This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Pete Mockaitis
Muriel, welcome back!

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you. I’m delighted to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m delighted as well. Last time we talked executive presence, and that was very fun. And it looks like your executive presence and star has continued to rise and rise. So, congratulations on everything.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
You got a fresh book here, Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential. That sounds so important. And I would love to hear, for starters, what’s one of the most common beliefs you’re seeing widespread that is limiting a lot of folks’ potential in their careers?

Muriel Wilkins
I think, probably, the one, they’re all equal opportunity, but the one that I see that really halts people in their career is, “I need to be involved,” because it gets them involved in places that they actually don’t need to be involved in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we need to be involved, as in, “I’m reluctant to delegate, let go.” Or, what are the flavors of “I need to be involved”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I mean, it’s this unsatiating, almost compulsion to have to be engaged in all the things. So, it looks like, “I have to be at that meeting,” “I have to be cc’d on all the emails,” “I have to be the one that has the conversation,” “I have to weigh in on that document.” And what it does is, it does a couple of things.

Number one is it keeps you from being able to advance in a way that you need to because the more responsibilities you get, the more you would need to be involved in in order to deal with all the complexities of your job.

And, secondly, it actually creates a clog in the system, meaning it keeps others from being able to develop, because they then end up become habituated by the fact that you’re involved in all the things, so then why should they do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, and I’m thinking of yet another downside there is, I recall I was having chat with a fellow Bain colleague. We were talking about, “Oh, what have you been up to? What are you doing?” And he was looking at all kinds of cool opportunities at buzzy startups that had hefty funding and dozens of employees.

And there was one that he got pretty far in the interview process and he was considering it. And he told me he was leaning towards rejecting the offer because of one of several reasons. The CEO of many dozens of employee companies still wanted to review every email that went out to the users.

And I was really struck by that because it’s like, I’ve lived that myself, but then I have a much smaller team. I managed to let it go a long time ago and life has been so much better.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, look, the thing with a belief like “I need to be involved” is, at some point, it served you, right? That CEO, it probably helped him in some capacity at some point where he was cc’d or maybe he had had an occasion where he was not copied on an email and all hell broke loose as a result of that, or he thinks as a result of that. And, therefore, his mantra then became, “You’ve got to CC me on all the emails.”

You know, I think the point here is that just because it works in one situation doesn’t mean it’s going to work in all situations. And, certainly, from a leadership standpoint, there’s no way you can have the sheer physical capacity to be involved in all the things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us a cool story of someone who had that limiting belief and what they did to evolve beyond it and what, ultimately, happened for them?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking, even as you were sharing the story of that CEO, I’m thinking about a client that I had who, and this is something that I often find, particularly if you’re the founder of an organization or a startup, or you were there from the beginning, even if you’re not the founder, you were one of the early employees, where, quite frankly, it is required that all hands are on deck.

And so, this particular person, she had founded this nonprofit on her own, it was just her. And so, she was used to doing all the things. But then as the nonprofit grew, and again, she really needed to be focused on external fundraising and being motivating staff and thinking strategically and dealing with the board.

I remember one of the conversations we had, she’s like, “But I just find I don’t have time to do all these things.” And I said, “Well, what are you spending time doing?” And she said, “Well, for example, like this morning, I was checking the bathrooms to make sure that there was toilet paper in there.” And I said, “Is that the best use of your time as CEO?”

And it made her really think about it from the perspective of, “Why am I the one doing this?” Not to say that it shouldn’t be done, but that wasn’t where she added the most value. And so, it wasn’t that I was telling her it’s not the best use. I just asked her whether it was the best use.

And so, when she started shifting to “I need to be involved where it’s the best use of my time” it gave her an automatic filter for how should she be prioritizing where she spends her time. And I think that’s what we all need to be doing, is really thinking about it through a filter rather than a universal level of engagement that we need to have in all the things in order to keep things from going wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, now for just our human need to have stories completed, how did that toilet paper get handled in the end?

Muriel Wilkins
She delegated it. And what’s funny is there were people in her organization who wanted to help. But she also, it’s interesting because these beliefs never come from a bad place. She was also very concerned because they were doing a lot of work and they were a service-oriented organization.

She was also concerned about putting more burden, as she put it, on her staff. She did not want to burden them with more. So, she took it upon herself. She’s the one who would do all these things, but they were like, “Look, you’re better off going out and raising money for us because if you don’t do that, you’re the only person who can do that. If you don’t do that, we’re not going to survive as an organization.”

So, these little things, and the toilet paper was just one example, but when you add up all those little micro examples of where she was spending the time, and we started calling them breadcrumbs, right? Like, stop focusing on the breadcrumbs and focus on the loaf, the mana. Then she started getting it, and her staff was more than happy to focus on the breadcrumbs.

And you know what? They felt like they were adding value by doing that. And so, kind of it worked out. So, it required not only a shift in belief in her, but she needed to have some conversations, be clear around what she was delegating and ensuring that her staff was also aligned around those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the rundown of the top seven beliefs that limit us, as well as your approach for addressing them. But before we do it, I’d like to hear, any other surprising, fascinating discoveries you made as you were digging into this research?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so I think there were a couple of things that really struck me, two, in particular. The first is we just talk about beliefs, and what they are. Because when I say the word beliefs, some people are like, “What are you talking about?”

And so, when we think about what a belief is, it really is just an assumption we’re making or a story that you’re telling yourself. Like, are they true? I mean, you came out of consulting, so you know this. I did as well. We make assumptions when we model something or when we put a budget together. But do we know if it’s actually true? We don’t. It’s a hypothesis around what’s going to happen.

And if you put in one thing I learned in consulting was, you put in garbage assumptions to that model, that spreadsheet model, what’s going to come out on the other side is garbage. And so, one of the things that I really loved digging into was the impact of our thoughts and our beliefs on our outcomes.

And there’s been some interesting studies, everything from Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset to Ellen Langer and Alia Crum’s work around the impact of thoughts and beliefs on health outcomes that undeniably show that it’s not just what you do, but it’s what you think about what you do that has a huge impact on the outcomes you have. So that was number one.

I think number two, when I looked across all of my clients, or I looked at 300 of them, to see if there were some commonalities in terms of the types of beliefs that they had and, lo and behold, I did find that there were some commonalities, the one that surprised me the most is the belief of, “If I can do it, so can you.”

And it surprised me, Pete, because that is a mantra that we use, I have used so many times that I thought was like very motivational, very inspirational. And it can be, but it isn’t always. It can actually be quite debilitating and demoralizing and, quite frankly, get in the way of the thing that you’re supposed to do as a leader, which is to also coach and develop others.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I want to hear, when you mentioned huge impact that you’ve seen from the research, can you share with us any sort of eye-popping discoveries or experiments, pieces of research that made you go, “Whoa”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, my favorite, which I write about or summarize, synthesize in the book is the one by Ellen Langer and Alia Crum. And so, they were looking at, and they were at Harvard. But they basically looked at a group of hotel attendants, so the people that you see when you’re in a hotel cleaning the rooms, doing all the things.

If you’ve seen these folks, they’re on their feet all day or they’re pushing things. They’re doing very much physical labor for eight hours a day. And they ask these folks, “Do you believe that the work that you’re doing is exercise? Like, does it equate working out?” And most of them said, “No, we’re just doing our job. It’s not exercise. Exercise happens after this if I get around to it.”

And so, they introduced to them, “What if you just thought about your work as exercise? What if you just considered your work to be exercise?” which is a belief, right? It’s just a different assumption you’re making about your work. And then they tracked what happened. And what they saw that four weeks after introducing this notion, they saw material enough improvement in a bunch of different health metrics in the folks who they had assigned this new belief.

And so, their conclusion was, and that was the only thing that changed, Pete, nothing else. The work didn’t change, the people didn’t change, their uniform didn’t change. That’s the only thing that changed. So, the conclusion was, again, that it’s not the work that they’re doing, that necessarily just drives the outcomes, but it’s what they think, the thinking about that work, what they believe about that work that then also impacted outcomes.

You know, when I read this study, as well as again, the growth mindset study that Carol Dweck has done, where she did almost the same type of thing as it relates to education, I thought, “Well, my goodness, like, why doesn’t this apply from a leadership standpoint?”

And I have experienced in my own work, part of my frustration as an executive coach for the past 22 years is I would help my clients move to action, move to doing something different but they would always come back to the thing that was frustrating them to begin with or the outcomes that they weren’t getting to.

And what I realized is they were changing what they were doing, but they weren’t changing what was driving the behavior, which is the belief or the thought or the assumption or the mindset. But if we could change that or expand on it, I don’t even like to use the word change, it made it much more sustainable in terms of them being able to have new behaviors, new ways of doing things to then make the out more sustainable.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard of this study several times, and whenever it comes up, I just wonder, like, what is the intermediate mechanism by which that is occurring? And so, I can only speculate, and maybe they’ve got better speculations or you know, and you can solve this mystery for me.

But in terms of, if you think about it as exercise, you then do it differently and you actually appreciate, “Oh, my heart rate’s getting up a little bit.” It’s like, “Ooh, I’m going to have a little bit more gusto in the way that I’m moving.” And, thusly, there are physiological impacts of that? Or, what’s that sort of intermediate step?

Muriel Wilkins
Think about it in terms of, you know, if I am watching a scary movie, again, I’m saying scary. If we’re watching the same movie and my belief is, “This is scary,” how does my body respond? My body responds for me, I might sweat, I might go like this and hide my eyes. I might clench my fists and my heart might start pumping fast.

But if you’re looking at the same movie, let’s say Chucky, which was the first movie my husband took me on a date, I would say that was scary for me. He thought it was funny, right? So, what did his body do? His body, his eyes lit up, he was jittery in his seat, he was laughing. Same movie, different response based on what we think about what we’re seeing in front of that screen. So that is my anecdotal way of explaining it.

And I think the same holds true in anything that we do, right? We all might look at a situation and approach a situation, and certainly in the workplace. How we experience any workplace situation, in particular the challenges, is impacted by the way we think about that situation, by what we think about ourselves, about how we think about the other person that’s part of that situation, or what we think about the context.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. I’m thinking about perhaps giving a speech or presentation. Some people say, “I’m so scared. I’m nervous. I’m terrified.” Others say, “I’m so excited. I’m pumped up. This is going to be awesome.” And it just has that whole cascade of downstream effects there.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and, by the way, I’m not a person who sits here and say, “Oh, my gosh, just think it and it will happen.” Like, that’s not what this is all about. I think it’s much more about having alignment, right? If what you want to have happen is to show up as confident in that presentation, or what you want to have happen is the audience leaving feeling like you’re engaging, then you ought to work backwards and say, “If I want to show up as engaging to the audience, how would I need to act in that presentation?”

“How would I need to behave in that presentation? And if that’s the way that I need to behave, then what do I need to think in order to be able to behave that way? Or, how do I need to feel in order to behave that way? And if I need to feel that way, then what do I need to be thinking about the audience, about the presentation, about me, in order to increase the probability that I can actually feel and behave in that way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. So, working backwards there, in terms of my thought or belief leads to my feeling and then my presence, how I’m showing up leads to the impact or transformation. And then as you explore that chain, you could even see, “Well, I need to think or believe that,” I don’t know, “this thing’s really going to work.”

And so then, we’d say, “Well, what are my doubts? Well, why don’t I go investigate those? OH, hey, what do you know? It looks like the odds really are good that this thing is going to work, and that it will naturally flow through.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and it’s not to lie to yourself. It’s also the point that many beliefs can exist at the same time, right? And so, again, going back to the example of the presentation, yeah, I could still say, “Oh, my gosh, like, I might mess up my words.” That certainly could be true. We don’t know if it’s actually going to happen.

And I have this belief that, “If I mess up my words, people are going to think that I don’t know what I’m talking about.” And I can also believe that what I have to say is really interesting and that others will be interested in it. So, which of those two is best going to serve me if my goal is to be engaging in that presentation? The second one.

So, it’s not to say that the first one doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s not helping me right now. So why pick it up, right? It’s like if I’m trying to be healthy and in front of me is a carrot or a bag of potato chips, right? Both are good, and I’m making the choice based on the outcome of I want to be healthy, I’m going to pick up the carrot.

If it’s like, “Muriel, you just want to satiate your taste buds right now,” if that’s the goal, then I might pick up the potato chips. Just make sure that the way you’re thinking about something and the way you’re acting is aligned with the outcomes that you want rather than just based on default or habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you give us the quick, I don’t know, two- three-minute version of the rundown of the seven beliefs you highlight here?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, we already spoke about one, which is “I need to be involved,” which is basically, the way you see it is somebody just wants to be involved in all the things. I think the example of wanting to be copied on everything is a great one, and that’s a telltale sign that that might be there for you.

The second is “I need it done now,” which has a sense of not only wanting completion on all the things, but also urgently. So, there’s almost this, what it leads is what’s known as toxic productivity, which is everything needs to be done at any cost.

The third is “I know I’m right.” It typically shows up as the person who, you often hear them called as they always want to be the smartest person in the room. What’s tricky about that one is those folks actually do have an uncanny ability to know the answer and see around the corner. They’re just doing it in a way that doesn’t serve their goal, which is to also get other folks to align with them.

The fourth is “I can’t make a mistake.” And so, that’s pretty self-evident. It’s this belief that no mistakes are acceptable in any type of way. And it really is grounded in this notion of underlying it all, feeling like, “If I make a mistake, I won’t be able to recover.”

The fifth one is, “If I can do it, so can you,” which is, again, one of those that sounds motivating, but can be quite debilitating. We have, “I can’t say no,” as the sixth one. And then the last one is, “I don’t belong here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so what’s interesting is each of these has many particular flavors, variations, facets. For example, “I can’t say no,” I can imagine it’s sort of like there’s a, “Or, what?” And like the, “Or, what?” it could be totally different for people.

Muriel Wilkins
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, they’ll think I’m not a team player,” or, “I’ll get fired,” or, “I will miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that’ll never come back.” Just for one demonstration, can you give us a feel for the different variants of, say, “I can’t say no”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I think that’s a great nuance that you’ve pointed out, Pete. And I think, in order to understand the variance, because, by the way, you can have this belief and it shows up in varying ways depending on the situation or different even times in your career or your life. But what I think is important to understand is where these beliefs come from, right?

You weren’t born with them, they were learned. And they were learned because it is what got you through something, that got you through to the other side. They actually helped make you successful. A lot of times, in your family of origin or maybe in your schooling or maybe in your community or maybe just out in the world, but now in this particular context, it might not be helping.

Even though they are variants, they all have a commonality, which is, “What is the need that they’re trying to fulfill? What are they trying to make sure that you get?” Fundamentally, under each of these beliefs, we are all trying to get three needs met. The first is the need to feel worthy. The second is the need to feel connected. And the third is the need to feel safe, okay?

We all have these fundamental needs in the workplace, outside the workplace, when we were two years old, and when we are 55 years old, right? So, many of these beliefs come from a place of trying to get these needs met. So, the, “I can’t say no,” for example, well, when you dig down, when I work with my clients and we dig down and say, “Well, why can’t you say no?” They might say like, “Well, I don’t want to disappoint them, right?

Well, what would disappointing them mean? Ultimately, when you feel, you know, I remember my daughter told me once when she was younger, she said, “The worst thing that you could ever tell me.” She was like eight. She said, “The worst thing you could ever tell me is that you’re disappointed in me.” I said, “Really?” I said, “It’s not that I don’t love you.”

She said, “No, no, no. It’s that you’re disappointed in me.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I would feel like you’re literally just, like, turning your back on me,” which basically told her those words meant that she would no longer be, in her eight-year-old mind, would no longer be connected to me, right? And so that was her articulation.

But at the root of “I can’t say no” is a sense that, “If I say no, I will be disconnected from the people who I am trying to do something for, or from the work. So, yes, on the other hand, means that I am connected, right?” And so where might that come from? Maybe at some point in your career, in your life, or whatnot, you learned that saying yes kept the relationship going, kept the connection going.

But does it still serve you? And is it necessarily true, now, universally, that if you say no, it will destroy the connection? And vice versa, as many people find out later in their career, “Even though I’m saying yes to everything and taking all the things on, I still am not maintaining the connection. I’m still not getting the promotion. I’m still getting fired. I’m still the last one here and abandoning myself rather than being able to care for myself and care for the work at the same time.”

So, it’s not that, all of a sudden, I want people to say no, no, no, no, no, no, no all the time. It’s just understanding that that rule that you have in your head that may have served you at some point is not a universal rule. You have to be able to adapt and recognize “When is it helping you, and when is it not?” So, there are times with my clients where I’m like, “Yeah, you can’t say no. This is one you can’t say no to. You got to do it.”

But then there are others who’s like, “Really? What are your other options?” Well, you’ve got yes, you’ve got maybe, you’ve got a stream of other options that you can choose as a response. It doesn’t always have to say yes, be yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that. And it sounds like we’re starting to get into it a little bit, the process, your framework, when you are addressing these pieces. Can you walk us through these steps?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first step is that you have to uncover that there’s actually some place where there’s misalignment. And so, what I tell people and try to short-circuit it and I talk about it in the book is the minute you feel something is off, that’s the only way I can describe it. And that can come from an external cue.

Somebody’s not getting what they want or you didn’t get the promotion or you’re not getting the feedback you want or you’re not, something is off. There’s a gap between what you want, the outcome you want, and what’s actually happening. The audience seems bored. But there are also internal cues, and I would much rather people face the internal cues, because they usually suggest it before the external ones come up.

And the internal cues, you know, I’m pointing at my chest, my heart space here, is my chest tightens. Something feels off. I get like a little tingly. Something feels off. I’m worrying about something, but I don’t even know what I’m worrying about. Something feels off. So, the first question is, or awareness is, “Something doesn’t feel like it’s happening the way I believe it should be happening.”

And then the second question is you have to name what is the belief that might be driving that dissonance, right? So, “What is it that I’m believing?” And this is a simple question, “What is it I’m believing about myself? What is it that I’m believing about the situation? Or, what is it that I’m believing about the people involved or the stakeholders or whatnot that is contributing to me behaving or feeling in this way?” Okay? And so, that’s where the naming happens.

And what I found is that when we got down to it, it typically, at least for my clients, ended up being one of these seven. Those were the top seven. There are certainly others. And so, I’m not suggesting that these are the only seven. It’s that at least it gives you a jump start as to what they might be. Once you can name the belief, then you want to move to, before you move to action, which is, “Okay, well, Muriel, what do I do about it?”

You want to actually unpack it a little bit, and that’s step number two, unpack it. The unpacking is becoming friendly, getting to know that belief, because it’s been around a long time. You better believe it. So, you’ve got to look at it and say, “In what way has it helped me? And in what way is it not helping me? Why do you want to do that?”

Because this is not about getting rid of the belief. Again, it’s just putting it to the side so that when it is helpful to you again, you can pick it up. And the only way you’ll know when to do one or the other is if you become familiar with it. And just asking yourself, “In what moments has it helped me? And in what moments does it not help me?” you are then having more agency and taking control more about what your beliefs are and your thoughts and assumptions are, rather than just, again, looking at them universally.

Once you do that, then you can move to the third step, which is the unblocking. The unblocking has two pieces and it’s very important. The first step is reframing the belief. So, you’ll say, “Okay, well, if that belief’s not helping me, which one would?” And it’s just as a reframing. So, instead of, “I need it done now,” what if it’s, “I need certain things done now,” or, “I need the things strategic, that have strategic value done now,” or, “I need the things that are most important done now”?

Or, we even drop the now, “I need to focus on the things that are important for us to do.” And that little reframing, you can then channel into the last step, which is the actions. If that is my new belief, then how will I approach this situation or this work in front of me or my team or myself, right?

The issue is most people try, because we are so action-biased, most people try to short-circuit the whole process and go straight to, “Oh, there’s a problem? What do I do? What do I do?” And that works, but that’s the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach and it’s not sustainable. We see this happen all the time with people outside of the workplace, with people who try to lose weight, for example.

It’s, “I’m just going to start exercising January 1st.” Well, we all know what happens by Feb. 14, right? Valentine hits and it all goes out the window. Why? Because the action change, but the mindset around relating to exercise, relating to working out, relating to all those things are not sustainable. And so, you go right back to the actions you were doing before because your actions will realign with the way that you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, sticking with that example for a moment, let’s say that we’re faking it till we’re making it in the world of exercise, your diet, health stuff, what are some ways some of these particular beliefs show up? Maybe just walk us through that whole process in which someone is engaged in that but it’s not going to end well, tell us, how might the execution of the three-step framework unfold to land in a happier place?

Muriel Wilkins
I’ll use me as an example. So, I have wanted to build my strength for a while. I’m a cardio person. I have been a long-time runner. Did distance-running for a long time, until my hip gave out on me.

And I thought to myself, I’d been told for years, “Muriel, you need to balance out your cardio with strength.” Okay, I tried. I would say, “Okay, yep, I’m going to start this program.” Went to action, but never, mindset-wise, it was, “No, cardio is where the real value is at. Running is where the value is at.” So, guess what I did most of the time? I ran, and within a couple weeks I would give up my strength training regimen, okay?

Until I recognized that, because of my hip injury, a couple ortho doctors told me, “If you don’t strengthen your hip more and your muscles around it, you’re going to have some serious issues down the line.” Okay, so how do I need to rethink about this? I need to rethink about this not in terms of training for a race, I need to rethink about this in terms of longevity, right?

What do I believe about longevity? Oh, what I believe about longevity is both my cardio and my strength is equally important to contribute to the type of healthy longevity that I want. Reframe, okay? That mindset of training for a race, “Cardio is where it’s at,” was not helping me. Okay, that I realized.

Once I understood where that original mindset came from, which was past the uncover, I could move to unpack. Why was I thinking, why was it helping me all this time? I knew that my success had come from racing, so I wasn’t letting go of that being the belief. I became very clear. I’m not racing anymore. That got me past the second phase.

Third phase, reframe, I now have new ways of thinking about my exercise routine. Okay, now I’m thinking about it differently, I can move to action. And every time I slip up on the strength training, which I still do, I go back and I say, “Okay, how am I thinking about this? Why am I slipping up on the strength training? I’ve got to rethink how I’m framing it.” And I go back to the longevity piece, which helps me continue with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, perhaps we have an eighth major belief there in terms of this isn’t valid. Maybe that’s related to “I don’t belong here.” It’s like, “You know, doing the strength training thing, that’s not really me. I’m more of a cardio person, a racing person, not down with the gym bros grunting and doing huge plates and all that. So, I don’t see the value here.”

But then, when there’s a new belief, indeed, it is transformational. I think I felt similarly, in that having a bodybuilder-like physique, I think, once appealed to me as maybe a 16-year-old. Never really happened. But now that’s just, it doesn’t matter at all in terms of my interest. But when you talk about longevity, I think about Peter Attia, and Outlive, and some of his things.

It really is, “Oh, well, would you like to be able to play with your grandchildren in your seventies and eighties?”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, different outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to being sort of stuck in a chair the whole time, and I’m like, “Well, I would. I would like that.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, you mentioned him, but that is what changed my framing of thinking about this was actually reading his book.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a good one, Outlive.

Muriel Wilkins
And so, it was like, “Yeah, I want a different outcome. So, what do I have to do? I can’t keep thinking about it the same way. I’ve got to change the way I think about it or else I can’t get with this program.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think about beliefs about value can be interesting, in that you may come to the opposite conclusion in terms of, “Hey, you know what? This thing really isn’t worth doing. I could just stop beating myself up and trying to get back on the wagon and just let it go.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here’s the thing, and what really drives me, Pete, like we ought to work every single day or we have work, but work is part of our life, whether we like it or not. And it can be truly challenging. A big part of my career is built on the fact that work is challenging for people. I would be out of a job if they didn’t consider it challenging. And I want to be out of a job. I truly do.

And what I find, though, is that people do not give themselves credit for how much control they actually have about how they experience work. And this might sound very controversial, right. because we tend to say organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like we belong, organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like this, this, and that. And I actually absolutely agree.

I am not absolving any organization or system for making you feel a certain way. They have a responsibility. And you also have a responsibility for yourself when you go into that job or into that workplace. And so, your part of your responsibility is saying, “How am I approaching this? And how am I thinking about it?”

Because, again, what the research has shown is how you think about something does have an impact on how you experience it. And I don’t know about you, but if I know that I actually have half the currency to influence how I experience anything, why in the heck am I going to wait for somebody else to change my experience?

I’m going to at least try to make it 50% better, my part of it. If they don’t want to clean up, and I don’t want to rely on the other person cleaning up their side of the room, let me clean up my side of the room and at least know that I’ve shifted the energy a little bit by cleaning up my side of the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Muriel, could you give us another fun example of someone who worked through this kind of process of examining the belief, starting from sensation, and, in fact, saw just this outcome, a transformation of the experience of work into something much more lovely?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think one that comes up also a lot is the belief of “I know I’m right,” you know? And these are the folks who, quite frankly, they tend to be high achievers. They have been known as being very smart, particularly as they were growing up. They get things very quickly. I suffered from this one, quite frankly, and still have to manage it.

And so, I had a client where he received some feedback. The feedback didn’t say, “Oh, he knows he’s right all the time.” It didn’t say that. What it said is, “He talks over people. He interrupts in meetings. He makes people feel like they’re not smart.” I mean, so the feedback said, “You talk to him and you feel stupid afterwards because of the way that he responds.”

“He did not give a chance for people to come up with their own responses. He would question them in a way that, quite frankly, they didn’t even want to share what they thought out of fear that he was going to sort of come down on them.” And we’ve all experienced those individuals at some point in our life. I will raise my hand and say, unfortunately, I have at times been that individual.

And with my client, even when he got the feedback, he was very like, “It’s wrong. It’s not right. It’s not right.” And it wasn’t till, and I talk about this in the book, like he not only got it from people on his team, he got it from his peers, and that became an issue. And because they didn’t want to work with him, quite frankly, at that point, which was hard to then get the work done, because he needed his peers to get the work done.

And it wasn’t until he saw himself on a Zoom, we had recorded a Zoom meeting that he had been in, and he saw not how he was behaving, he saw how others were responding to how he was behaving, which was again, the interruptions, the constant “Got it, got it, got it, got it.” And, particularly, he saw the look of frustration from his boss, and he valued what his boss thought a lot.

And that’s when he said, “Okay, that’s not the way I want my boss reacting to me.” So that was the beginning, for him the large part was even getting the, like, “Yes, there is dissonance and I want to do something about it.” So, then we were able to name like, “Why do you think she responds that way? When you speak in this way in a meeting, what is going through your head…” that’s the question I ask him, “…when you interrupt, when you talk over people?”

And I remember, he just with exasperation, he’s like, “Because I know what we need to do.” He’s like, “I know what we need to do. I know what the answer is. Why are we spending time talking about this? We’re wasting time.” That was the belief. And he was applying it for everything. And so, for him, the unpacking piece, which is the second stage, came from this place of his whole life he had been valued for being right.

He was a top tier scholar. I’m not going to go into specifics because then he might be identifiable, but like, he was top of the top of the top. But anybody who has done well, particularly at school, and gotten rewarded for it, may suffer from this one. So, he understood that, while it may have served him well at school, or it might have annoyed other students, but he didn’t really care, it wasn’t serving him well in this role that he was in now.

And so then, we reframed it, right? And the reframe was based on, “What’s the outcome that you need to achieve?” And the outcome he needed to achieve was, “It’s not just about getting the task done. I’m now in a position where I also need to get buy-in from my peers, and certainly buy-in from my boss. And so, what would I need to believe? What would need to be my operating assumption and principle in order to show up in a way where I was more collaborative in order to get to that outcome?”

And it was, “My job is not to always give the answer. My job is to help guide people to the answer,” which then led to him being able to listen a little bit more, ask the questions, wait till at least people finish talking. Now, will he ever be known as the warm and fuzzy guy? No.

But was there a marked improvement in terms of how others experienced him? Absolutely. And he was able to then move through some of these projects that he needed to get done with others a little bit more seamlessly than he was in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like a lot about that story with uncover the blocker is there are perhaps many ways to illuminate this above and beyond simply introspection. It’s like here we’ve got some technology and work, a recorded Zoom meeting, “Oh, okay.” And that shows some things that you may not get with looking into the sky with a journal in hand.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s why I think it’s both sort of a mechanism of there are external cues and then there are internal cues. For me, personally, I don’t really care where your cues come from, know. As long as you are aware that, again, the math isn’t math-ing, what you want to have happen is not actually what’s happening, or something’s getting in your way.

And sometimes, again, you know, it’s nice to know about the internals because you can short-circuit that a little bit faster than waiting till you get, you know, so for him, what would have been an internal cue, an internal cue would have been able to read the room, not necessarily waiting for the Zoom. Now what’s interesting in this particular example is that, with practice, he became better at reading the room, right?

And that’s what I’m looking for. It’s not necessarily that you get it right every time. It’s that he got to a point, and that’s what I look for with each one of my clients and I look for, for myself, is the course-correction time taking less time. So, “Am I able to notice?” It’s, was he able to notice in the moment that, “Okay, yeah, I just interrupted for the third time, and that person looks a little exacerbated. Maybe I should switch course right now.”

“Yep, I’m totally anchoring in the ‘I know I’m right.’ I can hear it. Let me reframe so that I can be more collaborative in this meeting if, indeed, that’s my goal.” Because if that’s not your goal, if your goal is to come off as the smartest kid in the room, as the 360 said, then keep doing what you’re doing. We don’t need to do anything differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I’m thinking, when it comes to these reframes, so we move from “I know I’m right” to “My role is to help others find solutions, not to always give them the answers,” I think that, in my experience when making that shift, in the moment it can feel revelatory like an epiphany I’m kind of excited about.

And then, yet over time, it doesn’t really feel as though that is, in fact, the dominant operating model inside of my feelings, nervous system at work. Do you have any pro tips on reinforcing the enlightened reframed such that it’s really sticking and taking root?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, look, I think that what’s very cool about beliefs is that they’re so malleable, right? And so, I actually think that this model works if you are curious. And so, I encourage people to continue to be curious about it because that may not be it. The reframe might not be what’s going to last forever and ever and ever. You may need to reframe that even more.

And so, you want to constantly be asking yourself. The real rule of thumb is really keep being curious about, “What am I thinking in this moment?” And the more that you can keep thinking, or, “What am I thinking as I walk into that meeting? What am I thinking as I go into that conversation? What am I thinking as I’m about to do this presentation?”

And the more you can make that curiosity starting point, the beginning of your planning for anything, the more you will let those beliefs evolve even more so that you can discover, “Oh, that’s not it. Maybe it’s something else,” and that’s okay, right?

The issue is when you just are so attached to that one fundamental belief, one of the seven or whichever other one you’re tied to, that you end up not doing anything differently. You just keep doing the same thing over and over again, which as we know is the definition of insanity if you’re expecting different outcomes.

And so, the whole notion is, if you want to do something different, just being curious about what’s driving that doing. And continue to mold it, continue to, I personally practice this a lot and it comes a little bit more naturally, but it’s taken me years to master. I don’t even think I’ve mastered it, but years to kind of habitually be curious about what I’m thinking in the moment.

And I will be like, “Yep, I got it.” And then three months later, I’ll be like, “Oh, there’s another level to it. It’s not only this, it’s also that. Okay, that’s cool, let me try that one now.” And so, you have fun with it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Muriel, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Muriel Wilkins
I mean, look, I think the main thing is, that I would love for folks to take away is, again, this notion of you have so much more in control than you might give yourself credit for. And true agency is an ability to have a choice.

And one of the areas, and probably the primary area that I believe we all have a choice with is how we think about anything. And so, if you want to have a choice in how you experience anything, start with what’s most in your control, which is your thoughts, your assumptions, and your beliefs.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Well, one of the quotes that inspired this work, and is a favorite quote of mine, that comes from the world of Buddhism is, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And that’s the quote, right? Pain is always going to happen. Challenges are here and they will cause us pain. The goal is not for the challenges to go away. But how we respond to those challenges can either make us feel like we’re suffering or we can have a different experience with them.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Right now, my favorite tool is breathing. It’s, literally, recognizing and applying the fact that I can change how I experience anything by just changing the way I breathe as I’m going through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Muriel Wilkins
My favorite habit is every night texting my kids because they are now off to college, and I text them “Good night” and “Love you” every single night.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with the clients, they retweet you and you’re known for?

Muriel Wilkins
Every now and then we get we go there, and I said, “Listen, I’m not religious, but I’m going to drop some Buddhist knowledge on you, right?” And, yeah, I tell them like, you know, pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And you can just see in their face that they get it.

Again, this whole notion is they have more control around how they experience something. And, particularly, from a leadership position, if you’re in a leadership role, the way that you respond to something has so much impact on everyone else. And so, the ripple effect is real and be a good steward over that.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about all the things that I’m involved in, MurielWilkins.com is the best place to take a look. And I’m on LinkedIn at Muriel Wilkins, and on Instagram @coachmurielwilkins.

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

Muriel Wilkins
My final call to action is be curious about your mindset. Don’t go straight to doing. Take a pause and just be curious about how you’re thinking or what you’re thinking about what you’re about to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, thank you.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you, Pete. Always a pleasure.