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

Sep 01
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796: How to Make Progress on Your Most Audacious Goals, Every Day with Grace Lordan

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Grace Lordan offers actionable solutions and tips to help bring you closer to your goals, one step at a time.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to free yourself from the fear of making mistakes 
  2. How to break free from impostor syndrome
  3. How to stop stress from hijacking your day 

About Grace

Dr Grace Lordan is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative and an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.   

Grace is an economist and her research is focused on quantifying the benefits of inclusion within and across firms, as well as designing interventions that level the playing field for under-represented talent within firms.  Grace served as an expert advisor to the UK government sitting on their skills and productivity board, is currently a member of the UK government’s BEIS social mobility taskforce and is currently on the Women in Finance Charter’s advisory board. 

Her academic writings have been published in top international journals and she has written for the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review. Grace is a regular speaker and advisor to blue chip finance and technology firms. Think Big, Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want is her first book. 

Resources Mentioned

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Grace Lordan Interview Transcript

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

Grace Lordan
Hi, Pete. I’m delighted to be here, and I hope that I am awesome at my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, we’ll see.

Grace Lordan
We’ll find out.

Pete Mockaitis
Just kidding. Just kidding. No pressure. I’m excited to hear about your book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want. But, first, I want to hear about your dog-kissing practices.

Grace Lordan
My dog-kissing practices, yes, I mean, that continues. And for my partner, it’s the most embarrassing thing, I think, ever because it’s not even just in private. It’s also in public. She will give me now kisses when she wants a treat. She gives me a kiss before she goes to bed at night. And, actually, when I want to laugh, I do say to her, “Casey, can I have a kiss?” and she does give me a kiss. So, for people who don’t like dog-kissing, it’s probably a really bad start to this podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no, I think that’s adorable. My kids, lately, have been asking it at bedtime, “I want 10 kisses,” and I just love it, so. So, dog kisses, yeah, I’ll take those, too, if we had a dog. As long as the dog, I think if it’s a dog you know, that’s cool. I might be a little uncomfortable if it’s like a total stranger dog that looks kind of, you know, ill. I don’t know if I want him kissing me. But if it’s your dog, it’s all good.

Grace Lordan
I think cuteness is a factor as well. You’ve chosen your dog, so you obviously think it’s really cute, but I think some dogs do look quite intimidating. So, yeah, I think stick to kissing your own dog, for anybody listening.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. We’re already getting actionable wisdom. Thank you, Grace. Well, let’s hear a little bit about inside your book. Were there any particularly surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made while you’re putting together Think Big?

Grace Lordan
There were lots simply because, when I was writing it, I treated myself as an experiment. So, if you read the book, there’s lots of tips that come from scientific research, and I actually tried them out. Some worked for me, and some didn’t work for me, which I think really kind of shows that you should, when you take advice, really figure out if it’s actually working for you.

I think some of the more interesting ones were thinking, for example, about the spotlight effect, how, for me, I have a tendency towards perfectionism, which it sounds wonderful, but actually it isn’t. It’s quite crippling. And learning about the spotlight effect, that people who are paying attention to you in the moment probably aren’t paying attention to you to the degree that you actually think has been quite freeing for me, and I’ve managed to verify that as true.

So, you can take that as depressing or not, Pete, but most of the things that I do, whether I do them well or do them badly, it feels like nobody’s watching, which is very freeing for me, but it could be quite depressing if you thought about it in another way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so I’m intrigued. How did you confirm? Did you say, “Hey, you, were you watching me earlier when I was doing this?” Or, how did you put that to the test that you were not really being spotlighted?

Grace Lordan
I think you wait for the legacy. So, if you do things like public speaking, or if you are the person who convenes round tables, sometimes you will have blunders and you won’t say things exactly the way that you wanted to say them. For example, you might not be as clear as you would want. And I used to ruminate on that, and I would ask you, if you were my colleague, who is in the round table, and procrastinate over, “What did you think?” because I’m drawing your attention, so you would probably have a few comments.

But I found out that, actually, not necessarily drawing people’s attention to it, verified for me the people weren’t paying attention to it to begin with. Then, actually, even just leaving a lag to get feedback of one week meant that people have kind of forgotten my blunders and really saw the performance as an average rather than these very small minute things that I was picking up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, zooming out a bit, can you share what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis behind the book Think Big?

Grace Lordan
So, I wanted to write a book that was for people who weren’t able to just upheave their lives to create huge change, because I think, here in the UK, and also in the US, we hear these stories of people who have great success, and it feels like they do it overnight. So, I wanted to write a really, really realistic book but I still wanted to write something where people ended up achieving really, really big things.

So, the starting point is getting people to think big, which really is getting somebody to imagine what their life would be in the medium term, so think years rather than months, if everything worked out and you had no constraints. So, Pete, you mentioned that you have two young kids, you would basically not say, “Okay, I have two kids I have to really factor in their care in this think big.” Instead, you would just imagine, “What if it all worked out?”

And then the second step in that is saying, “Okay, now that I have this vision of myself, what does that person actually do on a day-to-day basis?” So, I think one of the places where we fall down when we’re thinking about our future is that we visualize ourselves doing these kinds of huge big things, so declaring that we have huge earnings in our company if we’re entrepreneurs; imagining ourselves giving a statement if we were a CEO; imagining ourselves doing something else as equally impressive if we’ve gone into another kind of career aspect. But we don’t think about the tasks that actually get you there and the grit on the day-to-day basis.

So, I get people to visualize those, and, assuming that they’re happy with the tasks that they visualize, I ask them to put small steps in place that gets them doing those tasks now. Or, if they’re not able to do those tasks because of a skill deficit, to put steps in place to get those skills. If they visualize those tasks, and say, “Actually, this sounds really horrible. I like the idea of running my own company, but the day-to-day sounds terrible,” then they reiterate the process again. And, fundamentally, it’s about figuring out what you love doing, but also figuring out what you love doing that leads you to something probably bigger than you’re imagining at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so that sounds pretty quick and zippy, Grace. Is that the case? Or, how long are we talking till we land upon a vision and a plan that feels awesome for people?

Grace Lordan
So, I think it is zippy. I have exercises in the book to get people thinking about the activities they like doing on a day-to-day basis if they don’t know what they want to do so they can map back to a big dream. I have kind of guidance on the type of skills that you need to do particular careers. So, I think the think big part is actually quite…it happens really, really quick. I love the word zippy, by the way. It is actually quite zippy.

But I think the hard part is putting the small steps in place and sticking to those small steps. So, once you get over chapter two and you have this kind of big vision in mind, the rest of the book is devoted to thinking about, “How can you stick to your small steps? How can you find time to do the small steps? How can you overcome your own biases? How can you overcome the biases of others?” And that part of the journey does take time.

And I think most of us as human beings are really…find really easy dreaming of something that we might never achieve, and those small steps are the bridge to actually making it a reality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And in the book, you’ve got six key areas: time, goal-planning, self-narratives, other people, environment, and resilience. Can you share with us a couple of your favorite tips inside each of these areas that can help us to think big and realize those big thoughts?

Grace Lordan
So, I’ve said this so many times since the book has been written, so it feels like a cliché, but it is something that’s fundamentally true, is that time is the one thing that we can’t get back. It is our most precious resource. And one of the things that I love doing, when I feel that I’m not making progress, is time audits, and I’d encourage anyone listening to do one as well, and really divide…so, firstly, auditing what they’ve on a day-to-day basis, ideally, in 15-minute increments. And then going back and asking yourself, “Which bucket do those increments fall into?”

So, firstly, “Are these things that actually allows me to be happy in the moment or allow somebody else to be happy in the moment, or give some value?” The second are the things that, actually, are investing in your future self. So, this idea of me plus, or the person who you visualize when you think big. And the last are what I call time sinkers, and these are things that absolutely waste your time.

And when I wrote the book, my biggest time sinker is sitting in meetings. I work in the university and the meetings tend to be very, very long. I don’t know about the US, but in the UK, they tend to be very, very long, very, very boring, and no decision ever gets made. A lot of small-stake stuff gets debated. So, for me, that was my time sinker to really focus in on, “Do I need to be at these meetings if nobody is actually making a decision, nobody is listening to me?”

Another time sinker for me was spending too much time on email. For other people, it could be social media, it could be online shopping, but really figuring out what those time sinkers are and re-allocating that time to invest in your future long-term self.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, if I may, Grace, I’m curious, if you determine these emails are taking too much time, these meetings are taking too much time, in practice, how does one just ditch them, it’s like, “You know what, not doing anymore. Hey, Dean, or whomever, not going to those meetings anymore”? How do you pull that off?

Grace Lordan
It’s a really great question. So, I think, for me, it’s going to be easier than for a lot of people because one of the benefits of working in the university is they have this thing called tenure, where it’s kind of hard to fire you. So, if no one is listening to you in a meeting, it’s quite valid for you to say to the chair, “No one’s paying attention to me so I’m just not going to show up for this.” And if they don’t change the meeting, I think that’s okay.

I think it’s harder if you have a job where you do have to show up, but, nonetheless, I think it’s possible. So, for people who I know who work in finance and technology companies in extraordinary competitive environments, one of the solutions that they have for the emails is to check emails at particular times during the day.

So, they’re not firefighters and they’re not heart surgeons, so if it takes them 90 minutes to respond to something, it’s not going to be the end of the world. And that batching has been extraordinarily effective for them. On meetings, and we might get into this in a while, in a lot of companies where I’ve kind of been working and kind of doing work about redesigning how leadership should look, is fundamentally is about redesigning meetings to give time back to your team.

So, again, moving away from these forums where we over-deliberate on small-stake stuff to an environment where we have trust, and bringing people together when the big things are at stake, or when you’re creating and when you’re innovating. And in the book, I talk a bit about how you can redesign meetings if you’re in charge of them, but also if you’re somebody who’s low-power, how you can nudge the person in charge to get you there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a great turn of a phrase, deliberating on low-stake stuff. And I guess one would need to think through, “Are the low stakes just for me? Is there a low-stake for the company, for the team, or for everybody?” And I think, often, the answer is there’s little stakes for everybody. Maybe someone just doesn’t feel confident enough to make a decision on their own without gathering input. Or, they’re extroverted, they just like to chitchat.

So, I guess there’s any number of reasons why meetings appear that ought not to have appeared, but I think that’s a really great check-in question to work through there in terms of, “Is this, in fact, small stakes for everybody? And are we just talking because here we are and we’re intellectual creatures who have different ideas so we’re going to talk about them because that’s the topic placed in front of us?”

Grace Lordan
I think it comes from a really good place, so I think, as organizations grew, it was hard to build trust in organizations. Because, if we think back a hundred years as things were actually getting bigger, usually, you were just battling a growth cycle, so the idea of putting structure around meetings probably wasn’t something that dawned on anyone, particularly when people were working nine to five and time wasn’t as scarce as it is today.

I think, now, we fundamentally have an oversupply of meetings to discuss small-stakes stuff because we want to be transparent, so it comes from a really good place. So, if, for example, I’m interested in how many bike racks that I should put outside buildings, it’s nice for me to ask you, Pete, because I feel that I should be an inclusive person but, for you, that’s taking your time.

So, I think the battle for leaders and for companies now is to, firstly, figure out, “What are the things that are low stakes and what’s high stakes?” and put transparency around the low-stake stuff for the one person or the two people who might really want to see how that decision is made. They should be able to go online and look that up.

But I think for the rest of the people who are actually happy to trust and give autonomy to their teammates, then they should get on with it. And I think part of it is that leaders themselves shouldn’t be involved in the low-stakes decision-making. So, for example, if I’m in your team, Pete, and you’re the leader, you, like everyone else in the team, should accept me making decisions without you being there, and the mode of transparency that’s open to the team.

And I think I see in teams now, particularly in finance and tech where I do a lot of work, where people are moving towards that mode, and they’re getting just a lot of time back. And people are ending up being happier, safe in the knowledge that when the big decisions are being made, they’ll be called into the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I like the bike rack example a lot because you can very politely say, “You know, I trust you and whatever you decide with regard to how many bike racks is fine.” And then that might be a good little test for yourself internally, like, “Do you have any input here?” It’s like, “Actually, I guess I wouldn’t want you to add hundreds of bike racks, such that the closets are…or the hallways are really crowded, but other than that, I mean, really, you could have five, you could have 50, and it’s just fine with me.”

Grace Lordan
And most people will make a really sensible decision in that domain. And there are these experiments that are fantastic in behavioral science, where they give people things to deliberate in meetings, and they look to see how much time they spend on items, like the bike rack, as composed to items like project choice, capital structure decisions, pensions, and people tend to spend more time talking about the bike racks because, fundamentally, in meetings, most people can give an opinion on a bike rack because it’s a very easy thing for us to conceptualize.

When the material gets hard, you get much fewer questions. And, actually, for the meetings to work, we need it to be the other way around. We need it to be people like me who don’t necessarily and fully understand the question on pensions, for example, to be asking the questions so that everyone in the room gets to understand that really big decision, and we should leave the bike racks to somebody else to decide.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really good perspective, and I’m amused by podcasters. I’ve been in some podcast forums where folks have a question about, I don’t know, cover art, which kind of matters. It’s not the number one thing but it sort of matters. But that’s very easy for anyone to opine on, like, “I like the yellow one. I like the one with the bigger face,” a piece of art or design anyone can comment upon but, really, what’s most critical is, “Okay, do I have a show that serves a real audience and a real need that’s somewhat distinctive and/or superior from the alternatives available?”

But that’s a lot harder to…like, you’d actually have to do some research to be able to tell you, to opine on that as opposed to, “I like the yellow one.” And yet, yeah, that’s great. So, in a way, the primary driver of deliberation time is not so much importance or value but just, I guess, ease of folks having opinions on, opine-ability. I don’t know what we’d call that.

Grace Lordan
So, in behavioral science, there’s a whole area of research that talks about shared information versus hidden information. So, the shared information are the things that we have in common this evening when we’re talking. And for a podcast, it probably makes sense for us to focus on things that are shared, otherwise it would sound really weird for the audience.

But if we’re working together, the value of us as colleagues is actually in our hidden information, so you’ll have insights that I don’t have, and we should take time to learn those for the big stuff. But we should hire somebody who we can delegate the small stuff to so we actually have that time. So, some of the kind of work that I do is really getting people to, firstly, understand what we’re talking about to be true, but, secondly, to get comfortable talking about that hidden information.

Because one of the first things we do when we have new colleagues in companies is that we kind of condition them, if they’re going to stay with us, to conform to the type of information that we like sharing in meetings, which really gets rid of the comparative advantage we get when that person comes through the door. And it all comes down to our ego.

As humans, we just like to be comfortable in conversations where we fully understand what’s going on. But, obviously, to learn something new, there has to be lots of moments in our life where we’re sitting in rooms where we fundamentally don’t understand something. We grapple with that so we get on the same page as somebody who has a different perspective or unique information compared to us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, so we had some thoughts on time. How about self-narratives?

Grace Lordan
Yeah. So, one of the interesting things for me, because my background is in computer science, so one of the biggest learning curves for me has been that people prefer storytelling over data. One of the most interesting things to me in the psychology literature is that the biggest storytellers we are, are the stories that we essentially tell ourselves.

So, if I’m ever going to do something new, what actually goes on in my mind just before I do that particular thing is going to govern how well I actually do it in the moment, how I feel coming out of it, and whether or not I’ll engage in it again. And in Think Big, I kind of explore the idea of self-narratives that might be holding people back, like, “I’m not good enough,” “This doesn’t necessarily suit me,” “I don’t have time for this,” and really getting people to challenge those narratives so that they get to move forward in a way that feels much freer.

And I think, again, kind of in writing this and in talking to different people on their perspectives, what are the things that really stood out for me is, fundamentally, people often don’t see that. It’s themselves that are the majority of what’s holding them back as compared to other people. We usually see it really clearly if somebody else puts an obstacle in our way, but those obstacles that we have through the image we have of ourselves, which is probably not true, by the way, is something fundamentally that, I think, people need to address in order to achieve and, given the topic of this podcast, be awesome at their job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And so, if we’re exploring the stories that we’re telling to ourselves or about ourselves, do you have any pro tips on identifying what stories may not be serving us so well, and how to reframe them?

Grace Lordan
Absolutely. So, I think that there’s kind of two different ways in which you can go about this. So, the first is that you can start listening to yourself, essentially. So, when you have these big moments, recognizing whether or not you’re going into imposter syndrome; recognizing whether or not your self-chatter is saying that you don’t necessarily have enough time, which is my one, by the way; recognizing what that actual narrative is; and challenging that narrative in the moment by giving disconfirming evidence.

And I think that there’s some good evidence in psychology that this can work for people, I’m quite skeptical because I can’t imagine myself being in a situation where I’m about to do an action that’s making me nervous, and I find myself having the strength to have that argument with myself internally. So, I prefer the other approach, which is really to, once you’ve identified that narrative, to think about actions that disconfirm that particular narrative and engage in those regularly.

So, really, for example, if you think about somebody whose self-narrative says that they’re a smoker, so they now start saying, “Actually, I’m not a smoker. I’m somebody who does something different.” So, every time that they might think of a cigarette, instead of going and smoking, they bring that narrative to the fore so that they’re swapping out one behavior for another behavior in themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And then when it comes to resilience, how do we get a boost there?

Grace Lordan
So, the chapter on resilience, I actually wrote before COVID, and I think it’s been the most popular chapter in the book because, during the COVID pandemic, a lot of people really wanted to figure out how they could become more resilient when they’re at home. Again, in the same flavor as the book, I really lean on what are small things that you can do on a day-to-day basis that will preserve your resilience reserves or also enhance them.

So, I’ll give you two, which are two of my favorites. So, the first is to really reflect what you do when something negative happens to you. So, whether or not it’s a colleague insulting you, not getting a promotion, to something even bigger than that. What are the typical types of reactions that you have? So, really kind of engage in that self-awareness.

And for behavioral scientists, we call that period affect. So, basically, you’re reacting with emotion and you’re in this hot stage which probably isn’t the best for you to make decisions about your way forward, figuring out what you’re actually going to do in that period. So, for me, in the book, I give the readers a list of things that I do that range from a walk around the block when it’s something small, to taking bigger timeouts to have to spend some time with friends and get the healthy jolts of confirmation bias when things are a bit worse.

And then the second stage is dealing with the problem. And I ask people to do this ahead of time, so really think about, “When negative things happen, what are you actually going to reach with?” so that they’re not reacting with their emotions. And this is particularly useful, I think, for people who do become very emotional when things don’t actually go their way.

Within companies, you can also do this within teams so if you’re trying to build psychological safety, you could think about saying to your team, “Look, there’s going to be moments where things don’t go our way. And when things don’t go our way, we’re going to take a timeout, and this is what the timeouts can actually look like.” And that does something for the team in giving them certainty about what would happen in an uncertain situation. And with respect to the individual, you’re essentially giving yourself certainty about what you’re going to do when things don’t necessarily go wrong. So, it seems to be very effective.

The second then is to really go into a battle with loss aversion. So, if you can imagine yourself, Pete, and you’re walking down the street today, this won’t happen in London, by the way, because the weather is extraordinarily hot today, but if you’re walking down the street and it’s a rainy day, and somebody splashes you with a puddle, so they go through, you’re soak from head to toe, and you’re meant to go somewhere important. How would you react in that situation?

Pete Mockaitis
I would probably say, “Aargh!”

Grace Lordan
Would you shake a fist? Would you be annoyed at the driver?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I’d be annoyed, angry, confused, startled, yeah.

Grace Lordan
Would you tell the story later to other people?

Pete Mockaitis
It really could go either way. I suppose if I was entering a room and everyone says, “Whoa, why are you covered in mud?” I would absolutely tell them.

Grace Lordan
You might do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d probably tell my wife but, yeah, I’d probably lead with that.

Grace Lordan
But it would stick with you even for that moment where you have that angry burst, you have a negative reaction. That seems to be what most people would have, then some people would carry it with them for their day, and then some people would just find it really hard to get over. So, you have these kinds of three types of people, if you like.

You get the same when you have somebody who insults you. So, if you can imagine yourself being in the workplace and somebody says, “Pete, you’ve done an extraordinarily bad job today. I don’t know why you came to work,” usually people inside will feel quite negatively towards that person. They might tell their spouse or they might tell a friend, but it really weighs on their mind.

Or, if a colleague ignores them, the same thing. So, if a colleague ignores them, they do feel negatively towards the person, “What’s going on? Why is Jim ignoring me today? I don’t necessarily know what’s going on.” And on the other side, we don’t celebrate when we don’t get splashed by a puddle. We don’t celebrate when people are incredibly kind to us and give us compliments in work. We’re very unlikely to celebrate when somebody kind of gives us that greeting in the hall with a big smile on their face.

And it’s actually been shown kind of time and time again that people who focus on those moments, the driver who slowed down without actually splashing them and ruining their day, the person who is incredibly kind to them, the person who gives the good greeting, if you concentrate on those at a certain point in the day, which is known as gratitude in the literature, or celebrating small wins, if you’re a behavioral scientist, it really allows you to not just kind of preserve your resilience stores because it moves the focus away from bad things that have happened to positive, but also allows you to become more resilient because you recognize that you have these good things going on in your life.

And that is something that I really kind of encourage people to try and see if it works for them. For me, I’m not a great journaler so I usually do this at the end of my day, like 7:00, it would be later tonight, and I write down that I’m really grateful for a good conversation with Pete. And having those moments where I actually kind of look at my day, and say, “Yes, everything didn’t go my way but there were these things that actually stand out that life is going in the right direction,” is extraordinarily resilience-preserving and incredibly easy to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Grace, you’re also an authority on issues associated with bias. Can you speak to some of the takeaways there that can help us be more awesome at our jobs?

Grace Lordan
Yes. So, I wrote a whole chapter on bias in the book and one of the things that I ask people to recognize in the beginning is to think about what is the proportion of their journey that belongs to them, and what is the proportion of the journey where they rely on other people.

And then we go deep-diving into the biases that traditionally hold people back. And one of my favorites is confirmation bias. So, it’s my favorite because confirmation bias is both a good thing and a bad thing. So, when you’re having a really crummy day and things haven’t gone your way, you absolutely want somebody who’s going to take your side, who’s going to tell you that you’re right, and who isn’t going to put up a fight against you when you say to them it was all somebody else’s fault. You absolutely want that.

However, if we bring confirmation bias into the workplace on our regular days when we’re trying to do our job, when we’re trying to get critical feedback, it really, really will hold us back. And confirmation bias is a tendency for me to hold a belief and then go looking for evidence that actually confirms that belief.

So, for example, if I’m somebody who believes that we should go with a particular project at work, or, to use our example, that there should be ten bike racks outside the building, I will look for evidence that confirms that particular belief. But, of course, there’s lots of other perspectives that I should be taking into account when I’m making big decisions, like, the project to actually take on, a colleague to hire, or who to actually promote.

And, fundamentally, I think some of the battles that we have at the moment is getting within teams and individuals to really look outside themselves, for perspectives that aren’t their own, and to battle their own self-beliefs. And if you think about whether or not you’re growing as a person, it can be really helpful to ask yourself when was the last time that you changed your mind on something that was a fundamental belief to you.

So, you come into this world, we were brought up in a certain way, we go about our journey, and we kind of create particular beliefs. When did you actually change your mind? And in the absence of being able to identify when you changed your mind, being honest with yourself, and saying, “When did I sit down with somebody who held a different belief to me and had a conversation with them?”

And, for me, most of my work is in companies when it comes to investment choices, colleagues to hire, colleagues to promote, but you can also link this to what’s kind of going on in society and different perspectives with respect to governments and ideologies, and people just aren’t talking to each other. And what it really comes down to is, as human beings, again, our ego lends us to hanging around with people who have the same viewpoints of us and always wanting to be right.

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

Grace Lordan
No, I’m good.

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

Grace Lordan
I think I’m going to go with Madeleine Albright, who has passed away very recently, who said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

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

Grace Lordan
So, I have a number of them, but one that I refer to a lot is one that was done in the ‘60s on the Pygmalion Effect that really demonstrated that when researchers went into schools and they picked out the kids that had the highest ability, and then when they went away, and they came back and they looked at the kids’ test scores, well, they actually were kids who had done incredibly well.

But what was really unique about this study was that the kids had been randomly selected on the first day. So, they weren’t the highest ability at all, and it really demonstrated two things. So, firstly, self-belief of the kids mattered because they have been given the label that they were high ability but also the belief in the teachers towards these students.

So, if you are somebody who is struggling or who isn’t doing incredibly well at work, it might just be that you don’t have a manager who’s giving you opportunities to thrive. And why I picked that one this evening is it has been replicated many times in companies to demonstrate that somebody who isn’t doing particularly well in one team under a particular manager, when they move and the manager actually believes in them and inputs into them and gives them opportunities, they do tend to grow.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And now could you share a favorite book?

Grace Lordan
I love a lot by Ryan Holiday. So, at the moment I’m reading Courage is Calling, which is an absolutely amazing book, and I’m really looking forward to the second part, which is coming out in September on discipline. I think the work he does that really links to stoicism and some other concepts that have been long forgotten, and bringing them into the modern day is just so unique. I would really recommend people reading him.

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

Grace Lordan
iPad. So, my iPad is used to check my emails. So, on every other device, I don’t have my emails come in and ping and distract me. I use my iPad as the accessory where I check my emails, and it’s been the one thing that has really allowed me to increase my productivity in the last decade.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you don’t view or reply to any emails on your computer?

Grace Lordan
No, or phone. And, at the moment, it’s in a different room, so the cost of me checking it is actually really high. So, if you said, “I want to go and just make a coffee, I’ll be back in two minutes,” previously I would be checking on my phone, answering some emails, getting distracted, and not being in the moment. Now, I have to physically walk out, get it. Sometimes I do do it on autopilot, I won’t lie, but the majority of time, it has become conscious. So, it’s not the tool itself, but it’s what it enables me to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Grace Lordan
Favorite habit is I was going to say the email checker, but I’m going to pick something different. It’s walking my dog. So, I walk her morning, afternoon, and evening, very short in the afternoon, and it’s really just a chance to get mindful.

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

Grace Lordan
So, I say a lot that time is your most precious resource, and people do, on Instagram, let me know what they’re using their precious resource for. And so, we can’t get it back. So, really bringing people’s focus to time.

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

Grace Lordan
www.GraceLordan.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?

Grace Lordan
Yes, I’d like people to make a pledge to have one small change in their life that will make them be awesome at their jobs. If they’re not sure what to do, it can be doing a time audit. So, figuring out what they did in the last week, breaking that time into 15-minute chunks, and dividing it into things that are time sinkers, things that give you happiness in the moment, and things that are going to make you move more towards your future self.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Grace, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck as you think big.

Grace Lordan
Thank you, Pete. You’re absolutely awesome.

Aug 29
0

795: How to Stop Being Crazy Busy and Take Back Your Time with Zena Everett

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Zena Everett reveals the time-wasters to drop in order to make time for what matters.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The top things slowing us down at work 
  2. The questions to ask for effective prioritization
  3. How to say no nicely 

 

About Zena

Leadership Coach and Speaker Zena Everett is the author of Mind Flip, Take the Fear out of Your Career and the award winning Crazy Busy Cure. 

Originally a recruitment entrepreneur, Zena sold her business in 2007 then studied an MSc in Career Management and Coaching. She then took further postgraduate qualifications in psychological coaching and leadership with neuroscience (MIT Sloan Business School). She has coached on the Executive MBA Programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and is a member of the Associate Faculty at Henley Business School. 

 

Resources Mentioned

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Zena Everett Interview Transcript

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

Zena Everett
Delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re talking productivity and time stuff, which is a favorite topic of mine, as well as listeners. And I love your book title so much The Crazy Busy Cure: A productivity book for people who don’t have time to read productivity books. Please lay it on us, Zena, what do you mean by crazy busy? And how is your book sort of distinctive in that it’s for those who don’t have time to read such books?

Zena Everett
Yeah. And I’m nervous about talking about productivity because that sounds like we’re trying to get people to do even more and more, and I’m not sure we are, really. I think we’re getting people to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. But I’m a coach, and my clients kept saying to me, “Oh, yeah, I’m really crazy busy. I’m crazy busy,” and it just was kind of going through our head all the time. And I thought, “This isn’t a good thing.”

You know, the type of person, they’d be late for a session, and everything would kind of be thrown across the table, and they haven’t thought, and they have no time to think, and I’d been asked to coach them because they were causing bottlenecks for everybody else in the organization. And I just thought, “Gosh, this is really interesting. Why are people so crazy busy? Is it them?” and it is to a certain extent, but it’s also a systemic thing. So, that’s what I got really interested in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, your book is for folks who don’t have time to read such books. I’m curious, is there a particular…where my mind goes in reading that is thinking about sort of like a time ROI, and Chris Bailey talks about this, in terms of like minutes spent on a thing will yield more minutes back to you for having done so. Are there some particular insights or tools or tactics that are really transformational along these lines?

Zena Everett
Even when you say things like that, it makes me get a bit stressed because that’s sort of minute ROI and all those kinds of things. What I realized is that I found some great research by Bain, actually, where I know where you were a long time ago. So, what they talked about, this whole concept of organizational drag, so I realized that crazy busyness is a thing and it’s got a name, which I call productivity drag.

And these are all the things that kind of slow down the system, that makes it really hard to get any work done. And that is excessive complexity and collaboration, so we want all organizations to be inclusive, but having too many people around the table just means you’ve got too many competing opinions and competing agendas, and often nobody there who’s strong enough to align those and ask the right questions.

So, there’s too much complexity, digitization – amazing because this is how we’re doing this, but sometimes it can layer a layer of fake work, crazy busy work on top of the real work, and I definitely put messaging and teams and social media in there. And then there’s excessive organizational complexity, where there are just far too many systems and processes.

And then overservicing, actually. That’s the fourth, which I realize sometimes I do. I overservice some clients who actually, in terms of ROI, I don’t get that much back. And that can happen when you’re in a business partnering role. So, I think you’ve got those kinds of systemic organizational factors that slow us down. And then you’ve got our own ability to not say no, possibly, or please everybody, all that stuff that gets us here in the words of Marshall Goldsmith, but don’t get us there.

So, I think you combine the two, and that’s why it’s just so hard to get anything done. And you know as well, Pete, that we are switching all the time, aren’t we? Most of our tasks just take a couple of minutes. We’re switching, switching all the time rather than actually doing deep work. And there’s umpteen things being written about deep work and flow, but that’s the holy grail of this stuff, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay. So, that makes sense in terms of a cocktail for crazy busyness if you’ve got some organizational drag things going on, a bunch of complexity and collaboration, and overdoing it, and then our own difficulties internally putting together, and there you go, crazy busy, here we are. So, I’m curious, where do you recommend folks start? If they find themselves in a crazy busy situation and we want to get out in a jiffy, what do you recommend as some of the first key steps that make a world of difference?

Zena Everett
I always think our grandparents could run this kind of work because it’s so obvious. It’s first principles, isn’t it? I think it’s going back to people to say, “Actually, what am I really measured on here? What’s my job description? When I’m next in front of my boss or a promotion board or something like that, what do I want to talk about that I’ve actually achieved? And does how I run my role and spend my days reflect that?” because very often it doesn’t.

You know this, we sacrifice our priorities on the altar of everybody else’s urgent demands. So, I say to my clients, “Right. Actually, what is the difference between you and an outstanding performer? What are they achieving? What’s the gap? That’s where you need to focus your time.” So, all that stuff you say yes to, well, we can spend a lot of time saying yes to discretionary activities, all the other things that come our way, all those curve balls, some of which are career-enhancing because they’re interesting, or we’re learning, or they give us access to new networks but, actually, me making you more crazy busy, because I haven’t finished my work, and I say, “Well, look, Pete, would you mind?” isn’t a good thing.

So, that’s why I say, right, just take a step back actually and slow things down to go faster, and actually work out, “What is the top level of my job description?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Zena, can you tie that together for us with an inspiring story of someone who escaped crazy busyness by following such a process?

Zena Everett
I’ve got lots of examples, actually, so maybe I should sort of kind of talk about Captain Fantastic. So, I think my typical client would be somebody who got promoted, maybe they’ve been great at their job, they’ve always been hot on execution, worked harder than everybody else, long hours, just delivered. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, all that kind of stuff.

And then they’re doing really well at the job, and somebody says, “Hey, look, here’s an intern. Take them on. They know nothing. They’re clueless. Well done,” and nobody ever says to that person, “Right. You’re already spending 120% of your hours doing your job.” Nobody ever says, “Right. This is how you need to make your job more efficient to find time for managing those people.”

Anyway, invariably, they do, and then they end up having a team around them, and that’s often my absolute definition of a crazy busy client. It’s somebody on that sweet spot who’s managing their own contribution but they’re running a team as well, and they probably got a team of mixed ability, maybe some people they’ve inherited or they’re brand new and so on.

And those are the people that I would love to coach, and I have a really robust discussion with to say, “Right. You need to go back and talk to your boss about how much time you should be spending on your own work, and how much time you should be spending on management.” And we don’t talk about time in that respect. I think it’s rare.

Our manufacturing cousins would be everything is timed on the production line, isn’t it? We’re really sure about how long it takes to do when, and everything is fairly timed. Whereas, it’s rare that somebody says, “That report should take you 45 minutes. If you just do it once, do it properly, get it done, it’s about 45 minutes, and this is what good practice looks like.”

So, we’re nervous about micromanaging people, that’s what managers say to me all the time, “Oh, I really don’t want to micromanage people” But, actually, I think we’ve got to be about old school about this, and give some people some sense about how to structure their days, how long tasks should take, and get them to put some kind of rigor and discipline in them.

Because, at the moment, what we know is that work is just cannibalizing into people’s personal time. We’re getting our tasks done but we have this low level of anxiety, hopefully, only low level, no worse than that, because we always feel anxious because there’s just so much to do and we never get to inbox zero, do we, or whatever it is, and there’s always more projects, and there’s more things we can be doing, and never mind all the liking and posting and all that kind of crazy nonsense.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a great tip right there in terms of when it’s knowledge work, it can be super fuzzy with regard to you can do a report in 45 minutes, you could do a report in four hours, and I find those guidelines quite helpful, myself, both on the giving and the receiving end because sometimes it really is essential. I’ve spent all day on an email before, and it was absolutely the right choice. That email was mission critical and involved tens of thousands of dollars, so felt great about that.

And the other times, you can go way overboard on something that is like, “No, you just have to kind of check the box so that we know that’s checked, and then we’re fine,” or, “Well, this is going to be edited by six more people anyway down the road so no need to stress it too much because it’s going to be revised like the Dickens so just go ahead and get the rough outline and structure starter point in play and then we’re good to go.”

So, yeah, I think that is helpful as opposed to micromanage-y. And do you have an idea, or thought, or guideline for when does something become micromanagement versus is it just good wholesome quality guidance that is useful and appreciated?

Zena Everett
I like a bit of wholesome quality guidance but I think once we get people cured from crazy busyness, they’re much better managers, and then they’ve got time to say, “Pete, what can I back off and let you get on with?” I think that’s the thing is to have that continuous conversation. And when people are maybe working partly from home and partly in the office and juggling all that kind of stuff, sometimes we need more help than people expect, sometimes we need less, so you can’t overcommunicate on this kind of stuff.

But my real bug bear that really drives me mad is this whole culture of continuous synchronous working. So, this feeling the need to send you Teams Messenger, or WhatsApp, or something, and you respond to that immediately, and I think that is a thing that really slows people down because, aside those occasional days when you spend a whole day on an email, and you probably need to take a step away and come back and look at it again, and maybe sleep on it, all those things, that’s fine.

But, fundamentally, most of us, as you very well know, we’re just switching tasks all day, aren’t we, because people need us, and people need us now. So, I get my clients to have more meetings, which they aren’t that happy about, but better. I’d get them to put some real rigor into their meetings and sharpen up.

Have you ever said to somebody, “Oh, look, do that meeting for me?” and you think, “Great. I’ve saved myself a couple of hours there.” And then the person comes out of the meeting, and you say, “All right. How did it go? What happened?” and they brief you in about two sentences, don’t they, “Oh, yeah, we did this and Jim is doing this. That’s it.”

So, I’m always curious by how my clients can spend so much time in really rubbish meetings that they shouldn’t be in, but they don’t have time to say to you, “Really liked how you write that report. Actually, you can try and make it quicker now,” or whatever it is. So, there’s definitely something about communicating properly once rather than having this continuous stream of consciousness where we feel we should be connected to our teams, well, almost 24/7 in some cases. This drip, drip, drip of Teams messages.

So, I think if we can kind of eliminate that and get people to work away on their own, do some deep thinking, work in flow, all the kind of basic productivity stuff that we’ve all been reading about, and then come back, and then connect and have proper rigorous meetings, life would be so much better. But there seems to be a lot of wasted time in inefficient meetings that we could do something about.

And I think that we need to use technology better so that it’s just a kind of briefing rather than a discussion, or a celebration, or a brainstorm, or decisions to be made, obviously, then there is no reason for that to be a meeting. Our manufacturing colleagues would never get everybody to down tools at the same time because it’s such an expensive investment of time but we’re frivolous with our time. That’s a very long answer, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was agreeing with you with regard to that manufacturing analogy. It does feel kind of silly to say, “Okay, hey, everyone, stop. Stop things you’re doing, put down the chainsaw or kind of whatever is going on there, and we’re going to chat about this thing.” It’s just sort of a head scratch, like, “What? Why? What’s happening right now? And why? This doesn’t seem so critical. Is there an emergency? Like, is something catastrophic occurring?”

It’s fuzzy and yet, in professionals, that world is still plenty expensive to have whatever, six, ten people in a room all at the same time, and there is that interruption of flow factor in there as well. So, that really puts in the context that, “Yeah, those meetings are destructive.” So, I’m curious, when you mentioned people-pleasing and not saying no, do you have any pro tips on how we professionals can do that better? How does one decline a meeting politely, diplomatically, effectively in a none career-limiting fashion?

Zena Everett
Well, how do you do it, because you must do it all the time?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I sort of have the luxury of being the owner/CEO, and so there’s nobody above me to ask me things. So, then it’s like this great mass of the external world which I have license to engage or disengage as I please. So, in a way, I’m spoiled and I don’t have that much of a problem.

Zena Everett
Do you ever feel guilty if you say no to people?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, my wife, I would.

Zena Everett
You should never say no to your wife, ever. What are you saying no to your wife about? Let’s talk about that. Let’s get your wife on.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess when I was an employee, I did, it’s like, “Oh, shucks, I’m invited to this meeting. Oh, I don’t really think it’s viable for me to be there? How do I say this just right?” so I did have those consternations and worries. So, what do you recommend to folks inside organizations?

Zena Everett
I hate that word stakeholder. It’s really kind of cliché, isn’t it? But I think you have to work out who your best stakeholders are. Everybody in this kind of field of time management, we’ve got Pomodoros, or frogs, or something, and I love that antelope and field mice analogy. Do you know that one?

So, you’ve got to know who your main stakeholders are. And I love the analogy of the lions who only chase antelopes. So, they know that they can’t spend their whole day chasing after little furry critters because it’s not worth it. The calorific intake that they need, they wouldn’t get from lots of small things. It’s not worth it. They just let them go.

Whereas, we love to chase anything, don’t we? We love the dopamine hit of crossing something off our list, and our brains can’t distinguish between whether that’s a significant thing, an antelope that we can feed off or if it’s just a load of small field mice. And I am as guilty as anybody of writing small stuff down just to have the pleasure of crossing them off.

So, we’ve got to know who our antelopes are, and so that can be significant tasks, when we’ve got some big goals and we’ve broken them down, yes, sounded stuff, but, actually, we also need to know who those antelope people are as well. Apologies to any vegans who are finding this distasteful. But I think you got to know who the important people are.

And you can’t just jump and overservice people, and you’ve got to know who to say, “Yes, great. I’d really love to get involved,” and go through that thought process, “What’s good for my career? What am I trying to achieve? Where do I need to increase my visibility? If I do this, is this going to give me a new skill? Is this going to give me access to new networks?”

Does that sound calculating? I think we’ve got to be sensible about this, and some people are better than others. There’s so much about saying no, isn’t there? You just say no nicely. Don’t over-explain. Our Royal Family have got an expression of saying, “Never explain. Never complain.” And I think that’s really good. So, the more detail you go into about why you haven’t got five minutes, clearly, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. But you can just say, “Look, I can’t do it.”

But I try and get, I run these “Crazy Busy” sessions, and I teach people, just say, to sequence, “I can’t do that now but I’ll do it, don’t worry. The first available space I’ve got is 8:00 o’clock tomorrow,” or whenever, “Wednesday week and I’ll do it then,” whatever. Hopefully, they’ll disassociate themselves by then. So, I think we need to get into the habit of pushing back, and I think we just need to say, “Yes, I can, and this is when I can fit it in.”

Again, our manufacturing colleagues, if I came to you, and said, “Look, I don’t know, here’s my test tube. Test it in your testing laboratory,” you wouldn’t say, “Of course, I’ll stop the whole line, all those other test tubes will go crashing off the sides.” You just say, “Yes, of course. We start again at 3:00 o’clock, and yours will be the first on there.” So, we’ve just got to approach our work in the same way, and say, “Yeah, I can schedule it in then. How’s that?” And if that doesn’t work, then find somebody else to do it the nicest possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got that great clarity associated with who the people who really matter, and what is the work, and the projects that really matter, and the things you’re being judged or graded upon. Cool. And so then, I’d love for you to elaborate on the just say no nicely. Do you have any favorite phrases, scripts, verbiage?

Zena Everett
I’ve learnt, one of my clients taught me to say, “I’ve noticed…” so that’s a very nice way of dealing with things because I think the people that cause the greatest problems, actually, are the ones we can’t say no to. We soon learn to say, “Yeah, I can’t do that now. I’ll do it later,” or, “Actually, I really can’t get involved in this. I don’t have the capacity.”

But the ones that are the real problems are the, “You sending me a message, say, at 7:30 every morning when you wake up, saying, ‘I need this for a meeting at 9:00,’ and you’re my boss, and I’m terrified of you, and so I don’t know how to deal with it, and I’m hardwired to do it straightaway.” So, “I’ve noticed…” is a really nice way to start a conversation, to say, “Pete, I’ve noticed that you’re often sending me emails at 7:30 asking for information. Oh, that’s no problem. I love doing it for you, but…” okay, maybe not quite as revolting as that.

“But how about I have sight of your diary. Once a week, you can show me what meetings you’ve got coming up and then I can make sure I schedule time to get all that information from you?” So, “I’ve noticed…” is a really nice way to talk about someone’s behavior and how you want it to change rather than making it personal.

So, I think that’s a conversation-starter to say, “How can we do this and get a bit more organized?” because crazy busy people are a real problem for everybody else, because they’re multitasking, they’re always missing deadlines, everything at the last minute, they’re perfectionists often so that slows things down because perfectionists are more likely to procrastinate. They cause problems for everybody else, so we almost need to learn how to have conversations with crazy busy people so we’re not crazy busy by default. It’s not pushed down the chain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s say we’ve done all those things masterfully in terms of we’ve gotten clarity on what’s important and who’s important, and pushed back effectively on, “I’m not going to that meeting. I’ve noticed this behavior. I’m going to schedule some time to do these things.” If we’ve tamed the external world, what are some of the top things we got to focus in on with our internal world?

Zena Everett
Okay, I’ve gone on the external world. Often, when I talk to people about what sucks up their time the most, they talk about emails and messages; so emails, meetings, and messages, systems, processes, inter-team communication, networking, so I just add to your list. I would usually encourage people to have a talk about internal communication, like, “Can we stop emailing each other? Can we just talk? Can we go and have lunch and get all this dealt with rather than, again, this kind of James Joyce stream of consciousness all day?”

I think our internal world is often that people-pleasing, those messages we’ve internalized, “If you work harder than everybody else, you’ll do well,” the stuff. We look at maybe our parents, caregivers, people from our early lives that we’ve observed, they worked incredibly hard, they’ve done well. Actually, the world is slightly different now. It’s the thinking that makes the difference. It’s the creativity, it’s the innovation, it’s the space to lead, it’s time to think for us.

So, I think we’ve got to realize that, actually, the whole MO for getting us to a certain level in our careers has to shift when we want additional responsibility because we can’t run around like a headless chicken looking stressed. So, I think it’s some real self-talk about, again, like I said, Marshall Goldsmith is, “What got me there,” I love that expression, “won’t get me here,” thinking, “What does a high-performer in my organization look like? What are people saying about me? Am I giving off a vibe that I take it all in my stride, I’ve got capacity for other people? And have I got time to network?”

I’m interested in your thoughts on this, but I think that’s so important for career success, and I’ve heard you talk about this. I think people who got their heads down in their job and not networking, they’re not saying, “Pete, what are you working on? That sounds really interesting. Let’s have a chat about it. Let’s grab a coffee,” they’re not just reaching out. They’ve got their heads down, and, actually, in most organizations that I work in, those aren’t the people that do well.

The people that do well have got their heads up and they’re visible and they’re picking very carefully the projects that they get involved in because they want to be seen to come up with the gamechangers. But our brains fight against this, and it can be in our DNA just to do lots of busy stuff. And then there’s all the real kind of mother hen managers, I talk about in the book, that are the ones that are…they remember everyone’s birthday, they do all the emotional labor, they’re collecting the cups after the meetings.

They’re doing other people’s work for them because they don’t want to share out across the team because they’re worried that their colleagues are too busy, all that kind of stuff. And, actually, they’re the ones that crash and burn. They simply don’t get promoted.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Those are some good flags and watchouts there. Yes, I think I’ve noticed that as well as those with their heads up and around and aware, being thoughtful and selective, and networked and building relationships, do often seem to be advancing better than those who have their head down. And, I guess I’m an extrovert, but it sounds like more fun to me as well in terms of how you’re operating. So, you mentioned self-talk, are there some key mantras or I guess maybe cognitive distortions to tackle head on or how do we get our heads right?

Zena Everett
Well, I’m a bit of a “Just don’t do it” person. I think people really have to learn to say no to stuff, and that’s a big…like, we’ve just talked about. But, actually, even if they’re not saying no to somebody else, just think, “It’s really tempting for me to read that, get involved in that, but, actually, that’s not a priority. My time is finite,” so I think that’s important.

The voice that I want my clients to hear from me, “Why am I doing that? What’s my highest and best use here?” And the way that we manage our money, that idea of best use of treasury, is the same thing, “What is the highest and best use of my time? What is it that only I can do?” It’s a great question if you’re a manager, “Out of everything I can do, what should I be doing? What is it that only I can do on my team? And that’s where I should be adding the most value because that’s my greatest contribution to the business.”

So, I think those are the kind of reflective questions that we need to go through, “And why am I doing this? If this is my hourly rate, why am I doing this? Shouldn’t somebody be doing it?” We know when people are supposed to be more strategic and not get involved in the weeds. Sometimes that’s a bit scary because they think, again, I’m talking about guilt a lot.

But that can almost feel indulgent, couldn’t it? I’m really thinking about this kind of stuff where it’s actually, “Should I just be on the phone or getting involved in this kind of bring stuff to show that I’m willing,” but, actually, businesses want people they develop to spend more time being strategic and more time thinking. So, that can be something that people really need to talk themselves into to think, “Look, this is okay. I might be right at the top of my comfort zone and really enjoying it, and it feels good.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’ve got some good tidbits here. I guess I’m curious, having worked with so many different coaching clients, can you share a couple of the approaches, tips, tools, interventions that have been just the most transformational and yet also easy?

Zena Everett
Okay, I’m thinking about this. I love the whole towering strengths exercise which, again, is from Marshall. I’m doing PR for Marshall Goldsmith, it seems like.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we had him on the show recently. He’ll appreciate the reverberation there. So, let’s talk about that.

Zena Everett
So, he has a great exercise where you work out what your towering strengths are. So, that could be, “I’m a really hard worker,” and then what happens when that goes into overdrive, “Right. Well, actually, I’m a complete control freak. I really don’t like to leave anything not done exactly right. I don’t want any loose ends.”

So, when my towering strengths have been super hardworking, when it goes into overdrive, means that I just throw myself at everything in. I don’t stop and think, “I think hard work is going to get me through.” So, the towering strength versus overdrive exercise is really helpful because our towering strength is often what creates a kind of glass ceiling for us later on in organizations because that becomes the problem.

So, maybe, I mean, you and I work for ourselves. I know my towering strength is that I’m pretty strong, I’m very independent. When, actually, that towering strength goes into overdrive, it means that I can be a little bit slow in saying, in asking for help and getting support because I always think I can figure everything out on my own. So, that’s an exercise that I think can be really interesting for people.

And then I do love all those magic questions. If you went back into work tomorrow and everything was fantastic, what would be different? I think that tends to shift people because they say, “I’m stuck and I don’t know,” but you just kind of take them to the sunny opens and get them to look back, then they come up with ideas.

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

Zena Everett
Yeah. So, any kind of Productivity 101 is about scheduling. If it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t happen. So, I get people to pimp their calendars because our calendars are full of meetings, and full of calls but they don’t have tasks in there. So, I get them to understand their priorities, which is the P, to insert into their schedules, it’s got to be meaningful, the M in PIMP, because otherwise they’ll let somebody bump up their tasks and take priority.

And then the final P in PIMP is for prompts, which we know that people have got to have a prompt so that they don’t have…to remove the element of choice, “So, I finish doing this meeting. I’m going to put the kettle on, make a coffee, and then I’m going to go straight in and do that, write that bit of report, or whatever it is, for an hour. I’m going to set myself a timer and do it,” to remove as many options as possible.

So, I make people pimp their schedules, and actually schedule tasks in so that we feel that we have some greater sense of control because what I’ve noticed with people is they’ve got no time for actual work. They’ve just got so many meetings, so many different demands that they’re doing. They don’t have time to actually stop and think and do some deep work, so that’s going to be scheduled. So, your antelopes have got to be scheduled and also your field mice.

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

Zena Everett
Well, I have to say I like, “Just don’t do it.” That really works for me. And I tend to think about that first, “Why am I doing this?” Yeah, so just don’t do it. That’s the opposite of “Just do it” that we attempted to do. I think a lot of brain, just doing it, causes organizational drag, “Why are we actually doing this?”

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

Zena Everett
I love Dunning-Kruger. Shall we talk about Dunning-Kruger?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Zena Everett
I love the Dunning-Kruger Effect which is a cognitive bias. So, a hapless criminal, I think in the ‘90s, went and robbed two banks with just lemon juice on his face. And he robbed one bank and then another one thinking that he’d never get caught because lemon juice is an invisible ink. And, of course, he was arrested swiftly.

So, Messrs. Dunning and Mr. Krueger, psychologists, thought, “How can somebody so hapless have so much confidence?” So, they discovered this thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they did various research on students and realized that the people with the least ability had the most confidence, and vice versa. So, they call it Dunning-Kruger effect, so the less you know, the more confident you are.

And, of course, the opposite of Dunning-Kruger is that when somebody becomes an expert in something, sometimes they can have a bit of a confidence wobble because then they’re worried that, actually, they realize all the stuff that they don’t know because they’re benchmarking themselves against their peers who are other experts.

So, I see in mid-life that sometimes people have confidence wobbles, or they call it impostor syndrome, “All of a sudden, I was great at my job. And now I’m feeling a little bit hesitant and losing confidence.” So, I love telling them about Dunning-Kruger, “Actually, that’s really good because you just realized you know what you don’t know.” So, I’m a bit anti all this stuff, particularly, thanks to all kinds of stereotypes, but there’s lots of coaching for women around the impostor syndrome, “Oh, just relax about that. Don’t put yourself in those situations.”

I say to my clients, “That’s great if you’re feeling like an impostor. That shows that you’re really pushing something, you’re doing something new, but it’s also that you’re just realizing that maybe you need a little bit more preparation time to really feel confident. You need to put some more hours in but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep on going.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. And a favorite book?

Zena Everett
Okay. So, I’m a big fan of Alan Weiss. I love his Million Dollar Consulting book, I love his Money Talks, I love his kind of raw ambition and confidence and aspiration. I think it’s great. I recommend his books frequently. So, he’s talking about this whole idea about charging for what you’re worth.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Zena Everett
I don’t think I have a favorite tool. In fact, I’m quite nervous about people who like a software for everything because I think a whiteboard, where you map your projects with some really good Sharpies and some great Post-It notes so you’ve got visual management is a fantastic tool. So, there you go, an old-fashioned whiteboard where I can actually see it. That really works for me. I’m neurotypical. I’m much more visual than I am, so give me a whiteboard and a spreadsheet any day, though I think that works.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Zena Everett
I’d like to come up with some great productivity habit. I’m very motivated by a great cup of coffee, so that’s my favorite reward. Rewarding myself with a good cup of coffee.

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

Zena Everett
“Why am I doing this?”

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

Zena Everett
My website is ZenaEverett.com, and I send out a monthly article on productivity and career success. So, if people want that, they can either sign up for my website or just drop me an email and we’ll add them to our system.

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

Zena Everett
Work out what your antelopes are and make sure that your diary reflects your priorities, not other people’s.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Zena, it’s been a pleasure. I wish much luck and very little crazy busyness.

Zena Everett
Thank you. You, too.

Aug 25
0

REBROADCAST: 719: Liz Wiseman Reveals the Five Practices of Indispensable, High-Impact Players

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Liz Wiseman says: "By working on the agenda, you earn the right to help set the agenda."

Liz Wiseman uncovers the small, but impactful practices of exceptional performers.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why it’s okay to not be working on what’s important to you 
  2. The five things impact players do differently
  3. The trick to leading without an invitation 

UPDATE: Sign up for Liz’s new masterclass and learn what the best professionals do to stand out and perform at their best. Early bird registration is FREE with your purchase of Liz’s new book Impact Players.

PLUS, we’re giving away copies of Liz’s book! We’ll be picking 5 random winners who share a link to this post on LinkedIn, along with their favorite nugget of wisdom from the episode. Don’t forget to tag both Pete and Liz in your post! Giveaway ends August 27, Saturday, 11:59 PM Central time.

About Liz

Liz Wiseman is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. She is the author of New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter,; The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools, and Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work. 

She is the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Some of her recent clients include: Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, and Twitter. Liz has been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and in 2019 was recognized as the top leadership thinker in the world. 

She has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and a variety of other business and leadership journals.  She is a frequent guest lecturer at BYU and StanfordUniversity and is a former executive at Oracle Corporation, where she worked as the Vice President of Oracle University and as the global leader for Human Resource Development. 

Resources Mentioned

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Liz Wiseman Interview Transcript

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

Liz Wiseman
Well, thanks, Pete. I hope I walk away feeling like I can be a little bit more awesome at my job. This is your thing. This is what you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think I’ve mentioned, before we pushed record, that numerous people have mentioned you by name as being awesome at your job from your book Multipliers. And you’ve got another one freshly out Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact. All things we love doing here, so this is going to be a lot of fun.

Liz Wiseman
This is going to be a fun conversation, I can tell.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe to kick us off, could you share with us your favorite story of someone who made a transformation into an impact player and kind of what happened? What was the impact of that and kind of their before and after, and the results flowing from it?

Liz Wiseman
Well, so many of the people I wrote about were already awesome when I stumbled onto them. And the one I think, like if I could pick someone in the book who made the biggest transformation, it might’ve been me. Like, early on in my career, reorienting myself.

So, I came out of college like a lot of people, kind of fired up, knowing…I mean, some people don’t know what they want to do. I knew what I wanted to do to a fault. And I kind of was like knocking on people’s doors, like, “Hi, I’m Liz. I want to teach leadership and I represent good leadership. And ridding the world of bad bosses, that’s what I want to do.”

And so, I tried to get a job at a management training company and somehow wiggled my way into an interview with the president. He looked at my resume and was like, “You know, if you want to teach leadership, maybe you should go get some leadership experience.” I was like 22 years old and thinking, “That’s sterile-minded of him.” It’s kind of like he doesn’t get me. This is what I’m passionate about. It’s what I want to do.”

So, I went and took my backup job, and that one was at Oracle, which was a great place to go to work but it wasn’t doing what I really wanted to do, which was somehow teach managing and leading. So, I took this kind of consolation job, and about a year into that, I had an opportunity to transfer to another group inside of the company. This was back when Oracle was like a couple thousand people, and today they’re like well over a hundred thousand people.

And it was a group that ran technical bootcamps and I was hoping that their charter would expand, like the company is growing, they’re surely going to be building some management courses, young people are being turned into management, like wreaking havoc on the company. And so, I went into the interview, answered the questions from the VP, so it’s like the final interview for this job, and then it was my turn to kind of take charge of the interview. And so, I made my case for why Oracle should build a management bootcamp, not just a technology bootcamp. And, of course, I offered my services, like, “I would be happy to build this.”

And I thought, for sure, he would say, “Oh, that’s great, Liz. Yeah, I can see you’re passionate about that. Here you go.” And his response, it really, really imprinted me. And he was polite but essentially what I heard him saying was, “Liz, make yourself useful around here,” because his reply was, “That’s great, Liz. We think you’re great and we’re excited to have you join this group but your boss has a different problem. She’s got to figure out how to get 2,000 new college graduates up to speed in Oracle technology over the next year. And what would be great is if you could help her to do that.”

He was saying, “Liz, figure out what needs to be done and do the things that we need.” And I wanted to teach leadership and now he wants me to teach programming to a bunch of nerds, you know, programmers. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s not my thing. That’s not the job I want.” But I could see he was teaching me something. I’m like, “That’s not the job I want,” but what he’s saying was, “That’s the job that needs to be done.” So, like, “Point yourself over there, please.”

And it really shaped me because I said, “Okay, I don’t want to do that but I will do that and I’ll figure out how to be good at this.” And, Pete, I’m woefully underqualified to do this job. I came out of business school and had a teaching background, but I had taken like two and a half programming classes in college, and now they want me to be teaching programming to a bunch of hotshot programmers coming out of MIT and Caltech but I did it and it was amazing what happened after I reoriented myself, and, in some ways, subordinated what was important to me to work on what was important to my boss and my boss’ boss.

First of all, I figured out I love this job. Like, this was fun. I was having the time of my life. And then the second thing I discovered is that by doing that, all these opportunities opened up to me. And they came and tapped me on the shoulders, and said, “Liz, we want you to now manage the training group.” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m having fun teaching.” They’re like, “No, we want you to do this.” I’m like, “Yeah, pick someone else who wants that job.” And they said, “No, we want you to do this.”

And I don’t know if it was because I understood the technology or it was because I was willing to serve where I was needed, but, yeah, I finally said yes to that job. And then I just kept getting bigger and bigger opportunities, and I think it was because I learned to channel my energy and passion around what was important to the people I work for rather than focusing on what was important to me.

And it shaped my whole career and just allowed me to do work that was far more impactful. And it wasn’t too many years, if not even months, after that that I was able to argue that, “You know what, we really need to invest in management training and I’d be happy to do that.” And then, I, essentially, got a blank check, like, “Liz, absolutely. Go build that. Build a team to do it.” And that work had so much more impact when I decided to work on the agenda of the organization rather than on my own agenda.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that feels like a golden key to a whole lot of career things right there. And I guess what’s intriguing is, well, one, you were fortunate in that you got to do the thing you really wanted to do anyway afterwards. And, two, I suppose, I’m thinking, that approach, in a way, it feels rather noble and virtuous in terms of, hey, there’s some humility and there’s some service and generosity that you are engaging in when you’re working on the job that needs done as opposed to the thing you want to do.

I guess I just might want to hear to what extent was there drudgery? Or, it sounds like in your story, this path was actually plenty of fun even while you were on it prior to doing the thing that you really wanted to do originally. Is that the case with the other impact players, generally speaking?

Liz Wiseman
Well, I think it is. And you said it was sort of a noble choice, and I think it was a humble choice. I wouldn’t characterize it as a noble choice as much as a savvy choice. And it wasn’t like I was just like, “Okay. Well, what’s good for me in this?” I could see there was a real need there but something happens when you are working on something that’s important.

So, like if I’m off working on my own agenda, I’m pushing a boulder up a hill. I’m trying to get people to meet with me. I’m trying to get someone to pay attention to the thing I care about. Now, some amazing things can happen when you go down that path. But, like, what happens when you’re working on something that’s important? It’s what I call when you’re working on the agenda.

Well, every time I put myself on this path of impact, working on something that was important to the company, the executive, one of my clients, I always find that people have time to meet with me, resources flow. Like, I’ve done a lot of work with executives over the years, and one of the things I’ve noticed is I’ve never noticed like a senior executive at a corporation tell me something was important to him or her, and then not have budget for it.

It’s like funny how that when you’re working on the agenda, people have time for you, resources flow, decisions happen quickly, there’s more pressure but there’s also more visibility for your work. Like, it’s not drudgery. It’s actually fun because you’re making progress. And when you say drudgery, Pete, it makes me think about something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is burnout. We’re dealing with this burnout epidemic, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Resignation, whatever you want to call it. And I think we’re quick to assume that burnout is a function of effort and work. Like, we’re working too hard. We’re working too much. We have too heavy of a load and we’re going to burn out as a result.

And I’m not opposed to anyone taking time off. Like, a little R&R is probably good for a lot of people particularly right now, but I think burnout, based on all of my research, it tends to be a function of too little impact, not too much work. That what causes us to burn out is when we’re expending energy but not making a difference, not seeing how our work makes a difference.

So, like the beginning of being high impact and doing awesome work is doing work that is valued and important. And even if some of the work is tedious, like, oh, man, I remember like nights I stayed up till 5:00 in the morning trying to learn how to do correlated subqueries so I could teach them the next day. I couldn’t sustain that all the time, but I was making a difference. I was having an impact. I was doing something important. It was energizing not enervating.

And, yeah, there’s details and drudgery and hard things involved but it’s rewarding. It’s what I’ve seen in my own experience in studying these high-impact contributors. It’s a buildup experience not a burnout experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s beautiful in terms of that’s just a fun mental distinction that does so much. When you’re working on the agenda, what’s important to other folks, so many of the roadblocks that are annoying and frustrating and yield to burnout and exhaustion disappear. People are available, they make time for you, they make money for you, they take your meetings, you’ve got some support and backing as opposed to being ignored, and follow-ups. So, yeah, like that’s pretty fine.

Liz Wiseman
And you build voice. You build voice in the organization, and it’s how we build influence and credibility is by making progress on things that matter to our stakeholders. And so, as we do that and as we serve, people listen to us. And by working on the agenda, you earn the right to help set the agenda.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m loving this and that’s a lot of insight right there. So, tell me, is that pretty much the core idea or thesis of Impact Players? Or, how would you articulate it?

Liz Wiseman
I just think it’s one of the starting points is how people orient themselves. And I think if I were to kind of try to crystallize the thesis of Impact Players, let me start with the research. We looked at the difference between individuals who were considered by their leaders smart, hardworking, and capable people who were doing a good job, like doing well, versus smart, hardworking, capable people who were making an extraordinary impact, doing work of extraordinary or inordinately high value.

And so, this isn’t like top performers versus bottom performers. In a room full of equally smart, capable, hardworking people, why are some people stuck going through the motions of their job while other people are making a big difference? So, that’s what we looked at. And when I looked at those differentials and all the profiles that we built through interviewing 170 managers is we found that the ordinary contributors, typical contributors, people doing well, they’re doing their job.

And this is how managers describe them. They do their job. They do their job well. Often, extremely well. They follow direction. They take ownership. They are focused. They carry their weight on teams, which sounds great in some ways, like ideal team members and contributors but there’s stellar and unordinary times, but they tend to fall short in times of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is where the impact players handle these situations very differently, and there were five.

And it was how they handle messy problems, like, “Your job is not my job. It’s like no one’s job. It’s not really owned by this department. It’s like no one’s job but everyone’s job.” And this is actually where I think the most important problems and opportunities of an organization is in that white space between boxes. Now, in this case, ordinary contributors tend to do their job. Whereas, the impact players go do the job that needs to be done.

The second is how they handle unclear roles, where, “Okay, I know we’re collaborating, but who’s really in charge?” We have a tendency, organizations want to have more collaborative teams, flat in organizations but in these situations, typical contributors tend to wait for role clarification or direction, like wait for someone to tell them who’s in charge or give them formal authority. Whereas, the people who are having a lot of impact tend to just take charge but they’re not like take charge all the time.

They step up and they lead, maybe a particular meeting, maybe a project, but then they’re willing to step back and follow other people when they’re in the lead. So, it’s like they bring kind of big leadership, let’s say, to the 2:00 o’clock meeting, they’re the boss, but they then walk down the hall to the 3:00 o’clock meeting and they serve as a participant with the same kind of energy that they led the team. So, they’re able to step in and out of these leadership roles really fluidly, which really builds our credibility because we trust these kinds of leaders, the ones who don’t always need to hold all the power.

Pete Mockaitis
And the ones who care when it’s not “theirs.” That’s sort of endearing. It’s sort of like, “Okay, you care about this because you care about the team, the leadership, the project, the company and not just you care about your babies.”

Liz Wiseman
Oh, absolutely. It’s like they work with the same kind of level of intensity. They don’t need to be in charge but they’re willing to be in charge. And I think it’s a really powerful form of leadership. And it’s very much like sort of you take like the pyramid shape of an organization, and you turn that on its side. It’s more like the V formation of a flock of geese, where the flock can fly a lot further because they rotate that leadership.

One bird goes out in front, leads, breaks that wind, creates drag, sort of creates an ease for the other birds behind in that formation, but that lead bird doesn’t stay there forever like until it tires and then falls from the sky in the state of exhaustion, which is what happens so often in corporations. The leaders are running around with their hair on fire. They’re like all fired up, they’re working hard, but other people sit underutilized. Like, when the lead bird has done their duty for the team, they fall back and another moves into that role.

And then there’s three other situations where we see this differentiation when unforeseen obstacles drop in the way, things that are really out of your control. Most people tend to escalate those, whereas the impact players just tend to hold onto them and get them across the finish line. Not alone, pulling in help but they tend to just hold ownership all the way through.

When targets are moving fast, typical contributors tend to stay on target, they stay focused, whereas, the impact players adjust. They’re adapting. They’re changing. They’re like kind of waking up assuming, “While I was asleep, the world changed, and I probably need to adjust my aim so I stay on track with what’s important and relevant.”

And the last is what we do when workloads are heavy, like when there’s just mounting workloads, when there’s more work than…when the workload is increasing faster than resources are increasing, and most people, they carry their weight, but when times get really tough, they sort of look upward and outward for help to ease that burden.

Whereas, the impact players, we found they really make work light. Like, they don’t take all the work, they don’t take people’s workload away from them, but they work in a way where hard work just is fun. They bring a levity, a humanity, that just sort of eases the phantom workload so that people can focus on the real workload.

Liz Wiseman
That’s kind of what I found.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I was going to ask exactly that, so thank you for sharing. And so, that’s sort of like the five core distinctions. And I want to zoom in on a couple like super specific practices, habits. But, first, maybe I’d like to get your take on what discovery, in the course of all these interviews, did you find most surprising or counterintuitive?

Liz Wiseman
I should probably tell you I’ve got a little bit of a pessimist in me which maybe makes me a better researcher. But when we went in to study, like, “What is it that the top, real top contributors are doing?” I expected there to be a fair number of hotshots and superstars and people around whom the team revolved, and what I found was exactly the opposite. There were 170 of these impact players that we studied, analyzed. Not a single one of them was a prima donna, a bully, a bull in a China shop. Not one of them worked at the expense of the team, like, “Hey, I’m so good at what I do that you all need to kind of like be backup for me, or sort of accommodate me, humor me.”

They were superstars and everyone knew it. Like, that’s one of the things about impact players is everyone knows who these people are but they work and I think they’re comfortable with their stellar-ness, their awesomeness, like they get it.

Pete Mockaitis
They don’t have to prove themselves or flex or show off.

Liz Wiseman
Yeah. In some ways, and I’m just realizing this, Pete, is one of the things I found in the multiplier leader, so the other research I’ve done, like, “What is it that leaders do that allow people to be impactful and contribute at their fullest?” And the ones, the leaders I want to work for are the ones that are really, really comfortable with their own intelligence and capability. Like, I want to work for someone who’s an absolute genius who knows it, which you think, “Ooh, well, isn’t that like a know-it-all, a bully?” Like, no, I want to work with someone who’s so comfortable with their own intelligence and capability that they’re over it.

It’s not like, “I have to show up to work every day proving how amazing I am.” It’s like, “Yeah, I get it. I’m smart. I’m talented. I’m over it so now I can spend my time as a leader seeing and using the intelligence of others.” And I think these impact players are similar in that they know that they’re really valuable contributors, they know they do important and valuable work, but they don’t need to be proving it all day long. In some ways, it’s so obvious. They were comfortable with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool.

Liz Wiseman
I thought there’d be some brilliant jerks in the lot but there weren’t, at least not in my sample.

Pete Mockaitis
And then these 170, they were identified by their managers, they’re saying, “Boy, this guy is really an impact player”?

Liz Wiseman
Yeah, they were. And so, we didn’t go in and decide who was. We asked managers to consider the people that they have led over their career and identify someone from each of these two categories – impact players, ordinary contributors – and we also had managers identify someone who I later called an under-contributor – smart, capable, talented, should be amazing, like someone you hire, like, “This person is going to be awesome,” but yet they’re not. Like, they’re under-contributing relative to their potential and capability. And that was interesting. There’s like a whole set of things to learn there.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s different than the five key distinctions that we already covered? Like, they don’t do the things that the impact players do or is there more?

Liz Wiseman
Well, I think kind of in that ordinary contributor station, like you would see people who are well-meaning, working hard, and they’re doing their job. When you see people in that under-contributor kind of position, sort of on the stratification, you see a lot of people who are really pushing their own agenda, you often see people who are trying so hard to be valuable, trying so hard to like get ahead, maybe that they’re honestly annoying.

Like, “Hey, hey, how am I doing? How am I doing? Am I doing great? Was it good work? Hey, hey, coach, what? Can I sit next to you on the airplane? You know what, hey, let’s go hang out.” They’re needy, maybe needing too much attention, needing too much feedback, and they end up becoming more of a burden than a contributor on teams, but, yet, they’re people who are trying really hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Cool. Well, so then I love how we’ve laid out the five distinctions. And now I’d like to get really specific in terms of what are the particular mindsets, or habits, or particular practices, words, phrases, just like the super in-the-moment tactical, practical stuff that we’re seeing in terms of an impact player? I sort of got the conceptual. Could you give us a couple examples of, “Hey, these are the specific actions that we’re seeing over and over again”?

Liz Wiseman
We talked about the first distinction kind of through my own experience, is this willingness to do the job that needs to be done. It’s about extending ourselves like beyond our job boundaries. One of the favorite impact players I got to write about in the book is someone named Jojo Mirador, and he is a scrub tech. He works at Valley Medical, which is part of an academic hospital chain.

So, there are a lot of residents there, doctors who have graduated from medical school. They’re now in their training. They’re in residency. And he’s a surgical scrub tech. Now, Jojo’s job is to prepare the surgical tools for an operation, to make sure they’re sterilized and available, and to hand them to the surgeons when the surgeons ask for them. That’s his job.

But Jojo approaches his job differently than other scrub techs. First of all, he looks on the calendar, and he’s like, “What surgeries do we have coming up? Are there any that I’m not familiar with? Let me look. Let me just like Google that and figure out what’s going on in the surgery.” And during surgery, he’s not just listening for the requested instrument.

Pete Mockaitis
“Scalpel.”

Liz Wiseman
Yeah, scalpel. Exactly. It’s like such a moment. He’s watching the surgeons’ hands, he’s like, “I want to know what the surgeon is doing because I want to know what their next move is going to be because I want to be thinking about the tool they need, so I’m ready.” And one of the surgeons told me, “Jojo doesn’t just lay out the instruments. He lays them out in the order they’re going to be used so he’s got them ready.”

And when the surgeons ask for an instrument, he doesn’t just hand them the one they asked for. He hands them the one they actually need. So, let’s say they’ve asked for like a scalpel, and he provides a gentle suggestion, he’s like, “Why don’t you try this one instead that might work better?” Of course, these residents, they’re young, they’re new, and you can imagine the pressure on them to look like they know what they’re doing when they’re holding someone’s life in their hands. And you can imagine how grateful they are that he doesn’t just do his job. He extends himself and does the job that needs to be done.

And you would think that the senior surgeons wouldn’t want these suggestions, but they do, in fact. He said, “It kind of feels good. They come seek me out before a surgery.” They say, “Jojo, here’s what we’re going to be doing. What kinds of tools do you think are going to work best here?” And they line up outside of the scheduler’s office, they kind of fight a little bit over who gets to have Jojo in the OR with them.

And they found this nice gentleman’s way of sorting this out. It’s whoever has the most complicated procedure is the one who gets Jojo. And I love the imagery of this, which is just extending ourselves out of our job scope, but not doing it in an aggressive way of taking over. It’s done with this kind of sense of finesse of, “I think I can be helpful here.”

Another one of the behaviors we see is that these impact players, they don’t tend to wait for an invitation. I think a lot of people want to be amazing at their job, who have a lot of passion, who have a lot of talent, or maybe holding back a little bit, too much waiting for someone to come along and discover them.

And maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of my career teaching leaders, coaching executives, part of my message to people is like, “Ooh, your leaders probably aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you think they’re thinking about you. They’ve got their own set of things and they probably don’t have time to figure out, ‘Okay, wait a minute. I’ve got this meeting coming up. Who are all the possible people who might be valuable contributors?’” Like, sometimes, we need to invite ourselves in and go where we’re uninvited but do it in a way that people are glad we showed up to contribute.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think this has come up a number of times, like, “Oh, so many things you attend, it’s unnecessary, it’s a waste of time, and you should figure out polite ways to excuse yourself from them.” And this might be the first time I’ve heard someone say, “There may be times where you want to try to get into a meeting that you weren’t invited to.” And the way that could be super appreciated, like, maybe can you give us some verbiage or an example there, because I can imagine ways you might say it that could come across as appreciated as opposed to like, “Whoa, stay in your lane, buddy”? Could you give us an example there?

Liz Wiseman
Yeah, let me share two. One is about just initiating meetings that no one’s asking you to do. Eli Van Der Kamp at Target, she’s a project manager there, and her job is to get all the technology in a Target store up to speed and ready to go before a store opens. Well, this isn’t her area of responsibility but she can see that, “You know what, we’ve been dropping phonelines in here.” And her job was to get them up and running, but she’s like, “I don’t think we actually need those phonelines because, now that we have fiber optic cables, the phonelines that were needed for the alarm systems in the store, like fire alarms, we don’t need those.”

But it wasn’t that they didn’t need them, they sometimes needed them, and it was sort of complicated, and no one’s asking her to do this, but she realizes the company is wasting money on this. It’s a $92 billion a year company, it’s not a significant amount of waste in a company that size. But it’s significant enough, she decides she wants to do something about, so she just kind of invites herself to lead this meeting, calls people together, explains the problem with no sense of judgment whatsoever, “But we have this problem, and we’re like buying phonelines that we don’t need and it’s wasting money.”

And she just lays it out and invites people to step up and solve it. It was a complex decision tree. They worked it all out, owners stepped up, emerged, the problem is solved and she steps back. It’s sort of like inviting yourself in to lead and volunteering to lead where nobody has asked you. Now, it could be inviting yourself to a meeting nobody is inviting. So, I had experience with this, it was probably midway through my career. It preceded the most valuable piece of work I ever did for Oracle.

And I think, at this point, like I’m the vice president of Oracle University. I ran training for the company in human resource development, and I’ve particularly been focusing on some executive development, and had been working with three top executives to build this what was our flagship leadership development program. We called it The Leaders Forum. And it really consisted of two parts, which is teach our executives around the world like our strategy so they really understood that, and then build some leadership skills.

And in the process of doing this, it became clear that the strategy was not clear. So, we were bringing executives in, like 30 people at a time, presenting the strategy to them, building some skills, setting them on their way, and they’re like, “You know, the strategy is not clear.” So, the three executives I was building this program with, we heard the feedback, and we tried to make some adjustments, and it’s still not clear.

Finally, it comes to a head and we realized we have to stop these training programs until the strategy for the company is clear. I’m in that meeting. We decide this needs to happen. One of the three executives says, “Okay, you know what, I’ll get together a meeting of all of our product heads, all of the senior executives, and we will clarify the strategy.” Okay. So, I know that meeting is happening but I’m not included in this meeting because it’s a product strategy meeting and I’m responsible for training. But the meeting was happening the next week, and I decided that I probably should go to that meeting, not just to listen in, but I felt like I could really help.

And so, this is, I don’t know, this was a meeting of, let’s say, nine of the top 12 executives in the company, and I just decided to show up. And so, I show up, I knew the president would be thrilled that I was there, maybe not some of the others, but I get there early, I sit down, and one by one, like the various executives are coming in, they’re kind of like, “Hi, Liz,” and they know this is a product strategy meeting and they’ve got the head of training there. And they’re like, “Hi, Hi.” And then one particular executive came in, his name was Jerry, and he looked at me, and he’s like, “What are you doing here? Like, you’re the training manager. This is a product strategy meeting.”

And this was an important moment for me because I kind of squared my shoulders, looked at him, and said, “Jerry, we’ve got a really convoluted strategy right now that leaders around the world aren’t able to understand. Like, this group has got to take a lot of complex information about our products and distill it down to something that’s simple and clear, and that’s actually something that I’m pretty good at and I thought I could be of help.”

And he still wasn’t entirely convinced but I think the president said something like, “Yeah, Jerry, Liz is really good at this. And trust me, we could use her help.” And then I just paid attention, and I listened, and I listened to this conversation. Now, the fact that I had taken that job teaching programming helped me to really understand what they were talking about and be trusted to even be in the room, but I’m like taking notes.

I’m like, “Okay, what about this? And I like this pattern.” So, I’m now starting to reflect back to them, “Well, here’s this issue that I see coming up and I hear this, and it seems like these seem to be the three biggest drivers.” And they’re like, “Could you say more of that?” And it’s a longer story but, cutting it short, after two or three more of these meetings, they finally decided that they’re going to kind of obliterate the whole strategy, rebuild it from scratch, and they’re like, “Liz, we want you to be the author of the strategy. Like, we’ll all give you input but we want you to be the one that puts shape to this.”

And it was something I was able to do and it made a pretty big impact in the company, and I just think it’s so funny that maybe the most valuable work I did for the company was work I kind of forced myself into just a little bit. And I wasn’t forceful and I wasn’t rude but nobody asked me to do it. I just knew it was something I could be helpful with.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Okay. Well, so then any other examples leaping to mind in terms of a particular practice that makes a load of difference, sort of a small difference but huge leverage?

Liz Wiseman
Well, one of the ones I found was so interesting was this how people handle moving targets. And do you kind stick to what you’ve agreed to? Like, someone gave you a target, “We’re trying to increase market share by 12% year-over-year.” That’s like your goal, maybe your business development meter. What we find is that ordinary contributors tend to stick to those targets and they stay focused, whereas the impact players are constantly adjusting. In some ways, they’re reactive.

I wouldn’t say they’re reactionary but they react differently. Like, they’re assuming that they’re off target. So, it’s kind of like the metaphor I would use here would be like a violinist. So, if you play the violin, you know that you have to constantly tune that instrument. And, honestly, it was kind of mysterious to me when I was younger, like maybe younger up until like just a couple of years ago when I was like, “Why can’t they tune their instrument before they get up onto that stage? Like, why do they play poorly before they play well?”

And it’s like because even that movement from their backstage to centerstage, they’ve got to tune it before they perform. And it’s this tuning mentality, like lots of little small adjustments. And what we found the impact players do is they respond well to feedback but they don’t wait for feedback. They’re asking for feedback before it’s offered.

Shawn Vanderhoven, is someone who works on my team, and when Shawn started working for me, he would ask questions when he’d start a project, “Okay, what’s the target here? What does a win look like? What are we trying to accomplish?” And once he understood that, he would then start submitting work as part of that, and then he would ask a different set of questions, like, “Are you getting what you need? What can I do differently? What do I need to change so that it better fits the need?”

And he does this with such frequency that he then goes and corrects his works, comes back, submits it. But in the five years I’ve worked with Shawn, I can’t think of a single time I’ve ever had to sit down and have a tough conversation with him. I’ve never had to sit down, and say, “You know, Shawn, this is off and I need you to get it back on.” And it’s not that he doesn’t need that correction, we all do, but he always beats me to it. He’s fixing and changing and adjusting before I ever ask. Like, he’s doing the asking. And it’s so easy to give him feedback.

And one of the other like little distinctions that makes a really big difference is that people aren’t…these impact players aren’t focusing the feedback on themselves, like, “How am I doing? What do I need to do differently?” The focus is on the work, “How can I make this work better?” So, where others are maybe reacting to feedback people give them about themselves and their performance, the impact player is getting information to help them constantly adjust and tune their work so that their work is relevant and on tune.

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

Liz Wiseman
Well, maybe if there was an overarching theme that separated the impact players from everyone else, and I should say it’s not really about people. It’s more about mindsets that we tend to operate in. It’s like what separates an impact player mindset, that I and others tend to go in and out of from sort of a contributor mindset, is how we deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. And the difference we found is that the impact players, when they encounter situations that are out of their control, they tend to dive head in to these situations, kind of like the way an ocean swimmer, or a surfer, like seizes massive oncoming wave that’s kind of scary, like I would turn and run, panic, and get tumbled in the surf, but they dive head into and through this wave.

And they tend to move into uncertainty and they tend to look at that uncertainty and ambiguity through an opportunity lens rather than a threat lens. Like, where other people see, “Ooh, that’s uncomfortable. Roles are unclear. That’s messy. That’s out of my control. Let me back away from it.” The impact players kind of wear opportunity goggles and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s messy, uncertain, uncomfortable, but there’s…let me find an opportunity to add value.” So, they tend to bring clarity to situations that other people tend to steer clear of.

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

Liz Wiseman
Criss Jami, “Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.” And when I saw that, and I just saw this today, I thought, “That really captures a lot of what I’ve learned studying these people who were having a lot of impact is that they are not like pushing an agenda, they’re not necessarily pursuing a lifestyle. It’s they’re finding a situation that needs them and contributing wholeheartedly in that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Liz Wiseman
I think maybe the one that is most useful to the work I do is just this idea that we tend to overestimate our capability, that I think it’s the Kruger-Dunning effect, that we tend to think we’re better at things than we actually are. And this is the dynamic that I’ve seen play out in my work, kind of studying the best leaders, is that when we get put into a leadership role, we tend to focus on our intent, and we tend to not see our impact on others. Like, most of my work is about looking into this space between our intent and our impact, like learning not to operate based on our best intentions but to actually operate based on the effect that we’re having on others.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Liz Wiseman
I’ll give you one that this is a book I like because it made me so mad. I was really jealous when I read it, like kind of green with jealousy because the book is Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. And the reason why I love it is because, A, it’s an amazing book, and Ed Catmull is an amazing storyteller.

And it’s a story of Pixar, if you’re not familiar with the book, so it’s really like looking into “Why does Pixar consistently produce amazing films. Like, is that an accident or is there actually a system behind that?” And the answer is there’s a system behind it, there’s a reason why, and it’s not coincidence, and it’s how they lead and it’s the culture they built. And the reason why this book made me so mad is I got that reading and it was not too long after I had written Rookie Smarts and I’m like, “Wow, this is an amazing illustration of Rookie Smarts. It’s like what happens when you’re new to something and the innovation that comes out of it.”

And it’s an amazing example of what I call multiplier leadership. Leaders like Ed Catmull who use their talent and intelligence to bring out the best in others. And I’m like, “Wow, how did he do in one book what took me two books to do? And he did it better than that.” But I really loved that book and it’s full of fun, interesting, very practical ways of leading.

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

Liz Wiseman
Index cards. Succinct is not my strength and so I have to work at succinct in writing and in speaking. And so, I use index cards, and when I’m pulling together final thoughts before giving a talk, a presentation, if it can’t get on the index card, it’s not part of it. So, I use it to really boil down my thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Liz Wiseman
I think a favorite habit would be, I guess, I call it check in before diving in. And I’ve been there, like some people would say that I’m a workhorse, like I’m definitely not a racehorse. I’m a workhorse. I’m one of those people who just like grind through stuff. And I usually like to get right to work and I’m excited about it, I jump in. And one of the things I’ve learned to do with my own team is before we start working on something, to just take sometimes up to half of our allotted time and just check in, like, “How are you? How are you doing?”

And it’s gone well beyond pleasantries, and it’s typically like a chance for people to say, “You know, I’m not doing well. I’m struggling.” And sometimes we’ve spent hours, like we had a day blocked to work on something, and we spent hours just on, “How are you?” Sometimes it’s like, “Well, I’m disappointed that I thought by now I would have this done, and I don’t.” So, there’s been these moments where you could really check in and connect with like how people really are before we work on stuff. And it’s made all the difference for our team who’s gotten us through really some tough times.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And is there a key nugget you share that tends to be quoted back to you frequently?

Liz Wiseman
It would probably be something…it would be better said than this because I think other people would probably say it better than this. It’s just like, “Be the genius-maker not the genius.” It would be some version of that.

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

Liz Wiseman
Well, I’m pretty easy to find. TheWisemanGroup.com is a little bit of information about the work that my team and I do. ImpactPlayersBook.com, MultipliersBook.com, I think RookieSmarts.com, RookieSmartsBook.com, I’m honestly sure about that one, or, like I’m @LizWiseman on Twitter.

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

Liz Wiseman
Maybe a challenge and a suggestion. The challenge would be to ask yourself, “What might I be doing with the very best of intentions that is a barrier to impact? Like, what is preventing me from doing the most valuable meaningful work?” And it’s often things that we’re doing with our best intentions.

And if someone wants to get on the path of impact, maybe a challenge to start here, which is to find out what’s important to the people that you work for, whether it’s a client, a boss, internal customers or stakeholders. Find out what’s important to them and make it important to you. And all the right things tend to flow from that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Liz, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and impact in your future endeavors.

Liz Wiseman
Thank you. It’s nice talking to you.

Aug 22
0

794: How to Get Comfortable with Discomfort with Sterling Hawkins

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Sterling Hawkins shows you how to turn discomfort into fuel for transformative change.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why we need to hunt discomfort   
  2. Why you need your own “street gang”
  3. What to do when you feel like quitting

About Sterling

Sterling Hawkins is an internationally recognized entrepreneur, motivational leader, and public speaker. His 2019 TED Talk, “Discomfort is Necessary for Innovation,” has been viewed more than 100,000 times. 

Sterling serves as CEO and founder of the Sterling Hawkins Group, a research, training and development company focused on human and organizational growth. He has been seen in publications like Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, The New York Times and Forbes. Based in Colorado, Sterling is a proud uncle of three and a passionate adventurer that can often be found skydiving, climbing mountains, shark diving or even trekking the Sahara. 

Resources Mentioned

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Sterling Hawkins Interview Transcript

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

Sterling Hawkins
Thanks for having me on, Pete. Good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too. Well, I’m fired up to talk about your book Hunting Discomfort: How to Get Breakthrough Results in Life and Business No Matter What.  But it looks like you’ve been doing some discomfort hunting yourself with skydiving, shark diving, mountain climbing. Can you open us up with a thrilling tale? I’m wondering how close you come to dying, basically.

Sterling Hawkins
Probably too close. I think one of my favorite stories is, a couple of years ago, my sister wanted to go skydiving for her birthday. And, of course, everybody guilt-trips me, and they’re like, “Sterling, you’re the No Matter What guy, you have to do it,” which I’ve got a lot to say about. It’s a separate subject. But, anyways, we go skydiving. And have you ever been skydiving before, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I have. I loved it.

Sterling Hawkins
It was terrifying. Not so much the skydiving part but like the 15 things you have to sign, saying if you hit the ground wrong, it’s not their fault. Did you do this?

Pete Mockaitis
I signed some sort of release. I don’t remember the details.

Sterling Hawkins
Yeah, there were so many of them, like it just got me more and more hyped up, and we’re getting on a plane, and it’s a rickety old plane that I’m sure is not really built for much flying, at least not these days. And we get up there and once we jumped out of the plane, it was just bliss, one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

The discomfort leading up to it, though, was a challenge. It was a hard part. And some research I’ve found, after the fact, I realized I was in more danger driving there, a bee sting, a lightning strike, than actually jumping out of a plane. And I realized in that jump that we’re not always properly oriented to discomfort. And when we can line ourselves up in a way to use it, great results come, incredible skydiving jumps and also in our life and business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s talk about hunting discomfort. And, first things first, the goal of hunting discomfort is not so much to kill it but rather to seek it out. Is that fair to say?

Sterling Hawkins
Well, it’s funny, the thing that I get from most people is, “Sterling, you got to look at my bank account, my business, my relationships, like all these things. I don’t need to hunt discomfort. I’m surrounded by it.” And my answer, Pete, is always the same, it’s, “Oh, you mean you’re living with discomfort. You’re not hunting it.” Because when we hunt it, we maybe aren’t killing it, per se, but we’re free from it forever.

Not circumstantially free, not based on the amount of money in your bank account, or a special job, or certain relationships, but based only within yourself. And it’s the only kind of true freedom there is. We just have to hunt the discomfort that’s in the way of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Intriguing. Well, so, tell us, in the course of putting together these thoughts, any particularly shocking discoveries you’ve made along the way?

Sterling Hawkins
Yes. So, I’ve been doing this in some shape or form for about a decade, and I came across this research just a couple of years ago, in writing my book actually. I was looking at all kinds of research, and I found something out of the University of Michigan that blew me away. Now, they were studying discomfort of varying sorts: physical discomfort, like somebody broke a limb; emotional discomfort, somebody lost a job, or perhaps broke up with a loved one; mental discomfort. Like, they were looking at all these kinds of discomfort as they were analyzing somebody’s brain and body.

And what they found is that it didn’t matter what kind of discomfort somebody was going through. Our brain and body process them almost identically, so much so you can take acetaminophen for emotional pain, believe it or not. Crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
And it helps?

Sterling Hawkins
Supposedly. Now, that’s not like a bio-hack from Sterling, by the way. I’m not a doctor. Like, all the disclaimers, I’m not suggesting you do that. But the powerful piece is if you take the next step, you say, “You know what, if how we meet discomfort is the same anywhere, how we can deal with it, we can grow our capacity to deal with it everywhere.” It turns out it’s a muscle we can build. You go to the gym to build your biceps, and you want to grow your resiliency, your ability to create breakout growth, well, you hunt discomfort. There’s just no other way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think about the gym metaphor, you have some sort of a program. You have a stress, and then you have rest, and then you have adaptation. Tell us, how do we think about programmatizing our discomfort hunt versus the folks who say, “Hey, I’ve got all kinds of discomfort foisted upon me. Like, here’s your barbell. Ahh”?

Sterling Hawkins
Right. Yeah. Well, mostly what people are doing with discomfort is they’re avoiding it or they’re surviving it. They’re not using it as a feedback mechanism to change, to adjust, and to grow. And I think that’s one of the major missteps that many of us make, is when we externalize the problem, and say, “Well, we didn’t achieve our goal. We didn’t achieve X because we didn’t have enough money, we didn’t have enough time,” “I’m not old enough,” “I’m too old,” “I don’t have the right partner,” “I don’t have the right leadership.”

We rob ourselves of the ability to take that discomfort, that feedback, even that potentially failure, and use it to change and grow ourselves. And so, exactly as you pointed out, when you look at discomfort through the lens of, “Hey, this is here to help me. This is a feedback mechanism. I can use this to not just change how I act but change who I am and adjust who I am based on the results that I want to achieve.” Then it becomes hugely powerful.

Now, there is such a thing as too much discomfort, and there’s a framework that is best to work through because, I don’t know, one of the things that used to scare me most is public speaking. And if you were to throw me onto a stage back in the day without any framework or structure or support system, I’d probably would’ve collapsed.

But when you want to have a commitment of, “I want to achieve this. I want to be successful in my public speaking,” for example, and you’ve got people around you that are going to support you on that journey, and especially pick you up when you fall down, then it becomes much more feasible to move through and improve. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure. Okay. Could you bring it to light with a few examples in terms of instead of avoiding or just enduring hunting and how that’s been helpful for real-life folks who went out and made that mindset shift and saw cool results?

Sterling Hawkins
Absolutely. One of my favorite stories is from our No Matter What community. The No Matter What community is a group of people that we put together that have joined us on declaring big goals, big visions for themselves, for their communities, their family, their business, and they’re willing to move through the discomfort to achieve it.

And this one gentleman joined us a couple of years ago upon losing his really nice somewhat cushy corporate job during the beginning of the pandemic. It was a tough time for many, myself included, and especially him. He’s got his family to support. Now, what he could’ve done is just applied for another job and try to make ends meet but he didn’t just do that.

He was walking through some side neighborhood in the suburbs of New York, and he stumbled into a tattoo parlor. And one of the important things in the No Matter What system, the framework that we teach people to grow through is get a tattoo, commit so deeply, there’s no going back. Now, I don’t mean that literally, but Emmanuel took it as such, walked into a tattoo parlor, got the name of the business he wanted to start tattooed on his left bicep.

I don’t know how he explained that to his wife when he got home, but it left him working towards building his own business in a way that he probably, otherwise, would’ve shied away from. Been worried about, waiting for the right time to make sure his bank account was properly padded before he started it.

And today, he just texted me a couple of weeks ago, and he says, “Sterling, I can’t thank you enough. I’m a testimonial for life, but, really, what I have here is an eight-figure business in a matter of 18 months.” So, when you go into that discomfort and you commit to things on the other side, it produces remarkable results, things that we can’t even see from where we sit today.

Pete Mockaitis
Impressive. All right. So, then what are the steps here in terms of making that happen?

Sterling Hawkins
Yeah. So, the first, I think, is one of the more challenging, which is you’ve got to be willing to see reality clearly. Not the reality that we necessarily see with our two eyes, although that’s important, but we’ve got to be willing to question our values, ethics, beliefs, ways of thinking, being, and acting that might not be perfectly correlated with reality. It’s just like my experience with skydiving.

The chances of me dying were very, very slim but my experience of fear and failure were massive. And as we can come to terms or reconcile what’s actually dangerous from what is merely discomfort, we can change one of three things: either ourselves, how we see others, and how we see the world. And when we change that view, the perspective, those beliefs, it will naturally change our actions and then give rise to new results. So, that’s the first step.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share an example of that in practice in terms of someone who made the shift and it was cool?

Sterling Hawkins
Yeah. Well, I think a personal story might fit in well here because it’s been dramatic for me, Emmanuel and for many, but I was serious. Like, one of the things that scared me most was speaking in public. And it wasn’t just speaking in public, it was a lot of self-doubt and fear of exposure, two of the major discomforts that stop many of us as humans, me especially.

And I had this discomfort, in a large part, to do with the fact that I’ve been hugely successful early in my career. My father and I started this company, sold it to a group in Silicon Valley where we raised over $550 million in part of this collective in what was kind of the Apple Pay, before Apple Pay, multibillion-dollar valuation, like, “I think I’ve got it made.” It wasn’t discomfort at all. There’s all comfort in certainty.

And I really thought I had it all figured out until the housing market collapsed and the investment dried up. And it was like playing out a sad country song of a story where, no longer do I have a job. Eventually, I ran out of cash. I go from this big, beautiful penthouse in downtown San Francisco to my parents’ house. And it even got so bad, my girlfriend broke up with me. It was like one thing after another. And I was suffering from a lot of self-doubt, a lot of fear of exposure, people seeing me for what I really was, which I thought was not nearly enough, especially having all that success early on.

And what I did is applied to speak at this conference in Singapore because I remembered this thing my mom said to me when I was a kid, she said, “The way out is through.” And I thought, “Okay. Well, if I want to change the situation, I want to transform my business and my life, I need to go through the things that scare me most.”

So, I applied to speak at this conference in Singapore, and practiced incessantly. My poor sister, I dragged her into it and practiced in front of her probably hundreds if not thousands of times, and as part of that process, had to give up some of the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs I had about myself and what I was capable of.

And, eventually, I did go on to the stage, I gave the speech. Good thing I practiced because I think I blacked out, and I get off the stage, and the conference director. I think I bombed, Pete, so I’m, like, covering my eyes, tried to just sneak out of the room, and he catches up with me, and he goes, “Sterling, that’s the best talk I’ve seen in my 17 years of doing this.”

To this day, I don’t think he was in the same talk I was in. I think it was just like a nice thing he wanted to say to me. And he did go on to put me in touch with all of his conference director friends, and I was like, “Ah, my mom was right. The way out is through,” and the way through is giving up some of the things that you hold true about yourself. Whether they’re true or not, if you can let go of them, there’s new things that can arise on the other side.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you articulate, when you talk about engaging what’s true and real, how would you articulate your belief prior versus post in that moment?

Sterling Hawkins
So, prior, it was, “I am incapable of speaking in public.” And I had that all too common feeling that anybody that’s afraid of speaking in public probably knows, where you get really hot, the world starts to spin, and I thought that’s just the way that it was. I thought I was that way and there was no other option for me. I was just one of the many that would rather be giving the eulogy than in the coffin. Thank you, Seinfeld, for that reference.

And in going through that thing, and standing on the stage, like, yes, I experienced some of the feelings of self-doubt and worry and fear and all the things that I was expecting. But I proved to myself, importantly proved to myself that they didn’t have to stop me from giving a successful speech. So, afterwards, sure, I might continue to be scared.

In fact, I continued to be scared for some time afterwards, but I started to let go of that belief that I was a certain way, I was afraid to speak in public, and started to embrace the idea that I can, not only can I speak in public, but I do and I do it successfully.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, that’s our first step.

Sterling Hawkins
Of course. That’s the first step.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s our second step?

Sterling Hawkins
The second, we pointed to a little bit with that story of Emmanuel but self-doubt does get in the way of many of us. And when we commit with that second step of getting a tattoo, commit so deeply there’s on going back, it calls us forward through any discomfort, through any fear that might be in the way. Now, I’m not suggesting you have to get a real tattoo, like Emmanuel, although that’s an option. A surprising number of people from the No Matter What community have done that. But you do need something that’s going to call you forward when everything inside you is telling you to stop.

And you can do that in a couple of different ways. Like, sure, you could get a physical tattoo, but you might just tell a friend or a significant other. You might commit to them, and say, “Hey, I’m going to do X by certain amount of time that goes by,” and then have them call you on it. You could sign a legal agreement, you could put an amount of money on the line that’s meaningful to you, that’s going to bring you forward. You’re looking for ways to put yourself on the line that are going to, again, kind of call you into action when it doesn’t feel so good, where the commitment is stronger than the feelings.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me more about signing a legal agreement. When it comes to the money game, I’ve heard of what’s like Stake8.com that facilitates that. And so, with a legal agreement, I guess in the course of doing business, like, sure, I’ve actually committed to a client or a partner, or to whomever, a particular result by a particular time. So, there’s that. I guess I’m wondering if it’s a goal that doesn’t so much…when I signed a legal agreement to complete a marathon, for example. Have you seen that go down and how did it work?

Sterling Hawkins
It wouldn’t necessarily be a legal agreement, but you could formalize a commitment to somebody that was important to you. And you could take it up a notch by, I don’t know, posting it on Facebook and sharing with everybody you know on social media that, “Hey, I’m committed to running this marathon.” And then those mornings when you just don’t feel like getting up and training, that idea that everybody is expecting you to run this race is going to be a tattoo of sorts that’s going to help you move forward. It’s not going to feel good but it is going to help support you into moving into action.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful.

Sterling Hawkins
So, legal agreements are great for business purposes but I think it’s really the commitment that we make inside of ourselves that’s more important, and it’s the action of sharing it with others where it becomes much more powerful, whether it’s on a legal document or written down somewhere. I do suggest that, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly. I’m thinking about the research on commitment devices and the legendary Ulysses or Odysseus, like, “I want to hear the siren song but I hear that’s dangerous, so strap me up so there’s no way out.”

Sterling Hawkins
Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, “Burn the boat, like we can’t retreat. There’s nothing else.” Any other creative ways to lock that commitment in hard?

Sterling Hawkins
You can do it with consequence. If you do do something, you get a certain reward, or if you don’t do something, you lose something. One of my friends, he had some trouble making it to the gym every morning, so he committed with consequence, and said, “Every morning, of the five days a week that I’m committed to going to the gym, if I don’t, I’m going to donate $100 to my favorite charity.”

Now, sure, a couple mornings he didn’t make it, but that $100 going out of his bank account starts to weigh on you the more often you miss on that commitment, and it did really work. He lost something like 25 pounds from that alone.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny. And I am such a master of rationalizing, I’m like, “You know what, maybe I did need to do some more support of that charity,” like after the fact.

Sterling Hawkins
Well, I had another friend, a mentor of mine actually, his name is Kirkland Tibbels, phenomenal guy, runs a group called Influential U. But he, when looking at commitments, suffered from some of the same things, so he said, “I’m going to donate to the political party that I hate every time I don’t fulfill on my commitments,” so you can work it that way too.

Pete Mockaitis
I was also thinking about just straight up torching the money, although I guess that’s technically illegal in the United States. Fun fact, that’s against the law. But I think it may be effective.

Sterling Hawkins
It could be. You could give it to a friend or you could give it to somebody that you don’t really want to give it to, but you are looking for ways that are going to call you into action, to your point. Like, you don’t want it to be something that you really want to give money to all the time, at least in the amounts that you’re going to be giving it. You want it to weigh heavily enough on you that you’re going to do the action. The point is not to make the payoff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. I’m also thinking about how we had Maneesh Sethi on the show, and he created a device called the Pavlok. Have you heard of this?

Sterling Hawkins
I have. It shocks you when you don’t do whatever the thing is, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Of course, you still have to push the button to do the shock. So, I guess you give permission to a friend or a family member to engage.

Sterling Hawkins
That reminds of the original Ghostbusters, the very beginning, where he’s shocking the woman when they’re reading cards. Do you remember that?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m afraid I don’t. Refresh all of our memories, Sterling.

Sterling Hawkins
Old Ghostbusters reference, yeah. Well, in the beginning of Ghostbusters, they’re, I think, working on mindreading or something crazy like that. And he’s showing the backside of a card and asking this woman to guess what it is. And every time she gets it wrong, he shocks her. Supposedly, that’s supposed to be some negative reinforcement to make her better at mindreading but it doesn’t work that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, duly noted for the aspiring mind-readers.

Sterling Hawkins
Right. Right. Exactly. It is tough to make a commitment like that. And I think that self-accountability is fantastic to maintain the status quo. If you’re reliable to write one blog a week, or to make five cold calls, or to run two miles every single day, you probably don’t need to commit to somebody or something that you’re going to continue to do that.

But if you’re looking to grow in any kind of meaningful way, you need outside accountability, you need an outside commitment to call you forward because everything inside of you is going to tell you, “Stop. This doesn’t make sense,” you’re going to rationalize your way out of it. You really need people on your side to help. And that’s the third step of the No Matter What system, which is I call it build a street gang, not because I look anything like somebody that belongs in a gang, by the way. I think the best I did was Boy Scouts when I was 15.

But I call it building street gang for a reason. I’m not talking about a personal board of directors, I’m not talking about friends or spouse, although your street gang can be comprised of those people. But you’re looking for people that can go toe-to-toe with you and are really going to hold you accountable for what you said you were going to do.

Now, that’s the most important function of your street gang, being that accountability partner. Research shows that when you’re personally accountable to somebody on a specific day and time for a specific thing, you’re not 70%, 80%, 90% more likely to achieve your goal. You’re 95% more likely to achieve it. It’s almost like if we actually want to achieve anything, we better be personally accountable because it’s going to help us there.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to building the street gang, how do you recommend doing the recruiting?

Sterling Hawkins
Well, you’re looking for people that have four main functions. One is the accountability. You need somebody that’s going to be strong enough, again, to go toe-to-toe with you, especially when it doesn’t feel good. You want this person to be more committed to your growth and your success and your vision than they are to your feelings.

That’s not to say that you’re going to achieve everything every time but they are going to take a really hard look with you as to why you didn’t achieve what it was that you said. Was it an action? Did you take no actions? Was there a mistake? Did you account for something wrong? Did you maybe see reality incorrectly? And they’re going to work with you to figure out how to achieve that thing at a very, very heavy accountability level. So, that’s one.

The second piece is you need some kind of inspiration, somebody or something that’s going to light the fire in you about why you’re here, what your purpose is. To quote Simon Sinek, like, “What is your why? And how are they going to bring you through that or light that fire in you?” You then need some level of mentorship, somebody that’s got some expertise in the area that you’re looking to grow in, and they can teach you the specifics or specialized knowledge of how to achieve whatever that might be. They might also put you in touch with people. Like, there’s somebody that’s in the role, going the direction of what you want to be yourself.

And the fourth, which I find highly underrated in a lot of business cultures, but I do see it in the most high-performing, is love, not in a romantic sense. Like, I’m not talking about find yourself a romantic partner, especially if you have one, fantastic. But at a human level, somebody that’s really going to love and support you through any downfalls that you might have.

Now, many people have those four roles kind of revolving in and around their life but it’s a matter of sitting down with them, maybe having coffee, a Zoom meeting, whatever it is, and formalizing that role, and asking them, “Hey, here’s what you meant to me, here’s the role in my street gang that I’d like you to play, and here’s what that might look like over time.” And when you sit down and formalize it like that, people can kind of rise to the occasion of the role that they’re supporting you in.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you share with someone their role as your lover, what are some of the sort of actions? Like, what is that person doing in terms of like regular conversations and as the process unfolds?

Sterling Hawkins
So, it could be as simple and straightforward as some encouragement to point out the successes that you’ve had even if you haven’t arrived where you want to arrive yet. They could be looking at what you’ve already achieved in your life, what you’ve already achieved on this particular trajectory. They’re going to remind you of all the great things about you that you have, that they accept, including the failures, and help you kind of come to terms with, “Oh, yeah, this failure, this misstep, or maybe just not having achieved the level of growth that I want to, it is okay.”

Now, that could be over coffee, it could be a lunch, or it could just be kind of sitting down with a friend on the couch. It’s more like the feeling of acceptance that you’re looking to throw out in the situation. And that could look a little bit differently depending on the people having those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. So, after we’ve got the street gang, what’s next?

Sterling Hawkins
Well, of course, we all run into problems, obstacles, limits, challenges, like they are real. Sometimes there’s just not enough money or there’s not enough time. We do have to deal with the hard limits of the situations and circumstances that we’re in, and we need that four step, which I call flip it. and it’s looking for, “How can we use those obstacles, those roadblocks, those barriers? How can we use those things as the pathway to even greater results?”

It’s a very stock philosophy, the obstacle is the way. And as we can think differently about some of the things that maybe we’re sweeping under the rug, we’re embarrassed about, we try to get rid of those proverbial warts, the more we can embrace them and look to them as the source of our strength, it actually becomes the reason for your success, not the reason inhibiting you from achieving it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s go to some examples, like, “Hey, I don’t have enough time but, actually, that’s an enabler of success. So, I don’t have enough money but, actually, that’s handy. My boss is a jerk but, actually, that’s useful.” Can you give us some examples of how this plays out in practice?

Sterling Hawkins
Yes. So, I was lucky enough to give a TEDx Talk a couple of years ago with a gentleman whose name was William Hung from American Idol fame, if you remember him at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Was he also in “Arrested Development: Hung Jury”?

Sterling Hawkins
He’s not. No, this is the guy that sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” so badly that he became world famous.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, yes. Uh-huh.

Sterling Hawkins
Yeah. So, with the rest of the world, I had seen him on TV, in the news networks, and everybody making fun of him as like not a great singer, which I guess, subjectively, he’s not. But in getting to know him a little bit, I started to see the human side of it and how challenging and hard that must’ve been when he had what felt like the entire world kind of breathing down on him, of, “You’re not a good singer. You messed up. You’re embarrassed. Like, what are you going to do with your life?”

And for a while, he said it was debilitating. He wasn’t sure where to go or what to do because he felt that he was really expressing his heart and what mattered to him. And maybe he wasn’t the greatest singer in the world but singing was important to him. And what he did is he embraced that “failure” that he had, and he said, “Okay. Well, this is how I sing. This is how I sing. Everybody in the world knows me. Why don’t I make the most of this?”

And so, he started singing and capitalizing on the fact that nobody thought he was a good singer. And not only did he create his own record deal, but he ended up on a stage in Vegas singing Ricky Martin. He has made countless dollars from all the records that he’s sold and all the places around the world that he’s traveled to and singing from the very thing that everybody told him he would fail at. So, I always find that a great example of the obstacle being the way.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I couldn’t resist Googling while we’re talking about this. He was, indeed, in “Arrested Development” as a leader of the band.

Sterling Hawkins
Was he, really?

Pete Mockaitis
Hung Jury, which appears in mock trial.

Sterling Hawkins
I did not know. See, he’s ridden this thing in all the different ways he possibly could. I didn’t even know that, but that’s just another example of using this thing in all these different places.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I dig that. And, certainly, I guess, what is that they say, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”? He managed to take that, “Okay, I’ve got some notoriety.” Well, that is, in some ways, can be transformed into a positive asset. Any other examples that maybe the everyday professional can get behind?

Sterling Hawkins
Yeah. So, I’ll give you a business example, and this is going to be like a big case study, but I think everybody will be able to personalize it for themselves. And it’s from the famous Richard Branson, Virgin fame. And in the ‘90s, he was CEO of Virgin Atlantic, the transatlantic airliner. And one of the things he was committed to doing in the early ‘90s was retrofitting all of his jets with the latest and greatest entertainment system. It was something like a £10-million proposition.

And anybody that recalls the early ‘90s, it was a tough economic time. And so, Richard, he wasn’t quite as famous as he is now, but a lot of people knew him for the showmanship, the success he’d had, everything else, and he was calling banks, he was calling lenders, he was even calling in favors, and he just couldn’t find the £10 million that were required to retrofit his planes, so he’s got a hard problem. Like, something that he literally cannot solve, at least in its current form.

But what he did is one of my favorite ways to flip it, which is he created himself a bigger problem. You’re thinking like, “I thought you’re crazy, Sterling. Now, I’m sure of it.” But hear me out. He said, “If I can’t find £10 million to retrofit my planes, what if I buy all new planes, a £4-billion proposition?”

So, he called Airbus up, and he said, “Listen, if I buy an entirely new fleet of planes from you, will you throw in the entertainment system and give me the financing necessary to buy them?” They said yes. Airbus, same thing. Virgin ended up with an entirely new fleet of planes, the cheapest planes that they’ve ever bought in the history of the company with the latest and greatest entertainment systems on board.

It was only because he couldn’t achieve his goal in the original way that he thought, that he started creating a bigger problem, and that solved not only getting all the latest and greatest entertainment, but gave him the newest jets they’ve ever bought at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. All right.

Sterling Hawkins
It blows me away, I’m like, “That is so smart.” Most of us aren’t buying new fleets of planes, but we’re confronted with budget issues all the time. I know I am, personally and professionally. And it helps sometimes to say, “Okay, if this were an order of magnitude bigger, how would I solve it then?” It opens up some new ways to achieve that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then what’s the next step?

Sterling Hawkins
So, the next and final step is to deal with the fact that no matter how much we plan, prepare, or predict, tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us at any level. And I think we lose sight of that with all the stock predictions, and weather predictions, and road conditions, and news, and everything else telling us what tomorrow is going to bring. Tomorrow is not promised, and we have to deal with that uncertainty in a very specific way.

The fifth step I call it surrender, not in terms of giving up. I’m not saying sit on the couch and watch Netflix and order a pizza, though there might be a time and place for that. I’m talking about actively and intentionally accepting what is exactly how it is. Carl Jung, arguably, like the father of modern psychology, he had this great quote that really stuck with me, he said, “We cannot change anything until we accept it.”

Condemnation about not having enough time, or enough money, or enough resources, condemnation about any of those things doesn’t liberate. It oppresses. And when we can surrender our view, the things that we’re upset about, resentful of, holding against other people, when we surrender those things, it frees us to achieve something brand new. And if we don’t surrender, it works the other way. It becomes an anchor holding us back.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, I’m curious, in the middle of all this, when the rubber meets the road and we just sure feel like quitting, how do you power through?

Sterling Hawkins
Well, so you’ve got a couple of components. You’ve got your commitments that are calling you forward when you want to give up. You’ve got your street gang that’s building your courage, your confidence, and your accountability. You’ve got some of these different ways to flip it and think about it. But that acceptance piece, for me, is the most challenging.

And I find one of the greatest ways to accept is what’s called the sacred pause, by really slowing down, by maybe turning off your phone or your computer for a couple of minutes, even better for a couple of hours, by not bringing that phone in bed with you, by really slowing down and intentionally start to accept what is.

And it’s not necessarily a fast process, but when you have some kind of practice where you’re intentionally doing that over time, it’s going to allow you to let go of that discomfort, the things that maybe you’ve been holding onto, or better said, holding you back, and let you rise in a new way.

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

Sterling Hawkins
I think that’s it. This system is designed to move you through growth. I’ve always been inspired by movies like Star Wars and so on, where you’ve got these heroes moving through these incredible journeys. And I think this is almost a system to move ourselves through that journey. It helps us step into the unknown, unknown of ourselves, unknown of our world, and realize something new for ourselves, realize something new about ourselves or about others or about the world that we can bring back. And that’s a true gift to the world, and that’s what I think real growth is.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Well, now can we hear a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sterling Hawkins
It’s that quote I heard from my mom. It’s actually Robert Frost, “The way out is through.” The way out is through, to me, means you go through the things that you’re fearful of, scared of, and what you’re looking for is on the other side.

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

Sterling Hawkins
I found a study from Yale University, and it turns out, when you’re uncomfortable, you’re four times better at learning. You learn four times faster. It’s like a bio-hack to being better.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. So, when you say uncomfortable, there’s a variety of ways. So, if I’m just like cold, if I’m wearing a hair shirt, is there a precise form of discomfort we’re talking about?

Sterling Hawkins
No, we’re talking about what that University of Michigan study, like discomfort is discomfort – physical, mental, emotional, arguably, spiritual. So, as long as you’re in some level of discomfort that’s not debilitating, but has you kind of sit up and take notice, it could be a cold room, it could be sitting on a bed of nails, if you’re into that kind of thing, any kind of discomfort will trigger that kind of superpower of being four times better, faster, and smarter.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. All right. And how about a favorite book?

Sterling Hawkins
I have many of them. But as I was thinking about this, I think it’s got to be The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger.

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

Sterling Hawkins
This is probably an overused answer but I’m in love with Keynote, not only for giving presentations but I use it to map out some of my ideas, and kind of draw different maps of how some of these things are working inside of myself and inside of companies. And I find it something that I’m on, like, half my day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sterling Hawkins
So, one of my, like, only habits is that every day I get up and I commit to doing at least one thing no matter what. My days look very different. I’m on the road a lot, giving keynotes, workshops, different places around the world, and every day I get up and it could be something different, it could be I’m going to call my mom today no matter what, or I’m going to meditate today no matter what.

It doesn’t really matter what it is but I find that when I’ve got one thing that I’ll do every day, regardless of the circumstances, it builds my capacity to get things done even when the world is thrown into chaos; COVID, you know. So, it’s something I use and I recommend it to a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect, resonate, gets highlighted a lot?

Sterling Hawkins
I think it’s that research from Carl Jung, “We cannot change anything until we accept it.” And like I said in the beginning, discomfort is not the point. I’m not suggesting everybody live a super uncomfortable life. But when you move into that discomfort, and as Carl Jung suggests, you accept it exactly how it is, that’s where growth comes from, and you grow your ability to deal with different kinds of discomforts, it’s not set, and it grows over time along with you.

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

Sterling Hawkins
Best thing to learn everything about me, the No Matter What community, my book, all that stuff at SterlingHawkins.com. All my social media is there. And one of the really cool things we started doing is sharing commitments of folks from the community up online, so you can check out what everybody else is up to, get inspired, and maybe even submit something yourself.

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

Sterling Hawkins
Final challenge, is find something that you’re uncomfortable with every single day and at least take a micro dose of it. Every time you do, it’s going to make you a little bit stronger and it’s going to grow that discomfort muscle for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sterling, thanks. It’s been a treat. I wish you much fun on the hunt.

Sterling Hawkins
Thank you, Pete. it’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Aug 18
0

793: The Six Mind Shifts for Thriving at Work with Aliza Knox

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Aliza Knox breaks down the six critical shifts that help turn around an unpleasant work situation.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to stay enthusiastic in the face of work hardships 
  2. What to do when you feel stagnant
  3. How to engineer serendipity for your career 

About Aliza

Aliza built and led APAC businesses for Google, Twitter and Cloudflare. She is a BCG advisor, Forbes columnist, and board director. Called a “Kick Ass Woman Slaying the World of Tech”, Aliza wrote Don’t Quit Your Day Job, outlining 6 mindshifts you need to rise & thrive at work as part of  her commitment to empowering the next generation of leaders. She’s in the Top 100 Women in Tech, Singapore and was named IT Woman of the Year Asia, 2020. 

Resources Mentioned

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Aliza Knox Interview Transcript

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

Aliza Knox
Pete, thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate you’re waking up extra early for us in Singapore, and I understand that you celebrated becoming an Australian citizen in an interesting way. What’s the story here?

Aliza Knox
So, I moved to Australia in the late 1980s, loved it, and decided I wanted to become a citizen, I was eligible after a few years, and wanted to celebrate in a big way. As you probably know, converts are always more zealous than people born into things. And so, I went out with three friends to an indigenous Australian restaurant and did what I have called eating the coat of arms.

So, if you don’t know, the coat of arms in Australia has a kangaroo and an emu, so I thought that if I ingested them, I would become even more Australian. So, I started with a salad that had smoked emu on it and followed with a kangaroo steak.

Pete Mockaitis
And are these tasty items?

Aliza Knox
Not bad. Not bad. Not something I eat frequently but kangaroo steaks are generally marinated for a while because it could be a bit tough, but not anything vile to eat.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. I liked just about every meat I’ve ever had, and I’ve never had those, so I’m intrigued.

Aliza Knox
Well, next time you come down under, you can probably get them.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Well, I’m excited to chat about some wisdom in your book Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The Six Mind Shifts You Need to Rise and Thrive at Work. Tell me, as you did your research, did you discover anything particularly surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating about people and quitting and their thought processes?

Aliza Knox
The book is written from the viewpoint of somebody who’s worked in corporate for over 40 years and does huge amounts of mentoring, counselling, talking to people who want help, so it’s really anecdotal.

So, there aren’t a lot of statistics but the one thing that I did find in doing a lot of reading is that even during the pandemic and all of this talk of The Great Reset, The Great Resignation, much of the reason for quitting is the same. So, certainly, there have been resignations now because of burnout, or because people have not been allowed to work from home, or it’s become more of a norm, or because, as inflation has come in, people are looking for higher salaries.

But, still, among the top two or three reasons for people leaving their jobs are “My manager isn’t invested in me,” or, “My company doesn’t value me.” And so, those have remained steadfast based on all the research I’d read from a variety of firms, including McKinsey and BCG.

Pete Mockaitis
And your own experience.

Aliza Knox
And my own experience, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds right to me. And so, I’m curious then, if one finds themselves in such a position where one or both of those are true, you’ve got some mind shifts you recommend. How do they go?

Aliza Knox
Okay, let me just back up and tell you the mind shifts are about having a long, healthy, thriving career and not necessarily, despite the title, never quitting a job. It’s some shifts on how to think about your career. I definitely think      that there are times you will want to leave. The title is a bit provocative in a time of   The Great Resignation but, to be clear, it doesn’t mean you should never quit, and I’m sure there are instances when you should.

But what I do think is that sometimes there is a lens through which people can see their career, which they don’t use, and those make up the mind shifts, or that lens is the combination of these mind shifts, and that’s why this book is for everybody, whether they’re in a job now or thinking about getting a job. And Kim Scott, who wrote Radical Candor, actually said on the back of the book, that it proves that mindset, not just passion, drives career success. And so, that’s why I think these mindsets are really important.

So, if you will, what I can do is go through each mindset briefly and give you an example. Will that be helpful?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, please.

Aliza Knox
Okay. It’ll take a little while but we can talk in between. So, the first mind shift is, “Go for both. Your work and your life are on the same team.” And what this means is move past the kind of traditional thinking of, “Oh, it’s my work or my life. I have to make a decision, and if one goes up, the other goes down.” That’s why, in particular, I really hate the term work-life balance because it sounds like a see-saw, like if one’s up, the other has got to be down. And I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I wrote an article in Forbes a couple months ago about a young journalist who graduated from Columbia, in one of the preeminent journalism schools in the US, and did what many people do, went to a small town where she could really cover meaty issues. She went to the South and she was covering things like chemicals in the water, very big deal issues, the kinds of things that get you promoted to larger and larger newspapers, maybe get you a Pulitzer, but that approach takes years of working your way up through smaller-town newspapers.

And she had grown up in New York, was raised by grandparents, and really felt the pull to be back near them, and couldn’t see how that was going to fit with this issue of needing to be in smaller areas and her long-term dream of working for The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or WaPo. And so, she eventually said, “I can’t make this decision, my career or my life, because my life needs to be in New York.

So, she did what she thought she had to do, gave up on the career part, and said, “Okay, I’m going for my life. I’m moving to New York.” And guess what, after not that long, even though she had taken a job that she thought was really fluffy, writing about the real estate industry, not serious journalism, not award-winning, she actually was able to work her way into a position where she’s now an editor at The Wall Street Journal.

She didn’t have to trade off my life or my work. She actually got both. And by focusing on what was really important to her, she was able to have both things, if you will. So, I think this “Your life and your work are on the same team,” you can do it, you can have it both is really an important lesson.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious, in that example, did the being in New York…? I mean, that was good for her life and it ended up being good for her work. I’m curious, is there a connection there in terms of, because of feeling connected and energized or inspired or rejuvenated with her family, that was a career-enabler or did she just kind of get lucky?

Aliza Knox
I don’t think it was either. I think she was observant. We could talk about serendipity later but I think she kept her eyes open for opportunities to move around. I’m sure it helped. I’m sure it helped energize her, that she was with her family, that she was doing something that was very important to her.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. So, what’s the next mind shift?

Aliza Knox
So, just before we move on, I do think it’s important to say in each mind shift in the book, I got four, five power perspectives and then action steps to take from each one. And in this particular one, there is another interesting point, which is that often people obsess about these choices. They ruminate and ruminate and kind of can’t move on, paralysis by analysis, “Which one should I do? How do I do it? What happens if I do each one?”

And I found that, generally, if you take a plunge and move on, that’s helpful, and you are usually not derailed by a single career choice. Whatever she would’ve done, she probably could’ve made it into a good long-term plan. And I have another story about a young woman named Emily Rubin, who, after college, took a job in San Francisco that she wasn’t sure about but it was kind of her only option.

She liked it in the beginning, then was really miserable. I thought she should probably stay a year just because that’s kind of the minimum time to really get to know a company and be able to tell people, “Hey, I did something.” But she was too unhappy, so here’s one where she quit her job. But, in doing so, she found a job she really likes at a mid-size consulting company called Huron, and she would not have been able to get that job without, even though it was limited, the prior experience at the startup.

So, it’s important, she made a decision, she just got on with it. And, while that decision didn’t seem wise in retrospect because you could look at it, and say, “Well, she made a mistake. She didn’t like that job.” But she did need a job, and that job propelled her to Huron. So, I think an action step for this section in this mind shift is if you’re thinking about a choice like this now, think about it as best you can, get some advice – we can talk about personal boards of directors later – get some perspective, and then take a plunge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool.

Aliza Knox
All right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, tell us about the next mind shift, “Stamina is a muscle. Build yours.”

Aliza Knox
Right. Well, I’m thinking about muscles, in particular. I went away for a few weeks, and, over the last couple of years, I’ve tried to go to a personal trainer in hopes of developing some muscles. And I’m telling you, I’m feeling my muscles right now. So, I think my other muscles, many of them are weaker than my stamina one.

But one of my favorite formulas that I came up with for the book, because I really believe it, is that stamina equals perseverance plus enthusiasm. I think it’s not just gritting it out, it’s not just grinding it out, and it is a superpower because, no matter how much you love your job, how much you love your career, how upbeat you are, how well you perform, I think you’re going to have bad days, tough times, obstacles, and stamina is what gets you through them.

So, an example that I go through, this one, not her real name, is a woman named Barbara who was at a startup, and I met her and she was really disconsolate, she said, “I’ve been head of sales here, and I’m being layered over. They’re bringing somebody in over me, and I’m in my mid-to-late 20s, I’ve done this, I’m going to move on. I have to leave because this is just too demeaning and too demoralizing.”

And I had met her partly because I know the person who was going to be brought in over her. And so, I said to her, “You know, I wonder if you should hang in there. This person who’s coming in is actually a really good guy. He’s well-known for leadership, he’s well-known for investing in people, you might want to give it a shot before you leave because, even though you’ll have a slightly lower title, and you feel like it’s a step down, I think he might actually really help you grow your career faster than you will if you keep jumping to places where you don’t have someone above you to guide you.”

And so, I’m sure not completely due to me, but she must’ve talked to a few people, and she decided to stick it out, she decided to exercise some stamina, hang in there. And, indeed, she was promoted two times working for this gentleman. The second time while on maternity leave, which shouldn’t be something I have to call out but I still think it’s important in this day and age because it doesn’t happen that often.

And, eventually, she left that company and she’s gone on after two jumps to be the CRO at another quite well-known startup, so she’s done really well. And I think by exerting that stamina and getting herself to think about staying, she really had a better outcome than she would’ve if she had quit her job at that time. So, I think this is a great example about using stamina, using patience, and using optimism to hang in there and test out things that you think might have made you want to quit.

Pete Mockaitis
And if we find that our perseverance and enthusiasm muscles are weak, how do we get them stronger?

Aliza Knox
Well, I think one very common step that is talked about a lot, especially if you ever read anything by Arianna Huffington, is to make some time for yourself that includes sleep. Sleep is really important to keeping up your energy and enthusiasm. And, indeed, for those of us who are aging, I keep reading that lack of sleep is one cause, long-term lack of sleep seems to be one cause of dementia. So, I’m sure most of the people listening to your podcast are not worrying about that yet, but it’s starting to be on my list of things to be concerned about. So, I definitely say sleep.

And, for me, personally, I go to the gym or exercise every day. And if you’re a high-energy person but you also need to vege, or remove some of the excess energy, or build up some if you’re a low-energy person, I really do find having one hour for myself every day to workout is important. And I think for people who get energy in other ways, by actually, if you’re more of an introvert, having time for yourself, having an hour every day that you protect and that is something you want to do is really critical to that. And that’s a better tradeoff than doing another hour of work, even in a really driven high-performance culture.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about the third mind shift, “Connection trumps tech savvy even in tech”?

Aliza Knox
Yes, this is really important because I think, again, during the pandemic and working for Silicon Valley firms, we tend to think that tech can solve everything, and I think it solves a lot. I think we have a lot of collaboration tools, we have a lot of devices, things that really help us. I listened to one of your podcasts where there was discussion about equipment to help you even meditate better. And I think there is a lot of technology out there that’s fantastic.

But human relationships are still really critical. And we see this over and over again back to, “How does my manager invest in me thinking about how I relate to people at work?” So, one anecdote about why they’re still important, I tell a story about Suzy Nicoletti, a real person who worked for me at Google and then Twitter, and is now the head of Asia for a startup called Yotpo.

She didn’t get promoted at Google at one stage when she really expected to. She was performing well, she was selling well, her clients liked her, and she sought some advice from a gentleman who she knew from the outside who’s quite a bit more senior, and she said, “I don’t understand this. Here’s all these things about what I’ve been doing. Why would I not get promoted?”

And he said, “Well, you know, I listened to you talk about your job a lot, and I can tell that you’re great about it, and that you really like it, and that your clients like you and you’re enthusiastic but one of the things is you talk about yourself and your clients. You don’t talk about the team. You don’t talk about the support you’re getting.”

“If I were your boss, I might worry even though I know you personally and you’re not like this. I might worry that you’re not really a team player. I might worry about putting you in charge of a bunch of people because you’re not narcissistic but you’re coming across almost as if that might be the case. Why don’t you think a little bit more about in your discussions and in your actions working with a team, like, I know that you’re doing it, but I think that you could emphasize it some more.”

And she went ahead and did that, and she got promoted the next time. And I, actually, since had a chance to talk to her boss at the time, and that was precisely the issue. And so, Suzy was able to get some outside perspective on what was going on. And I think that it’s really important – and we can talk about it later if you like – that you create a personal board of directors, that you have some outside perspective on your career so people can maybe give you insights that you might not be getting directly at work on what’s going on and what you might need to do.

And in that case, what was really important to her, in terms of human relationships, is having a sounding board, an effective sounding board, with people who know you outside of your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And what’s powerful about that story is that that person actually provided some useful actionable wisdom as opposed to, “Oh, that’s bull. I can’t believe they did that to you. You’re so amazing.” That was really cool of him.

Aliza Knox
That’s why, like I think friends are great sounding boards and probably part of your moral support group. And sometimes if your friends are people with lots more experience or really different experience and have great perspective, then they might be on your board of directors. But, you’re absolutely right, I think that, “Yeah, that’s bull,” and “You’re fantastic,” we all need that for moral support, and especially if we’re beginning to get things like impostor syndrome, but they’re not necessarily all that effective in the “Don’t quit your day job,” really understanding how to build your career aspect of life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And can we hear about the next mind shifts?

Aliza Knox
Sure, “You’re in a relationship with your career. Nurture it.” So, what’s interesting to me, most of us probably have been in a relationship with somebody, or want to be in a relationship with somebody, or are thinking about being in a relationship with somebody, and all the reading I’ve ever done about that, I’m certainly no expert, and, again, not a psychologist, but it says, “Don’t put all your expectations on your partner. Don’t expect your spouse, husband, wife, partner, companion, to fulfill all your needs. You’ve got to have outside stuff.”

And I, personally, have been married for almost 30 years, and I have a great husband, but I don’t do everything with him, and I have lots of outside sources of things that keep me interested, and the same for him. But somehow, at least in the time I’ve been working, we’ve come to this point where there’s a lot of expectations that our career will fulfill all our passions. It kind of started out with, “Hey, I’ve got to work to pay the mortgage, or pay the rent, and feed my kids, get some clothes.” Then, careers were supposed to become rewarding and fulfilling, and I think that’s entirely possible.

But then we got to a stage where it’s like career should fulfill all your passions, and I think that’s a really high bar and maybe not possible for everybody. I went out to lunch recently with a professor who’s an avid equestrian, and I guess it’s possible to have a career in horseback riding. I don’t really know. I’ve never investigated it. I think you can be a jockey. I know that there’s a lot of great nonprofits on like riding with the disabled, so maybe there’s a career there, but maybe there aren’t a lot.

And so, what this guy does, he also really likes teaching. He’s got a great career as a professor, he’s picked a career where he has summers off and long winter breaks, and he manages his finances so that he can have a couple horses, and during these long breaks, be places where he’s in a rural area and ride all the time. And then he’s also living somewhere where, early in the morning or late at night, because he’s not required to teach at those hours, he can ride, and he doesn’t have a commute.

So, he’s managed to say, “Okay, there are things I care about,” and, again, back to what you said earlier, Pete, “that give me energy, that also help in the other part of my life,” and so he’s managed his career to do both.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And it is a nice paradigm shift to go away from, “My career needs to be my passion and fill, and tick every one of those boxes to my choice of career can support my passions.” And I think that that’s an important consideration as you’re looking at opportunities, in terms of, “I don’t care to be in the midst of hustle-bustle urgency, and I really don’t think I would flourish in, like, deal environments, either like real estate deals or Wall Street IPO deals.”

Because it seems like whenever you’re connected there, whether you’re doing strategy consulting for the private equity firm who’s doing the deal, or you’re a lawyer who’s supporting it, or you’re the banker who’s got some funds, it’s like nutty. It just seems like there’s no way around it. It’s nutty, late nights, and, “Answer your phone and…” my phone defaults to do not disturb, like always. So, I know I would not flourish in such an environment and so I’ve chosen kind of the opposite of that with regard to we’ve got a media schedule that goes sometime in the distance.

And then the horseback riding is a nice specific example of that, in terms of, “What’s important to you?” “Horseback riding.” “What’s necessary for that?” “We got some money, some time off, some home in a rural area.” And so, I like how that’s nice and concrete. And though if we think about our own emotional, relational needs with friends, hobbies, family, then that can also spark a nice little list of extra considerations that might’ve been totally outside your awareness before having considered this.

Aliza Knox
I think that’s right. There’s another story in the book about a professor named Marla Stone, who didn’t get a job she really wanted. So, she wasn’t doing things around her job, like the equestrian. She had a professorship in Rome, there was a more senior role in that same foundation and she applied for it, didn’t get it, came back to Los Angeles, and thought, “Well, I want to throw myself into something that I care about. I didn’t get that and I’m back to my old job.”

And she started working with the ACLU on the side, and went on their board, eventually became chairman of the Southern California Board of ACLU. The job in Rome came up again, she thought, “Oh, listen, it’s kind of my dream job. I’m going to apply one more time. I really want to do it.” And it turned out that by being on the board of the ACLU, she had more of the skills that they wanted. Originally, she was just a great academic, but they also wanted somebody who understood some aspects of running a business. And because she’d been a Chair, even though it was a nonprofit, she picked up some of the skills along the way.

She didn’t go to the ACLU in order to get this job in Rome. It had nothing to do with it. She did it to just say, “Hey, I want some other stuff out of my career. I didn’t get this one thing I wanted so I’m going to shift gears a little bit and make sure I have something else that’s really interesting to me that fulfills a passion.” And guess what, it came back and actually boosted her into a dream job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Aliza Knox
Very cool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear about the fifth mind shift.

Aliza Knox
So, back to a word you’ve been using a lot, and one that I like. This one is “Get a move on. Use movement to stay energized and thrive.” And this is about movement keeping you energized, maximizing your value. Movement can be a promotion. It can be moving geographically. It can be moving laterally, which means moving from one role in a company to another to learn something else, like from sales to marketing, or from engineering to sales. It could be job crafting.

And it could, ultimately, be leaving your job, quitting and going to another job. So, I don’t think I’ve used any examples of men so far, so I’ll talk a little bit about a guy who I call Tim Liu in the book. It’s not his real name, but he was working for a company here in Singapore. He really liked the company and he liked his job, and he was doing well at it, but he felt stuck. There were no promotions available. There were no other jobs available. He didn’t want to move, he really wants to be in Singapore, and he really felt stagnated. He felt like he wasn’t learning.

So, he went and talked to other companies, I would call it job dating. He was just trying to see what else is out there, “Is there something else that really gets me going, that I’ll be excited about at another company?” and he didn’t find it. So, he went to his manager, and said, “Listen, I really like my job, I really like the company, but I’m stagnating here. I need to learn more. I need something.”

And, of course, that’s pretty good for a manager to hear, which is, “I can’t find something I prefer. I really want to stay here, but can you help me?” That is a lot better for a manager than to hear a good employee saying, “I feel stuck and I’m going to go,” and trying to save them. So, the manager said, “Yeah, what is it? What do you want to learn?” and they worked together. Tim really wanted to know more about, in his case, government relations and business development.

So, the manager helped him craft, add on some extra tasks, mixed with some different kinds of people in the firm to learn, and it re-energized Tim to hang out for longer. Eventually, there was room for him to get a promotion at that firm, and so he stayed. So, in this case, because he couldn’t get the movement that he wanted, he was able to ask for it, create it himself with the help of his team, and he’s saved, which was great for the firm.

There are lots of other ways to do it. I’ve got a good friend, who also felt like she was stagnating, and she’s moved from one country to another. Another young woman, Ling-Ling, who was in sales but loves social media, and so, even though she was in sales and mostly needed to be on the phone with clients, she spent a lot of time on LinkedIn building her profile, putting up lots of really insightful pithy comments, stories, small videos about what her firm was doing, and, eventually, she was so good at it that she was able to switch into a marketing job at her firm.

So, all those things were creating movement, and all these people are energized and thriving in their new roles. So, some have left, some have not, but, really, interesting ways as they sort of left their roles but none of those have left their firms.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s handy. And the sixth mind shift?

Aliza Knox
Okay, the sixth one, “Distant is the new diverse. Include the international working from home team.” So, this is one of my favorites because when the pandemic started, I bristled a little at the idea that, “Gosh, no one’s ever done this. Nobody’s ever worked from home. Nobody has ever run teams that are dispersed all over the world.” That’s kind of not true.

If you look at people who’ve been building Asia, or Latin America, or Europe, or the US for a headquarters in Korea, France, Brazil, they’ve often been in the situation where they’re trying to deal with a lot of people whom they never get to see in person, except for maybe a couple times a year. So, I call this removing the R from remote to try and make it emote.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Aliza Knox
And one of my favorite statistics from Gallup is that companies with engaged employees are 20% more profitable. If you keep employees close, if you keep them feeling good about the firm and feeling engaged, and it does also go back to having a manager who cares about you but not only, you really have a firm that does better, not just employees who are happy.

So, one of the things I’ve seen over time is that many companies, tech companies, I think, do this a lot, other companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, try to engage their employees by having global townhalls, or monthly or weekly video meetings where everybody can get on, and maybe leadership will talk about examples of great client wins in the firm, or do shoutouts to employees who’ve done great things or gone the extra mile.

And you’ll notice that companies tend to focus on things that happen in headquarters because that’s what the leaders hear first. But if you make the extra effort, as a leader, or even as somebody on the team to make sure this doesn’t happen, if it’s an American company, they might talk about GAP or MasterCard.

But what about if they think about Uniqlo in Japan, or China UnionPay in China where employees are doing something? Or, what about if they don’t just call out that Joe is doing a good job but remember to shout out that Mariabrisa, at Latin America, is doing a great job. So, that really helps bringing in the international or the work-from-home team.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And then, as we think about navigating our own jobs, how do you consider the working remotely versus in the headquarters or at the office in terms of career impact?

Aliza Knox
Yeah, I think that’s really good question. I think there’s a lot of literature that, “Hey, we’ve been really more efficient and effective during the pandemic, and it’s because we don’t have commutes, and we can just keep up all the personal relationships.” So, I’m a little bit skeptical on that. I think we have been efficient, and there probably are better work models. I’m not sure it means we should never meet in person.

I think what happened is that everybody sort of drew down on their social capital during the pandemic, and that the lack of face-to-face time hindered new relationships and, in some cases, weakened existing ones. We’re using these relationships we’ve already built but building new ones remotely is harder. So, I think a really good thing to do now is to focus on building back that social capital, and that could mean a couple things.

It could mean making some effort even if your company is working from home or working remotely to get out there in person if you’re in the same city, or if you travel a little bit, to meet some of the people you work with in person. I think another case, if it’s all remote, I have a good friend, who is in comms at Google, who says, “I don’t take a meeting. I make a friend.” So, just like what you and I did right before the beginning of this podcast, just chat a little bit about things to get to know you. You could do that. One of the things about Zoom, “We all get on it at 6:30, let’s start, let’s not waste any time, business, business, business. It’s 7:00, let’s get off.” Maybe.

But in a real meeting, people come in and not everybody enters at exactly 6:00, and somebody comes in with Doritos and shares them. There’s always that few minutes of kind of idle chitchat or maybe commiserating about the weather that are silly but that kind of start to build relationships. So, maybe you build that into Zoom.

And one strategy for individuals is to maybe build a personal visibility plan that takes into account the challenges of remote or hybrid work, and includes ways to remain visible and connected, like, you might decide to try to do a little more than was asked, or you could plan for some get-togethers with colleagues out of work, even virtual cocktails to help build back up social capital that’s been depleted.

Or, I think something good managers do and can do for their teams is to make sure that they’re talking to other people in the firm about you, and you can repay that favor so that you’ve visible. People know about you even if you’re not seeing them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Okay. Well, so some nice mind shifts that can change the way we think about career decisions and perhaps illuminate optimal paths that were previously just not even in our conscious awareness, so really valuable stuff. Let’s talk about serendipity because these mind shifts feel a bit – what’s the word – not quite the word programmatic. They’re principles to be considered versus serendipity, just kind of seems to happen. So, how do we think about finding and seizing serendipity?

Aliza Knox
So, serendipity, I’ve always thought of it as something originally thought of something that just happens, right? There’s that famous story about Kate Moss, who was an amazing model, being seen in an airport in Florida, someone coming up to her and saying, “Do you want to model? You’re gorgeous,” and then going on to being rich and famous. And I’m still waiting for that, frankly. I’m traveling next week, so if anybody wants to come to Cheney Airport and give me the same opportunity, I’m happy for that.

But I think of serendipity more as opportunity plus action. So, a small personal story, I think I might’ve mentioned to you, Pete, but I am now and what I would consider phase 3.0 of my career. So, if you think of life as software releases or your career, 1.0 for me was consulting and financial services, 2.0 was tech, 3.0 now I sit on boards, I’m writing, speaking, etc. But how did I get from 1.0 to 2.0?

Well, I was working at Visa and I, at that point, was living in the Bay Area and we were working on a deal with Google, which was in some really fairly stages in the early 2000s, and I happened to meet Vint Cerf, who was one of the real founders of the internet. And in this meeting, we discussed a possible joint venture, and I was responsible for what was going on, so I wrote a thank you note and the follow-up steps, and I thought about this, and I thought about it for a couple of weeks.

And I thought, “Wow, I just met this amazing person who knows all about the internet. I’m an internet newbie.” I’m using it for email, but other than that, I don’t know much. I’ve been in financial services for a long time, certainly haven’t mastered it. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully mastered anything, and I like it. But, gosh, there’s a lot going on. We’d already had the first dotcom boom and bust. There’s a lot going on in the world of the internet, and I know nothing about it. And I am curious and I would love to learn. So, would it be appropriate for me to write to this guy I’ve only met once and I met through my job? Is it too audacious?

So, I thought about it for a couple of weeks, and I thought, “Oh, come on, be bold. Take the step.” So, for my personal email, I went back to his work email, which I had, and said, “Hey, Vint, I would love to learn more about what’s going on in the world of the internet. And I know I’m a bit older than the people you’re hiring right now, and I don’t have any particularly relevant experience. Would Google or someone else talk to me?”

And I guess the worst thing that could’ve happened is he could’ve said, “Huh, I’m going to tell Visa that you’re coming after me and it’s so inappropriate,” but I figured he wouldn’t do that. And the second worst that could’ve happened, which would’ve been very disappointing but not life-shattering, would’ve been that he just didn’t write back at all. But you know what, he wrote back, and he said, “Okay, send me your resume. Let’s talk. This might be interesting.”

And that led to my talking to a number of people at Google and eventually going to work there. And it was so serendipitous, and, in fact…so, I wrote him a thank you note at the time, and then, 10 years later when I started at Cloudflare, which is an internet security and performance company and now a number of other things, I was watching some videos to get up to speed on how Cloudflare works, and because it’s built on a back of the structure of the internet, the infrastructure, there were videos with Vint Cerf in them.

And so, I saw him and I wrote him again, and I’m like, “Hey, I don’t know if you remember me, but here I am, 10 years later, still in tech, thanks to you,” and I got another email back. So, I would consider serendipity opportunity plus action. So, how do you seize that? And I’m sure there’s plenty of times, by the way, that I’ve missed it, but there’s been serendipity right in front of me and I haven’t gotten it, but that’s one where I did.

So, I thought, here’s the thing, you’ve got to be open. There is potential around us, make a habit for looking at unexpected opportunities. Listen to the people you meet and the conversations. What do they know that might be of interest to you? Do they know someone where you’ve been thinking about that career? Or, did you just hear that their firm is hiring? And even if it’s audacious, might you ask? Follow up.

If you hear a great talk, or you hear about a career path that you don’t know anything about, be audacious. Like, most of the time it’s not going to hurt you. Usually, the absolute worst thing that’s going to happen is you’re going not get a reply. Most people just aren’t going to go to the effort to write to your boss or tell somebody else…

Pete Mockaitis
“How dare you?”

Aliza Knox
Yeah, you know, “This person had the guts to talk to me.” Make the ask and make it specific. So, it’s not like, “Hey, Vint, do you think I could ever do something in the internet?” I just said, “Do you think I could talk to somebody at Google?” that was brazen but it was something he could do, like he works there, he knows someone there, and it wasn’t a very big deal to him when I think about it. I thought it was a big deal, like, he was working there, he can say to somebody else, “Hey, will you look at this resume and see?”

And then, I think the other really important thing to do is to pay it forward, and I tell people this over and over again. People are going to ask you for the same thing, and they’re going to ask you for inspiration and for advice, and make sure to pay it forward because you can help other people and I think it’s both fulfilling and who knows, I think there is karma in the world and it might come back to help you at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, now let’s hear a bit about your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Aliza Knox
So, my favorite quote is from Maya Angelou, which is, “My mission in life is not merely to survive but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

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

Aliza Knox
Yes. So, I talked a little bit about job crafting, and there’s a really cool study by these guys Laker and Patel about how job crafting can make work more satisfying, that they wrote with MIT Sloan. I think they’re professors in England. And then there’s another one that Catalyst did, which is an organization that really promotes women in the workforce, and super relevant to the times we’re in now, and it’s called “The Power of Empathy in Times of Crisis and Beyond.” And, in fact, it was part of what I used when I wrote an article called “Is CEO now Chief Empathy Officer or should it be?”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite book?

Aliza Knox
So, I know you’re a business podcast but I read fiction all the time, so my favorite book is Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, who’s a physician, who’s also an author on the side. I don’t know how you can be that talented. And it’s a book that follows twin brothers born in Addis Ababa, and it’s about the coming of age of one of them and also the coming of age of Ethiopia out of colonialism, and I highly recommend it.

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

Aliza Knox
Yeah, there’s a tool that’s just out in beta that I’d gotten access to called OnLoop, and it’s a mobile-first feedback tool. I’d say it is to team development what Apple Watch is to fitness, so it’s feedback minus the recency bias. It captures in-moment reflections on yourself or feedback for colleagues, and it tags it, and it actually helps you. It compounds over time to reveal people’s superpowers and blind spots. It really helps with writing evaluations, which is something most people hate in performance evaluations, going back, trying to remember what they thought about colleagues or coworkers.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

Aliza Knox
Going to the gym or playing badminton.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite resonant nugget, something you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Aliza Knox
Yeah, I keep getting quoted back from, “I read your book. I especially love stamina equals perseverance plus enthusiasm.”

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

Aliza Knox
AlizaKnox.com, @AlizaKnox on Twitter, and Aliza Knox on LinkedIn. Fortunately, I have a pretty unusual name, A-L-I-Z-A K-N-O-X.

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

Aliza Knox
Yeah, if you don’t have one, go set up a personal board of directors. There’s a step-by-step on how to do it in my book, and I really think I regret not thinking about it and doing it earlier in my career. It would’ve helped a lot, and I see it helping people whom I mentor.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aliza, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in this version of things.

Aliza Knox
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been fantastic to be on your show. I’ve not listened to all 700 plus podcasts, but I’m getting through them, and they’re great. I’m honored to be included.