like breathing, that don’t involve language but almost everything we do involves language. We write emails, we build PowerPoint presentations, we make phone calls, we make presentations, we talk to either through face to face or through digital means, everyone in our lives, words are how we convince others, they’re how we connect with loved ones, they’re how we hold audiences’ attention.

We spend almost every waking moment of the day using language in one way or another. Even our own private thoughts rely on language. And yet while we spend a lot of time using language, and sometimes we think about what we want to communicate, “So, I’m making a presentation today. Okay, my goal is to get people to support this initiative, and so I’m going to talk about it in a way that will get them to support it.”

We think a lot less about the way we use those words, and that’s a mistake because subtle shifts in the language we use can have a huge effect on our impact. Certain words can increase persuasion by 50%, certain language patterns are much better at holding an audience’s attention, and the words we use can even impact social connection with the ones we love.

And so, the big idea behind Magic Words is kind of we can use language better, whether at home, or at work, whether convincing clients, holding attention. By understanding how language works and how we can use it, and understanding the power of magic words, we can increase our impact in every aspect of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jonah, that’s so much good stuff. Could you give us an example of a subtle-shift or two in language that has a huge impact?

Jonah Berger
Yeah, let me give you a really simple one. So, often, when we’re trying to get people to do something, whether at home or at work, we often use verbs. And what do I mean by that? Well, we say, “Hey, can you help me out?” We use the verb ‘to help’ to ask for help. Similarly, if we’re a nonprofit and we’re having a get-out-the-vote campaign, we might send mail to people’s houses, saying, “Please go vote.” Vote is an action that we’re hoping that people will take.

But it turns out that a subtle shift, even a couple of letters in those type of appeals can greatly increase the likelihood that people do what we want them to do. So, let’s take something as simple as helping. A number of years ago, some scientists at Stanford University did a study at a local elementary school where they made a mess in a classroom and they asked students for help cleaning up that mess.

And for some students, they used the typical approach, they said, “Hey, can you help clean up?” as we often do. But for another set of students, they changed their question very slightly, they said, “Hey, can you be a helper and clean up?” Now, helper, I don’t have to tell you, it’s very similar to help. It’s just adding the word E-R at the end, but that subtle shift led to a 38% increase in the portion of children that helped.

And it’s not just kids in classrooms, it happens with adults in a variety of different domains. So, in another study, when individuals are trying to get folks to vote, they changed the pitch they used in the mailers to people’s houses. Some people got the traditional pitch, “Hey, please go vote,” others were asked, “Would you be a voter and go vote?”

Now, again, voter and vote are even closer, they’re just adding an R to the end of it, but there, asking people to voter, to be a voter, increased the percentage of people that turned out to vote by over 15%. And you might be sitting there going, “Well, okay, help, helper, vote, voter, what’s the difference?” And the key insight here is that by turning actions – voting, helping – into identities, being a voter, being a helper, can make people more likely to take those actions. And the reason why is the difference between things like identities versus action.

So, imagine I told you about two people, I say, “Hey, I have two friends. One of them runs and the other one is a runner.” If I told you about those two people, which one would you guess runs more often, the person who runs or the person who is a runner?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, the identity is a runner, it sounds like they run more. And even when I did, you reminded me, when I did my first triathletes, I didn’t even think – triathlons – I didn’t consider myself a triathlete yet, I was like, “Well, I mean, I walked the last half of the run portion, so am I really a triathlete?”

Jonah Berger
“I did a triathlon but am I triathlete?” Notice the difference. And so, what you’re pointing out is that these identities, they seem bigger and more long-lasting, “Someone who runs, yeah, once in a while they go for a run. Someone who’s a runner, well, that’s a part of who they are. That’s an identity.” And so, we all want to hold desirable identities, we all want to see ourselves as smart, and athletic, and knowledgeable, and helpful in a variety of different things.

And so, actions, like voting or helping, yeah, those are good things, I want to do those things, but if those actions are an opportunity to claim a desired identity to be a voter, to see myself as a voter, to see myself as a helper, well, now I’m much more likely to do those things because the identity is more desirable than the action.

So, if we want to motivate people to do something, frame actions as identities. If we want to get people to do one of these things, frame them in that way. The same thing goes with the negative side. Losing is bad, being a loser is even worse. Cheating is bad, being a cheater is even worse. And so, research shows in a classroom context, for example, you want to get students not to cheat, don’t ask them not to cheat, say, “Don’t be a cheater.” It greatly decreased the percentage of people that cheated.

And so, I think this has implications not only for kind of motivating others or getting them to do what we want, but also even how we describe ourselves or others. So, on a resume, for example, we could say we’re hardworking or a hard worker. We could describe a colleague as being innovative or being an innovator. Just like with running and runner, it’s going to seem more like a stable trait, like it’s who you are if it’s described as an identity rather than an action.

So, again, a subtle shift in language, just a couple of letters, can increase our impact in a variety of ways.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good, so good. And, well, one, it sounds a lot easier than when I try to do with my kids to tell them I have a mission for the super cleanup team, which kind of works. I’m going to try…

Jonah Berger
Yeah, but that’s a desirable identity, cleaning up. Cleaning up is not that fun, but being a member of the super cleanup team, well, hold on. If being a member requires that I clean up, maybe I’ll clean up because I want to be a member.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, now I’m thinking about identities, so I guess there’s don’t litter, don’t be a litterbug. They just invented that word. And, likewise, is it Home Goods who had that ad campaign about, like, you’re a thrifter or be a thrifter. And it’s funny, it’s like, “I don’t know if being a thrifter is a desirable thing.” And I guess it depends who your segment is.

Jonah Berger
Exactly right. So, LL Beans has this campaign “Be an outsider.” And “Be an” looks like Bean, but not everybody wants to be an outsider, not everybody wants to be a thrifter. But the type of people that interested, your target segment, probably does. Most people want to be a listener. Being a listener is not a bad thing. And so, being a leader is not a bad thing. So, rather than ask people to listen or lead, ask them to be a leader, ask them to be a listener.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, within the book, we’ve got six such principles, and here we’ve talked a good bit about activating identity. Can you share with us what are the other key principles?

Jonah Berger
Yes. So, let’s step back for a second. So, as you noted, there are six key principles or types of language. I actually gave one example of one type. There are other examples of that type, but just to talk about the types for a second. They actually can be organized in a framework called ‘the SPEACC framework.’ That’s S-P-E-A-C-C. I’m not clever enough to come up with a word that starts with K so I’m stuck with two Cs at the end.

But that stands for the language of similarity, posing questions is our P, E is emotion, A is agency and identity, and the two Cs are confidence and concreteness. And each of these are a type of language that we can use to increase our impact. So, we just talked, for example, some about the language of agency and identity. They are the identity-activating identities but the same is true, more generally, with other types of examples there.

There are some nice work, for instance, that shows that when we’re stuck on a tough problem, rather than thinking about what we should do, think about what we could do makes us more creative, it makes us a better problem-solver. Even if we don’t end up doing one of those things that we came up with that we could do, because sometimes things that we could do aren’t actually good solutions, but by thinking about what we could do rather than what we should do, we think about a broader range of possibilities, and that helps us reach a better outcome overall.

And so, a subtle shift in language there can help make us more creative and a better problem-solver. Or, think about something as simple as the word ‘you.’ Again, only three letters here, ‘you’ it seems like a very small word, but lots of research that I and others have conducted shows that ‘you’ is extremely powerful.

Work I’ve done on social media content, for example, shows that the word ‘you’ increases engagement. If we want people to click on, like our content, engage with it, or open an email, words like ‘you’ in a subject line holds people’s attention, acts like a stop sign, suggests something as relevant for them, and encourages them to pay attention.

At the same time, ‘you’ can also be damaging if it’s used in the wrong ways and the wrong context. Often, if you look at customer support pages, for example, pages that use the word ‘you’ more often, people find them less helpful. If someone says, “To fix your computer, you need to reboot and do this,” someone might be sitting there, going, “Well, I need to do all this work, why is it my fault?” ‘You’ can suggest blame in a negative way.

And so, ‘you’ isn’t just a word. It’s a word that can do a lot of work and we can use it to increase our impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that’s powerful stuff. And I’m thinking, when I see social media posts or news items in the headline which says something like, I don’t know, “The War in Ukraine: What You Need to Know,” I resent it because, I’m like, “You don’t know who I am, publication. Thank you very much. Like, you have not researched me. You have not segmented me. Everybody has different sets of needs, values, preferences, wishes with regard to this news article, so that’s pretty freaking presumptuous of you to say this is what I need to know. Thank you very much.”

Jonah Berger
Well, yeah, good. So, what you’re talking about is how ‘you’ can evoke reactance. So, we find in online reviews or in word-of-mouth, if someone says, “I like this,” we’re like, “Okay, you like it.” If someone says, “You’ll like this,” we say, “Well, how do you know I’ll like it?”

And so, yes, if someone knows you, or if the content is relevant to you, then you can sort of act as an intensifier, might make it even better. If I like playing basketball, “Six tips you can use to be a better basketball player,” well, suddenly, I’m even more interested. Whereas, if it’s like, “Six tips you can use to be a better water polo player,” which is not relevant to me, I might have that reactance.

And so, again, I’m not suggesting that ‘you’ is great in all situations, but it’s a powerful word that we can use with great impact if we understand it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’d love to dig into a few of the additional principles here. How about asking the right questions?

Jonah Berger
Yeah. I love the area of questions. I think it’s fascinating. And I’ve talked about questions a little bit, I talked about questions a little bit in my last book The Catalyst, and the more I’ve learned about the power of asking questions, and the more research has come out about questions, you really realize they’re useful in so many different ways.

I think many of us think that questions are a tool to collect information, and they are. Questions do help us collect information, but they really do a lot more than just help us collect information. So, one area that I think we’re mistaken about the use of questions is asking for advice. And so, often when we’re dealing with a tough problem that we can’t solve, or a difficult situation, we try many things. We often don’t ask people for advice.

And why? Well, we assume they’re busy, they won’t know the answer, or, even worse, they’ll think less of us. So, in a work context, “Am I really going to ask my boss for their advice on something? Maybe they’ll think ‘Why don’t you figure it out yourself? Why don’t you know that already?’ It makes it seem like I don’t know something.”

And so, some research looked into whether asking for advice was a bad idea, and so they ran a number of experiments in which people asked for advice versus didn’t, and they looked at the outcomes. And they found something really interesting, which is we all think that asking for advice is going to hurt us, it’s going to make people think we’re less intelligent and less competent, and all those things. That’s not what happens. In fact, the exact opposite happens.

Asking for advice makes us look smarter and more competent, and has a variety of benefits for how we’re perceived. And the reason why is really simple. People are self-centered. People think that they give great advice. We all think our advice is good. And so, when someone comes along and asks us for advice, we go, “Wow, they’re a pretty smart person, they knew to ask me for advice, they must be smart themselves.”

And so, asking for advice makes us seem better not worse, more competent not less competent. And that’s just one example, but it’s not just about asking questions, about the type of questions we ask. Certain questions are better than others, and there are certain situations where types of questions can be more effective than others as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, lay it on us.

Jonah Berger
Sure, yeah. So, let’s talk about what types of questions to ask. And often, when we ask questions, we ask questions to be polite. So, I can’t remember back to the beginning of this call but you probably said something, like, “Hey, how are you?” And I probably said something like, “How are you?” And we both asked a question. “How are you?” is a question, but that isn’t actually a question that has a big impact. It is a question but it’s more being polite. It shows that we’re a polite person but it doesn’t have as big of an impact.

Researchers looked at hundreds of social interactions, everything from speed dating and workplace interactions, and they found a particular type of question was very useful. It made people like the others they interact with more, and, in a dating context, even made them want to go on a second date. And that type of questions was what are called follow-up questions.

And so, a follow-up question goes something along the lines of this, if someone says, “Oh, yeah, I really enjoyed that presentation,” we could say, “Yeah, I did too.” Or we could say something like, “Oh, neat. What did you like about it?” If someone says they’ve had a tough day, we could say, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Or, we could say, “Oh, what made it so difficult? Tell me more. I want to understand more about what happened.”

Questions that follow up on what someone said show a few things. First of all, it shows that we paid attention. You can’t ask a follow-up question if you didn’t pay attention to what someone said. But, second of all, it shows that you care. You care not only enough to pay attention, but you care enough to ask for more. It shows that we’re responsive, and because we’re responsive, it makes people like us more.

And so, it’s not just about asking any question, sure, we can ask questions to be polite, and that’s fine, but the more we’re asking questions to be responsive, to show that we care, the more they’re going to lead people to like us more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I dig it. Well, now could we hear a little bit about conveying confidence? And you say – I love your table of contents – “Why Donald Trump is so persuasive no matter what you think of him?” Lay it on us, Jonah.

Jonah Berger
I’ve enjoyed writing popular press books because it’s a little bit like that old Michael Jordan quote, like everybody buys sneakers. Like, you’re entitled to your own viewpoint, but unless you want half the world to hate you, you probably shouldn’t get too deep into politics.

And so, I want to frame this discussion by saying whoever you support, whatever you believe in is great, but, yeah, whether you like someone or not, Donald Trump, in particular, you can’t deny that he is amazingly good at selling ideas. Whether you like him or you hate him, he’s done a fantastic job of making a large set of people believe what he has to say.

And so, if you like Donald Trump, you’re probably saying, “Great. It’s wonderful.” If you hate Donald Trump, you’re saying, “Oh, God, why is he like that?” But I think a smarter strategy is to step back and say, “Well, what makes him so effective?” It’s easy to complain about him. What makes him so effective? Why is he so persuasive or convincing? What does he do that makes him so impactful?

One of the speeches he made when he first announced his candidacy, he said something like, “I’m going to build a great wall. Nobody builds walls better than me. I’ll build them very inexpensively. Our country is in trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have them. We don’t have them anymore. When was the last time anybody saw us beating China in a trade deal? I beat China all the time. All the time.”

Now, critics listened to that speech, and said, “Oh, God, this is ridiculous. It’s overly simplistic. It’s empty. It’s filled with bluster.” And, yet, less than a year later, he was elected president. So, what did he do? What does he do in his speeches that make him so impactful? And it’s not just him. So, if you look at folks like Steve Jobs, if you look at startup founders, they get a lot of attention.

If you look at leaders that everybody listens to. If you listen to so-called gurus, they often do one particular thing, which is they speak with a great deal of certainty. When they talk, other people listen because they seem like what they’re saying is obviously true.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “We’re going to win so much, we’re going to get tired of winning.”

Jonah Berger
Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s as certain as you can get.

Jonah Berger
“I don’t know what that means, but I like it, right?” Who doesn’t like winning? Who wouldn’t like winning more? And if you dig a little deeper, you might say, “Well, what does ‘winning’ mean? How are we going to get there?” But, forgetting that for a second, because that’s what most of us are doing when we’re listening to something, if someone says something we like is going to happen a lot, we go, “Great.” That’s what we’re paying attention to.

And so, Trump is just one example of someone who speaks with a great deal of certainty. And you alluded to this a little bit yourself. Something isn’t just true, it’s certainly true. It’s definitely going to occur. It’s obvious. It’s unquestionable. Every time, this is clearly what’s going to happen. It’s guaranteed. It’s unambiguous. He uses a lot of language that is really certain.

And in a variety of contexts, research shows that certainty is good. Work on financial advisors, for example, shows that people prefer more certain financial advisors, even though those financial advisors that are certain aren’t any more accurate. Even in some cases where they’re making more extreme judgments, people like them more and want to choose them more because they seem so certain. If someone seems really certain, it’s hard to not want to go along because they seem so confident about what they’re saying.

Contrast that, though, with the way most of us communicate. So, I’m an academic and I’m terrible with this. I do this all the time. I often say, “Well, I think this…” or, “It seems like this will happen,” or, “Maybe this is true,” or, “This might work,” or, “Probably this will happen.” As a consultant, as a speaker, we default to those tics all the time. Those are called hedges.

What hedges do is they make it clear that we’re not so sure, like they hedge. They don’t say, “This is definitely true.” They say, “This might be true.” “Is it going to rain tomorrow?” “It’s definitely going to rain tomorrow.” “It might rain tomorrow.” “Is this a good strategy?” “It’s certainly a great strategy.” “It might be,” or, “It’s probably a good strategy.”

The problem, though, and I’m not saying that hedging is never good because sometimes things are uncertain, but the problem is that hedges reduce our impact. They undermine our impact because, while not only do they share our opinion, they simultaneously say we are not sure about our own opinion. And if we’re not sure, it makes people think we’re less certain or less confident, which makes them less likely to listen to us.

And so, if our goal is to communicate uncertainty, great. Maybe there are times for hedging. I’m not saying we all need to be like Donald Trump. There are certainly times for hedging, but if we want people to listen to us, or we want people to be persuaded, we need to ditch the hedges. Unless we’re using them strategically, unless we’re using them on purpose, don’t just say it because it’s convenient. Don’t just say it because it’s a verbal tic when we’re filling in space. And, second, when we do need to hedge, there are some types of hedges that are more persuasive than others.

So, contrast, for example, if I said, “This seems like a good strategy,” versus I said, “This seems, to me, like this is a good strategy.” If I said, “This might work” versus “I think that this might work.” In some cases, I’m saying something is generally uncertain, “It seems” or “It might work.” In another, I’m adding my personal perspective. And we can call these general and personal hedges.

Personal hedges are saying, “I’m adding a personal pronoun, I, me, my, to whatever I’m saying.” And it turns out that adding these personal pronouns in actually makes us more persuasive because it makes us seem more confident. If I want to show there are some uncertainties, and rather than saying, “It seems like this will work,” “It seems, to me, like this will work,” the listener goes, “Okay, well, you’re a little bit uncertain, but you’re willing to say that it seems, to you, to attach it to yourself, and so because of that, you seem more confident and I’m more likely to do what you suggested.”

And so, if we have to hedge, let’s hedge in a way that doesn’t undermine our impact or what we’re trying to get across.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, Jonah, you got me thinking, like you could totally say, “That is definitely a major risk,” and you haven’t said it’s certainly going to happen. You said it’s a risk. Risks, by definition, have a probability. Or, “That absolutely could be a huge opportunity for us. It could be an opportunity. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” but you can throw those adverbs and that intonation of certainty on something even when there’s uncertainty.

Jonah Berger
It’s definitely one of the paths we should pursue.

Pete Mockaitis
Definitely.

Jonah Berger
Rather than saying, “It’s not clear what path we should pursue,” saying, “It’s definitely one of the paths,” or, “I’m very certain about a narrow…” And so, what you did right there, and this is probably what you’re trying to do, but you did it very nicely, is you shrank the world but you added certainty. We’re always certain about something, there’s always something there we’re certain, but we may not be certain about the big picture, we may not be sure that a particular strategy is going to work, but we may be very certain about a part of that strategy. We may be certain that this strategy is worth considering.

And so, there are ways to add certainty in a way that doesn’t make it seem like the entire world is obviously clear. And so, I think, again, in times where we want to be clear that there is uncertainty, and there are two sides, and we need to be careful and all those things, and, yes, use hedges. I’m not saying not to. But in times where we want to be persuasive, let’s be careful about hedging just because it’s convenient.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Now, can we hear a bit about leveraging concreteness?

Jonah Berger
Yes. So, to talk about this, I’ll share a story of mine, which there are a couple personal stories in this book, and this one is one that really helped interest me in a range of the topics in this book. So, a few years ago, I was coming back from a consulting project, I think it was in Dallas or something in the area, and I was in an Uber on the way to an airport to fly back home. I was very excited to go see my family, and I got the text message that every traveler dreads, which is “Your flight has been delayed.”

And as often the case, they had rebooked me on something, and it was the next day, it was a connecting flight, it was, like, 36 hours later, it was a terrible, terrible option. So, I call customer service and tried to improve the situation. And after sort of talking back and forth with them for 10 or even 12 minutes, the situation was not much better, and I was frustrated.

So, I get off the phone, and the very nice Uber driver had been forced to listen to what I had to say, said, “Oh, it sounds like you’re really frustrated,” and I was like, “Yeah, but it’s got to be tough being a customer service representative, like you do is hear from people like me all day who are frustrated and want to get home and are stuck and are sort of annoyed, and it must be a difficult job.” And he goes, “Yeah, but my daughter is actually a customer service representative, and she loves it.” And I go, “What do you mean?”

And he was like, “Well, she loves the job and she’s so good at it that, actually, they’ve now gotten her to train other people to talk to customers.” And I sat there, going, one, “That’s really interesting,” and, two, “What is she doing that makes her so effective?” Just like Donald Trump, like we can sit there, going, “I like him,” or, “I hate him,” or we can sit there, going, “Something he’s doing is working. What is it?”

And so, with a great colleague, Grant Packard, of mine, great, great friend and colleague, we went and got hundreds of customer service calls and analyzed the language of those calls to look at what increases customer satisfaction. And we also have data on whether people purchase again from the firm. So, are they happy once they get off that call? And does that call lead people to come back and buy things from the firm in the future?

And, obviously, problem-solving matters. So, yes, it matters whether they get me on a better flight, whether they find my bags, whether they solved the problem, but we looked at controlling for that. Does the language, can the language you use shape customer satisfaction? And I think there’s a key challenge that comes up in customer satisfaction. It comes up in a variety of areas of life. It’s not just customer satisfaction. It’s also when we’re talking to a group or even chatting with a spouse or a friend.

We want to signal that we’re listening. We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but when someone calls customer service, we don’t just want to solve their problem. We want to show them that we care. When somebody at the office talks to us about something, we want to show them that we’re interested in what they have to say. And so, how can we use language to show listening? We can shake our heads, yes, but how can we use language to show listening? How can we use language to show caring?

And it’s good that companies care about us, because when you’re on hold, they often say things like, “Oh, your call is so valuable to us. Thanks for staying on hold.” Twenty-five minutes into you sitting on hold, and you’re sitting there, going, “F you. If my call is valuable to you, you would answer the phone in less than 25 minutes.” So, they want to show they care but they don’t know how to.

We found, though, that a certain type of language shows listening. And that type of language is what we can describe as concrete language. And so, what does concrete mean? Well, if you can touch something, if you can feel it, if you can smell it, if you can see it, it’s concrete. A table is concrete. Trees are concrete. A cup is concrete. A strategy? Not so concrete. Soon, the word soon, not so concrete. The word tomorrow, well, that’s more concrete. I have a sense of when tomorrow is. I don’t know exactly when soon is. Beautiful? That’s a nice word but not very concrete. Striking red color, very concrete. I can see that color in my mind.

And so, we found that using concrete language increases customer satisfaction, makes them more satisfied at the end of the call, makes them more likely to buy more from the firm. Rather than saying something like, “Oh, we’ll get you a refund soon,” “Your money will be there tomorrow” is a much more concrete way of saying the same thing because the challenge often, as a customer service representative, and anyone trying to help someone else out, is we tend to use sort of language that works in all situations, “I can help you with that.” “I’m happy to solve your problem,” whether that problem is a delayed flight, a lost bag, anything at all.

And while that kind of Swiss Army language works in a variety of situations, really good for us, it doesn’t show someone listened. It’s so general that it doesn’t show someone we heard what they said. But concrete language, similar to what we talked about already, shows that you paid attention, that you understood what was said, and that you care enough to do something about it, it shows listening. And so, as a result, it has a variety of benefits, both in customer satisfaction but in other domains as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Jonah, that’s so good. And I’m thinking about my own customer service experiences as the customer. I really like that concreteness when they say, “You’re the third person in line on the end. Your wait time is approximately nine minutes.” It’s like, “Okay.” Like, I really understand these expectations. And, contrarily, I get really irritated with these chatbots who act like they can solve any problem but, when push comes to shove, they really can’t, which is why I’m there in the first place.

It’s, like, if this were an easy problem, it would be loaded into the interactive voice response, the IVR systems of the push button or whatever, and I would’ve already solved it via automated portals. So, when I’m talking to a human, it’s thorning, like, we got some nuances about a changed billing/shipping address, and that’s why I need to go down the route of talking to someone. So, it is quite irritating when I get the general language, which isn’t even true, “I could help you with that.” I was like, “Well, we’ll see. We’ll see, chatbot, if you got the right stuff, but I have my doubts.”

Jonah Berger
I certainly agree, and I think everyone would like, when they call customer service, to be heard and to be listened to, to feel like someone cares. And as a customer service agent, you only have so many degrees of freedom. You can’t create a flight that doesn’t exist. But just as someone listens to a colleague at work, or a spouse at home, by using the right language, you can make it clear that you listened, that you heard, and that you care, which can, on the margin, make things better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, Jonah, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Jonah Berger
No, I think the only thing I would say, which we sort of started out talking about in the beginning, is we all use language all the time. Language is how we convince clients and customers, language is how we change the minds of bosses and colleagues, language is how we connect with our loved ones at home. By understanding the power of magic words, we can use language in these situations more effectively and in all areas of our life.

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

Jonah Berger
I think one quote that I like a lot is from Albert Einstein. I’m going to get it probably a little bit wrong here, but he says something along the lines of, “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” And I think it’s really easy to think things are complicated. Many things are complicated but part of the job of a good communicator is figuring out how to meet their audience more than halfway and simplify it. And so, I always found that quote quite motivating even though if I don’t always achieve what it sets out to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jonah Berger
One of my favorite books is a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s a great book on communicating, and I find myself going back to it again and again over time.

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

Jonah Berger
I have started using voice to text more in a variety of areas of my life, whether writing emails, whether writing articles, not just texting on the phone. It’s not always perfect but it does an amazing job of allowing us to sort of dump more thoughts out quickly, which I think is really great. One thing to be careful of, the modality we communicate through, the medium we communicate to, speaking rather than writing does change what we say, and so we need to be a little bit careful. But I think it’s a great productivity tool and a good way to express ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jonah, I got to follow up here. I’ve been disappointed with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. How are you rocking and rolling? Is there a particular piece of software or is it built-in into the MacOS?

Jonah Berger
I’m just using whatever comes with Microsoft. So, whatever comes with Microsoft Word, whatever comes with Outlook, I’m using that. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m not expecting perfect. I am amazed that it captures, generally, what I’m saying, and it gives me a place to start and sharpen some thoughts.

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

Jonah Berger
Oh, yeah. Well, Magic Words is available wherever books are sold, so Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you like to go for books. You can find me at my first name-last name-dot com, so just JonahBerger.com. There’s a bunch about the book there, a bunch of free resources. One page, there’s guides and the like. And you can also find me at @j1berger on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

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

Jonah Berger
Yeah, think about how you can use language more effectively. We all have things we want to communicate but we often think less about the specific words we use, and there’s a lot of opportunity there. So, by understanding magic words and their power, we can increase our impact in every aspect of life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jonah, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many magical words.

Jonah Berger
Thank you so much.

843: The Master Key to Overcoming Procrastination with Dr. Hayden Finch

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Hayden Finch says: "It’s not time management. It’s emotion management."

Dr. Hayden Finch unpacks the psychology behind procrastination and shares strategies for overcoming it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why time management won’t solve procrastination—and what will.
  2. The easier way to do what you don’t want to do.
  3. A powerful question to help motivate you into action.

About Hayden

Dr. Hayden Finch is a licensed clinical psychologist, behavior change expert, and dessert enthusiast.  She is the founder of the Finch Center for High Functioning Anxiety, an online therapy clinic that helps anxious and overwhelmed high-achievers learn actionable, research-proven skills to turn self-doubt into self-confidence.  She is a go-getter with a passion for empowering others to find meaning in a busy life.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Hayden Finch Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I should also mention, the video is not being recorded at all. So, however you want to roll, so there’s that. Hayden, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Hayden Finch
I‘m so thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so thrilled to be chatting with you. You’ve got the coolest name for your organization – The Finch Center for High Functioning Anxiety.

Hayden Finch
Doesn’t that sound official?

Pete Mockaitis
It really does. I think we have a lot of high-functioning anxiety in the listenership, myself included.

Hayden Finch
Yeah. Well, that’s how I sort of got in this space, was like, “That’s me.” I’m pretty high-functioning and have a lot of anxiety, and noticed that my clients were kind of being attracted to me because they were pretty similar to me in terms of being pretty high-achieving people, doctors, and attorneys, and scientists, and also having anxiety, and trying to work all that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s powerful, it’s important. And kudos on zeroing in on your message and your uniqueness and your brand relatively early in the course of rocking and rolling in your practice. That’s really cool.

Hayden Finch
Yeah, I studied marketing for a minute after I realized that that’s an essential part of the process, and that really helped me kind of figure out how to actually reach the people that I thought would be a good fit for me and that I would be a good fit for. So, yeah, that’s really helped kind of get that branding right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some of the insights that you’ve shared in your book The Psychology of Procrastination. But maybe before we do that, could you share, is there anything particularly striking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive you’ve discovered about us high-achieving folk having gotten a unique vantage point of looking at the personal deep stuff that we’re all dealing with?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, one thing that’s interesting about especially high-functioning people is, obviously, procrastination hasn’t been so problematic that it’s kept them from being able to achieve great things. Like, these people that I work with are highly successful, and so procrastination hasn’t kept them from being successful like it can for some people.

And so, I see this kind of brand of procrastination in this population that’s really closely aligned with perfectionism. And so, they want to do things perfectly and that can kind of contribute to procrastination, and then the procrastination kind of influences how well they can do something, and there’s this relationship between procrastination and perfectionism that I think is particularly unique to this high-functioning population.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonating in terms of one thing I’ve really procrastinated on is just processing my mail, like paper mail, because if it’s really good, I usually grab it already, like, “Ooh, this is a cheque,” “Ooh, this is a card.” And then what’s left is a big pile of, “I don’t know what’s in that envelope. Probably not anything interesting.”

Hayden Finch
Yeah, that’s really common to struggle with, like those basic activities of daily living, but then to not struggle so much with some of the bigger things in life that would seem more intimidating.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. And then with that perfectionism, it’s funny, I ended up buying a bunch of stuff in terms of I’ve got three different kinds of letter openers now, and a nice little six-stack tray, and some special redaction markers, etc. And I guess there’s some perfectionism in there, it’s like, “If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it so freaking excellently.”

But I found that from my own motivational triggers at least, it’s really helping. It’s like, “I am well-equipped to tackle this thing now, so let’s get after it.” Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s going to be so hard and boring, and I’m scared that I might realize I’ve neglected something important about insurance, or about taxes, or something, and then feel bad about myself.” So, anyways, yeah, a lot of stuff gets wrapped up in this procrastination.

Hayden Finch
Yeah, and sometimes, you’re right, like setting ourselves up with the best materials can really then motivate behavior. And sometimes people observe the opposite, and they get all the stuff, and they have all these great intentions, and still they can’t go through their mail, that there’s something missing that actually helps them overcome that barrier to really doing the behavior, so it can kind of go either direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, boy, it sounds like there’s a lot of nuances to be untangled here, so let’s do that. Maybe let’s zoom out a smidge. If you had a big idea, core message, or thesis behind The Psychology of Procrastination how would you articulate that?

Hayden Finch
My main thesis is that procrastination is not as much about time management as we would expect. That’s what you hear a lot when you’re talking about procrastination, is you need to schedule, you need to plan, or you need to manage your time better. To me, poor time management can certainly affect procrastination, and improving those skills can be helpful, but, ultimately, overcoming procrastination requires addressing the deeper emotional causes. Overcoming procrastination is about emotion management as much as time management.

Pete Mockaitis
Tweet that, Hayden. That’s good. Uh-huh.

Hayden Finch
Yeah. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that distinction does a lot right there. Cool. So, then I’m curious, okay, well, we’ll get in the how in just a moment. Then, is there any distinguishing or defining we should do about procrastination itself? Like, in some ways, I think we know it when we see it, it’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s procrastination.” But how do we distinguish between procrastination versus, “Oh, I’m taking a break,” or, “This is actually another important thing that’s popped up and needs my attention”?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, there are different forms of procrastination. And so, there’s actively procrastinating versus passively procrastinating. So, active procrastination means, “Oh, I’m going to work on that later.” I’m making this active decision to do it later so that I can do this other thing instead. And that other thing may be something that is also important, maybe more important, or maybe also important but less important, or something that’s not important at all but just something that you want to do. So, I’m actively making the decision to put something off until later.

And there’s also the passive procrastination, which is just like just not getting around to the stuff, just not getting around to making a doctor’s appointment or to calling your grandma or something like that. It just doesn’t come around. You’re passively procrastinating on those things but not really intending to. So, that’s one important distinction, is, “Am I doing this on purpose? Am I purposely putting this off? Or, am I just like not getting around to doing these things that I need to be doing?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so then, either way, there’s something that ought to be done that you’re not doing.

Hayden Finch
Right, yeah. That’s essentially the definition of procrastination. And you bring up a good point, which is, like, there are lots of things that need to be done in life, so how do you distinguish if I’m working on something that’s important, how do I know if the stuff that is waiting in line is being procrastinated or I’m just not getting to it yet? And that’s a matter of priority.

By definition, there can only be one most important thing, and that’s your priority. And our job in overcoming procrastination is to get really serious about what is the most important, or most urgent thing to be done right now, and what are the other things that need to wait. And you’ll see your mind getting really creative with excuses to kind of trick you into changing the priority order, and making something seem like a greater priority than something else.

And so, you really have to be savvy in calling yourself out when you’re lying to yourself or when you’re making excuses that aren’t helpful in really prioritizing your list.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful. And a couple things you said reminded me of the conversation we had with Perry Marshall who talked about the 80/20 Rule and marketing and other domains, and it’s intriguing. And for me, that’s been so huge with priority, is if I can quantify, like, “What is the expected profit created per hour invested?” as I think about different business initiatives, like, if that’s what I’m trying to achieve.

Then if I lay it out there, I can be dazzled by, “Sure enough, that one is ten times as much as that other one. So, even though it’s unpleasant, I should probably really do that one.” And it’s powerful and beautiful to be able to see it in black and white in such stark dramatically differing terms. Although, often, it is not that clear, it is not that quantified, and it’s much fuzzier.

Well, now, sorry, I’m pausing here because I want to jump right into, “How do I determine the priority?” but maybe that’s not the perfect sequence. Oh, perfectionism. Uh-oh. That’s so meta. So, yeah, let’s just do it. So, how do you think about determining priority?

Hayden Finch
Well, there are a lot of different ways that you can do that. There’s The Eisenhower Matrix, which is if you can imagine is this sort of two-by-two matrix of urgent, not urgent, important, not important. And so, you’ve got a box that’s both urgent and important, and a box that’s neither urgent nor important, and then the other two as well. And you can kind of categorize your tasks into that matrix.

And so, the things that are most important and most urgent are probably going to be your highest priority things. These are kind of emergencies in your life, or rapidly approaching deadlines, things like that. Things that are urgent but not important might be interruptions, so someone asking you, like a coworker asking you on your opinion on something, or for feedback on something. That may be kind of urgent, especially to your coworker but not especially important to you, so that might be a little bit lower priority for you.

Or things that are important to you but not necessarily urgent. These are projects that you want to work on that have no deadlines. So, organizing your closets or making a doctor’s appointment. These things are important but not necessarily urgent, so they’re also going to kind of be in the middle of your list. And then things at the bottom of your list are going to be things that are neither urgent nor important.

So, these are distractions in life. This is social media, this is just hanging out, this is kind of our time-wasters are definitely in that category. And these are going to be at the bottom of our list, and, hopefully, we’ll get there but in terms of prioritizing our time, we want to start with those things that are most urgent and most important. And, again, I haven’t said this, but you want to overcome the urge to, like, just use urgency to measure your priorities, and really looking at the importance of it too.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think that you’re right in terms of the priority can slide or sort of like we rationalize or deceive ourselves. And so, you can say anything is important, like, “It’s important that I play this video game because self-care is essential. I’ve been working so hard and I need a break.”

But the flipside, it could be, “Well, yeah, self-care is important. You have been working hard, you should have a rest, and this isn’t going to fill you up as much as any number of other activities which might require a little bit more effort, and might not be as immediately accessible, do.”

Hayden Finch
And that’s where the emotional stuff comes in. When you’re really in tuned with your emotions, you can see that your emotions are making the decision to procrastinate more so than you actually making that decision to put something off strategically. So, the emotion is something like, “I just don’t want to work on that project,” or, “I just don’t want to open the mail right now.”

And so, whatever emotion word we would put on that experience, that is what’s making the decision to put it off versus you sitting down, and saying, “Well, mail is kind of like it’s important but not especially urgent, so, therefore, I’m going to kind of put it in the middle of my list.” Like, that’s a very rational process but that’s very rarely what happens because, instead, our emotions are making those decisions for us.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Hayden, I don’t know how many times I’ve dreamt about this ultimate holy grail, and maybe it’s not achievable for us mortals, but exactly that notion, “I just don’t want to.” I think I’ve even written this on a goal sheet somewhere, it’s like, I would like to make “I just don’t want to” or, “I just don’t feel like it” almost irrelevant in terms of the power it holds over me. It’s like, “Duly noted, emotion, but we’re going to do it anyway, so too bad.”

And so, tell me, Hayden, is that an achievable goal or is the state of humanity incapable of that ideal?

Hayden Finch
Well, we can’t certainly eradicate that as an experience. I think that’s what most of us sort of envision, it’s just like, “I have this emotion, I don’t want it, so I’m just going to get rid of it. I’m just going to amputate that from my experience.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sounds nice.

Hayden Finch
Probably not an achievable goal, so it’s more helpful to figure out, “How do I have that feeling, that ‘I don’t want to’ feeling, and put that in my pocket, carry it with me, but continue to choose my behavior in the direction that I want it to be?” So, it’s making this distinction where, “I can have that feeling but choose a behavior that’s incompatible with it, so I can exercise, or do this documentation, or go through the mail, even though I have this feeling that I don’t want to. I’m just going to put that in my pocket, carry it with me because I can’t get rid of it, and then do the behavior anyways.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. Yeah, understood. Yeah, the feeling is there, it doesn’t just disappear at will, but what is possible – it sounds like you’re saying, tell me if I’m accurate – is that with a high percentage, now, you tell me, Hayden, is it 100, is it 90? With a high percentage, with practice, and mastery, one can, with a high percentage, say, “Duly noted, I-just-don’t-feel-like-it emotion. I’m going to put this aside and proceed, regardless.” Is that accurate?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, and I love the way you just did that. You talked to the feeling, and that’s helpful, right? What that’s doing is taking the feeling from being, like, enveloping you, and you’re putting it out in front of you, and you’re speaking to it as if it’s something separate, because, in effect, it is, and you’re saying, “Hey, feeling, I hear you, I see you, I’m going to validate you, but I’m not going to let you make the decisions for me because you are separate from me. So, yes, I’m going to acknowledge you, say duly noted,” and then continue in the direction that you want to go.

This, of course, yes, is more difficult in real life than I’m making it sound, and it requires a lot of, like, emotional skill, but you can learn that, those skills, so you can learn that and you can improve those skills over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s really nicely said in terms of talking to the emotion, and “I hear you” validating. I think I’ve wrestled with this in my own journey with regard to emotions, is if folks say, “Oh, you know, Pete, emotions have information. Be curious about them.”

And I think that’s probably generally good advice for most people but, as a podcast host, I am pathologically curious, I’d say, in terms of…or a good distinction I’ve gathered is that emotions cannot be solved but rather felt, in that they have information but sometimes that information isn’t really relevant, or novel, or actionable, like, “Oh, I’m angry about this thing, which is a lot like this thing that’s happened before and is likely to continue.”

It’s like, “Yeah, that’s true. Yup, that much to be done, so duly noted. Thank you. Thank you, anger. We’re going to go ahead and do this other thing now.” Or, that’s how I’ve come to terms with things. What is your professional opinion, Doctor?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, for sure, emotions exist for a reason. Like, humans have evolved with emotions inside of us for a reason. Like, evolution tends to get rid of things that aren’t particularly helpful, and so humans and lots of other animals have emotions, so we have to believe that that’s there for a reason, because emotions are somewhat metabolically expensive in your brain, so, again, they must be serving a purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, true that.

Hayden Finch
And so, yes, we do want to pay attention to our emotions and try to figure out what they’re telling us, and, at the same time, what they’re telling us does not need to necessarily dictate our behavior. In a perfect world, that’s why we have emotions because, for example, if I see a snake, that’s going to automatically, without me even thinking about it, motivate my behavior to get away from that snake.

And it happens so quickly that it’s life-sustaining, that I’m moving away from that snake before I can think about, “Should I? Is that snake dangerous? Is that one poisonous? Is that one going to bite me?” We don’t have to do all of that. We’re just already moving. And that’s really helpful, and those are the reasons that we have emotions in the first place.

But, in our human lives where it’s not all…like emotions aren’t always triggered by things that are life-threatening, we have to be a little bit more thoughtful about the behaviors that are following our emotions. There’s a natural behavior attached to every emotion. So, if I’m sad, I naturally kind of want to hide and just slow down. If I’m anxious, I kind of naturally want to plan and worry.

And that can be helpful in certain contexts but we just have to ask ourselves, we have to pause on that emotion, and say, “What is this emotion trying to tell me? And is this one of those contexts where I need to do exactly what it’s telling me to do? Or, is this one of those tricky contexts that I actually need to go in the total opposite direction?”

Pete Mockaitis
Hey, I like that a lot. Natural behavior, and then we assess that, like, “Hmm, interesting suggestion you have proposed here. Let’s consider, is that the optimal move?” Okay. Well, so, Hayden, just kind of rounding out the why before we dig into the nitty-gritty hows, you mentioned it can be possible to practice to have a very high percentage of “Duly noted, I-don’t-feel-like-it, and we’re going to proceed, regardless.”

Could you also share with us a particularly inspiring story of someone you’ve seen really turned it around in terms of they had some procrastination that was causing some challenges, and then they just really came out the other side, and were taking care of business?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, I have a woman I used to work with that, again, very high functioning. She’s an attorney in a pretty prestigious position, and have obviously been very successful her whole life. She was very successful academically and, honestly, in everything she ever did. Like, she’s just super bright and driven, but part of her success was because she would pull all-nighters to get her briefs written, or her motions written, or whatever, and she was kind of constantly asking the court for extensions because she just didn’t have the time to finish some of the things that she needed to write for the court. And that became problematic, as you can imagine.

Pete Mockaitis
The judges are tired of that.

Hayden Finch
Yeah, they kind of catch onto this, and they’ll put some limits on it. And so, overcoming procrastination became important for her because like, she’s not 20 anymore, like pulling all-nighters is not necessarily a great way of living your life as an attorney, and asking the judges for extensions is not super helpful either.

And so, we worked for a long time on setting up some systems in her life that are going to support her moving up deadlines and being able to work on things earlier, but mostly we were looking at what are the emotions that drive the procrastination. And for her, it was a lot of distraction. It was a lot of distraction by other things that were also interesting, or overdoing it on one brief that then made it so that she couldn’t work on another one.

So, kind of like you, she’s just super curious and would do too much on one project and then procrastinate another project because of that. And so, we worked a lot on kind of figuring out emotionally what’s going on here. So, curiosity here is driving some of the procrastination, and being able to work with that so that she could set that curiosity aside, say, “Yes, duly noted, I’m very curious about this project, and I actually need to shift my focus to this other project that I’m a little bit less curious about.”

So, doing that kind of emotional work in addition to really setting herself up with some good systems for prioritizing tasks and subtasks, and knowing really what the priorities are, and how to manage her time so that she can get everything done on time. And now she holds very few all-nighters, or like less of an all-nighter, like, “I’m going to be able to sleep for two or three hours tonight instead of zero hours,” which was a significant progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. So, I’m inspired, I’m motivated, let’s dig into some of the means by which we win against procrastination. So, we talked about it’s really much about emotional management as opposed to just time management. So, could you orient us, you’ve got a procrastination cycle, how does this work?

Hayden Finch
Right. So, this cycle kind of starts with the idea that I’m going to have a thought about working on something, “Oh, I should open the mail.” And then some things are going to happen after that thought. And those thoughts that come up after you have that initial thought, that’s what, ultimately, is going to determine whether you are successful at following through with opening the mail or you defer to a different task.

And so, that interim space is really super duper important. So, I think about working on a project, so I think about opening the mail, and then I have this feeling, this, like, “Ugh, I really don’t want to. That’s kind of boring, or there’s a lot stacked up, or I don’t know what some of it is, or it could be bad news, like I could have some bills in there I can’t pay.” There’s some feeling that comes up. And then I want to get that feeling out of my body as quickly as possible because we don’t like feelings.

So, I’m just trying to get rid of that feeling. And the quickest, most effective way to do that is to just say, “You know what, I’ll do that later. I’m going to go over here and I’m going to go get a snack, or I’m going to play a video game, or I’m going to work on a work project that’s also really important. I’m going to go do something else.”

And as soon as I make that decision to go do something else, that feeling goes away. And that is really reinforcing, or in other words, kind of addictive to our brains, that relief from that anxiety that we felt or whatever that kind of feeling was, that relief from that feeling is kind of what makes us do that. And because our brain figured that out, that that felt good to get that feeling out of our body, it’s going to do that the next time too.

So, like, “Oh, I got to get around to opening that mail. Oh, yeah, I really don’t want to. Oh, there could be bills in there that I can’t pay. Oh, you know, I’m going to work on this other thing. Oh.” That relief, again, your brain learns that relief feels good, and it’s going to encourage you to do that every time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. It’s not so much that doing the other thing is just orgasmically pleasurable in terms of, like, “I’m being deluged with dopamine because this snack is so amazing, or this video game is so good.” I love that distinction you brought there in terms of we’re addicted to the relief, like, “I was feeling yucky, and then I felt un-yucky, and, oh, that’s real nice,” even if the alternative isn’t all that amazing.

Hayden Finch
Right. Yeah, even just less yucky. If I feel 2% less yucky doing this other project, then that’s a 2% gain for my brain, and, “Ooh, that’s better, so we’re going to move in that direction.” So, yeah, our procrastination doesn’t have to be just something that we actually enjoy or want to do. It just has to be incrementally better than what we otherwise would do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really like that a lot. And so then, okay, so that’s sort of the cycle. And you say it’s the thoughts we have that determine which pathway we’re going to end up going down. So, can you give us a demonstration? We heard some of the thoughts that don’t take us where we want to go. What’s the flipside of that?

Hayden Finch
Right. So, that would be a lot like what you demonstrated. So, here I am, I have this thought, like, “Oh, I really need to get to that mail. Like, oh, gosh, there could be some bills in there that I can’t pay. And there’s so much stacked up, I feel so guilty about just not being good at this, and there’s just a mass of mail. Okay, yup, yup, there is that guilty feeling, there’s that anxiety. Yup, there it is. Duly noted that this feels bad.”

“I can actually feel bad and do this at the same time. I can feel guilty about this and open the mail at the same time. Those are not mutually exclusive. So, here I am, I’m going to put that guilt in my pocket, and I’m just going to carry that with me, and I’m going to feel guilty while I open the mail. And maybe I don’t commit to opening all of it. I’m just going to open up a couple pieces of mail. That’s what I feel like I can commit to today. And so, I open a couple of pieces of mail, and then I move on.” And so then, I’m going to feel some relief after that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Hayden Finch
And that feels good to our brains too. So, now I’ve actually done some work, and then I feel relieved, and that’s kind of the process that we want, is that relief to come after engaging with the task rather than before.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that’s really nice. That’s really nice. I think I heard an interview with Dr. Andrew Huberman in which he suggested that whenever there’s a means by which we can very easily acquire feeling good, whether that’s alcohol or nicotine or porn or whatever, there’s a risk that addiction and not a great cycle can begin there, as opposed to what you’ve laid out is that sounds like what I’m picking up.

It’s like, here, we’ve got a choice in terms of which pathway are we going to go down. And in so doing, which behaviors are going to get reinforced. Is that accurate, Hayden, that if we do choose to procrastinate this one time, we’ll be more likely to procrastinate next time? And, vice versa, if we do choose to do the unpleasant thing, we’ll be better able to do the unpleasant thing next time? Is that accurate or am I reading too much into it?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, right. So, your brain is paying attention to these reinforcement schedules, and it is noticing that, “I avoided the task, I decided not to open the mail, and I felt better.” So, in this case, avoidance is being reinforced. And, in general, that’s kind of not what we want to happen in our lives. But if, instead, I actually engage with the task, maybe not completely but in a way that feels manageable for me today, then my relief comes from engaging the task rather than avoiding the task, and that is what we want to see more of.

And the more you do that, yes, you’re right, the more you do that, the more resilient you become. And so then, what feels manageable today, which is opening two pieces of mail, like, down the road somewhere, I might be able to open ten pieces of mail, or maybe even feel capable of approaching the entire task.

So, we want to start where we’re at, and then, as we kind of build some resilience to that where that starts to feel easy, then open that up a little bit so that we actually can do more and more, and tolerate more distress.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, we talked about the cycle and we talked about prioritizing. Any other just absolutely core themes, principles, practices that make a world of difference in terms of getting better at not procrastinating?

Hayden Finch
One thing that comes to mind is this idea of motivation, and I hear that come up a lot in my clinic about, “I’m just not motivated to exercise,” or, “I’m not motivated to write my notes, do my documentation,” “I’m just not motivated to work on this project.” That comes up a lot as a factor that perpetuates procrastination.

And so, we really have to rethink motivation in this context. And there’s a lot floating around the internet, so your listeners have probably encountered this, that motivation is fleeting, it’s unreliable, it’s definitely not something that we want to rely on to motivate behavior. Like, we don’t. We want to choose our behavior, whether we have motivation or not, because this misconception that, “If I’m motivated, then I can take action,” but it’s actually the reverse, “If I take action, and then I start to see results from that, then I may feel motivated down the road.” But that’s neither here or there.

In overcoming procrastination, motivation doesn’t even really need to be part of the equation. We just need to focus on tolerating the distress, the emotional piece, and then choosing our behavior that’s aligned with our goals rather than what we feel like doing or not doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, motivation, fickle, fleeting, and so it’s not essential to have but it’d be nice to have. Are there any things that we can do to, over the long term, build up more? I guess, is it just doing that path that brings about more resilience will also yield more motivation? Or, is it just like “Can’t count on it. It’ll come and go, and just move on”?

Hayden Finch
We certainly don’t want to count on it but definitely there are things that we can do to enhance motivation. So, these are things like reminding ourselves why, “Why is it important to go through the mail? Why don’t I just want to let this accumulate?” And if I have a good compelling reason that this is an important task to do, and I remind myself why it’s important, then I’m probably going to feel more motivated to engage in it, or, in other words, I’m going to feel more motivated to push through that “I don’t want to” feeling.

So, importantly, that “I don’t want to” feeling is probably still going to be there, but it’s a little bit easier to put that in your pocket and carry on when you have a compelling reason to do that. So, reminding yourself, like, “What are my values? What’s important to me? Why am I trying to do this?” that can be really helpful for being able to push through that discomfort.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Hayden, do you have any thoughts when we talk about the why? I think I’ve historically viewed the why as some grand ennobling purpose that just inspires and is maybe even extra fun to say and articulate, versus the why could, in fact, be pretty mundane, like, “Well, if you don’t open your mail, there could be some nasty bills that you haven’t paid and your credit score will go down, and you’re going to have to pay more for your next car payment, or mortgage, or something.”

And so, I think I’ve gathered that that’s a perfectly valid why that can nudge you and get the results even if it’s not all that inspiring and pretty.

Hayden Finch
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be anything that you’re going to…that’s going to be tweetable. Like, it doesn’t have to be. Like, it can just be, like, “I need to get this stuff off the counter. That’s just an important thing to do, just clear this up so that’s it’s just not taking up space.” Or, also, it’s not taking up brain space, “Really, I keep having to think about the freaking mail, and that’s a silly waste of brain space, and so I’m just going to go ahead and do this so I can clear that up to think about things that I’m actually more interested in.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And so then, the why can be either carrot or stick, it can be pain or pleasure. Okay.

Hayden Finch
Right. Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And then I’m thinking, once we’re actually started which…well, maybe let’s talk about that. So, I’m thinking about Dr. Timothy Pychyl, I don’t know if I’m saying his name right, but he wrote another book about procrastination which I thought was pretty good. But that was one of the themes over and over again, it’s like, “Just get started,” which, in some ways, is, I don’t know, felt like an oversimplification, like, “Oh, you’re procrastinating? Well, just get started.”

But, on the flipside, it’s like, “But, no, it’s true. If you could just get like a minute or two into it, magic happens.” Can you comment on the “Just get started” concept?

Hayden Finch
Super important because that’s where the emotion, that’s your choice-point, like, “I have this emotion, and I have a choice to either avoid it or to tolerate it. And if I can just get started, every time I just get started, that is me tolerating that emotion even if I only get started for two pieces of mail. I’ve tolerated that emotion for longer than I, otherwise, would have, and that is a step in the right direction.”

And, typically, once we can overcome that first hump of the emotion, it’s kind of downhill from there. It’s a whole lot easier. It’s that first step that is the most difficult. And so, yeah, there’s some truth to that, that if we can just get started, and there are lots of ways that people have come up with how to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell.

Hayden Finch
And if we can just do that, that tends to help us down the road. It tends to help us continue the task longer.

Pete Mockaitis
Hayden, you said lots of ways, and I can’t let that go. What are some of these ways?

Hayden Finch
Well, like, with the mail example, right? I’m just going to commit to doing a little bit of the task. So, if I can break this big task into something smaller, “I’m going to unload the dishwasher. I’m just going to put away the forks,” or, “I’m going to do the laundry. I’m just going to fold the towels today.” If we can break it down to just one thing, that’s one way to get started. So, we’re not committing to doing the entire thing.

Or, commit to a certain amount of time, “I’m just going to do this for five minutes, and then I’m done after that. I’m only committing to five minutes of this hard thing, then I’m done.” Or, a renewable strategy, “So, I’m going to do this for five minutes, and then after five minutes, I’m going to ask myself whether I want to continue for another five minutes,” and then kind of having that renewable engagement with the task.

And so, there are lots of ways like that, that essentially, come down to breaking that task down into a small-enough component that it feels manageable. And that maybe, like, what’s manageable for you at the moment, if it’s something you’ve been putting off for a long, long time, that may be, “I’m just going to put one fork away, and that’s all I can manage today. Like, that’s just where I’m at, and that’s totally fine.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s so good. And it’s so funny that state of mind. I’m thinking I’ve had times where I’m looking at a kitchen island just full of junk. We got mail, we got trash, we got recycling, we got laundry, we got a car seat, because it’s big and convenient, it’s right there, so we stick things there. And so then, it’s overwhelming, it’s like, “Oh, there are so many things.”

And it’s funny, sometimes I will do a little bit and I’ll feel exhausted, like, “Ah, that’s all I can muster. I put the car seat on the stroller, which makes a lot more sense for it to be, and that’s good.” And other times, I do that and then I behold the wake, the space, that has been cleared, beautified, liberated, from that action. And I find it to be beautiful and inspiring such that I keep going.

And maybe this is just a fancy way of describing what motivation feels like in practice. But, Hayden, it’s just a mystery to me, is, why is it sometimes I take the path where it’s like, “Ooh, that was great. Let’s keep going,” and other times, I go, “Ugh, that was exhausting. Let’s stop”? What’s behind that?

Hayden Finch
Well, it’s a lot of things. Sometimes it comes down to emotional energy. We have a certain amount of emotional energy, and some days you’ve probably already spent a lot of your emotional energy on, “I didn’t sleep all that well,” and, “My boss was mad at me,” and, “I got in trouble for this thing,” and, “This project isn’t working out the way I want it to,” and, “There was no toilet paper in the bathroom.”

And so, by the time you get around to just cleaning off your island, like, “Ugh, I just put the car seat away,” is all you can muster. But other days that are going pretty well, you might have enough emotional energy to actually do the entire project. So, it just kind of depends, I think, a lot on kind of what’s already been stocking up for you in the day or the week or whatever time is leading up to that task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we did get started, mission accomplished. And then distraction appears, maybe it’s from the phone, maybe it’s from a knock on the door, “You got a minute?” or any number, or just our own internal thoughts, like, “Ooh, it’d be fun to go on Facebook right now.” What do you recommend for sticking with it once we’ve started?

Hayden Finch
Well, obviously, if you’re a person who’s prone to distraction, then you want to do the normal things to limit distractions. You’re going to leave your phone somewhere else or turn it off. You want to shut your office door. You want to take all of those steps that we all know we ought to do. I have nothing revolutionary to add there about limiting distractions. So, if you’re prone to distractions, you certainly want to do that.

And I think we have to be honest with ourselves about what we’re distracted by. So, if you’re distracted by your phone, you’re getting on social media, you’re checking text messages, or whatever, then your phone needs to go. And, also, I think we just kind of need to be honest with ourselves about how long we’re able to work before we take a break.

And we need to kind of schedule in some breaks, and that can get your key for people to, in terms of coming back from a break. But everyone needs breaks to just kind of refresh our energy and our focus, so we have to be thoughtful about that. But, certainly, limiting distractions is important, and setting ourselves up with systems that are going to help us with the distractions that you don’t normally think about.

So, you were mentioning getting distracted by your own thoughts or ideas. And so, one idea there is to keep a list where you can follow up with those ideas. So, right now, I am working on this memo, and I should not be getting on Facebook to look at the events that are going on this weekend. That’s a distraction. I’m going to write that down so that once I’m done with my time commitment to this memo, I’m going to follow up with the Facebook idea.

Or, I’m going to follow up with, “Oh, yeah, I want to do Wikipedia, that thing, like I’m going to follow up with that later because I’ve got a list. I don’t want to forget them so I’m going to make a list of them, but kind of having the discipline to, not right now, and just put that away,” which, again, is going to bring up some emotions, like, “I really want to get on Facebook. Oh, I really want to, like I’m really curious about that thing.” We have to tolerate that distress of postponing that experience until later.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Hayden, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Hayden Finch
I don’t know if I’ve said it, but like the emotional piece is super duper important. Yeah, I think it’s, like, I know, I’ve sort of beaten that dead horse, which is then my intention because I think that people continue to try to overcome procrastination again and again and again, and they’re trying similar strategies and not finding progress.

And I think it is because a lot of people are neglecting the emotional piece. So, that really has to be your focus, is trying to figure out that arch of your emotional experience. So, I think about doing something, I have this emotional experience in response to it, and then I choose my behavior accordingly. When you can master that emotional arch, you are going to make so much more progress in overcoming procrastination.

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

Hayden Finch
There’s this author and finance expert named Nathan Morris, and he has this quote, like, “It’s not always that we need to do more, but rather that we need to focus on less.” And I find that pretty inspiring. He talks about kind of editing your life frequently and ruthlessly.

And, for me, being the person that I am, who’s like prone to anxiety and perfectionism and doing more, more, more, it always feels like if I just do more or work harder, then I will get to my destination. But I think there’s a lot of truth in what he’s saying, which is, like, we just need to focus on less. Like, choose the priority and focus on that, and then that’s where success will come in.

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

Hayden Finch
There’s this study where they had human subjects at a starting line, and they had to walk to a finish line, and along the way, they had to pick up a bucket. And they’re going to encounter one bucket sooner, and then there’s another bucket kind of closer to the finish line. And they can choose either one, they just have to walk with a bucket from start line to the finish line. And so, rationally, what we should do is, like, pick up that second bucket that’s, like, closer to the finish line, and just walk from there to the finish line.

But actually, people tended to pick up that first bucket and then walk farther with this heavy bucket to the finish line. And what I love about that study is that it sort of highlights how irrational human behavior is, that we will, in some cases, do more work for no good reason. Like, obviously, in that case, just pick up the second bucket and we won’t have to carry it farther. We are predictably irrational, and that’s why psychology is so interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so funny, and I guess we have all of our own little reasons for that. It’s like, “I’m going to show this bucket who’s boss. I’m a tough guy. I can handle carrying a bucket the whole way, so I’m going to do it. This is boring, so carrying a bucket makes it a little more interesting, so I’m going to do it, I think.” Yeah, okay. And a favorite book?

Hayden Finch
Sophie Mort, who happens to be a friend of mine, wrote A Manual for Being Human, which I think is revolutionary because you know how people is, “Oh, there’s no manual for, like, being a human. There’s no manual for figuring this out.” Well, she, like, literally wrote the manual for being human in this space in psychology and mental health. And it’s a great read for people trying to figure out how to manage mental health and really thrive in life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Hayden Finch
I love Google Reminders. I think that is such a big help in my life for trying to keep me on track so that I don’t have to keep it all in my head. But I can just set up reminders to remind me to do stuff every four days, or every six weeks, or whatever it is. Love that tool.

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

Hayden Finch
My sleep schedule is definitely number one. I am very rigid about my sleep schedule. I protect sleep at all costs. I am headed to bed at 8:20 every night. I sleep by 8:30, so that when my alarm goes off at 4:45, I am well-rested and ready to go. I think that is the secret to just about everybody’s success, is making sure you protect your sleep schedule.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really connects with folks, resonates, they tweet you?

Hayden Finch
Yeah, it’s got to be that. Like, it’s not time management. It’s emotion management. And once people get that, which it makes sense, but once you get that in real life, once you experience that, like, that unlocks everything. And, really, honestly, when it comes to mental health, that’s kind of the bottom line with everything. It is emotion management more than what you would typically think of, “How do I overcome depression?” Well, you manage the emotions and separate your behavior from that.

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

Hayden Finch
My website is HaydenFinch.com. There, you can learn more about The Finch Center for High Functioning Anxiety, you can contact me and work with me directly, or find links to the books I’ve written on the psychology of procrastination, or habits, all there at HaydenFinch.com.

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

Hayden Finch
Yeah, I would say, based on that quote that I just made, it’s not about doing more in life, that’s not it. It’s about editing your life. So, find something to edit to create more space because more space in your life is going to be a greater ability to stay in the driver’s seat and manage those emotions that are going to come up. You need space to be able to do the emotion management piece.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hayden, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and very little procrastination.

Hayden Finch
Yeah, thank you. I’ve enjoyed this and, hopefully, that will help your listeners be awesome at their jobs.