This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

Nov 09
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914: Turning Awkwardness Into Your Greatest Asset with Henna Pryor

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Henna Pryor reframes awkwardness and shows how we can turn it into a superpower.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How not embracing awkwardness is hurting our performance
  2. How to work out your awkwardness muscles
  3. How to release the discomfort that follows awkward moments

About Henna

Henna Pryor, PCC is 2x TEDx and Global Keynote Speaker, Workplace Performance Expert, Author, and Executive Coach. Her talks blend 2 decades of work with corporate leaders and teams, with a modern, science-based approach to taking more strategic risks and being braver in the work that we do.

Resources Mentioned

Henna Pryor Interview Transcript

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

Henna Pryor
Thank you for having me, and it’s the greatest podcast name, I think, I have ever heard.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. That’s what we like to hear. We try. Well, I’m excited to hear about the wisdom you’ve got for us in your book Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become The Bravest You. But first, we need to hear what is the story with you being a genuine bonafide princess?

Henna Pryor
It’s not so much a story, it’s more of a fun fact. So, my parents are both South Asian. My dad was born in India, my mom was born in Pakistan, and so, technically, I am a 32nd generation Pakistani princess, which just means, bloodline, I am from a royal bloodline. Now, that’s said, Pakistan is no longer a monarchy, so my princess status means bopkiss, absolutely nothing. I get no perks whatsoever.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, do your loved ones treat you like a princess?

Henna Pryor
Most days. Most days. I think I get trolled in even measure but, yeah, I get some good treatment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Nifty. So, nothing happens then, like if you visit Pakistan or you’re…?

Henna Pryor
No. No red carpet, no elephants. My grandfather, my mom’s father, was treated with a little bit of, let’s call it, extra respect due to his family name but, really, as the generations go on, it’s less and less cool. There’s really no measurable perks. I’m still waiting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There’s no certificate, no jewels.

Henna Pryor
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Henna Pryor
No. I wish but no.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, I know. I appreciate that. That was fun. Well, now tell us a little bit, when it comes to awkwardness, first of all, I just got to hear, since you’re an authority on awkwardness and I’ve just got to go here, first and foremost, I find it very annoying, and maybe you do this, so sorry.

Henna Pryor
That’ll be even more awkward here.

Pete Mockaitis
This hasn’t happened much since I’ve been a grown up as opposed to maybe like high school/college, when someone just proclaims, “Awkward!” It’s like, “Oh, wow.” That just grates on me so much, it’s like, “This is not helpful and now it’s way more awkward because you’ve just proclaimed it as such.” Since you’re an awkwardness expert, what is your hot take on this phenomenon?

Henna Pryor
Yeah. So, it’s funny, I don’t mind when people claim it. I think what you’re describing is when they claim it so loudly and ostentatiously that it draws even a greater magnified lens to whatever the experience was. And so, ironically, the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness. So, I actually teach people it’s okay to name it in the room.

It’s when we make a really big audacious deal out of it, “Awkward!” kind of the way you did it, that it actually almost has the opposite effect, where it adds to the feeling of attention is on this, embarrassment. When we subtly name it, it actually allows us to relax and move on. But I think when we amplify it that way, it can actually make it linger longer than it needs to, and draw an even brighter spotlight to something that maybe people didn’t even notice that much in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Like, “Hey, I’m sorry, this is sort of awkward but your credit card has been declined.” It’s like, “Yeah, yeah, fair enough. All right. Well, let’s try another one,” and that’s that, versus yelling it loud and proud.

Henna Pryor
Shouting. Right, I agree. Yeah, I think the whole point of navigating our awkwardness has to do with the idea that we are in this tension space between who we believe we are and who we think other people see in that moment, “Oh, my gosh, they think I’m someone who has terrible credit, whose card was declined.” I might feel a bit awkward about it, but the whole problem with the emotion of the thing that we tend to wrestle with is what we think other people see in that moment. So, if we declare it loudly, we’re just putting more eyes on that version, it’s kind of counterproductive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, tell us, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and awkwardness as you’ve dived into this research?

Henna Pryor
Yeah, several, and I think, especially as it relates to your topic of expertise here about being awesome at your job and being a high-performer at work, there are some very interesting data that came out in the last year or two about how catering and performing actually decreases our workplace performance. So, I’ll explain what I mean by that.

We’ve had a wave of conversations around “be more authentic at work.” Authenticity is the superpower. Be more authentic at work. And people hear that and they agree with it. You see the nods, they’re like, “Yup, yup, that seems like it would be a good idea,” but then, more often than not, I work with clients who tell me, “Yeah, that would be great. How? I don’t know how to be more authentic at work. Can somebody give me the playbook? I don’t understand why I just can’t show up that way. It doesn’t feel quite that simple.”

And so, what I’ve discovered in some of the research is when people feel awkward, or unsure, or embarrassed, or they’re fearing awkwardness at work, what they tend to do instead is something called catering, which is essentially putting on a bit of a performance to meet other people’s expectations, “I have a new boss, they expect me probably to be like this, or show up like that, so I’m behaving in a way that caters to their expectations. I’m performing to meet what I think they expect of me.”

And while first impressions do matter, I don’t want to diminish that, there’s actually now a significant body of research from Francesca Gino and her team at Harvard that says that catering to meet other people’s expectations not only diminishes our performance at work but, frankly, it’s exhausting. We collapse into bed at the end of a night. We don’t do our best work. We don’t save our energy for the things that we genuinely want to do to make an impact at work.

And so, there’s actually a lot of downsides to that catering behavior instead of coming in stumbles, fumbles, and all.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us a few examples of typical workplace catering behavior that has the potential to kill our energy and our performance?

Henna Pryor
Sure. I’ll give you, actually, the study that really found this and then I’ll give you just a run-of-the-mill example at work. So, in Francesca Gino’s Harvard research, they actually were studying a team of inventors, kind of entrepreneurs who were pitching their ideas to investors, they were trying to get funding for their ideas.

And what they actually found was those who catered to meet the investors’ expectations, in other words, told them what they thought the investors wanted to hear, were actually three times less likely to get the funding than those who came in, still prepared, but a little bit more authentic, a bit more passionate, a bit more honest, which was inclusive of stumbles, fumbles, and all. That’s one example.

Another example that I see a lot is when we think about awkward conversations, it’s the whole diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging discussion. Most people still struggle to have those conversations in the workplace. They find it very awkward. They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. They’re afraid of not getting it right. So, instead, a lot of people will cater, “I think this is what my colleague of color wants me to say. I think this is the right thing to say in this meeting.”

And it actually kind of comes across as a performance versus it is actually much more impactful to say, “Hey, I tried to think thoughtfully about this part of the conversation but I don’t know if I’m going to say the right thing right now. There’s a chance I might get it wrong and it might stumble out of my mouth but I’m going to give it an attempt anyway.” That version actually lands better. So, it’s when we perform, it’s when we try to smooth out the bumps of areas where we do feel a bit uncomfortable that it actually has an inverse impact to what we think.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so I’d love to hear then, in terms of awkwardness becoming our strength instead of our weakness. How do we begin to think about, reframe, and make that true for us?

Henna Pryor
Sure. So, again, just to put a spotlight on a definition that we’re going to operate from for the context of this conversation, awkwardness is an emotion that we feel when the person we believe ourselves to be, or our true self, is momentarily at odds with the person that they see on display. In other words, the person we are, for a moment in time or maybe several moments, feels different than who they see.

So, I’m jumping on a podcast with you today, Pete, and I butcher your last name, I mispronounce it horribly, and I feel awkward and embarrassed about that for a moment, because the person I believe myself to be, someone who is intentional and prepared when it comes to the pronunciation of names, for that moment, feels at odds with the person who I think you see, someone is not thoughtful about names, someone who is not trying. There’s a gap between those two people.

And so, when we think about our professional lives, every time we’re at an inflection point, a growth point, a transition point, we’re going to invite opportunities for awkwardness, we’re going to invite opportunities for embarrassment. And it’s learning how to get comfortable with those that actually leads us continuing to take the chances that contribute to our growth.

When we can’t lean into them, we tend to avoid them and run away from them, which becomes very problematic when we’re trying to advance our careers and our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, with this definition, awkwardness is when there’s a difference between who we believe ourselves to be versus what someone else is perceiving from us in a moment. Now, that’s pretty specific as opposed to generalized discomfort about any number of things, like, I’ll feel awkward when…well, I guess, maybe not your definition of awkward. Like, if I just disagree with somebody, I will experience a sensation of discomfort that I would have previously called awkward, although that’s not exactly in harmony with your definition. Or is it?

Henna Pryor
It is, I think, to a degree. So, maybe let’s peel back the layer one more bit to help unpack that. Awkwardness is also a social emotion, meaning if you read something online by yourself and you didn’t agree with it, you wouldn’t feel awkward about that because no one is there to hear you even if you were to express your disagreement out loud, “That person is an idiot. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” No one is there to hear you so you don’t feel awkward because awkwardness is a social emotion, meaning that others have to exist.

Now, awkwardness also exists as a social emotion when what we think is going to happen isn’t met. So, in our minds, we built some certain expectation of how an interaction is going to go, how a chat is going to go, and our expectation isn’t met. So, in the case of the example that you gave, when you wildly disagree with something that someone said, probably, subconsciously, there was some part of you that expected that conversation to go a bit differently.

So, yeah, there probably are some other uncomfortable feelings and emotions mixed up in that, but part of that may have been a feeling of awkwardness because, suddenly, you are finding yourself feeling a little thrown off balance or a bit unprepared because you didn’t expect the conversation to go that way.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s also interesting when you experience this, like, I’m just thinking about TV comedies, awkward situations, like The Office. Michael Scott says just some outrageous things and the situation, like you feel uncomfortable watching it but it’s also very engaging, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. Oh, cringe. What’s going to happen here? And this is hilariously inappropriate, and whoa.” So, there are two, I suppose, I have a different set of expectations as to what would normally unfold in such a scenario.

Henna Pryor
Yeah, I love that you brought that example up because I have a whole section in the book where I talk about this. That’s actually an entire genre of comedy referred to as cringe comedy. So, there’s The Office, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm, America’s Funniest Home Videos. There’s a certain genre of comedy that is called cringe comedy. You watch it almost with that expectation of the things you’re going to watch are going to make you go, “Oh! Ooh! Eeh!”

What’s interesting about this is part of the research that I dove into that was also fascinating is there are some people, you’ve kind of alluded to this already, who can point at cringe comedy and laugh, and go, “Oh, my God, this is so entertaining. This is hilarious.” There are others who cannot deal. They’re underneath the covers, they’re like, “Oh, I feel this fully from head to toe. I feel ‘Diversity Day,’ ‘Scott’s Tots,’ these episodes, like I cannot watch this without having full body embarrassment.”

And so, interestingly, people who that experience on that extreme, actually have something that they feel very strongly called vicarious embarrassment, which is actually a function of empathy. When you’re particularly high on a certain type of empathy, not only do you feel that embarrassment or awkwardness and cringe for someone momentarily, but you actually take it on with them as though it’s your own, and it becomes this full body visceral reaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, working with this definition of awkwardness now, tell us, how do we make this so that it really is a jet fuel source of strength and power?

Henna Pryor
Yes. So, two-part process here. Number one is just self-awareness around this emotion in particular. So, as we started to say, it is not the same as just regular discomfort. Awkwardness, as a social emotion, is very tied to approval, “What do other people see? Do they like what they see? Do they approve of who they see?”

So, one of the first things we need to do is just peel back our own layers of self-awareness around the messages we receive around awkwardness and approval growing up. Were you someone who grew in a household where it was, “Hey, don’t speak up and stand out. Just kind of blend in”? It’s going to be more likely that you feel awkward as an adult if you’ve never undone those messages.

Are there stories that you’ve told yourself about what previous awkward interactions have meant? So, I like Dan McAdams’ research out of Northwestern. He refers to two types of stories. Let’s say you have an awkward situation at work where you spoke up in a meeting, and it was a total bomb, embarrassing, did not feel good. Do you tell yourself a contamination story, meaning, “Well, that was a nightmare and I’m never going to raise my hand ever again”? It contaminates the future.

Or, do you look for the redemption story, which is, “Okay, that didn’t feel so great, but I tried it. I raised my hand. I don’t normally do that in that meeting. I got some practice in. Hopefully, it’ll go better the next time”? What are the stories we tell ourselves?

Part two is conditioning, and I’m very passionate about this as it relates to this topic in particular. What we’re talking about when we’re talking about building awkward muscle and using it as a strength is building some strength in our social musculature. Social fitness is a type of muscle building, meaning we have to have interactions with other humans in small-stakes moments so that we can use that feeling as fuel instead of something to be fearful of.

And in this modern climate, we live in a world that’s optimized for smoothness. I don’t technically have to talk to another human being outside of my immediate family today if I don’t really want to. I can order my food online. I can order my groceries on Amazon or the Instacart. We don’t have to talk to folks when we used to.

And, nowadays, increasingly in the grocery store line, we’re looking down on our phones, we’re hammering the elevator door button shut to avoid a two-minute ride with someone. We go to the coffee shop we have in headphones. So, the problem is when we don’t have chances to practice our social muscle in small-stakes situations, when it comes to a big-stakes moment, like negotiating for your higher salary, or trying to advocate for yourself for a promotion, we are increasingly out of practice using these social muscles.

So, if we don’t practice in small-stakes moments to increase that awkward tolerance, the big-stakes moments become nearly unbearable. And so, we really need to create opportunities to condition and put in the repetitions when it comes to these social muscles.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a cool story of someone who put in the reps, where they start from, what did they do, and what cool results did they see on the other side?

Henna Pryor
Absolutely. Yeah, I do some executive coaching, and I worked with a private client named Satya. I talk about her a bit in the book. She was painfully shy. Her parents, very gregarious, extroverted, her sister as well. And not only was she sort of naturally introverted and shy, but she had begun a new job during the pandemic, at which point she really didn’t have any ability to meet her peers in person.

And she would see, for a period of time, her peers continue to get promoted ahead of her because they had had the advantage of things like networking, and she didn’t have natural places to do so having worked from home by herself. So, she realized, “Hey, if I want to get ahead, I got to do this thing that I don’t particularly love, I find very awkward, which is networking.”

So, she practiced in the small-stakes moments. So, first things, once the restrictions started to lift, she’s like, “My first at-bat can’t be the networking event with my entire company and 200 people.” She challenged herself to meet up with an old colleague first who she hadn’t seen in a really long time. That was at her growth edge. She went and tapped on the door of a neighbor who she’d kind of known but not really, and struck up a conversation.

She made an admission that every time she rode the subway, she lived in the city, she was going to leave her headphones out and try to just catch eyes and exchange a smile with someone, low-key, little old lady, nothing aggressive, but she slowly started to recondition these muscles that had kind of gone stagnant. And then, slowly but surely, she put herself in slightly bigger rooms.

A friend invited her out to a wine-tasting event. She said, “Normally, I don’t do that stuff, but it was a small group so I tried it.” Slowly but surely built her way up. So, by the time in two months when her company had their big kind of networking extravaganza company offsite, she felt a bit more prepared, and she had some lines on the ready. She had kind of practiced what this was going to look like.

So, in her case, we actually came up with the strategy that she would find one other person, or at least two other people, that were standing kind of by their lonesome, potentially in the same situation, and she had a line that she had practiced in the mirror about a hundred times. It was this, “My sister told me I needed to talk to at least two new people today, and we have a bet for 20 bucks. I really don’t want to pay her 20 bucks. Will you be one of them?”

And she said it immediately diffused the tension, it created this little icebreaker moment, and this colleague, the one, the first one she actually ended up introducing herself to, they ended up collaborating on a project later that year. A huge win for her. A huge visibility. And none of that would’ve happened had she not kind of put in these reps and created these strategies ahead of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Well, so what do you recommend in terms of the different means by which we put in the reps? Like, if this were an exercise program, what are the best exercises that give us great gains and the suggested frequency and dosage of them?

Henna Pryor
Sure. I’ll give you kind of two buckets. First, from the team perspective. So, if you work on a team or if you’re a leader of a team, I would be so happy if you incorporated some specific and intentional exercises into your team meetings as it relates to this. Again, understand this is not something that happens by accident anymore. We don’t have as many bump-into-each-other-at-the-watercooler moments so we have to create intention.

Some of my favorite ways to do this, I’ll encourage leaders to have five minutes at the top of the meeting, have a bad idea brainstorm, meaning you’re encouraging your teams on purpose, “I want you to share only unrealistic ideas. Realistic ideas not allowed.” And if you’re thinking, “Why? Why would I do that?” Well, believe it or not, often the most unrealistic ideas somewhere in there is one that’s kind of, like, “Hey, that actually could be possible.” Second is even if none of them are, just by starting that way, it lowers people’s guard, and the ideas that follow in the rest of the meeting are more innovative, they’re more creative, they’re more generative, and people are more open.

There’s a similar exercise you can do, I call them cracked-egg stories, where you go around and every single person in a meeting, you can do it either one at a time or you can turn to a partner. Everyone shares one cracked-egg moment from the past week or two, a time where something did not work as planned, or it was kind of a misstep, a fumble, it was embarrassing, it was awkward, it didn’t go the way we hoped, and what did you learn from it.

But, again, by putting these into the room, intentionally creating the space for them to be put into the room, we create a more normalization of this behavior and this emotion that everyone experiences. The thing that’s wild about awkwardness and embarrassment is when you’re experiencing it and feeling it, you feel like it’s just you, “It feels like nobody else is dealing with this emotion the way that I am.” The truth of the matter is everyone is. And so, normalizing it in meetings on purpose is a huge helpful step to creating the types of environments that can take more chances and take more risks in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, that’s the team perspective. And then individually?

Henna Pryor
Individually, again, it sounds simple but I would love to see this actually done. I would like to challenge you, listener of this show, today, next time you’re in the supermarket checkout line, leave your phone in your pocket, leave your phone in your bag. Next time you go to the coffee shop or ride the train or ride the plane, just for a few minutes, leave your headphones out.

The goal is to put yourself in minor social situations where certainty is not guaranteed. I call them strategic micro risks. If you reach out to someone in the coffee shop that’s standing in front of you in line, and say, “Hey, I love your sneakers.” Okay, chance that they could look at you like you’re a moron, chance that they continue to strike up the conversation and you meet someone fascinating and interesting.

I was sitting next to a woman at the train station the other day, a much older woman, and just kind of struck up conversation instead of sitting on my phone. I found out that she went to the same college I did, University of Delaware, but 30 years before me. She kind of knew who my father-in law was, which was wild, but these are just life moments where there are no stakes, this was not a professional conversation, but by practicing in those moments where certainty is not guaranteed, what I need you all to understand is you are creating the needed muscle to have other conversations in your professional life where certainty is not guaranteed.

So, it’s about getting comfortable with that uncertainty. If you really want to fast-track this, take an improv class. Take an improv class. If you really want to fast-track your uncertainty tolerance, improv is the fastest way that you can do it because the entire thing is built on this premise of, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’m just going to stay with it. I’m just going to lean in. I’m just going to stick with it. Instead of avoiding it or deflecting it, I’m going to stay with it.” That is the fastest way you can fast-track your awkward tolerance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s fun. Any other recommended exercises?

Henna Pryor
Oh, gosh, so many. I’ve got, like, a dozen improv exercises I take people to. I also recommend to people to strategically use humor. I think some people are, like, “Well, I’m not funny. I’m not a ha-ha.” Strategically using humor in awkward situations is something that benefits everyone. And when I say strategically, it’s typically just rooted in truth.

So, I said at the top, the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness. Sometimes all it takes is that one person to gently name, like, “Okay, I’ll be the first to break that awkward silence. Ooh, that was cringe. Nobody expected that.” But it just takes the one person to bring a little bit of that lightness back into the room for folks to move on.

Humor has to just be used strategically because I think, generally, what we want to do is make sure that we are not punching down. So, if you’re a leader, we don’t want to shame anyone. Like, if a junior person that’s trying to raise their hand and maybe they’ll get it wrong, there’s a silence. A leader should not say, “Hey, that was pretty awkward, buddy.” That’s not necessarily helpful, but there is a general rule of thumb not to kick down but you can punch up.

So, if the leader says something, we can all smile and go, “Oh, awkward,” but in a gentle playful way. So, there are some rules, and, again, we go into it in detail but also just learning how to find your own talk tracks. I think talk tracks are really helpful and important. When something doesn’t feel good, having language that resonates with you that you can use right away.

So, there’s an early example in the book where one of my very first meetings after we started reconvening in person, I met with a sales leader. I was trying to win a very big project, a large-scale project. Hadn’t met folks in person in a while, pandemic had restrictions had just lifted. So, 15 minutes I’m going on and on, I’m pitching, and I’m thinking, “Henna, I’m crushing it.” I did sales for 14 years, I’m like, “I’m crushing it.”

And he puts his hand in front of my face, and I’m like, “Sweet!” so I give him a high five. I’m like, “I’m nailing it. Henna, nailing it.” And then he says, this is the next thing out of his mouth, “Henna, I was putting my hand out because I was trying to tell you to stop.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, she’s forgotten how to people.” I’m mortified but, luckily, having been in this research and knowing this work, the next line immediately out of my mouth was exactly that, which is, “Wow, okay, I’m mortified, but that was pretty awkward. Hopefully, I can still have a chance to keep going with you.”

And just by owning it, he laughed, I laughed, our shoulders relaxed, and we were able to move on. Had I let the awkwardness overtake me and have a grip on me, I would’ve gotten totally off the rails. The whole conversation would’ve left on a very different note. And so, ironically, it’s not about eliminating it or avoiding it, because, again, that’s trying to eliminate or avoid uncertainty. It’s not going to happen. It’s learning how to lean into it, to own it, to embrace it, and use it as a force for good. You tried something. Relate to folks. Create some connections. Lean into those uncertain moments, and move on.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And this reminds me a little bit of like rejection therapy when you ask for things that you’ll probably not get, like, “Hey, can I have a discount on…?” whatever, etc. And so, what’s fun about this is it’s easier, the rejection therapy, because your odds are better that you’re not going to hear a no per se, and it’s broader in that you can have conversations about a much bigger range of things than simply requests, like, “Would you please do this for me?” “No.” “Would you please do this for me?” “No.”

As well as having more of an extended exchange as opposed to just a simple no. It’s like, “Okay, I guess that’s even a conversation.” Any thoughts about the parallels there with regards to therapy?

Henna Pryor
Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a lower-stakes form of exposure therapy or rejection therapy. I think the goal is to recognize that we are increasingly sensitive to social interactions gone awry because we’re out of practice. So, in the case of this gentleman who I high-fived with, and he clearly wasn’t looking for a high five, what was occurring, and the research now actually corroborates this, is that because we’re in isolation in the pandemic, we started to lose our ability to read other people’s social cues.

And this is something that we know is true because there’s been studies done on people whose jobs are more isolated by nature. For example, astronauts or polar explorers, people whose jobs are isolated. They found that when they returned to social settings, those social skills atrophied, meaning they had difficulty properly reading someone’s body language, their gestures, their cues.

The same thing can happen to us. And this is where I’m also very careful to point out that awkwardness is not something limited to introverts. I am 100% an extrovert through and through. I don’t think there’s an introverted bone in my body, but after the pandemic, we all realized that we could get this kind of off balance, “Okay, my social skills aren’t quite what they used to be.”

And, again, in this moment in time where we can order our food online, my 13-year-old and I joked, she doesn’t ring her friends’ doorbells. She’s like, “Mom, just text, ‘Here.’ Text them we’re in the driveway. Text them ‘Here.’” And I’m like, “Ugh, text them ‘Here’?” I used to have to talk to my friends’ parents on the phone for 10 minutes before they got on the line.

But we don’t have these same opportunities for unexpected happenstance social interactions, so we actually have to be more intentional about carving them out to create that desensitization or that exposure therapy. We actually have to go seek it out a bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m thinking if you have had an awkward, embarrassing, cringey moment in the past, maybe the distant past, or the recent past, that continues to pop up and spook us, it haunts us in the here and now, any tips for how do we deal with that?

Henna Pryor
Sure. This is common. I think we can call it by a variety of names. It’s rumination. It’s lingering. Some situation had such a grip on us that it seems to keep rearing its head. I would offer two thoughts here. First, it’s okay if you think about it. I’m not concerned about you thinking about it. Humans are wired for social acceptance. If those thoughts come up every now and then, I don’t mind. The difference is do those thoughts keep you in a cycle of inaction the next time? Does that thought have such a grip strength on you that you don’t take the chance or say the thing the next time?

So, part of what I coach my own clients through is just to slow down the thinking. What are people actually thinking? Often, when we are replaying a situation in our mind, we’re making the assumption that they think we’re a moron, they think we’re inept, they think we’re unqualified, so there’s a few things I remind them of.

First of all, remind yourself of the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is a phenomenon coined by Tom Gilovich out of Cornell that is essentially pointing the idea that people are not paying nearly as close attention to you as you think they are. They’re more concerned with themselves. They’ve already turned the spotlight back onto themselves. They’ve forgotten about you long ago.

The second thing that I love to remind people of is there’s a phenomenon called the Pratfall Effect, which is if you are generally someone who is smart, competent, capable, skillful, if you are generally someone who is seen that way, and you commit a blunder, or a misstep, or you say the wrong thing, not only will people not hold it against you for the rest of your life like you think, it actually makes you more likable.

There’s a body of research that says when you are generally seen as smart, capable, and have a decent level of aptitude, a blunder makes you human. It knocks you off the pedestal that other people put you on, and it actually makes you more warm and likable so there’s actually an upside to these things. If you are working hard, and if you’re someone who generally is prepared, and these things happen, give yourself some grace. People are not tearing you apart the way that you’re tearing yourself apart.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got a fun turn-of-a-phrase I want to hear about – protagonist disease. What is it? And why should we watch out for it?

Henna Pryor
Yeah, it’s similar to the spotlight effect in that, often, when we are concerned about approval and when we are chasing a version of ourselves that we want other people to see, I think the millennial Gen Z population these days refer to it as having main character energy. We think that we’re the star of the show, everyone is paying attention to what we’re doing, to what we’re saying, to how we’re saying it.

In the social media era, this feels even more pronounced. Everyone is dissecting everything. But here’s the truth. Everyone is a protagonist in their own story, but as far as you’re concerned, you’re an extra in their story. You are not the center of their world. And often, when we are so consumed with, “What will other people think about this awkward moment, this misstep, this embarrassing thing?” we become so consumed with this idea that we are the protagonist of everyone’s story.

The truth is we’re not. They are the protagonist of their own story. We are merely an extra. And if we can remind ourselves of that regularly, it helps release some of that grip strength of everyone is watching because they rarely are.

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

Henna Pryor
Last thing I’ll just say on this is when I titled the book Good Awkward, people were like, “Oh, she wrote a book about me.” I can’t tell you how many people have responded with that phrase, “She wrote a book about me.” And what’s funny is that everyone says that, and the research actually proves that awkwardness is for everyone.

The most confident person you know, the person that you look to, and you’re like, “Gosh, they are smooth, flawless, they’ve never had a blunder, they’ve never had a misstep,” guess what, yes, they do. They experience this emotion just as much as you do. They’ve just learned how to lean in, and they’ve learned how to accelerate their comeback rate but they are not exempt from this.

It is for everyone, you included, your favorite celebrity included, and so just knowing that, hopefully, it helps everybody relax a little bit.

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

Henna Pryor
Favorite quote, this is probably silly and funny but it’s one that I say all the time, “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”

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

Henna Pryor
The vicarious embarrassment one that I shared earlier, to me, is really fun. I think the one I mentioned, cringe comedy, but the other one that I thought was really exciting was this idea of embarrassment for versus embarrassment with. So, let’s just say, Pete, you walk up the steps to the stage, and you’ve got toilet paper out of the back of your pants, you don’t know it’s there, and so only I feel embarrassed. You don’t even feel it.

And if you knew it was there, then what I’m doing is empathy. But if you don’t know that it’s there, then what I’m doing is judgment. And I think that it’s a really interesting exploration of how our own tendencies to judge actually impacts our own ability to take risks. So, I think all the research around that shared empathy and vicarious embarrassment is my favorite stuff to talk about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Henna Pryor
Probably The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown on nonfiction. And on fiction, Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie.

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

Henna Pryor
I think that technology can be a gift when used appropriately. I think technology is that namaste from social interaction is tough but, I hate to be cliché in this moment in time, I think that ChatGPT and generative AI is the coolest brainstorming partner for any creative work. So, I’m going to go AI, when used correctly, as a brainstorming partner.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Henna Pryor
Can I cheat and say my favorite habit is habit stacking? I’m not someone who necessarily would just choose one habit, but I find I’m effective at picking up habits when I stack them. So, for example, as I’m washing the dishes, I start a cup of tea because I want to be someone who drinks tea at night. So, it becomes a routine that, as I’m doing the dishes after dinner, I start my water for tea. So, anytime I have it stacked, I like those habits the best because I’m more likely to do them.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell me more about the phrase “I want to be someone who drinks tea at night”?

Henna Pryor
I want to be someone who chooses healthy habits that serve me and keep me sharp.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as opposed to boozing?

Henna Pryor
Right, as opposed to boozing or even as opposed to, like, a bowl of ice cream, which is what I want sometimes, but I tend to find that the ritual of tea is very calming for me. And I’m someone who runs hard and talks fast as you’ve noticed in the last half hour. So, this is like a recentering moment for me, is the cup of tea at night.

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

Henna Pryor
The one that’s coming up all the time lately is “Do it awkward but do it anyway.”

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

Henna Pryor
LinkedIn is my preferred playground, so there if possible. I’m also on Instagram, hennapryor, and all the places. And information about the book is at GoodAwkward.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?

Henna Pryor
I do. I do. If you want to be awesome at your job, and you are not a polar explorer or astronaut, meaning you don’t work completely by yourself, if you work with other people, I want you to challenge yourself this week to do something that strengthens your social muscle. If that’s striking up a conversation in the grocery store line, if that is ringing the doorbell instead of texting “Here,” find one opportunity to put yourself in a social situation that you, otherwise, might have had an inclination to avoid, and just see how it feels, see how it serves you, and message me on LinkedIn. Let me know how it goes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Henna, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in your awkward moments.

Henna Pryor
Thank you for having me.

Nov 06
0

913: Upping your Influence with the Five Principles of Captivating Stories with Karen Eber

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Karen Eber shares neuroscience insights to help you maximize attention and impact in your communications.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why storytelling dramatically increases your influence
  2. The five factory settings of the brain
  3. The key to creating memorable stories

About Karen

Karen Eber is an author, leadership consultant, and keynote speaker. She has a TED Talk on storytelling and recently published, The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence, and Inspire, with HarperCollins.

As the CEO and Chief Storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, Karen helps Fortune 500 companies build leaders, teams, and culture, one story at a time. She’s a former Head of Culture, Learning, and Leadership Development at GE and Deloitte.

Resources Mentioned

Karen Eber Interview Transcript

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

Karen Eber
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m pumped up to hear about some of the gems you got for us in your book The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence, and Inspire. And I’d love it if you could start us off with an example of a perfect story or a super memorable gripping story that exemplifies a perfect story in action.

Karen Eber
I’ll tell you the opening story in my book, which is about my eyes. I was born with blue eyes, like most babies, and at about the age of four months, they start to change to different colors, so I have a brown eye and a green eye. And I’ve always loved this. Why have one eye color when you can have two? And it’s a special thing but, as much as I loved it, I would come to recognize the exact moment when people would notice it for the first time.

And their words would slow in the middle of a dialogue and I could see them moving back and forth, almost like their brain was in a negotiation, trying to think like, “Which one do I look at?” And they would eventually stop mid-sentence, and say, “Do you know you have two different color eyes?” to which I would usually go, “No,” because what do you say to that?

And then I would brace myself because the following script happen just about every time, of, “I know a dog that has two different colored eyes.” I’m like, “Okay, thank you.” “David Bowie, he had two different color eyes,” which he didn’t. He had an accident and dilated pupil. And then it would turn into, “Well, do you see the same colors out of both eyes? And what color are your parents’ eyes? And do your eyes give you special powers?”

And this thing that I love suddenly became this burden because I was now this weird thing where they would call other people over and there would be 10 faces trying to get a viewpoint of my eyes, and I hated it. I didn’t love the way I was treated for the thing that I really enjoyed about myself. And one day I decided that I was done with it.

And so, once I got the “How did that happen?” I told them how I was born with brown eyes, and, “One night, when I was about four years old, I was in my room coloring, and you know that big box of crayons that everybody has where you’ve got the broken ones, and peeled ones, and the perfect ones? Well, I reached into that box and I pulled out a green crayon and I sniffed it, and it didn’t really smell like anything but I took a nibble and kind of liked the texture and so I ate the green crayon, and I like it so much I ate all the green crayons in the box. And the next day I woke up, and my eye was green.”

And then I would be quiet, and you could see whomever I told this to, there would be this internal negotiation going on of, “Is she for real? Like, there’s no way this story is real but she said it so straight, I can’t really tell. Like, what do I say? What do I do?” And I would let them off the hook. But what happened was this shift in energy, where I went from this thing and this weird person and weird, weird thing on display to a moment of connection.

And most of the time, people recognize they had been asking me all these silly questions, and they kind of made me not human, and that this was something that actually made me more relatable and more human. And it created a shift that not only was memorable because I’ve had people tell me decades later that they remember this. But that it created a connection that we probably wouldn’t have had had this not happened.

And so, for me, this was the perfect story to start with because it shows stories aren’t just about giving a presentation. They can be a moment of connection, or shifting energy, or shifting circumstances so you can get into a different type of conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, yes. And what’s nifty there is you have a lot of reps in terms of, okay, this happens to you repeatedly so you can sort of experiment and see how things go and what works. And, sure enough, you’ve transformed an experience which is sort of annoying and a burden to deal with into something fun that you can laugh with and roll with.

And that is cool. There you have it. Stories transforming what’s going on with our brain experiences. And in your TED Talk, you mentioned just that, is that our brains kind of mirror each other, the storyteller and the story receiver. What is this science fiction, Karen?

Karen Eber
Yeah, it sounds almost too fake to be true. There’s a neuroscientist out of Princeton, Uri Hasson, who put people in MRI machines, and the first person, first group, goes in, and they are listening to an episode, or watching an episode of a show on the BBC, and they are measuring their brain activity. And when they take them out, put them in a second time, and this time, those people are told to recount the episode that they had just watched.

They then record the brain activity during that. And then a new group of people are brought in. They go into the MRI and they listen to the recounted episode of the people that were in the MRI machine. So, you have three different instances of watching, recounting, and listening to the recounting. And what they found is the activity was the same.

It didn’t matter if they had experienced it, if they were the ones recounting it, or they were actually listening to the recounting of it, that neural activity was very similar, which means that stories almost gives you this artificial reality because, as you’re listening to it, your brain is imagining and seeing and placing you in the story, and it then lights up as though you were in it, which is why we go to the movies, and our heart is racing because James Bond is running across the rooftops but we’re not moving because our brain is saying, “You’re in this movie,” or it’s imagining what it would feel like, and you can feel that amped feeling.

Or it’s also why this time of year is where there’s often a lot of horror films and things that people pay attention to. That’s why you get so amped and surprised, it’s because your brain is, like, “You are here about to have someone jumped out at you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that’s wild. And now that gets me thinking in terms of the emerging proliferation of fMRI type devices with kernel or neuro link or others in terms of if all of our brains are doing the same things in response to the story being told or heard, it seems that it may not be so fanciful to think of a world in which technology can decode what’s happening in our brains to relay that story.

Karen Eber
Let’s give an asterisk next to it because I’m not trying to suggest that it’s like propaganda and we can brainwash everyone into it, but what does happen is that your brain, your senses are starting to engage as though you are the character there and you’re having some of the experiences. And so, it is a more dynamic way to interact with stuff.

It’s not quite propaganda at scale though but part of the reason why this is increasing in interest and popularity is that in the past 15 years, our understanding of the brain has just become so much more. There are just so many more discoveries and understanding and experiments have been done to help us be more savvy, but what is really happening from how we are communicating, consuming, deciding, all of these things are just we learn so much every day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, with that said, can you share with us, what’s sort of the big idea or main message behind the book The Perfect Story?

Karen Eber
It builds on the science of storytelling but in a relatable way. So, this won’t have you be putting on a lab coat and breaking out test tubes and beakers. The idea is that it’s not enough to tell a story the way you tell a story is going to make a difference in the experience with the listener. So, there are certain ways that our brain is going to respond to information but it’s the way we put together that information to put in the unexpected events to engage the senses to build tension in the story.

It’s the orchestration and the choices that we make that cause the brain to pay attention and be immersed in it or not. If you think of a movie that you tried to watch and didn’t get very far in, it’s because your brain just said, “This is not worth the time or the calorie spend.” And so, the book gets into, “How do you understand what’s happening in the brain when you tell stories?”

But, more importantly, what do you then think about when you are putting your stories together so that you can create an immersive story? And then it takes you through the full process of developing and telling stories, telling stories with data, and making sure that they don’t manipulate while you navigate the vulnerability.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very cool. And before we get into the particulars of how that’s done, could you share with us a little bit of the why in terms of what’s ultimately at stake for professionals if they do this well or not so well? What kind of career trajectory impact do you think that makes between folks who tell okay stories from time to time when they remember, to those who consistently take the time to craft the perfect stories where they can?

Karen Eber
I think it comes down to attention, and the greatest gift any audience they can give you is their attention. It is a precious commodity. And we have choices to make of “Are we going to talk at people?” If we’re in a business setting, are we going to pull out the PowerPoint quilts of slides then just pick and choose, and just dump things at people and put up the 10-point font, and say, “I’m not going to read this,” and then proceed to talk at people where no one remembers it ten minutes later? Or are we going to be thoughtful about how we’re using that attention and really trying to connect people to information that’s going to inform their world and help them think differently, or maybe reach a different decision?

If you take the time to really build these muscles and then you become faster at it, you are always going to be winning the hearts and minds, you’re going to be connecting with people and being relatable, you are going to see how to motivate individuals on an individual level. The more that AI and automation comes in, the more we need to be able to leverage individualization at scale. And so, storytelling and really communicating are just a really dynamic way to do this and maximize the attention that we get.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that end, let’s dig into how it’s done. You’ve got a fun turn-of-a-phrase, you say we’ve got five factory settings of the brain. Tell us, what do you mean by that? What are these settings? And how do they impact how we tell stories?

Karen Eber
If you think of a phone that you unbox, it comes with a factory setting. There are certain apps and programs, and anytime you restore the phone, it’s going to go back to those basic settings. It’s like, “Here’s the core things that run it.” There’s something similar in the brain when you communicate. There are basic ways that we’re going to respond to information and communication. And so, I call them the five factory settings of the brain.

And they get into different things, like the first one is that your brain is lazy. It is meant to be the broker of calories in your body. The number one job of the brain is to keep the body alive. And part of that is making sure you’re safe. Part of that is also regulating how you breathe, move, digest, all of those things but it’s also, “How do I need to set my foot down if I’m going to be walking downstairs?”

And so, the brain is using 20% of the body’s calories for these things, and the majority of these calories are going to these predictions for like, “How do I move around?” And that means it always wants to have a surplus of calories because it never wants to go bankrupt. The goal of the brain is to respond to stimulus to be able to be ahead and anticipate and make predictions versus to react because by predicting, you’re making a guess and you’re doing something, and sometimes you’ll get it right and sometimes you’ll get it wrong.

But if you’re reacting every time, it’s a much bigger energy drain. So, what this means in terms of stories is that because the brain is lazy, it’s not meant to be deeply immersed in everything all the time, and it looks for moments for when it’s going to be able to step back and conserve calories. These are the nights that you binge your favorite show on TV that you’ve seen several times, or maybe you put in a movie that you could recite the dialogue because you have that moment of, like, “I just don’t want to think.” That’s your brain saying, “Let’s conserve some calories.”

The same thing happens in meetings and stories when you notice you’re drifting off. That’s the brain taking a natural pause and conserving calories. The way to overcome this in a story, though, is to put things in that make people have to spend calories, put in the unexpected events, be building the tension, be engaging the senses so that the brain is there, interested, ready to go.

So, that’s one. There’s five more but these are starting to help you understand, “Okay, I get it.” There are certain things that the brain is going to be doing, and that then gives me different choices as the storyteller to then play with and see how immersed I can make the brain.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’m reminded, there’s a marketing book called Don’t Make Me Think, and I feel that when I’m interacting with webpages or any number of things, like, “Okay, oh, this isn’t going to be quick and easy. Ah, never mind, maybe later.”

Karen Eber
Right, and that’s fair. I even joke, like it’s our attention span, and some of it is. Our attention spans have definitely changed, especially through COVID, but it’s also there is, at the bottom of this, a whole internal wager, like, “Is this worth the attention and the calorie spend?” and sometimes it’s not. Or, if we’re tired or hungry, that it gets diverted and it makes it even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear the other four factory settings.

Karen Eber
The second is that we make assumptions. So, the brain hates for things to be incomplete. It’s always going to be making predictions and trying to anticipate because it wants to respond and not react. So, the faster it makes an assumption or a prediction, the faster it can say, “All right, we’ve done this. Now, we can conserve.” Maybe we have to course-correct every now and then but we know.

And what this means is this is why you try to guess the ending of the movie, or the book, or you’re in a meeting and you’re trying to anticipate what the person is going to say, or the show starts, and you’re like, “Yeah, I know where this is going to go. Forget it. I don’t need to be paying attention to this.” And what you want to do when you’re telling stories is either slow down these assumptions or you want to lean into them.

So, if you lean into, if I said to you, “He gave her the passcode to his phone,” what does that bring to mind for you?

Pete Mockaitis
I recently saw an Ashley Madison documentary so I’m thinking about infidelity. You’re right. I filled in a lot of gaps there.

Karen Eber
You did. That’s really fine, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Apparently, during the romantic relationship and there’s trouble in paradise.

Karen Eber
Yes, completely, right? And then there’s someone else that’s going to be making an assumption, they’ll might say, “Well, he trusts her.” So, there’s many different things. But just by that one sentence, your brain is already trying to make assumptions and fill in the gaps because this is what we naturally do. So, sometimes in a story, you want to lean into what those assumptions might be and let the brain finish a thought. And sometimes you want to disrupt them, you want to put in an unexpected event or detail that makes them pause because you want to have their brain hit the proverbial speed bump, and say, “Wait a minute. What? That’s not what I expected.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Sometimes you go with the flow with what they expect, and sometimes you don’t. I’m thinking about how in casinos and video games, they very deliberately finetune the percentage of time you receive your variable rewards. Do we know, Karen, is there a range of percentages in which we want to give them what they’re expecting versus something totally different?

Karen Eber
No, it’s all choices and experimentation. While I’m giving you steps, it’s really not formulaic. It’s really more like here are a whole bunch of ingredients, and you can make a Mediterranean dish, you can make a Thai dish, you can make an Italian dish. It’s up to you on the combinations that you put it together with, depending on what you want for that audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s also making me think about comedy in terms of, I guess that’s what makes jokes, jokes, is that, “Oh, you’re expecting one thing then, surprise, we get you with the other thing.” And I guess I’m thinking about the comedy I love the most is a little weird, like, I don’t know, Key & Peele or Nathan for You, and it’s because, for me or my taste, it’s like they crank it up even more, like, “Whoa.”

Karen Eber
Comedy is such great storytelling because what they’re doing is they’re forcing your brain to spend calories. They’re building the tension because you think you know where it’s going to go, and your brain is guessing what this joke is, and then, zing, you get the punchline and it went in a different direction. And then you’re like, “I did not see that. That is so clever,” and you remember that joke, and it’s because it challenged your assumptions and it helped your brain spend some calories. And so, now it’s become a part of your experience and your long-term memory. Same thing can happen in stories, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear more of these factory settings and implications.

Karen Eber
Third one is that we have this library of files in our brain. So, if you take a photo on your phone, and you swipe up on it, you’ll see the F-stop, the date, the location, the megabytes, like everything that was used to take the photo is stamped on it. And something similar happens to our senses that is a metaphor. So, as you’re taking in information through your senses, and you’re having these experiences, they get stamped with emotions and stored in your long-term memory the same way that this photo has.

So, when your brain is going to make these predictions and these assumptions, it’s going through this library of files of things that you know, or things that are related to what you know, or maybe sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got to open a brand-new file for this one. We’ve never experienced this before.” And these are all going to be different because we all have different experiences. But when you’re telling a story, you want to connect to what people know because you get a very different imprint.

So, if I say to you, “The incision was small,” how big do you think that is using centimeters or inches or some type of measurement that is helpful to you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, when I’m imagining a small incision, it’s between half an inch to two inches is a small incision.

Karen Eber
Yeah, right.

Pete Mockaitis
Not that I know anything about surgery but I’m just going to declare that for a small incision.

Karen Eber
Right, exactly. Your brain is going, “What is small?” and you’re not even thinking. This is all happening subconsciously. But if I say to you, “The incision is the size of a paperclip,” you immediately see it, you immediately know how big it is, and I’m now taking up free real estate in your brain because that just gave you, and often I can build on it, and you are not even having to think about it.

And so, when you’re telling a story, you want to put in some of these things that are going to immediately connect to what people know and give that visualization so that the person isn’t even having to connect the dots. You are taking over their brain and putting this fully-formed idea or image in there, and you’re getting instant cognition from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s the fourth one?

Karen Eber
The fourth one is that we…actually let me ask you. If you walk into a networking event and you didn’t know anybody there, what would be your thought process for who you want to go talk to?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, it varies a whole lot based on my overall mood and objectives but, generally speaking, I find the safest move, this is what it feels safest, is to go to the one who is adrift, lonely, isolated, looking at their phone, as oppose to those who are like huddled up and like deeply engaged, leaning in in a conversation, like, “Okay, I’ll let them lie but that person looks like they might appreciate having me into their world.”

Karen Eber
Totally. And what your brain is doing, is they’re going, “Who is that person or that group that I can walk up to that feels safe?” Exactly what you just described. So, that is like, “This is going to be my person for the next five minutes or maybe for the whole event. Who knows?” and it’s the in group. This is the group that we share something in common, maybe it’s values, or beliefs, or experiences, or even aspirations, and say, “We feel a sense of kinship with this group.”

It also categorizes things into outgroups, so that group that’s huddled together really tightly that looks like it’s too hard to break into, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m not a part of that group. I could go over to that group, I could try, but I don’t really feel a part of it.” And outgroups are where we notice differences. And so, when you’re telling a story, you want to be thoughtful of, “Are you trying to have the audience feel like a member of the in group, feel like some group that they feel a part of, or that feels safe to be around, or are you trying to have them notice or feel the experience of being a member of an outgroup, which charities do this?”

A natural disaster happens, and you see a charity spotlighting an individual that lost their home, has no electricity, is struggling to get clothing, food. Meanwhile, you’re sitting in electricity and have food and running water right next to you, and you recognize how different your circumstances are. So, some of what you want to think about is, “What is the experience you want the audience to come away with? Do you want them to feel a part of something or a connection to the idea in your story? Or do you want them to notice how different they are?”

And neither are right or wrong, these are just some different ingredients you could choose, which brings us to the last one, which is that, at our most simple level, we seek pleasure and avoid pain. We’ve got this cocktail of pleasure neural chemicals which are serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. These are mostly released in moments of connection, so you can’t wield them, you can’t command them. It’s truly when someone feels that bond, that connection, that they are shared.

There’s also a cocktail of adrenaline, or epinephrine, or cortisol, and it’s released when the brain says, “Okay, you need to focus. There’s something here that’s potentially not right. You might be in danger, so we’re going to give you these.” And what happens in a story is that we see increases in some of these neurochemicals as a result of the story.

So, when your heart starts racing because there is something that happens on screen, or someone jumps out and surprises you, and you feel that wave through your body, that’s adrenaline. That’s your brain saying, “Focus. There’s something happening.” And the story that gives you goosebumps or makes you maybe well up with a tear or two, that you’re getting different pleasure neurochemicals.

And so, some of what you want to think about is what is that experience. So, are you intentionally telling an uncomfortable story, or are you telling a feel-good story, or maybe both? And so, now you start to look at these five and you recognize you have choices and where you’re making the brain pay attention and spend calories, and where you are leaning into assumptions, or slowing them down, and how you’re taking advantage of what the person knows by putting fully-formed ideas in their head.

And then thinking about, “Am I trying to have you feel a member of the group or different than a group? And am I having you or both? And am I trying to have you feel like a member or have that feel-good experience or an uncomfortable experience, or both?” So, now you start to see, “Okay, these are all choices, and I might not choose all of them in every story, but I can start to see where these are going to make a difference in the experience that someone has of this story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you give us a demonstration perhaps of a lame story that fails to take into account these ingredients, and then that same version hopped up with some goodness? But, yeah, it’d be really fun to see these in action.

Karen Eber
I think what I would love to do is an activity with you, if you’re open.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Karen Eber
Let’s take a basic story and then show how we build it. Are you game?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Karen Eber
Okay. So, I want you to think of a vacation experience that you don’t mind sharing with people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I went to the Dominican Republic with some friends once. It was an all-inclusive resort.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Give us the 30-second version of it. Don’t worry about the five factory settings or any of that. Just tell us a little bit about this vacation.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. It’s very lazy. It was warm. There was a beach. It was all inclusive. There was much food and beverage and water. Chilling. Talking. Eating. Yup, just relaxing stuff.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Okay, so now I’m going to have you tell the story again. So, we’ve got a basic story, “We’re in the Dominican Republic, we’re on vacation, all-inclusive.” Your brain is in lazy mode, for sure, on this vacation. So, now I’m going to have you tell this again, and this time I want you to describe the colors as you’re telling the story. Make us feel like we’re there seeing some of the things that you’re seeing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. There were white sands, palm trees with brown trunks and green leaves, bright blue water, some oranges and pinks in the sky during the sunrise and sunset times.

Karen Eber
Yeah, so now we went from this kind of bland landscape that we can’t necessarily picture to, now we’re picturing this. We can the seascape, we can see a sunrise and a sunset with the colors. So, now, I want you to tell it again, and this time, I want you to bring our senses into it of what are you hearing? What does it smell like? What is, if there any taste involved, what are some of those things? Tell it again and make us feel like we are there experiencing it beside you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, for the sounds, we can hear some seagulls, we can hear some ocean waves, we can hear, I remember, there was this very colorful fellow who ran this sort of water aerobics course twice a day, and he would yell out nice and loud, “Aqua gym!” And I remember there was this repetitive baseline, like, “Dit-rit, dah, dit, dah, dit” whenever the “Aqua gym!” was happening.

Karen Eber
I’m going to pause right there. Dear listeners, I hope you see what just happened. We never would’ve started there but now we can see this moment, and this Aqua gym and the music, like, amazing. So, I hope you’re seeing as well, this is now, we went from this basic story to now we’re there and we’re feeling it, and our brains are, whether we like it or not, our brains are there thinking those things and seeing it. Amazing.

I’m going to ask one more iteration. So, this time I want you to describe your emotions on this. Like, tell us, as you’re hearing Aqua gym and the music and all that, like give us the emotional experience of what did it feel like being there.

Pete Mockaitis
It felt very carefree in the sense of we didn’t have to rush, we didn’t have to worry about what time it was, or what day it was, or what needed to get done. It was just being with friends, like, “Hey,” and just let that sense of carefree timelessness, and it’s very peaceful.

Karen Eber
Amazing. So, if we put it all together, I want you to tell the story one last time of just pulling some different things of you’re on this trip, and it’s carefree, and you’re painting the scene on the beach, and we’re hearing this sights and sounds. Just pull a few of the things in from each of the iterations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. And I imagine, with iterations, with the time available to think right, revise, etc., we’d come across a whole lot smoother, but, I’d say, for a story, I had an amazing time on vacation at the Dominican Republic. I had some of my best friends with me. We’re in an all-inclusive resort situation. Beautiful white beaches and blue skies with some nice oranges and pinks during sunrise and sunset.

Bright blue water, fun sounds of seagulls and the seashore, and this fun fellow who would proclaim twice a day, it was time for “Aqua gym!” and play the “Di-dah, di-dit, dah” tunes as a subset of folks on the beach would run with big goofy smiles to participate in the Aqua gym without a care in the world. And we, too, didn’t have a care in the world in terms of what we had to do, or accomplish, or where to be, or what time it was, and it was just very, very peaceful and relaxing and restorative to bond with those guys on that trip.

Karen Eber
Amazing. Amazing. So, in three-ish minutes, we took the basics of a vacation and now we’ve been there with you, and we can see and we get the sense of what it’s like. That’s the difference of you start to make choices and, first, you’re doing this on the fly and doing it amazingly. And thank you for playing along because I appreciate that’s never quite easy to do on the moment. But it shows that you can make different choices to play with different things to pull people into it.

And now I’m going to have Aqua gym stuck in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, so now I’m curious to know, so those are some general principles that can serve us well. Can you perhaps zoom into any particular do’s and don’ts as we’re trying to pull this off? Like, we’re in a professional setting, we want to be persuasive, we think, “Okay, storytelling is cool above and beyond just charts and graphs and data.” What are some pro tips and things to do and things to not do as we’re trying to integrate some of these principles?

Karen Eber
Well, let me start general, and if you want to dig into story time with data, we can get more specific. The biggest mistake, I think, people make is that they think, “Okay, this is an opportunity to tell a story. What story can I tell?” and they focus on the story. You always start with your audience. Every time you tell a story, even if you know the idea you want to tell, you want to center on who you’re telling it to because the story is in service of the audience, and there’s something that you want them to know, think, feel, or do after.

And if you don’t start there, if you don’t ground yourself in “What do I want the audience to know, think, feel, or do? What is their mindset today? And what might be an obstacle?” you risk the story not landing or connecting with the audience at all. Starting with that, you start to picture who you’re talking to and you can make sure that you’re making it relatable to them.

So, that’s the biggest thing of whether it is storytelling with data, or in a meeting, or presentation, or even a story you’ve told many times, you want to stop and just really be thoughtful of “Who is this group I’m telling it to? And what is it that I’m trying to do after?” because that is what’s most important. When you don’t, it’s like the uncle at the holiday table that’s just telling the same story on a loop, that you don’t even need to be there because he just says the same thing over and over.

He’s not saying it for you. He’s saying it for him. It doesn’t matter who’s there. He’s just telling the story. And those moments are always so grating. Same thing that happens in any setting if you don’t start with your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And anything else?

Karen Eber
The biggest thing from there is to put a structure to your story. It’s tempting to just go and let the story meander and not really worry about how you’re structuring it. But when you put a basic structure in place, it’s not only going to be easier for you to tell. It’s going to be easier for the audience to hear. So, once you figure out the audience, you’ve figured out what you want them to know, think, feel, or do, their mindset, and what might be an obstacle, you then want to come up with the four-part story structure.

First one is the context. What’s the setting? Who’s involved? And, really, why should the audience care? Write one sentence out for that. Not every detail, not every plot point, but write a sentence that summarizes the context. Write a second sentence for the conflict. What is there to be resolved in the story? What is the tension and the fuel for the story? Maybe it’s between two people or a person and themselves but you want to get really clear on that conflict that’s going to be the heart of the story.

The outcome is what is the result of the action? What happens as a result of whatever that conflict is? What’s done? And the last is the takeaway. What is it that you want the audience coming away thinking? Because the takeaway should connect back to what you mapped for the audience. So, if you take five minutes before a story to plan out your audience, and then you take another five minutes to plan out a basic story structure, in 10 minutes before the meeting, you can have a more cohesive story that is going to better land with the audience.

Now, there are still all these other things that we would want to do and add to it with time that get to engaging these senses and emotions and counting for the five factory settings. But if you can ground yourself on these things, you’re going to have a better structured story to tell and it’s going to be easier for the audience to listen.

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

Karen Eber
Is there anything that is a burning question that’s helpful to make sure we touch on?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s take professional settings, stories, data, how do you imagine them working together well? Or, is there a time where you will want to lean more story, more data, right down the middle, story and data? How do you think about that?

Karen Eber
It’s story and data. So, data never speaks for itself. If we go back to the second factory setting that we make assumptions, we are each going to make different assumptions because our assumptions are based on this library of files, all these experiences that we have, and yours are different than mine. So, if I put up a slide that is a simple chart, it seems like there would be no room for a different deciphering, but what really happens is we’re making different assumptions, and we don’t even know. So, then we try to get to a discussion, and we’re not talking about the same thing.

So, recognizing data doesn’t speak for itself, what you want to do is guide people through the story of the data so you can have a common starting point even if people disagree with it. I think there’s this myth or a bias that data are fact and story are not, and that is not true. One is not anymore important than another. Together, I think, they come together to make really helpful understanding and ensure that you can have a discussion and make sure everyone is starting from the same place.

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

Karen Eber
It is by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a neuroscientist. I just heard her say this, and I keep thinking about it. She says that emotions are the recipe for action. And I just keep thinking about what an interesting statement. And we know data doesn’t change behavior; emotions do. But I love thinking of these emotions are the recipe for action, especially I think at work when we’re often encouraged to leave emotions out of it. Like, they’re part of everything that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Karen Eber
I just read this book that is a memoir, it’s called The Many Lives of Mama Love. It is by a woman by the name of Lara Love Hardin. So, I just finished writing and publishing a book of my own, and I now am finding I have time to read for fun again. And I met Lara at TEDWomen and was really intrigued by her story of someone that had a really hard life and struggled with drug abuse and built her way back to this really incredible story. So, I really enjoyed that quite a bit.

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

Karen Eber
Google Keep is my external brain. I dump everything into it from story ideas to to-dos, to a running list of where I need to be. I can access it on any device, and it saves me from trying to remember. It’s like if I’m on a walk, it goes into Google Keep, and it works so well to keep me on track.

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

Karen Eber
Use Google Keep. It really is, actually, part of what works for me is spending time every Friday planning out a couple weeks of where is my time going, and where do I want to free up space for thinking time or writing time. And then I do go into Google Keep and use that to prioritize and make sure, because I have free today what my priorities are and shifting around. I am an introvert and I like to have good chunks of thinking time for working on things but also for resilience after a full day of speaking. And so, I am continually calibrating my calendar to make sure that I have the right balance of what I need.

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

Karen Eber
The statement that data doesn’t change behavior but emotions do, I think, is something I said it in my TED Talk, and people, random strangers will send me messages on social media how that stood out to them. And I think that we are in a data-rich era but, as one of my friends said, but we’re insight-poor. And I think the more that we can connect to things in a different way, the more powerful they can be.

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

Karen Eber
My website is the best place. It is my name KarenEber.com.

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

Karen Eber
Embrace stories. Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait for someone to invite you to tell one. Don’t think that you can’t tell one because you have to present data. Stories have compounding interest and they earn you the ability to tell more of them. And they honor the most precious thing that people can give you, which is their attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Karen, thank you. This has been fun. I wish you much luck and many enjoyable stories.

Karen Eber
Thank you.

Nov 02
0

912: Maximizing Your Impact by Leading with both Head and Heart with Dr. Kirstin Ferguson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Kirstin Ferguson shares how modern leaders can best meet the challenge of the new work landscape.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why traditional leadership is lacking–and what you should do instead
  2. Why you may not be as self-aware as you think
  3. Why you might want to talk less in your next meeting

About Kirstin

Dr. Kirstin Ferguson, PhD is an award-winning leadership expert, best-selling author, columnist, and keynote speaker. Kirstin has been called “Australia’s own Brene Brown” and been named one of the world’s top 30 thinkers to watch by Thinkers 50. Her latest book, Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership, has been named one of the top 10 best new management books in the world in 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Kirstin Ferguson Interview Transcript

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Hello. It’s fabulous to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about some of the wisdom you have for us from your book, Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership. But first, I need to hear a little bit about your time with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And most top of mind is what was your involvement with Bluey?

Kirstin Ferguson
Well, every Australian likes to claim that Bluey is somehow connected to them, but I have two connections with Bluey. It’s made in my hometown where I live in Brisbane and produced there, and I was on the ABC board when we commissioned it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful.

Kirstin Ferguson
But I can’t claim any responsibility for that but it’s fabulous, isn’t it? Have you got young children?

Pete Mockaitis
It really is, yes. I’ve got kids – five, four, and one – and Bluey, wow, is maybe the top thing. I think Daniel Tiger, in my own opinion, for whatever it’s worth, Daniel Tiger is very strong in terms of enriching, but Bluey I think is just about as enriching but so much more entertaining.

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah, they’ve done so well to make it entertaining for adults to watch as well. My children are now not children, they’re 23 and 21, and I can tell you I wish we had Bluey on repeat rather than The Wiggles and Wesley. I love The Wiggles, of course. Another Australian children’s export but there’s only so much, so many times you can listen to their songs.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’re on the committee that commissioned it. And, I’m curious, when it comes to creative works, it’s like do you know if you have a hit on your hands or do you not? Like, people have famously passed on The Beatles and other smash hits in terms of culture and creativity. But what was the vibe, like, “Yeah, let’s give this a shot. Some blue dogs? Yeah, it can’t hurt”?

Kirstin Ferguson
Well, this is where I can’t claim any credit. The board is a long way from most kind of commissioning discussions. And I remember, at the time, our head of television, who’s now the managing director or the CEO of the ABC, quite visibly so, I remember he said to me, “Hey, I’ve just commissioned this show about a dog called Bluey.” And he said it’s going to be a massive hit. So, I think the people who know, know, and he certainly said that before anyone had seen it, and he was right. So, I don’t know, whether I could’ve had the same skill, I’m not so sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Kirstin, I’m now going to force a segue. I think Bluey does a fine job of engaging the head and the heart.

Kirstin Ferguson
It does.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to hear, with your book, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made as you’re learning and researching and putting it together?

Kirstin Ferguson
I think your podcast is fabulous because it’s all about helping people to be awesome at their job, obviously. And what I really hope people take away from our conversation is that delivering whatever your job is, an inverted commerce, your job description and the outputs and the KPIs and all those sorts of things, are obviously incredibly important to retain a job but to be truly successful, you have to be able to balance that ability to deliver, and that is sort of encompassed by leading with the head, and we can go through what that looks like, but with leading with the heart.

But I think people sometimes forget that. And that’s because, as leaders, and let me say, we are all leaders. It doesn’t matter where you are in the org chart, you are leading in your families, in your communities, and in your role, so it doesn’t matter who’s listening right now, I’m telling you you’re a leader because you’re impacting those around you through the words you use, the choices you make, and the behaviors that you role-model.

And so, I think leading with the heart, which is around humility, and empathy, self-awareness and things, it has to be balanced with all those technical capabilities to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And so then, are there some folks who just totally don’t have it in their head that they’re a leader or that they need to lead with their head or their heart? What are you seeing is sort of the antithesis of that message or that experience?

Kirstin Ferguson
I think anyone who thinks they know everything and is the smartest person in the room, we all know those people, they’re a challenge because they’re the kinds of leaders, and we all worked with them, who aren’t interested in diverse points of views, they’re not interested in feedback, they’re not interested in a different way of doing things, and I think those kinds of leaders are not the modern leaders that we need in the workplace today.

So, if you’ve got a leader like that, that’s going to be really challenging but don’t be that leader yourself. So, it’s really easy to identify who those people are but it’s much harder for us to look in the mirror, and think, “Actually, am I doing some of that myself? And is my leadership style still fit for purpose?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you mentioned modern leaders, and that’s also in the subtitle, would you contrast that with traditional or old-school leaders, or…?

Kirstin Ferguson
Dinosaurs, I tend to call them. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Dinosaurs. Okay.

Kirstin Ferguson
It’s not too bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my mission is to rid the world of dinosaurs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure.

Kirstin Ferguson
That pretty well covers most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, that’s the mission. So, then could you maybe paint a picture for what does a dinosaur or old-school traditional leadership look, sound, feel like that you’re saying is not what we need right now?

Kirstin Ferguson
Oh, my goodness. I reckon everyone listening have someone in their mind who doesn’t believe in remote working. They think if you’re not right in front of them, you’re not working, you’re just relaxing at home somehow, watching television. They don’t believe in doing things differently. Everything is done the same way. They’re not interested in feedback, as I said. They’re really just there to tell you what to do and to make sure we deliver on the KPIs for the organization. And that’s really work is a task to be done rather than a way to sort of be as humans.

And I think you can’t separate who we are when we come to work. We have lives, we have issues we’re dealing with, we’ve got all sorts of challenges, and I think modern leaders actually understand that and factor that into their leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, that’s a view of the dinosaurs. And then we talked about head versus heart. I’d love to hear how you think about this in terms of it sounds like it’s sort of a both-and approach as opposed to all head or all heart.

Kirstin Ferguson
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
How do you think about, I don’t know if the word is balanced, or both, or simultaneous, or the same time, but what’s a view for too much of one versus too much of the other?

Kirstin Ferguson
I think we all know individuals like that, and, you’re right, being all heart is just as unhelpful as being all head. So, we would know, or people might know leaders who run a not-for-profit organization or really great causes, but they’re all about how they can benefit people, which is wonderful but they don’t think about the strategies for how they’re going to get there, how they’re going to fund it, all of those kinds of things. That’s as unhelpful in leaders as the CFO, and I always pick on the poor old CFO, but who’s just focused on balance sheets and not thinking about how decisions are impacting others.

So, it is about balance. And the art of modern leadership that I write about is knowing what is needed and when. And I guess I feel I’ve been really fortunate because I’ve been a leader myself for 30 years. I started in the military, I went through, as you heard, I sat on company boards, I’ve been a CEO, but I’ve also got a PhD in leadership.

So, not only was it important to me to write this book based on research. It also was sort of a counterpoint to some of the anecdotal leadership books you get, which are all very interesting. But I want to know, “How do you know that? And what’s the datapoint to show that?” And that’s how I came up with, obviously, it’s a metaphor, the head and heart, but four attributes of leading with the head, and four with leading with the heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fun, as we’re chatting, I just finished listening to the Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, and, well, there’s some head there.

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah, yeah. Well, I went and heard Walter recently, just a week ago, in LA.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no kidding?

Kirstin Ferguson
Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, talking about the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it was riveting. It was 20 hours, and I was, “Wow, am I done already? I wish it were longer.” So, there were these periods of, I guess, what he would call being ultra-hardcore, and having a surge, and saying, “This thing needs to happen by this time or everybody’s fired.” Now, that sounds super head and minimal heart. I’m curious, is there a place for that ultra-hardcore? And how do we play that game?

Kirstin Ferguson
Look, I don’t think so because there’s always repercussions for behaving in that way. When things are steadier, you’re going to have people around you that don’t know when you’re next going to decide that it’s time to be ultra-hardcore. There’s obviously times when there’s a crisis, for example, and your leadership needs to change.

And you, as a leader, may have once been very consultative and taking the time to get everyone’s feedback, and, suddenly, that is not a priority. You actually, as a leader, need to step up then and make some decisions, and perhaps have just a very small core group around you. It doesn’t mean though that you need to lose your humanity.

So, decisions still have impacts on people, regardless of whether or not you’re making them in a crisis or whether you are doing them because you want to save money because you just bought a new company. I think we must, as leaders, be thinking about what the impact is beyond ourselves. And, yes, in a crisis, the consequences may be weighed up differently but it doesn’t take away from our need to be human.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve got a number of attributes associated with being a great head leader and a great heart leader. Could you share those attributes and maybe a pro tip or best practice for doing that well in practice?

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah. So, the four attributes of leading with the head, this is all the tangible stuff we’ve been rewarded for at school and being promoted, and that we feel really comfortable in, so there won’t be too much of a surprise. There’s curiosity. Most people love curiosity but it’s scary to think that, while the research shows 92% of us value it, only 24% of us get to feel curious at work. So, that’s a real challenge for leaders.

The second attribute is capability, and that’s all about how we feel capable in our jobs. We’re not just capable, but how we actually believe we can do things, and that we know that making mistakes is all just part of the learning process. The third one is wisdom, and that’s all about decision-making and we gather data and evidence to make really good decisions.

And the last one, which is the most important, actually, of all eight, is called perspective. And that’s about, in basic terms, how to read a room and really bring in the signals that you’re seeing, understanding the environment and the context that you’re leading in. And it also means that you can see who’s missing from the room, which is incredibly important. And it’s highly correlated with empathy because it means you can put yourself in the shoes of others.

So, they’re the four head-based attributes. And, generally, people are pretty comfortable with this. And I should mention now, anyone listening can just jump on HeadHeartLeader.com, totally free, but I’ve had 16,000 people complete this scale since January, that’s one I built with one of the universities in Australia, and will give you personalized report and a comparison to how you’re going on each of these.

And same with the heart. So, the four heart-based attributes are humility, which is all around confident humility, intellectual humility, knowing we don’t know all the answers, and being quite okay with that. Second is self-awareness, which obviously understanding that impact that we’re having on others. Feedback is a critically important tool there.

Third is courage, and that’s the courage to speak up for what you believe in even in the face of pressure not to do so. And the final is empathy, and that’s our ability to really understand that your lived experience is not the same as others, and to appreciate that you’re going to need diverse points of view to make the best decision that you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so within these eight attributes, I’d love to hear are there some particular tools, or tactics, or practices, things that you’ve discovered, “Wow, this little thing makes a world of difference in improving curiosity or perspective or empathy”?

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah. Well, let me share one with you that I, first, came up with about 10-12 years ago when I first started sitting on company boards, and I was only 38 then, so I’m 50 now. And I remember feeling really insecure, and feeling I needed to contribute to every conversation even though I wasn’t adding much value, I felt I needed to say something, sort of prove myself. I think we’ve all been in that situation.

But, at the same time, I was noticing that my really experienced colleagues around me barely said anything at all. And they might only ask a single question, but that question was gold, and it would change the course of the conversation. So, then I came up with a concept I still use now called the word-to-wisdom ratio, and I would write, back in the day when it was still hardcopy papers, WTW, on the corner of my page.

And it was to remind me that I really needed to be mindful of the impact I was having on those around me. And at that stage, the number of words that was taking me to add any wisdom at all was pretty unhealthy, whereas my colleagues clearly were doing much better than me. But as I’ve become more experienced and a more senior leader, what I use it for now is to really make sure I’m not taking up all the space in meetings.

So, for people listening who do have a team, if you’re going into a meeting, and you’ve already got the answer in mind, and you sort of are just checking in to make sure they all agree with what you’re proposing, then it’s likely you’re taking up so much space no one else gets an opportunity to contribute. And the word-to-wisdom ratio is something you can think about in terms of your coaching ability.

And I would encourage modern leaders that even if you know the answer, use that opportunity, when you’ve got the time and it’s appropriate, to really ask good questions of those you lead so they can feel they’ve come to answer themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a fun one, the word-to-wisdom ratio. Anything that you’d also put forward in terms of boosting our perspective?

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah, like reading a room is, I think, we all know sometimes it’s easier to do than others, and sometimes we get it wrong, and we really need feedback to calibrate whether or not we’ve read it correctly. But one of the challenges to reading a room is if you’re someone, firstly, who has blinkers on and pretty much thinks you’re right all the time, then you’re basically the only person in that room, and so that’s a problem.

So, you need to make sure that you’ve got people around you that are actually giving you dissenting opinions, respectfully, of course, but that you’re not surrounding yourself with people who just agree. But I think, also, around leading with perspective, it’s important to be getting feedback, and to really understand whether or not you’re reading of the situation is the same as others. Test that with people because, invariably, we’re not going to get it right.

Sadly, our self-awareness is very high, we think. About 95% of us we think we’re self-aware but only 10 to 15% of those we lead would agree. That’s a pretty scary statistic, and that’s why feedback is so important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m also curious about boosting that self-awareness. If we think we’re self-aware but we’re not, well, first, how do we know if we really are? And, second, how do we boost that?

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah. Well, that is why you need trusted people around you, and you need to sniff out the bad news. I think we, invariably, like to hear from people that tell us we’re doing a good job. We’re human, obviously, we love to be reassured, but they’re not the people that you actually want to seek feedback from. You also don’t want to go to the people who are really critical of you because that’s not helpful either.

But it’s finding those people in your life who know you well enough that they are unafraid to tell you what they think, and that they want you to succeed. So, it’s given in a way that’s there to help you actually do better. And I think if you’ve got those people in your life, whether they’re mentors, colleagues, your boss, someone that’s in your team, really thank them and take their feedback with a gratitude because it’s a gift.

And if you can be doing that for someone else, make sure that you’re open to that. I should say that when you’re getting feedback, though, curiosity is the most important attribute to bring into that conversation because we’re all going to have triggers. There’s three triggers we all feel when we get feedback.

The first is you think, “Well, you’re an idiot.” But the conversation or the feedback is clouded by your relationship with the person. Regardless of how valuable the feedback might be, you’re thinking, “How dare you tell me this?” The second trigger we’ll have is, “You’re wrong.” And you’re just thinking, “Well, I don’t agree with your perspective,” so you shut down, and that’s not helpful either. You need to stay present, even if you don’t agree. It’s not a matter of having to change based on the feedback but you do need to be able to hear it if you want to encourage others to give you feedback again.

But the third trigger is something in us, and it’s about shame, or embarrassment, or ego, or whatever gets triggered. And I think knowing that that’s going on for you, and still being able to stay present, is one of the most important things leaders can do when they’re practicing self-awareness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, zooming out a little bit, one of your key messages in the book is that we need to sort of know when is the right moment to lead with more head-style versus lead more heart-style. What are some of your top indicators or telltale signs which tend to nudge you one way or the other?

Kirstin Ferguson
Oh, that’s an impossible question to answer because that’s the art. And there’ll be situations, I know I’ve gone into meetings, that I think are going to be all about deliverables pretty much, and I’ve got my documents, or my policies, or whatever it is that you think you’re there to do. But in the course of that conversation, you know those things go a little bit off the rails. And some leaders need a huge amount of humility or empathy, whatever it is, to get that conversation back on track.

So, I think, in any given context, you’re going to be mastering this art back and forth, and that’s part of the learning process of being a good leader, and we never get it all right. It’s not as though you’ll ever get to a point in your career where you can say, “Alright, I’ve mastered that now.” And that’s okay, that’s part of being a modern leader.

You know you’re going to have a misstep but a modern leader doesn’t really fear that so much because they’re able to say, “Oh, I’ve got that wrong. Let’s talk about how we can get this back on track.” It’s freeing to be able to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, there’s no cut-and-dry, hard-and-fast rules and algorithm that we can turn down.

Kirstin Ferguson
Wouldn’t that be easy if we do?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ll just sort of see from my own experience, think about in Myers-Briggs language, thinker versus feeler, I am a feeler slightly. And I think there are definitely times where I need to be less accommodating and more hardcore, maybe not ultra-hardcore like Elon Musk.

Kirstin Ferguson
No. Talk it over.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what might be some indicators that more of a head approach is needed in a given moment?

Kirstin Ferguson
I’m similar to you, and so I’m naturally one who wants to make sure everyone’s on board with an idea, and I’ve consulted, and we’ve all got buy-in, and then I notice there’s been times in my career that that style, I’ve used it, and it just isn’t the right style for the moment, and so I haven’t read the room properly. And I think part of being self-aware is that you realize that fairly quickly. You’re assessing what’s going on, the response to that, whether or not it’s timely because, obviously, in some situations, it just practically takes far too long to be consultative in that way.

So, there’s definitely situations where you need to be adjusting your leadership style in that response, but you’re still using these attributes. Just think of it like a pendulum. You’re sort of moving back and forth as you need to, and really being intentional about the kind of leadership style. That’s all this is about. It’s about not mindlessly leading one way forever, and thinking that’s going to work.

And I think that might’ve worked in the past where it was pretty consistent at work that if you are ultra-hardcore, back in the ‘80s in some organizations where that was the culture, and you could just do that day after day for 20, 30 years, get to the top and then retire. I don’t think that is how organizations work now and it’s certainly not how individuals succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, maybe instead of talking about broad-based rules, maybe you can just give us a couple examples in terms of, “Here’s a leadership situation, and, wow, that really pointed to head would be better,” versus, “Here’s another situation that points to heart would be better.”

Kirstin Ferguson
Well, I think a common scenario lots of people find themselves in, especially if you’re leading a team, is you’ve got your team meeting, and you sit down, you’ve got a bit of a plan you need to come up with, and you’re telling everyone what the plan is, and you ask, “Are there any questions or any feedback?” you’re trying to do the right thing, and it sucks, and everyone goes, “No, it’s great and it’s fine.” And everyone goes back to the meeting. This is a very common situation.

In that circumstance, it’s easy for a lazy leader, and I’m going to be pretty hard there, to just go, “Okay. Well, no problem. Let’s all go do this.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I guess there’s no questions. All right. Good news.”

Kirstin Ferguson
“I get to go to lunch early.” The better leader, a modern leader, I think, would see that as a signal, and like, “Okay, that’s something about my leadership is giving the impression that either I don’t want to hear questions, I don’t want to hear feedback, I’m not curious as to different ways we could do things.” I always think leaders need to look at themselves rather than thinking it’s the problem of the team.

And so, in that situation, you really need to turn it around, and maybe not in that meeting, but maybe having a second meeting afterwards to go, “Look, I noticed that in all our team meetings, there’s never really any feedback. What am I missing? Is it something about how I’m presenting the information? Is it something about how I’m asking? I’m really keen to know because I know you guys have got far more to contribute than what you’re showing. And I really need your contributions to make the best outcome.”

So, there’s different ways you can create a safe environment and try and explore what’s going on. And if you ask the right questions in the right tone, you might find that someone brave enough says, “Actually, well, when I did raise something three months ago, you really bit my head off, and I don’t want to bring it up again.”

Now, if someone was to say something like that, the only response you should have as a leader is gratitude because that person has had so much courage, firstly, to say that. But secondly, you’ve obviously not even remembered that that was an impact that you had. And remember at the beginning, I said I think leadership is just simply a series of moments. And that is a moment that you’ve missed, and you’ve got to do a lot of work to rectify it. But finding out what’s going on is the most important goal.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, as I imagine situations where I’m in the room and I have no questions, sometimes it means I am completely satisfied with the wisdom that I have received. And other times, it means, “I think this is boring, and stupid, and lame, and I shouldn’t really even be in this meeting in the first place. And I’m hoping this can be over as soon as possible.” Now, I’m not going to say that out loud. If someone really pressed me multiple times, one on one, yeah, I might let them know. But, generally, it’s like, no, I’m not going to go there.

Kirstin Ferguson
But if you think that, the chances are other people think that that meeting is a waste of time, which means leaders need to also be assisting, like, “Have I asked for feedback on whether these gatherings are even worthwhile? We sit here and you just listen to me for an hour. Is there another way you guys would prefer to work?”

And you might say, “Actually, I’d rather do all this stuff asynchronously because I don’t want to have to come in, or even get online, and have these meetings. I can be doing something else. But why don’t we…?” And you’ve got suggestion A, B, and C. If I’m prepared to hear that, it’s much more likely others in the team are going to have suggestions. And, suddenly, you come up with an agreed way that you’re going to lead, move forward, and you will be, as a leader, getting feedback.

Now, it might be that I’ve always thought, “It was better in a face-to-face meeting.” And, suddenly, when you are asynchronous, you’re giving endless feedback in a document. That’s something as a leader I need to get my head around.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it seems like, I guess, this is sort of next level humility for leaders to realize, “Oh, this whole initiative or project that we’ve been embarking upon is really ill-conceived, and should be shut down and reversed immediately. Oh, good to know.”

Kirstin Ferguson
But a modern leader goes, “Okay. Well, great, better we know this now than later. So now what?” And that’s when this isn’t all about bending to other people’s will. It’s about saying, “Okay, I’ve heard you now. Now, we’re accountable because this is an idea as a team we’ve come up with. What are we going to do? How are we going to get there? Who’s delivering what?” So, this is where that head and heart balance comes, but I don’t think you get there unless you’re prepared to open your mind to not having all the answers.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Well, I’d love people to take a look at the book. It’s just been launched in the US. It’s been named in the Top Ten Best New Management Books for 2023 by Thinkers50. So, you can find it on Amazon. I’m all over the socials. I love connecting with people. So, please find me online. And do the HeadHeartLeader.com, go there and I’d love to hear how you go with the scale.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Oh, that is so hard but I think the best advice I’ve ever been given that I give others, and perhaps I can sort of do it that way, is to just say yes. Say yes to opportunities as they come along. Even though I’m guaranteed that you’ll likely to think you’re not ready for them, say yes anyway because you just never know what other opportunities will come from them. And that’s certainly advice I’ve followed throughout my career.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
There’s one in my book that I’m currently loving, which is a guy who wanted to get better at chess, and this is back in the ‘60s, and he did an experiment with chess grandmasters and amateurs to see if chess grandmasters just had better memory, and it turns out no. They can read a board. Anyone who’s watched The Queen’s Gambit and seen her look at the ceiling and all the chess pieces move, that is perspective. They read the room or the read the board really well. But you can read more about the study in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I think I’ve heard of this in that if pieces are just randomly placed on the board, the grandmaster has no better memory than your average Joe.

Kirstin Ferguson
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to they go, “Oh, wow, so that bishop is putting that kind in check right now, and so then he’s going to have to…” Like, it means something to them, like a configuration.

Kirstin Ferguson
It does. The researcher, his name was Adrian de Groot. And, yes, he put all, initially, just put the pieces in a position on the chess board so the amateurs couldn’t remember where they were, but the grandmasters easily because they must’ve looked at it, and go on, “Oh, that’s the queen’s gambit,” so they could put it back. But when he randomly mixed them up, as you said, they were no better than the amateurs. Not sure that it made old Adrian a better chess player, but he did learn about how they can read a board.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kirstin Ferguson
Well, I’ve just picked up Elon Musk’s biography as well because I went and heard Walter Isaacson speak. So, I’m midway through that but I’m also reading the new book by Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried. So, I, obviously, have a penchant for reading about questionable businesspeople at the moment. I love reading about different types of leaders.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
I like the app Calm. So, it’s got good soundscapes, so this helps me get to sleep. I love having a good night’s sleep. So, I think every leader needs to sleep well.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
I walk my dog. I live on the beach in Australia, which is pretty tough, I can assure you. We’ve got a ten-mile beach in front of our house, and I definitely try to walk my dog when I’m at home every day. That helps me just center myself and remember what’s important.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Yes, to remember that everyone’s a leader, and that leadership is simply a series of moments. And every moment is an opportunity for you to leave a positive impact in your wake.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah, go to my website KirstinFerguson.com, or HeadHeartLeader.com, or you can find me on the socials.

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

Kirstin Ferguson
Yeah, have a look in the mirror first. So, as much as we can easily point out all of those leaders around us who are doing a bad job, it’s much more important that we’re considering how we’re going, and get feedback, and just work on it every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kirstin, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and good head and heart moments.

Kirstin Ferguson
Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Oct 30
0

911: Making Uncertainty your Friend with Maggie Jackson

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Maggie Jackson talks about the power of uncertainty and how to harness it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How uncertainty enhances learning
  2. How to manage the fear of uncertainty
  3. How routine can hold us back

About Maggie

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist. Her new book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure (Nov. 2023) explores why we should paradoxically seek not-knowing in times of flux. The book’s been nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain is a Next Big Idea Club “must read.” Jackson’s prior book, Distracted (2nd ed., 2018), sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of fragmenting our attention and won the 2020 Dorothy Lee Award. A former Boston Globe columnist, Jackson has written for the New York Times and other publications worldwide. Her work has been covered extensively in the global press.

Resources Mentioned

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Maggie Jackson Interview Transcript

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

Maggie Jackson
Oh, wonderful to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about your wisdom you’ve put forth in your book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. But first, I need to hear about you swimming in the Atlantic Ocean almost every day. What’s the story here?

Maggie Jackson
Well, it’s a pandemic story. I used to be a pool swimmer, and I’ve increasingly loved swimming the older I’ve gotten. And then I moved out to the countryside in Rhode Island from New York City during the pandemic, and got kind of really into swimming all the time in the ocean, increasingly in the fall, and then all winter, and spring. I absolutely love it. Being there at dawn, it’s beautiful and feels a whole exercise you can’t beat.

But then it’s sort of interesting because it also offers a great deal, kind of a daily dose of uncertainty. So, I finally began to realize that part of the joy and the daunting nature of what I’m doing is that swimming is never the same twice. When you’re open water, four seasons swimming, it’s never the same twice. So, it’s a great little lesson in uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And I have recently been getting into cold water immersion. Fun things. And I’m thinking, wow, fall and winter, you’re getting that in spades. You know what the temperature in the water is like during these times?

Maggie Jackson
Oh, yes. Yes, we all keep track of the temperature quite carefully because I do wear some gear, so I adjust my gear. But the temperature is about the low is 36 Fahrenheit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Maggie Jackson
And a lot depends on it could be 20 Fahrenheit in air, and it can be the wind, and then you can be in the snow. It’s all really beautiful and it’s just so much fun. And they’re now doing studies, trying to augment people’s kind of understanding or capability with uncertainty in order to boost resilience. So, we could talk about that. But that, I feel as though, I’ve gained resilience by doing this.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is it your experience, as it is mine, that just the sheer cold alone is invigorating and mood-boosting over the long term?

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. I find that the colder it is, the more joyful it is. The deep dark winter when my little band of swimmers is going at it, we’re actually laughing out loud and sort of hooting and hollering, and I find that the summer is beautiful, it’s relaxing, it’s wonderful, but it’s not quite as exhilarating. So, it completely represents what we might call good stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now let’s hear a little bit about uncertainty in your book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Have you encountered any particularly surprising, or extra-fascinating, or counterintuitive discoveries about us humans and uncertainty while putting this together?

Maggie Jackson
Sure. A long list of surprising discoveries related to uncertainty. We mostly think of uncertainty as being, what psychologists call aversive. We don’t like it. Humans don’t like it. And there’s a reason for that. We’re naturally made to survive by getting answers. Like, we can’t exist in the state of not knowing. However, it’s really interesting because when humans encounter something new, it might be your first day at the job, it might be a six-month roadblock on your highway and you got to adjust, you actually undergo all of these kinds of stress changes in your body.

You might sweat a little, your heart might race, but at the same time, there are changes in the brain that are extremely beneficial when you are in this uncertain, this unsettling state of uncertainty. Actually, your working memory is bolstered, your focus broadens, the brain is more receptive to new information, so you’re basically on your toes. So, what seems unsettling and sort of this uncertainty that we dislike is actually priming us to be able to learn.

So, as one neuroscientist told me, “When you’re in that moment of so-called arousal due to uncertainty, the brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.” And so, I think it’s really important on the job, or on the restive life, not to squander that moment. Move forward into uncertainty. Don’t run from it or deny it or hide it. I think it’s really important that we don’t cut short that opportunity to learn that uncertainty offers.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we are more able to learn with these sorts of emotional stress response things going on, and that just sort of fits. It makes sense because, well, yes, there’s something that needs learning here because, by definition, it’s uncertain what’s going on.

Maggie Jackson
Yup, you walk into the meeting and there’s a surprise, or your boss hands you a project you didn’t really think you’re going to have to do. And it’s not emotion, really. It’s cognition. So, your brain is actually going on alert. It’s being aroused, as scientists say. And that puts you in a state where you can take advantage of that.

And so, I think the myth-busting one we have to do first about uncertainty is to realize that uncertainty is unsettling, yes, but that is its precise gift. It bumps us off the routine. It’s telling us. When you’re uncertain, that’s basically your brain telling you that you have to stop your automatic behavior. The status quo doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to be ready to update your understanding of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is you say that we tend to not like uncertainty, and yet there are some contexts where we, humans, proactively go for it. We want to play card games, or videogames, or go to the casino, and that’s the whole draw of these things, is we don’t quite know how things are going to turn out. There’s an element of chance.

Maggie Jackson
Oh, I think that’s a very, very good point. It’s sort of uncertainty by another name. We might call it suspense, or just the kind of not knowing that’s playful or entertainment form that, I think, as uncertainty has grown, or I would say unpredictability in the world has grown, and, really, studies do show that economics, business world, climate, etc., there are a lot of aspects of the life that are more volatile. Uncertainty has become kind of a lament. You see it in the headlines. You hear people talk about it.

People just equate uncertainty with something bad. And that’s not moving us forward. That’s actually keeping us. Uncertainty is not the paralysis that we think. The human uncertainty, the unsureness, the not knowing, it’s not that all, as research shows. It’s actually something that’s highly dynamic and active, and something that moves us forward. Uncertainty is a lot more than we know.

And, actually, for decades and decades, this state of mind, it’s a mindset, basically, wasn’t studied. It wasn’t studied even in psychology because the onus and the emphasis was on what the human can do, what’s the task that you accomplish. It’s not sort of in between time when people are pausing and unsure, or they don’t know what to do. The scientists wanted to study what they could get accomplished.

And so, I think this puts human thinking, and even what it means to know what it means to be successful, it puts it in a whole new plane because if we can add not knowing to our skillset, as well as knowing, well, we’re suddenly really opening up to the world in ways that we weren’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, not knowing as a skillset that benefits us. Could you perhaps give us a story, an example, of someone who upgraded that skill and saw cool results as a result?

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of stories, but one little story came from a friend of mine who was calling me up, and saying, “Oh, there’s a merger and acquisition at my pharmaceutical company,” and she’s a scientist, and she was moaning and groaning. And in the next breath, she was talking about how she’s brushing up her resume, and she’s looking around for an internal job.

And I was sort of amused inside, having been steeped in uncertainty research, so I realized that she was actually doing precisely what, through her uncertainty, she was actually taking hold of the situation, and she was propelled to investigate further. And you can see this in many, many great figures. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was basically borne of uncertainty. He was a leader who was very humble. He wasn’t opposed to saying, “I don’t know,” and he really led the movement through conviction but also with adaptability.

And when it came to that incredibly important speech that day in 1963, The March on Washington, first of all, he had asked for opinions from many, many advisers. The night of the speech, he didn’t know quite what he would say. He had elements but he didn’t really know. He was actually still working on the speech right up on the podium that day.

And what that shows is that he was in tuned with a very divisive, very difficult moment in history. He was wakeful to all the different influences and patterns and sort of things that were going on in that moment, and he, of course, pulled off one of the greatest speeches of all time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Let’s have another example.

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say a more modern example is I’ve been studying the work style of the new Nobel Prize winner in medicine, the co-winner, Kati Kariko, who was originally from Hungary, and she worked for decades on mRNA, which, of course, was the sort of her work on mRNA led to the breakthrough that gave us the COVID vaccines and saved hundreds of millions of lives perhaps.

And she was incredibly dogged and incredibly persistent, and she saw the capacity of this aspect of biology when no one else was. She was terminated from UPenn, but this is not just a story of persistence. As she puts it in one Nobel Prize interview, one of her coworkers said, “Oh, Kati, you’re always zigzagging.” In other words, she didn’t always work in a straight line. And she said, “By zigzagging, I learned so much.”

And this is what it means to inhabit uncertainty. You’re not shutting down on that space of possibility that uncertainty is. And one of the most interesting things about curiosity is that scientists have been finally studying this topic, too, and they’re beginning to kind of understand that one of the most key components of curiosity, of the curious disposition, is the ability to work with or tolerate the stress of inhabiting the unknown.

So, when you’re curious about something, anything, painting or what you’re curious about, something you’re doing at work, or curious about what this Nobel Prize winner did, you are actually having to kind of understand, or withstand, or kind of leverage that uncertainty in order to get to the answer. And that she really represents that. She really does. She spent so much energy on doing things that were denigrated, devalued in every sense of the word. She kept going and she basically exemplifies the willingness to stay in that liminal space, which is to not know, to not know in order to get the better answer.

If she had raced to the first answer, well, she might’ve discovered something but she never would’ve put the pieces together. She had to go down a lot of dead ends, and that, to me, is that entirely what uncertainty is about, productive uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you elaborate on the distinction between working in a zigzag fashion versus linear fashion? What are those different modes look, sound, feel like by contrast?

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say that the linear fashion         of working would be to work from one logical point to another, to be focused on outcome. Outcome orientation is a really hot topic in business circles today. Whereas, a zigzag, a nonlinear, that is something that Leonardo da Vinci was famous for. “Confusion rouses the mind to invention,” he once said.

And the zigzagging that she was referring to would be the dead ends. Many times, mRNA was actually toxic to the body when introduced in mice, etc. It didn’t do them any good. And so, basically, she could’ve quit there but instead she zagged, or zigged, over to a different type of thing. So, that’s what I mean.

Eighty percent of strategic business decisions are made after considering just one option. And, yet, if people actually go to the root of the problem and consider multiple reasons for the problem, multiple roots of the problem, then they’re actually four times more likely to have a successful decision.

So, again and again, we hear that we should widen our options but the other point of that is what I call widening and deepening, and that is testing and evaluating. So, again, that’s where you’re leveraging uncertainty. This is leveraging what Kahneman calls the slow mind. It’s what I also call take two. Rather than just leap to a solution, or go to what’s obvious, or try to shoot for that outcome, you’re willing to explore many avenues, and not forever.

Sometimes this can happen just in a few minutes in the operating room with a surgeon in crisis. They just take a minute to do take two, or to dwell in uncertainty, and then they find the better answer, or the hidden answer. And so, that’s what I mean by zigzag.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And so, if folks do have this attitude or fear of uncertainty, do you have any recommended first steps in terms of, “Hey, if that’s where you’re at right now, here’s what I recommend you do or think about”?

Maggie Jackson
Yes, that’s a great question. And it’s really important, and I get asked that all the time now, “How can I get better at dealing with uncertainty?” And, actually, I’ll talk a little bit about what I found, but also there’s some new research on this, a great deal of research. There are scientists now planning a new study, an intervention, in Columbus, Ohio, to help stressed high schoolers gain resilience by teaching them how to better tolerate, which is not such a great word, but to manage uncertainty, to actually, it means lean into uncertainty. That’s the term I prefer.

And how are they doing that? Well, scientists, clinical psychologists, and others were developing these interventions, are now, they’re basically importing some lessons from exposure to therapy, so that makes sense. If you are fearful of uncertainty, if you’re the type who’s intolerant of surprises, you need to overprepare for the presentation, you need to pack not just your bag for the family vacation but the entire family’s bag because you don’t trust them to do it, those are kind of signs that you might be a little bit intolerant of uncertainty.

And so, trying new things, trying to, in effect, seek a little bit of surprise in your life, will show you not that it’s always the perfect solution. You might delegate at work, and it might not actually work out better every single time. But, at the same time, if you never delegate at work, you will never know the other possibilities that that person, that the hidden talents of that person shows. The person who works for you might show hidden talents when you allow them to work on that project a little more than before.

So, what you’re doing is expanding your perspectives, expanding your range of experience, and one of the ways in which clinical psychologists are now teaching people, especially people with anxiety, to get better at handling uncertainty, to stop denying and avoiding it, are tiny little things like, for instance, “Answer your cellphone without caller ID.” And that seems so simple but, at the same time, it’s just injecting a little bit of mystery.

And some scientists actually surmised that phones, because they provide instant answers all the time, and we’re checking 150 times a day, that’s what they call certainty-seeking behavior. So, some part of this is just sort of lifting up your head and kind of contending with what’s happening, not trying to control every little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. This reminds me of a recent camping trip in which we were…I don’t even remember what we’re talking about but it was some sort of factual question that could be readily Googled, and we weren’t sure, it’s like, “Oh, I think it’s this way.” “Well, no, I think it might be this because what about that?” And it was funny, we’re like, “Huh, here we are all not being quite sure about this thing,” which, on ordinary circumstances, when we had cellphone reception, someone would’ve Googled it within about five seconds, and then that would be that.

Maggie Jackson
Right. And, actually, what you were doing, by collectively or individually kind of cogitating, you were reaching into your memory, which is not something we do when we’re turned to the phone all the time. You’re actually reaching deep into your memory. And even if you don’t come up with the answer, it strengthens your brain to do so.

It’s really quite amazing but just searching around in your memory, something that we just don’t do today, is actually great for the brain. And why is that? Because, say, you’re trying to think of a painter. I’m trying madly to think of Degas, and all I can think of is Monet. And, really, if you’re looking around in your brain, internally searching, in other words, you’re looking through different knowledge networks because our minds and our experiences, they’re varied associations. They’re networked. They say they’re branching trees of knowledge.

And what you’re doing is going along those paths, and you’re saying, “Oh, well, maybe an impressionist, or I guess French,” so you’re strengthening by utilizing those synapses, you’re strengthening other areas of the brain, and that’s really great for greater wisdom. Our minds are not computers, information is not downloadable and upload-able. It’s really sort of an organic shifting thing. And that’s another reason why not knowing is really important because it kind of blows away that idea that our minds are computers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are fun practices. Tell me, Maggie, anymore?

Maggie Jackson
Yes. Well, I would say one very, very important practice is it involves teamwork. So, uncertainty has a social side to it. And the upshot is that, basically, one of the best fuels of collaboration is conflict, and I mean judicious, mild, respectful conflict. But study after study shows that teams and groups that have mutual criticism, conflict, dissent are better performing. They actually have deeper discussions, they’re more creative, they surface hidden information that isn’t usually discussed, etc. Now, why is that?

Well, a lot of people think that, basically, when you have a disagreement or even when you just have diversity on a team, diversity of opinions, that diverse or dissenting opinion is just giving you the right answer, but that’s not true because a dissenting opinion, even if wrong, also bolsters performance. Why is it? It’s because uncertainty has rousted you from that kind of complacency of being in agreement. And the neuroscience on that is pretty amazing. The brain in agreement is a really lazy animal, believe me.

So, basically, if you can keep cultivating disagreement, then you get on what I call uncommon ground. It’s really important to be uncertain, and then you can do a whole host of things. You’re basically finding out what the team doesn’t know, which is really important for growth. You basically deepen and intensify the discussion. Now, studies have shown this in supreme courts, in the Supreme Courts, in juries, in financial trading, even on Mount Everest.

They did studies where teams that were very diverse, had a lot of different kinds of knowledge on climbing Mount Everest, but who emphasized all for one kind of mentality, so a kind of collective mentality, actually were more likely to have a depth on the team, and that’s really serious business. So, one flexible work consultant told me a wonderful story to illustrate this.

Cali Williams Yost was at a law firm where she was helping the firm institute flexible work for the legal team. I’m sorry, it was the legal team of an energy company. So, the legal team was all set to go, the bosses were on board, they were going to work remotely part time, etc. Well, one executive stood up and said he was completely opposed, at a meeting, and there was going to be a lot of knowledge left on the table because people weren’t meeting in the morning to coffee clap, etc.

Well, the bosses were angry, and everyone was shocked, they were all set. And what Cali Williams Yost wisely told me is that, basically, he was wrong to oppose flexible work but he was right, something was missing. And so, his dissent actually sparked a younger person in the room to, later in the afternoon, stand up, and say, “Well, I can create a virtual knowledge platform, and we can go remote and still have that time to coffee clap, so to speak.” So, that’s a perfect example of how dissent threw everyone into uncertainty, and then they were able to actually kind of find a third way to meet the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny how, as I imagine that scene, the emotional reaction is just as you’ve described, it’s like folks are annoyed, like, “Oh, come on, man. Just, like, shut up and get in line. We’re almost done. Why you gotta be difficult and cause problems, and not be a team player?” Like, all of these negative associations. And yet, it really is an asset to have folks who have unique perspective and the courage to share it and go against the grain, it really does enrich the whole team, and yet so rarely do we say, “Thank you, dear colleague, for disagreeing with all of us. This is very helpful.”

Maggie Jackson
Oh, you’re so right. And you put it so well, and I’m so glad you used that word courage because I was just thinking of a quote by William James, a great psychology philosopher in the 19th century, who talked about the courage of a maybe. He basically talked about how no human achievement can be created without the “courage of a maybe.” And that’s exactly what’s happening.

I think one tip for people who want to try this, and I would advise, throw in a no, a gentle no, or maybe just a maybe. And what you’re doing with the word maybe is actually using something called hedge words. And so, those are really, really important. Hedge words are maybe, sometimes, those sorts of words, as opposed to more…there’s no alternative word for hedge words, but anyhow, non-hedge words, which are, “You’re wrong,” or, “Therefore.” Those are not hedge words.

And what hedge words do is signal your receptiveness to another opinion. They also signal that there’s something that’s not known. So, if you say, “Maybe we should consider something,” or, “Maybe we haven’t thought of…” etc., you’re actually smoothing the way for others to pick up on that. And it’s a wonderful kind of linguistic flag that you’re waving, saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be so sure,” and that’s where then the disagreement can be fueled, and the uncertainty. And then people can be in the space of uncommon ground, and then go deeper and explore multiple perspectives.

Another study I really loved, which brings this all to life, was basically a CEO who’s in Europe, a few years ago when the European Union was being widely expanded, so quite a bit of Eastern Europe was being inducted into the EU. And so, it was a time of great unknowns for business leaders on that continent. And so, two professors, one in Germany, one in the US, went and studied German CEOs for an entire year, and they asked them whether they’re for this expansion or were they against it, and what would happen, was it good for their company or was it bad for their company.

Well, when they got the results back, they found this third group. To their surprise, 25% or more of the CEOs were ambivalent, they didn’t really know, “Well, we’re not really sure this is going to expand the markets. Is it going to take our customers away? We’re not sure.” And it’s amazing to me that the professors were surprised.

Well, a year later, fast forward, the result was the people who were sure that it would be either good for their company or bad for their company, basically didn’t do very much. Those who were ambivalent were more resourceful, they came up with more products, they opened new factories, they actually were more inclusive, they asked for different opinions. They weren’t sure so that propelled them to do more.

And I think there was an award-winning study, and it just perfectly underscores not just what we’re talking about, about dissent, but also about the power of uncertainty. And it certainly is an overlooked unsung power.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. They’re not sure and, thusly, they do more. They’re not sure, so it was like, “Uh-oh, I don’t know so I better hustle. I better figure it out and do the research, do the work, do the investigation, talk to people, and get the info.” And this reminds me of, I don’t know if this has been coined somewhere before, but I might’ve made this up. I call it second time syndrome.

Like, the second time you do something, you might get worse results than the first time because you’re more confident, like, “Oh, I know how this goes,” versus the first time, you’re like, “Oh, boy, I’m a little scared, a little intimidated, a little overwhelmed. I better really hustle and figure this out.” Like, I remember, I was, at one point, a leadership seminar chair, or HOBY daddy for these HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership event, so there’s a bunch of folks assembled for a three-day thing, and I’m kind of like the guy in charge of everything.

And so, the first time, I was like, “Wow, this is intimidating. I really want to make sure I’m on top of everything,” and it went very well. And the second time, I thought, “Oh, we got this. It’s fine.” And it was still good but it was not as excellent as the first one. I could see this event now years later. And it’s because I was more certain and more comfortable and less effortful the second time around.

Maggie Jackson
I think that’s so true and that’s such a good point. Because uncertainty, and confronting something new, is actually putting you at the edge of your knowledge, and that’s exactly when we want to retreat. There’s a term called the routine expert. The routine expert is someone, we’ve seen it everywhere. We see it in medicine. We see it in accounting. We see it in reporting. I’m a journalist. But people who have accrued years of experience, they’re really good at what they do, but everything has become routine. They have this sort of honed automaticity, so the heuristic thinking, “Chest pain equals heart attack” that is predominant.

But when the routine expert hits something that’s really new, they just retreat into the same old solutions, and they’re then not doing well. They fail. Whereas, adaptive experts are the people who can utilize that uncertainty, to do the kind of deliberative work, and also to be flexible about using their knowledge. And so, adaptive experts are nimble. And that’s exactly what we want.

When something goes wrong in the operating room, I witnessed multiple operations up in Toronto while researching this book, and one of the senior surgeons who epitomizes our ideal of the expert, he was quick, he was sure, really sure, well, he then, in a moment, in a terrifying moment in the operating room, he thought he had done something nearly lethal to the patient during a liver operation. Everything fell silent, there was sweat on his cap.

Well, he was just too sure. He carried his certainty into that operation like a badge of honor. And then he was able to, “It was not a lethal error,” but, at the same time, he epitomizes what we loved in experts. And we really are venerating the wrong type of experts. What we want to really emulate and respect the people who ask the questions, the people who say, “I don’t know,” whether it’s medicine or not, and the leaders who are willing to pause and deliberate.

And other study shows that those leaders, who when confronting a new problem, actually, are deemed in experimental studies anyhow as being less influential. But we’ve got it all wrong. We’ve got it all wrong. We need to be really promoting people who ask questions, who don’t mind hesitating for productive uses, who don’t mind being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Indeed, we tend to favor, like, trust the confident-sounding voice but there are studies that reveal that there is almost no correlation between the confidence someone exerts and how right or good they are at the thing, so that’s dangerous and some ways it’s like we’d be better off if we trusted or valued more the nuanced person, it’s like, “Well, you know, under these circumstances, it’s probably best for A, but, however, given the variables X, Y, Z, I’m leaning towards B.”

Like, that doesn’t sound as commanding and inspiring, like, “Yes, you know what you’re doing. I’ll follow you unto death” That doesn’t give you the that emotional charge. And yet, it’s likely much closer to true, and there’s much higher probability, it seems, of finding great wisdom there worth following.

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. Adaptive wisdom, the kind of person who sees the world as it is, not as they wish it to be or assume it to be. And that takes time, it takes effort, it takes unease, etc. but it’s really important that we change our views on what a leader is, that we change our views on what a student or a pundit or a presidential candidate is, because the cost of our certainty are certainly rising, and we can see it everywhere in terms of the polarization, narrowmindedness, etc., the anxiety levels.

I see that uncertainty, if we begin to understand it, to study it, to learn how to use it skillfully, can really change humanity, and give me great hope. They’re even trying to, there’s a movement by leaders in AI today to instill uncertainty in models, in robots, that is to make AI unsure. Now, there is some uncertainty in a robot. It couldn’t traverse the factory floor without some degree of being open to what’s unpredictable in its environment.

But what they’re trying to do, and this is picking up steam, and it’s really quite important, is to make on a robot that’s unsure in its aims. So, say, you have a housekeeper robot, and it’s fetching your coffee, well, today’s AI is built to carry out a task because the rationalist’s definition of intelligence is fulfilling your goals no matter what. And, therefore, that’s both the danger and the wisdom of today’s AI.

Well, an unsure robot, and what I call the “I don’t know” robot, will actually ask you how you want your coffee, or which room across the kitchen, or, “Do you want something?” It’s teachable and it’s more honest. It’s not just doing what it was initially programmed to do. It’s more flexible. And in that very vision of “I don’t know” robot, we can see something a little bit that we should be striving for, too.

Pete Mockaitis
The quote that comes to mind thinking about these notions of certainty is this quote, I come back to it again and again, I just got to have him on the show. Robert Rubin said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I can totally relate, it’s like, “Are you sure?” And I think about all these scenarios when the experts tell me the opposite of each other, and they do so very confidently.

Like, roofers. You get multiple bids on a roof project, it’s like, “Wow, that guy said we had to tear it off, and the other guy said we could just put another layer on. And they were both very sure. And they’re the roof experts, and I’m not. What the heck am I supposed to do here?” And I think that if most of us took the time to solicit multiple perspectives from multiple angles, we would see a lot of that, “Wow, these people are very certain of the exact opposite thing. Well, now I have to do some hard thinking.”

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. And we think of uncertainty as being sort of lost, adrift, etc., some of the metaphors used with uncertainty or lostness and wandering, etc., but it’s a form of exploration. It’s kind of a wonderful way to buy time, in a sense, so that you can explore the possibilities and uncover the complexities that are already there.

You’re not creating complexities when you do a little bit more pondering. You’re actually uncovering what’s already there. And it’s not that it’s an endless kind of pursuit but it has its place, and we haven’t given enough due to being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Maggie, tell me, any final things you want to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Maggie Jackson
No, I think we covered a lot of great ground.

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

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, it’s actually a quote from my book, and there are many but I’ll start the quote, “’I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew.’” That’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher.

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

Maggie Jackson
Well, there are lots. Yeah, I’ll tell one little one. And you probably heard of the candle problem. This was a psychological experiment developed in the 1920s in which people were asked to tack a candle to the wall using just a box of matches, some thumbtacks, and then just the candle. Well, people made a real mess of it, and they tried to melt the candle, glue it to the wall, etc.

Well, the answer lies in making a platform out of the matchbox. But the point of this story is that people only see what an object is meant to do, not what it can do, because they’re so sure that matchboxes are there just to hold the matches. They cannot see any further. And what’s wonderful about this study is that if you take a bunch of five-year-olds and give them a similar study, but without the matches, with toys on a shelf, the five-year-olds don’t have any problem with this. Their knowledge doesn’t get in their way of their problem-solving.

Whereas, at age seven and up, they’re beginning to act like adults. They only see what it’s made to do. They don’t ask what it can do. And that’s a miniature example of the beauty of being unsure. And uncertainty is basically another word for open-mindedness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Maggie Jackson
I would have to say Pride and Prejudice, kind of an old classic but it’s really about two people, Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, whose certainty got in the way of their love. And, finally, when they were a little bit less sure, they were able to get together and understand one another despite their differences. I already loved that book before I became an uncertainty junkie, so to speak. But now I kind of see it through the prism of uncertainty.

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

Maggie Jackson
It definitely has to be just plain old paper pad. I’m completely adoring of the technology of paper. By writing, I don’t write everything in the longhand, but I do drafts of what I work on that I call sketches, literally, because I can draw arrows and make circles out of what it is. It’s all over the map. And I find that, by putting something immediately onto a computer, I’m forcing my thoughts onto the template of another person’s design. And so, I find that the legal pads, I go through so many, and they’ve been a huge help to me in my writing.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Maggie Jackson
Well, in order to get in the focus that I need, there’s a kind of boundary-making, focuses literally a boundary-making, a type of attention that creates boundaries around what you want to be doing, I use alarm clocks and I use distance from my phone. So, if I really have to concentrate, I’ll put my phone on another level of my office, downstairs, basically. If I’m able to take a phone call, it’ll be nearer to me, but it changes how you think, etc. So, I really curate where the phone is.

I also use alarm clocks. So, if I have an appointment in an hour, I’ll put the alarm clock on, and then I don’t have to spend my mental resources thinking about when I have to do this. I then am able to drift off, inhabit the uncertainty, focus on what I need to do, and completely within the new you of what I need to think about.

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

Maggie Jackson
I’d say that the quote from my book that resonates most with people is “Uncertainty is unsettling, and that is its gift.”

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

Maggie Jackson
I would say my website would be a great one to stop and shop. I’m also on Twitter, LinkedIn, but the website is a great resource for my articles, my events, etc., what’s going on with my books.

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

Maggie Jackson
I think that if you realized that at any one moment you might not know, you’ll be giving yourself the power of an open mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maggie, this has been a treat. Well, Maggie, thank you for this. I wish you much fun uncertainty in the years to come.

Maggie Jackson
Thank you, Pete. It’s been a pleasure. You, too.

Oct 26
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910: Mastering the Four Conversations that Transform all Your Interactions with Chuck Wisner

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Chuck Wisner reveals the four universal types of conversation—and shares advice on how to maximize the effectiveness of each.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four universal types of conversations—and why they matter
  2. How to stop your stories from limiting you
  3. The fundamental pattern for better collaboration

About Chuck

Chuck Wisner is president of Wisner Consulting. His client list includes companies such as Google, Rivian, Apple, Tesla, Harvard Business School, Ford, and Chrysler. Wisner was a senior affiliated mediator with the Harvard Mediation Program and was among the first to be certified through the Mastering the Art of Professional Coaching program at the Newfield Institute. He was also a specialist in organizational learning and leadership as an affiliate with MIT’s Center for Organizational Learning.

Resources Mentioned

Chuck Wisner Interview Transcript

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

Chuck Wisner
Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom, hearing some tidbits you’ve collected in your book, The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen, and Interact. But first, I need to hear about you and rock and roll. What’s the story here?

Chuck Wisner
Oh, boy. Well, when I was very young, I think I was very fidgety and probably a bit of ADD, and my mother took me to school when I was seven, and said, “This boy needs drum lessons,” because I was always (finger drum sound) sitting around doing that sort of thing. So, literally, I was trained professionally, classically, as a percussionist from seven years old.

And then I played all through high school. I was in jazz bands, rock and roll bands. I ended up being in the Air Force National Guard Band because I played timpani, and so that was my first career. And to this day, I still play in a rock and roll band, maybe better categorized as a garage band but four or five of us have been playing together for over 30 years, so we have a great, great time together.

Pete Mockaitis
That is impressive. I’m curious, with this rock and roll band or garage band, any noteworthy performances or encounters you had in your gigs and such?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I had fun when I was a lot younger when I was 18, 19 because the rock and roll band I was in, we cut records and we were on national TV, some small little thing in Ohio. But now, the fun that we have is once or twice a year, we invite hundreds of our best friends and we just have a big dance party.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome.

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. So, that’s how we do it now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. That’s fun.

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious to hear your book, The Art of Conscious Conversations. Boy, you talked to a lot of people about this sort of thing and collected a lot of wisdom. I’m curious, any particularly surprising, or extra-fascinating, or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and conversation and being conscious over your years?

Chuck Wisner
Well, there are several important facets that show up everywhere, whether I’m with a family, a couple, a leadership, a team. And the biggest one that often pops up – there’s two – one is authority issues, and we live in hierarchies, whether we like it or not, families have a hierarchy which is just natural hierarchy, and business has a sort of man-structured, man-made hierarchy, and the issues of power just resonate in every conversation from leadership to parenting. And so, that is something we have to pay special attention to.

And the other piece is that we grow up adopting standards. Now standards is a catchall phrase to mean our morals, what’s right or wrong, what we like, what we don’t like, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s fair, what’s unfair, but we grow up adopting standards from our families and our cultures, and believe that they are the truth, or believe that they’re the right thing, and that gets us in a lot of trouble because, often, our quarrels are because, “I think I measure success this way and you should measure success that way.” So, those two are really big.

And then the other big one is the first conversation in my book is the storytelling conversation. And if we just look at the state of the world right now, we live in stories, and like Yuval Harari’s book, A Brief History of Humankind, we evolved learning to tell stories and we adopt stories, and that’s how we create our culture and our society. The trouble is that when we’re attached to our stories, we believe them as the truth and we’ll do anything to defend them. And that’s a very common theme.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that feels like a, I think, big master key to humanity and life itself. Chuck, not to overhype it, but gives us an example of that in practice.

Chuck Wisner
Okay. Well, let’s say in business, I have situations, I have two actually very similar situations from different companies where the legal department and the finance department weren’t even talking to one another, and two departments that probably should be working hand in hand. They had different stories about what was going on in the company, and they were applying different standards to what was going on in the company, and they were so attached to their story that the other side was the enemy.

And it took bringing them into a room, and just putting, deconstructing these stories so that the finance department could see how the legal guys and gals were thinking, and vice versa. And within a couple days of working hard and playing hard together, those stories started to not be held so hard. And I think if we have a story that we really believe in, and that we think is the truth, it’s like having a story, like having a fist, like we’re telling our story, like, “This is the truth. This is the way it has to be.”

So, anyway, in that situation, deconstruct stories, get them to hear each other, and things start changing rapidly, we start building bridges. And not in business life, but in personal life, even with friends, we have stories and we judge people based on our stories. And if we believe our story is the only one, then our criticisms and our judgments really sting, and they hurt us, and they hurt the other person. So, stories abound everywhere and they cause a lot of the friction and stress that we experience.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us an example of an articulation of a story, maybe if it’s not too intricately detailed with the finance and legal, just so we can see how that plays out, like, “Hey, here’s the finance story and here’s the legal story. See how these implications unfold trickly?”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, I can do that and then I would give you a very personal example, too, of how powerful it is, which might resonate a little more. I grew up with a very redneck grandfather in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, and I had three older sisters. And when I showed emotion, or when I didn’t want to skin the deer because I didn’t like it because it made me sick, or when I got hurt and cried, the message that I always got was, “You’re not a big-enough man. Be a bigger man. Stop that.”

Now, that’s not a new story. A lot of men my age have experienced that but what I realized was that story I adopted as a child because my grandfather, to some degree my father, but my grandfather, I gave his voice authority, I gave his voice power so I believe I wasn’t a big-enough man. It wasn’t until I was 30 that I was able to bust that story.

And when I busted that story, it was like such a dramatic change because, up to that point, I was a successful architect, I have a family, but I would walk into a room of men and feel smaller than, or not as competent as, or whatever, however, I’m not a big-enough man would show up. And when I busted that story, it was like transformational.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, that’s when you entered those rooms, you experienced those feelings, which are not pleasant, which I guess, in turn, likely reduced your confidence, your willingness to take risks, take on projects and initiatives. What are some of the other implications of that story going on for you?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I think back then was, whether we know it or not, that kind of self-limiting belief, other people read that so it affects how other people see you and then how other people treat you, and, in turn, the story they know about you. So, it does have an effect where it’s literally how you’re showing up in the world. And you may think you’re hiding it but it’s actually quite obvious to people that are paying attention. They noticed it and that affects our interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how did you break free, bust loose of that story?

Chuck Wisner
All right. Well, I left architecture to study the ontology of language, which is a story of why that happened, but once I was in those studies, inside of there, in the world of philosophy of language and the study of language, there’s a term called master assessments. And so, if you’re looking at, “What master assessments do you have of yourself? Good, bad, ones that serve you, ones that don’t serve you.” This happened to be a master assessment I had in my brain, in my mind, that didn’t serve me.

So, using the ideas around language and the five speech acts in deconstructing language, I was able to sort of take it apart. And when I say deconstruct, it’s like, “Wait a minute. What are the facts here?” Well, I’m six feet tall. I’m happily married, I have two young kids, I’m an architect, and all those facts didn’t line up with the story. And so, as I keep looking into it, and saying, “So, what were the standards that my grandfather was applying?” Well, he was a redneck and that was his story about what a man was, and I happen to be the recipient of that standard that I adopted unconsciously.

And so, that’s what I did. I just sort of took it apart piece by piece until I was, “Aha, this isn’t true. This isn’t who I am.” And the next morning when I went in to have coffee with the president of the firm I was working at, we’re good buddies, it was the first time I was able to stand there, have a coffee, and I said to myself, “Holy mackerel, I am taller than Bill.” And, literally, that was like a moment that I was shocked. I was like, “All this time, I saw myself smaller then.” That’s how sort of like embodied this stuff gets.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. Wow! Okay story. Well, we’ll probably talk more about that but maybe we could zoom out a smidge. In terms of The Art of Conscious Conversations, it sounds like we’ve got one major thread in terms of story there. Could you maybe zoom out and tell us what’s sort of the big idea, main message, core thesis? And what do we mean by a conscious conversation?

Chuck Wisner
The core idea is we grow up learning to converse, talk, listen, interact through our culture, through our family, through our education, and we adopt all the norms from those different domains but we’re never really taught to understand how conversations work with the DNA of conversations. And so, through my work and my consulting and my teaching in the last 30 years, I kept seeing clients’ eyes light up or have aha moments when they realized that their stories weren’t the truth, or they didn’t know how to collaborate, or they were abusing power, or whatever, or they adopted standards that don’t serve them.

And then they would say, “Well, where can I read about this?” And there’s amazing information out there but it’s all scattered. And so, I decided to try to take some esoteric work and some work that’s been done by people like Peter Senge and Fred Kaufman, but I decided to sort of compile it into a book, that said, “Look, here’s the fundamentals of conversations. And instead of being unconscious of how they work, let’s have some distinctions so we can become much more aware and make much better decisions about the conversations we’re in and how we want to participate in them.”

And so, one metaphor I like is, like, fish in water. There’s fish swimming, and this old fish swims by two young fish, and he says to them, “Hey, fellas, how’s the water today?” and they just ignore him and they keep swimming. And they stopped, and one of the young fish says to other, “Hey, what’s water?” And so, it’s like they aren’t even aware they’re in water. We, a lot of the times, aren’t aware that we’re in conversations, or aware or conscious of our words and our interactions, in the way as much as we could be.

So, the book presents some distinctions that says, “Okay, let’s think about it. Let’s have some new ways to look at it and see it and experience it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, when you talked about having an awareness that we’re in a conversation, you have, in fact, segmented the conversations into four universal types. Can you share what those are? We’ll just start there. Can you share, definitionally, what are these four types?

Chuck Wisner
Yes. So, I’ll do a very high level. So, storytelling, and the byline with storytelling is your stories are not the truth. The second conversation is collaboration, and the byline there is seek to understand, and ask questions to understand, and absorb other perspectives. And absorb being the keyword there. The third one is a creative conversation which is about trusting your intuition and learning to balance your left brain and your right brain, and co-create with others.

And the last conversation is commitment conversations. And that conversation is the action conversation. That’s when you and I agree to do a podcast together. That’s when my wife and I agree who’s going to pick up the kids. That’s when a team decides who’s going to lay the strategy for the board meeting. So, that action conversation is everywhere, and we don’t understand it, and we do it in a very sloppy way. Those are the four.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked a bit about storytelling. Is there more you want to say there in terms of how do we get to become consciously aware of our stories and the actual truth?

Chuck Wisner
So, in conversations, we all come to every conversation with a story, with our story about what’s happening, there might be some facts, there might be all of our opinions, it might just be a bunch of assessments or judgments. We, humans, all have patterns of interacting. And I like to use the word patterns because it allows us a little bit to step away from, say, a behavior or a habit that we have, and look at it neutrally, say, “Wow, what’s my pattern around storytelling? What’s my pattern of when I enter a meeting, how I’m telling my story or what energy I’m bringing to that?”

And so, the first thing is becoming aware that your story is not the truth, and then, secondly, how you are presenting yourself and how you’re presenting your stories because we all have patterns around judging, around being perfectionists, around being critical of other people’s ways of doing things. And so, becoming aware means we can have a look, and, instead of maybe a reaction or a pattern of defensiveness, we can change that.

So, I mentioned earlier about a fist. One analogy I like is if we have a story and we believe it’s absolutely true, and it’s a really important topic that we care about, it could be business, it could be out of business, it could be political, it could be not political, but if we believe that we have the answer and we are right, we are basically telling our story with a closed fist. And under every story, there are emotions, and facts, and standards, and power issues, and desires that are really what’s the root of our story.

So, when we can change our fist from closed to open, we can be more humble, more vulnerable, and reveal our thinking under our story. Does that ring?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about standards, in particular. How is a standard articulated in our minds?

Chuck Wisner
So, example, I work with women groups sometimes and, just for fun, and this isn’t anything about dissing women or anything, but, for fun, I would say, “So, how many people in the room, when they leave the house, if the beds aren’t all made, they feel like they’re not a good mom or a good housewife?” And, generally, a large proportion, the majority of people in the room, raise their hands.

And I simply ask, “So, that’s a standard. You have that standard. Where did you adopt that?” So, they adopted that standard from their mother, from their grandmother, from their aunty, or a lesson they learned in school. Who knows? But they adopted that, and I’m not judging that standard, but I’m saying to have the standard, and to investigate it, and to decide consciously, whether you want to keep it or not, is that’s where freedom comes from, that’s where I can say, “You know what? I don’t have to feel bad when I go to work because the beds aren’t made.”

And so, the standards for men, we actually are probably taught not to show our emotions. That, too, is a standard. And so, if we investigate that, we can see the benefits of finding ways to be emotionally intelligent, and to productively and effectively share our emotions. We can shift out of that sort of unconscious standard that we hold that might keep us back.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in the example of the beds not being made, I suppose, can you walk us through a little bit more of the detail of how do we look at it because I imagine that’s not a two-minute operation, “Hey, you know what, that’s silly. The beds don’t need to be made, and I’m still a great mom, huh. Well, I looked at that and that’s now behind me”? I imagine there’s a little bit more depth to it. What’s happening there, Chuck?

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. So, I mean, it can happen like that. There are people that go, “Whoa, that’s a standard I didn’t even know I had,” because, literally, I don’t know, some large number, 90% of our standards, we did not consciously choose. We adopted them from our culture and family. So, it can happen where someone goes, “Whoa, that standard, hmm, I don’t need that.”

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re going to switch overnight because it’s like we’re messing around with neuro networks in our brain, and there’s no switch to make it happen overnight. But, slowly, with awareness, maybe the next time this happens, the woman thinks to herself, “Yeah, I feel a little guilty, but you know what, I’ll make them when I get home.” And then two weeks later, she does it again, she goes, “Oh, screw that. I’m fine.” And three weeks later, she goes, “I’m going to make the beds today because I have time.”

And so, she has a totally different relationship with the standard. She can be conscious of, or choose, when she wants to apply it or not apply it. And I often say every time my clients say, “Well, I don’t want to do this habit,” or, “I want to change that standard,” and I say, “Well, if I had a magic pill and you never did that again, would you pay me $10,000?” And most people say, “Sure,” and I’d be a rich man. But there’s no magic pill.

So, it’s beginning to increase our awareness of what our patterns are, whether it’s standards or some kind of ways that we emotionally react to things, pay attention in a new way, and then begin a process of being consciously choosing how you want to shift that pattern.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really good question there with regard to the magic pill, which reminds me, I’m thinking about the book Feeling Great by David Burns, the sequel to Feeling Good. And they asked a similar question about if I had a magic button where you’d never worry about this again if you press it, usually, often they say, “Well, no, I don’t want to press it. Like, there are times and places in which this reaction, standard, belief, story is a value to me. And just sort of severing it entirely is not ideal.”

And so, that question in and of itself, it kind of segments or puts you down a different fork path of potentially insightful exploration, like, “Huh, there’s just no place for this at all,” versus, “Wow, under these circumstances or with these nuances, it’s great.”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, actually, and that’s being aware of and understanding the underbelly of the standard or the underbelly of the assumption or judgment so you can make a more wise choice about how to apply or how not to apply. There are times when this gets into a little bit of the power issues. At times, you can be in business and someone might say to you, “You did a terrible job.” Depending on the hierarchy, depending on your relationship with that person, you might not give a damn about what they said.

But the next day, someone else with more power, or hierarchy, or higher in the hierarchy, says something, and you trust them and you give their voice a lot of power, you care a lot about what they said. And that, too, is a choice point, but being aware of those differences makes us be able to be much smarter and wise choices.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right, so we talked about story bits. Anything that you really want to make sure to put out there about collaborative conversations and how those can go better?

Chuck Wisner
Yes. Now, if you think about storytelling, that’s the primary because that’s where the book starts, and it’s a good 50 pages at the beginning of the book because we have to start with our own stuff. We have to become more aware of our stories and where we are and how we show up in the world with them. Now, we walk into a room, and there’s two people, you and I, or five people, or a meeting of 10 or 20 people, now we have 20 people, 20 stories around the room, 20 different perspectives around the room.

And when we are entering there with a semi-closed fist, or closed fist, there’s a lot of friction and a lot of stress that’s created because everyone is trying to up the other person. And I think the fundamental pattern that we have is to, we’re educated to have the answer, we raise our hands to have the answer, and get the gold star, but the fundamental pattern is that when we enter into collaboration, or let’s just say we enter into conversations, we’re not even aware whether we’re collaborating or not, we enter conversations, we generally can enter in defensively because we want our answer to be right.

And so, the real art of the collaborative conversation is learning to not give up your position, but hold your position with an open hand and reveal the thinking underneath. Are there power issues? What are the desires you have? What are the concerns you have? What are the standards you’re holding? And when we can be a little more vulnerable and open our hands that way, we are also inviting other people to do the same thing.

So, the collaborative conversation is the art of open advocacy and open inquiry. And open advocacy means open hand. An open inquiry means asking questions that you really want to understand, better understand the other person’s perspective, versus inquiry, where you’re asking questions to prove them wrong so you can be right.

And so, there’s a dance there, and there’s no, “I can’t say do this first, do this second,” there’s a dance with paying attention, and there’s a motion, and there’s body language, and it’s this dance of opening and opening and learning together, I call it mutual learning, where multiple perspectives can surface up. And because of that, there’s space for ideas to bubble up, there’s ways that I can say to you, “Oh, gosh, I never thought of it that way.” So, that changes how I’m thinking about the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if you’re not in the headspace of feeling curious – curious, not being curious – you’re not curious and you do think someone is wrong, do you have any pro tips on how to just do a mental emotional redirect to into a better head space, groove, flow, to have a higher-quality conversation?

Chuck Wisner
Well, let’s say the best place to start is compare, state what you know is to be real, to be true, to be factual, and see if you can find a bridge with the other person about, “This is what happened,” or, “This is what’s happening,” because the facts are the safest ground we have to stand on in a collaborative conversation.

Now, we know from politics that when that ground is shaky, it’s just a freaking nightmare. So, if you can sort of calm yourself to go, “Okay, we don’t agree, and before we actually start sharing our standards and things like that, what are the facts we agree on? We agree that the…” going back to the legal and financing, “…that the company last quarter, the last four quarters had been pretty miserable, and we have to change things, and we have to push our product in a different way, or be more creative.” We agree on the state of things, and that’s a solid ground to work from.

And then, from there, we can start asking questions, like, “Well, how do you think about X? And what you think about the market share?” And so, that inquiry is how we learn what the underbelly of your judgment is or your disagreement is. It’s always going underneath to find out more, to think about your thinking, or to reveal your thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m curious, in the course of having these conversations, are there any favorite or least favorite words or phrases that you think really open up cool things or shut it down real quick?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I think that most of the time, what shuts things down is judgment. So, someone will maybe put something out there, and another person will rise up right away with, “Well, that will never work.” And that’s why I shy away from the term brainstorming because we all know what that means, but the downside of brainstorming is someone comes up with a crazy idea and someone else in the room goes, “Well, we tried that five years ago, it never worked,” and that closes down the conversation.

So, this sort of gets us into the creative conversation because if you and I are in a mutual learning conversation where I’m saying, “Wow, I never thought of it that way,” and we’re sort of coming to a way of having a mutual understanding, what happens is there’s space in that conversation, there’s space in our minds, and ideas start bubbling up. And together, we might come up with, an idea might bubble up that you didn’t think of, or I didn’t think of, independently, and we both go, “Whoa, yeah, that’s the answer. Wow!”

And that’s how the creative conversation functions. It only functions when all parties are willing to be in that open space, open mind, open heart space.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, “We did that last year” is not a great phrase in a creative conversation. Any other phrases you love and phrases you don’t?

Chuck Wisner
So, a phrase that’s really useful is “Help me understand your position. Please help me understand your thinking. What’s your thinking under your thinking?” That’s a very inviting sort of phrase that tells the other person you’re open to not criticizing but to truly understanding. And your other question was what some that aren’t so helpful.

So, the unhelpful are instead of asking questions, to stay in advocacy, what I call closed advocacy, where no matter what they say, your response is, “Yes, but I think…” blah, blah, blah. And so, that’s a closed advocacy where we still can’t undo that need to be right, and so that’s a real trap. And the distinction that I’ve learned from my teachers is the distinction of being a knower versus a learner.

And so, the bad side of the advocacy and inquiry and the collaborative conversation is to be stuck as a knower, and no matter what the other person does, even if they ask you a good question, you don’t want to reveal your thinking, you don’t want to open your hand, you just go, “No, this is the way it is because this is my experience,” and you’re just stuck. You’re sort of like a solid rock.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay. And can you tell us what are mindful agreements and how do we get there?

Chuck Wisner
So, there’s a phrase that I have in the book, a little chapter around commitment conversations, that I called the conversational bypass. And what I mean by that is we have storytelling, and we have commitment conversations. Those are our favorite conversations. We like to tell our stories and we like to take action.

The middle two conversations – collaborative and creative – take more effort, take a little more time, take a change in how we’re showing up, and so what I’d say is because we love our stories, and we’re addicted to action, we leap from storytelling to action, and we do a bypass. So, an example might be we’re in a meeting, there’s a couple people, let’s say, someone saying, “Here’s what we’re trying to solve, here’s the problem,” a couple voices speak up, the loud extrovert speak up, the boss might say what his is, and then someone in the room, or the boss, or someone says, “Okay, what are we going to do?”

And so, we make a leap to action and decision, and often those decisions aren’t as vetted as they could be because we haven’t listened to opposing perspectives, we haven’t taken the time to come up with other possibilities. The creative conversation is about possibilities, what’s possible. And so, that bypass makes us make bad decisions.

A good commitment conversation, a good promise, means both sides understand what’s being asked, what’s being promised, and what success looks like. So, that conversation actually involves every time someone makes a request, we do X, Y, and Z, our tendency, our pattern as a culture is to default to yes. And when we default to yes, we miss, we don’t take the time to get clarity, and go, “Wait a minute. What am I really promising here? What’s the timing? What’s the condition to satisfaction? Who’s it for? What format do you want?” Whatever the questions are, we miss that because we are sort of addicted to, “Sure, no problem. I can do that.”

And an example is someone runs by your desk, and says, “Can you put some numbers together for me for Monday morning?” You say, “Sure.” You and your team spend the weekend putting a 30-page report together. Monday morning, the boss takes it, looks at the back page which is a summary, rips the back page off, “Perfect. This is just what I need for my meeting.” And how many manhours were spent because they didn’t take an extra five minutes to ask the question, “Listen, to help you with your meeting, I really want to understand what you really need.”

And now, with the rip of the last page, the boss goes off happy, unaware that 300 manhours were spent, and they’re all frustrated, and they all now have a story about the boss, and so we’re back to stories. So, we can do commitment conversations, just slow the process down a bit. Any request, make sure you have an understanding of what you’re making a promise.

And the other thing is to avoid the yes. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I can be asked to do something, and maybe I’m not competent to do it, and I have to be willing to say, “You know, I need a week to learn how to do that,” or, “I need help how to do that.” So, there’s all kinds of ways, if we slow down the process, we might discover how we can make them a sloppy promise but a better promise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Chuck, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, I think, for me, this is a practice. I think learning about how conversations work, there’s no switch, there’s no magic pill, but as we look at the distinctions, it gives us a new lens, and be gentle on yourself. Don’t judge yourself. Be curious about, “Well, what is my pattern and how can I change that pattern?” And that change is sort of a slow process. It’s like it might change overnight but it might take you a week, it might take you two weeks. But if you stay paying attention and patient with yourself and nonjudgmental, you can change those patterns.

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

Chuck Wisner
Well, one of my favorite spiritual teachers is Hafiz who was pre-Rumi. And I love this quote, he says, “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”

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

Chuck Wisner
Right now, I’m liking neuroscience, and I’m not a neuroscientist, so I don’t go too deeply, but I think we’re just on the brink of learning how the brain works and how the chemicals interact and the electrical impulses, this incredible complex set of neurons, billions of neurons. And I think what it’s doing is giving us a window into why we humans act the way we do, which takes a little bit of the sting out on some of our habits so we can look at them more neutrally and with a little more compassion.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite book?

Chuck Wisner
It’s a few years old but I love Yuval Harari’s book called Sapiens. And I like it because he tells a different story about humans, how we evolved, and how our brains and our thinking evolved. Again, it’s a fresh look at how mythology got created in concert with how our brains developed, and so we learned to tell myths so we can have bigger societies, and then we attach ourselves to those myths. Even money is a story, and law is a story. And so, it’s a way of looking at the world so we aren’t so attached to our particular perspective but we learn a little more tolerance. And the world could use a fair amount of that right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you elaborate on how money and law is a story? Because I think, to many, they think, “Well, those things are just ironclad.”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. Well, over time, money has evolved from a point where at some time in history, shells could be a form of trade. And metals, or precious metals, even tulips, at one point, were the trade for the way that we did trade, and what had value. And so, money is a story because we all agree that this piece of paper has value. The piece of paper is nothing. The value and the power only is in our agreement of its value. And that agreement is a story that we all adopt and live by.

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

Chuck Wisner
Well, I say meditation is a really important tool for self-awareness and learning to understand our minds. And, at my age, yoga is really important, so I think mental and physical things like that, that help keep us awake and aware and able, are really important things to pay attention to.

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

Chuck Wisner
I think the visual in my book of a spiral, it’s like V-shaped and think of a funnel like you put a quarter in a funnel at a museum of science. And by the time the quarter gets to the bottom, it’s spinning so fast you don’t recognize it as a quarter. I use that visual to help people understand that when something triggers them, emotional trigger, an upsetting event, that, generally, what we do is we spiral down, and it’s usually fear-based. There’s some fear we have that has us spiraling down. And the opposite of fear is love at the top.

And I bring that up because that visual helps people, when they do catch themselves triggered or spiraling, they go, “Okay, where am I on the funnel?” And that stops the spin, and then we can do some investigation into our thinking and into our emotions, and stop spiraling down, and maybe move ourselves up through that awareness.

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

Chuck Wisner
My website is ChuckWisner.com. I believe they can download a free PDF of the introduction. My Instagram, chuck_wisner, and LinkedIn, and I think Facebook is the same.

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

Chuck Wisner
Yes. I’d say investigate your thinking, be kind to yourself, be tolerant, try to be less judgmental, and really practice opening your hand so you can have an open hand and an open heart, and also being aware that you have to protect yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chuck, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many lovely conscious conversations.

Chuck Wisner
Same to you. Hope it resonates.