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Oct 05
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904: How to Gain Trust and Insight by Asking Better Questions with Mark Balasa

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Mark Balasa shares the most important lessons learned on trust from his celebrated career in asset management.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to build trust with anyone
  2. How trying to sound smart can hurt you
  3. The most important question to ask in any meeting

About Mark

Mark is the former founder and CIO of Balasa Dinverno & Foltz LLC, a wealth management firm.

Mark has been a featured speaker on investment and technology topics with organizations such as Morningstar, the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Charles Schwab & Co., and Standard & Poor’s. He has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron’s, Smart Money, and BusinessWeek.

Mark has been recognized as one of the top wealth managers in the country by organizations such as Robb Report Worth magazine, Medical Economics and Bloomberg. He previously sat on Blackrock’s RIA Advisory Board, J.P. Morgan’s RIA advisory board, PIMCO’s advisory panel for RIAs, the advisory board for State Street Global Advisors, and the technology board for Charles Schwab & Co. Mark has written for INC. magazine website and publications for CCH.

Resources Mentioned

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Mark Balasa Interview Transcript

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

Mark Balasa
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to dig into your life and career and the wisdom to be gleaned from it but, first, I want to hear a little bit about when you grew up, you were in a town of 300 folks. Tell us what was that like?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, it’s funny. Looking back, it was such a small town. Of course, when you were growing up, you don’t know that. That’s just normal. So, when we went to the nearby large town of 7,000 to go to school and shop and everything else, but it was awesome. You knew everybody, everybody knew you, very relaxed. It was a great spot to grow up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now was there anything odd that, I guess, you later learned was odd about the experience of being in such a small town that came to light?

Mark Balasa
What struck me, as I came to Chicago to start my career, was how unusual that was in many ways. Because you knew everybody, there was, of course, good and bad. They knew all your business, you knew theirs, but for the most part, it was very positive. And going into a much larger city and into a working environment, where you had to learn the ropes about how to trust people, how to navigate relationships that you didn’t grow up with them, because it was so intimate in such a small town, so that was a period of adjustment, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It’s sort of, like, “Huh, this is different. I know nothing about you, and you, and you, and you.”

Mark Balasa
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to youth. Okay. Well, I’m so excited to dig into… you’ve had just an impressive interesting career, and we’ve had a number of really delightful exchanges and conversations, so I think that we have a lot to learn from you. And I want to hear maybe just the four-minute version so we can get a little bit oriented. Can we hear a bit about your journey from founding your asset management company to exiting it, and then we’re going to dig in a whole lot more from there?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Again, the four-minute version of this is I was in the financial industry, I found that very boring, so I went back to get additional schooling in credentials, etc. I always thought it fascinating to be able to work with somebody about what’s really important to them, and finance, of course, checks that box pretty well.

So, I started a firm inside of an accounting firm and left that, went and started a wealth management firm and I brought in partners as I went along. For me, the journey was fascinating, Pete. The opportunity to help people, to get to be, in many cases, friends with them, to know their families and get paid for it at the same time, it was a dream career.

I loved getting up every day going to work. I love growing the firm. There was lots of challenges. Of course, there is in any business but it was so rewarding. We had people that were clients for 30 years. Some, of course, were just started just as I was leaving, and everything in between. But it was the relationships and the ability to help people that made it so rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, tell me a little bit about the decision to sell or exit as well.

Mark Balasa
We became victims of our own success, in a way, and, of course, it’s a first-world problem but, as the firm went along, Mike, and Armand, and I were the three founding partners, and we wanted to bring in additional talent to grow the business. So, a really important way to do that was to give ownership. Not give, I should say, but to provide ownership, which they had to pay for.

So, as the firm continued to grow, and we got leverage, if you will, in terms of our asset growth and so forth, the revenue and the profitability was quite high. And so, what happened is the ownership interest became very high and very expensive. And so, what in the beginning was kind of a manageable debt load for a young person to buy in became very expensive, and it got to the point, actually, it was borderline not doable.

So, we looked out into the future, we said, “Gosh, it’s going to take probably another 12 years, maybe 15 years, to transition the firm internally,” and I was 60 at the point, “And do we want to work that many years?” And the answer was no. And so, we decided to look to the outside. I would tell you that, over the course of the firm’s trajectory, I would say three, four times a year for the last 20 years, we had people approached us to buy us.

So, we know that there was an interest. We always deflected that because we have the opinion that we wanted to have our own control, grow at the pace we wanted to grow, etc. And so, in making this decision, we knew it would be a big one because we’d be bringing an outside capital, in the end, actually, ownership but the reason for doing it was the ability to transition internally and transfer the firm got too expensive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a victim of your own success, yes, well, I guess that’s what I wanted to establish here because you are a kind, humble, generous man, but you said the revenue and profitability became quite high. I’ll say it for you, it seems like you guys were crushing it in terms of you were growing well, more and more folks were entrusting their assets to you, you were named seven times one of the best financial advisors in the US by the magazine that report such things.

And, yes, as I’ve interacted with you, I have also been just impressed by your way. And so, I kind of want to dig into the underlying skills or mindsets associated with your success. First of all, is it fair to say, your success as a company was not due to the fact that you generated massively superior returns relative to all of your competitors? Is that a fair statement?

Mark Balasa
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I imagine there’s something else going on there because that would be kind of obvious, “Oh, hey, Balasa’s company makes the most money. Let’s just go over there.” There were some other factors that were driving this success and growth. And what do you think some of them were?

Mark Balasa
That’s a great point. Each industry has its nuances, Pete, and ours, returns from an organization are like a state secret. Unless you’re a public mutual fund or a hedge fund that we have to report some of this stuff, it’s almost impossible to get people’s returns. And so, I can talk about our returns relative to peer groups, if you want to do that later, and then we were very proud of them.

But you’re absolutely right, when people come in to hire someone like us, you don’t do it based on returns. I would calmly tell them the criteria for a high net worth individual to hire someone like us is as follows. Number one, do you trust them? That’s a gut instinct. The second is, what is their background, if you will, academic and so forth?

Number three, what’s their scope of services? Number four, who’s the team I’m going to work with? Number five was fees. And number six was returns or vice versa. The last two were fees and returns. So, the thought process of hiring was not based on returns.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about trust. There’s something that I think all of us would love to exude, to have a vibe such that folks want to trust us to buy into our ideas, our proposals, or what we’re after. And, in some ways, that feels kind of intangible. I think some people just give you a vibe that you’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that guy.” And others, like, “Yes, I really like and trust them.” What, Mark, do you think is behind this in terms of you and your team that made you come across as trustworthy?

Mark Balasa
I’ll answer that in two different ways. First, structurally, our firm collected a fee for the services provided. We got no compensation from any other source. Not selling any products, not giving information, literally nothing, so we had no other objective other than serving our clients. In other parts of the financial world, there is that conflict where you’re being sold a product that has a commission or some other incentive for the person to sell it. We didn’t have that.

So, structurally, us and firms like ours, had that to help, if you will, as the foundation. But to answer your question a different way, for me, it’s trying to not sell in the sense of, “Look how good we are,” but, “Let me sit down and ask you, what’s important to you? What do you struggle with? What are your problems? And can we solve them?” And being honest about whether or not we can solve them. So, if we can’t, then say that, “You’d be better served over here,” or, “This is what we can do in terms of what you’re struggling with. This, we can do, we can do very well.”

So, it was, frankly, something I never learned in school but in the real life, which is how important it is to ask good questions, and how important it is to listen. Those skills are unbelievably important to me to build trust in the sense of solving a problem and not selling something.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. Well, Mark, I was hoping you’ll bring this up or I was going to foist it upon you because that’s what exactly what I’ve observed as we’ve had interactions. And, in some ways, I think it could be rather easy to become sort of prideful or arrogant or to think you know a lot. But in our conversations, I know you’ve experienced much more success and experience in terms of financially and scope over the course of running your business and career.

But when we’re having conversations in the world about media, podcasting, etc., you are full of questions and listening well, and not cutting me off. And I really do feel like I am the expert, you are the pupil, and it’s kind of fun, it’s like, wow, you can teach me so much. But here you are, you’re in a learner mode and it’s just great to be on the receiving end of that. And I imagine your teammates probably felt likewise over the course of your career journey. Have you heard feedback along those lines?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, very much. Thank you for those kind comments. I would give you an example to illustrate the point. So, for a number of years, we did recruiting on college campuses for new team members. We eventually gave up on that. We only wanted people with two- or three-years’ worth of experience. But whether it was someone with two or three years of experience, but certainly, for sure, someone coming out of college.

They would come in and they would have a lot of background, let’s say, on investment or taxes or estate, whatever, and then we would give them additional learning. So, let’s say two years in, they’re now going to present to a client on some specific topic. They tended to come in with, in their mind, a prepared avalanche of information and data.

And what you had to encourage them on was, “Look, a couple things. One is they really don’t care what you know until they know you care.” You hear that a lot but it’s so true. The person doesn’t think that you’re there for their self-interest. They don’t really care how much you know. Number two, you’ve got to learn to modulate that. So, things I used to talk to our new team members was, “Look, on a scale of one to ten, if you know a lot about the subject matter, and one means you know very little.”

A client comes in, an interior professional so you know ten, or whatever the subject matter is. A client comes in and, in my case, let’s say it’s investments, and it’s a widow, and she’s on a three on a scale of one to ten. Well, then you need to talk at a level of four, just ahead of where she’s at but not over her head, not jargon, not tons of data but more stories to give her the point and the comfort to take her and educate her to where you need to go.

By comparison, if you’ve got a CEO from a company in Chicago coming in, and he’s a nine, well, then strap on, go to ten, and get data and give concepts, and give hard-charging data. In other words, you have to modulate with who you’re in front of to help them bring them along. To come back to your point about how do you build trust, and how do you communicate well, it’s doing two things. Being aware of who you’re in front of, and being good at what your subject matter is.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that really resonates. As I’m thinking about conversations I’ve had, if someone is dropping lots of complicated stuff on me, way over my head, I never really walk away thinking, “Wow, they’re so knowledgeable. I felt clueless. I should really go with them.” I think, “Hmm, this guy probably knows a lot because I wasn’t understanding it, but they could also be a con man. They could just be making up these things I don’t actually know.” So, that doesn’t give me a great impression even when they do know a lot, and they’re sharing a lot to prove that they know a lot.

Mark Balasa
That’s very true. And I’ll give you a nuanced example of that. Almost always, when a husband and wife came in, they were on a different spot on a scale of one to ten, so you had to adjust your presentation, the questions you ask, and how you presented it, to both audiences at the same time, especially the wife, which is stereotypical but, unfortunately, it’s true.

They’d have less knowledge about taxes and investments, and so forth. Most of them didn’t have an interest in it. If they felt that they couldn’t understand or follow you, and they left the meeting, that was not good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no.

Mark Balasa
No, no, because the husband and wife are going to make decisions in the car on their ride home, and she says, “I have no idea what that clown was talking about.” That doesn’t help your cause, so you’ve got to learn to do both at the same time without being disrespectful or condescending to either party.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share a little bit about how you, if you are, I don’t know if I want to use the phrase dumbing it down, but let’s say you have a ten-level knowledge, you’ve ascertained that the person you’re speaking with has a three-level knowledge, so you’re aiming to be a four. When you are doing that, how do you do that in a way that doesn’t come across as patronizing, or like, “Well, listen up, little lady, let me simplify this to you. Mommy and daddy have a lemonade stand…”? How do you do that skillfully without coming across as patronizing?

Mark Balasa
You have to do both. You have to talk intellectual, high-level, for the one that’s a nine or ten, and give data or numbers, but then give stories, give examples, or say, “Out of that, tell me what you heard.” Let them play that back, “I heard nothing or I had these two bits.” “Great. Here’s the other thing I’m trying to explain.”

And many times, not always, many times the husband or the wife, vice versa, will step in, and say, “Here’s what he means. Here’s what they’re trying to say.” And, of course, almost all of them appreciate that because you’re trying to meet them where they’re at. And so, it’s more of a conversation at that point, which is what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now I want to talk a bit about asking good questions and listening. When you were in the process of having a conversation, and attempting to do just that, how do you do that? What is your mental process by which you are generating good questions and listening well?

Mark Balasa
You bet. Some of it, of course, is just practice makes perfect. But in terms of how to approach it, I always took it from the perspective of, “If I was in their shoes, what would I want to know?” I’ll give you an example. One of the reasons I came into this business to begin with was when I got out of college, I was studying for the CPA exam, and a buddy of mine that I was growing up with from northern Michigan, lived in Chicago, he came to sell me insurance, and he asked me a bunch of stuff. Here I was, I’m 22 years old, he’s selling me life insurance, “Okay, I’m not sure I need it.”

But he’s asking me all these stuff in the sales process, I think, “Well, I don’t know.” So, I remember going to the library, back in the day when people went to the library, there was no internet, and trying to find an answer to how to buy life insurance, and I could not find it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. And so, I told myself, “Well, gosh, if I can’t find it, there’s got to be other people that are confused by this sort of thing.” And that’s literally part of the reason I went into this business.

So, I try to put myself in their shoes, their age, their gender, if they’ve got kids, if they’ve got a mortgage, they like their job, they don’t like their job, all that stuff. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “What’s important to them? Why are they here?” And so, I would try to build the questions off of this specific scenario, but there are some standard ones that you could certainly start with.

So, for example, “What does success mean to you? If we were here together a year from now, and you’re with us, and you look back, what would you say, ‘Gosh, this was a homerun for us to work with your firm’?” I would ask that question. Another one I would ask questions about is what is their experience around money or taxes or estate. Those are generic. Several don’t apply, frankly, but you get the idea. There’s a handful of standard questions to get things started.

But, almost invariably, when you ask a couple of things, especially around, “When do you want to retire?” Oh, my gosh, is that loaded. All kinds of stuff would come out of that. So, I just gave you a bunch of openings to start to ask questions about, “Why did you say that? What do you mean by that?” So, I can give you examples but that was kind of the general premise.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you’re in other contexts and generating good questions and listening, how do you think about that? So, in the world of asset management, you are asking questions to gain an understanding of their situation to tailor what you’re going to share and to see if you’re a sensible fit. When you’re in learner mode, it’s a little bit of a different process of generating questions. How do you play the game in that context?

Mark Balasa
For me, part of the answer to that question is I try to think to the end, “What am I trying to accomplish? What do I need to understand better?” And I try to take it back from there. So, in the example, let’s take, I’m starting to do more in the social media world, which I don’t know much about, so there’s infinite ways for me to learn.

So, I try to say, “Okay, why do I need to know how Instagram works? Why does someone who views it, what do they get from it? If I’m a sponsor and I’m going to monetize Instagram in some way, how does that work? Why does it work that way?” So, in other words, I start at the end and I come back, as best I can, and try to say, “What do I need to understand to get to that point?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I still don’t think I understand Instagram, Mark. So, okay, kudos. All right. So, we start at the end, and so then we ask the questions that drive us there. Do you have any favorite master questions that you find you use again and again as you’re trying to get the lay of the land and understand the situation?

Mark Balasa
Yeah, I hope I can think of examples. So, let’s say we’re going to look at a brand-new piece of software, and then maybe we can take other examples, Pete, if you like. But I don’t know anything about the software so I would start with the salesperson on the phone, “Tell me about you a little bit. Great. Tell me about your company. How many employees? How much revenue? How long have you been in business? Can I talk to some of your referrals as a client, a client referral? Tell me who your chief competitors are?”

So, it’s a series of things to understand more about their business, nothing to do with their software yet. Because if those things don’t check out, I don’t really care about your software, frankly. I want to know that that’s a stable business, if you will, before I’m going to proceed further.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I’ve made that mistake by not asking those questions, because, a lot of times, when it comes to someone who’s very eager to give me a software demo, the answer is, “It is a super cutting-edge hip startup who has revenue and profit that is minimal, that existed for less than a year,” and I’m sort of there to help them learn how things work. In a way, that’s okay. That’s sort of fun. That’s sort of how things can get created, it’s sort of a two-way street.

But you’re right. To the notion of, “Do I want to invest myself in this software?” that becomes important because, like, “Oh, shoot. There’s a high risk it won’t be around in a year or two.” And then it’s like, “Well, now what? I guess I’ve got to go find another one to solve the problem I was trying to solve.”

Mark Balasa
Yeah, and that came true just making some mistakes for our firm with technology over time. I did exactly what you said. I remember we had a CRM early on, it was neat stuff but the company wasn’t viable, and so we had to convert a year later because they were out of business.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, CRM conversions, not pleasant. Okay. So, lovely. And now when it comes to the listening, how do you ensure that you are really tuned in and getting the goods?

Mark Balasa
That was one of the hardest things, frankly, to mentor and train new people on, was the ability to just be still and listen. And I mean not just thinking about what you’re going to do tonight after dinner, but listening. And, for me, some of that comes back to inside of you. It takes humility, it takes patience. Some people, depending on personality, it takes perseverance. But, in my view, it’s critical.

How many sales presentations have you been in? I’ll give you an example. So, we went to update our website a couple times in the last 10 years in our firm. Both times we put out an RFP, and you would have these three or four firms coming in, all kind of preselected, certainly know what they were doing. But you would watch the sales process, it was so fascinating. You’d have one group come in, they came in actually from New York, flew in, it was an hour meeting. They spent 55 minutes with their deck. They never even asked our name, and it was just this long trudging page-by-page process of just listening to what they had to say.

By contrast, if you start a sales meeting, or actually even a regular meeting, by saying, “What’s important? Why are we here? Let me ask you some questions. What’s your biggest pain point?” Even though you’ve already prepared a deck, I would always start with saying, “What questions do you have first?” Because if they asked a question, they come out and then frame something they’re struggling with, even though you’ve had two sales pre-calls, if you will, sometimes that’s with different people, sometimes it’s with them, invariably if you ask them that question, they tell you where they want to go.

And so, one of the hardest things in telling and training a new team member for us was they’d be very prepared for the meeting, the sales meeting. They’d have a 10-page deck and all kinds of data to back that up if we needed it, and their inclination is to present that, and we would always say, “No, no, don’t do that. Because out of those 10 pages, you probably need a page and a half. You just don’t know which page and a half it is. You have to start with what’s important to them, and then come back and use the pages that represents or makes that point.”

My favorite way to listen and to engage someone is with the whiteboard. Because when you present something that’s written, on a PowerPoint or whatever, it’s kind of pre-canned, and people kind of almost automatically kind of turn off a little bit, especially after four or five pages, they do. By contrast, if you’re on a whiteboard, and you ask me a question, and I draw a picture, and I write words, and draw numbers and designs, you’re engaged the whole time because I’m building and it’s custom. It’s a reaction to what you just asked me. It’s not pre-canned.

And so part, to me, the importance of listening is you can do that in person, real time, you ask me a question, here’s an answer based on all my experience, my network, and my training specifically about something you asked, as opposed to, “Turn to page seven now, and we’re going to go through these six bullet points next.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, very different energy. Very different feel there. Absolutely. All right. Well, Mark, tell me, anything else about listening, questions, engaging people, relationships, you want to make sure to mention?

Mark Balasa
I think those have been a good series of questions, Pete, no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now since you happen to have a towering expertise in money, let us know, as professionals who have an interest in their money, are there any top things that people tend to get wrong as they’re thinking about money or managing their money that you’ve sort of seen as a pattern over and over and over again?

Mark Balasa
There’s lots of ways to answer that question. I’ll pick two. On the actual specifics, expenses are really important when it comes to money and investing. You want to try to minimize costs. That’s universal. Morningstar’s done two studies over the last 20 years about bond returns. And so, there’s, pick a number, 2500 bond, mutual funds in the United States. The difference between the top tier and the bottom tier, the number one difference is their expense ratio. It’s not how clever the manager is, it’s not how the duration of the bonds, it’s not the quality of the bonds. It’s their expense ratio.

Because the bond returns are so narrow that if someone is charging you 1% to manage your money as opposed to 0.2 of a percent, that’s a 0.8 of a percent immediate benefit to you, that’s a huge difference in terms of collective return on the bond side. So, expenses are always important. Taxes, always important. So, when you’re investing, what’s your after-tax return, not so much your growth return? So, if you have a high turnover, you’re constantly selling and buying, you’re going to pay a lot of capital gains, short term, in particular, capital gains, that really eats away at your return.

So, there’s a couple of examples of universally always true things on the investing side. Let me answer your question a different way, and this is behavioral finance. Are you familiar with behavioral finance, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m thinking Richard Thaler comes to mind, Nudge.

Mark Balasa
Yup. Yup, exactly, Nudge. That’s exactly right. Daniel Kahneman is another one. They both won Nobel Prizes for their work in behavioral finance. For your listeners, it’s a field of study that tries to look at mistakes that human beings make when we’re dealing with finances just because of the way our brain is wired, and they’re called heuristics. I’ll give you just a couple of examples.

Human beings as a species are overconfident. Now, that helps us in many ways. So, when you go to start a new job, you’re going to get married, go to college, you’re really not sure what you’re up against, but, “I can do this, by God. Here I go.” And that’s awesome for us. But when it comes to finance, overconfidence is not an advantage.

We think we know more than we do. So, if you have a stock, you work in a company, you think you know all about it, well, really, you don’t. And so, helping people against some of these heuristics, overconfidence, loss aversion, framing, anchoring, all of those things play tricks on how we make our decisions. I’ll give you an example, loss aversion. This is one of the chief things that you have to deal with when people are investing their money.

When a human being sees a loss, it’s very different than when a human being sees a gain, and that bleeds into their decision-making. Thaler has done this one, a great example. He’s got a room full of participants.

And he says, “I’m going to flip a coin. And if it’s a head, I’ll give you $1500. If it’s a tail, you give me 1000. How many of you want to take the bet?” Like, no hands go up. Well, mathematically that makes no sense because the 50/50 bet and you get an extra $500 if you win. No, human beings don’t like that chance that they could lose.

How about 2000 to a 1000? “No, I don’t know.” Twenty-five hundred to a thousand? No hands started going up. That was his way of quantifying that for a human being, a 10% gain is one unit of pleasure, a 10% loss is two and a half units of displeasure. And so, think about your portfolio. What people do then, psychologically, is they hold on to their losers because they don’t want to recognize the loss, and they’ll get rid of their gains because it feels fabulous to say, “I sold a stock when it doubled.” So, that’s not a good recipe, selling your winners and holding onto your losers.

And I can’t tell you how many times people come in, we’d go through the portfolio, and we say, “Okay, we should get rid of these six types.” “Well, no, I can’t. I’m underwater on those. We have to wait till they come back.” That makes no sense.

So, behavioral finance is a really rich area for people in terms of how they can check themselves. One of the things you can do there is encourage everybody, and it’s maybe too pedestrian, but to be a long-term investor, and it’s easiest to do many times with exchange-traded funds or mutual funds as opposed to individual stocks because you don’t see all the moving parts. It’s easier to stay the course.

But in periods of like 2008 and during the pandemic when we got big drops, oh, my gosh, is that hard. I was at a meeting in Chicago, and there was a person who sat on the board for an endowment for one of the prominent universities here in Chicago, PhD in Finance, runs an enormous firm. So, he’s on the investment committee for this university in Chicago for their billions of dollars of endowment.

2008 hits, and you know how bad that was, right? One month led to the second month, led to the fifth month. It’s like its sixth month, constant grubbing of the portfolio. Portfolio has easily lost in the stocks at 50% of their value. So, here’s this sophisticated university, with world-renowned people on the board, including this gentleman, and the investment committee came in about five months into this, said, “We’re going to sell a bunch of the stocks.” “No, no, no, don’t do that. We’re probably near the bottom. We don’t know. We’re probably near the bottom. No, we can’t.”

“As a fiduciary, we have to stop the bleeding.” “No, no, you can’t.” “Oh, yeah, we have to.” And they did. About two months, maybe 30 to 60 days before it bottomed, it went up. And when it goes up, it goes up disproportionately quickly in the beginning. And so, the psychology there is, like, “Yeah, I missed the first 30% back. I got to wait till it drops again.” It’s all bad.

So, to come back to your question, what are some things, as an investor, you should know? Taxes matter. Costs matter. Diversification matters, I didn’t touch on that. And on the behavioral side, coming up with checks and balances so that you don’t get greedy, and that you don’t get frightened.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, so now you have sort of turned over a new chapter in your life and career. You have towering knowledge in asset management, and now you’re in media. What’s the story here, Mark?

Mark Balasa
You bet. As we sold the firm, I wanted to do three things, Pete. I wanted to try to work with my family, so I’ve got some family members involved in the new business. I wanted to do something, not to give back some of my money, but also my time. And the third thing is I wanted to do something faith-based. And so, our new venture does those things.

And so, I’m a complete novice at this world, but the people I’m working with are much more experienced, so I hope I’m bringing some of my experience to the table to help us reach a younger audience with things that are impactful for them, for their lives, and for their families.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you give an example of something that you’re putting out there that’s impacting folks?

Mark Balasa
We recently just started a podcast about a month ago, it’s called Is THIS for Kids? And it’s two young parents, Jonathan Blevin and Katie Ruvi, who review each week something in terms of a movie, a song, a video game, or TV show through the lens of, “Is this good for your kids?” And they’re not telling you whether or not if it’s good for your kids, but they’re telling you things you should be aware of, especially with things a lot of parents don’t have time to review, like video games or music, “Are those lyrics, are they okay? That video game, is that too violent? Is it too much sexual content?”

You, as a parent, can decide but we want to tell you, “Here’s what you should be aware of.” So, it’s an attempt to help busy, young parents, with the avalanche of stuff that’s available to their children, about how to navigate that world. So, that’s a specific example of how we’re trying to bring to the market with something that hopefully is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And I’ve watched “Is THIS for Kids?” and I actually really love it because I am a semi-young, approaching 40 parent, and it’s not just a couple of prudes, like, “Oh, dear, dear, I was so repulsed by this egregiously inappropriate whatever.” It’s sort of like, “Well, hey, in Barbie, there was a masturbation joke, and it was kind of an eye-roll but I actually didn’t think Barbie was that fun anyway.”

And then just, generally, sharing, “Hey, these are my thoughts, these are my observations, this is my best guess for what age it’ll probably be fine,” and it shows that two good parents – I assume they’re good parents, they come across as good parents, Mark – can come up with different interpretations and conclusions of something, and have a lot more fun and laughs and nuance than, “Oh, no, they said the F word two times, so, therefore, this is immediately banned.”

So, I think it’s really cool. So, good job.

Mark Balasa
I appreciate that. And I’ll just tell you, one of the first things that struck me about the point you just made about the interplay between the two of them, because they don’t agree on many things, so Jonathan tells Katie that she’s getting older, and Katie says, “Well, I’m like a fine wine. Jonathan, you’re more like a sippy cup under the couch.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s a nice chemistry in that they seem to genuinely like and care about each other, but they do not mind to razz. Okay. So, that’s a very different thing, “Is THIS for Kids?” and faith-based media stuff. So, tell me, how have you used these skills associated with listening and good questions as you do something totally different?

Mark Balasa
Well, what I’m trying to do is, as you just said, you assemble those skills that I’ve acquired in my other business into this and help the team learn how to do sales presentation, how to do an interview, how to work with a new vendor, kind of some of those universally needed skills, if you will, regardless of what the actual business is, whether it’s a service or a product, and trying to bring that to them, so that’s hopefully my contribution.

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

Mark Balasa
I think that’s it. Thank you.

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

Mark Balasa
I thought about that, it’s a great question. I’m not sure if I can attribute this to Winston Churchill but I remember reading it in context of him. I’m a real big World War 2 aficionado. And he said to some of his military leaders during the war, he said that, “Authority is taken, not given.” So many times, when a young person would be in our firm, they’d say, “Well, how do I become an owner? And how do I get to lead a team?”

It’s one of those tricky things. You don’t really have a checklist, right? You know it when you could see it but I would always tell, “Look, you have to essentially take the authority because no one is going to step up and say…” Well, I shouldn’t say no one. It’s less likely someone is going to tell you, “You should go do it,” as opposed to stepping up and take it.

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

Mark Balasa
Going back to behavioral finance, I love that stuff. I would use it with our clients all the time. In many cases, I would tell them if I’m using it so they would see the folly of their own decision-making, and that area is ripe with so much interesting research. Like you said, Richard Thaler with Nudge, he did another one recently. What was it? Misbehaving. Daniel Kahneman has got a great book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That’s actually one of my favorites. But there’s so much stuff in there that’s not applicable just to finance. It’s applicable to running a meeting, to how to interact with people. I think it’s just a really helpful thing for anybody’s career.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Mark Balasa
I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. And so, two of his books are actually a required reading at our old firm. We’re doing it at the new firm as well, which is how to be an ideal team player, be humble, hungry, and smart, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good stuff. Pat was on the show. It’s so good.

Mark Balasa
Very nice.

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

Mark Balasa
This is a boring one. As bad as it’s going to sound, Excel. I just use it. Even my to-do list, as something as simple as that, I just found it indispensable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, now I got to ask. A to-do list in Excel, are you putting some numbers or quantification on some of the columns? Or, how does Excel enhance a to-do list?

Mark Balasa
It doesn’t. It’s just easy. It’s a great question. I’m not that sophisticated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I thought you’re like, “Approximate hours required to complete this task.” All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Balasa
Favorite habit for me is probably reading, if I can answer that broadly. Whether it’s for your own benefit, for your own edification, for your professional development, I know media is voraciously consumed by the younger generation, but maybe it’s just me and my generation, but I don’t retain things as well when I watch them as opposed to when I read. And so, for me, reading is critical on all fronts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget that you’ve shared with colleagues that people associate with you or they quote back to you often, a Mark original?

One of the things I almost always would ask at the end is, “Is there anything else I should be asking?” And so, I would get teased for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have asked me that, and I asked that myself, so it’s a good one. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mark Balasa
BVM Studio. Right now, we just have a landing page. We’ll have more to come but that’s an easy way to reach out.

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

Mark Balasa
For me, as I look back over my career, the things that stick out is this. The world is a hard place, and an act of kindness, a sincere effort to help someone is always recognized and it’s almost always rewarded.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with BDM Studios and all you’re up to.

Mark Balasa
Thank you very much, Pete. It’s great to spend some time with you.

Oct 02
0

903: How to Save Time Using ChatGPT at Work with Donna McGeorge

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Donna McGeorge provides practical examples of how to use ChatGPT to get work done faster and easier.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get started with ChatGPT
  2. What ChatGPT does better and worse than a human
  3. Tricks and prompts to get the most out of ChatGPT

About Donna

Donna McGeorge is a passionate productivity coach with modern time management strategies designed to enhance the time we spend in our workplace.

With more than 20 years of experience working with managers and leaders throughout Australia and Asia-Pacific, Donna delivers practical skills, training, workshops, and facilitation to corporations—such as Nissan Motor Company, Jetstar, Medibank Private, and Ford Motor Company—so they learn to manage their people well and produce great performance and results.

As a captivating, upbeat, and engaging resource on time management and productivity, Donna has been featured on The Today Show, on radio interviews across Australia, and has written for publications including The Age, Boss Magazine, Smart Company, B&T Magazine, and HRM.

Resources Mentioned

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Donna McGeorge Interview Transcript

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

Donna McGeorge
Thanks for having me, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to be chatting with you about ChatGPT. It’s overdue, frankly, that we have an episode dedicated to this. And, Donna, you just happen to be an expert, and we already love you, so I’m stoked to be chatting again.

Donna McGeorge
Oh, look, it’s not as overdue as you think. I’m quite surprised at how I thought ChatGPT would be taken up by millions, well, it has, but it’d be over the place by now, but it’s been a little slower than I thought.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I just saw some research from Pew, and this was maybe in July, so it’s probably a little higher by now, that in the US, about 60-ish percent of people had heard of ChatGPT, and of those who had heard of it, who have college degrees, which is most of our listeners in the US, about 32% of folks had used it. Does that sound about right from what you’ve seen in your research as well?

Donna McGeorge
Yeah. And so, my research is mostly standing in a conference and asking people to raise their hand. And so, when I’ve got a room full of people, and I say, “How many of you have heard of it?” It’s the same, it’s around 60-70% of hands up. And then, “Keep your hand up if you’ve actually used it or you are using it?” and the hands dropped considerably.

And then I’d say, “Now, who’s loving it and using it pretty much for their everyday world?” and then the hands dropped again in terms of using it consistently. But, again, that’s pretty anecdotal just from watching crowds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, it’s just good to get a fresher test on that because it’s sort of, in my world, it comes up a lot. And so, it’s just good for context.

Donna McGeorge
I don’t know if I’m just a bubble but, like, everyone I know is using it but it’s like I go out into the world and I find all these people that some have never even heard of it, it’s like, “Wow, you’ve been living under a rock,” because that’s how it feels to me anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s funny, when it comes to many tools, I remember it had been years until I learned that I could enable shortcut keys in Gmail, and I was like, “How come nobody told me about this all these years? How many hours have been burned without me knowing I can enable shortcut keys in Gmail?” But then I did and I never went back, and, actually, I went with Superhuman to kick it up another notch. So, yes, tools can take a while to permeate.

And that’s what I want to talk about because there’s a lot of hype, and maybe why don’t we start with it since, hey, not everybody’s familiar. Let’s take maybe three minutes. What is ChatGPT? How do we get it and use it? And why bother?

Donna McGeorge
All right. So, I’m not going to go down the massive technical path that people are hugely interested in, the technical backend of it all. I’ll let them go Google that. But in terms of what you need to know to use it every day, it’s a large language model it’s been trained on. What that means is it has access to all published written communication up until about September 2021, so that’s all books, all articles, all websites, all research papers, pretty much everything.

So, the way I like to think of it is it’s like a librarian that has read every book ever written, read any paper, looked at every website, remembers anything, and can quote from it, ad nauseam, really. You ask it a question; it can pull from all of that knowledge to give you a reasonable answer. And so, look, it has its pitfalls. If you know a little bit about it, you probably read some of the negative stuff because it’s pulling data from all over the place, sometimes it puts stuff together that’s not true. The technical term of it is hallucination.

And, certainly, sometimes when I’ve asked it to give me references for various bits of stuff that I’m looking for, it makes up whole references, puts whole names of scientists together, and says they’ve written a paper, and they just never did.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, indeed. Well said. Thank you. All right. So, we’ve got an artificial intelligence, a large language model, it’s called, and it’s read the whole internet, or a fraction of it, and a bunch of books and stuff, and, thusly, you can interact with it. And so, if someone is like, “Whoa, that is cool. How do I do it? How do I get there? How do I play with it?”

Donna McGeorge
Okay, the easiest way is to go and register a free account with OpenAI, and you can get started straight away. What I’ll do is I’ll send you, and you can put it in the show notes. I’ve got a list of prompts across a range of different aspects of both our professional and personal lives, but it’s straight out of the book that I’ve written. But it can give people something to play with rather than just sitting there, looking at it, going, “I don’t even know how to start.”

Because it’s so big and it’s got so many potential uses that I hear someone, even today, say, “Hey, I used it for X, Y, Z,” and I’m like, “Well, I would never have even thought of that.” So, it’s not exactly something you can just go and sit in front of and start playing with. You got to have a reason. So, you go register for a free account. It’ll talk to you probably about the paid version. I would say 80% of my use it with the free version.

I’ve got the paid version but I mostly use the free version. And go play around with it with something that’s relatively harmless, like, I don’t know, meal planning and holiday planning just to see what it’s capable of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. So, OpenAI.com, and you click Try ChatGPT, and so you can start taking a look. And you’re right, you just have a box, you can type anything into it, and then it will go for it. You can say, “Hey, tell me a poem about sand timers,” and it will tell me any number of things. I have a buddy who likes to say, “Hey, rewrite this email I just wrote but make it more polite,” and then it does the thing he forgets to say, like, “Hello, hope you had a great weekend.” He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I probably should’ve said that. Okay, yeah, thanks, ChatGPT.”

So, that’s really where I think you can be super useful here, is to help us understand, like, what is overly hyped and just sort of silly? Like, are the robots taking over mankind, they’re going to enslave us? Is this the answer to everything? We’re all going to get fired. Like, what’s too much hype? And what is really possible for us right here, right now that’s useful that can save us time and increase our results at work?

Donna McGeorge
Okay. So, the overhyped stuff is, now, look, it could be because I come in from a more Star Trek optimistic future of the world where humans are awesome and everyone is getting along nicely, and we’ve got the occasional attack from Klingons. Like, that’s kind of it. So, I have a more utopian view of the future so I don’t believe robots are going to take over the world. I think it could be a thousand years from now, an evolutionary marker where humans just get, again, a whole level of smarter than the technology that we’re creating, it could be.

I certainly don’t think we’re going to see a wholesale loss of jobs no more or less than any other technological breakthrough that has created some loss of jobs but created some new ones. So, I’m old enough to remember when the internet first came out, and all the kind of palaver we’re hearing now about it’s going to take jobs, it’s going to destroy the world, all of that started to happen when the internet became a thing that we carried around in our pockets, it was on our desktops, it was readily available.

So, it’s the same kind of technophobia that’s been around since, frankly, the printing press was a thing. And so, what we’ll see is new jobs or new ways of doing work. So, my advice around this is let’s not worry, “Is it going to take my job?” I can’t remember who said this but it’s been floating around for a while, “Don’t worry about it taking your job. Worry about someone who adopts AI and use the tools of this. They’ll probably take your job.” So, if you don’t keep up with it, then you’re at more risk of that than losing it straight out to AI.

Having said that, gosh, there’s some mundane administrative things that we do on a day-to-day basis that AI could be really helpful for, like any kind of repetitive processing or data entry that has a human looking at some kind of written file, and then typing it into some kind of system. I mean, there’s already systems that do that. So, I suspect that’s the kind of work that would go away.

Pete Mockaitis
And for right now, today, something that professionals can use ChatGPT to assist them with, I’d love to get your perspective. I know that some folks, if English or whatever language, is not their first language, and is maybe a little bit rough, they’ll say what they’re roughly trying to say in the language that they mostly know, and then ChatGPT just give it an automatic polish that has a little bit more smarts to it than, say, a spell check or grammar checks, so that’s sure handy. Tell us, what else are you seeing is super useful that folks are doing right now?

Donna McGeorge
Right. So, look, so I don’t even know where to start but I actually think this is a massive literacy gamechanger. So, you talked about English as a second language. I’m going to go back to the kids that struggled at school because written comms wasn’t that easy for them or they were dyslexic so they left early and have now considered themselves not terribly well educated, can’t spell, don’t know grammar terribly well, and that holds them back.

And so, this is an absolute literacy gamechanger so we don’t ever have to worry about that again. In fact, there are already stories about people who are saying, “Here’s what I wanted to write,” misspelled, no grammar, really poorly strung together sentences, whack it into ChatGPT, and it comes with a “Dear Madam,” like perfect kind of phrased email.

So, what I know, as someone who writes a lot about productivity, is one of the biggest bugbears of many people is email. And so, first of all, it’s volume, so volume of email, then other ChatGPT can’t help with that just yet. But, certainly, sometimes the time we spend responding to something that’s a bit tricky, so, as you said before, your friend that had to, “Here’s what I want to say. Now, make it sound slightly empathetic and friendly,” well, people are using it, heaps are writing emails.

In fact, I predict, once Microsoft get their act together with this, there’ll probably be a button in your Outlook email in the future, maybe Google as well, that you click on, that says, “Compose a response,’ and it will automatically generate a response for you. So, that’s going to save us a pile of time. But right now, you can already do that.

I even did it myself recently, a delicate no letter. Someone wanted to work with me, not really my thing, they were pretty insistent, so I said, “Hey, help me write a really delicate letter that’s assertive in my no, I don’t want to roll over, but maintains the relationship.” So, I’m going to say any written comms. So, as a business owner, I struggle with writing about myself, bios, website copy, email newsletters, social media copy, that’s the sort of stuff I struggle with, so I use it for that.

In corporate, so I’m hearing people using it for similar things, putting proposals together, writing about products, and getting ChatGPT to edit and get feedback on product descriptions. So, if you say, “Here’s a product description. It’s for this market. Can you please make it sound more attractive or irresistible to this market?” and it will then put the words in it. Because of our humility frames, we’re not terribly good at talking up stuff, whereas, ChatGPT is shameless. It’ll talk to your stuff up no end.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Oh, Donna, I think you’ve just really nailed something there. Our humility frames that we have as humans, ChatGPT does not, is not a human, and it can be shameless. And I think that’s great, you said, “Hey, I have to say no but in a way that’s polite.” I think, whenever you have some written communication with some emotional resistance, like, “Aargh, this is kind of complicated and tricky. I sort of feel like I owe them but it doesn’t work for me,” it’s like you could just say, “Hey, write an email response to this letter, copy/paste, or email copy/paste, that is very polite and says no.”

Or, emotionally, I remember I had a landlord who, I think, just had some unrealistic expectations for what a tenant was supposed to do. I won’t go into details. But at one point, I thought, I’m sure this landlord is going to drop in and find fault with all sorts of things, and demand that we do all kinds of things, like, “How about you repaint some walls?” I’m like, “I’m pretty that’s not my job as a tenant.” But whatever.

So, I said, “Hey, write an email from a landlord that’s utterly disgusted with the condition of a unit in the nastiest language possible, taking the role in the nastiest thing, whatever.” And so, what’s funny was so I read it and it was sort of like an inoculation or a vaccine or a preventative measure, because it’s like, “Okay, this is not real. This is not a real human but this is just the AI writing it up.”

And sure enough, once I read this harsh language that was AI-generated, later on I did get a harsh email from the landlord that was like, “Oh, I was expecting this, I prepared for this, and this isn’t so bad.” And it genuinely helped my emotional coping with that situation because I don’t like being judged and told I’m doing a terrible job at something in any context. That’s me.

Donna McGeorge
Right. So, it took the sting out of that because you had somehow prepared for it. And chances are, the actual email you got was nowhere near as harsh as the one that ChatGPT generated.

Pete Mockaitis
No, it was about half as harsh.

Donna McGeorge
Right. And lots of people are doing around things like feedback. And so, if I’m writing something, and I say, “Give me feedback on my style,” I don’t get offended by…I call it Charlie, by the way. I don’t get offended by Charlie because it’s just a robot, and it gives me really good structural, editorial, to-the-point, very distinct feedback.

Now, I don’t know why I would take it better from Charlie than I would from a human, but two things I reckon. One is the emotional aspect of working with a human. And, secondly, the human probably wouldn’t be that harsh with me. They’d probably couch it with a little bit of cottonwool around it or something like that. And so, that’s one side of it.

The other side of it is Charlie doesn’t get offended. When you tell it, it writes you something, and you say, “Actually, that’s a big pile of rubbish. I need it done this way, this way, this way.” And it apologizes, “Sorry about that. I’ll have another go.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m sorry, Donna.”

Donna McGeorge
Yes. Not quite in the dulcet tones of how, which is probably showing my knack for anything but, yes, no it doesn’t quite speak spit to me yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so another’s thing. I guess now it can speak to you in the iPhone app and/or with some plugins. I haven’t played with that yet but I think that just might be handy like on the car. Like, you’re thinking about something, you could have a little bit of a conversation, I assume you could use the Siri activation button, I don’t know yet. Be safe, everybody, in your vehicles. Don’t look at your screen.

But I assume you can have some voice activation, get back-and-forth conversations, which can be handy so I can then read that later, and maybe actually get some good thought work done while driving, which is often hard to do because you’re not looking at a screen or a notebook to write it, so that’s really cool.

Donna McGeorge
Well, the thing that I find when I’m driving is accessing. Usually, if I’m driving, particularly long distances, which is just about everywhere in Australia that you’re driving long distances between one place and another. And so, I go into that really awesome alpha brainwave state, which is often when my creativity kicks in, so you’re absolutely right.

So, whether it’s, “Hey, Siri, make a note of this,” or, “Hey, Charlie,” or ChatGPT, “look, let’s have a conversation about this,” I think it’s a useful tool to think about. But you have done something else in here around, again, the aspect of literacy or creativity where some people say, “All right, I’m terrible at written communication but I can talk about my ideas.”

And so, maybe you’re struggling to explain in written form so you talk it through, record it into ChatGPT, ask it then to construct whatever output you’re looking for, like an awesome proposal letter or something like that, or lots of people are using it to help them get their resumes in good shape, their cover letters in good shape. But just be very careful that you edit it because it’s starting to get pretty obvious when people…there’s things you can do to not make it obvious.

If you’re not very well-versed with it, a straight copy and paste out of ChatGPT is a little obvious, it can be a little obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. I found, because we’ve been experimenting with it in all kinds of contexts, in terms of writing episode titles and teasers and descriptions, it doesn’t do as good a job as we humans do, in our humble opinions of ourselves, but it can spark a few ideas, like, “Oh, that is a good turn of a phrase. Yeah, I’ll grab that. Okay. Oh, okay. I like that sentence there. Okay, we’ll take that.”

So, it can be a nice little starting point, and sometimes your copy doesn’t have to be smashingly captivating, it’s like, “Yeah, good enough. Good enough for this email response, copy, paste, done.” Other times, it can be a launching point. But one of my favorite little tricks is I’ll just ask for sheer quantity. I’ll say, “Give me 20 potential titles for this summary,” and then it’s like, “Ooh, I like this word from number two, and that word from number seven, and, thank you for your inspiration. Your work is done here,” even though I took none of the titles that it actually gave me.

Donna McGeorge
And that’s the shift that a lot of people are struggling to make because many think of it as something like Google, where you go in and you put a command in, and say, “Hey, give me a recipe for a banana bread,” or something like that. Whereas, you can go into ChatGPT, and say, “Give me 10 recipes for gluten-free sweetish snacks, and generate a shopping list that goes with that,” and it’ll give you the whole thing. So, the volume aspect is really powerful.

I did the same thing. I played around with blog titles. So, one of the tricks that I do is if I know my target audience, which is often women in leadership positions who want to level up, so I say, “This is my target audience. Give me a list of their hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations. And then give me three suggested blog titles for each one. And then give me an absolutely irresistible captivating headline that will draw people’s attention.”

And, boom, before I know, I’ve got a quarter’s worth of social media, not copy because I’ll still go in and create much of it. I’ll get it to help me but at least I’ve got a plan in place and all my topics sorted out. And that sort of thing, this is where it really, for me, this is where I became interested in it. I became interested in the time savings that we can garner from it.

So, whether it’s spending time and energy agonizing over an email response, or the time energy to generate a social media plan for your target audience, or whatever it might be, research out of MIT says you’re saving at least 37%. I reckon it’s more for me. I reckon it’s taking me maybe about 30% of the time to do some of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. So, lay it on us, what are some of the hugest timesavers, and if you’ve got them, special prompts, that you’ve generated that had helped you realize these time savings using ChatGPT?

Donna McGeorge
Probably the first one is teaching. So, I’m a writer, so that may be a bit different to some of you, so I’m regularly writing articles and things. So, I’ve taught it how to write in my style. So, one of the very first prompts I did was I told it its personality, “You are an expert, a writing style analyzer. Analyze the following passages and play it back to me in a way that I can then,” this is a bit convoluted, “…that I can then feed it back to you so future writing will be in this style,” and so it made sense of that.

I then copied and pasted a couple of chapters from one of my books, and it spits out, and says, “You have a very engaging conversational style using anecdotes and rhetorical questions.” I go, “Awesome!” Now, in the free version, I then I copied it and say, “I need an article, 700 words, for this publication on this topic using this style. Get a start for me.”

Now, to make a start on any kind, like a blank page, whether it’s an email, or a proposal, or anything, that’s often the hardest bit to overcome. So, you never have to wait again. So, I go in there, it gets me a start, and then I’d say, “Rubbish first drafts are around 50% useful.” That’s one thing, teaching it to write like me.

Just FYI, the paid version now has an option in it where you can permanently put information like that, “Anytime I ask you to write an article, use this information.” And so, you can now train it with your stuff. There’s also plugins where I’ve been able to put PDF versions of my books, and I say, “Write this article using the following content from the following PDFs.” So, I don’t know if we’re about plagiarism now because it’s using my stuff.

So, there are a couple of timesavers for me, straight away, that means that I can generate good quality content, still human edited, in a matter of an hour. Whereas, it could’ve taken me half a day, to a full day, sometimes to write something of reasonable quality. So, that’s the first thing, any writing task. I would say anytime you’re stuck, as someone who’s done a bit of research into what happens in our head when we start to get overwhelmed, we end up in cycles that uses a lot of energy, and two hours of agonizing and we’re still having got more than a sentence on a page. So, whatever you’re agonizing over, ask it, and it will give you at least some response.

I think the volume thing is a good one because we can cut straight to the chase, “Give me 10,” you don’t have to ask for one, “Give me 10, 20, 30” however many you need. Things of a personal nature, “I’ve got my 55-year-old sister-in law, likes 1980s country and western music. Can you suggest 10 gift ideas for her that aren’t records, as in CDs or music or whatever, under 50 bucks?” because I’m a cheapskate. So, boom, all my Christmas shopping now will be a list generated there.

Meal planning. Holiday planning, “I’m about to jump in the car with a couple of pre-teens, what’s some great podcasts we could listen to?” So, it’s an entertainment curator. They’re all the things I’m using it for that just mean I can put my time and attention on the things that only a human can do in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I like these sorts of themes we’re collecting here. So, emotional writing, we’ve got some hangups, we’re humble, we’re awkward. Just starting the writing. It’s a blank page. It’s intimidating. “Give me a volume of ideas. Give me 20 options.” A curator of things. And with that, I like it how you could say, “Hey, I’m looking for the music,” for example, like, ‘80s music, or, “I want music kind of like artist A, B, C and D. Now give me some more,” which I think is pretty cool.

And, likewise, even with podcast guests, it’s like, “Hey, ‘How to be Awesome at Your Job’ is about this. We’ve had some guests such name, name, name. Who might be some others?” And it’s funny, it’s sort of like, “We had them, and them, and them, and them.” It’s like, “Well, we’ve already had them but thanks for trying, ChatGPT. You’re in the right zone.”

Donna McGeorge
That’s why sometimes I think of it as an eager intern. It’s eager to give you more of the stuff that you want but doesn’t always give you the right thing. But, hey, just quickly on the playlist thing, there’s a Spotify plugin now, so you can now give it access to your Spotify account. So, when you say, “I like artists like this. Give me playlist for this. Oh, by the way, then whack it into Spotify for me.” So, that’s pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Also, with curation, it’s cool. Sometimes I’ll say, “Hey, I’m looking to do this. Give me a great book that will help me do just that.”

Donna McGeorge
Or, even better, “Give me 10. Give me 10 great books.”

Pete Mockaitis
Exactly, yes. Like, “What’s a good book to help me reprogram my brain to enjoy effort, struggle, and mistakes?” ChatGPT recommends Mindset. And I say, “Can you give me 10 more?” And it says, “Oh, yeah. All right, here we go.” So, we got Grit, Antifragile, Ode to Happiness, etc. So, I just think that’s pretty darn handy.

And it works differently because sometimes it’s different than keywords because it’s, like, sometimes I don’t yet know the keywords, and sometimes I’ll specifically say, “Hey, what’s a word that means like Washington counts for like the seat of US governmental power that’s a figure of speech?” It’s like, “Oh, you’re talking about metonymy.” It’s like, “Oh, yes, thank you, if I’m even saying that right.” It’s like I didn’t know the keyword but it can generate that for me, so I dig that.

Well, maybe let’s flip it on its head now, Donna. We’ve been speaking breathlessly about how great this tool is. What are some of the limitations? What are some requests that it’s probably just going to fail us on, disappoint us on, and we would take its advice at our own peril?

Donna McGeorge
Well, first of all, it does make stuff up because it’s pulling information from all over the world, so it sometimes puts stuff together that’s not quite right. So, if you’re writing, for me, if I’m writing a book, and, by the way, to write my recent book, I did get Charlie to help me do that. So, if I’m writing a book, I still go back to Google to check my references and stuff like that because that’s important.

Look, I had to say it but it’s often about the quality of the prompts that we do that means that you get a bit of rubbish from ChatGPT. So, when people say, “Oh, I tried it once and I got a terrible response,” I’m like, “Well, did you go back and have a conversation with it? Did you tell it, it was terrible? Did you give it some more parameters?”

So, I got a bit frustrated this week because I was trying to get it to write me a story in the first person about some famous people, and it kept giving me almost obituary-style responses. And I asked it three or four times, and it still wasn’t getting it right, so I kind of pause, went off, had a bit of a break, came back, and re-crafted my prompt, and put the words in, “And I don’t want an obituary,” and I started to get the right thing.

So, occasionally, it kind of is smarter than its own good. It thinks that that’s what, in that case, it’s trying to outthink or be that eager intern that says what it thinks you’re looking for and add a bit of extra value, when I just didn’t need it to do that. So, for me, it comes back to the prompts. Certainly, if you’re looking for current data, just my point, asking it what the weather is like in San Francisco today because it will say, “No, I can’t help you with that because that’s not what I’m for.” I have had once, I violated their terms, the way in which they operated, there’s this little message that comes up.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, what did you do, Donna?

Donna McGeorge
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
You naughty.

Donna McGeorge
I was researching for a fictional book, and I was using a real-life person as the model for what I was doing. And so, I asked a pretty tricky question about this real-life person, and I think it was implying that I was either going to stalk him, or murder him, or something like that, I don’t know, so I had to go in, there’s a little, “Please explain” thing that I had to fill in.

So, on the one hand, that was a little bit frustrating, but, on the other, I was kind of encouraged by that. So, I would say that’s the efforts by the OpenAI folks to try and alleviate some of the fear that people have around it being used for evil.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And any other shortcomings you’ve seen? I guess I’ve asked it to write compelling headlines, it sort of fallen a little bit short but it just gave me a ton of options and I can mix and match and edit, and that’s cool. And I think I’ve also found that someone said it very well that AI can tell you, because that’s how it works, it generates the next most likely word to come, so it tends to give you the most obvious answers, as opposed to wildly creative answers, which I think I found that to be the case. But sometimes, the obvious thing is actually really handy, like, “Thank you. I should’ve thought of that.”

Donna McGeorge
Right. Yeah, if you need any obvious thing, it’s awesome, because sometimes I do that. I say, “Here’s a pattern that I’ve created. Here are two points in a pattern, because we know the world loves the rule of three. So, what could be the third? Give me 10 options for the third thing.” And the first one is the obvious one, and I go, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” So, that’s useful.

But I’ve told it, if I’m really wanting something different, I’ll ask it to be a critic of whatever I’m talking about. So, one time, I was writing about burnout, and I said, “Be as if you’re a critic of burnout, and write me three paragraphs on why you think burnout, or what criticisms you have of burnout.” Anyway, so it spat out this piece that said, “Burnout is just a thing made up by people who are lazy, and dah, dah, dah.” And I’m like, “That was fun.”

Like, I would never use it in the article, but it was just fun to kind of get kind of like what you did with your “Write me the nastiest possible email from a landlord,” thing. It gave me a bit of, “Whoa, that’s interesting.” But I do ask it several times, “Give me nonconventional, give me something out of the box.” It’s not quite capable of doing that. It’s not able to do really, I don’t think, yet the really abstract stuff that the connections that a human mind can make as well. So, often when I say, “Give me this stuff that’s nonconventional,” I still get pretty conventional stuff from it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. And there was a Wall Street Journal article, which we’ll link to, and I’ve mentioned in a recent podcast episode, about how AI was generating more and more new creative product ideas than some MBA students, and I had to read the full text of the paper, as I do, and I wasn’t that impressed. I guess it can generate a lot of ideas fast, no doubt. That’s very impressive that it can do that. But the quality of the ideas were like, “A portable printer,” I was like, “Well, yeah, that’s nice but you didn’t invent that. That exists, there are many options for that.” So, it can’t do that.

But what I do like is sometimes I’ll ask for it to engage me in metaphor, like, “Hey, let’s say that running a podcast is like captaining a ship in the ocean. What would be some of the elements of the metaphor?” And then that can help just spark my own ideas, and I find it handy in that regard. Or, I’ll say, “Give me advice on this issue as Yoda would, or as Tony Robbins would, or as Marshall Goldsmith would.” And so, that’s just sort of fun to say, “Oh, yeah, I guess Tony Robbins probably would say something kind of like that. David Allen probably would say something like that.”

So, sometimes I think that helps me a little bit in terms of it’s not groundbreakingly novel but it gets my own brain a shove in a direction to help me get to novel with a little bit of help.

Donna McGeorge
Yes. So, I’ve got it because a couple of my favorite writers, because I love the way they think, Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Levitt, so I’ll say, “This is the topic. What are some quotes, if they were writing the article, what might they say about it because I’m looking for a slightly different angle?” But you’re right, it’s usually something to give me a bit of a poke or a bit of a shove in a direction when I’m stuck.

And so, I think this kind of comes back to this idea of, “In what aspects of your world do you just get stuck and you end up wasting your time spinning your wheels because you can’t find an answer?” On the more emotional level, I had a woman recently say to me that she’d been using it to help craft responses to her ex who she was divorcing.

Because she couldn’t afford a lawyer, and a lawyer had said, “If you give us the basic information we need, we’ll then spend a small amount of time crafting the legal documents that are needed. But all the research-y stuff and all the kind of the backend stuff, if you can do the bulk of that, it’ll save you a truckload of money.”

And so, she was using, she told ChatGPT, “Act as if you are my divorce lawyer, ask me a series of questions to be able to fill in all the paperwork,” and she was able to get all the documentation that they needed collated, and saved herself a whole pile of money as part of her divorce, which I thought was quite…

Just quick disclaimer now. Please do not use ChatGPT for legal documents. You’d still need a lawyer to submit all that stuff, but, yeah, it was a real gamechanger for her.

Pete Mockaitis
I also recommended ChatGPT to a friend going through a divorce in terms of like, “I’ve got all these questions I’m supposed to answer,” I was like, “Well, for a first draft, let me show this.” He’s like, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive.” So, that is cool. You say when you’re stuck, I’ve also found it helpful when you’re stuck, when you’re researching and your search engines aren’t getting it done.

And it’s because, well, hey, the sad state of affairs of the internet in terms of searching is that many of the top search results are there very intentionally by companies with a budget who have hired search engine optimization professionals to accomplish that very goal, and they have succeeded. And so, you might not actually be getting the most useful information. It’s just like the most “relevant and authoritative in the eyes of Google” information, and that’s, in many ways, gamed intentionally. And not everywhere, and often it works just the way it should, and so we’re delighted with the result.

But sometimes I found, when I can’t find a product, ChatGPT can find it. Like, “I need to find a car seat that’s super narrow so I can get three across,” and it’s like I’m having a hard time finding that in Google and in Amazon, and then this thing is recommending, ChatGPT is recommending stuff that was not popping up in those searches, like, “Well, that’s very helpful.”

Donna McGeorge
Look, I’m going to catch this with at this point in time, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of product bias. Like, if you pay someone a chunk of money, your products end up being at the top of the list no matter what search criteria is put in there. I would agree. But I’d also say the risk is that we treat it like a search engine because it’s not a search engine. It’s someone you’re having a conversation with.

It’s more like you’ve got someone sitting next to you that you turn around, and go, “Hey, I’m really struggling finding this product, and, clearly, my search string in Google is not working. Can you help me maybe redefine what might be the parameters I need to get Google to work better for me that also bypasses all the paid ads so I can actually get to the product that I need?” and get it to help you craft your Google search right.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is. I think about it, I read somewhere, it is an intelligence but it’s an alien intelligence, and I thought that was well said. And I like to think of it as my alien intern who has read the whole internet or a good chunk of it, and so it’s like, “You’ve read a lot of stuff, alien intern. What do you think about this?” Alien because it’s got to be different than human, so watch out. And intern because, “Hey, I’m in charge. I am never going to blindly copy/paste what you say. I’m going to, at the very least, read it, and most likely edit, pick and choose, edit heavily.”

Donna McGeorge
Right. What you’ve actually got is an alien intern that has a hangover.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Donna McGeorge
And so, they’re keen and eager to do the work for you. It’s going to be a bit nonhuman and alien in its form, but you better check it because sometimes it’s just a bit dim on certain days if it’s had a big night the night before.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. An alien intern with a hangover. We can get some AI to generate art to that effect for us as well. That’s a whole another episode, I guess.

Donna McGeorge
That’s a whole another episode.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Donna, any final thoughts before we shift gears? Well, first of all, your book is called The ChatGPT Revolution. Got to make sure that title gets in there, right? It sounds like it talks about any sorts of things. Anything, specifically, you want to mention about the book proper?

Donna McGeorge
Only that you can grab it from any reputable online bookselling place, on my website. But, look, I’d say when my publisher approached me to write it, we were like, “Well, what’s the angle we want on it?” So, it’s very much “Get me started, I’m interested.” It’s probably already, in fact, I know this passage in it, it’s already a little bit out of date because the technology is moving very quickly, but it’ll get you started and get you going, and get you interested.

And in terms of, I think you started to say what would be a last message, I think, around this or any kind of last comment I’d say, I would say get interested, get curious, and a saying we have in Australia is just have a crack, have a go at it, go in and try it out, and play with it. Be playful at first, which is why the list of prompts that’ll be in the show notes, are not terribly earth shattering but they’re something to get you going with.

And you can’t break it. It’s not like you can get in there, and go, “Oops, I broke ChatGPT.” The worst that can happen is you just get a somewhat rubbish response, in which case you tell it, “Gee, that was a bit rubbish. Try again from this angle.” So, have a go, have a crack is what I would say.

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

Donna McGeorge
From David Allen, you mentioned him earlier, “The human mind is for having ideas, not storing them.”

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

Donna McGeorge
So, Taylor’s study, it’s called the pig iron studies from the late 19th century. I love him. He discovered that you can actually achieve way more if you take plenty of breaks throughout your day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Donna McGeorge
Apart from my own, I can’t stop thinking about Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
And what do you love about the book?

Donna McGeorge
Look, it just got me thinking differently about the finite nature of time. And he has a really interesting angle around settling. So, we’re told nearly all our lives, “Don’t settle. You could always go for more.” And his position is, “Well, why wouldn’t you settle and make good with what you’ve got rather than constantly seeking this better job, better relationships, better something?” And I’ve not stopped thinking about that, actually. That’s really got me going.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Donna McGeorge
I’m afraid I’m going to talk about my own, which comes from one of my books, called The First 2 Hours, which is a way in which I think about how I do my work and how I do my to-do list. There are some things that are better to do in the morning and some that are better to do in the afternoons. So, I’m happy to share a PDF of that tool as well in the show notes if you like.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, thank you. And a favorite habit?

Donna McGeorge
Early to bed, early to rise. That’s me. I like to get plenty of sleep.

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

Donna McGeorge
Yeah, pay attention to the clock in your body, not the one on the wall.

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

Donna McGeorge
Just my website, DonnaMcGeorge.com. And I’m a shameless self-promoter, you’ll find me on my social media platforms, and my name is a bit unusual, Donna McGeorge.

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

Donna McGeorge
Absolutely. It’s a version of something that Sean Patrick Flanery said, which is, “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Donna, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun with ChatGPT and all you’re up to.

Donna McGeorge
Thanks, Pete. Great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Sep 28
0

902: How to Ensure Great Career Fit with André Martin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

André Martin discusses how to avoid wrong career fit and ensure your career aligns with your needs.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What right fit and wrong fit look like in practice
  2. Four powerful questions to know if a job is the right fit
  3. Why it’s OK to have a boring job

About André

Dr. André Martin is an organizational psychologist and author of the book Wrong Fit, Right Fit – Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. He has spent 20+ years as the Chief Talent Officer of iconic brands such as Mars, Nike, Google, and Target. Now, acting as an operating advisor, coach, and consultant, André continues to counsel leaders and founders to peak performance. When André isn’t working, he can be found with his wife and two English labs on the rain-soaked trails around Portland, Oregon.

Resources Mentioned

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André Martin Interview Transcript

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

André Martin
Hey, thanks, Pete. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m fired up to get into some wisdom from your book Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. But, first, I think we need to hear a little bit about your mushroom farm. What’s the story here? You do that on top of everything else?

André Martin
I do it on top of everything else, although I’m not in the day-to-day operations of it. So, the farm was a passion project by some buddies of mine that grew up in southern Missouri, and the concept behind the farm is we actually grow mushrooms in empty grain silos to the tune of about 20,000 pounds a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! How many grain silos does it take for that volume of mushrooms?

André Martin
That’s one grain silo.

Pete Mockaitis
One grain silo?

André Martin
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! One of my first jobs, actually, was I audited, like, local municipalities and farms. I was a little auditor intern for an accounting company. And I had the privilege of getting to climb up grain silos to drop a measuring tape to assess the inventory value of the grain in the silos on the balance sheets of these farms. So, I’m quite familiar with grain silos. And I’m thinking that sounds somewhat lucrative based on the price point of mushrooms and the cost point of a grain silo. Am I overlooking something, André?

André Martin
I think you’re overlooking the length of time it takes to get it right consistently when it’s the first time it’s been done. So, the team has been at this for about four and a half years, and we’re still trying to make it consistent enough that we can guarantee that we can continue to make that kind of production month over month over month. So, we’re getting close. Hopefully, someday it’s lucrative and, even more importantly, I hope it helps us get rid of food deserts around the world someday. That’s the goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s so clever. And so then, do I have multiple, like, layer cake inside that grain silo? Like, how many stories, I guess, of mushrooms am I looking at?

André Martin
Think of it more like a helix.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

André Martin
It’s gravity-based. And so, what we’re really trying to do is remove a lot of barriers to mushroom farming, one of which is the cost to do indoor farming is significant but the cool thing about mushrooms is they thrive in dark and humid environments. So, these grain silos provide a really great sort of architecture to do some cool work off of. And, again, the team has been at it for a while and we’re learning every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious to hear, what is, in your opinion, the most delicious species of mushroom and recipe for that mushroom to be in?

André Martin
Oh, that’s a great question. So, I grew up in southern Missouri, and I remember one of my best friend’s mom, Ruth Lorman, made beef stroganoff, and that was your basic button mushroom done up with a lot of cream, a lot of goodness, and a lot of heart. So, that’s my best memory of a mushroom dish. What about yourself, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. I’m thinking about my buddy, Father Jim Herbert, and we went to get some morel mushrooms, and they were just very simple. We just grilled them up and had them as like a side dish in the middle of the rest of the meal, and there’s life for you.

André Martin
Oh, that’s great. I love them. They’re super good and great for you, so we hope they’re around and an even bigger food in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m glad we covered that, André. We got it now.

André Martin
Yes, sir.

Pete Mockaitis
We set the record straight on mushrooms and grain silos. Now, let’s hear about Wrong Fit, Right Fit. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you guys made when researching and putting this together?

André Martin
Quite a few. I think I’d start with the first one, is that, hey, when we looked at the issues around employee engagement today, we know that Gallup tells us there’s an estimated $7.9 trillion of lost productivity due to disengagement. A lot of the time, we like to think that it’s good or bad culture. It’s a toxic environment or it’s an engaging environment.

And the truth is it’s a lot more nuanced than that. So, when we talked to the hundred or so interviewees that we interviewed for the book, one of the things that came out really quickly is this idea that every company starts off wanting to create a great experience for their employees. They want to be a great place to work. It’d be counterintuitive to create anything other than that.

And so, if you start with that truth, the thing that we found that’s most surprising is that, for about 60% of people in the company, they’re pretty happy. Maybe not totally engaged but they’re content. And then for the other 40% who have the same skill set, the same background, the same affinities, they struggle, it’s like they’re slogging through mud.

And so, really one surprising idea is that there’s probably not a single best practice because every company has a different way of getting work done day to day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then when it comes to fit, there’s multiple styles, approaches that can work. How do we think about fit in terms of which one is good for me or not so good for me?

André Martin
Yeah, Pete, it comes down to a couple of things. The obvious things that align us to an organization are things like purpose, values and mission, the team I’m working on, the manager, the job that I have. But one of the things that came up in the book, too, was there’s this whole piece of information below the surface, which is how the company works day to day. How do we solve problems? How do we make decisions? How do we manage conflict? How do we develop people and give feedback? How do we gather and convene? What’s our relationship with time? How does information flow?

And those were the things that when we talked to talent, they were saying when the company works like you like to work in those areas, it’s easy. It’s like writing with your dominant hand every day. When it doesn’t, it can feel hard, it can be stressful, your quality goes down, you lose confidence and competence, and you end up in a place that’s really hard to go to work every day. It’s sort of the origin of the Sunday Scaries in many ways.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who went from feeling like their job was the wrong fit to the right fit? And what did they do? And what did they discover?

André Martin
Well, I’ll start with a story that’ll answer that question sort of in the other direction, so someone who was looking from a wrong fit experience back at what actually was right fit for them. And this was a creative marketer, and one of the places that this person started their career had very standard and consistent ways of working, so those things we mentioned: how they collaborate, how they socialize ideas, how they solve problems.

And early in their career, this person felt like that was constraining. And one of the insights from this story that was really interesting is, looking back now, what they said is, “Because I didn’t have to worry about how to present an idea, back then and that right fit experience, it was actually a pure execution or experience of my craft. That is, I was being able to do what I do best every day because all my creative energy was flowing to the thing that I do really well, as opposed to how work gets done.”

And that was sort of the big insight from the story, is this idea that your creative energy is always flowing. But for many people in wrong fit experiences, it’s flowing to how work gets done as opposed to what they’re really gifted at in this world.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you give us some examples of some of this “how work gets done” stuff?

André Martin
Yes. So, think about it this way. There are some organizations that socialize ideas via beautiful decks. You create PowerPoint slides with wonderful images and pithy poetry. And then there’s other companies that do that via two-page memos. Amazon is one of the most popular examples of that. And then there’s others that expect really deep research papers, which is something we saw a lot at Google when you’re working in technology and machine-learning. And so, if the way that ideas get socialized don’t match the ways that you prefer to do work, it just feels harder than it should.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so then, I’m curious, how do we go about clearly identifying what an organization does on these dimensions? And what is our preference to really determine: do we have a wrong fit or a right fit and making some adjustments where we can?

André Martin
Yeah, Pete, this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. And, again, through the interviews, one thing that became really clear is that work decisions are one of the most high-value decisions we make in our lifetime. Think about it this way. We spend about 13.5 years of our adult lives at work. That’s every second, every minute, every year. It’s a huge chunk of our lives. It’s actually second only to sleeping if you think about the distribution of our time as adults. And yet we tend to make those decisions about where we work on very little information.

The interview processes, if you think about it, they’re more like first dates than they are really getting under the hood to understand what the reality is going to feel like. And if you’ve ever had a first date, I know I had many before I met my wife, although you feel that excitement on the first date, by the second, third, fourth, or fifth date, things change as you get to know the person.

And what we’re finding in companies today is that’s happening more and more regularly to talent. They get recruited with this idea of what the company is going to feel like, what the job is going to be like, and then when we get into the company on the first day, it feels radically different. And it’s in that sort of discrepancy that we’re seeing a lot of engagements start to suffer.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, what is your recommendation for a prudent, practical research approach by which we can learn the stuff before it’s too late, and we go, “Uh-oh, wrong choice”?

André Martin
I think there’s a few things I’d say, and as a psychologist, I’ll start with some of the cognitive things. First, you have to understand that there’s a few things that are at play as you’re making a big decision. And that could be the cereal you’re going to buy in the grocery store, to the house you’re going to buy, to the job you’re going to take.

First and foremost is we tend to be very influenced by successful brands and successful companies. And there’s a phenomenon in social science called BIRGing. It’s called basking in reflected glory. It’s this idea that we are going to buy into things that have had past success. And so, one of the first things I’d say to talent is just watch that. The biggest coolest brands might not be the best place for you to work.

The second thing that happens is, once you open up a job description, and you get in a recruiting process, you have to realize you’re in a marketing effort. Think about it. Every talent that is showing up for an interview, we show up on our best behavior. We’re first-date ready. We have scripted answers. We’re dressed in our best outfits. We’ve thought about what we’re going to say and how we want to present ourselves. And the same is true for the company.

And so, instead of getting a realistic idea of who each other is going to be like on a random Tuesday morning, we actually are seeing us at our best, which we know isn’t necessarily who we are day-to-day. And the third thing, from just a cognitive standpoint, is this idea of confirmation bias. Because talent is so motivated to find a job, to get the job, to work at a great brand, we tend to pay attention to only a small sliver of the available information given to us, and most of that’s subjective and from the internal source of the company, career sites, recruiters, the interviewees.

And so, the first thing I tell talent is, “Make sure you’re using a broad set of information. Pay attention to what happens in the interview. Pay attention to what’s on the website, but go and find videos. Talk to people who have recently left the company. Look at annual reports. Find all the public information on the company to sort of round out what you’re seeing.” And my rule of thumb is if it doesn’t show up in three sources, really ask yourself if it’s likely going to be true day-to-day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you perhaps walk us through a research process by which someone is assessing what’s up with their prospective employer, and they have a few specific questions they want answered, and how they might get after them via these different sources of information?

André Martin
That’s great, Pete. The first thing I would tell any talent at the start of a process is the first thing you should do is not open a job description and apply for a job. The first thing you should do is take some time to really understand who you are, how you work, what you’re solving for right now, the kind of life you’re trying to build, what kind of leader or manager you work really well for.

And in the book, we have this set of excursions that really helps talent to do that. When we were talking in the interviews, one of the things that talent told me when we asked them, “When did you know it wasn’t a right fit?” And they said, “If I’m being totally honest, I knew it in the interview but I chose not to pay attention to those things.” And so, the first step is make sure you know who you are, how you work, and what you’re solving for.

The second step is to really do a lot of external research on the company. So, before the interview happens, don’t just depend on what the company sends you. Look at all those assets we talked about: annual reports, and videos of leaders, and past folks that have worked there, and really get a good sense on, “What does this company look like day-to-day?”

And then when you’re in the interviews, there’s a few key questions that will help you sort of discern a little bit more about what it’s going to be like to work there, and it’s hard because these are first dates. So, a few of the questions I really like, the first one is, “What’s the profile of the person that’s really successful here?” That gives you a sense on… and ask the follow-up question, “How do they show up for work? What does it look like when they’re in a team meeting?” And really get at, “What’s the success profile? Who’s really successful?” And ask yourself if that’s you.

The second thing I like to have people do is have someone walk you through a-day-in-the-life. So, in an interview, have them pull up their calendar and walk you through what’s on their calendar for the day. This gives you a sense on what’s important, what they’ll be working on, how they think about time, what’s their meeting cadence, all those kinds of things.

And then I also love to ask the question, “What’s the reputation of the team? And what’s the reputation of the leader?” because, again, that tells you where the team is going to be and what you can expect of some of the work that you’re going to have to do upon arriving there. And we have, again, about 10 or so questions in the book that help talent get a little bit deeper into how the company works.

Pete Mockaitis
And is the timing for these questions, is it your recommendation that it’s sort of right there in the interview, “Do you have any questions for me, André?” Like, right there?

André Martin
You know what, it’s really funny, Pete, I love the way that you bring that up because we often feel, in an interview process, like we’re being interviewed. And the truth is that you have to be at your best as an investigative journalist inside an interview process. And so, in those last five minutes, which we all get to, “Hey, André, do you have any questions for me?” often we don’t take advantage of those.

We ask a layup question, something that makes us look good or sound good. And this is your moment to really dig in and get to know the company at a deep level. So, I always would say have two or three really strong questions, and use that time. And then if you don’t get them answered, ask for more time because, again, this is one of the highest-value decisions you’re going to make in your life, and you don’t want to just be dependent on the small bit of narrowed information that you get from the company through the process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m curious, do you recommend, from a timing perspective, we’ve got the “Do you have any questions for me?” right there, first interview or second interview or third interview, and then there’s a whole another zone of time in which, ideally, you have the offer, and you’ve not yet said yes to the offer.

And it’s funny because, as I’m imagining this, I sort of think about, like, “Ooh, that’s the time when I can really just get after it in terms of my investigations and talking to people and all of that.” And so, how do you think about the timing and the sequencing? Does one line of investigation work better at one time versus another? Or, can we just do all the investigating all the time and it’s all good?

André Martin
Well, here’s what I would say, is those early questions you ask in an interview, you absolutely want to be able to convey that you’re both highly interested in the role, and also that you’re a very curious person. And so, I think it’s okay to ask some very pointed, very high-impact and meaningful questions during the interview. It can actually make you look like a better candidate.

The other thing I would say to you, and you mentioned it, Pete, there’s that moment after you get the offer and before you take it, and then there’s also a moment after you take the offer and before you start, where often we just sit and breathe, we just sort of go, “God, I got the job. I’m so happy and my job is over.” I would tell any candidate that that’s the time when you really start increasing your efforts, both so you can be really ready to onboard and get to high productivity quickly.

But the second reason is because this is your time to really find out more and more about the truth of the company. And a couple places I like to look is I almost always reach out to my LinkedIn network, and look for people that I know that have recently worked at that company but might’ve just left because they’re going to be willing to sort of tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the experience and being there.

And because they’re in your network, or second in your network, they’ll usually pick up the phone, and most people want to talk about their past experiences. So, that’s a really good place to do some digging if you don’t feel comfortable about doing it in the interview process itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And these high-impact questions, we talked about a couple, like a-day-in-the-life, let’s see the calendar. Can you just give us bullet after bullet after bullet of some of your favorite high-impact questions you like to ask?

André Martin
Yeah. So, I talk about the person, what’s the profile of success, that’s a big one. A-day-in-the-life I do love. The reputation question is really important. And often, if you’re doing interviews with people outside of your function or your team, they’ll tell you sort of what the reputation is. I like to also get after, “What are going to be the two or three most important pieces of work I’ll do in the first 12 months?”

Because here’s the deal, Pete, as we know that job descriptions, they are a litany of bullet points about all the possible things you could do in a job really for the rest of your life. And that’s very different than what you’re going to be asked to do in the first 90 to 120 days of being there. Often, what we find is if this is the job description, this big long list of all the things you could do, often the job that you get is going to be a very narrow set of those things plus a lot of additional duties that never showed up in the job description.

So, I like to ask that question for two reasons. One, it’s important to really get out, “What is this role in reality day-to-day?” The second reason is that you want to make sure that the near-term deliverables fit areas where you’re best in class because the easiest way to be a success in a company early on is to be given deliverables that are in your wheelhouse or they’re something you’re really good at.

And when I’m looking at a job, if I look at the near-term deliverables, and I say, “Yeah, I can do those things,” but I’m not best in class at it, I might sort of think twice about taking that job because you’re transitioning into a new company, you’re building a brand-new reputation, a brand-new network, and people are going to start looking at you to say, “What kind of talent do we have?”

And if you’re doing work that you’re not great at, it can sort of cause you to create maybe a less impactful reputation than you could’ve otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, let’s fast-forward in time, and so we’re in a job right now. As we think about fit, are there any telltale signs that it’s just like, “Yes, this fit is fantastic” versus “Oh, no, this fit isn’t quite right” that maybe is escaping our immediate conscious awareness at the moment?

André Martin
There’s a few. And so, one of the parts of the book that resonates, at least for me, personally, is the metaphor of what it feels like to be in a wrong fit experience. One of my favorite quotes from the book is someone mentioned they’re in the wrong fit when it felt like everyone else had a secret decoder ring for success except for them.

They were seeing people in the company that looked like them, acted like them, had the same experiences as them, had the same job, and they were excelling, when this person go, “Something just doesn’t feel right.” And so, one of the ways I think about it is if you’ve ever tried to write with your non-dominant hand, that’s what it feels like to be in a wrong fit situation.

It’s harder than it should be. You’re frustrated. You’re stressed. Your quality of work isn’t where it used to be. You start questioning whether or not you’re good enough. And I think your first instincts in that is if work feels hard, you might want to think about whether or not, long term, this is going to be a fit for you.

Some of the telltale signs are things like, “I tend to work harder. I’m putting in more and more hours because I’m trying to be impressive.” That can be a sign many of the interviews talked about, “When I didn’t have a right fit, when it was a wrong fit, I tried harder. I spent more time.” And that’s because you’re trying to make up for fit in effort, and it just doesn’t work out that well.

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

André Martin
The only other thing I would say is one of the aspects of fit that I find really important is this idea that sometimes we mistake the excitement for something new with the comfort that comes from a committed relationship. And so, again, the analogy that’s really great is if you compare a first date to being married or being in a long-term relationship, a first date is all dopamine. It’s excitement. It gets your blood flowing. It’s the unknown. All those things produce dopamine which is this really powerful neurotransmitter that causes us to react in a certain way.

There’s a very different neurotransmitter that’s activated in long-term committed relationships, and that’s oxytocin. And what oxytocin feels like is it feels like more like a deep hug, like this really warm pleasant feeling. And what I worry about is, since we’re in this world where everybody’s infinitely browsing, we’re all looking for greener grass, we can sometimes mistake comfort for boredom, for lack of momentum, and we will jump ship from right fit experiences in search of dopamine or excitement when we really had maybe a place we were thriving at and we just mistook the feeling we had for something other than what it was.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, André, that’s powerful stuff. It’s funny, as we speak, just yesterday, I started listening to Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, which I’m digging. I recommend it. And you’re right, that idea, especially if we’ve become so acclimated to stimulation nonstop in every format from social media to games or alcohol, you name it, that you think, “My job is boring. I got to go find something more exciting.” And yet if our job is boring, as opposed to horrific, like, that might be a good thing.

André Martin
Pete, it’s a great thing. If you think about where creativity comes from, where inspiration comes from, having a firm grounding, a sense of comfort to explore, that’s the basis of what Amy Edmondson talks about in terms of psychological safety. That is the feeling of comfort that we often are like, “I’m bored. I got to go do something else.”

And I looked at some of the stats data that are out there, 29% of employees leave their company after their first promotion. That’s stats from ADP. And 70% of Gen Z cited that they were potentially thinking about leaving their current job inside of 2023. And so, you just get this feeling that everybody has sort of mistaken this idea of comfort for boredom, and we’re jumping way too fast.

And transitions take effort, right, Pete? Like, the thing that we know psychologically is every time you move companies, every time you hop jobs, you are having to rebuild your understanding of how a company works, you’re having to rebuild the understanding of the products and services that are offered to customers, you’re having to rebuild your social network, you’re having to rebuild your reputation.

And, therefore, if you think about, in every transition you go through, your creative energy in that first year, it goes to rebuilding those things, not to your craft so you’re probably getting better at transitions but you’re not actually getting better at the thing that you’re trying to do as your craft, day to day in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, André, this is probably a whole other conversation but how do we get better at being okay with being bored in our careers or, I guess, anything?

André Martin
One of my strategies, Pete, is I do a lot of self-reflection about what I’m solving for. And so, I go back, not to make this about the book, but those excursions in the book are personally made, because the one thing we don’t do enough in this high-information, high-excitement, high-dopamine world is we don’t stop, take a deep breath, take three steps back, and open our eyes really wide, and ask the question, like, “What am I solving for? What am I trying to build in terms of my life? What do I want out of my job? What kind of career am I building?”

There’s three different types of careers, for instance. Like, you can build a career around craft, company, or cause, but you can’t do all three of those things. What kind of person do I want to work for? What do I want my life to be 10 years from now? And what’s really interesting is, if you do that work, you can sort of start to see the signal in the noise, and you will, I guarantee it, look at your current experience very different, and you will look at every experience that comes after very different as well.

But we have to do that work a lot more often than we used to because there’s just an onslaught of greener grass coming at us every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you expand upon this notion of craft, company, and cause? You say we can’t have all three.

André Martin
Well, that’s the unicorn. I’m not saying you can’t but it’s really difficult. What I try to tell people is each of those careers has a very different trajectory and a very different choice you make around the types of jobs you take. So, I’ll give you, for instance, let’s say you’re of company. I don’t know what your favorite consumer brand is but let’s say you’re working for this company that you just believe in your heart and soul in what it stands for, and the products it brings to bear.

You want to be at this company for the next 25 years because you love it so much. I would tell you that your career then needs to have as many different jobs and as many different functions as possible because the strength of being part of a company as a career is that you know the system and the people in the system better than anybody else.

Right now, very different than craft. If you think about craft, craft is about this question of saying, “I want a career that ensures that I will be the best in class in a very narrow and specific area.” To be the best in craft in any specific area, let’s say my area. I was a chief talent and learning officer, and started my career in leadership development.

To be one of the best in leadership development, it’s really hard to do that and stay at a single company, because if I stayed at a single company, I see one approach to those things. If I’m at multiple companies over a career, I see five, six, or seven different ways of doing it, and, therefore, I have a lot more tools to use as I develop those assets. So, if you’re doing a career around craft, it’s really important that you think about having as many different systems as you can, within reason, to see how to do this in many different industries, in types of companies, and even sizes of companies.

And then cause, cause is the ultimate. Cause is all about, “I have this really big injustice, opportunity, or thing I’m trying to solve for in the world.” And when you have a career around cause, you really want to be at the middle of whatever is happening in that space. So, again, if you’re wanting to solve for the environment, get to a place where the environment is at risk. You want to save the oceans on the coast of California, you want to save the rainforest, but you need to be in the middle of where the action, where the thought leaders are, where all the discussions are happening. And that’ll take you wherever that movement is sort of in the world.

And so, my younger brother spent a lot of time in the Peace Corps, and he was of cause, and he went to Kazakhstan for a longer part of a year and a half because he wanted to help drive education in developing countries, and so he was definitely of cause. But I would say this, it’s not impossible to have all three, but you create very different experiences and design very different careers based on what you’re really making primary.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a very helpful framework there. And it’s nice how it seems like, “Oh, those are the opposite in some instances,” in terms of, like, craft and company, and I know folks who have gone both ways. I’m thinking about web design or systems architecture, it’s like, yeah, they probably know that better than, I don’t know, 99.99% of humans on the planet because they’d gone deep into it. And then once they’ve exhausted the learning that organization can give to them, it’s like, “If craft is your thing, then it’s time to move on.”

And, likewise, I’ve got buddies at Nike, that was their dream, and they’re still there from college to now because they think it’s just the coolest thing ever, in terms of, like, the shoes and the sports and the athletes. It’s so cool, and, likewise, he has been in a lot of different roles, and that makes you all the more valuable and hard to fire in terms of, “This guy is the glue who knows about the manufacturing, and about marketing, and about the new product design, and then the athlete partnerships.”

It’s, like, you think twice before, your next cost-cutting endeavor, you slash that guy because you’re going to miss a lot of the good connectivity that makes a behemoth of an organization function smoothly.

André Martin
Pete, I couldn’t say it better myself. And what I love about your description and your story there is, often people who are of company, they’re not maximizing their ability to be invaluable because they’re not thinking about their job progression as, “Wow, I need to broaden my network. I need to broaden my experience. I need to know every corner of this company.” And that’s the way you protect yourself and allow yourself to be invaluable over time if you truly are in love with the place, like Nike, which many are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re in Oregon. So, you’ve seen that before, I bet.

André Martin
That’s right, I have.

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

André Martin
One of my favorite quotes is “Joy cometh in the morning.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is hopeful on those days.

André Martin
I’m a hopeful person, Pete, 100%.

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

André Martin
It’s a new one. So, there’s a recent study by MIT, it just came out with a company called Culture 500, and they did this really cool study on culture. And what they did is they took the espoused values of all these companies that are high on culture, and they grabbed those from annual reports, and videos, and communication with the company, and then they weighted them.

And then what they did is they took those espoused values, what companies said they were about, and they compared those with the felt experience of employees on the employee review sites. And the net of the study was there’s zero correlation between the two, that what companies are espousing they stand for isn’t necessarily what’s showing up in what the felt experiences for the employees that are part of their company.

Now, that study is fraught with a little bit of a hardship because we know that the employee review sites aren’t necessarily all the employees but it gives you a good indication that, “Hey, often what we’re talking about that’s important isn’t necessarily what’s showing up in the day-to-day lives of our employees as they work for us.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hope there’s at least a few companies that have a good match up, but, across the board, they weren’t seeing it.

André Martin
They weren’t seeing it. And I find that really fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And a favorite book?

André Martin
Dedicated by Pete Davis. He has written a book on how to get through this crisis of commitment that we’re living in the world. And I really like his perspective that it’s not a loss cause. We can still be committed to things. We just have to stop infinitely browsing as much as we currently are.

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

André Martin
Favorite tool, I have been recently using Arist.co. It’s a text-based learning platform that allows the small micro doses of learning to hit you every morning via your phone, and then you can have the option to go deep or wait until the next day’s lesson. And it just allows learning to be spread over a long time, and it’s with me every day in the flow of work.

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

André Martin
Favorite habit, this is more of something I did to be awesome as a husband and a father. We practice no-text Sundays. So, from the moment all of us got out of bed until 3:00 o’clock, we would turn off our phones and our technology, and make sure that we were eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee, elbow-to-elbow out in the world. And that was a pretty fun way to put technology aside just for a little while, and have some fun as a family.

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

André Martin
Yeah, this nugget that resonates for me is that “Opportunity is infinite, and human energy is not.” So, really try to spend every day at your highest and best use because we just don’t have enough time.

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

André Martin
I’d point them to www.WrongFitRightFit.com and also to a newsletter that I run called Monday Matters. It’s meant to be practical tips to make your week better, and that’s at MondayMatters.substack.com.

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

André Martin
I do. I think my final challenge is back to what we talked about, because it’s one that is core to why I wrote the book, which is just be careful not to mistake comfort for boredom. The grass is inherently often not greener, and comfort is something that allows us to be at our best, and so cherish it if you have it. If you don’t, I believe it’s out there, and you can find it if you keep looking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. André, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and many good fits.

André Martin
Hey, thank you much, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Sep 25
0

901: How to Lead with Emotional Power with Julia DiGangi

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Julia DiGangi shows you how to harness your emotional energy and turn it into your greatest strength.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What others’ skepticism is telling you
  2. How to reframe your brain’s negative patterns
  3. The root cause of procrastination–and how to deal with it

About Julia

Dr. Julia DiGangi is a neuropsychologist, who completed her residency at Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. She has nearly two decades of experience studying the connection between our brains and our behavior. Dr. DiGangi has worked with leaders at The White House Press Office, global companies, international NGOs, and the US Special Forces. Her understanding of stress, trauma, and resilience is also informed by her work in international development and humanitarian aid, where she served some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

The founder of NeuroHealth Partners, a neuropsychology-based consultancy, DiGangi shows people—at work and at home—how to harness the power of the brain to lead more satisfying and emotionally intelligent lives. She is the author of Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power.

Resources Mentioned

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Julia DiGangi Interview Transcript

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

Julia DiGangi
I’m so glad to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into some of the wisdom you share in your book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. Neuroscience just gets me all fired up. So, I think, first, I want to hear, for you personally, can you tell us from your own experiences working internationally and with vulnerable communities, is there a particularly powerful moment or story that shaped your understanding of stress, trauma, and resilience from a human experiential point of view?

Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, let me just say that I am a neuropsychologist, which means I’m a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain, and never in a million years did I think that I would become a psychologist. And the reason is my father is actually a psychologist, and I grew up, I’m very close with him. I grew up, he was always telling fascinating stories about human behavior, and I just always thought that psychology was my father’s domain and that it was not going to belong to me.

So, I was called to a lot of social justice work, so I started doing a lot of political work, and I started doing a lot of international humanitarian aid and development. And the reason I became a neuropsychologist was because I started working all around the world, so Detroit, Chicago, Latin America, Africa, and I was working in very, very traumatized communities, very high stress environments.

And the thing that really started to strike me is that, regardless of where I was, people were responding to stress in similar ways. So, I was really kind of struck by this idea that despite this wild amount of diversity, why is it that human behavior looks the same when it comes to extreme stress?

And it was really that question that got my scientific mind fired up and decided to really look at, “What can we understand about the human brain that can explain the way we run our large systems, whether it’s our family systems, whether it’s our organizational systems, whether it’s our companies, and whether it’s our political systems?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the stressors then, I’d imagine, in those different environments are quite different, varied from each other, you know, what’s happening in Chicago versus Latin America are different, and yet the stress reactions and responses of the people were pretty similar to one another?

Julia DiGangi
Yes. So, I was working with a lot of very, very extreme trauma, so I was working with torture survivors, I was working with combat veterans, I was working with child soldiers, I was working with orphans, I was working with war survivors, so really extreme forms of trauma. But the thing that kind of struck me though is, like, “Why are such similar situations unfolding, because they’re all perpetrated by people? And then what was happening to the human body that was then creating additional trauma?”

Because when we’re traumatized, we then show up in our relationships, in our communities, in our workplaces in ways that aren’t really that functional. So, yes, I was working in a lot of different environments and seen a lot of different things, and I started to think, “If we could understand human suffering and human resilience at the most extreme ends of the spectrum, then there would have to be some pretty, pretty powerful advice about how the rest of us can grapple with the more common stress that we face in our ordinary lives.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Julia, that’s exactly where I wanted to go. You have piqued my interest to the max. So, I have a lot of notes and things I’d like to cover but let’s just go right where we are right now because that’s juicy. So, tell us, from those experiences, did you discover any master keys to resilience that we can put in place right away?

Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, I will say that I feel like I am on this planet, I feel like my core message is that our experiences of emotional pain, and by emotional pain I just mean any bad feeling you don’t want to feel – so stress, aggravation, irritation, inadequacy, fear of rejection – that these terrible feelings that we all experience in our own nervous systems in our own bodies are absolutely not here to torment us; they are here to set us free.

They are literally the line between where we currently are and the next evolution of what I call emotional power. So, if you want to show up at work more powerfully, if you want to show up online more powerfully, if you want to be more creative or more expressive, absolutely the number one thing you need to work with is your hard feelings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is juicy, that is a thesis alright. Can you provide an example illustration so that we can get our arms around that conceptually to experientially, like, “Oh, I see. I see in that instance, that person, there was the line, and they surpassed it and then cool things unfolded”?

Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. Sure.

So, I would say that, without question, the hardest thing for us is our experiences of other people’s emotion. So, I think that our leadership is best understood as, “Who do I become in the energy of other people’s emotions?” In other words, “What happens to me when people don’t see me the way that I want to be seen? What happens to me when the people around me don’t agree with me? What happens to me when the people around me don’t understand me?”

If I’m not emotionally powerful enough, and I have this really great idea, okay, let’s say I have a great idea for a podcast, I have a great idea for a social media post, I have a great idea for a new product, if I feel like people don’t understand me, it’s going to provoke bad feelings, it’s going to make me feel insecure, it’s going to make me feel anxious, it’s going to make me feel stressed. If I don’t know what to do about those bad feelings, it will shut down my behavior.

So, it’s only when I’m able to say, “I know, in the energy of you not understanding me perfectly, Pete, it’s provoking the sense of anxiety or stress inside of me, and I know…”

Pete Mockaitis
Like, right now?

Julia DiGangi
Yeah, I mean, I always get nervous before these podcasts, so, yes, absolutely, but I think that’s a perfect example. It’s like, “Can I still, in my fear, in my anxiety, in my worries, like, am I going to say something stupid? Are people going to understand me? Am I still powerful enough to show up here and say the things that I want to say?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Understood. And so then, there you go in terms of, like, the line in terms of it is sort of a border or a fork in the road – I’m mixing my geographical metaphors here – in terms of you could say, “Well, just forget it. Just whatever. I guess we’re done here.” That’s one option, like we give in, in terms of the frustration, the anxiety, the fear, the overwhelm, whatever, just sort of wins out, like, “I’m out of here.” That’s one approach. And then the other way is that you sort of fold.

And for the record, Julia, I think you’re doing great.

Julia DiGangi
Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that you have whipped up a frenzy of curiosity inside me such that now I want to understand all of it and with perfect clarity. And so, yeah, we’re going to be picking up on that.

Julia DiGangi
Let me say this because I think this is really clarifying, too. Everyone has problems, we’re all, like, “All right. So, what’s the biggest obstacle in my life? This problem, this problem, this problem.” But if you really think about what a problem is, there is no problem on the planet until you have activity in your nervous system. In other words, anything that you’re calling a problem in your life necessarily means you have bad energy in your nervous system.

So, let’s say I’m fired from my job, and let’s say I’m fired from my job and people call me like a bumbling idiot in front of 50 people, and I legitimately don’t feel bad about it. I’m not intoxicated or I’m not dissociated. I just really don’t feel bad about it. Because I have no pain, I have no problem. And one of the things, this is such a big shift, it makes you so more powerful in your leadership, a lot of times we run around trying to solve our situations, “Okay, this person is going to say this and so I’m going to do this,” or, “This project might go with this, and I got to do this about this project.”

And I’m not saying your situations don’t matter, but if you really think about the most powerful place to work in your life, it’s at the beginning of your emotional energy. In other words, who would I become in this situation if I said, “It’s okay, Pete, if you don’t perfectly understand me”? actually, I’ll tell you a good story.

So, I interviewed a lot of very, very elite leaders for the book, and one of the leaders that I interviewed, and I said that I was going to anonymize everyone because some people talked about some really sort of controversial and difficult things in the book, but I’ll say it’s someone who leads tens and tens of thousands of people.

And one of the things he said to me in the book that I was totally struck by, is I said, “How do you deal with your own tough feelings? Like, how do you deal with your own feelings of doubt, or insecurity, or fear, or anxiety?” And he said, “That’s kind of a hard question for me to answer but I would imagine that if my wife was in the room, my wife would tell you, if I have to make a hard decision that is not a sleep-loss moment for me. In other words, if there is a thousand people in the room, and only 501 agree with me and 499 don’t agree with me, I’m totally okay with it.”

By the way, this guy has amazing employee engagement scores, so he’s very, very well-liked. He’s not some brute who has no emotional intelligence. So, what that moment is telling us is that this man is powerful enough to be misunderstood in the energy of other people’s skepticism and doubt and confusion. And if we’re really honest, how often does other people’s emotion shut down the big visions that we have inside of our own brains and our own spirits?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny. I’m reminded of, or there’s so many things that are coming to mind here. I remember a buddy of mine, we had the idea that was basically Airbnb, I think shortly before Airbnb was founded, and so we thought it’s really cool. And so, why not? We were consultants, we saw empty bedrooms, we’re like, “Well, these underutilized resources could really turn into something.”

And so, we thought, “Let’s chat with a buddy of ours who is somewhat high up in Hyatt Hotels.” And then his energy was like, “You know, I think this could be a nightmare for liability, people are going to ruin stuff and commit crimes. And, yeah, ugh, I’m really nervous about that.” And so, we’re like, “Oh, yeah, I guess he’s right.” So, we just stopped.

Now, who knows what life path that we could’ve been to people who started Airbnb, or if maybe hundreds of people were thinking the same thing around the same time in the universe. But it’s true that energy did shut it down, and it’s a common experience. Or, if someone seems to respond to our idea with a sense of, I don’t know, contempt, or disgust, or even just more subtle, like, “Oh,” like they’re not really into it but just, like, “Okay, you don’t find that interesting or compelling. Okay, duly noted.” So, yeah, that can shut it down.

So, are you telling us, Julia, that it’s quite possible to develop the emotional power, force, resilience?

Julia DiGangi
A hundred percent. First of all, your story was a phenomenal one.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Julia DiGangi
And we all have versions of that, like we all have. And here’s the thing that I think is so important to really get. When we have these moments of inspiration, whether we call it inspiration or creativity, or we have these visions, the whole idea of creativity is the world has never been here before. So, of course, there’s going to be skeptics. It would make no sense if you said, “Hey, you know what we’re going to do, we’re going to start a community on Mars,” and the rest of the world was like, “Of course, that makes perfect sense.”

So, it’s almost like some of our best, most powerful, most transformative ideas, if they’re not being met by other people’s resistance, I think we need to question, “Is it really a good idea?” So, it’s almost like part of our work is to reframe the patterns we have around other people’s reactions. That’s the first thing I want to say.

There’s another second important thing that I can say that can really help our leadership, and that is this. We all know that when people are flagrantly rude to us, or egregiously cynical, that hurts. But something that we egregiously underestimate is the pain of confusion. Well, you just gave a great example where you said sometimes people will meet our ideas and, like, not just be super enthusiastic. They might just be a little bit lukewarm or they might seem a little bit confused.

One of the things we’ve very clear about in neuroscience is your brain absolutely despises confusion. So, a very practical way to think about your brain is as a pattern detector. It’s going through your life, largely unconsciously, going “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank. Apple. Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank. Apple.” Now what this actually means is “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank,” sometimes the answer really isn’t apple. But because your brain hates that ambiguity or that openness, it will try to close the pattern in a way that’s going to make sense to you.

When we are confused, what happens is the brain can handle kind of the open-endedness of confusion for a very short period of time, and then very quickly it will close the pattern, and it will close the pattern in a way that is suspicious, fearful, and small.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Just this morning, Julia, this was funny, I thought I was going to be making some scrambled eggs for the family. And then Katy said, “Oh, hey, can you come watch Joey, and I’ll make the scrambled eggs?” And I said, “I thought I was making the scrambled eggs?” And she just said, “Can I do it?” And so, I was like, “Well, what’s going on here? I made the scrambled eggs last time, I usually make scrambled eggs, she’s asking to do it.”

And so, it’s sort of like I can’t even stand the uncertainty, the question mark associated with why this is happening. It doesn’t even really matter in terms of I’m thinking, “Is there something wrong with the way that I make scrambled eggs, with the scrambled eggs that I made yesterday?”

Julia DiGangi
Isn’t that interesting? Because, like, your interpretation automatically goes to the brain definitely has a negativity bias, it’s a way to keep us alive. So, now you’re thinking, “Oh, she hates the way I make my scrambled eggs.” And the next thing we know, we’re fighting with our partners over something that nobody really even understands because we’ve all been confused from the beginning.

So, it’s like if we could understand the power of confusion in our lives, like have reverence for it, understand how the brain is really, because I think I always say the brain is the most powerful machine you’ll ever own. You have to operate it powerfully. A great example of that happened in my marriage a lot more at the beginning, is like me and my husband had different texting patterns. So, it’s like I would text and then he would delay for a long time, and instead of just being, like, the man is not near his cellphone, or the man is busy, or the man is distracted by something else, you start to come up with all of these ridiculous stories.

And the craziest thing of all is the stories help no one. It doesn’t help the relationship, it’s not fair to the other person, and we injure ourselves in the process. So, again, if we understand what the brain is doing, which is why I wrote Energy Rising, we become so much more empowered in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in that circumstance, I’m curious, it feels like we need a narrative or an explanation so badly we just make one up. So, Julia, is there a better alternative for us in these moments?

Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, the thing that you want to do is you’ve got to think about this idea of emotional power is, “Who do I want to be in the energy of other people’s bad emotions?” So, if I want to be the type of leader, and, by the way, our leadership totally shows up in our romantic relationships as well so it’s not just a thing at work, it’s a thing in our homes as well.

If I want to be the type of leader who’s trusting and generous, then I need to know that when I start to wobble in uncertainty because, again, the brain has an allergy to uncertainty, I need to really think, “How do I hold the frequency of trust and generosity?” And if I don’t ask myself, if I don’t have a practice of discipline of asking myself that question, the brain is automatically and reactively going to shut the pattern.

And it’s going to shut the pattern in a way that actually makes no sense to our wellbeing. This is kind of the paradox of having a human brain. It’s going to make you start thinking suspicious, annoying. And if you let it fester for too long terrible things about the people in your life who really are on your team. But can I tell you an example from our lab that I just think is so powerful to show you how much the human brain hates uncertainty?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Julia DiGangi
So, in part of our paradigms, we would, in our lab, we had a machine that would shock people. So, this is a way to administer pain to see how people respond in conditions of pain. And what people, as lots of researchers out there who study uncertainty in the brain, in fact, this is at the foundation of all anxiety disorders are. All anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty.

So, we would bring people into the lab, and there’s conditions that you can put people in these laboratory settings. So, you can have a machine that counts down five, four, three, two, one, and when the machine hits one, you’re absolutely going to get a shock. Then you have another condition where the machine counts down five, four, three, two, one, and maybe you’ll get a shock or maybe you won’t get a shock.

Now, the “rational person,” and I’m using air quotes here, is the person who says, “Definitely put me in condition two because there’s a good chance I will walk away pain-free.” But statistically, people choose to be in the option where they get the shock every single time. What that is telling you is that emotional pain, first of all, uncertainty is literally emotionally painful. And the pain associated with uncertainty and stress can be more painful than actual physical pain.

And so, when we think about the way that we lead, the way that we communicate with people, how confusing we are, how much clarity, how much transparency, we have really powerful neuroscientific evidence that says really, really think, especially in a world that is filled with a brim of information, think about how to communicate clearly if you want to be powerful. And by powerful, I don’t mean command and control. I mean effective, connected.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we got this allergy to uncertainty, and one master approach is to rather than letting our default brains do what they do – inventing stories that cause turmoil – we could proactively say, “Who do I want to be in this moment amidst the uncertainty?” And so then, we’re making sort of a conscientious choice, “All right, this is how I’m going to be amidst this as opposed to letting autopilot take us somewhere, which is probably not going to be a great place where autopilot would go.”

Do you have any other pro tips in the midst of uncertainty how we can deal with that well?

Julia DiGangi
I do. This one is, like, I think, a fantastic one. I want to teach you guys something that I call a power pattern. So, I said before, your brain is a pattern detection machine. Now, overwhelmingly, the brain is driving you through your life in ways that are unconscious. We all have had that experience where we’re driving in our car and we’re talking on the phone, and somehow, we magically show up in our driveway and we have no idea, we actually have no conscious recollection of it. So, the brain is an incredibly powerful machine and it does a lot of the work for you unconsciously.

Okay. But let’s go back to this pattern, this idea of “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank.” How that actually sounds emotionally in our lives, and emotion is the most powerful energy in a human being’s life. This is just a neuroscientific reality. So, we’re all running these patterns in our life, and maybe your pattern sounds like, “Things just never work out for me. Things just never work out for me. Things just never work out for me.”

Maybe you have a pattern that’s like, “People don’t understand me. People don’t understand me. People don’t understand me.” So, if you look at your life and you say, “Where are the ways in my life that I kind of keep getting into conflict, or struggle, or stress?” you’re going to see there’s a pattern that kind of connects all those things.

So, let’s imagine that mine is, “People don’t understand me.” So, I write a book, and I kind of have a sense, “Nobody is really going to get it.” Or, I show up at parties and I kind of feel weird because I really don’t feel like people understand what I’m talking about, or people don’t enjoy talking to me. Now, let’s say I’m creating a business, and the whole reason one would create a business is because, hopefully, it’s bringing something novel to the world.

So, I start this business but my underlying pattern, the underlying energy in which I’m doing it, whether I’m conscious of it or not, is, “People don’t understand me.” What do you think the likelihood of success for that business is? I can almost guarantee I am going to self-sabotage. So, what if I said to myself, “Instead of working with this pattern of ‘People don’t understand me,’ what if, if I think I’m really creative and I have these really kind of cool visions for my leadership, what if I started having the…?”

Also, let me just say, when people don’t understand us, especially if we have kind of forward-thinking ideas, that is stressful. But what if I change my pattern, and my pattern, instead of being, “People don’t understand me,” what if my pattern was, “I am ahead of my time”? Now, I kind of have the sense, when people don’t understand me, “Of course, they don’t understand me. I go first. Of course, they don’t understand me. I am a pioneer. Of course, they don’t understand me. How could they possibly understand a place that I’m trying to lead them to?”

Do you see how much more life-giving and hopeful and spacious, “I am ahead of my time” is than “People don’t understand me”?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, building the power pattern seems like we are reframing a thing that’s a bummer into, “Well, yeah, of course, that’s just sort of normal and to be expected.”

Julia DiGangi
A hundred percent true.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I remember doing this during my dating years because it’s a bummer when you’re digging somebody and they blow you off, it’s like, “Oh, okay.” And what’s so funny, I decided about my criteria, I had to boil it down into four.

Julia DiGangi
And will you tell? You’re going to tell me your four criteria or is that top secret?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, they’re cool, they’re cute, and one of them was that they’re crazy about Pete Mockaitis because that’s just more fun. And so, it’s so funny, even though the same thing happened, like, “Oh, I texted her and she ghosted me. Bummer,” I reframed it in terms of it isn’t like, “Oh, why? What’s wrong with me? Was I…?”

In terms of it’s like, “Well, unfortunately, this candidate has been disqualified because she doesn’t really measure up on the key criterion of being crazy about Pete Mockaitis. So, yeah, that’s disappointing that we’re going to have to conclude this candidate’s application process, but I guess we’ll have to move onto the next.”

And it was funny because in both instances, they more or less decided they didn’t dig me enough to want to continue communicating.

Julia DiGangi
Well, Pete, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t dig you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Julia DiGangi
But that being said, things happen that are unexplainable, but what a liberating frame. Because the only thing that would’ve happened if you would’ve been like, “Oh, this person doesn’t like me. I’m not good enough,” which we all do, is we just sink ourselves. So, the other piece here is that this is so big, it almost can sound like I’m saying nothing but it really does matter, which is there is no meaning in the world until you use your nervous system to make meaning out of it.

And the way I really learned that this was true, so, first of all, it’s kind of obvious. If it doesn’t hit your brain and your neurons, like, “Did the tree fall in the forest? Who cares? You weren’t around to hear it.” The whole idea of objectivity, it’s coming through our subjective nervous systems. The way that this really kind of became very, very clear for me is I’m fundamentally a trauma researcher. I’ve done extensive scientific research into trauma, the behavioral consequences, the neurobiological associations.

We very commonly see people undergo the same trauma, the same objective event – childhood issues, assault, accidents, combat – and have wildly different experiences. At one extreme, you have post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a form of illness after trauma, and at the other extreme, you have something that scientists are now starting to study more and more, which is called post-traumatic growth.

How in the world? So, trauma is horrific, that definition is what makes trauma, trauma. How could two people experience something that no one is debating was horrible, and have two remarkably different stories, realities, meanings emerge from that? It has everything to do with what is happening inside of their nervous system.

So, you want to say the stories we tell ourselves are the meaning we make, this has everything to do, everything to do with how powerful we are in our lives. Because I will tell you what, I work with people who had every good reason, every good reason to stay down. The amount of trauma that some people go through is mind-blowing.

If they said to you, “I am never up again,” you would say, “I completely understand.” But for some reason, they say, “I rise because I say that I rise.” And when you see people say, what they’re really saying is, “Even though this horrific thing happened in my life, I am still the most powerful person in my own life.” And when we really touch that, our energy is unstoppable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Julia, I’d love your take in terms of, I think, sometimes we can see, “Yes, this frame, this power pattern would be more useful and helpful to me than the alternative, and yet, I just don’t really believe that to be true. It’s, like, I’d like for it to be true. It sounds pretty nice. I think it can be true for some people, and yet as I try on that belief, it doesn’t fit, or feel right, or feel me.” What do we do with that?

Julia DiGangi
Totally, you got it right-size it. One of the things I love doing in the area of emotional intelligence, mental health wellbeing, is making just tons of great, great analogs to physical health. If I really had been totally out of shape, and I call you, and I’m like, “Hey, you know what, I’m going to run Ironman. I’m going to participate in Ironman athlete,” you’d be like, “That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard you say, Julia, and you’ve had some pretty dumb ideas in your life, but that one takes the cake.”

So, what we have to do when we’re thinking about our own emotional expansion, our own emotional increases in our power, and our emotional strength, we have to think there’s not a more powerful journey in your life so we have to right-size things. So, a lot of times what will happen is people will reach for the emotional Ironman off the dome. And this is why I do not like affirmations, I look in the mirror and, let’s say, I feel terrible about myself, I look in the mirror, and I say, “I’m so great. I’m so great. I matter so much. I love myself so much.” Whatever.

But there’s huge parts of me that is like, “Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.” Not only is that not going to help, it’s going to make me feel worse because the dissonance between what I’m feeling and what I’m actually saying is like so far apart. What I need to do is say, “What is the edge?” And I talk about this a lot in my book, “What is the edge of my emotional power?”

So, if I go to the gym, and I can lift 20 pounds today, tomorrow I’m not going to try and lift 50. I’m trying to say, “What’s 22?”. I go to a conference and I normally sit in the back of the room. I’m too afraid to speak up. I don’t say, “I deserve to be on that stage today.” Maybe I say, “You know what’s accessible to me, I’m going to sit in the first row.” Maybe the next thing is, “I’m going to sit in the first row, and I’m going to ask a question.” You see, so it’s this idea of if you can think about evolution in other areas of your life, of course, you can think about evolution in your emotional life.

The other thing that I think is so exciting is we have totally misunderstood human development. We celebrate, like, “Oh, the little kid took a step,” “Oh, the little kid is walking,” “Oh, the little kid is eating solid food.” And then by the time you’re 21, everybody is done with you. Graduation, college, you’ve hit all your milestones, there’s nowhere but down to go. Not freaking true.

The next frontier of human intelligence is absolutely going to be emotional. And the sooner leaders understand this, the better, because the human brain is emotional. But what we need to now think is, in the middle of our lives when we’re kind of hitting our stride in our career, the most powerful question is, “How do we think about our emotional evolution?” And by emotional evolution, I mean, “How do I still speak up when other people don’t understand me?”

I think a lot of us are saying we’re exhausted, but we’re overworking. That’s a form of self-injury. A lot of us are saying we have really great ideas in our mind but we’re keeping our mouth shut. That’s not emotionally powerful. We’re saying we want to work on holding our boundaries, “I’m really going to start telling people no,” and the second somebody calls me, they’ll be like, “Hey, can you do this other project, Julia?” I’m like, “Yeah,” and then I’m so pissed off all night because – why? – I’m not really resentful of them. I’m resentful because I betrayed myself.

So, we got to get clear on, number one, where the emotional pain in our lives is coming from. And a lot of us don’t recognize this but the majority of the pain in our lives is actually coming from the ways that we abandon ourselves. And the second we start saying, “No matter what, I will not leave myself. I will pay attention to my emotional energy. I will work with my emotional energy. I start to become more and more powerful.”

The reason that this is so important for our leaders is, do you know what your followers want more than anything on the planet? They want access to their own power. And when you become the embodied standard of a human being who is in touch with your own emotional power, you become the influence, the true influence. We all throw this term around. You become the standard that everyone follows, not because they have to, not because they have FOMO, but because they truly desire to. And this is the leadership that will change the planet.

Pete Mockaitis
This is powerful stuff. I’m digging it, Julia. Let’s hit another example in terms of a power pattern and knowing that we don’t jump to the Ironman, metaphorically, but rather we sort of take one more step, like sitting in the front of the row. Let’s say there’s a pattern of energy associated with procrastination or distract-ability, like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing this. It’s boring and I don’t want to.” And then that shows up a lot. How do we apply some of these frameworks to that issue?

Julia DiGangi
So, you want me to tackle procrastination?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Julia DiGangi
Okay. So, first of all, you ready for this?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Julia DiGangi
We have to really get down to the guts, and Energy Rising takes you to the guts of what procrastination is actually about. First of all, let me just say neurodiversity is totally a thing, so a lot of people struggle with attentional issues. I always say attention is the mother of all of our cognitive abilities. If you think you can’t problem-solve, you can’t remember things, you can’t make decisions if you’re not paying attention in the first place.

So, there’s a lot of sorts of taxes on our attention these days, I want to acknowledge that. But if you really look at the research into procrastination, procrastination is always about a fear of not being good enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah? Okay.

Julia DiGangi
Let’s break this down, and I can actually really speak to this from my own. I just wrote this book, like it was a glorious process but I will tell you it was so hard. And the reason it was so hard, and I would have writer’s block, procrastination, distraction, it’s because you have this sense, and a lot of times it’s not even that conscious, but, like, “If I don’t make this perfect,” and a lot of us aren’t able to, we’re not in touch with ourselves enough to say this.

But the logic kind of goes like this, “If I don’t make this perfect, people aren’t going to like it. But it’s not just that they’re not going to like it, they’re going to think I’m an idiot. I’m going to humiliate myself. People aren’t going to want to be around me. I’m going to let everybody down. I’m going to be…” It just keeps cascading and cascading and cascading, and this is what catastrophic thinking is.

So, we do a lot of work around catastrophic thinking in both the coaching industry and in the mental health field, but it’s, like, the true thing about procrastination is not, “I can’t make a phone call,” or write four sentences on a page, or get on camera and say a few things. Procrastination is really this deep, deep fear that there’s something fundamentally wrong with myself.

So, first of all, the first step is to name it. And as soon as you start to say, “Hold on, Julia. So, you’re telling me if you don’t write 10 sentences that are absolutely like Pulitzer Prize-winning, you’re going to basically be a troll living in a refrigerator box?” And when you start to make that explicit, it just starts to let some of the pressure out of the pressure compartment.

And then I start to say, “I’m going to write 10 sentences with absolutely no judgment. I can literally write, “The sky is blue and the grass is…” I just need to start going because you want to start getting some momentum. And you also want to say, like, if we want to be effective leaders, the fastest way to get there is to totally release this perfectionism BS. Because it’s so interesting to me, and I will tell you, I treat a lot of anxiety. OCD is an anxiety disorder, and one of the forms, there’s many forms of OCD, but at a pathological form, perfectionism is OCD.

We think that OCD, or we think that perfectionism makes us so strong. It makes us so weak because the person that you’re doing the perfection for isn’t you. You’re performing for some fantasy that you have about what other people think. And if you’re really getting to the guts of it, what you think is that, “They’re going to think I’m a fool, they’re going to think I’m a reject, they’re going to think I’m a degenerate, unless I nail it.”

And what’s really interesting is when you get people to start verbalizing, “Tell me about the fears,” it’s almost hard for them to put it into words because the intellectual part of their brain knows that it’s absurd. The intellectual part of my brain knows that if I don’t write the best book in the history of the planet, I’m not going to be a social outcast and die alone. So, it’s more of this nebulous sense of, like, “This just doesn’t feel good.”

That sensation is generated by emotional systems in the brain. So, part of the work of getting over distract-ability, and perfectionism, and procrastination is to say, “How is my fear of failure playing out here? Let me start to literally list the reasons, and then let me start to take reasonable action.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Julia, much good stuff. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Julia DiGangi
I think I just want to say this because I think it’s so hopeful and so empowering and so healing, and I sort of started our interview saying this, is that the feelings, if you really think about any problem in your life, the reason you have a problem is because you have a bad feeling. You feel intimidated. You feel disappointed. You feel overwhelmed. You feel scared.

If you don’t work on the actual feelings themselves, those feelings will just keep popping up again and again and again, which means your ability to be powerful in your leadership will be constrained by that level of your emotion. Let me make this more clear. Let’s say I get really anxious talking in front of five people, and I make it through my talk, and they’re only five people there. Next time I give a talk, it’s probably only going to be to five people. If I want to talk on huge stages to 20,000 people, do you think I’m going to be able to talk on a stage of 20,000 people if I really can’t handle a stage of five?

So, it’s not really the situation I need to work with, it’s the sensation of anxiety and fear. And once I break through that at five people, then I can start to speak to 20 people. When I break through that, I can start to speak to 50 people. So, when we really start to work not just with our situations but we really start to work with the energy in our nervous system, it really transforms our leadership and our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Julia DiGangi
Yeah. Can I share two?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Julia DiGangi
I have two favorites. The first quote is from Mother Teresa, and it is, “If only we would sweep our own doorsteps, then the entire world would be clean.” I have worked with human suffering and human redemption for a long time, and we’re all out there talking about a better world. If we really want to create a better world, we have to look more closely at our own emotional pain because nearly all of the pain in the world actually comes from people’s fear. It doesn’t come because we’re cruel, vicious, psychopaths. It comes because we don’t feel like we’re good enough. And in the panic of not feeling good enough, we create messes.

The second quote is related to that, and the second quote is, “Everywhere I go, there I am.” A lot of times, we think if we could just change our situation, we could get a better job, we could make a little bit more money, we could have the breakthrough in the business that we just created, the kids could graduate, on and on and on and on. But what I have seen over and over and over again through my work, and also because I understand the brain, the brain is a pattern detector that runs on emotional energy.

So, your situations can change, you can move from Chicago to Denver, and you might feel good for six months, but pretty quick, you’re going to feel the way you’ve always felt unless you work at the level of your emotional energy.

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

Julia DiGangi
I’ll say one of my own studies that I really like and then I’ll talk about someone else’s work. The study of my own that I like the most is I looked at what’s called pre-morbid predictors of PTSD. So, this kind of goes back to this idea of we have so much power to make meaning out of our own lives.

So, basically, the idea here is that most people who experience a traumatic event will naturally recover. Just like if you fell down on the street and skinned your knee, if you give it some time, chances are good that your leg is going to recover naturally. So, scientists are asking the question, “Is trauma alone not enough to describe who gets sick and why?”

And so, this study really looked at, “What’s going on with people even before the trauma has happened that can describe who’s at risk and who’s really resilient?” Because if we understand that, there’s so much potential to heal people. So, that’s kind of my work that I think is really exciting.

And I’ve also really liked a lot of the studies around uncertainty and boredom. There’s a great study where people were put in a room, and they thought they just had to go in this waiting room for a little while, they thought they were going to be part of another study but it was actually a setup. They were put into this room, and the only thing that was in this room was an electrical shock machine.

And they were like, “We’ll be back in three minutes to come get you,” that’s what the experimenter said, but the whole experiment was just to leave people in the room. And you saw that in a relatively short period of time, people were so bored that instead of just sitting with themselves, instead of just being still, meditating, thinking, people started using this electrical shock machine to shock themselves.

And I think that’s such a powerful metaphor because we are so resistant to just sitting with ourselves. And if we really want to feel better in our lives, we don’t need to achieve more and do more, I’m not saying those things can’t be done, but they come from a much more powerful place when we really understand our own inner energy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Julia DiGangi
So, a great book, I can’t say my favorite because I have a lot, it’s like picking your favorite child, is The Body Keeps the Score. Are you familiar with this book?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Julia DiGangi
So, obviously, a great book about pain and how it shows up in the nervous system. So, if we really want to empower ourselves, it begins with our brains and our bodies.

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

Julia DiGangi
Well, this isn’t going to be this fancy but it’s going to be honest. I do a tremendous amount of work texting myself. I wrote enormous sections of the book texting myself. So, a lot of times, it kind of goes back to what we were saying about procrastination and fear of failure, when I would fire up the computer, I felt like there was all this pressure to start being, I don’t know, Ernest Hemingway or something. And a lot of times, I would get paralyzed by it.

And it was a night when I was calm and my kids were asleep that a lot of times, I would have all this inspiration – there’s that word again – all this creativity, and I would, in my Notes app and in my text message, do a lot of really beautiful work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Julia DiGangi
I would say my favorite habit is I free-write every evening. I’m very, very disciplined about this. And the reason I do this is because it’s a great way to integrate your thinking and your feelings. It’s a great way to have the most powerful brain. So, you have systems in your brain that think, and systems in your brain that feel, and they are connected but not perfectly integrated.

So, if you free-write, in other words, you’re not writing with a goal, you’re not trying to answer a very logical question, it’s a great way to link your emotions to the way that you think. And the most powerful person is a person who knows what they feel and feel what they know.

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

Julia DiGangi
Yeah. “Emotional energy is a currency, and you cannot give what you do not have.” We get this in all other domains. If I came to you and said, “Pete, I really, really need five bucks,” and if you really wanted to help me but you genuinely did not have five bucks, you would go, “Julia, I’m sorry, I don’t have five bucks,” and that would be the end of it. I would clearly understand.

In our workplaces, in our homes, we’re now talking about all these emotional currencies: transparency, empathy, inclusion, belonging, authenticity. And leaders are supposed to give these things to their teams, they’re supposed to give these things to their children, they’re supposed to give these things to their partners, the problem is I cannot give something I do not have.

How can I give attunement to my child when I’m not even attuned to myself? How can I create a culture of belonging if I’m always feeling, like, “I’m not really sure I belong in this organization. I’m kind of worried about my relevance. I don’t really feel like people like have my back”? We cannot give what we do not have.

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

Julia DiGangi
I would love to connect and talk about emotional power in leadership. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram @drjuliadigangi. Or, you could check out my website which is DrJuliaDiGangi.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?

Julia DiGangi
Yes. I would say think about, look for a pattern in the ways that you get stuck. Where are you getting constantly overwhelmed, constantly stressed, constantly feeling frustrated? And ask yourself, what can you do that would push you a little bit further out of your comfort zone to be able to feel your feelings a little bit more so that you could ultimately release those feelings that don’t feel good?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Julia, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and good energy.

Julia DiGangi
Thank you, Pete. Likewise.

Sep 21
0

900: Six Mindsets For Thriving in Uncertain Times with Charles Conn

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Charles Conn shares how to be strategic and make breakthroughs when things are uncertain.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How talented people unknowingly self-sabotage
  2. The simple question that leads to clever breakthroughs
  3. How to communicate your ideas so people will care

About Charles

Charles Conn is an investor, environmentalist, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of Monograph, a venture firm, and was previously CEO of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. He is Board Chair of Patagonia and sits on The Nature Conservancy European Council. He was founding CEO of Ticketmaster-Citysearch, and was a partner at McKinsey & Company.  He is a graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Boston Universities.

He is co-author with Robert McLean of Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything, published with Wiley in 2019, a best-seller now in six languages, and The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Charles Conn Interview Transcript

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

Charles Conn
It’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and the book, The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times and general problem-solving wisdom you have to share with us but, first, I’m curious, so you’re the board chair of Patagonia. I’m imagining that you’re an outdoorsy person then. Is this fair to say?

Charles Conn
Yeah, my big passion is to spend time outside.

Pete Mockaitis
Are there any particularly memorable tales of outdoor adventures that leap to mind?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I have explored on several occasions the very upper regions of the Skeena River in British Columbia which runs almost the entire length of the province, and goes from these incredibly beautiful mountains, all the way down to the sea. That one is deep in my heart.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And have you ever had any brushes, close encounters with death in your adventures?

Charles Conn
Yes, on several occasions, once involving a landslide and also, in northern Canada, this time on a lake called Mistassini in northern Quebec, and a couple times in boats.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. And what does that do for you, like, internally and how you view the world and your priorities?

Charles Conn
That’s a good question. I think it sharpens you up on what’s important and makes you focus on not all the little things that are the day-to-day but on the bigger things that actually matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re talking about something that matters a whole heck of a lot in terms of strategic mindsets and problem-solving. Could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about mindsets and problem-solving and such while putting together The Imperfectionists?

Charles Conn
I think perhaps the one that’s hardest for people to get their own heads around is to be comfortable with the idea of collective intelligence or outsourcing wisdom, whether that’s outsourcing it to ancient wisdom, or outsourcing it to artificial intelligence swarms. It’s very hard for people to think that they don’t have everything inside themselves. But, of course, we don’t and we can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, what I find counterintuitive is that people find that counterintuitive, that’s so meta. Maybe I’m humble or just a dummy but I’m thinking, “Of course, I don’t have the answers.” And, in a way, that’s kind of a relief. I’m not on the hook, on the spot, expected to. Can you dig into this mindset a little bit?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think what happens in big organizations, and you’ve worked for fancy consulting organizations, people, over time, sort of overcome that natural humility that you just described and begin to think that their organizations can do remarkable things. And it’s that idea that… you remember Enron, they thought they were the smartest guys in the room.

And that kind of idea, like the arrogance of thinking, “We’re the smartest guys in the room, and, therefore, all of the pieces of the solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve can be found here,” is a fundamental delusion that especially talented people tell themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know that that is widespread. And I guess that kind of hits me interestingly because I’m thinking about, boy, there was a quote. I got to get this guy on the show. I think he was in the Bush cabinet, he said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” That is exactly how I feel all the time because people will say things with such definitive language and tone of voice and use the word obviously, it’s like, “Oh, it’s obvious.”

And I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that that’s the case.” And, occasionally, they’re just dead wrong. And so, I’ve sort of had to, in my mind, mentally attach a disclaimer to all things being shared in general casual conversation.

Charles Conn
And don’t you find, as we get older, that instinct to humility should get stronger and often it doesn’t?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think so.

Charles Conn
And that’s what makes someone boring, right, that they’re confident that they know everything there is to know and they’re not open to new mindsets and new ways of seeing things, new lenses.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I think about just how many times I’ve been dead wrong about things, so it’s, like, I have evidence to suggest that it’s quite probable that I may be mistaken about something, especially with my first impressions pre-research.

Charles Conn
When we’re young, we often have that kind of confidence, never in doubt, occasionally correct. Hopefully, the world gives us the evidence that you just described. Usually, it does.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, so there’s something surprising that popped up. Could we maybe zoom out and hear kind of the big picture or the thesis behind the book The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times?

Charles Conn
Yes. So, here’s 30,000 feet on it. There’s always this sense that the world’s getting faster and faster, and now it really is. There’s objective evidence with the amount of new data that’s being produced every day, the impact of artificial intelligence, computational biology, robotics. It’s a blur. And no young people today can look at their parents or their grandparents’ careers and think, “I will have something like that.”

This idea that you could gather a body of knowledge, in high school or university, and then put that to work over 40 years, if it ever really did hold, certainly doesn’t hold now. And that creates a feeling of anxiety and anomie, and you see this a lot in young people. There’s an epidemic of anxiety and also depression because of that sense that we’re unmoored.

And my sense is that, instead of looking for perfection so that we know all of the moving parts and we can confidently solve the problems in our lives, that we should actually let go of that idea, and we should lean into the risk and uncertainty that the world is delivering up to us by using some mindsets that actually tame that or make sense of it for us. So, that’s the 30,000 feet of what the book is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s so much great stuff to dig into here. So, let’s hear about the anxiety and depression coming from a sense of being unmoored. Can you expand on that?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the way we’re all taught to think about our lives, and companies are taught to think about strategies, to think that there’s a structure out there that you can understand, markets have structures, lives have structures, and that there are agents that operate within this structure. And if you do some thinking about what their incentives are, you can actually deduce what the right strategy for you is. That’s a very standard model of strategy sometimes called structure conduct.

And I think the world that we operate in now, that structure is changing so quickly that understanding the rules or dynamics of how agents will behave in those fluid structures has diminished or gone out the window. And that leaves many people who are looking for structure conduct rules feeling anomie. And in the businesses that we all operate in today, compared to the past, you don’t even know who the disruptive entrant is going to be to your nonprofit or to your business. Maybe one of these super competitors like an Apple or an Amazon who you don’t even think of as operating in your sphere.

And I think that creates a kind of a feeling of uncertainty in a world that’s changing quickly that makes many people freeze, paralyzed, or makes other people leap before they look, both of which are pathological responses to uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just a definition check for anomie. What does this word mean?

Charles Conn
So, anomie is this sister to entropy, the idea that we’re lost in a world where there’s no meaning and no touchpoints or milestones.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I can see how depression or anxiety, might be in the sense of, ‘Oh, this is solvable but I just can’t so I guess I’m no good” is one direction versus anxiety, like, “Ahh, there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Charles Conn
“I don’t know what to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s freaky. Okay.

Charles Conn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you say if we let go of this notion and that there are structures, this is solvable, etc., that we can feel liberated from that.

Charles Conn
That’s right. It doesn’t mean we just sort of lean into anomie. It means we actually have some tools that are well within our capabilities to make sense of this faster-moving world. The fact that we don’t have simple structure in conduct doesn’t mean there isn’t structure in content. We can actually learn the game that’s being played. It’s just the rules are changing and it’s unfolding quickly so we need an orientation toward uncertainty and change, which helps us gather information to make good decisions and to be successful even when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this sounds super beneficial, we can let go of some of that anxiety and depression. And what are some of the other benefits associated with mastering these skills and mindsets?

Charles Conn
So, I think you said mastery, and I think a feeling of mastery, even in a world when things are changing, a feeling, a quiet confidence that even when things are changing, you can actually chart a course that makes sense, not a course without mistakes because mistakes and learning from mistakes are a critical part of this framework for getting comfortable operating in this world of change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a cool maybe case study of someone who felt some of these challenges and adopted some new approaches and saw cool results?

Charles Conn
So, I think the very most important mindset will sound incredibly obvious but I think it’s actually really profound, which is curiosity. Humans are pattern recognizers when we’re young. We look for patterns that help us make sense of the world. And then, as we get older, we become pattern imposers so that we can make sense of confusing things.

The problem with pattern imposition is we often get it wrong. This is what Daniel Kahneman wrote about when he wrote about all the cognitive errors that humans do in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If we can stay curious even as we get older, we can actually be open to learning in this world that’s going faster and faster. And I’ll give you two little case studies.

One is Nespresso. So, everybody knows what Nespresso is. It was created by Nestle, which is one of the world’s biggest food companies, the biggest producers of coffee. Nestle had a young engineer, his name was Eric Favre, and he happened to be with his wife visiting Rome. And he was standing there thinking he wanted a coffee, and he noticed that there were a whole bunch of coffee shops in Rome, and only one of them had a queue out the door.

And instead of thinking, “Well, I don’t want to stand in that queue. I got to go with this one,” he said, “I wonder what’s going on here? Why are people queueing outside the door?” And the name of the coffee shop was Sant’Eustachio, so he waited in the queue, and he went inside. And there was this whole barista in there called Eugenio. And he thought the machine was broken so he was pumping the espresso machine and putting extra bars of pressure into everybody’s coffee.

And the result was this incredible thick crema on the top of everybody’s coffee, and that’s why people were waiting. And Favre’s curiosity didn’t stop there. He obviously enjoyed the coffee, but he went away and he thought, “I wonder how we can make that, give people that experience, that actual experience of being in a Roman coffee shop in their home?”

And he tinkered and experimented, he was actually a rocket scientist, and he figured out how to create pressure via the machine, what we now think of as a Nespresso machine and a Nespresso capsule, so that you can produce that wonderful thick crema in your coffee at home. It took eight years to do it. Nestle gave him the time and the space to do it, and he created a business that does about 10 billion a year in revenue, all from curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think that line, that really is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to curiosity. It’s like, “Are you impatient, in a rush, need to do what’s latest and loudest and now, now, now? Or are you like, ‘Hmm, what’s that about? It’s going to take more time and maybe be kind of annoying but let’s go with it, see what happens here’?”

Charles Conn
Right. And in this world, this feeling of anxiety that we’ve got to just to keep our nose at the coal phase, we often let those experiences pass by, and those are the experiences that give us insights that actually give us that feeling of mastery and confidence when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, when it comes to the mindset of curiosity, what do we do with that sort of actionably, “Just be more curious”?

Charles Conn
Well, yeah, so that doesn’t sound right but the truth is we can put it into practice by stopping to notice. And that thing, as kids, we always ask the question “Why?” In fact, there’s all this research, kids ask something like a hundred questions an hour. It’s incredible. And what they’re doing is trying to find patterns that make sense.

And when they eventually learn how to tie a shoelace with a double bow, that problem is solved and they become a pattern imposer after that, “This is how we tie a shoe,” they learned an experiment of how to tie their shoe. How can you leave open that childlike way of asking why. Eric Favre stood there on the cobblestones of Rome, and asked, “Why?” And I do think curiosity can be as encouraging, or spurring curiosity can start with putting questions when we see phenomenon that we don’t immediately impose a pattern on.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, we just ask why about anything and everything that pops on up.

Charles Conn
Everything, especially stuff that’s anomalous. So, we tend to look at things that are anomalous, and we put them into the bucket of not an important datapoint because it doesn’t confirm something that we wanted to confirm or that’s natural to confirm. Or, we bucket it very quickly into, “I guess they’re short a barista there, and that’s why there’s a queue.” We use the wrong framing because, and you said it, we’re impatient creatures.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, once we ask why, I guess then the next step is to try to see what’s going on.

Charles Conn
Yeah. Another great case study, which I wouldn’t go into in detail, is how instant photography was invented. Edwin Land, now a famous chemist, was walking around Sante Fe, New Mexico, with his daughter, and he was taking pictures with his conventional film camera. And his little daughter, Jennifer, pulled on his sleeve, and said, “Let me see the picture, daddy.” And he knelt down and he said, “Oh, well, that doesn’t work because we’re exposing a film emulsion to light, then we send that to the drugstore.”

And he stopped himself, and he realized, like, “No, why can’t we see the picture?” And it was his curiosity, instead of just brushing his daughter off, that led him to spend the rest of the day walking around Santa Fe, thinking, “I wonder if I could make the pictures appear instantly.” And he was working with a patent attorney that night, that very night, to develop what we think of as the Polaroid instamatic camera.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, we got curiosity. What’s next?

Charles Conn
So, the next one, I think, is really important. It’s kind of a sister idea is one we call occurrent behavior. Occurrent behavior means what actually happens in the world as opposed to what you wish would happen or think will happen, and for us it means an experimentalist approach. You can see why that’s a cousin to curiosity.

It means instead of accepting existing datasets, you actually create your own data. When you were a Bain consultant, and I was a BCG consultant, one of the first things that they tell you when you started a new piece of work or study or a case, it’s called different things in different places, is you’d look out for the existing datasets that you could purchase or rent so that you can begin to immediately draw insights, but everybody has access to those purchasable datasets, and they don’t represent whatever current reality is because they were collected before.

And an experimentalist or a current behavior mindset says, “I wonder if we can test or taste the market ourselves,” and you can do this in any part of your life, rather than accepting what exists to see if you can generate your own perspective. So, occurrent behavior is trying it. And I think we think of that a lot when we think of internet companies.

So, in internet companies, we think, “Oh, you can just try interface B or interface A, and you can see which one generates more traffic or more revenue.” But you can do this kind of thinking in any business. One of my favorite crazy examples is SpaceX. Whether you’re a fan of Elon Musk or not, what he’s done in only 15 or 20 years with SpaceX is incredible. You had NASA for 60 years sending parcels into space, including people, and during that entire time, they didn’t drive down the cost curve.

In a period of only 15 years, because he was willing to relentlessly experiment, going from sending three or four missions into space a year, which is what NASA was doing, to sending 15 or 20 missions into space a year, which is what SpaceX has been doing, and each time trying something new, including using technologies from the automotive industry, like heat shielding, using innovations like using a basket or a net to catch the nose cone, which is an expensive part that you might otherwise lose, they’ve been able to drive down the cost curve by about 95%, so cutting the cost of sending a kilogram into space from 50,000 to just over 2,000.

It’s remarkable. And it shows that even in the ultimate of heavy industries, experimentation can lead remarkable results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you say experimentation, I’m thinking SpaceX, they’ve had a number of things explode, and I guess that’s part of it.

Charles Conn
Right. And I think this is part of imperfection. Obviously, unplanned disassembly, which I think was the term that they used in a hundred-million-dollar mission is an extreme example of what sometimes comes at a cost. Experiments come with a cost. But there were 20 different things, according to the commentary by SpaceX at the time, that they were trying to experiment with in that launch, and that they learned from, and that they’ll improve from.

In any of human enterprise with relative low cost, in this case, it was relatively high cost, we can generate new data that gives us a better sense for how the world is actually unfolding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is sparking some cool connections. We had Suneel Gupta on the show talking about being backable, and he said one thing that makes you phenomenally persuasive is you have an earned secret. It’s, like, you know something that other folks don’t know, and one of the best ways to do it is just do those experiments.

And then it speaks to fundamental problem-solving process, whether we’re in uncertain times or not so uncertain environments, just that hypothesis-driven thinking approach that we’re into in consulting, is so huge. It’s like, “What must be true for this to be a good move or workout? And then how do we test that?”

And so, just for funsies, could you share with us a couple really cool examples of means of experimenting and testing that are accessible to the typical professional in the midst of problems they bump into?

Charles Conn
So, one is an old story from some friends of mine in McKinsey, which is another firm that I worked at, who were trying to solve a really difficult problem when they were working with the Federal Reserve, which is, “How do you count money?” And this is in the days before counting machines, so in the late ‘70s, they were actually counting money by hand, and they would double and triple count the big bundles of hundred-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills, if you can believe it, and they thought that that was a far more accurate approach than any other approach.

And one of these clever consultants said, “Hmm, seems like a slow and error-prone approach,” because they would often do tests and find that the counts were off, “Why don’t we weigh the money?” which was a crazy idea. But with a very accurate scale and money at a particular humidity, so specific gravity, weighing is much more accurate than counting, and they were able to demonstrate that.

And I think that’s just one of those really cool little examples, which is exploring your curiosity by doing a mini experiment, in this case, weighing the money, led to kind of a breakthrough how the Federal Reserve thought about counting money. Later on, that was bypassed by great counting machines, but I just think that’s one beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun and it reminds me of my favorite TV show ever, Breaking Bad, in which they all have to weigh the money, the stacks of it in the storage facility.

Charles Conn
Oh, dear, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a good one. I’d also love your take on experiments about if we have to predict the future. And so, for example, one of my favorite encounters of one of my failures in using good hypothesis-driven thinking was I was exploring making an investment – this was back in the day – in a magazine that went to producers of TV and radio shows, because I wanted to sell a book and associated speaking services, but the price tag for that ad was sort of substantial for me at the time, and I was like, “Oh, is this going to work out?”

“At the end of the day, am I going to recoup more money than I invested in this thing?” And that’s all based on the responsiveness, both of the producers and the consumers listening or watching? I was like, “How can I even know?” And so, I went in the wrong direction, as a consultant, I was like, “Well, let’s just assume this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and make a spreadsheet.” I’m just making up numbers, and I was like, “Well, those numbers seem reasonable. Let’s go for it.”

And it was a total bust, I very much regret that investment. And then months later, I got a phone call from someone, who said, “Hey, Pete, I noticed your ad in this publication. Can you tell me how that worked out for you?” I was like, “Oh, not well, but what I should’ve done is what you’re doing. I had a whole content info of all these people who bought the ad and I could’ve just given them a ring, and say, ‘Hey, how did this work out for you?’ and then I would’ve known and saved some money.”

Charles Conn
And that’s one of those great problem-solving techniques, which is called Occam’s razor, which is a 15th century idea, which is the best solution to the problem is usually one that requires the least assumptions. And you could’ve started with that approach, which is the simplest one right in front of our nose.

And we often, especially clever people, and I think that’s what’s amazing here, is that these techniques are not to help ordinary people behave like clever people. These are techniques that help clever people even more because we’re the worst pattern imposers, the people who are very confident about their abilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Occam’s razor or with this book, I think it was called Obvious Adams, the idea was, “Hey, just do the obvious thing in business and it will take you really far,” which, in some ways, is I think is best about AI. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about AI coming up with creative business ideas more so than ten MBAs.

I’m a little skeptical but, either way, I’ve heard elsewhere, it said that AI tends to give you the most obvious answer because it’s like picking the words that are next to other words around this thing, large language models. But that in of itself is super helpful, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, let’s do that obvious thing. That’s pretty handy. Let’s go ahead and do that.”

Charles Conn
I think that’s right. Basic large language models that are trained on the internet, which is the junkyard of HTML that is the internet, are likely to give pretty obvious and not creative solutions. I do think AI trained on better databases, and particularly the kind of underlying databases, can actually generate surprising and sometimes creative outcomes because it isn’t looking to impose a particular pattern. It isn’t working with a set of assumptions the way you and I often do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. Charles, well, we talked about curiosity, occurrent behavior, experiments. Is there another key mindset or piece we should dig into?

Charles Conn
So, the other mindset that we think is really powerful, we call dragonfly eye. And the analogy of the dragonfly eye is because they have these incredible compound eyes that have all these different lenses, more than 30,000 lenses, and a couple of different types of receptors that allow them to see almost 360, and also allow them to see spectra of light that no human can see.

We don’t really know how that insect experiences the world but we like this idea, when you’re problem-solving, of making sure to test different perspectives than your own. And sometimes people will call that perspective-taking, so maybe that would be a simpler way of putting it. When you’re solving a problem, remember to step out of your shoes because your shoes are the shoes of the organization that you’re working in, and your particular set of beliefs about how your organization competes in the world.

So, what we’d encourage people to do is see the problem through the eyes of others. So, that might be your suppliers, it might be your employees, it might be from one of your existing competitors, or it might be a perspective like an incipient or potential competitor, and we think that’s a particularly useful lens. So, trying your problem on through the perspective of others, which is a relatively straightforward thing to do, you can workshop this, gives you insights that other people just don’t have. And I’ll give you an example, this one that I love, and done by a friend of mine, is Invisalign.

So, you’re familiar with Invisalign, which are these clear braces that have just taken the orthodontic world by storm over the last 20 years or so. Were those invented by an orthodontist?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m guessing not, but I don’t actually know. Lay it on us, Charles.

Charles Conn
You got it. So, why not? There had been various forms of braces around since actually the time of the pharaohs but the kind of metal tracks that we have today have been around for something like 70 or 80 years. Why is it that orthodontists who get paid so much money to put those tracks on didn’t think of these clear progressive teeth corrections that Invisalign thought of?

It was thought of by two students at Stanford Business School. One of them was a kid who didn’t have the money to get braces until he was in his mid-20s, actually at business school. He was noticing how awkward it felt to have braces as a mid-20s person. He also noticed that, when he got his braces off, that if he forgot to put his retainer in for a couple of days, when he put it in, it hurt, and then it stopped hurting.

And what he noticed, therefore, was that his retainers were also moving his teeth, and he and his colleague, who’s called Kelsey Wirth, thought, “Huh, I wonder if you could do 3D printing, using a hard clear plastic like this retainer, that would move people’s teeth just like the ugly braces do.” They were taking the perspective of a brace patient, or braces user, not the perspective of an orthodontist who was just looking for the technical teeth correction.

With a different lens, they ended up creating a business, a very difficult to do because no one wanted to support them in dentistry, but eventually they got a school of dentistry to help them do the engineering. They got some engineers at Stanford to help them do the 3D printing, and they created a business that’s worth $20 billion market capitalization today, and have totally democratized orthodontics. It used to be just a small group of people who made that money. Now, any dentist can fit it.

So, I think it’s an incredible insight. It came from seeing things through a different perspective that other people didn’t think, and it’s one of the most powerful ways that you can improve your own life, which is to stop and see things through a different perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get with the Invisalign story that it was an atypical perspective that we wouldn’t expect it to come from. And so, in practice, if we’re trying to take other’s perspectives, how do you recommend we do it? We just ask, “Hey, any ideas for how to correct teeth?” Or what’s the process?

Charles Conn
I love workshops and maybe you do, too. I love getting people in a room. One of the most powerful things you can ever do is get your customers in a room. Never understand why people don’t do that, and whether you work in a nonprofit or for-profit organization, you can bring the people into the room who you’re trying to provide services to, and ask them, “How do you see my product?” and listen to what they’re saying.

Now, sometimes that doesn’t work when the products super breakthrough. In this case, they wouldn’t have told you that they wanted Invisalign. What they would’ve told you is how awkward they felt getting braces, how painful it was getting braces, how they couldn’t wait to get their braces off. So, imagine the original Sony Walkman. A focused group wouldn’t have created the Sony Walkman, they didn’t have it in their minds to do so.

But asking people how they wanted to consume their music, which was increasingly mobile, actually could’ve created the Sony Walkman. And I think that’s the kind of insight that comes from stepping outside your own pattern imposition framework, and thinking about whatever the problem is from the eyes of others.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s well said there. What is the Henry Ford quote – “If we ask the customers what they wanted, they’d say they wanted faster carriages,” or something like that. And so, some would say, “Oh, well, customers don’t know. You’ve got to figure it out for them.” But I think that what you’re saying is, within that, it’s like, “Well, you’re getting at something. If the customers say that, then, well, that can spark some things to go forth and innovate.”

Charles Conn
Customers know their pain points and customers know their druthers even if they couldn’t conceptualize the Walkman or Invisalign. So, I’ll give you one more example. The biggest player in cloud computing isn’t IBM, and it’s not Microsoft. Why? Because they didn’t get the idea first. Someone else got it first. And the people who got it first was Andy Jassy at Amazon, and he got it first because he saw something they were doing internally for their own computing power.

And he realized, “What if we could offer this by the minute or by the byte instead of having people have to create their own server farms? What if we rent this capacity?” And, of course, that’s where the idea of cloud computing came from. He saw things through a different perspective. They developed something internally, and then he thought, “Huh, I wonder if there’s a business here?”

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s exactly what happened with me, as well with podcast production. So, that’s cool. All right. Well, then can you give us some views on when it comes to the notion of being an imperfectionist, or embracing imperfectionism? Can you talk to us maybe a bit about the emotional hang ups? Or how do we make that journey, so it’s like, “Oh, yeah, now I’m just totally cool making lots of mistakes, and being totally imperfect”? That could be quite a leap for some.

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I think the overarching mindset is imperfection or imperfectionism, and that really brings together all of the mindsets, two we haven’t talked about, or we talked about briefly, collective intelligence and show and tell, together with the ones that we have talked about. The overarching idea is to go ahead and lean into risks, and I think this is the emotional thing that causes people either to freeze, “I better wait till things are more stable,” or to just like, “Ahh, jump,” and you could look at Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and think, “Hmm, he probably should’ve thought about that a little harder.”

I think the way to get over the emotional either paralysis or impetuousness is to think about what things you can do – so curiosity, dragonfly perspective-taking, or experimentation – that you can do that are relatively quick, relatively low cost, and relatively low consequence when it goes wrong.

So, if you had those three things, “I can get feedback quickly, it doesn’t cost me too much to make this experiment, and the consequences of it going wrong are relatively modest, I can lean in and learn more about the game that’s being played, see the structure,” and, again, we can’t count on some historical structure, “see the structure that’s in the current game, and look at the behavior of the players that’s in the current game. That gives me information and allows me to be more confident about my next step even if what I did originally has some failures in it.”

I’ll give you an example because it’s always better to bring things to life, and it’s another Amazon example. So, Amazon is now a big player in what we call consumer financial services. They have something like a 24% share of all the transactions that occur online because people use Amazon Pay even when they’re not on the Amazon site. How did that happen?

Well, did Amazon use its giant balance sheet to buy a huge bank or consumer finance company? Nope, they didn’t. Well, why? So, what they did instead is, starting around 2008, they made a couple of little investments in fintech companies, they hired a team from a failed fintech company, they tried to build their own version of what was then called Square, which was a little payment device, which is now called Cube, and they bought some IP.

Almost all of those specific steps that I’ve just described ended in failure, meaning they no longer exist today, but each of those things built their understanding, built their skillset because they brought in people, and built their capabilities, ultimately, to become a competitor. And that allowed them to climb kind of an invisible staircase to be competent enough to begin to do the things in consumer financial services that they’re now known for, ultimately including an Amazon credit card and Amazon Pay. They did small low-consequence steps that, when apparently failed, actually helped build their capabilities and their confidence to become a real competitor in the space.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Charles, I really geek out at all the stuff. I love problem-solving and decision-making stuff. I think it’s just massively leveraged powerful skill that makes a world of difference in terms of if there’s a thing to learn, or to really invest in, it’s probably this and several organizations said, it’s like, the top skill for the decade or century that we’re in.

What I find interesting and intriguing is that sometimes in episodes where we’ve covered this, I see the data that my dear listeners aren’t as jazzed about this as I am, or so it seems, in terms of, “Huh, I thought this was one of the most killer episodes ever,” and then the download and engagement numbers are, like, modest, like, “Oh, yeah, it’s all right.”

And so, I scratch my head a little bit, but my leading hypothesis is that people say, “Well, yeah, I know I got tons of problems solved. I got lots of answers, and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere when I share them with my collaborators and colleagues in the organization.” So, I’d love to hear, you got Chapter 6: Show and Tell, Storytelling to Compel Action, what are your pro tips for when we’ve got a great solution ready to pop into the world, make its debut? How do we lead other people on board with that?

Charles Conn
What a great segue and setup. Yeah, no matter how good a problem-solver you are, on your own, you won’t make any change in the world. And I think it’s almost an icon, the brilliant person laboring by themselves without recognition or understanding, and I think that exists for a reason, which is the independence that allows some people to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions that are out of the norm doesn’t necessarily make them compelling to others.

And we love to go back to this very simple concept you did as a kid, probably in kindergarten or first grade, which is show and tell. And the way to bring people on board with your idea is to, literally, think about, “How would I show and tell this?” And sometimes smart people think, “Well, I’m going to give them the data. I’m going to give them a graph that tells them what the output is.”

What we’ve learned is, in a world where there’s more and more data produced every day, in a world of polarization that we live in today, that people don’t trust information the way they used to anymore. So, to break through with your idea, is actually much more difficult than it’s ever been before. And the critical insight here is to speak to people’s hearts, not just their minds. So, when you construct your stories, think about what people’s values are.

And I’ll give you an example here, which is if you’re in the nature conservancy, you want people to change their behavior about how they interact with the natural world. You could do that just by pointing out that we’re destroying the world, the temperature is going up, and species are dying. But people often don’t pull their Subarus over to the side of the road and change their behavior unless you talk about something they really do care about, which is, for example, their kids.

And even people who have very different political perspectives love their kids, and you can use something like that as a common ground to begin to build the story for change, which people will actually sign up for. And one of the reasons The Nature Conservancy has been quite a successful conservation organization is that it has incentives when it comes to telling stories that speak not only to the facts but also to the values that people care about.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that story can sound like, “Don’t you want your children to be able to enjoy these beautiful spaces? Or you want them to not live shorter lives because of pollution?” like that sort of thing?

Charles Conn
Better yet a demonstration. Sure, what you just said makes sense but what about a demonstration? So, I’ll give you a physical demonstration done by The Nature Conservancy. They were trying to convince wealthy donors that they should invest in building shellfish reefs in estuary areas because estuaries are where fresh water comes out, but there’s often pollution in that fresh water. And when it gets mixed with the saltwater, this is where a lot of creatures grow up in estuaries. This is where we create some of the biggest environmental crises.

If you put in oyster reefs, for example, or rather shellfish reefs, those tiny creatures that are inside the shells actually are filter feeders, and they filter out a lot of the toxins and pollution that comes out of estuaries. What the Conservancy did in one famous presentation in Australia is they put 17 10-liter buckets at the back of the room stacked in a beautiful pyramid.

So, everyone came into the room, and the first thing they noticed is these 17 beautiful green buckets stacked in a pyramid. Even before they said anything, they had the audience’s attention, the philanthropists’ attention, “What’s going on here?” And they said, “Do you know that each oyster filters 170 liters of water a day and cleans that as much as those 17 10-liter buckets holds each day?”

And by using that physical demonstration and tying it in, again, with values that people cared about, clean water for their kids, that demonstration opened up people’s wallets in a way that a PowerPoint presentation never could.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s fun, as I imagine the philanthropists, which I’ve done on a very tiny scale, is you get excited, like, “Wait, one oyster and all that water? Well, that sounds just like a kill on return on investment. Where do I write the check?”

Charles Conn
Exactly. So, here’s another example. Richard Feynman, he’s speaking before the Space Shuttle Disaster panel, and he thinks that the problem is with the O-rings because the launch was done at a low temperature. And he could’ve presented a table of data showing that O-rings fail at lower temperatures, which is true. What did he do? He had a glass of ice water on the desk in front of him, and an O-ring in his pocket.

He took out the O-ring, held it in the water with a little clamp that he purchased at the hardware store next door, and then he twisted the O-ring to show that it deformed and then cracked at that lower temperature, the temperature of ice water. Well, no one will ever forget his testimony. Even though he had a Nobel Prize and could’ve used all kinds of data, what he did was a short demonstration that grabbed people.

And if you want your ideas, after you’ve done your clever problem-solving, if you want your ideas to have currency, if you want your ideas to break through in the world that’s a blizzard of ideas, think about how you would do show and tell.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, if you could just give us a few rapid-fire bullets of examples. So, we’ve got the ice water O-rings. We’ve got the big buckets of water. What are some other ways that we show stuff visually that’s powerful?

Charles Conn
Well, there are some famous graphics in history that I always go back to. So, you know that there’s a famous nurse called Nightingale, Florence Nightingale. Very few people realize that Nightingale was also one of the best statisticians of her day, and she drew this thing that’s now sometimes called a rose crescent diagram to show the impact of, basically, the filthy conditions during the Crimean War in the middle 1800s.

And she showed that way more soldiers were dying from the bacterial infection of their wounds, or bad water, than were actually dying from bullets. And she did that by showing this amazing graphic that’s famous to this day, that grabbed everybody’s attention. She could’ve written 150-page or 250-page finding but that single graph convinced the British military that they needed to upgrade the public health facilities that were in the hospitals in Crimea, which eventually led, by the way, to a public health revolution back in the home country, Britain, because Queen Victoria paid attention to what was going on in Crimea.

And we don’t know this for sure, but apparently met Florence Nightingale. That’s a person who figured out show and tell, and she changed the world. That’s how we get public health. Not just a nurse, someone who changed everything.

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

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I’ll give you one more, which I think, in the world we live in today, we talked about it very briefly at the beginning, but think about collective intelligence whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, and where you can outsource incredibly great ideas that will help you solve your problem. There are platforms like Kaggle which allow you to bring in other people’s ideas for a small amount of price money, maybe an AI algorithm, maybe an AI swarm.

The Nature Conservancy used that very effectively to create a program called FishFace that allows computer recognition aboard boats to identify which fish are endangered species and should be put back in the water, and which fish are okay to eat. They didn’t have that capability internally at The Nature Conservancy so they outsourced it for $150,000 price via Kaggle.

That’s just one of thousands of good ideas that come from bringing other people’s expertise inside your organization even when you’re full of clever people. And so, that would round out the six mindsets that I think will give people confidence that despite the pace of change, and all the terrible things that are happening in the world, that we can step into that risk and confidently navigate our way.

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

Charles Conn
Einstein is famous for saying if he had an hour to spend solving a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the nature of the problem, and five minutes solving it. So, he was a predictably clever guy, I think we can all agree, but there’s so much benefit that comes from thinking through your problem from different perspectives before you run off and try your favorite technique. So, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the research behind the book called The Selfish Gene, which was a book published by Richard Dawkins in the late ‘70s, is the most concise encapsulation of how evolution works, which is this powerful engine that’s behind everything in the world today, including how humans compete with each other.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Charles Conn
I think my favorite book is probably E.O. Wilson’s Biodiversity which sort of naturally flows from the Dawkins book. Biodiversity comes from the impact of how evolution works.

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

Charles Conn
I actually love old-school woodworking tools. So, my personal favorite tool would be a woodworking plane. I think it’s amazing. They’ve been around for 3,000 years.

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

Charles Conn
Climb the stairs.

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, they retweet it, they Kindle book highlight it?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m hearing back now is around curiosity, which is people are thanking me for awakening them to their own curiosity and to the wellspring that comes from asking the question why.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can find both the books I’ve published on LinkedIn, or you can find them on Amazon, or any other great booksellers. We also have a website which is called TheImperfectionist.org, or BulletproofProblemSolving.com.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah. So, don’t be afraid to lean into risks using relatively low cost, relatively reversible moves. You may make some mistakes but you’ll learn tons.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Charles, thank you. This has been so fun. I wish you lots of fun problem-solving and imperfection results, and, yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Charles Conn
It’s been terrific. Thanks so much for having me, Pete.