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Dec 09
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1017: How to Reclaim Your Creativity and Unlock Innovation with Duncan Wardle

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Disney legend Duncan Wardle shares keys for tapping into your creative side.

You’ll Learn

  1. What blocks our creativity
  2. How to hone your ideas with a “naive expert”
  3. The trick to surfacing your best ideas

About Duncan 

As Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney, Duncan and his team helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences.

He now brings his extensive Disney expertise to audiences around the world using a unique approach to Design Thinking, helping people capture unlikely connections, leading to fresh thinking and disruptive ideas.

Delivering a series of keynotes, workshops and ideation forums, his unique Innovation toolkit helps companies embed a culture of innovation into everyone’s DNA.

Duncan is a multiple TED speaker and contributor to Fast Company, Forbes & the Harvard Business Review. He teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale, Harvard, and Edinburgh University. 

Resources Mentioned

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Duncan Wardle Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Duncan, welcome.

Duncan Wardle
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I am so excited to talk creativity and The Imagination Emporium. And, first, I’d love it if you could kick us off, no pressure, but I’d love to hear a super riveting high-stakes story that’s also instructive and behind the scenes related to a Disney classic masterpiece that we’re all familiar with. Just no problem.

Duncan Wardle
Any particular masterpiece you had in mind?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, it’s not hard enough. Let’s make it more specific. I’ll keep it open. I’ll keep it open. I mean, I’m thinking my kids love Moana, but we can go anywhere you think there’s a juicy story.

Duncan Wardle
So, I started, I finished as Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney. Didn’t start that way. I started as the coffee boy in the London office. I used to go and get my boss six cappuccinos a day from Bar Italia on Frith Street. And about three weeks into the role, I was told I would be the character coordinator, that’s the person who looks after the walkaround characters, at the Royal Premiere, for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Diana.

I was like, “Ooh, what do I do?” They said, “Well, you stand at the bottom of the stairs, the Princess will come in along the receiving line, Roger Rabbit will come down the staircase, the Princess will greet Roger, she’ll move into the auditorium.” How could you possibly screw that up? Well, that’s the day when I found out what a contingency plan was, because I didn’t have one.

But a contingency plan would tell you, if we were going to bring a very tall rabbit with very long feet down a giant staircase towards the Princess of Wales, one might want to measure the width of the steps before the rabbit clips on the top step and is now hurtling like a bullet, head over feet at torpedo speed directly down the stairs towards Diana’s head. Whereupon he was taken out by two Royal Protection officers who just flattened him.

There’s a very famous picture on Reuters of Roger going back to the air like this, two secret service heavies diving towards him, and a 21-year-old PR guy from Disney about going, “Oh, shit. I’m fired.” So, I thought, “You know, there’s no point going to work tomorrow.” So, I got a call from somebody called a CMO. I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I thought, “Oh, he’s going to tell me I’m fired. He goes, “That was great publicity.” I said, “Who knew? I could make a career out of this.”

And so, for the next 20 or 30 years, to be precise, I got to have some of the more mad, audacious, outrageous ideas for Disney, Pixar, LucasFilms, etc. and I was like a kid in a candy store. I always liked the ideas that I had no idea how to pull them off. When I sent my son’s Buzz Lightyear into space, I had to convince NASA to take Buzz Lightyear into space. He’s the world’s longest serving astronaut on the International Space Station.

I built a swimming pool, a full-size Olympic swimming pool down Main Street, USA for Michael Phelps to swim down. I really only ever liked the ideas that I had no idea how I was going to pull them off once they were approved.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that sounds like a ton of fun. I’m just taking it all in. Wow! So, basically, you had nothing to do with the tripping, and had you thought of it, you would have prevented it, and you would not have had this beautiful serendipitous pathway of fun, creative goodness, unfold for you.

Duncan Wardle
So, basically for 20 years, I got to do the more mad, audacious, outrageous ideas, and about, oh, God, 2009, 2010, I got a call from the boss who said, “Listen, you’re the guy with all the mad ideas who seems to get them done inside a very large organization, you’re going to be in charge of innovation and creativity,” to which my response was, “Well, what the hell is that?” He said, “Well, I don’t know. We just want to embed a culture of innovation and creativity into everybody’s DNA.” I said, “Okay.”

So, I tried three or four models, I hired outside consultants, we did accelerator programs, we created innovation team. But what we failed in, actually, our overall goal, which was “How might we embed a culture of innovation and creativity into everybody’s DNA?” So, I set out to create a toolkit, one that has three principles: takes the BS out of innovation and makes it more accessible to normal hard-working people; makes creativity tangible for a 50% of us who are uncomfortable with ambiguity and grey; but far more important, make it fun, give people tools they’ll choose to use when the boss isn’t around. That’s when you know you’re changing a culture.

And we ended up having, I think it was like a three-year waitlist for what was a two-day voluntary training course. So, we must be doing something right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. Well, I’m intrigued then, with all this study and practice and teaching and experiencing in the zones of creativity and imagination and innovation, is there a key surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans when we’re trying to do this stuff?

Duncan Wardle
Yes. Close your eyes. Where are you usually and what are you doing when you get your best ideas?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m often in bed or in the shower.

Duncan Wardle
Okay, there we go, so we’ll go with those. So, you can open your eyes. I’ve done this with up to 50, now 20,000 people in the audience, and used either here, in bed, in the shower, jogging, running, commuting, playing with the children, out walking, and nobody ever says at work. Not one person. Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it, because we’re paid to have our big ideas at work.

So, close your eyes again. Picture that last verbal argument you were in with somebody. A bit of a shouting match. Your voices are raised. You’re angry. You turn to walk away from that argument. Now you’re five seconds away. You’re 10 seconds, you’re 20 seconds away from the argument. And what just spontaneously pops into your head the second you turned to walk away from that argument? What was it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, a smarter thing that I should’ve said.

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, the killer one-liner, the one perfect, beautiful comeback you wish you’d used during the argument but you didn’t, did you? No. Why? Because when we’re in an argument, our brain is moving at a thousand miles an hour. defending ourselves, and when we’re in the office, it’s the same for meetings, emails, presentations, and I hear myself say, “I don’t have time to think.” But the split second you gave yourself time to think, came up with a killer one-liner, came up with a big idea.

But we don’t give ourselves time to think. And how do you get there? By being playful. Why is that important? Because when you are in the argument or at work you, and you hear yourself say, “I don’t have time to think,” you’re in the brain state called beta, where you only have access to your conscious brain. Well, that’s only 13% of your brain; 87% of your brain is subconscious. Every meeting you’ve ever been, every creative problem you’ve ever solved, every innovation you’ve ever seen, it’s back here. It’s unrelated stimulus but you don’t have access to it.

How do I get access to it? By being playful. What do I do? Sixty-second exercises deliberately designed to make you laugh. Why? Because the moment I hear laughter, I know that, metaphorically, I placed you back in the shower where you are when you have your best ideas. When you ask, Pete, I often hear people say, you know, you ask, “What’s the barriers to being more innovative and creative where you work?” People say, “We don’t have the resources, you know.” “Oh, okay. All right. Well, who are the most creative people you’ve ever met?” “Children.” “How much money they got?” “None.”

There is a correlation there. The challenge is this. I believe that the most employable skillsets of the next decade are being killed through Western education. Why do I believe this? Because I was doing some work recently with Google on their DeepMind project, and I asked the engineer, that’s their artificial intelligence program, what she believes will be the most employable skillsets in the next decade. And she said the ones that would be the hardest for her to program, and we agreed on what they were. The ones that which we were born with.

We were all born creative. We were all born with amazing imagination. We’re all born with empathy and intuition, but then we go to school, and the first thing our teacher tells us to do is “Don’t forget to color in between the lines. Well, stop asking why because there’s only one right answer.” So, by the time we’re 18, we identify as not creative and we’re not curious anymore. And yet with AI coming into the marketplace, these will be some of the most employable skillsets for the next decade.

So, I am on a mission. I believe everybody is creative. I don’t believe it’s just some people. I define creativity as the ability to have an idea, and I define innovation as the ability to get it done. That’s the hard part. But here’s the thing, we train our lawyers, train the IT team, train marketing, train sales, but when it comes to innovation, we just tell people to get in a room and have a big idea with no training, no equipment. So, I thought, “Right. I’m going to create a toolkit.”

So, let me ask you a question, actually, before I describe the toolkit. When you’re in your office, or anybody else’s office, for that matter, and you see a business book, where, physically, where is that business book? Where is it in the office?

Pete Mockaitis
On a bookshelf.

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, bingo. Do you ever read it? “No, I’m too busy. My boss needs this by three o’clock. I’ve got a weekly report to do, so I don’t read the books.” I thought, “Okay, what nonfiction book have I ever read, where I could only read one page, don’t have to read the whole book, but I get exactly what I want?” A cookbook. You want Shepherd’s pie? Go to page 67. And so, I’ve designed the book exactly the same way.

So, there’s a contents page for the left-hand side of the brain, and there’s a contents page for the right-hand side of the brain, and it says, “Have you ever been to a brainstorm where nothing ever happened? Go to page 67.” “Fed up with your boss shooting your ideas down? Go to page 12.” “Don’t know how to find an insight for innovation? Go to page 47.” So, I’m trying to make it accessible for people, and then I want it to really make it tangible and fun.

Because the more expertise, the more experience we have, the more reasons we know why the new idea won’t work, so we constantly shoot it down. And I call it our river of thinking. And, basically, in the last four years, we don’t get to think the way we thought four years ago. We’ve got climate change, we got artificial intelligence coming into the marketplace, we’ve got Generation Z that doesn’t want to work for us, and we’ve got global pandemics, so we don’t get to think the same way we always have. So, I want to give people a set of tools that stop you thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, it’s a lot of goodness to dig into. We’ve got the creative side, getting ideas, and the innovation side, the hard part, making them happen. So, let’s talk about each of these in succession. On the creative side, you said you want to get us into a playful zone, and you’ve got some 60-second exercises that make us laugh. I would love to be able to laugh within 60 seconds regularly, just in general, as a life skill for joy and happiness. So, how do I pull that off?

Duncan Wardle
Well, let me see. Experts, okay. I’m going to give you an occupation. You’ve worked in this occupation for the last 25 years. Therefore, you are the world’s leading guru on this particular topic. I will play the role of a news reporter and I’ll interview you about how you get your job done. So, Pete, for the last 25 years, you are the world’s leading guru as a designer of parachutes for elephants. I will now interview you about your job.

So, Pete, I’m just curious, is there a difference in how you design the parachute for an Indian elephant versus an African elephant, given that their ears are totally different sizes?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Given the aerodynamic qualities of the ear, we make sure that the shape of the parachute can accommodate them effectively and slow things down just right, compensated for the fact that we’re getting some ear help along the way.

Duncan Wardle
And the airplane, do they go up to 30,000 feet? Or, do they go up to a thousand feet? Do they have to go to a higher altitude because of the weight of the elephants versus a human?

Pete Mockaitis
No, same height works just fine.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And are the elephants, the Indian elephants more intimidated than the African elephants? Is one more bold and loves throwing themselves out of planes? Or is it sort of a joint fear factor?

Pete Mockaitis
They both hate it.

Duncan Wardle
And how did you get into this line of business in the first place, I’m curious?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I met this charming podcast guest and he inspired a whole career journey.

Duncan Wardle
All right. Well, thank you very much. So, I walk into a room and ask people, “Hands up if you think you’re creative,” and less than 3% of the audience will put their hand up. And then I’ll give them this exercise, and you just hear a huge laughter, and they realize that they’re far more creative than they thought they were. And I think that’s important.

The other one that I do, because I think it’s really impactful, is this one. So, you and I are going to brainstorm an idea for a birthday party. We’ve got $100,000 in the budget. And so, would you like it to be a Star Wars party or a Harry Potter party? What would you like?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I can’t help but going meta, so we only have two choices, huh?

Duncan Wardle
Well, we’ll pick a theme. What do you want?

Pete Mockaitis
I was thinking Superheroes, broadly speaking.

Duncan Wardle
Okay, superheroes. We’ll go superheroes. So, I’m going to come at you with some ideas for a superhero party. I want each and every response, every time you respond, I want the first two words out of your mouth, if you would, to be “No, because” and then you’ll tell me why we shouldn’t be doing that idea. So, I was thinking, right, we’ll get all the superheroes together. We’ll get the DC heroes, we’ll get the Marvel heroes, and we’ll even put Disney characters in there with capes and masks.

Pete Mockaitis
No, because we don’t have the intellectual property rights to do DC. This is Marvel country.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. All right. Okay, I’ll tell you what then, we’ll just do a cosplay party using all the…wait, no. Actually, superheroes, we could do a crossover party between Star Wars and Marvel, and all the tall people could come as like Darth Vader, and all the little people can come as Ewoks.

Pete Mockaitis
No, because that’s offensive to people who suffer from disabilities.

Duncan Wardle
No, a fair point. So, what if we do a Guardians of the Galaxy party because that’s got superheroes from all different, a very diverse background, and we just show the movies back-to-back-to-back, and we’ll have a playlist where we can actually all set ourselves back into, oh, LP 1970s. We’ll look good in the ‘70s.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I want people to really connect and engage with each other as opposed to seated and watching films.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, well, okay. So, we’ll stop there. So, let me ask you a question. When you’re throwing out ideas and somebody’s constantly “No, because-ing” you, how does that make you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s really deflating. It’s just like, “Oh, no, no.” I was like, “I regret starting this conversation. Hmm.”

Duncan Wardle
And do you think our idea, where we were going there, do you think we were heading in a much bigger direction or were we getting smaller? Which direction were we heading?

Pete Mockaitis
Smaller.

Duncan Wardle
So, let’s try it again. Pick another theme.

Pete Mockaitis
Another party theme?

Duncan Wardle
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. Let’s go with the ‘90s.

Duncan Wardle
The ‘90s, okay. Man, what do I remember about the ‘90s? Not much, but that’s okay. Who cares? So, I’m going to come at you with some ideas for a ‘90s party. Unlike our colleague, the other Pete, who started with the words “No, because,” I’d like you to start with the words “Yes, and” in each response, and we’ll just kind of build it together.

So, I was thinking we could, oh, yeah, a David Hasselhoff lookalike party. It’d be great.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have cars that are like KITT.

Duncan Wardle
Ooh, yes, and we could have Transformers and the cars could actually turn themselves into Transformers, and everyone gets to take one home, and it could be sponsored by Ferrari.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have ChatGPT in the cars so they could actually talk back and forth to us.

Duncan Wardle
Ooh, yes, and we’ll have ChatGPT in all different languages around the world. And then we’ll bring in holograms of ABBA from the ABBA Live Show in London. And then we could actually all be holograms, so we’re not actually in the party at all, but that we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have 3D headsets to make it a more immersive experience for the people who are there remotely.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, yes, Apple Vision Pro, so people could actually join us from around the world. So, we’ll stop there. So, a lot more laughter, a lot more energy. This time around, if you were to describe that exercise in one word, what one word would you choose?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.

Duncan Wardle
Fun. By the way, why shouldn’t work be fun? This time around, bigger or smaller?

Pete Mockaitis
Bigger.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Far more importantly, when we work inside big companies, we’ve got bosses and colleagues and constituents to bring on board with our ideas. When we just finished building that idea together, whose idea was it by the time we finished?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s a team. It’s both of ours.

Duncan Wardle
It’s ours. So, just using “Yes, and” has amazing powers to turn a small idea into a big one really, really quickly, but far more importantly, allows us to transfer the power from my idea, which we know never goes anywhere inside a large organization, to our idea and accelerate its opportunity to get done. But the more experience, the more expertise we have, the more reasons we know why the new idea won’t work.

So, we start, “No, because we tried that last year,” “No, because that won’t hit our KPIs,” “No, because that’s not the way we do it here.” Just remind yourselves and the colleagues who tend to start with the words “No, because,” “Look, we’re not green lighting this project for execution today. We’re merely just greenhousing it together using yes and.” You can change your culture overnight with “Yes, and.”

Pete Mockaitis
Greenhousing, that’s fun. And even just imagining a greenhouse puts you in a good mood, with the water mists and the sunshine and the plants and the flowers.

Duncan Wardle
Actually, whilst I’ve got you, I’m going to grab a pen and a piece of paper. Have you got one? I know I should have probably mentioned that in advance. I want to talk about the power of diversity in innovation, because everybody talks diversity and then nobody does anything about it. So, I want to prove to people how diversity drives innovation.

We’ve been designing a new retail dining and entertainment complex for the Hong Kong Disney Resort, in the room that day were, the Disney Imagineering team, a team you would expect to be there, but on that particular day, I was faced with 12 white male American engineers, all over 50. That’s called groupthink.

So, I invited in a naive expert. Well, what’s a naive expert? A naive expert is there because they don’t work in the industry in which you work. Well, how can they help you solve the challenge? Well, they can’t but that’s not why they’re there. They’re there because they will say or do something to stop you thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.

So, I brought in a young chef from China, a female. Why? She wasn’t male, she was female. She wasn’t American, she was Chinese. She wasn’t over 50, she was under 20. And far more importantly, she wasn’t an architect or an engineer, she was a chef, and I knew she would say or do something to get us out of our river of thinking and thinking differently.

So, I gave them the same challenge that I should give you now, pen and paper. I’m going to name an object. You have seven seconds to draw it, and then I want you to hold it up. Are you ready?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Please, would you draw a house? Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Share your genius, if you would, please. Let’s take a look. Let’s take a look. And, ooh, can’t see, it’s fading in and out there a bit. Okay, so hands up if you drew one door.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, one door, yep.

Duncan Wardle
How many windows?

Pete Mockaitis
I have one window, but I ran out of time. I would have had two.

Duncan Wardle
Did you draw bars over the windows?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And what shape is the roof?

Pete Mockaitis
A triangle.

Duncan Wardle
Shocker. So, all of the Disney Imagineers drew exactly what you did because they were constrained by their river of thinking. But the young female Chinese chef, she drew, hang on let’s just see if I can’t sketch this in 10 seconds, she drew a dim sum house with some dim sum on the top of it, a chimney. And so, it never occurred to her to draw the house the same way we would because she wasn’t stuck in our river of thinking.

And on the way out the door, a Disney Imagineer slapped a Post-it note over her dim sum house, and said, “Distinctly Disney. Authentically Chinese.” Seven years later, the strategic brand position that guided the entire design of the Shanghai Disney Resort, “Distinctly Disney. Authentically Chinese.” The point is this, diversity is innovation.

If somebody doesn’t look like you, they don’t think like you. And if they don’t think like you, they can help you think differently. And so, the next time you have a leadership meeting, the one person that you could do within that meeting room is not a leader, “Oh, we can’t do that.” Well, why not? Have some young 25-year-old superstar in the meeting. They’re not there to solve the challenge for you. That’s not why they’re there. They are there to challenge the way you think and to help you think differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Duncan, I’m loving this so much. And this reminds me when I was consulting at Bain, we had a giant department store client and I was new to the case, I was naïve. And the partner was talking about size packs, which is something I was not familiar with, but, apparently, there are garments that are sent to department stores, at least at that time, that you don’t get. You don’t say to the supplier, “I want three smalls, five mediums, ten larges.” No, you buy different size packs which have a certain preset number in there.

And I said, “Why do we have size packs? Like, aren’t we a big deal retailer who could ask for and receive from our suppliers the exact sizes that we wanted, and they would need to play ball, and would nicely meet the inventory needs and demands of how many different people of different sizes are in different stores?”

And it was funny because the partner looked at me, he’s like, “Are you kidding?” He genuinely was not sure. He wasn’t trying to be offensive or dismissive, but he was not sure if I was joking about the size pack question, because size packs are just part and parcel with what he’s been dealing with and thinking about, an industry norm forever. And so, so for me to say this is just, like, shocking.

And I don’t know, it may or may not be a wise idea with logistical efficiencies to have size packs in department stores. But I think that just by shaking it up, we are at least able to consider some new ideas and the implications of, “What if we didn’t have size packs? Maybe smaller players could work with us and we could have more fresh interesting offers in our stores. Hmm.”

Duncan Wardle
“What if” is a great tool. It was designed by Walt Disney for Fantasia. He was very frustrated that he couldn’t pump mist into the theatre or heat into the theatre during the movie. So, the theatre owners, so step one, you list the rules of your challenge. Do not think about them. If you start thinking about them, you’ll think of all the reasons you can’t break them.

So, Walt simply listed down the rules of going to a movie theatre, “I must sit down. It is dark. I must go at a set time. I can’t take in my food and beverage. I must pay to get in. I can’t control the environment.” Just list the rules. Don’t think about them. Then pick one and ask the most audacious, provocative, outrageous “What if.”

So, Walt chose the environment, he said, “Well, what if I could control the environment?” Well, he couldn’t, he didn’t own the movie theatres. Besides, that wasn’t provocative enough. So, he said, “Well, okay, if I can’t control the environment, what if I may take my movies out of the theatre?” If you know how to do it, you’re iterating. If it scares you, you’re innovating.

So, somebody said, “Well, how are you going to do that, Walt? They’ll be two-dimensional, they’ll fall over. People won’t be able to see them.” “Well, what if I made them three-dimensional?” “Well, how are you going to do that, Walt?” “Well, what if I just put people in costumes like in princesses and cowboys and pirates?” “Yeah, but, Walt, you can’t have Cinderella standing next to Jack Sparrow. People wouldn’t be immersed in her story.”

“Hey, what if I put each of them in a different themed land?” Boom, it’s called Disneyland, and that’s how he came up with the idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful.

Duncan Wardle
So, let me ask you a question. Did you used to go to Blockbuster Video?

Pete Mockaitis
I did.

Duncan Wardle
Did you used to pay late fees?

Pete Mockaitis
Not much, because I was broke, and I really tried to be on time.

Duncan Wardle
Well, you were one of these people who took them back on time? Wow, okay. Well, clearly, you didn’t. Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but, occasionally, I did.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. So, Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, very fed up of paying late fees, walked into a Blockbuster Video, sat down, observed the process for a day, and wrote down the rules. “I must drive to a physical store. I must go during opening hours. They have a very limited stock. I can only take out three at a time. I must return it. I must rewind it. And if I take it back later, I must pay a late fee.” Listed the rules.

So, he took one in 2005, he took store, he said, “Well, what if there was no physical store?” What a stupid idea in 2005, or was it? YouTube was already seven months old. YouTube was only streaming professional content. So, he said, “Well, hang on a minute. What if I just did a deal with a major movie studio? I’ll stream professional content. Huh. Nobody would have to drive to a physical store. I’ll be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everybody gets the one they want. I’ll have unlimited stock. Nobody would have to return it or rewind it. I’ll cut the rental off at 24 hours. Nobody pays a late fee. I’ll call it Netflix. I’ll take my ideas to Blockbuster five times. They’ll turn me down five times. I’ll take them out of business in less than five years.”

Now, a lot of your listeners are going to be sitting there saying, “Oh, but we don’t have the resources.” Uh-uh, that’s not fair. This tool works for everybody. There was a very small company in Great Britain in the late ‘60s. They used to make glasses that we drink out of, and they found too much breakage and not enough production as the glasses were being packaged and shipped.

So, they went down to the shop floor and they watched the production, and they broke down the rules. “Twenty-six employees convey about 12 glasses to a box, six on the top, six on the bottom. Glasses separated by corrugated cardboard. Glasses wrapped individually in newspaper. Employees were reading the newspaper.”

So, somebody took that one and said, “What if we poke their eyes out?” Well, that’s against the law and it’s not very nice. But because they had the courage to ask the most provocative what-if question of all, the lady sitting next to him immediately said, “Well, wait a minute, what if we just hire blind people?” So, they did. Production up 26%, breakage down 42%, and the British government gave him a 50% salary subsidy for hiring people with disabilities.

So, list the rules of your challenge. Don’t think about them, just list them. Pick one and ask the most audacious what-if question. You’ll be amazed how it gets you out of your river of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right, Duncan, so we’ve hit a few guidelines for the creative, getting ideas part of things. Now let’s talk about innovation, implementing them. It’s funny, sometimes I think I have so much curiosity and love playing in the world of ideas and brainstorming and imagining and what-if and how might this work, that it’s actually a little bit tricky for me, personally, at times to hunker down. It’s like, “Okay, let’s do the things to get this going.”

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, very true. Analysis paralysis. Welcome to corporate America. So, let’s say, hang on, I’m just drawing something out here. Strategic brand fit, consumer truth, bucket load of money. Can we get it in the marketplace in the next 18 to 24 months? And is it socially engaging? I just made that up. So, this is called Stargazer. It looks like a starfish, right? And so, as you’re evaluating, let’s say, to your point, we’ve got 47 ideas up on the wall. Well, how do you know which is the right one for the consumer, for the business, etc.?

Well, so I’ve just created this and people can create their own criteria but, let’s say for today, criteria number one, “Is this embedded in our strategic brand fit? Is this aligned with what we stand for as a company? Is this embedded in consumer truth? Is the product or service relevant to the target market we want to go after? Can we actually get this into the marketplace in the next 18 to 24 months? Is it socially engaging? Will it get everybody sharing it on social media? And will it make us a bucket load of money? Obviously, you’ll have a fiscal goal.

And what you do is – I don’t have colors with me today – but you just go around each of the little criteria has three little marks on it. Does it do a poor job of meeting this criteria, a good job of meeting the criteria, or does it knock it out of the park? And all you do is you go around, let’s say it’s now idea number 13, and I’m just going to score it here on the notepad, and then I’m going to join, literally just like we were when we were kids, I’m going to join the dots.

There’s idea number 13, so it’s not really aligned with our brand, not really embedded in consumer truth but, yeah, we can get it in the market in the next 18 to 24 months, yes, it’s very socially engaging and we think it’ll make us a bucket load of money. And so, then you go around with idea number 47, I’m making it up, and you do exactly the same exercise. And very quickly, one idea rises to the top as to meeting your criteria the best, not the idea you like the most. And that’s the problem.

Ideas are very subjective, and this tool allows you, very quickly, to make an objective decision. When we were doing an event for Disneyland Paris, the CMO at the time decided it would be a really good idea to do a cowboy festival for the 25th Anniversary of Disneyland Paris. Well, if you look at consumer truth, our average consumer was a mum with toddlers who was aged 32.

And when he got to that criteria, he realized that mums didn’t know how to spell the word cowboy, let alone knew what they looked like, so he himself had to kill his own idea. So, again, make the tools simple, make them powerful, make them fun, and people will use them.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, there, it seems like a lot of that you can do just right there, moments after you have your ideas, and other pieces, you might really need to do some extra research and to figure out, “Well, will consumers love it and share it? Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ve got to go talk to them.”

Duncan Wardle
Well, bingo, see, focus groups. We’ve stopped doing focus groups. It’s in a meeting room with no windows and no doors, and the consumer knows you’re on the other side of the window, and so it’s not a very relaxed environment for getting true insights for innovation. And our market segmentation teams tell us, “Well, we need to get in 14 different individuals.” No! Individuals don’t tell the truth.

If you ask a bloke, “Hey, what do you do when you go to Disney?” “Oh, I’m a manly man. I ride the thrill rides.” But if he’s sitting next to his husband or his wife and they go, “No, no, dear, actually, you did Small World 17 times about last year. You really loved it,” you get insights out of couples that you don’t get out of individuals. And the real insight comes from looking where your competition isn’t looking. It’s in their living rooms.

When was the last time anybody listening to this podcast actually spent a day in the living room of one of your consumers? So, we were tasked by Disneyland Paris to get more people to come more often, spend more money. The classic. Data told us who could afford the brand, who had an affinity to the brand, who’d been shopping online, who’s a 10 out of 10 every year around coming this year. Well, they hadn’t come, so my intuition told me these people were liars or procrastinators. Let’s go find out.

So, we went to go. And our going, in hypotheses, was the classic “If we build it, they will come.” Why? Well, because that’s the way we’ve always done it. We just build a new attraction, people will come. Our data tells us that. So, we went off to live with a consumer for a day, each of us. Now, I’m curious, do you have children, by any chance?

Pete Mockaitis
I do, yes. Three.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Could you close your eyes for me, if you would? And I want you to picture a favorite photograph of your children, the one that you can already see in your mind’s eye, because you can see it. It’s a physical one. It’s somewhere in your house or your apartment. Tell me which room is that one in that you can see right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Where is the photo? It’s taken in the backyard.

Duncan Wardle
So, the picture was taken in your backyard. And can you describe the photograph to us?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure, yeah. We’re wearing white shirts, and we’re in the backyard and looking happy.

Duncan Wardle
And who’s the we part?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the whole family.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, and can we name them or is that…?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Myself, Katie, Johnny, Mary, Joey.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And which ones are the children?

Pete Mockaitis
Johnny, Mary, and Joey.

Duncan Wardle
And how old were they the day that photograph was taken?

Pete Mockaitis
About five, four, and a half, years old.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And how old are they today?

Pete Mockaitis
They are now approaching seven, six and two.

Duncan Wardle
So, that photograph is, give or take, three years old. Give or take.

Pete Mockaitis
In the ballpark, yeah.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. All right. So, you can open your eyes. And here’s what we found in each of the houses we went into, I saw this photograph above the mantelpiece, and I asked the mum, I said, “Oh, how old are your children, love? Four or five?” She goes, “No, love, 14 or 15.” I said, “Oh, okay. Well, write it down. It’s one individual observation. It doesn’t mean anything.”

When we got back together, we all had the same insight. When we asked the mum how old the children were in reality versus the photograph in her living room, they were anywhere from three years older to 25 years older. Well, does that mean we don’t print photographs of our children anymore? Yeah, of course, we do. Graduations, promotions, etc. And so, why did you pick one that was three years old?

Actually, let me just try another one because your children are quite young. So, close your eyes again. Picture your parents’ house and that really dorky photograph of you from 15 or 20, 25 years ago, where you looked like a complete dickhead. Tell me which room is that photograph in?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s in a downstairs bedroom.

Duncan Wardle
Bingo. So, it’s still there, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Duncan Wardle
You wish they burned it 25 years ago, but it’s still there. Right, so you can open your eyes. So, I was like, “Why is the photograph still…why do all the mums have photographs of their children from 20 to 25 years ago? Why don’t they have more recent ones? Why did she pick that one?” And so, we dug a bit deeper, asking why, why, why, why, why, because the insight for innovation comes on the fourth or fifth why, not the first way. And, by the way, our data only goes to the first why today.

And each of the mums told me about three moments in time, I label them bittersweet transitions, that take place between a parent and a child through which you must cross. And, Pete, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to break your heart now because you haven’t gone through any of these but you will. I remember where I was when my son was 10 years of age, he came around the corner, Christmas Eve, and his eyes were half full of tears, he says, “Papa,” I said, “Why?” He goes, “Are you Santa Claus?” Boom. Imagination, gone. Spider-man, history.

But what hurt was so much was behind what he had said, was, “I’m not your little boy anymore, Daddy. I’m grown up.” Now, do you have a daughter, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. How old is she?

Pete Mockaitis
Six.

Duncan Wardle
Six. So, you probably got about another six or seven years left, and one day you’re going to be walking down a high street, and I was outside Panera, Adriana was on my left-hand side, I was in Kissimmee, Florida. It was a Tuesday morning. It was my left hand she dropped in public for the first time because she didn’t want to hold Daddy’s hand in public. Every time you put your hand back now, you know she’s going to grab it, but, well, in one day, she won’t, and it’ll hurt.

And then, the last one was the day where we sent her off to college for the first time, and we put her in her dorm, made the beds, made friends with the roommates. Then it was time to turn around and say goodbye for the very first time. And we hugged and laughed and cheered and told her how much we loved her, and then we walked out to the car park and cried our eyes out like everybody else. And our mums described each of the same three moments in time.

So, what we realized, despite what our data hoped has told us, which was, “If we build it, they will come,” there isn’t a mum alive today who wakes up in the morning, wondering about whether or not Disney is going to build a new attraction this year. But there are, every mum, wakes up every morning, as your wife does today, worried about how quickly her children are growing up and how she wants to make special memories for them “While they still believe, while they still hold my hand, while they’re still here.”

That’s a segmented communication campaign, another capital investment strategy, one that drove the doors down to Disneyland Paris and turned a very product-centric culture into a genuinely consumer-centric culture. It’s now mandatory for every Disney executive to spend at least one day a year cleaning the streets of Disneyland, Walt Disney World, or Disneyland Paris, or serving popcorn, and one day every two years in one of the living rooms of one of our consumers. It’s about looking for insights for innovation where your competition isn’t looking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. And so, then the focus groups aren’t doing the trick. You really got to get kind of intimate and up close and personal in the natural environment, and seeing what’s going on.

Duncan Wardle
Look, I don’t discard focus groups, but I just think there are more insights to be found in people’s living rooms than there are in a room with no windows and no doors, because it’s not just what they tell you. It’s what you see and notice in those living rooms that will confirm or deny your data, or you may just find an insight for innovation your competition couldn’t find because they weren’t looking there.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Duncan, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things.

Duncan Wardle
I genuinely believe everybody is creative. I just think education is killing you, and I’m on a mission to prove it. It’s as simple as that, and make it fun, why not?

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

Duncan Wardle
“If you’re going through hell, keep going,” Winston Churchill.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And favorite book?

Duncan Wardle
Virgin by Design by Richard Branson, or Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, or The Imagination Emporium, that’s coming out on December 10.

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

Duncan Wardle
“If you do what you love, you’ll be good at it.” It’s amazing how many people fail to recognize it. When I was at school, I did eight subjects. I failed at seven. I got an A in one. Why? Because I loved it. If you apply that principle to life, if you do what you love, you’ll be successful. It doesn’t matter what it is. I don’t care what your job is. And so many people, I see them so miserable in their jobs and they’re not successful at them. But, particularly young people, my advice is do what you love. You’ll be really good at it.

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

Duncan Wardle
DuncanWardle.com would be the easiest place, I think.

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

Duncan Wardle
Think about some of the tools we talked about today, what-if. List the rules. Pick one and ask the most audacious what-if? Or, naive expert, having a naive expert in the room. Think about some of the things we’ve talked about or how why playfulness is so important. And write down three “I wills.” Three things you say you’re going to do in the next 30 days as a result of what you may have heard today, and just put it away in a drawer and take it out 30 days from now. And, hopefully, you’ll have done all three. And if you haven’t, hopefully, it’ll remind you of some of the things you’ve heard and you can go use them now.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Duncan, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many delightful imaginations.

Duncan Wardle
Cool. Thank you very much, indeed. Lovely to meet you.

Dec 05
0

1016: Untangling Identity from Your Work to Rediscover Yourself with Dr. Janna Koretz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Janna Koretz reveals the pitfalls of letting your job become your identity and what to do about it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why career enmeshment harms mental health
  2. The power of protected thinking time
  3. The root cause of workaholism–and how to cure it

About Janna 

Dr. Janna Koretz is the founder of Azimuth, a therapy practice specializing in the mental health challenges of individuals in high-pressure careers. She has spent over a decade helping her clients face and overcome their mental health issues by developing a unique understanding of industry-specific nuances in fields like law, consulting, finance, and technology. 

Dr. Koretz has been featured in many publications, including Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, focusing on the importance of recognizing career/identity enmeshment. She also writes and speaks on the challenges of discovering and living your personal values. 

In addition to therapy, Azimuth provides a set of free online tools that have helped tens of thousands of people, including the Burnout Calculator, Career Enmeshment Test, and Values Navigator. The practice is also developing a values-based journaling iOS app, set to launch later this year, based on the popularity of its Values Navigator tool.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Dr. Janna Koretz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Dr. Koretz, welcome.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Thank you. So happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be discussing these very important matters. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a particularly surprising or novel discovery you’ve made about us folks and high-pressure careers and mental health things. What’s something you know that many of us don’t?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Wow, there’s so many to choose from. Well, I think a lot of people on a smaller level don’t realize how capable they are, and how resilient they are, and how much they’re doing despite all of the struggles that they have. I think people really feel the loss. They feel the pain of their emotional burdens. They feel the stress of work. They feel the burnout, but they don’t see it in the background, like, the rest of it, and all the things that they’re doing despite that. They’re only feeling sort of the loss. I think that’s also really important to keep in mind for everybody, is there’s so much and so many strengths and so much to be to be offered.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, how capable are we?

Dr. Janna Koretz
You guys are so capable. I mean, it’s unbelievable, really, and I mean, I think a lot of people who are in high-pressure careers are high achievers and they sort of assume that everyone can do what they’re doing and everyone is doing it better, and they need to strive to be better and the best, and give more but they don’t see how much they’ve already done.

Most people can’t do, with the clients that we see, most people can’t do a lot of that. It takes a lot, a lot of mental effort, a lot of smarts, a lot of emotional energy. So, you’re very capable, from what we see. Most capable.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, what you’re saying sounds very true, and it also sounds very easy to dismiss and to shoo away, and instead of allowing to truly sink in and allow the good mental health vibes that it can deliver to us be delivered. Is that fair to say? How do people respond when you share this truth with them?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Oh, absolutely, that’s true. It’s so dismissed. It can be so easily dismissed, partly because people, A, are not used to receiving compliments, because the way in which our culture works now is we’re always looking for what’s wrong, and no one’s saying, “Great job,” or things like that, especially in the workplace, especially in a fast-paced workplace, so I think that’s part of it.

And I think that people often feel awkward about that because it’s so dissonant to what they believe that they kind of brush it off because it just doesn’t really serve them in the moment, when, really, it serves them in the long term.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we do want to sort of brush that aside, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, sure. You know, yeah, I guess I got some good grades, and I got some lucky breaks, and, yeah, I guess it worked out, so, okay. I’m here. And, yeah, okay, fair enough. I guess maybe, statistically, you know, the majority of people couldn’t. exactly pull off what I’ve pulled off, so fair enough. But, I mean, you know what, there’s millions of people just like me, so like, is it really that special?”

Dr. Janna Koretz
Are you really that special? Interesting question. Well, think about it this way, so it’s not really about being special. It’s about having a great capability and applying that in a way that’s useful to you. And so, a lot of people have kind of gone through life and checked all the boxes, that whatever they’re supposed to do, the expectations they were supposed to meet, they’re kind of on this treadmill and they’re not necessarily thinking about it, but that’s a lot of effort and a lot of work.

And so, if you find yourself in a place where you’re burnt out, yes, you need to get away from the burnout to have access to those resources, but these people are very capable. You’re a very capable person. If you use that energy and direct it towards what’s helpful to you and figure out what that is, then that’s the dream, right?

And I had a client once who was like, “You know, my boyfriend says it’s kind of, like, people who do, like, these complicated scams, right? It’s like these really complicated scams, and if only they could apply that to curing cancer, wouldn’t that be cool?” You know, like that’s so much effort and it’s smart in some ways, right?” They’re getting around all these things, they’re using AI, I mean, just not for good, but if you could harness that and apply it somewhere else, that would be pretty great.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, when you say the power, you mean our own capability to dream, to imagine, to figure out, to come to believe things, is that what you mean by the capabilities and the scams?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I mean, partly. I mean, certainly the internal piece, but also just the work, the actual energy, and the mental effort, and the multitasking that people do on a daily basis, I mean, just the inside and the output too, is a lot, and it could be directed in a lot of different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose what I’m really driving at is, if it is a master key to understand and believe that we have vast capabilities, and it feels like it is, is that your assertion as well?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I think it’s an important thing to acknowledge for a lot of reasons, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if that’s one key factor, but we’re quick to brush it off and to not allow it to sink in and enrich us, do you have any pro tips on how we can get there? Because what I’m thinking about is, if I truly believe, in deep down in my heart of hearts, that I have vast stores of capability, not that I’m sort of omniscient or the most brilliant person who ever lived, but vast stores of capability, then it would seem like it would naturally follow that a sense of peace could emerge, and think, “Hey, you know what, wow, yeah, there’s a lot of challenges out there, but they are ultimately figure-out-able because I’m pretty good at figuring things out and handling the things that life throws my way.”

So, that seems to me very, very powerful to have that as an interior, internal mental health asset. But if we shoo it away, we don’t have it, and that’s sad. How can we get it?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, the first question I always ask is, “Why? Why can’t you access that? Why don’t you believe that? What is hard about that?” And that’s the whole, you know, we do spend a lot of time in therapy doing that, so that’s not a simple question.

But also, I mean, a lot of people’s inability to  appreciate, and believe in themselves and their capabilities is because they don’t have a grounded sense of who they are, and they don’t have a grounded sense of their identity anymore, or their identity is like wrapped up in one thing, work, motherhood, something like that, and people lose themselves so that they don’t feel steady in saying, “Yeah, I do have these abilities and capabilities because I just don’t feel like I do those things anymore. Or I just do them ad nauseam so it just feels like everybody has them.” So, I think a lot of it has to do with really finding your identity again and really knowing who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Working with a lot of folks in high-pressure careers, what are some of the themes or patterns you see over and over and over again with regard to their mental health that we should be clued into and aware of?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, I think career enmeshment for our people is huge, which is just their whole identity is wrapped up in their career. And so, inevitably, when something happens at work, like they don’t miss a promotion, their company gets acquired, they get laid off and things like that, they don’t have any part of themselves to fall back on, and you’re made very uncomfortable by that because it brings up a lot of existential questions, like, “Who am I? What was the point of that? What am I even doing here?” And people can get really upset about that and kind of fall into more of an anxiety, have a lot of anxiety, depression, start using substances and things like that. That’s a really big one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, our identity is wrapped up in our career. I’m reminded of a couple of things here. One is, personally, I remember once, I, in fact, got a mediocre review, mediocre-to-bad, at work, and I was so surprised and stunned and puzzled. And I remember, I actually said out loud “This doesn’t feel like who I am.” And I later reflected, I was like, “What an interesting reaction because, of course, it’s not who I am! It was one review.”

Dr. Janna Koretz
That’s what I mean, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
One review. But there it is, and then I’m also thinking about, I think it was Ronda Rousey, the fighter, was interviewed, and she was very emotional and powerful. She was crying because she lost a huge match or championship, and she said something like, “If I’m not a champion then who am I?” And I was like, “Oh, man, Ronda, I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down there from that experience I had previously.” So, that’s kind of what it sounds like what career enmeshment might look, sound, feel like, these kinds of reactions to normal career hiccups and setbacks that happen to us all.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Yeah, I mean, she said it perfectly. And I think it can apply to other things, too. Like, one metaphor we use a lot, is, for parents, in general, but there’s a lot of talk about motherhood and loss of identity because you’re all consumed into this one thing. And that can be applied, being enmeshed in anything or with anyone is totally possible.

So, it happens a lot in the workplace, and we see it a lot too with our clients who used to be athletes and they spent a really long time, like all of their time really perfecting their craft, getting really good, maybe they’ve made it, you know, they’re doing Olympic trials, they’re doing all sorts of stuff, and then they get injured. And then what, right? Sounds of like Ronda was saying, “Then what? What do I have? Who am I?”

And what we see a lot, too, is because people have spent coming up so much time with that from an early age, sports is a great example, but it could be anything. You spend a lot of time through your childhood playing, I always use soccer as an example, but it could be anything, that you’re missing out on critical developmental periods where you’re supposed to be doing other things, like learning social skills with friends, like the nuances of social skills, or taking small risks to learn about your independence and confidence, learning how to make choices, things like that.

And so, because you’re siloed into this one thing in a very sort of constructed environment with rules, and so within that context, people can get creative and learn those things but the world is a much bigger place. So, then you find yourself in a place where you don’t have that anymore, and you don’t feel prepared or equipped to navigate what’s in front of you because you haven’t had the practice that a lot of people have had to figure that out. And that sort of adds on to the burden of, like, “Who am I? What am I doing?” because it makes people flounder a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, if some folks are nodding their heads, like, “Oh, my gosh, yes, that’s me,” what do we do about it?

Dr. Janna Koretz
What a big question. I love coming on podcasts because people ask these big questions and they’re so complicated, but we start out a lot of times working with doing values-based work, like what is actually important to you, because, oftentimes, we don’t live in a culture that promotes that. I mean, certainly, when I grew up nobody asked me what was important to me. I was just expected by my family and the culture that I was in to do certain things and be certain ways and achieve certain stuff. And I did it because I didn’t think much about it.

And then as I got older and life happens to you and stuff, whatever, you just get wiser with age, I started to realize that what I was doing wasn’t actually what would make me happy. And what does make me happy? And it took me a long time to figure that out, and that’s what we do a lot with our clients, “What is it that makes you happy? How far are you from that? And how do you start to incrementally get to that place or add that into your life?”

Because, I mean, most people, right, can’t just quit their job, or they can’t just move to wherever. I think there’s this idea of, you know, one of the exercises we do is, without any constraints, what would your life look like? And people have, like, things that are very far often from what they are, where they are, and they think they just have to go to that place, but, really, that’s not reality. Reality is still important, too.

But we can slowly start to figure out how to turn in that direction, how to enter into that lane, and if we can get there, great, but what if we could get 70% there? That’s still much better than 0%. So, it’s kind of, like, working in that gray area. But I think values-based work is the crux of so many things.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense. When you say values work, I’m thinking we had Dr. Steven Hayes on the show.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And, in his book, the phrase “values work” comes up many a time. So, when you say values-based work or values work, what does that mean and how does one do it?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, I have to give a plug for him because he is the nicest person of all time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, my gosh, yes.

Dr. Janna Koretz
And his work is incredible, and what he spent his life doing is incredible for all of the ACT workbooks and the books that come with that. I mean, it’s really changed the face of therapy, and he is just a delightful person. So, we talk about him a lot and I do send people to some of his literature and his workbooks because they’re so accessible and they’re so true, of sitting down and doing those exercises. I mean, that would be a more formal way of how we would start that.

You can just put some of the sort of self-reflecting questions we can talk about, like the ones I just talked about, “What would your life look like without this? Who do I admire? Why do I admire them? What about that makes me want to be that way?” There are a lot of like sorts of questions you can ask yourself that start to help people think about things in that way, or you can do more formalized values-based work through ACT, which I recommend to people all the time. I love it. I think it’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are great questions. And can you lay a few more of those on us?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Okay, let’s see. What do you admire? What would you do if someone gave you $40 million? How would you spend it?

Pete Mockaitis
I love the specific figure there.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, it has to be so big that, whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not billions. It’s not one million. It’s ample. It’s not yacht money, but, well, it could be, I guess. But it’s like retirement plus, plus, money.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Right. Right. Because, like, billions, it’s like then you’re going to space and that’s not the sphere that we’re talking about. We’re going to bring it down a little bit, but there can’t be any restraint. So, that’s one we do a lot. I also like to talk about, like, “Who are your favorite people to spend time with?” And another one we talk a lot about is “If you could spend more time with your family, why or why would you not do that?” And so, those are some other questions to kind of start thinking about “What is important? And what do I value? And how do I want to go about that, like incorporating that into my life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And we’ve had some guests who talk a little bit about values as sort of a thing almost to be discovered and codified, like joy and discovery. And so, that’s one way we could think about values. Or do you have a recommendation on a codification or documentation or ratification or a writing it down official thing associated with the outcome of this values exploration?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I love that you asked that because it’s so relevant to a project that I’ve been working on. So, on our website, we sort of changed Shalom Schwartz’s values navigator a little bit to fit our clientele a little bit more, but his work is really great, and that kind of goes through, it’s just a little quiz. It’s actually one of the most popular pages on our website. People, thousands of people do it a day, so I think, I think there is something in there that people really feel connected to, and that kind of puts you into some categories.

And what we are doing actually is we are coming, it’s all beta, public beta should be out in a couple of weeks, but private beta is being sorted now. It’s a values-based journaling app called Clearly, and that is a way in which we have people, like, journal and see how in line they are with their values. And we also are incorporating prompts from various people, like myself or other experts in various industries, to kind of help people prompt them to write more about how that works and what it’s going to look like, and, “Are they living in alignment? Why are we not?” So, it’s going to be pretty neat.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. So, there are some assessments to be taken, and that’s handy. Thank you. And some journaling, and all of these is sort of, let’s see, how do I say this? Is there an end point, or is it continuous? And how do we know we’re starting to reap the benefits or rewards of the values work?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I think you know when you know because you feel grounded and you feel happy. And I think that’s another thing to think about, too, and part of this conversation is “What is happiness? What does that look like? What is the expectation of happiness look like?” Because it’s not eradicating negativity or negative feelings or anything like that, or negative events. I mean, that’s impossible.

But it’s how to manage that in a way that brings the most joy to your life and living well with all these other things that are happening to you, or with you, or things like that. So, that’s what I would say about that, I guess. Does that answer the question?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a great perspective. Happiness is not eradicating all unpleasant experience. And, boy, if you make that your goal, it’s going to be a bummer.

Dr. Janna Koretz
It’s way more attainable. It’s way more attainable to know that you can’t figure out how to live, like, most of the time, pretty well with all this heavy stuff around you because that’s just what being an adult is. I’ve come to learn myself, you know, that’s just what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, maybe, could you share with us, perhaps, a story or two of transformation, so we can get a picture of, “Okay, I’m experiencing a career enmeshment, I have not yet done the values work, and then I do the values work, and this is what it looked like, and this is what I discovered and how I live differently”? And then what’s the sort of the happy, the before-after profiles?

Dr. Janna Koretz
So, I mean, I think running a business and being a psychologist lays the groundwork for being enmeshed in your career and kind of being on a treadmill that you know why you’re there, but it’s so easy to get caught in the weeds, like anything else that you’re intensely into. And doing what is needed to complete tasks and to achieve whatever the goal is, you have to check off some boxes, you have to jump through hoops, you have to do all these things, right, and you do become secondary.

What you want becomes secondary because you’re working on these projects that are bigger than you are. Or for a business, right, it’s like now other people rely on you to pay for stuff and support their family, right? It’s, like, that’s a really big responsibility. And, over time, even though I knew that’s what I loved, I love all of that, I love to help people, I love to run the business, I love all of that, I felt so negative to me.

I think probably, like, eight years in, I was just feeling maybe a little burnt out, but just like the joy of it had sort of passed by, and I just really wasn’t sure. It was a little confusing, to be honest. And it’s funny because we do all this work with other people, but all therapists have their own therapist because you cannot do the work by yourself. It’s impossible.

And so, through my own therapy, kind of figuring out that the things that it wasn’t that I didn’t like what I was doing anymore, it’s just that I didn’t have the other things that I was missing from previous parts of my life. So, it’s not that I didn’t want to be a psychologist anymore, I didn’t like running the business because I did. It’s just I couldn’t only do that and be a happy person. That’s just for me, that was not something that went together.

So, then, figuring out what it is that you can realistically add back in is tricky because, at the, time I had a full caseload of clients and I was running a business. Like, when exactly was I supposed to strap on my shoes and go for a run, things like that? But time can be made, and this is a strategy I tell people to do all the time, is I kind of went back to people that I had known for a long time ago and just reconnected with them.

I didn’t necessarily tell them about what was going on with me or anything, but I remember, at the time, telling my husband, “I used to be funny. I used to be a really funny person. Who remembers me when I was funny?” And kind of going back in time, and those people you’ve known from before remember those parts of you vividly, and they kind of bring that out for you, and so then you can start to remember, “Oh yeah, this does feel like me. This is kind of where I’m at.”

And it took a long time in doing that and feeling uncomfortable because I was leaving unanswered emails on my computer at 6:45 at night so I could go to the gym or something occasionally or something like that. I feel like I built out, by doing more, like, a more diverse activities and having more things in my life, I actually enjoyed all of my life more, and I really got back into the flow of the business and feeling really good about it, and things like that.

So, that’s not like a dramatic transformation in that I didn’t go from being like a sailor to running McKinsey or something like that. But I think this is the kind of transformation our clients experiences. They’re not necessarily going to quit their job and go to the Bahamas and start an ice cream shop. That’s not really even the point.

But it’s to realize what you’re missing and become whole again as a person and with your identity, and that’s what brings people joy, is like feeling good about incorporating those different pieces in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, could you share a little bit of some of the questions or exercises or things you did that unearthed some of these insights, like, “Hey, I used to be funny. What happened to that?” or, “Oh, shucks, I’m not exercising nearly enough as to feel great”?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I think part of what I learned, too, about myself, and I think this is true for our clients also, is there’s not really a time to sit and think, period. Like, just end stop, right? It’s like, we’re kind of always driving, we’re doing laundry, we’re just doing too many things at once. And I always found that when I just did “nothing,” and was thinking, that’s actually when my best ideas would come about work or other things in my life.

But it just feels really silly to do it because you’re basically just staring into space. It doesn’t feel like it’s something that you’re allowed to do. So, yeah, I mean, honestly, right? So, I was prescribed by my own therapist to sit around and just stare into space and think about stuff, and that’s what I did. And it was so uncomfortable in the moment. Like, I hated it so much because, first, all I could do, it’s like when people start to learn to meditate, right? So, all they can think about is their laundry list of things that they’re not doing.

But over time, I got pretty good at thinking, just thinking, and using that time to figure out those bigger questions and asking myself, “Oh, I thought about that. I wonder why that happened.” I kind of had my own stream of consciousness that kind of led me there. So, I think protected thinking time is super important. It’s not like a shiny piece of advice but it’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’s actually fairly shiny, if I may be so bold. I’ve heard a thousand-ish guests share many nuggets. And what I love about that is it’s the distinction you drew between the thinking we’re doing, it’s even better than thinking while driving and thinking while doing the laundry. It’s completely uninterrupted.

And that’s rather, well, it sounds delightful to me, because a lot of times I think, I read these studies on, “Oh, meditation is so beneficial. I should do the meditation.” It’s like, “Okay, I guess I’ll do that because I’m supposed to because of all the rewards and the optimal benefits versus costs dah, dah, dah, dah.” And sometimes it just really hits the spot and it’s great.

But other times, it’s like, “Well, no. What I really want to do is think about anything and everything and wherever,” and, in a way, it’s like there’s a little bit of a stressor in that there’s always something happening, even if it’s low level, like taking a shower or driving. There’s always sort of something occurring.

And so, having protected thinking time is a fundamentally different practice than a mindfulness meditation, return to the breath, but it is restored. I guess there’s like a Venn diagram overlap. It has some restorative goodness the way that does, and yet it’s a distinct activity.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Yes, I would agree with that. And even now I try to do that. I go into Boston, into the office, at least once a week, which is a little bit far from where I live. And I do take the train now because the walk from the train station to my office is about a half hour, and I feel bad. My dog is the therapy dog for our office and I often bring her to the office, but there are days where I don’t, and my husband’s always like, “What? Just bring the dog. Like, she’s just there. She’s a great companion.”

I’m like, “I can’t have to think about anything else during that time, or anybody else. Like, she’s going to stop, and people are going to pet her, she’s going to go to the bathroom, all this. I don’t want to listen to a podcast. I just want to be sort of, like, by myself and not have to answer to anybody, sort of.” And I love the dog and I bring her all the time but there are just some days where I feel like I know that I need that protected time, and so I don’t bring her, which makes her a little sad, which then makes me a little sad, so then we don’t do it that often but that’s how I kind of do that because anything feels like a huge interruption to me during that time now.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, for you, personally, how long are these sessions here?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, that walk is a half hour, there and back, so that’s an hour in one day, but then I won’t do it for a couple of weeks. So, Thursday or Friday is a crazy day, and then I can find some time on Saturday. So, I kind of fit it in where I can, and there are just some days where I know that it’s going to be stressful to try to find that time so I don’t do it on those days necessarily. But probably every other day, every three days, for at least like cumulatively, maybe an hour.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m also thinking about, is it Bill Gates, famously, just had his think weeks, where, I don’t know if it’s annually or so, he just disappears with a bunch of books and Diet Cokes into a cabin somewhere.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Yeah, he’s got like a house on an island, doesn’t he?

Pete Mockaitis
And then he’s just thinking. And so, that seemed to work out pretty well for him, and it’s working out pretty well for you. So, tell us, what sorts of, it sounds like you don’t even have an agenda by design?

Dr. Janna Koretz
No, no agenda. Can’t have an agenda.

Pete Mockaitis
No questions to be thought of. Just rolling.

Dr. Janna Koretz
I mean, every so often, like, I will think about one thing and use that time to do that, but mostly it’s just wherever the wind blows, that’s where we go. And it’s always very helpful, like I always get something out of it at the end.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have like a notebook with you?

Dr. Janna Koretz
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Sometimes I’ll write down the idea. Well, that’s the thing, too. I mean, not everyone operates the same. Some people might have like a recorder or like record stuff on their phone or they might take notes after or have a journal while they’re doing it. Occasionally, I’ll write something down if it’s really important, and, I don’t know, I feel like I have to write it down, but most of the time I remember those things because they kind of come to me in this aha moment, and I just don’t forget them.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I also love about that is, sometimes, I think and then I’m so excited by the thing I thought about I want to go immediately explore it, it’s like, “Ooh, let’s go see if that already exists, if that’s available, and if I could go buy it or whatever.” It’s like, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll just write that down and continue the thinking.”

Dr. Janna Koretz
Or, if you’re excited by it, then I usually write it down because, inevitably, my time is up or I’ve gotten to the office and I have other things to do. But, yeah, I mean, it’s good to come back to that stuff too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this is fun. Thank you for indulging me with that deep dive. Let’s hear a little bit about stress in the midst of high-pressure careers. What are your top pro tips, do’s and don’ts to deal with that?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Well, my advice is never, I guess shiny is a good word, but I think people always want like this really great advice they never heard of before. And I have a little bit of that because I think we all know what we’re supposed to be doing. And this is kind of what happens to a lot of our clients when they come to our office. A lot of them have been to therapy before, and they go there and the therapist says, “Well, you need to work less. You need to eat more vegetables. You got to sleep more,” all the things.

They already know that, but they can’t do it because of all the reasons. And so, it feels a little invalidating, “If that’s the way you’re supposed to manage stress then, and I can’t do that logistically then, therefore I cannot manage stress, then my situation is hopeless.” And not to say that other therapists are bad or anything. These are all things that we’re telling people are important, but if you’re in a high-pressure career, there’s a lot of nuances that just don’t allow for the same kinds of flexibility that some other people might have.

There are deadlines, there are clients, there are acquisitions, there’s all these things. People are raising money, they have investors that they’re answering to and all of that. So, do I think sleeping more is important? Yes. Do I wish I could sleep more? Yes. Do I think everyone should sleep more? Absolutely. But I know that getting an extra hour of sleep for people is like a really big ask.

So, I think if you can think about those, like, common things that we all know about, you know, sleep, eating, stuff like that, exercise, I think being creative is actually the way to go about it, and think about creative ways to implement those things, and not sort of the prescribed way in which everybody seems to be doing it. The example I always give is like a lot of our clients when they start exercising again, they sign up for like a triathlon or a marathon or something like that because that feels like the right thing to do for them.

But that’s not a sustainable choice most of the time. Occasionally, it is, but most of the time it’s not. And if you can get creative and be okay with something that doesn’t fit into sort of the box or what you expected exercise should be looking like, then that’s actually where the success comes from. And there are these small sorts of incremental changes of adding those things in, are all fine and all really important.

And they help with, like, a mindset shift, because a lot of times, like the initiation is the hard part, and like showing yourself that you can do things differently is the hard part because, especially if people have been in like the same kind of routine for a while, like starting to cook, like that’s really awkward. It’s really hard to start to do that.

And so, being sort of expecting that and knowing that’s part of the process of being okay with that is important. And I think it’s kind of interesting, too, because people, like all of us, we’re always looking to sort of optimize, and so we’re trying to look like, “What is the eating plan? What is a good exercise thing so I can lift and gain muscle and be strong and all these things?” But, oftentimes, we make them really complicated. And it doesn’t have to be that complicated and it doesn’t have to be that prescribed.

If your goal is to eat more home-cooked meals and you cook once a week on a Saturday, like that’s great. You’ve done it now. It doesn’t have to be that now you’re scratch cooking and meal prepping all week on a Sunday, and spending your whole Sunday doing that. So, that’s kind of like the first section of advice I give people, is kind of reorienting them to what’s possible in those kinds of common domains that we know about, and also to get creative about it.

There are all sorts of interesting ways to incorporate those things. I mean, maybe not sleep because then you’re just asleep. I mean, you can put in naps and stuff like that but, I mean, there’s like a thousand different ways to exercise, and a lot of them can be done in your house without any equipment. And so, just kind of figuring out what that looks like, I think, is important. So, that’s where we start usually. I don’t know if that answers the question, but that’s a strong place to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. Well, I think it’s handy in terms of, I think, that’s like a top don’t with regard to stress management, is don’t just look at the moon and stars, like the utmost perfect exercise plan, the perfect amount of sleep, “Oh, yes, I should be sleeping seven to nine hours every night in complete darkness and silence, dah, dah, dah, with a bed that’s dynamically adjusting its temperature for me.” They haven’t sponsored the show yet. I mean, we’ll see.

But, okay, “Well, that’s beyond my reach, so just forget it all, you know.” Rather, it’s like, “Okay, well, what is creative? What is realistic? And what’s fine?” in terms of exercise or give you some more sleep, whatever, that’s really nifty. So, then it sounds like, with regard to the shiny advice, you don’t have a one weird trick to instantly calm down, but rather, “Hey, just do the little stress-relieving things we all know about in reasonable approachable proportions.”

Dr. Janna Koretz
Yes, I think a lot of that ties back into sort of black-and-white thinking. You’re right, it’s like, “It has to be all of it or none of it,” and like, we’re all kind of predisposed to that for various reasons. But the gray is fine, like good enough is excellent. And if you’re just looking to change your behavior, to make new habits, and also gain those advantages from doing all that stuff, it doesn’t have to be wild times. So, yeah, don’t do the big things. And also, if you’re looking to calm down, don’t tell people to calm down. That’s another don’t, right? Don’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. And if we find ourselves in the workaholic mode, what are your tips there?

If we are in a zone where it’s like, “I have to do this,” or, “I just am having so much fun, you know, work, work, working away for 13-plus hours a day.” I imagine this comes up frequently with your folks in high-pressure careers. How do you advise them?

Dr. Janna Koretz
I think you have to think about what motivates you in life and what makes you happy, right? It comes back to the value stuff again a little bit, where there are people who work all the time and they’re happy, and that’s fine. You know what I mean? Like, think about like a lot of physicians spend a lot of time at the hospital, and, I mean, they don’t love their 36 hours on call, but they enjoy their job and they’re not going to necessarily quit their job because they really like what they do.

I know a lot of people do like coding. They get into the zone, they’re coding with their headphones on and then, somehow, like eight hours passes. But that’s what makes them happy, they like to build stuff, they like to be creative. So, keep in mind too, like it’s not always bad to have a couple days or kind of like a job where you’re working all the time. It’s when it gets in your way and when it causes you distress and then you have to sit and figure out what it is, why that is, like, “What makes you happy? What doesn’t make you happy? How do you want to spend your time? What is motivating to you?”

Because a lot of times when you ask those questions, it starts out being really obvious, “Well, I’m motivated because I want to do a good job.” “Why do you want to do a good job?” “Because I want to make money.” “Okay, why do you want to make money?” “Because I want to be able to buy all this stuff.” “Okay, why do you want to buy all this stuff?” And you keep going through all those lines of questioning.

It usually comes down to something like, because anxiety or fear-based, “Because I didn’t have money growing up, because I’m afraid I won’t have it. I’m afraid if I don’t make it now, I won’t have it later. I have a family to support. I want to support my parents as they age,” and things like that. Or, people don’t really have a good answer for that, and that’s important, too, to know if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, then that’s a whole other conversation.

So, the line of inquiry is also incredibly important to kind of figure out what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it and why you’re working so much.

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

Dr. Janna Koretz
I have to tell you, in general, I’m not a quotes person.

But I will share a piece of advice that’s kind of a quote that I do like and I follow, which is, one of my supervisors a long time ago, I was working in a long-term adolescent in-patient unit, it was a state hospital, and there’s like just a lot of chaos that comes with that in terms of even just the systems issues.

And I was complaining one day about, like, “Well, if it’s that, the answer’s so obvious. Why are they doing it this way, the administration, this, that, and the other?” And she was like, “Janna, you got to play by the rules to change the rules.” And I was like, “Ah, yeah.” Like, I’m not in a position right now to change the rules, but I could be one day if I play by the rules and check the boxes and get to the place where I need to be to make the change. I thought that was kind of like an interesting way of thinking about things.

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

Dr. Janna Koretz
It’s a controversial thing now, but I did like the Stanford Prison Experiment a lot, not because I think it was a great idea, but I think it really showed dynamics around people and pressure and power that I think are really important that we should be talking about and thinking more about.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Maybe controversial to say, but I’m going to say it anyway, I love The Coddling of the American Mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, Jonathan Haidt. All right. And a favorite tool?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Boundary-setting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dr. Janna Koretz
Waking up before everybody does.

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

Dr. Janna Koretz
I think what maybe I might be known for is asking why maybe a little too much, but for the purpose of really getting people to think about things and wonder why things are the way they are. Like, “Why do we need to do this this way?” And this is true, I feel this way about therapy, in general, and psychology, in general, and just the way the industry is.

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

Dr. Janna Koretz
Our website is where we keep all the things, so AzimuthPsych.com, A-Z-I-M-U-T-H, psych. That’s where the burnout calculator, career enmeshment test, the values navigator are, all of the things we do, the people we see, other things that we like, that we share, other resources, where we’ve been in the media, things we’ve written about, stuff like that. It’s all in one place.

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

Dr. Janna Koretz
You can’t think about it too much. Sometimes you just have to do it and see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dr. Koretz, thank you. This is fun and I wish you much joy.

Dr. Janna Koretz
Thank you. You as well.

Dec 02
0

1015: The Science Behind Setting, and Achieving Your Biggest Goals with Caroline Miller

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Caroline Miller shares the overlooked science that helps you pursue your most ambitious goals.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top goal-setting myths to abandon immediately 
  2. The two types of goals and how to set them 
  3. The BRIDGE methodology for effective goal-setting 

About Caroline 

For over three decades, Caroline Adams Miller has been a pioneer with her groundbreaking work in the areas of the science of goal setting, grit, happiness, and success. She is recognized as one of the world’s leading positive psychology experts on this research and how it can be applied to one’s life and work for maximum transformation.

She is the author of nine books, including My Name is Caroline, Getting Grit, Positively Caroline and Creating Your Best Life, which the “father of Positive Psychology,” Dr. Martin Seligman, lauded in Flourish as “adding a major missing piece” to the world of goal setting. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and attained one of the first 32 degrees in the world in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Caroline Miller Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, welcome back.

Caroline Miller
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Goals. And I’m curious, you’ve been around the block, doing a lot of research, positive psychology, and more, what would you say is your most fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and goal-setting, goal-achieving?

Caroline Miller
I think my biggest awareness aha moment is that, 20 years after I learned goal-setting theory, the number one ranked management theory of all time of 73 theories, also known as the 800-pound gorilla, everyone sets goals and no one knows this number one theory, and it floors me to this day that it remains one of the most unknown, but most validated theories ever to come out of psychology.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m intrigued. So, if there’s 73 theories, how does a theory get to win number one? I’m imagining a reality TV show which the theories are competing against each other with judges and audience input. How does that work?

Caroline Miller
Well, I only report the news, but I do know I have research showing that academics, management theorists, people in the field who actually know what the science is about when you look at self-efficacy theory or different kinds of bias, etc., goal-setting theory is universally ranked number one because of its importance and because everyone does it.

And if we knew the science, which is so amazing that people don’t, if we knew the science, I do believe we’d be more productive, more engaged and more successful. And as a mother, I also feel strongly that our children would grow up with dreams that they have the tools to accomplish, which I don’t think they have. And I think that’s a huge error we’ve made as a society and as parents to not have this science and teach it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. Like, what kind of lift might we see in terms of our goal attainment rates, peddling around as we do, ignorant of the science versus utilizing all these best practices?

Caroline Miller
I can’t give you a percentage, but what I can tell you is that most people disengage and become overwhelmed by the size of their goals, the fact that they have a big dream and they don’t know where to start. And so, as the mother of three adult children who grew up being told to tell them they were winners and that, if we did this, they would all grow up confident and happy, and they’d be very hard workers.

What instead we found out, now that this era of self-esteem parenting is over, is that for the most part, they’re fragile and they can’t always take feedback or performance reviews. Now, I’m not being universal, not all are like this, but the findings are pretty robust that this is a generation that doesn’t know how to do hard things and break goals down into small component parts and have mastery experiences. But I also speak for the parents.

I mean, I’ve known this thing for 20 years. I’ve been all over the world. I work with CEOs and leaders and companies big and small, countries big and small, and they all set goals and no one has this science. So, I think, universally, we are underperforming and underachieving. And one of the things in Big Goals that I’m really proud of is I dug into the research that shows that it’s mostly white men who have benefited from these productivity systems that started in the 1880s and do not benefit women and people of other cultures, partly because we weren’t around.

We weren’t in the workplace. This is not how we thought the workplace would be, but it hasn’t evolved, and it’s something that isn’t discussed. It’s time to have this bridge between the 20th century and the 21st, and my book addresses that gap that I’m happy to share more about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I guess I’d like to understand, if you don’t have a precise percentage, perhaps could you tell a story in terms of a transformation unfolding by utilizing the science?

Caroline Miller
I could tell you a million stories. I worked with one executive, a lot of executives, but I’m thinking of one in particular, a CEO of a major, let’s call it, outdoor remodeling company, who through COVID just kept setting the same performance goals for the salespeople and his senior leadership team, but the entire society turned upside down. We were in, what Locke and Latham would call, a mass learning goal condition where everything you did five, ten years ago can’t be done the same way anymore.

We’ve got a distributed workplace. We’ve got artificial intelligence. We’ve got all kinds of supply chain issues. And so, what he did was he hit pause on all of the goals that he had for himself and for his senior leadership team, and he said, “Caroline Miller’s going to come in and teach us about goal-setting theory, and we’re going to now slow down, and we’re going to take all of these goals and turn them into learning goals because we’re learning new ways to do things.”

The world is different. This is a period not unlike after the Black Death, which gave birth to the Renaissance, which became more evidence-based approaches to medicine and art and science and so on and so forth. So, what he did was he changed the entire goal-setting dashboard within the company. People were able to take the time to learn how to do their jobs in new ways because they had to. They couldn’t meet with customers in person anymore. There were different ways of working with computer systems that people had to learn, let alone artificial intelligence. That’s a whole different conversation.

And as people slowed down, they became more curious and engaged in what they were being asked to do, how the onboarding was done. And as a result, the company hit record profitability in the last few years, and he’s a very satisfied customer. But that’s just very typical of what happens when people learn about Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory and realize that there are two kinds of goals: performance goals and learning goals, and you can’t mix them up.

And when you do, when you take something that the world has never done before, you’ve never done before, a learning goal, and you skip the time that it takes to gather the skills and the education, the knowledge to do this job, and the time to kind of try out “How do I personalize my approach to this?” what you end up is something called goals gone wild, which is embodied by Boeing’s 737 MAX disasters. The Titan Submersible was stocked in rush.

You can’t skip the learning component when you’re doing something for the first time. When you do, people lose their reputations, companies lose their reputations, and in the case of the Titan Submersible, Boeing, other companies, Ford, the Ford Pinto, people lose their lives. So, it’s a serious issue. It’s a simple theory, but the importance of getting it right cannot be overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, what’s sort of our fundamental misconception? Is it the performance learning stuff?

Caroline Miller

I think the fundamental misconception is that people think SMART goals is science, and it’s not. It was this dude, this manager in 1982, who was going to give a presentation. It was this sticky acronym, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, whatever. I mean, the part of the problem that we’ve discovered with SMART goals, because it’s been studied, is not only does it undermine goal achievement, because if you use the word “realistic” for “R,”what you find is that people undershoot their ability to go after hard goals. And Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome for all goals is challenging and specific.

So, imagine my arm reached out in front of me, or yours, and the goals that we should be shooting for that always get the best outcomes are past our fingertips. So, when you use “R-realistic,” what you find is that people undermine their ability to find out what they’re made of, and they usually shoot and get very mediocre results. But it’s called “jargon mishmash syndrome,” because “smart” means different things to different people. So, it’s not science. It’s just not science.

So, that’s one of the first things that I would say is that people labor under the conception or the misconception that they know the science of goal-setting, and I think we take it for granted that we have accomplished things in our lives, “And if I did this, I can do that,” when, in fact, the science came out in 1990, and it’s still the most unknown, undelivered piece of research from academia into the mass market, and it stuns me every day.

No matter where I’m talking, no matter who I’m working with, their productivity dashboard in their company or in their lives is based on an urban legend, or vision boards, or law of attraction, or some version of that. And we are not supporting ourselves and the people around us, and our children in particular, in the best possible way if we don’t go out and learn this science.

So, I think it is a crisis of unimaginable proportions because we have a generation that is anxious and depressed and disengaged from the workplace and quite often comes right down, as Gallup said in their State of the Workplace in early 2024, “The number one problem facing all workplaces is a lack of productivity based on faulty goal systems.” We don’t have good goal hygiene. And if we don’t know the science, it’s like trying to put a cornerstone down for a building that’s rocky or isn’t going to hold the weight of the building and everything’s going to crumble.

We have to know the science of goal-setting. This to me is an urgent plea for everyone to stop and say, “It’s time to go in an evidence-based direction,” just like we did during the Renaissance after the Black Death. Everything has to come up a notch and I’ve worked on that. Plus, in the book Big Goals, I introduced something called a BRIDGE methodology that then is the gap between “Here’s goal-setting, theory, here’s the right goal, but how are you going to accomplish it?”

And what I’ve brought to bear is all of this science that no one has heard of from academia, from psychology, from motivation, from mindset research, from grit, to help us understand how to accomplish those goals. And as I said earlier, there’s a gender component that people haven’t paid attention to. Not all approaches to productivity and goal setting fit everyone. You have to personalize it based on who you are and where you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, are you telling me that if I put my dreams on a vision board and secrete them to the universe, the universe is not going to bring them into my reality?

Caroline Miller
Hmm, let me think about that. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then lay it on us, let’s get these principles associated with the goals theory.

Caroline Miller
Well, what I will say about vision boards is the reason why they hang around so much, I call them these zombie theories, they’re just not dying like SMART goals. They’re dying. They’re hanging around but they won’t go away. There’s some little kernel of something important in vision boards, and that is the science of priming.

When we remind ourselves with pictures or words or aromas, things that enter our conscious and subconscious minds that prime us to act and think in goal-directed ways, we are more likely to accomplish our goals, but that’s a small subset of what must be done. It’s never enough to just have a vision board or to just chant or to write something in lipstick on your mirror.

I think that we’re not taking ourselves seriously if we’re going to just have this one-dimensional approach or magical approach to getting what we want. We can’t skip the hard work piece, that’s just not possible. And you know what, even little kids know that if you give them something that they haven’t worked hard for, they don’t tend to value it. None of us do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s hear the principles fundamentally. How do we set goals?

Caroline Miller
How do we set goals? So, we start with goal-setting theory, basically, “Do I have a performance goal or a learning goal?” In the book, I call it performance goal with checklist goal. So, this is something you’ve done before that’ll fit on a checklist, and you can actually give that checklist to someone else and they’ll have a shot at accomplishing that goal.

So, what it is, it’s like a hotel maid, it’s like a surgeon going into the operating theater and checking “Do I have all the right instruments or the right people around me?” or a pilot in a pre-flight checklist. Checklists are for things you’ve done before and you don’t want to skip a step. And for that reason, you know that you can set a specific outcome by a specific date. And again, Locke and Latham say challenging and specific. That’s a performance goal/checklist goal.

The other kind of goal is a learning goal. So, you start with that, and you can call it a moonshot goal, meaning you haven’t done it before, and the world hasn’t done it before. And then you have to say, “What is it I need to learn in order to accomplish this goal? Who has that knowledge? Is it on Wikipedia? Is there a YouTube? Is there a book? Is there a podcast? Where am I going to flatten my learning curve?”

So, then you go into this BRIDGE methodology I came up with, the brainstorming. But the brainstorming really ought to start with this one prompt that I keep coming back to, “What’s new? What’s new? What do I not know yet? What’s new in the world that would help me become more efficient and effective in this goal?”

And I’ll just tell you one little story that I’m just transfixed by, and that’s this Herculaneum papyri, how they’ve solved this library of charred scrolls. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, when Vesuvius dubious erupted, the biggest, most wonderful library in ancient history was charred and these scrolls became like little pieces of firewood. And for years, hundreds of years, I want to say 400 years, we’ve been trying to unroll them.

Guess what happened? During COVID, the former CEO of GitHub got fascinated and bored by the fact that he’s sitting at home every day and he goes on Wikipedia, and he starts looking up ancient tragedies and catastrophes, and he stumbles on this unsolved thing like, “Oh, my God, what do we know now from Silicon Valley, from high particle accelerators, from artificial intelligence that could help us unroll these scrolls?”

Long story short, they now have unrolled, by using artificial intelligence and beaming lights into these scrolls and virtually unwrapping them, they have started to read these ancient scrolls and it’s going to remake everything we know about religion and art and philosophy. It is just stunning. So, you always start with what’s new.

So, in the book, I talk about why traditional brainstorming approaches don’t work, but I have a long set of prompts I have in the book to help people through brainstorming. Relationships. Relationships mean not just “Who do I need to know and have in my life to accomplish this goal? But who do I need to put a container around and keep them out of my life while I’m accomplishing this goal?” People don’t look at that and that’s critical.

And we know research from Shelly Gable at the University of California Santa Barbara, she found that when you share a big goal, a dream with somebody else, their response has to be curious and enthusiastic. That’s the one signal that says to you, “This person has my back, they’re in my corner, and I can tell them more, and they are going to help me accomplish that goal.” So, “Who should be in my life? And who shouldn’t?” Relationships.

Investments, “How am I going to invest my character strengths in the pursuit of this?” We know from positive psychology that knowing your top five-character strengths and using them, deploying them in new and interesting ways to accomplish your goals, or to interact with people throughout the day, makes you more successful. It also makes you happier and it makes you more authentic.

So, the investments can be time, energy, money, character strengths, but you have to think through, “What am I going to sink into this process that I have to build a budget for, build a time budget for, etc.?” So, BRID decision-making. Oh, my gosh, I love this topic. So, when Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for sunk cost theory and all of his work on how do we value the things that we spend time with, he also did a lot of work on bias.

But at the end of his life, he wrote this brilliant book with two other economists called Noise, and he was saying that the biggest mistakes we make in decision-making is when we don’t do a noise audit of how we’ve made previous decisions, identical decisions, “What are we being impacted by? Did our football team win or lose yesterday? And are we making the same decisions as judges in identical cases? Are we paroling these people and keeping these other people in jail?”

Noise is a huge part of how we make decisions. It’s rare for me to find someone who has sat down and made a list of their best decisions and the components of those decisions, and done a noise audit. And I think this is why there’s a big move to teach game theory and Poker, especially to women who don’t always learn how to take risks. Poker, and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, is how we’re beginning to teach people how to take risks in decision-making situations that they must take, even if they have imperfect information.

Pete Mockaitis
With noise, we’re defining that as our historical track record of decisions? How are we defining noise here?

Caroline Miller
Noise is when we have the exact same decision to make about, let’s say, a referee on a football field, right? And it’s the same player going off sides, and it’s a Sunday or a Thursday night game, and you didn’t get a lot of sleep before the Thursday night game, and you see the same player or the same play unfolding in front of you but you make a different decision. You throw a flag or you don’t throw a flag.

Noise is when you have the same kind of decision to make but you make it differently on different days because of things that are going on in your life, and that’s different from bias. Bias is when you’re biased against a certain gender or a certain class of people, or you’re biased against people who didn’t go to your school and you’re a hiring manager. That’s bias. Noise is when you’re allowing the variables—usually you don’t know this is happening—to interfere with decision-making so that your decisions are uneven.

And what’s interesting is artificial intelligence is proving to be one of the greatest ways to spot and fix noise problems in decision-making because it’s just taking data and making a decision on an algorithm, and that’s really what we need to strive to do. Does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, could you just give me eight examples of noise variables?

Caroline Miller
Another example of a noise variable, I said about a hiring manager, would be, let me think, I’m going to go back to a judge, a judge who is making parole decisions. And during the course of a day, at 8 o’clock in the morning, they make a parole decision and a complicated decision where they give somebody parole instead of sending them back to jail because they had a good night’s sleep, their football team won, but maybe their willpower is a little bit higher in the morning. But they’re making a decision that they won’t always make at the end of the day from decision fatigue. That’s noise.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, the variables would have to do with the rest, their rested-ness is noise because it’s not actually a valid consideration in terms of what is optimal for a decision regarding that person’s fate. And so, if they’re tired, they’re hungry, they just got in a fight with somebody, it’s sort of like they’ve got an emotional thing going on.

Caroline Miller
They’re distracted, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve also heard that we can estimate the steepness of a hill differently if there’s a friend with us or not. And so, in a way that’s noise. Friendship is noise. It’s somewhat ambiguous, but we’re assessing our prospects based on things that are not intrinsic to the situation on the ground.

Caroline Miller
I know the research you’re speaking of, that’s a little bit different than a decision. That’s a thought. That’s a thought you’re having, and you’re saying this is a more effortful climb or it’s not, based on whether you’re looking up, down, do you have a heavy backpack. I’ll give you another example of noise that I think most people can relate to is a radiologist reading mammogram screens and they look identical.

There’s very little difference between the two mammograms, but depending on the time of day, again, “Did you sleep? Did you have a good lunch? Are you distracted because you got a call from school and your child needs to be picked up?” What you might do is send somebody to come back in for a second mammogram, or say to the other person “You’re clear.” And again, I’ll just say, artificial intelligence is reading scans and removing noise from decision-making. It’s fascinating.

So that’s just another example of noise. Same screen, same X-ray, different decision, based on the noise that’s going on in your life. And what’s interesting is Kahneman said, at the end of his life, and he died in March of this year, he said, “This is a bigger problem that’s so not discussed, bigger than bias.” And we get all this bias training. Noise is a bigger problem and it potentially cost companies and countries billions of dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And you said there’s a final component.

Caroline Miller
So, grit. So, I’ve worked closely with Angela Duckworth. I wrote a book called Getting Grit and I’m fascinated by the fact that we can break grit down into components like humility, and patience, and the ability to take risks, and persistence, and perseverance, the ability to stick with a task just a little bit longer.

When you have big goals, it’s baked into that idea, that fact, that you’re going to have to be more than just resilient. You’re going to have to do hard things for a long period of time. So, you have to essentially do a grit assessment on yourself, “Do I have what it takes to actually hang in there through the dark night of the soul? Do I have the people around me who will reflect back to me that I have what it takes to finish what I’m starting right now?”

Grit is a quality that can be cultivated and it can also be contagious. So, Angela Duckworth found at West Point that if you had a low grit score, because she does the grit scale on incoming cadets at West Point, because what they found is your grit score predicts whether or not you drop out that first summer, Beast Barracks, because they couldn’t figure it out.

For a hundred years, they couldn’t figure it out. Leadership scores, grades, whatever, nothing, nothing spoke to the dropout rate during Beast Barracks until the grit scale. And she found that when you room a lower grit score cadet with a higher grit score cadet, it’s contagious because you do a few things differently for longer periods of time. You might even be a mindset. I call it changing the channel. You can learn to change the channel in your brain to go to a place where you hang in there a little bit longer. So, you have to have what’s good grit, and you can build it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is the higher contagious to the low-grit person or vice versa?

Caroline Miller
Yes, high grit. Well, the lower grit person becomes grittier, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
The higher grit person does not become less gritty? They’re not infected by the lazy person there?

Caroline Miller
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Because the culture of West Point rewards grit. And that’s something that Locke and Latham also found is they found that people are less happy while they’re pursuing hard goals over a long period of time. They set, again, these challenging and specific goals and they were puzzled, “Why are you a little less happy while you’re pursuing these long-term goals but then happier at the very end?” It’s because society prizes and rewards that kind of behavior.

You want to have good grit. And I’ll quickly say, there are three kinds of bad grit that we all have to look out for. One is stupid grit. I call it stupid grit. It’s like summit fever in mountaineering where you see the top of the mountain and you’re so drunk on getting to the top, or you’re so arrogant that you don’t listen to the Sherpas and you’re not caring about the people you’re roped into. You see a lot of arrogance with stupid grit, and it’s people who think they know better and they won’t change direction. Good grit does not have that component because it has humility baked into it.

And then there’s faux grit. We have so much faux grit, you know, people pretending to do hard things, faking their PhD research, pretending they won the Medal of Honor when, in fact, they bought it on eBay. I mean, so much faux grit; performance-enhancing drugs. And then there’s selfie-grit, which is also bad, and that’s when you do hard things, but you are so obnoxious about it, because you tell everybody that you suck all the oxygen out of the room and that repels people.

So, good grit is important when you have big goals, because you will have to dig a little bit deeper and work harder to achieve them. And then excellence, people need to start at the beginning of their goal-setting strategy with “What am I attempting to hit here? What is my definition of excellence with my behavior, or with this particular outcome?” Because in goal setting, we say that which cannot be measured cannot be achieved.

You must have a measurement in place of the excellence you’re shooting for. And I’ll just remind you, Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome was always past your fingertips, challenging and specific. Low goals and no goals got mediocre to no results whatsoever. And at the end of every day, believe it or not, we do scan our day subconsciously for what we’re proud of that we did that day. And the things that build what’s called authentic self-esteem are the things we did outside of our comfort zone in pursuit of meaningful goals.

We never build our confidence and pride on doing easy things. And this is why I believe we have really done a tremendous disservice to the generation of young adults now when we took away valedictorians and gave them comfort animals, and we dumbed down the playgrounds, and we just did a lot of things that ended up stripping elite out of their vocabularies, and they didn’t know “What does excellence look like? And how am I going to get there?”

And the minute you introduce that back in, people take more pride in what they’re doing and they change their perception of themselves, “What am I capable of doing? How did I do it? And I’m proud of myself and I also know who has my back. I know who was there for me when it was hard, and when I fell down, and when I needed to get back up.” That’s why we all need to do hard things, because it changes our lives, and I believe it changes the world. And knowing goal-setting theory makes it more possible that we can do these things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps give us an example of a worst practice and a best practice approach to, let’s say, we’re tackling a goal to launch some new and improved marketing initiatives to reach record-breaking levels of revenue?

Caroline Miller
So, let’s say you’re at a company and you’re launching sweatshirts, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re going to have this font or that font, or this color or that color, and you just want to do a brainstorming session. So, you pull everyone in, 30 people into a conference room, and you start throwing around ideas. And at the end of the day, you’ve come up with maybe one or two good ideas, but, hey, that’s it.

And then you don’t set a target for, “Well, how quickly can we do it?” or, “Is there a better way to do this?” Remember, brainstorming, you also want to know what’s new, “Is there a better, more efficient way? How do we find out where to do that?” You don’t find out any of those things. It’s what we’ve always done before. This is the approach we’ve always used before for brainstorming.

You don’t even stop and think about relationships, “Who in this company also has to know that this is our timeline for achieving this goal? Whose support do we need?” You don’t figure out investments. You don’t even realize that the cost of the kind of material for these sweatshirts has gone up, “Oh, my gosh, your budget is blown.” Your decision-making, you’ve never figured out “What if I have to pivot? What if COVID hits? What if the whole world shuts down? Do I have a playbook for pivoting?” Probably not.

Good grit, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never faced a situation where I didn’t succeed in this job.” So, then you maybe blame it on somebody else, and excellence is you probably never started with a target. What’s different, what to know what’s good, is when you have this goal, “Okay, I’m going to make the best possible sweatshirts with this font and this color and the rest of it.”

And then you go, “Okay, who around me, who in this world is doing it better than us? Who has set some kind of dimension of excellence that we can look to? Are they using the kind of fabric that doesn’t kind of go into the trash dumps? Is it biodegradable?” So, you study what excellence looks like. And instead of putting all the people who look like each other in the same room where you get, what I call the Habsburg-Jaw effect, where it’s sterile, there are no ideas that actually live past being in that room because they’re not interesting and they’re not diverse.

You do a very different approach where you maybe have people submit their ideas. Instead of being in a room, you want a diverse set of people brainstorming, and you figure out, “Is this a learning goal or a performance goal?” It’s probably a performance goal because you’re making – I hope this isn’t going on too long – because you’re making sweatshirts. So, you’ve done it before and you know you’ve sold 100,000 in six months at this price.

So, you say, “Hey, we’re going to do it with this new fabric, and it’s within our budget, and it’s a performance goal for us so we’re going to sell 200,000 more. And here’s how we’re going to do it because we’ve got this new factory process, we’ve got this new sweatshirt, we’ve got these people who are giving us better prices on fonts, etc.” You go into the decision-making, “What do we do if…?”

Let me give you an example on this, if you don’t mind. Abercrombie & Fitch was about to introduce what they called their best dressed guest line, and they had, just as COVID hit, they had taken pictures of all the models, they had all the clothes made, best dressed guests. It was designed to appeal to millennials who needed five outfits to go to weekend destination weddings, which was the big thing. So, suddenly COVID hits, and they’ve got this marketing line all paid for, they’ve got the budget, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the pictures, and it’s not usable because no one’s getting on a plane, no one’s going to a wedding, and no one’s buying clothes.

They pivoted quickly. They sent cameras to all their employees. They said, “Wear our lounge clothes. Take pictures of yourselves. Those are our ads for the next year and a half.” That kind of agility and that ability to pivot and do that kind of decision-making was such a plus for Abercrombie & Fitch. So, then they reintroduced best dressed guests when COVID passed, and, anyway, that ended up being a big hit too.

So, you have to know, “What’s going to happen if we have a black swan event like COVID?” And then grit, I already explained. And then excellence, you start with “This is a performance goal for us. This is what we’ve done before. What’s challenging and specific?” You name that number and then you measure along the way to make sure that you’re hitting those targets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, let’s say it’s a learning goal that it’s new and never before done, how do we approach that differently?

Caroline Miller
Okay. So, let’s just take the Apollo spacesuits. So, there was that horrible implosion where three astronauts died in, I think, the Mercury capsule, Gus Grissom and his two colleagues, but Apollo was still going to put a man on the moon. That was their goal. So, they had to make these spacesuits that were going to withstand the kinds of pressures and fires and gases that could leak into the suit. So, what did they do?

They didn’t set an exact date and time by which they would have the suit, but they went and they found people who knew how to deal with stretchy fabric and who could sew with great precision. And what did they do? These engineers went and found these seamstresses at Playtex, the girdle company, and they met with them. And in a room of brainstorming, they honored the knowledge and the wisdom of these teenage and young 20-year-old seamstresses quite often who could sew with precision to 1/32 of an inch.

And instead of saying, “This spacesuit will be ready by September,” they said, “We’re going to get this right and we’re going to incentivize everybody here to have the standard of excellence, that this is going to keep people alive, and it’s going to allow the United States to come back with what we need to learn about the moon.”

So, all the seamstresses had pictures of the astronauts hung over their sewing machines to remind them of the importance of what they were doing. So, they baked in the motivation, and so only the definition of what excellence looked like was “Could this spacesuit allow Neil Armstrong to move and twist and maneuver and reach down and pick up lunar rocks?” It wasn’t, “We’re going to have it done by a certain date.” Excellence is, “It’s got to work and it’s got to pass these tests. And that’s when we’re going to say we have a spacesuit that’s going to go to the moon.” That’s a learning goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, tell me, Caroline, any final do’s and don’ts that we should know about setting and achieving big goals?

Caroline Miller
I think the most important one is to assume that you know nothing. And I hate to say that, but 20 years ago when I was handed goal-setting theory at the University of Pennsylvania as one of my first assignments in this Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program, I own Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, every single person, I had their books and I got goal-setting theory and I went home and I looked at all of them. They were all urban legends.

And yet, this is how we have built companies. This is what we’ve instilled in productivity systems. If you don’t know goal-setting theory, you don’t know how to really set goals effectively. Just start with that one assumption, dip into Big Goals, and just learn goal-setting theory in the first three chapters of the book.

Get that and then move on to the BRIDGE methodology, because if you do that, there isn’t any dream that you have that you can’t have a really good shot at achieving because you’ll be able to create a strategy that’s going to get you as close as you can possibly get to that dream or get you there. Because I really do believe that the science changes our lives and it makes us more hopeful and optimistic.

I also want to say that one of the most important things in this book is that women do not typically do as well with all the motivational kind of programs and advice that’s been doled out for 50 years. I’ll just give you an example. When women perform jobs on time and tasks on time and get things done on time, they do not get credit for it. Instead, men often, who work longer hours and who don’t get it done on time, the men get rewarded for being seen as harder working and more committed to the company.

So, it’s really important that when you pursue a goal, you have to know what’s the culture you’re working in and how is that culture going to support you in the process of pursuing and achieving your goals, and that’s just one of many examples in the book. You have to know, “Does my company and does the culture I come from and my gender support using this advice to achieve my goal? Or is it going to backfire?”

Because men tend to approach goals as winning and domination and power and success and often money, and women are more communal. They’re not as agentic. That’s not what women get acculturated and rewarded for. So, you can’t just take the goal-setting advice that’s out there on lots and lots of podcasts.

Because, quite often, we don’t hear voices other than men talking to men about men, like Special Forces and presidents and examples that are unrelatable to a lot of us who are taking in really, really interesting stories and advice, but pause and say “Does this story relate to me and my life and what I do and what I look like?” Because if it doesn’t, make sure you do the research to find somebody who does fit that. That’s going to be the advice that’s going to help you the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Caroline Miller
My favorite quote is, “You can’t keep what you don’t give away.”

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

Caroline Miller
My favorite study is the “Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener. And they found, at the same time, 2005, as I went back to school, that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. So, any goal strategy plan has to start with how you boot up your well-being through positive interventions, like using your strengths, exercise, gratitude, meditation. So, all success in life is preceded by being happy first, so you got to start there.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Caroline Miller
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chessler.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Caroline Miller
I love Perplexity.

Pete Mockaitis
I just started using that. Why do you love it?

Caroline Miller
Because it gives you the sources and citations where it’s getting information from, instead of just kind of being a wild scrape of the internet. And I’ll just say this, I just spent last weekend at Penn with the co-creator of the Google Notebook, which just got rave reviews everywhere. Google Notebook, Steven Johnson is the man I was with at Penn last weekend. He has come up with something extraordinary where you can drag all your sources and websites and links and podcasts and whatever into this one notebook and, oh, my God, you have your own brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Caroline Miller
Favorite habit is swimming. I get up at five o’clock and I go to swim practice with other master swimmers.

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?

Caroline Miller
“You can’t keep what you don’t give away.” And can I give you the backstory on that, because it’s very meaningful to me?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Real quickly. When I was overcoming bulimia almost 40 years ago, at a time when nobody got better, it was really a death sentence. I started to get better one day at a time in a 12-step group in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was just a miracle. I didn’t think I was going to. I’m surprised I’m alive some days. And I was so thrilled and proud and happy that I was eating and healthy and just not doing all the destructive things I’ve been doing for seven or eight years before.

And someone said to me, “Caroline, it’s great that you’re in recovery, but you can’t keep what you don’t give away.” That taught me what gratitude and love and giving is all about. If you have something worth sharing that’s good, that will help somebody else, you can’t keep it unless you turn around and pull someone with you. So, people quote that back to me all the time.

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

Caroline Miller
My website, CarolineMiller.com, or the book Big Goals has its own website. We just loaded lots of case studies on success and failure using the BRIDGE methodology and goal-setting theory and that’s BigGoalsBook.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?

Caroline Miller
I would say choose to do hard things and choose to learn about yourself and your character strengths in the process of doing hard things. And if I have a bonus asterisk point, go to something I have no vested interest in, I don’t get anything for this, the VIA’s Character Strengths Survey. It’s free, 15 minutes, at ViaStrengths.org. And, boy, it ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. Lock onto your top 5, and use them every day in new and creative ways to show up and succeed. It’s proven and it makes you happier to just find out what your top five are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Caroline, thank you. This is fun. I wish you much luck with all your big goals.

Caroline Miller
Oh, you, too. Thank you so much.

Nov 28
0

Happy Thanksgiving 2024!

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Happy Thanksgiving! Pete briefly reflects on two recent episodes that helped level up how he uses AI.

Resources Mentioned in the Show

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Nov 25
0

1014: How to Make Meetings Better for Everyone with Calendly’s Darren Chait

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Darren Chait discusses how to make meetings more engaging using data from Calendly’s State of Meetings 2024 research.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why 81% of respondents want more meetings 
  2. Three meetings to keep—and the one to stop 
  3. Surprising statistics on meeting etiquette 

About Darren 

Darren Chait is the VP of Marketing at Calendly, leading the world-class marketing organization. Previously, he was a co-founder of Hugo, the leading meeting workflow solution powering meetings for tens of thousands of customers backed by Google, Slack and Atlassian.

In a prior life, Darren was a corporate lawyer at one of Australia’s leading law firms, where he attended meetings for a living – the start of his passion for meetings and the future of work.

Resources Mentioned

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Darren Chait Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Darren, welcome.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into your unique vantage point, your insights, your wisdom. So, you work at Calendly, which is my all-time favorite meeting scheduling software. Use it in two businesses. So, great job, guys.

Darren Chait
Good to hear those. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious, while you’ve been there, how many meetings have been scheduled in Calendly?

Darren Chait
Personally? Thousands.

Pete Mockaitis
Thousands? Millions?

Darren Chait
Well, yeah. I’d say thousands. I’ve been at Calendly for two and a half years. I think I probably would have exceeded hundreds. I spend a lot of my day in meetings, like we all do, which is why it’s such a good topic for discussion. And I really try and schedule most via Calendly because who’s got time to jump around with the back and forth and try to coordinate multiple schedules? And being an Australian, living between the US and Australia, time zones are a nightmare. So, I need Calendly to work, and luckily, so do other folks.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many meetings has the Calendly software product platform scheduled for humanity?

Darren Chait
That’s a very good question. That’s not a number that we’ve actually published before. So, you’ve heard it here first, if I had to do the math quickly, I wonder if we’ve crossed a billion, it’s possible, but I’m not sure. So, keep that one between us, all right? But I want to look into that. It’s the number I should know off the top of my head.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’ll say rounded to the nearest billion and one million.

Darren Chait
Exactly, that’s right. It’s closer to a billion than zero, but it could even be more. I’ll have to check on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so that’s cool. So, a billion meetings, and you’ve been in many yourself, personally there. I’d love to hear, off the top of your head, what are some of the most striking, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us workers and meetings from your vantage point here?

Darren Chait
We’ve recently published a report on this. We do it every year, and the 2024 State of Meetings Report, went in and asked over a thousand workers a whole lot of questions about meetings. And what I love about this process, this piece of content is because we do it year on year, things are changing right in front of us.

So, the number one thing that jumped out at me, which I can’t reconcile, I don’t know what your thoughts are, Pete, but 81% of workers want more meetings. Here we are talking about meetings being the bane of our existence, competing with productive work, there’s a million and one memes about meetings that should have been emails and those sorts of things, but the overwhelming majority say, “Give me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Okay, now I imagine that the devil’s in the details in terms of do they want more meetings like the ones they’re having right now? Or are they looking for something else on the menu that they haven’t received yet to appease their appetite?

Darren Chait
Yeah, exactly. It’s both. So, number one, firstly, productive meetings was the caveat there. We want more productive meetings. Are we having productive meetings today? Yes and no. But I think there’s a more interesting take, which was my opinion, anyway. We sort of said, “Why? Like, how do meetings help you?”

And if you look at all the different reasons why people love meetings, 51% said connection with colleagues, 44% said more collaboration, and the list goes on. And what it really led me to think is that we’re in this new world where we’re now post-COVID, we can’t blame COVID anymore, but it’s certainly reset the way we work. We have many, many, many remote-first companies out there, many, many, many hybrid companies, and some companies that are operating in a traditional office environment, but we’re really just seeking out connection.

So, yes, we want more productive meetings, but based on what respondents said in this particular survey, and what I hear talking to folks every day, meetings are how we stay connected. It’s how we build relationships at work, it’s how we make the work we do human. So, I guess it’s not that surprising if you think about it like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we like more meetings, in so far as they are productive and connecting. Got it. And can you lay it out for us, just how much time are we spending in meetings these days?

Darren Chait
Most of us, in terms of the respondents, are only having one or two meetings a day, but about half are having three or more meetings a day, and I guess it comes down to what you do for work, right? So, this year for 20% told us, they’re spending more than six hours per week in meetings, which, 20% doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But I think there’s a few things to consider.

Firstly, the folks that are customer-facing, we heard way higher. We saw five, six hours a day in some cases. The folks that aren’t customer-facing, so in roles that they don’t need to be talking to customers, just internally, is where we saw those numbers of one or two meetings a day.

The other thing is you might have two meetings a day at two hours in total, which doesn’t sound like much, but think about the time needed to prepare for the meeting, to travel to the meeting, in some cases, attend, take notes, travel from, identify what the follow-ups were, share them out, and before you know it, your two hours of meetings a day could be closer to four. And that’s why the cost of these meetings and making them productive and valuable matters so much.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about making them productive and valuable. What are some of your top insights and discoveries here associated with what makes meetings excellent versus bad?

Darren Chait
The fundamental question is whether you need a meeting at all. It’s 2024, we have a ton of technology at our fingertips, there’s so many different ways to collaborate and communicate, but in many cases, we just jump straight back to the calendar.

I used to tell my team, I’m in a different role, there’s only three reasons you need a meeting, the three D’s: debate, discussion, and decision-making. So, if that’s not going to happen, does it need to be a meeting? Can I send them a video, right, with, “Here’s what I want you to know, the background on this particular topic,” or, “Here is the plan for next quarter,” or, “Here is some feedback on something I’ve read.”

If I don’t need debate, discussion, or decision-making, I can share that asynchronously via video. And there’s many other different ways we can achieve that. So, if you don’t need to have a meeting at all, that’s the number one way you can reduce the cost of those meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose connection as well, it doesn’t fit into the nice 3D framework, and it’s not necessarily about making productive value creation happen, but that is a key source of reason and value of a meeting going down.

Darren Chait
That’s a very good point. I think you’re right, and it sounds like that’s what people are craving. So, even if we could do everything async, we would be losing out on that element of connection. But then, again, is a meeting always the best way to achieve that connection? Can we catch up spontaneously? Can I give you a call? Can I text you and say it’d be great to have a one-on-one and check how things are tracking and hop on the phone? Different style of meetings can, obviously, favor connection and can be achieved that way.

But a traditional meeting, if I have eight people in the room, in a meeting room with some slides up on the screen and so on, debatable the level of connection you get there. But it’s a good point and something to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, with the three D’s – the debate, the discussion, the decisions – what are some inappropriate meetings then, meetings we’re having where this is not occurring that should perhaps sound the alarm bell for us, and make us say, “Wait a sec, maybe this meeting should not exist anymore”?

Darren Chait
The knowledge sharing meeting, I think that’s the one. worst culprit. So, where I’m just coming to share information, “So, can everyone come because I need to present the 2025 plan for whatever with you?” And you come along, and everyone’s happy because I’ve got some interest in the 2025 plan, and I go and tell you a story for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, and that was helpful to know. I need to know your plan.

But do we really need everyone in a meeting on the schedule that I dictated, joining the Zoom call, or traveling to the meeting, sitting there at the same time, perhaps having distractions because I’ve determined the time that they have to listen, and really, they’re just gleaning this information from me. Could I not have shared that some other way? So, that’s one. I think that jumps out at me a lot.

The other alarm bell for me when I look at a meeting is the attendees – too many or too few. Too many is where everyone has some sort of, you know, interest in the topic. They all join this meeting and you’re never going to have any real debate or discussion, right? There’s 20 people in the room. Even if there’s 12 people in the room, that’s just not going to happen. We can’t have this productive discussion with, effectively, a conference that we’re running.

Or, too few people in the room, or the wrong people in the room. How are we going to make a decision? I can’t go and talk about planning or strategy when Pete clearly is a stakeholder who couldn’t attend and has to be a part of the decision, or talk about what we’re doing for social next year where there’s no social media marketing folks there. So, the attendees is the second red flag that jumps out at me.

And then, I guess, the third thing I’ll say, which is back to really tips for a great meeting, they sound obvious, but we don’t do them well, which is goals for that meeting. So, when you actually look, and ask yourself, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself, it should be clear, but if you have to ask yourself what the goal of the meeting is. If you can’t answer that very quickly, we shouldn’t have had that meeting. We didn’t need that meeting in the first place.

So, what do we need to walk out of this room with, virtual or physical? If we haven’t achieved this, this meeting has been a waste of time. If you can’t express that for a meeting, at least once it’s started, I think we’re making a mistake here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when it comes to the right number and the right people in the meeting, you have some work there associated with folks having a specific role. Could you expand on that?

Darren Chait
So, one of the downsides to virtual meetings in 2024 is the risk of multitasking and distraction. We know that 52% of workers report multitasking always or often in virtual meetings. Now, yeah, it doesn’t surprise me, but when you look at it like that in the numbers, it’s mind blowing. That means, in every meeting I go to, more than half the folks in the room are doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
When they’re remote?

Darren Chait
Yeah, they’re doing both. Now, how well can we do both? Well, I won’t debate you on that topic, I know we’ve all got different views there, but you don’t have 100% of their attention. And I’ve got a goal here for this meeting, we don’t want to walk out of the room without achieving this meeting, but I know half the people there are doing something else. So, that’s number one.

And then, to more directly answer your question around engagement level for different types of meetings, if I have an assigned role in that meeting, we saw more than 90% say that they’re engaged in that meeting, “I’m actively listening.” So, an assigned role, I might be chairing, I might be taking notes, I might be presenting a piece of it, everyone’s kind of listening. Very few said otherwise.

But if I don’t have an assigned role in that meeting, it’s almost inverted. We see, at this point, almost 30% of folks who are somewhat disengaged or completely disengaged. And that role, again, could be part of a brainstorm, providing a status update. Again, taking notes, whatever the role is, it makes a very, very big difference.

The reason I like this stat, it sounds obvious, again, naturally, if people don’t need to be there, number one, they’re not going to be engaged. But even if people need to be there, it’s really important to run these meetings in a way where other folks are involved, where there’s collaboration happening, if you want everyone to be engaged. And as I mentioned, particularly for virtual meetings, you’re competing with that 52% who are doing something else otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s kind of fascinating, and there’s a whole lot of debate right now like, “Everybody come back to the office!” “No, we don’t want to come back to the office!” Or some people are like, “No, we’re fine, you don’t need to go back to the office.” So, that’s sort of raging now in 2024, and probably will continue in 2025.

And so, I can imagine, if those people who are calling the meetings are aware of these phenomena, that’s probably sort of annoying to them, “No, I would like you to be physically in the space such that you cannot be multitasking.” But, at the same time, I think some people really do perhaps think and function better when we’re multitasking.

I’ve been to meetings where someone’s on his walking treadmill desk, and it’s like, “More power to you. I think your brain is working better when you’re moving, and that’s cool.” Or folks are able to just kind of move around a little bit, or fidget with some things, or ponder. I think, I don’t know, I don’t have any evidence in terms of scientific randomized control trials on this, but I think some people just happen to be in a more comfortable thinking, working groove when they have the flexibility to be in their own space.

And yet, having a little bit of that forced pressure of, “No, you’re here and there’s no escaping. There is no multitasking available in this room without you looking rude and embarrassing yourself.” So, it is really juicy and personal what’s at stake here.

Darren Chait
I have two views on that. I think fascinating point. One is what sort of multitasking, right? So, I’m a big fan of the walking meeting. A lot of my team will know, I’ll put in the AirPods and go for a walk and have a conversation at the same time. Certain meetings, right? That works great when we’re catching up about the week and I’m helping to hear and unblock.

But if I’m going to have a really direct conversation with you about feedback or performance, or we’re trying to solve a problem that might be financial and we’re sharing our screen, obviously, you can’t do it that way. Similarly, if I’m sitting in a meeting and I’m now working on writing a piece of content, there’s no way I’m listening or engaged with what you’re saying. No part of my brain can do that. So, I think it comes down to definitions of multitasking. It’s a fair point that some types of multitasking can be productive.

The other side I was going to mention is around remote, and Calendly, full disclosure, Calendly is a remote-first company. What we mean by remote-first is we designed a workplace, a way of working, that takes into account the fact that our team is remote. And I think what we learned through the pandemic, many companies sort of just picked up their culture and dropped it in online and ran into a lot of issues. Different businesses have different views on the topic, and that’s why many companies have required their employee base back to the office, either full-time or part-time.

If you design a meeting culture around the way you’re set up, I don’t think it makes any difference. So, if I’m running highly collaborative meetings where everyone’s engaged and has a role to play in that meeting, I’m going to see the same levels of engagement, or higher even, than I would if I force everyone into the room such that they can’t be on another device, such that they can’t be doing something else.

And to your point, Pete, many people do better because you think better when you’re on your treadmill while you’re in that meeting or when you go for your walking meeting, and we allow for that. So, I guess what I’m saying here is your meeting culture and the way you meet has to be purposeful and intentional based on the way your organization operates.

Pete Mockaitis
And to your point about our own idiosyncrasies and perceptions, you’ve actually got some fun tidbits about etiquette, like what we consider to be rude or unacceptable. This is fun, because I think some people wonder, “Is it okay if I do this on this meeting?” Well, you actually have some answers. Lay the numbers on us, Darren.

Darren Chait
So, in general, we asked a whole lot of questions around, “Is it okay to eat in a meeting? Is it okay to schedule over lunch?” and those sorts of questions, things we do all the time. And let me run you through some of this data.

So, in general, we saw that 23% think eating in a meeting on camera is totally fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so 77% thinks it’s not fine.

Darren Chait
No, no, no. But, if you’re on mute and your camera’s off, that’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis
And they’ll never know.

Darren Chait
Most people thought that was okay, 68% said that’s fine, “I just don’t want to see you taking those bites.” I thought that was interesting. I’ve definitely been a bit self-reflective after that because I’ve probably been guilty of that over the years. But some more, I guess, relevant ones to the way we work, the dynamics with camera on and camera off is really fascinating. So, when most people have their camera on, 39% said it’s okay for you to have your camera off, but, obviously, 61% said the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
So, 61% said, “I want those cameras on.”

Darren Chait
Yep, that’s right. “If some people’s cameras are on, yours better be on,” that’s what they’re saying. And that kind of makes sense, right? You’re trying to build connection here. You know you’re remote in these examples, they’re virtual meetings. It’s hard to do that when you’re the one that’s not there. You think about the real world parallel. So, I wasn’t too surprised by that, the people weighed it up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what would the real world parallel be, like you just have a black bag over your head? It’s like, “Okay, I’m not available to be looked at.”

Darren Chait
It’s true. It’s true. Again, it’s funny with technology because, just a few years ago, if you weren’t in the office, hopping on the phone is totally acceptable with no camera. But now that we have the likes of Zoom at our fingertips, no longer good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it gets to the notion of, “Well, hey, if this was a properly sized meeting with the proper people in attendance, it makes sense for everyone there to be on their camera,” in most contexts, as I think through it. And yet if it’s like, “Well, you invited 80 people to this meeting when, really, only nine are there,” it’s sort of like the other 71 are more so spectators, so, like, it seems to make sense to turn the cameras off at that point.

Darren Chait
And that’s why I blame the media organizer, or the onus is on the media organizer. If you have a meeting where folks consistently have their camera off, or if they are doing things while the meeting is running, rather than go to the attendees, and say, “Why are you doing this?” you should be looking at yourself, and saying, “Hang on, what is it about this meeting that disengages, that means that folks can go and do something else, or have their camera off?”

So, I think that’s the feedback there. I think related to multitasking point, before I shared some data with you around how many people are typically multitasking during a meeting, but what surprised me is 70% said that’s okay. They don’t have a problem with it. So, then 30% said, “Nope, everyone should be there.” I don’t personally agree with that.

Again, if you’re running a great meeting and everyone needs to be there, I think that number should be lower. But I think it’s a sign of the fact that we’re not all running those great meetings. We’re all attending many meetings. We don’t have enough hours in the day to get our work done because we’re attending all of these meetings that maybe I didn’t need to be in and that’s why I’m multitasking and that’s why I think it’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s some good stuff about inside a meeting. Anything else you want to share about best or worst practices when you’re inside a meeting?

Darren Chait
So, generally, I mean, from a data standpoint, we asked some questions about folks calling in when they’re not at their desk, but others are at their desks, only 37% thought that was okay. I was offended by that one. Again, I’m a fan of that walking meeting. If people are at their desks, you should be calling in the same way and so on, so similar sorts of insights.

But really, we’re just seeing the same trends again and again in terms of great meetings, great engagement, everyone needs to be there, everyone’s there. Poor meetings, unclear goals, not everyone needs to be in the room, didn’t need to be in a meeting, everyone disengages, and technology has made that so much easier, because I can click one button and turn my camera off. And again, I can’t do that in the live meeting like we discussed.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really intriguing. The word “should” is so heavy, like, with judgment, you know. And I guess it varies how strongly people hold these “shoulds.” Like, is it more like, “I’d kind of prefer if it were on,” versus, “I can’t believe this unprofessionalism on the other side”?

But I think that really highlights the need to have these conversations because we might very well be entering into this situation, blindly unaware, it’s like, “Well, no, I got my video camera off because, I mean, it’s during lunchtime and I’m hungry and I’m going to get really cranky if I don’t eat. You’re going to have a dumber Pete if I don’t eat. So, this is all in everyone’s best interest for me to be eating right now.”

So, I’m just thinking, “Hey, I’m making prudent decisions that make sense for me and my team and organization.” And unbeknownst to me, I’m getting some judgments from others participating in the meeting, so it sounds extra super important that we have those conversations candidly and upfront so that we’re not incurring the negativity that can just be unspoken and foment and grow, you know?

Darren Chait
Well said. And it gets even more complicated culturally because different demographic factors drive different opinions. I saw in the research, for example, 72% of folks in the US feel like it’s okay to eat off camera, but only 64% in the UK felt that way. So, if you’re meeting with Americans, have your lunch. If you’re meeting with Brits, maybe not a good idea. And there’s generational differences and all sorts of others. So, to your point, being clear on expectations and the way we’re operating this meeting matters because you’re never going to make everyone happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah, that’s handy. Well, I think it’s just good that the fact that you have this report gets some people thinking and perhaps more likely to discuss, “Oh, hey, I had no idea that a reasonable portion of you might find my behavior completely unacceptable. Why don’t we go ahead and chat about that, shall we?”

Darren Chait
We actually had that a few weeks ago. We have a weekly meeting with the team, and a lot of the team don’t have their camera on, and there’s 40-something people in this meeting, and I get it. Everyone’s got busy. This meeting has just been dropped on their calendar. We haven’t really found a time that suits everyone. It’s impossible with so many folks, and about half of them come with camera on, half come with camera off.

And for the people that are presenting content in that meeting or sharing and driving the discussion, it’s really difficult because there’s no feedback, right? When I’m chatting live with video, we can read each other’s faces and body language and build a great relationship. If you’re just a name, it becomes really hard.

So, we did two things at the same time. One is we set expectations. I said to the team, “Hey, I really want to make this into a meeting that you have your camera on, and I’ll explain why.” And I gave that rationale. And at the same time, we redesigned the way we ran that meeting so it was a lot more collaborative, we had a lot more engagement. Even though it’s a big team, we’d have breakouts most times, we’d have polls running, we’d have an open agenda that anyone could add to.

And both of those things together, a terribly designed scientific trial, both of those things together changed the way this meeting operated. So, I think it comes down to, as we keep saying, right, being clear on expectations and why it matters, but also creating meetings where we want to be there, we get value out of them, and naturally I’m going to be engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Darren, let’s dork out a little bit, if I may, on tech tools. So, Calendly is one of the finest software as a service tool as I’m aware of on the planet. So, yep, I said it. I made it, Darren. You can quote me if you like.

Darren Chait
It must be true then. I’ll take that. I was going to say, just capture that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it sounds like you’re doing some cool stuff with regard to the open agenda, the polls. Lay it on us, in terms of when you’re in meeting, what are some cool tech features you’re utilizing, and how’s it go down?

Darren Chait
So, firstly, talking about Calendly, as you and hopefully many of the listeners are familiar, we make scheduling automation software, so we make them very easy to book meetings with you and with your team and co-workers from your website, directly by sharing a link, balancing multiple schedules, round-robining, allowing lead routing, whatever the use case is, we want to make scheduling very easy.

And the reason I share this with you is some of my favorite features and tools out there related to meetings actually happen in the pre- and post-. So, I know one of the common reasons I hear why people buy Calendly reminds me of great meeting practice, which is confirming the meeting, sharing out content before the meeting, and sending that thank-you or that follow-up after the meeting.

But, in general, whatever tooling you’re using to do that, you got to do it, you just got to do it. You have to make sure that everyone knows why they’re coming, what the goal is, and making sure they’re actually attending, and then that you capture the value afterwards. So, sure, use Calendly’s workflows by all means, but otherwise, find a way to do it.

Outside Calendly, we spoke earlier about avoiding the meeting. Here at Calendly, we’re big fans of Loom. Loom is an asynchronous video collaboration tool. They’re actually now part of Atlassian, but you can buy Loom independently too and they’ve got a free tier I believe. And the reason I love Loom is it helps me avoid those meetings when I don’t need meetings, but it does it in what I would call a high bandwidth way.

So, here’s what I mean. If I want to share something with you, Pete, I can go and send you an email or a message, say, a Slack message, and say, “Hey, Pete, I want you to know what I’m thinking about this topic, and here’s some feedback on this work,” you just deliver in bullet points. You’re going to come to work. Firstly, I can do it on my schedule, time zone, the way I work, when whatever my workday looks like.

But you’re going to come to work, you’re going to read this message, and you’re going to have 50 questions, right? You’re going to wonder if what I really meant was this or that, if I’m unhappy about that, what the tone was there. Or, I can send you a video, which is what Loom allows me to do. I can record a video, and say, “Hey Pete, great work there. I want you to be even better because you’re next in line for that director promotion. Here are some tips to make your amazing work absolutely incredible.” And I can run through that.

And, very quickly, you’re seeing my tone, my body language, the words in between, the real words, and you’ve got a completely different message delivered, and we’ve avoided that meeting with all those questions. So, async video tools like Loom, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis
I love Loom so much, and I’m amazed at just how much you could accomplish there. We bought a company about a year ago, and much communication between buyer and sellers is like, “Hey, so here’s kind of how I’m thinking about the financing situation, dah, dah, dah.”

And so, like, we’re going into all these details of a spreadsheet, and so it’s like, “Huh, this is kind of high stakes kind of a communication, and yet we all recognize that, yeah, this is the best way to do it. We want to say, ‘Wait, what was that sell? Where did you get that number? Where’s that coming from?” And we can’t find the right time to meet together quickly, but it’s like, so it really kept our back-and-forths moving faster as opposed to, “Oh, I guess we could all meet Thursday.” “No, give me the Loom Monday, and then we’ll all have our comments Monday evening.”

Darren Chait
Exactly. I love it. What a great testimonial. So, I think that’s an absolute secret for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. So, Loom or something like it enables you to, very quickly, easily do a screen record share. You can see your face in a bubble and mark up documents or spreadsheets or work products of any sort. Very cool. Any other favorite tools?

Darren Chait
So, at my core, I’m a marketer. I crave voice of customer. I want to hear from the customer all the time. So, looking for solutions that allow me to do more of that, and there’s lots out there and it depends on the nature of customer and so on. So, without going to a specific solution, because I think it depends on the company, if you can find a tool that helps you record customer conversations and allows you to share them around internally, that is game-changing. That helps us organize.

Because, in my marketing org, I can go and tell you what the customer says, I can give you slide deck after slide deck, spreadsheet after spreadsheet, until you’ve heard a real human standing right there, talk about the value they get from your product or service, the challenges they have with your product and service, nothing aligns you more like a marketer. But it’s also an area that we’re very interested in directionally at Calendly.

We are moving beyond just scheduling. We are very interested in tasks around meetings, preparation, engagement, and follow-up. I think you’ve got to find ways to capture what’s discussed in meetings and circulate them and surface them and share them to create that organization that’s always working for the customer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, when you say record the voice of the customer. Is that just as simple as, “Hey, we’re on a Zoom, or a Google Meet, or whatever, and I’m clicking record, and now here’s the snippet”? So, what you’re saying is there’s tools that make it even simpler than that?

Darren Chait
Totally, yeah. I know a lot of enterprise organizations use Gong, for example, where sales calls are recorded, you can search and share snippets so there definitely are. But, again, it’s a bit like some of the meeting features and workflows I mentioned earlier. It’s a way of working more than a particular tool that matters. And we really have seen total change in the way we work and collaborate and how customer-centric we are as we’ve created that culture of sharing meetings.

Because the thing about meetings, right, I should have said at the beginning, is we love to hate them. Yes, they drive all of these great outcomes for our business, but it’s where business gets done. If you think about external meetings, every meeting you have with someone outside your business is somehow tied to making money, or recruiting to have the right team to make money, or build relationships that ultimately may lead to customer acquisition, whatever it is.

So, the fact that we’re letting the value of these meetings dissipate into thin air when the meetings end doesn’t make sense. So, we need to capture them, and the same rationale is, the same reasons why we have to make sure we take notes, we have to make sure that we have follow-ups, and make sure those follow-ups actually happen and so on. So, just all of these ways of working and tools out there are all really reminding us of the fact of the value of every meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, inside a meeting with remote technology operating, you mentioned open agenda, polls, whatever. So, these are just the features baked into your Zoom or Google Meet or whatever you’re using?

Darren Chait
Yep, yep. In many cases, yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, just making the most of them. Like, they’re there for you. Go ahead and learn about them. Try them out.

Darren Chait
Yep, and like that, we won’t be eating in meetings anymore, right, because I’ll be so engaged in what we’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
“I get to vote! I’m excited!” It might not be immediately that transformational.

Darren Chait
Yeah, that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
It may or may not be that immediately transformational.

Darren Chait
There you go. That’s the disclaimer.

Pete Mockaitis
But you’re right, it is fun. It’s intriguing. I don’t know about you, but something about real-time data, there’s a little bit of a reveal. If it’s an interesting question, like, “Oh, hey, how many of you are calling in from the West Coast?” It’s like, “Okay, I don’t know.” But like, if I’m genuinely wondering in terms of like, “Hey, we came up with 12 ideas. I’d love for everyone to vote on which ones they think are the most likely to be high impact and they want to start on first.” Like, I don’t know about you, but that just gets my heart thumping a little bit. Like, “Ooh, who’s going to be the winner?” It’s like election night, like county by county.

Darren Chait
You know what though, Pete, if you said, “Does anyone have any views on how we should prioritize this?” Silence. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Darren Chait
We use a lot of Miro here as well. Miro is an online whiteboarding tool, and there’s a few of them around as well, and some of them are embedded in other products and so on. The reason I like Miro is it allows a very fluid, freeform way to collaborate in the form of whiteboards. But they have a lot of great real-time tools you can share.

You can share your Miro board for your Zoom or directly, and it’s great for voting. People can put stickies. They can contribute to a conversation. They can drive that collaboration in a real way. So, that’s what you’re reminding me of as you’re talking about that behavior because it definitely does exist.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Well, Darren, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention, any top do’s or don’ts?

Darren Chait
So, one other thing to mention that we noticed in the research this year, and again, I’m not surprised, but also really cool at the same time. We asked, in general, we asked all the respondents in this survey their views on the role of AI in meetings, if they’re interested in the use of AI in meetings.

2023, 17% said yes. This year, almost 50% said yes. But we’re all learning so much about AI every day and the advent of all the big players in tech in AI. It’s now very clear, to these respondents at least, that it’s here, we’re heading there. Most products are releasing AI features now, particularly those in the meeting space, Calendly included, and we’re coming up there soon.

So, I think it’s fascinating to see that AI has unlocked a ton more powerful online, and it’s a logical place to start, right, to make us more productive in our meetings, more effective. So, that trend in just 12 months was really surprising to me.

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

Darren Chait
One of my favorite quotes, in general, in business, comes from, it’s actually been quoted many times by many people so I won’t try to attribute it, which is not to confuse work with progress. So, something I often think about is, “Is this just work keeping me busy or is this actual progress or output?” So, “Don’t mistake work with progress” is one of my favorite business quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Darren Chait
Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal. Definitely a bit of a less conventional business book, but a must-read if you’re leading a team.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Darren Chait
I don’t end my day until I’ve got a plan for the next day. I think, especially with time zones and the likes of Slack and other tools now that bombard us when we’re not online, you always wake up, you always start your day feeling behind. So, I, at least, want to start my day having clarity for the goals for the next day.

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

Darren Chait
Absolutely. So, obviously, if you want to learn more about Calendly, Calendly.com. But on LinkedIn, always happy to connect and chat and nerd out on these topics, and we can, yeah, definitely dive more into what we’ve learned. You can also, if you go to Calendly.com. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link or other resources to the State of Meetings 2024 so you can dive into this data. And there’s many more thoughts and perspectives here that we didn’t have time for, but you can nerd out on the State of Meetings yourself as well.

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

Darren Chait
Go through your calendar, and look at those meetings that are competing for productive time. See what you can cut, and then choose a favorite meeting and see if you can make it that much better. Go and look at who’s attending. Look at your process around setting agendas and planning. Look at the tooling that you’re using to power that meeting, scheduling all the way through to follow-ups, and see if you can get that favorite meeting performing that much better. And no doubt you will, you’ll see the results and you’ll move on to the next one. So, meetings really are a hack for team productivity, and I encourage you to try it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Darren, thank you. I wish you many excellent meetings.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Likewise. Great to chat.